The eighteen-mile strip of asphalt known as the Little Trace began as a deer path in pre-Columbian times, was widened by Indians hunting the deer, then centuries later was taken over by whites traveling from Fort Bienville to the Natchez Trace, where it crossed the eastern edge of Tenisaw County. In those days outlaws would lie in wait along the trail, ready to ambush travelers unprepared to defend themselves with powder and shot. What irony that Buck, who chose to live along that historic route, would be murdered by modern outlaws exploiting that same weakness.
As I turn onto the Little Trace east of town, I wonder who might have staked out Buck’s house, waiting for his grieving widow to depart so that they could ransack the place. But before I’ve covered two miles, my thoughts return to Jet and her father, and to Paul Matheson, who is quite capable of killing me if he finds out I’m sleeping with his wife. To be clear, Paul isn’t simply capable of killing me; he’s been trained to do it. And unlike a lot of men with that training, Paul has used what he knows—just like his father did in Vietnam. I’ve seen him do it.
By the time Jet and I began our senior year, Paul had graduated from St. Mark’s and left for Ole Miss, and this opened the possibility of a new life to me. Thanks to Buck Ferris—and my failed suicide attempt—I had rejoined the world of the living by then. My home life sucked, but at least Dad had settled into a well-worn groove of pretending I was part of the furniture. My struggle with Adam’s death was something I pressed down deep in order to survive. The loss of Jet still stung, even after three years, but Paul leaving town had taken a weight from my shoulders.
During the previous year, my athletic pursuits had forced me into constant contact with him. We’d played football and basketball and even run track together, which meant that we’d spent hundreds of hours in each other’s company. We shared locker rooms, showers, bus rides, fast-food joints, team suppers, and crazy stunts in the dead of night. Despite the fact that he’d essentially taken Jet away from me, all this activity allowed our childhood friendship to reassert itself. We parted on good terms when he left for Oxford, but there was no denying the sense of relief I felt as he drove away from my house in the Corvette that had been his graduation present from Max.
To my surprise, when school started I found that I had become something of a star in my own right at St. Mark’s. In many ways, “Goose” McEwan seemed a character apart from me, but because he was accepted by all, life was easier when I pretended to be him. My grades had always been the best on the sports teams, and after Paul’s class graduated, I suddenly emerged as a replacement for my dead brother—or at least a reasonable facsimile of what everyone’s expectations for Adam had been. (To everyone except my father, of course.)
With Paul no longer around, Jet and I found ourselves thrown together almost every day. We were awkward around each other at first, but before long the feelings we’d shared during our magical summer returned, and nervousness blossomed into mutual attraction. In physics class one day an analogy hit me: Paul had stood between us like a lead shield separating radioactive masses. The moment he was withdrawn, Jet and I surged toward criticality.
Paul hadn’t broken up with her when he left for Ole Miss, as so many college-bound guys did when dating juniors. He’d promised he would come home every weekend, even though Ole Miss was four hours away. As it turned out, Paul didn’t return to Bienville for seven weeks, and that left Jet and me sufficient time to find each other again. We began in secret. That was when she told me that her father had originally been resettled in America by the CIA, for whom he had worked against Gamal Nasser, in Egypt. She also confided that a year earlier, Joe Talal had written a letter asking her to come to Jordan and live with his other family. This request had stunned Jet, and her mother had descended into depression, fearing that her daughter, too, would abandon her. As Jet and I grew closer, she gently probed me about Adam’s death. Soon we were comforting each other in places far removed from our classmates.
Then the rumors started finding their way back from Ole Miss. Since leaving Bienville, Paul had apparently been screwing every girl in Oxford willing to remove her sorority skirt, or even hike it up behind the frat house. At first Jet wrote these stories off as malicious gossip. Then she had a confrontation with a drunk girl who’d graduated from St. Mark’s three years earlier. The girl ended up yelling that she’d not only slept with Paul at Ole Miss, but had also had him the previous year, while Jet was going around on his arm like the queen of the city.
Two days later, Jet and I properly consummated our relationship. It was a bittersweet experience for me. I’d slept with three other girls by then, but Jet had learned a lot during her years with Paul. I couldn’t escape the feeling that he had explored and awakened parts of her that I had been meant to, and only because Jet’s father had abandoned her a month after our summer ended. Jet sensed a shadow between us, and eventually she asked me about it. This conversation finally exorcised Paul’s ghost for me—her assertion that I was not a substitute for Paul, but rather the reverse. He had been a replacement for me, during a time when she’d been too wounded to trust any emotion that made her feel vulnerable. She’d wrapped herself in a shiny new life with an extrovert jock, rather than a wounded, self-conscious introvert like me.
Paul finally came home in late October, and he expected Jet to pick right up with him. When she refused, he got angry for about five minutes. Then he found another girl and spent the night with her. Despite this public abdication of their role as the school’s golden couple, Jet and I kept our heads down. For a week we met out at the spring at Parnassus. With cars at our disposal, we could easily drive out there separately, then relive the afternoons of three years before, only with penetration added to the mix. But it was inevitable that someone would eventually see us behaving like lovers, and they did. When word reached Paul, he went crazy.
It turned out that Jet had shared many details of our first summer with him. Because he’d had far more sexual experience than Jet, she’d used her experiences with me to pay him back in kind for his too-vivid recounting of previous exploits. This left Paul feeling that no matter how many times he had sex with her, he would never elicit the purity or depth of response in her that I had.
I hoped he was right.
The night he heard about our new relationship, Paul demanded to meet me at the Bienville Country Club the next day. At four p.m. on a weekday—I still remember that. Through a mutual friend he had called me out, Old West style. The story spread like wildfire. The next day, he skipped class and drove four hours to kick my ass.