The Devil's Punchbowl

CHAPTER 8

The hours after receiving Tim’s text message are an emotional seesaw for me; panic alternates with wild hope that Jessup has somehow obtained evidence of fraud and gotten safely away with it. This hope is a tacit admission that Tim’s allegations are neither exaggerations nor paranoid fantasies. The maddening thing is that I’ll have to wait until midnight to talk to him. I assume his choice of hour means that he intends to stay on board the Magnolia Queen until the end of his shift. Why doesn’t he simply walk off the boat, I wonder, and race up to my office at City Hall? My endless analysis of this question puts me into such a state that Rose, my secretary, asks repeatedly whether I’m all right and even convinces me to lie down for an hour on a cot in the civil defense director’s office. Lying by the director’s red phone, I find it almost impossible not to call Tim, but somehow I manage it. If he’s willing to risk his life, the least I can do is take his precautions seriously.

The afternoon passes slowly, with Rose doing her best to handle the calls from the various committees and charities using the Balloon Festival to generate support or contributions, and Paul Labry fielding complaints from merchants and residents involving zoning and noise violations. Like the other selectmen, Labry has a full-time job, but he always makes an extra effort to help me during crunch times.

From the volume of calls and the traffic outside City Hall, one thing is certain: Even if Jessup is right and Natchez is festering with corruption beneath its elegant facade, the “Balloon Glow”-tonight’s official opening ceremony of the Great Mississippi River Balloon Festival-will go on.

I manage to get out of City Hall by six and collect Annie from my parents’ house, where she usually spends her after-school time. I can tell she’s excited as we drive toward the bluff, and she blushes as the police wave us through the big orange barricades at Fort Rosalie. Annie’s at the age where anything that makes her stand out from her friends mortifies her, but I sense that she’s enjoying the VIP treatment.

The sun has already set below the bluff, and the truncated roars of flaming gas jets sound from beyond the great mansion whose grounds provide the setting for the town’s biggest festival. Annie gasps as we round the corner of Rosalie, and I feel my heart quicken. The term balloon glow perfectly describes this night ritual; from a distance the balloons glow like giant multicolored lanterns against the black backdrop of sky. But up close, among the inflated canopies swaying in the wind, the experience is much more intense. When the pilots do “burns” for the spectators, you can feel the heat from thirty feet away. Yellow and blue flares light the night like bonfires, awing children and adults alike. The tethered balloons tug against the ropes binding them to the earth, and kids who grab the edges of the baskets feel themselves lifted bodily from the ground. The ceremony is a perfect prologue for tomorrow’s opening race, when the balloons will leap from the dewy morning grass and fill the skies over the city, pulling every attentive soul upward with them.

“I’m glad ya’ll decided to go ahead with it,” Annie says, grabbing my arm as we hurry to join the people streaming among the balloons. “This will help the refugee kids forget about the hurricane.”

She tugs me toward the nearest balloon, and I use her momentary inattention to check my cell phone for further text messages. I don’t know if I’m hoping Tim will cancel the meeting or move it forward. All I know for sure is that I want the truth about Golden Parachute. But there’s no message.

I spend the first forty-five minutes with Annie, looking at everything she instructs me to and buttonholing pilots so she can ask them all kinds of questions about the flight parameters of hot-air bal loons. I get buttonholed myself a few times, by citizens with questions or complaints about their pet interest, but Annie has become adept at extricating me from such conversations. TV crews roam the grounds of Rosalie with their cameras: one from Baton Rouge, ninety miles to the south; another from Jackson, a hundred miles to the north. I promise a producer from the Baton Rouge station that I’ll give her five minutes at the gate of Rosalie, where they’re interviewing pilots and Katrina refugees. I plan to take Annie with me, but two minutes after I make the promise, we walk right into Libby Jensen, and something goes tight in my chest.

“Libby! Libby!” Annie cries, running forward and giving her a hug. “Aren’t the balloons awesome?”

“Yes, they are,” Libby agrees, smiling cautiously at me above Annie’s head.

Libby is a Natchez native who went to law school in Texas, married a partner at her Dallas firm, had a child by him, then divorced him after discovering that he’d kept a series of mistresses during the first decade of their marriage. She liked practicing law about as much as she liked being cheated on, so she brought her son back home and used her settlement to open a bookstore. Her charisma and sharp business sense have made the shop a success, and several author friends of mine stop to sign books there when making the literary pilgrimage from Oxford to New Orleans. After Caitlin left town, Libby and I found that our friendship quickly evolved into something that eased the loneliness we both felt, and that mutual comfort carried us through most of a year. But her son, Soren, has some serious anger issues-not to mention a drug problem-and Libby and I disagreed about how best to handle that. In the end, that disagreement drove us apart.

