Cemetery Road. Greg Iles
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had undoubtedly designed this obstacle to prevent drunken fools such as ourselves from attempting the suicidal climb. Clearly, they underestimated our stupidity.)
While still in the tree, Joey Burrell decided he was too drunk to try crossing to the metal pegs, so he turned back, becoming the first to earn the penalty. But soon the rest of us were clinging to the tower leg, like newborn raccoons afraid to follow their mother up a tree. Trey Matheson was highest, followed by his brother Dooley. Then Paul, Adam, and, last of all, me. I went last because something told me I might have to make a strategic retreat. I didn’t want to, but I wasn’t so deluded as to think I might not get into trouble.
For most of the climb, I stared only at the ladder rungs, focusing on the few square inches where I would place my free hand, then release the other and reach up again, finding the next rung—again and again and again. I heard birds and bats flying around me, but I didn’t turn to see them. Mosquitoes bit me, sucking my blood without interruption as the wind whipped my shirt, tearing at my body. I sweated continuously, soaking my clothes. The boys above me chattered and laughed, and the Mathesons whooped like madmen every minute or two. All this I ignored to keep my Zen-like focus.
Two-thirds of the way up—at about four hundred feet—I made the mistake of looking out over the river. A paralyzing wave of vertigo hit me, and it was all I could do not to vomit. My vision blurred. I became vaguely aware of the lights of faraway towns and farms, and the great glittering serpent of the river running beneath us. From six hundred feet in the air you can see thirty miles. At only four hundred feet, I was incapacitated.
Adam soon realized I was in trouble. He stopped climbing and offered to come back and follow me down, discarding any thought of the climb as a test of manhood. But since we were already two-thirds of the way up, I decided to go on. I didn’t want to suffer the penalty and risk arrest for indecent exposure; nor did I want to suffer Paul and his preppy cousins ragging me for all eternity.
I made it fifty more feet. Then my nerve broke.
It was the signal failure of my life. While the Mathesons hooted with derision from above, yelling “Pussy!” at the top of their lungs, I clung to that ladder like an arthritic old lady asked to scale the Matterhorn. This time Adam insisted on escorting me down. Shivering in terror, I told him I would descend only if he pushed on to the top. Besides, I whimpered, we were on a ladder. How the hell could he help me get to the ground? Adam said he would tie one end of his belt to his ankle and the other to my left arm, so that if I slipped, I’d have an instant to catch myself before the belt broke and I went into free fall.
I wasn’t going to put my brother in that kind of danger. When Adam saw that I wouldn’t change my mind, he finally started up again. My subsequent descent was a triumph of courage over abject terror. I was still two hundred feet off the ground when I saw the others “summit” the tower. And once they were on the platform, six hundred feet in the sky, I learned just how crazy the Matheson cousins were. Dooley, the seventeen-year-old, climbed onto the top strut where the aircraft warning lights were mounted. There he stood up like a gymnast on a balance beam. There was nothing to hold him, not a safety rail, not a belt … nothing. A single gust of wind could have plucked him off that tower like a dandelion seed. Watching him dance along that strut like a drunken court jester nauseated me. Dooley Matheson was willing to throw away his life to try to get back at my brother for a basketball loss that could never be erased. That, I thought, is what makes McEwans superior to Mathesons on the evolutionary scale.
Then, to my horror, I saw my celebrated brother prove he was just as crazy as Dooley Matheson. As Dooley climbed down into his brother’s arms, Adam mounted the strut and not only walked along it, but extended his arms like wings while his shirt parachuted around him in the wind. When I saw the wind whipping his shirt like a sail in a storm, I finally puked. After I recovered myself and looked back up, I saw Adam bend his knees, take Paul’s hand, and drop back onto the platform. Relief surged through me like an anesthetic.
Then, as Adam started down the ladder, I saw Trey Matheson leap from the platform and catch hold of a high-voltage line where it passed over a horizontal strut that protruded from the tower. My heart started slapping my chest wall. The madman was hanging from a wire carrying 50,000 volts of electricity across the Mississippi River! God only knew what he must have been feeling: every hair on his body had to be standing on end. What I couldn’t see was how he would get back onto the tower without killing himself. If he grounded his body to the metal, the electrical current would blow off his legs as it shorted out his brain and heart. I watched Trey the way I’d watched the trapeze artist from the Ringling Bros. Circus as a little boy, until the elder Matheson finally swung himself repeatedly to gain velocity, then let go of the wire and flew back to the tower ladder like Spider-Man.
The shame and abuse they heaped on me when they finally reached the foot of that tower was almost unbearable. I heard the word pussy a hundred times in five minutes. Dooley crowed about how I had “pussied out, like all faggots do when the going gets tough.” Trey stared at us with a trancelike glaze in his eyes, claiming he’d gotten a massive hard-on as soon as he grabbed the high-voltage line. Pretty soon they were bragging that there was nothing that required balls they couldn’t beat us at. The basketball championship had obviously been a fluke. Then Dooley started singing “The Ballad of Casey Jones,” substituting profanity at every available opportunity. “Marshall McEwan was a pussy from hell, born sucking dicks in Bee-en-VILLE, tried to climb a tower with some ree-ul men, then he pussied out all over again!”
I laughed, even as some part of me wondered why Dooley seemed so obsessed with homosexuality. Did he really hate queers that much? Or was he secretly gay himself? As he started another verse, I wondered whether Dooley’s IQ might be marginally higher than I’d initially guessed—but Adam wasn’t having any. He told Paul to shut his cousin up, or he’d shut his mouth for him. I hadn’t seen Adam make such a threat since he’d defended me from a bully when I was ten years old. Dooley started squaring up to fight Adam, and Adam’s eyes went strangely flat. Paul Matheson looked worried. Paul knew all too well what Adam could do to someone on the football field when he felt no particular animus toward them. What would happen if Adam McEwan decided to really mess somebody up? I could see Paul wondering. There was more tension in the air than there had been atop that electrical tower, but Paul’s cousins didn’t seem to realize the danger.
Then I heard myself say, “There’s something I can beat you assholes at. And I’ll bet any amount of money you want on it.”
This took their attention off Adam, and quick. What was I talking about? they demanded. Some kind of fag parlor game, like bridge?
“I can beat you across the river,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Trey demanded. “Like racing over the bridge? We already won the drag race.”
“Not in the cars,” I said, feeling eerily calm. “Swimming.”
That stopped them. I knew then that, whatever they might say, they couldn’t refuse my challenge. Refusal didn’t fit into their fantasy of themselves. I had them cornered.
“Bull-fuckin’-shit,” Dooley said finally. “You won’t swim that river. It’s a mile wide.”
“More like half a mile. Three-quarters maybe, with the high water. And I’ll beat you by a hundred yards, you stupid cow-fucker.”
They looked at me like I was delusional.
“You ever swum it before?” Trey asked cannily.
“No.”
“He lying?” Dooley asked Paul, over his shoulder.
“No. But he’s a hell of a swimmer.”
“Well, shit. I’m a hell of a swimmer, too!” Dooley crowed. “I’m a great swimmer! I won the hundred-meter freestyle when I was thirteen.”
“Blue ribbon,” I said with mock awe. “So you’re all ready.”
“Fuck you,” Dooley growled. “I was born ready.”
“Nobody’s