The man scowled. “Don’t get smart now, Marshall. I wouldn’t want to have to get up and teach you a lesson.”
By this time I had studied “Willis” a bit. He was a lot heavier than I, and he looked pretty strong, but I was sure I could outrun him. Of course, Jet was upstairs. She could probably outrun him, too. But she would have to get safely to the ground before she could.
“I’m guessing you don’t want me to tell Mr. Weldon you were here,” I said.
Willis scowled again. “I’m guessing you don’t want him knowing you out here, either, smart boy.”
I shrugged and tried to look nonchalant.
“Why don’t we make a little deal?” Willis suggested. “We’ll both just keep our business to ourselves.”
I waited a decent interval, then said, “That sounds cool.”
“Okay, then. You’d best get back up there and tend to business. That girl prob’ly gettin’ nervous by now.”
I took a tentative step back. “Are you gonna be here anymore? I mean, after today?”
“I been here other times, too, if that’s what you wonderin’. My old lady kicked me out the house, and I ain’t got no place to stay.”
“You sleep out here?”
Willis nodded. “Right now, anyways.”
I thought about this. “Okay, then.”
“Hey,” he called as I turned to go. “Don’t be afraid of it.”
“What?”
“Girls ain’t made of glass, boy. They want it, same as you. Don’t be afraid to work it. And lick it, too. You lick it?”
My face was turning purple. The old man laughed.
“Whatever you been doin’, try it ’bout twice as hard. Start gentle, but take it up steady, you understand? That girl’ll holler in three, fo’ minutes, I guarantee.”
“Um … I gotta go,” I croaked, backing away fast, then turning to run.
His cackling laughter followed me back up the ladder.
I found Jet waiting at the top, looking frightened, but once I explained what had happened, she calmed down. I didn’t think we should return to the barn anymore, but Jet thought it was fine.
Two days later, we discovered I’d been right.
On that day, some dopeheads from the public high school showed up at the barn and sat outside in the clearing, getting high. Jet and I hid in silence on the second floor, waiting for them to leave. But when they started building a campfire, we knew we had to go. We tried to slip away unnoticed, but they heard us trying to sneak out the far side of the barn. In seconds they surrounded us and started the usual bullying that older guys love to deal out to young guys as tall as me. It was during this hazing that they noticed how beautiful Jet was.
The conversation that followed that realization scared me in a way I’d never experienced before. These guys didn’t look like the potheads I knew, gentle dudes who’d rather lie on their backs staring at the moon than exert a single muscle. These guys looked like what my father called “dopers,” needle freaks. As they talked, I saw all the blood leave Jet’s face. They were sixteen or seventeen, pale and dirty looking. And they meant to have her. The tallest one told Jet to take off her clothes before it got too dark to see her. If she refused, he said, they would take them off for her. When she didn’t move to obey, one guy said he wanted to see what A-rab pussy tasted like. I wanted to protect her, but I couldn’t see any option other than getting honorably beaten within an inch of my life. I didn’t want Jet to know how scared I was, but when I stole a glance at her, I saw tears on her cheeks. That was when I heard a low, dangerous voice speak from the darkness under the barn.
“You boys ’bout to buy yourselves a boxcar full of trouble.”
The leader’s head snapped left. Like me, he saw Willis coming through the dark barn door, looking pretty goddamn intimidating. I suppose the three older teenagers could have taken that old man, but they didn’t look too sure they wanted to find out what it would cost them to do it.
“What you gonna do, nigger?” asked the leader, sounding more petulant than threatening.
Willis regarded him in silence for about ten seconds. Then he said, “What I’m gon’ do? That’s what you axed? Well …” Willis scratched his bearded chin. “I’ll prob’ly start by bendin’ you over that log there and fuckin’ you up da ass. That’s how we broke in fresh stuff like you in Parchman. You’ll feel just like a girl to me, boy. Tighter, prob’ly.”
My blood ran cold when Willis said that, but the threat had its intended effect. The three freaks shared a long look. Then the smallest skittered into the darkness under the trees. The other two followed, though the leader vowed revenge from the shadows. It was hard to believe the situation had changed so fast. It was as though a grizzly bear had scattered a pack of dogs.
“Were you really in Parchman?” I asked, after Jet had gotten control of herself.
“Nah,” Willis said. “My cousin was, though. I been in the county lockup a couple times, but not the Farm. I knew that’d scare them dopers, though.”
“Man … thank you so much.”
Jet began crying and shivering—delayed shock, I guess—but she thanked Willis profusely. When I rolled her bike out to her, she said, “What if they’re waiting for us on the path somewhere?”
“I’ll walk out with y’all,” Willis said. “I can’t come back here no more anyways. Them boys’ll go home and tell their daddies a mean nigger threatened to whup ’em on the Weldon place, and the sheriff’ll be out here to run me in. I need to find somethin’ to eat anyway.”
“I’ve got twelve dollars in my pocket,” Jet told him, digging in her jeans. “You’re welcome to it.”
Willis smiled. “Twelve dollars’ll keep me fed for most of a week, missy. I’ll take it.”
That was the last day we went to the barn.
We soon found another sanctuary—one equally as isolated and even more beautiful—but it was never quite the refuge that the barn was. It was a spring-fed pool that lay about six miles out Cemetery Road, on the old Parnassus Plantation. Generations of kids had spent summers partying out there, even skinny-dipping, until an accidental drowning and subsequent suicide forced the owner to fence off the hill where the spring bubbled out of the earth. I never saw anything quite like that place again, but I know it remains unspoiled, because Jet and I met there several times before I bought my house outside town.
Thirty-two years ago, she and I spent the last half of July and part of August at that pool, which had gone by many names since Indian times. Our trance slipped a level deeper in its cold, clear water and as we lay on the warm banks in the afternoon sun, like the turtles that were our company. But our time was growing shorter each day. I was scheduled to start summer football practice, and Jet had some sort of mathematics camp to go to. Like many fools before me, I assumed that time was infinite, that we would spend the rest of our school years together, then marry and strike out into the world to do great things—things the people of little Bienville had never dreamed about. To this end, Jet had already persuaded her parents to let her transfer to St. Mark’s, despite the extra expense. I couldn’t know that within a month, Jet’s father would vanish, severing the fragile filament that had bound us like a common blood vessel until then.
The disappearance of Joe Talal shocked all of Bienville. It wasn’t one of the garden-variety abandonments that were becoming more common as the ’80s progressed. Jet’s father was a chemical engineer, seemingly the most stable of men, and his work ethic was legendary. He’d invented a new chemical process at the electroplating plant, something that would have made him rich,