Tonight is the first time we’ve found ourselves together since ending our relationship, and I’ve worried it would be awkward. But Libby’s soft brown eyes shine as she hugs Annie, and in them I see an acknowledgment that the sadness she feels is in part her own choice.

“Where’s Soren?” Annie asks, reminding me that Tim said he’d seen Libby’s son down on the Magnolia Queen, looking high as a kite.

Libby rolls her eyes to disguise the anxiety that’s her constant companion. “Oh, running around with his friends, complaining about the bands they booked this year. Where are you guys headed?”

“Daddy has an interview,” Annie says, obviously not enthused by the idea of standing by while I play talking head.

“Well, you can just come with me while he acts like a big shot for the cameras.” Libby gives me a wink. “I just saw some of your friends diving into the Space Walk.”

“Can I, Dad?”

I question Libby with a raised eyebrow, and she nods that she meant the invitation sincerely.

“Okay. I’ll catch up in a half hour or so. We’re not staying long, though. I have some work to do tonight, and I want to be rested for that balloon flight tomorrow.”

“I’d like to see that,” Libby says, chuckling like a wiseass.

“I’m making him take a barf bag,” Annie tells her. “Seriously.”

I wave them off and head back toward Rosalie, wondering where Tim Jessup is at this moment. Dealing blackjack on the boat docked below the cemetery? Or hiding out in some hotel room with stolen evidence, chain-smoking cigarettes while he waits for midnight to come? There are no hotel rooms available, I answer myself. Implicit in my worry about Tim is a fear of violence, and it strikes me that violence has always been a part of the ground beneath my feet. Fort Rosalie, the original French garrison in Natchez, was built in 1716. In 1729 the enraged Natchez Indians massacred every French soldier in the fort to punish them for ill treatment-for which French reinforcements slaughtered every native man, woman, and child they could find the following year. Rosalie went on to become General Grant’s headquarters during one night of the Civil War, but by then it had presided over untold numbers of robberies, rapes, and murders in the Under-the-Hill district that lay in its shadow. Is it possible, I wonder, that in some dark clearing across the river men are gathering to watch starving animals tear each other to pieces while half-naked girls serve them drinks?

As I round the east corner of Rosalie’s fence, a tungsten video light splits the dark, and several brown heads begin bobbing in its glare. If the gas jets of the balloons look like lanterns, the video light is a white-hot star illuminating a blond woman with a handheld mike standing before Rosalie’s gate. She’s interviewing some children who apparently fled here from the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans in the wake of Katrina. Two TV trucks are parked nearby, and more than a dozen journalists call questions to the kids from the shadows behind the light.

As I near the spotlight’s halo, the producer I spoke to earlier waves me over and tells me what she wants: the basic Chamber of Commerce routine. When the kids finish, I take their place before the gate and squint against the glare while my pupils adapt.

On TV I tend to come across more like a district attorney than a mayor, and this has been a double-edged sword. Despite my diminished enthusiasm for the job, after two years in office I can give the city’s PR line on autopilot. This year’s Balloon Festival, however, has more meaning than usual. With the city’s hotels and shelters filled to bursting with suffering families, many locals believed we should cancel the races out of respect for the hurricane refugees, and also to keep from straining the city’s overtaxed resources. But the Balloon Festival is a twenty-year tradition, and I, along with several community leaders, championed the idea that the work required to bring off the races under extraordinary circumstances would prove a unifying force for the community. As I explain this to the brightly blank eyes of the TV reporter, she acts as though my words amaze her, but I know she’s thinking about her next question, or her eye makeup, or where she can get a sugared funnel cake like the one a refugee kid is eating. I try to wrap up my pitch with some enthusiasm for the citizens who’ll see the report from home.

“Critics argued that with the hotels filled, the balloon pilots would have nowhere to stay,” I say, “but dozens of families have generously opened their homes so that the festival could go forward. We’ve had more volunteers for the support crews than we’ve ever had before. After feeling the outpouring of energy up on the bluff tonight, I believe events are going to bear out our optimism. The best thing you can do in the aftermath of tragedy is to focus on the present, because that way lies the future. Thank you.”

I move to step out of the light, but suddenly a cool, calm female voice with no accent reaches out of the dark and stops me.

