In truth, I didn’t know why Paul had even bothered going to college. It was a foregone conclusion that he’d end up working for his father in the lumber business. I guess he’d expected Jet to put up with a few flings, then be waiting for him when he came home with a report card full of “incompletes,” ready to settle into the rut that had always been waiting for him. One thing I knew—Jet had no intention of marrying into that life.
“You’re boning her, aren’t you?” Paul said, and this time his voice had an edge to it.
I said nothing, but my nerves sang, and the muscles in my arms quivered in expectation of a fight.
“You know,” he went on, “I could tell you something that would hurt you. Hurt you bad.”
My eyes burned and watered, but I held my silence. I wasn’t going to take the bait. I feared what he might say too much.
Paul looked off to the west again. Against the clouds I saw the great electrical tower we had climbed two and a half years earlier, just before Adam drowned. The sight half made me want to fight Paul. Fight somebody, anyway. He saw the tower, too, and maybe the flash of rage in my eyes, because his next words were not what I’d expected.
“Everybody’s gonna ask what happened out here,” he said. “If I kicked your ass or what.”
I was surprised to discover that I didn’t care one way or the other. My fear had seeped out of me during the walk, or else the sight of the tower had driven it from me. “If you want to try,” I said, “let’s get it over with.”
“How about we don’t and say we did?” Paul suggested. “I need a fucking drink.”
The implications of his words washed over me like water in a heat wave. “What do we say out there?”
He shrugged. “Fought to a draw. Got tired of beating up on each other. No girl’s worth killing each other over. Not even Jet.”
I wasn’t sure of this. “No black eyes?”
Paul chuckled. “You want to pop each other once apiece? To sell the story?”
I thought about this. “Not really.”
“Fuck it,” he said. “Let’s get back to the cars. I’ve got an ice chest in my backseat.”
This bloodless accommodation couldn’t have been what he had in mind when he drove down from Oxford with his hands clenched on the wheel of his Corvette. But whatever rage he’d felt over Jet’s cleaving to me had subsided. Night was falling, and a cold wind blew off the river, making the long walk back to the clubhouse an unpleasant prospect. I asked Paul if he wanted to run it, but he just laughed. Three days later, he dropped out of college and joined the army. Everyone we knew was flabbergasted. When George H. W. Bush gave the go order for Desert Storm, Paul was sitting in Saudi Arabia, waiting for the balloon to go up.
The honk of a horn startles me out of my reverie.
I speed up and wave to the impatient driver behind me, surprised to find myself on the Little Trace and nearly to the turn for Buck’s house, which sits well back in the hardwood forest in rural Tenisaw County. I’ve driven out here so many times that I can do it on autopilot, even after an almost thirty-year gap.
The narrow gravel road arrows away from the black asphalt and runs through tall trees wearing the fresh pale green of spring. Back in those trees, Quinn Ferris sits in a house with a bed that will never again hold the weight of the man who built it. Handcrafted guitars hang on its walls—and a mandolin and a mandocello and two dulcimers—that will never have another note pulled from them by Buck’s gifted fingers. All because he threatened to slow down the gravy train of the bastards who run Bienville like their personal fiefdom. I dread facing Quinn in her grief and anger, but what choice do I have? If the Poker Club killed her husband, it’s because nobody ever planted themselves in their path and said, “This far, but no farther.” Am I that guy? My father never set himself against them. But if my brother had lived, he would have. If only for that reason, I realize, I must do it.
QUINN FERRIS GREW up in West Texas, and she looks more like a Westerner than a Southerner. She wears almost no makeup, even when I’ve seen her out at night, and she has the sun-parched look of a woman who spent much of her life exposed to a dry climate. Mississippi girls grow up in nearly 100 percent humidity, and they’re reared from infancy to baby their skin. They get softer as they get older. Quinn has grown leaner and harder with age. Her pale eyes have an avian intensity, her arms and hands a whipcord toughness. She makes me think of long hours riding pillion on a motorcycle, her sun-bleached hair flying behind her from beneath the helmet.
Four days ago, when I met Buck at the Indian Village to interview him about his find, Quinn took care of the tourists who showed up, keeping watch for anyone who seemed more interested in her husband than the archaeological exhibits. Today she looks as though the shock of Buck’s death has burned through whatever reserves of fortitude she possessed. She’s standing at her stove, making tea with shaking hands. I’m sitting at their kitchen table, a Formica-topped relic from the 1950s. I ate at this table many times during high school and sat around it playing guitar with Buck deep into the night.
“What does a private autopsy cost?” Quinn asks. “An outside autopsy?”
“Three to five thousand. Unless you want a superstar pathologist.”
She takes this in without comment.
“You saw Buck’s body?” I ask.
“The sheriff told me not to go to the hospital, but I went anyway. They weren’t going to let me see him. I made a ruckus. The security guard came. I think they were going to call the police, but an older doctor heard the noise and came. He made them let me in to see him. Dr. Kirby. Jack Kirby.”
“He’s my father’s doctor. A great guy.”
“Well, God bless him. But I saw the wound.”
“I’m sorry, Quinn.”
She closes her eyes and shakes her head. “You asked me about the break-in.”
“It’s okay, take your time.”
As she makes the tea, she gives me a straightforward account. She’d gone to the Ruhlmann Funeral Home and spent a frustrating half hour on the phone with the sheriff, trying to learn when her husband’s body might be returned to her after the autopsy. The sheriff was evasive and made no promises. Then she learned from the funeral director that the autopsy was going to be performed at the local hospital. After finally getting in to see Buck’s body, and then recovering herself, she arrived home to find her front door standing open, cold air streaming through the screen door into the yard. Two steps inside, she realized that the house had been trashed. While she waited for a deputy to show up, she spent forty-five minutes “picking the place up.” After seeing her husband’s body so profoundly insulted, she couldn’t abide having her house in disarray.
The deputy who responded to her call pushed Quinn into a state of fury. No matter what she told him, he insisted that the break-in had been carried out by “crackheads looking for something to sell.” In his estimation (and obviously that of his boss), Buck’s “drowning” had been a regrettable accident, but one that had nothing to do with a simple B&E near the county line, twenty miles away. Quinn pointed out that the offenders had taken great pains to go through her husband’s papers; they’d even fanned through every book in his library, as though searching for something specific. “Addicts hoping y’all keep cash stashed in your books,”