Cemetery Road. Greg Iles
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spotlight he walked in whited out everything around him. And while I stood six feet tall as a ninth grader, and was no slouch in the classroom, I couldn’t possibly stand tall enough to escape the penumbra around my brother. Yet as I watched him stride like Apollo through our earthly realm, what amazed me most was his humility. Despite being subjected to near continuous adulation, Adam did not “get the big head.” He kept himself apart from all cliques, treated everyone as an equal, and he almost never got angry. Adam seemed, by any measure of human frailty, too good to be true. And while someone so universally admired almost inevitably generates resentment or outright enmity in some people, Adam seemed the exception. Even teams he embarrassed on the hotly contested fields of Mississippi embraced him as a kind of hero, someone they would later boast they had played against.
By the end of his senior year—at least the athletic year, of which that track meet marked the coda—Adam wasn’t the only high school boy feeling immortal. As soon as the coaches handed out our trophies, we broke out in spectacular fashion. After holding ourselves in check for most of the year—limiting ourselves to a few beers on weekends—we switched to Jack Daniel’s or vodka for the ride home, and some guys even broke out the weed. By ten P.M. in Bienville, every member of every St. Mark’s boys’ athletic team was wasted.
We started in one big group, a convoy of cars and trucks that hit all the high school hangout spots like a motorized Roman triumph. McDonald’s, the mall parking lot, the recently closed electroplating factory, and finally the sandbar by the river. But as the hours wore on, the liquor and grass began culling the weaker members of the tribe. Some left to find girlfriends for late-night rendezvous, while others simply passed out in cars at various places around the city. By midnight, we were down to a core squad of six guys in two vehicles.
Adam and I were riding in Joey Burrell’s beat-up Nissan 280ZX 2+2. In the other car were Paul Matheson and his two cousins from Jackson—prize assholes and stars at Capital Prep. Like Paul, they were blond and annoyingly handsome (our cheerleaders loved them, the bastards). Having won the Quad A division of the state track meet, the Matheson cousins had driven their sparkling new IROC-Z Camaro the forty miles from Jackson to Bienville to “teach Cousin Paul how to celebrate.”
Paul Matheson didn’t need any lessons in that department. It was Paul who’d supplied the weed after we got back from Jackson, and I was pretty sure he’d been smoking it all year long, between seventh period and afternoon practices. Though only a year older than I, Paul was talented enough to outplay most of us stoned. His father, Max, had been a football legend at Bienville’s public high school in 1969, before he went to Vietnam, and the son had inherited enough of those genes to return punts and kickoffs for the varsity and to take people’s heads off as a strong safety on the starting defense. Paul had also been sixth man on the championship basketball team that defeated Capital Prep—something that drove his cousins crazy.
Despite the age difference between us, Paul and I had been friends on and off since we were young boys. Back then, his house wasn’t far from mine; we swam at the same pool, and by the time I was seven we were playing on the same sports teams. After going through Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts together, we found ourselves playing for St. Mark’s junior high. In that sense, we were comrades in arms and close to brothers. The main thing that separated us was money.
Paul’s father was rich. His uncle in Jackson was richer still. Paul’s family owned the lumber mill in town and also a wood treatment plant by the river. The uncle was a big contractor who did a lot of state jobs. My father earned a decent living publishing the Bienville Watchman, but our family cars were ten years old, and we lived in a tract house built in 1958. We had no second home on Lake Comeaux, no killer stereo or projection TV, and no kids’ phone line or swimming pool in the backyard as we hit our teenage years.
As a boy, I never noticed this wealth gap. Paul shared what he had, and money didn’t seem important. Besides, his dad had won some big medals for bravery in Vietnam, and not many people begrudge a veteran success when he survives combat. But having Max Matheson for an old man was a heavy cross to bear for Paul. The war hero was a hard-ass, despite being known to party on occasion, and he pressured his son to win every contest in which he participated.
From the way Paul’s cousins acted the night of the track meet, I figured the uncle must be an even bigger bastard than Max. They’d come to Bienville still angry about losing Overall State to us back in February. By the time they found us, they were toasted on some combination of grass and speed. Not that we were sober. Even Adam—who always imbibed in moderation—had skipped the Miller ponies in favor of Jack Daniel’s. The hours before midnight passed amicably enough, but after twelve, things started to get contentious. The Matheson cousins had been digging at us all night, and we had been paying them back with interest. But around two A.M., things drifted out of control.
We were parked at the foot of the big electrical tower near the port, close enough to the river to get hit by barge searchlights as they passed. The Matheson boys weren’t rocket scientists, but they had the animal cleverness of natural predators. Dooley was seventeen, his brother Trey a year older. Dooley had the mean streak. All night they’d been calling us faggots, losers, and cheaters—because if we hadn’t cheated, how else could Capital Prep have been beaten by a pissant Single A team? The fact that we’d won by only one point was to them clear evidence that we’d bribed a referee, at the least.
I didn’t give a damn what they said, but for some reason Adam couldn’t endure their incessant ragging. This got my attention, because my brother was the most unflappable guy I knew. And somehow, before I understood what was happening, Adam had accepted a challenge for a hundred-yard sprint along the road beneath the tower. One minute we were a group of griping drunks, the next we were lined up along the asphalt in the beam of the IROC-Z’s headlights, smashing bottles and waiting for the starting gun.
Joey Burrell kept a pistol in his car, a little .25. He fired it into the sky, sending us all blazing down the road with adrenaline, alcohol, and cannabis roaring in our veins. I ran so hard I thought my heart might burst, but I only came in fourth place. Adam won the race, beating Paul by half a step. Trey Matheson was third, then me, and finally Dooley Matheson, the complainingest son of a bitch I’d ever met. All the way back to the cars, Dooley bitched about Adam and Paul getting a head start.
We should have stopped then, but when we reached the foot of the tower, Dooley demanded a chance to get his own back. He didn’t want to do it on foot, though. He wanted a drag race along the levee road. This was preposterous. Their IROC-Z boasted a hundred more horsepower than Joey’s 280ZX, but nevertheless I soon found myself sitting shotgun in the Nissan while Dooley and his brother revved the big engine of the IROC-Z. Adam sat in the backseat behind me, his seat belt cinched tight, while Paul angrily took the backseat of his cousins’ car to keep the weight distribution even. The finish line was a grain elevator at the end of Port Road, roughly two miles away. After Joey and Dooley shouted a mutual countdown from five, we were off, blasting along the levee, watching the taillights of the IROC-Z as it vanished like an F-16 ahead of us. That Camaro beat us so badly that by the time we reached the grain elevator, the Mathesons were lounging against their car drinking beer.
At that point, we should have quit while we were behind, but the drag race only sparked further madness. We were boys, after all, and the testosterone was flowing. After handing out the embarrassing loss, the Mathesons insisted on giving us a chance to “win our pride back.” I didn’t know what they were talking about until Dooley pointed up at the electrical tower standing two miles back at the starting line. At six hundred feet tall, that tower—and its twin on the Louisiana shore a mile away—supported the high-voltage transmission lines that carried electrical power across the Mississippi River. I knew a few guys who’d claimed to have climbed that tower, but I’d never believed them. Nor could I see how climbing a six-hundred-foot-tall erector set represented any kind of winnable contest. But as the drunken discussion progressed, it became apparent that this was more of a test of manhood than a contest.
Once again, I was shocked to see my older brother buy into this idea. On any other night, Adam would have laughed at the absurdity of the dare. But that night, he let himself be baited. As subtly as I could, I tried to stop him. I wasn’t scared of much back then, but heights I did not handle well. That