“Mr. Mayor, some refugees have claimed that they’re not receiving the relief checks that the federal government promised them. Could you comment on this for our readers?”

Caitlin. She is here.

I shield my eyes from the glare. “What paper are you with?” I ask innocently.

“The Natchez Examiner,” Caitlin answers with the faintest trace of irony. “Caitlin Masters.”

“Well, Ms. Masters, welcome back to Natchez. As for the relief checks, they’re a federal matter and consequently not within my purview. Could someone kill that light, please?”

“What about the contention of two of your selectmen?” Caitlin continues, a fine barb of challenge in her voice. “They say there’s been a great deal of fraudulent application for relief by refugees, with some people going through the check line three and four times with one Social Security number.”

To my surprise, the spotlight goes dark, but I can’t pick Caitlin’s face from the red afterimage floating before my eyes. “As I said, those relief checks are being issued by the federal government; therefore, fraud in obtaining them falls under federal jurisdiction. I suggest you speak to the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security.”

“I intend to.”

“Good luck. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. Enjoy the festival.”

The knot of reporters breaks up quickly, leaving Caitlin and me with two techs packing equipment. My eyes having recovered, I see immediately that she looks as good as she ever did, unique among the women I meet in my daily life. Caitlin’s bone-white skin, her waterfall of jet black hair, and her startling green eyes combine to radiate an almost disconcerting sense of self-possession. This woman is smart, you sense on meeting her, probably too smart for her own good, or anybody else’s.

“You want to walk?” she asks.

“Sure.”

She gives me an easy smile and starts away from Rosalie, walking across the head of Silver Street, the hill road that leads down to one of our casino boats, then toward the bluff proper. Caitlin leads me along the fence, on the asphalt path laid by the Corps of Engineers when they reinforced the bluff. Eighteen inches beyond the fence, the land drops like a cliff to the banks of the river below.

“You never were much of a walker,” I comment, “unless you were headed somewhere specific.”

She laughs softly. “Maybe I’ve changed.”

I murmur in surprise.

“So…how’s it going?” she asks, her words banal but her tone something else altogether.

When you practically live with someone for six years, you come to know their rhythms the way you know your own. Their way of talking, the way they breathe, sleep, and walk. Changes in those things communicate messages if you pay attention, but as I walk beside my old lover-old in the sense of long experience together-I find that our separation has dulled my perception of her secret language. That is if she means anything beyond her literal words. Maybe in this case a walk is just a walk.

“It’s been hard,” I say quietly. It’s tough to admit you were wrong about something, and even harder to admit someone else was right. “Harder than I thought it would be.”

“People don’t like change,” she says. “I see it every day, wherever I go.”

“You said you’ve changed.”

Her green eyes flicker. “I said maybe.”

The small park we’ve entered was the main venue for festivals when I was a child, the white gazebo atop the bluff a gathering place for painters and musicians and even ham-radio operators, who came because the ground was the highest for miles around. At the gazebo steps, I let her ascend first, watching the clean line of her shoulders, the graceful curve of her back. God, I’ve missed her. She walks to the rail and looks out into the night sky over the river.

“It smells the same,” she says.

“Good or bad?”

“Both.”

Across the river, lines of headlights move east and west on the main highway crossing the hard-shell Baptist country of Louisiana. Twelve miles into that darkness, Jerry Lee Lewis and Jimmy Swaggart were raised under the flaming shadows of God and Satan, while around them sharecroppers toiled in the cotton and sang their pain to the uncaring fields.

“People think they’re in the South when they’re in the Carolinas,” she says. “And they are, I guess. But this place is still the South, you know? It’s unassimilated.”

I murmur assent, but I still don’t engage in conversation, preferring to study her from an oblique angle. This is the closest I have been to Caitlin in months. In a crowd of Mississippi women she stands out like a European tourist. In our moist, subtropical climate, the milk-fed, round-cheeked faces of the belles usually last until thirty-five, like a prolonged adolescence. This beauty seems a gift at first, but when it goes, the rearguard action begins, a protracted battle against age and gravity that leaves many with the look of wilted matrons masquerading as prom queens. Plastic surgery only makes the masks more startling in the end. Caitlin’s face is all planes and angles, a face of architectural precision, almost masculine but not quite, thanks to feline eyes that shine like emeralds in the dark. Her every movement seems purposeful, and if she has nowhere to go, she stands like a soldier at rest. She never drifts. And remembering this, I realize that this walk is not just a walk.

“What brought you back here?” I ask softly.

She hugs herself against the wind shooting up the face of the bluff. “Katrina.”

This answer is certainly sufficient, but it seems too easy. “You’re covering the aftermath?”

“I’m taking it in. Trying to process it. I’ve heard a lot of disturbing things about what happened down there. The Danziger Bridge shooting, wide-open rules of engagement. The administration’s response on the humanitarian side, or lack of one. Talk about too little, too late.”

There’s nothing original in this view. And I’m not much interested in a privileged publisher taking a luxury tour through the dark side of our national character. This reminds me of Caitlin as I first met her, a Northern dilettante who preached liberalism but who had no experience of the world outside a college classroom or a newspaper owned by one of her father’s friends.

“Disturbing things happen everywhere,” I say, “all the time. In Natchez, in Charlotte, wherever. You can find a window into hell a mile from wherever you are, if you really want to.”

She inclines her head, almost as though in prayer.

I didn’t mean to sound so cynical, but I have little patience with selective outrage. “You could just as easily be doing a story on how the white Baptist churches are sheltering black refugees, but that won’t sell as many papers as a white-cops-shoot-black-civilians story, will it?”

“You always kept me honest, didn’t you?”

“And you, me.”

She turns from the rail, and her green eyes throw back reflections of the streetlamps behind me on Broadway. A thumping bass beat booms from the tavern across the street, then a blast of calliope music blares dissonant counterpoint from below the bluff.

“Wow,” Caitlin exclaims. “The boats must really be crazy tonight.”

With a start, I realize that for a few peaceful minutes I haven’t thought of Tim Jessup. “I really should get back to Annie,” I say, suddenly anxious about the depth of my need to be near Caitlin. “I’ve got a really long day tomorrow.”

“No doubt. I heard you’re on the morning flight,” she says with a knowing smile. “Is that true?”

“No way out of it, I’m afraid. I’m schmoozing a CEO who could bring a new plant here.”

“I heard. You think you may swing that, Mayor?”

“No comment.”

She laughs dutifully, but her eyes are troubled. “I can’t read you like I used to.”

“I know how you feel.” Despite my anxiety, I realize that the dread I felt earlier has been replaced by an exhilarating feeling of lightness under my sternum, as though I’ve ingested a few particles of cocaine along with Caitlin’s words. An electric arc shoots through me as she takes my hand to lead me down the steps.

“Is Annie with your mother?” she asks. The path along the bluff is filling up with people preparing to watch the fireworks display across the river in Vidalia. “I haven’t seen your parents in so long. I feel bad.”

“They still talk about you. Dad especially.” I don’t want her to ask any more about Annie. I don’t feel she has the right to, really.

“You know, Charlotte’s not what I thought either,” she says.

“No?”

“It’s a lot smaller than I expected. Boston too. I’m starting to think that no matter where you go, it’s basically a small town. The newspaper business is a small town. L.A.’s a small town. Paris is a small town.”

“Maybe those places only look small from the window of a limo. When you have the phone number of everybody who matters.”

She doesn’t respond to this, but after a moment she lets my hand fall. As we near the festival gate, she stops and gazes at me without the guard of irony up. “That’s the question, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“Who matters?”

“Yep.”

Her eyes hold mine steadily as the crowd swirls around us. “What’s your answer?”

“That’s easy. Annie.”

“Touchй. You’re right, of course.” She looks back toward the carnival lights beside Rosalie, brushes the black veil of hair away from her face. “This feels strange. So familiar, and yet…I don’t know. You don’t seem quite yourself.” She tilts her head and tries to penetrate the time that hovers between us like an invisible shield. “Is it just me? Or is something really wrong?”

“What are you doing here, Caitlin?”

Her eyes narrow. “I told you. Working a story.”

“A New Orleans story?”

She glances away for the briefest of moments. “There might be a Natchez angle.”

Before I can ask about this, a male voice cries her name twice in quick succession. “There you are!” says the newcomer, a handsome man of thirty-five who disengages from the chaos with some difficulty. He has a bohemian look-bohemian chic might be more accurate-and he clasps Caitlin’s right hand in both of his. “I’ve been looking all over for you. I ended up down at the stage, talking to some gospel singers. They’re fantastic!”

Caitlin casually extricates her hand and introduces me as the mayor of Natchez. The bohemian’s name is Jan something.

“Jan’s doing a documentary on the Danziger Bridge incident.”

“Bridge massacre,” Jan corrects, as though quoting the title of the film.

On the Danziger lift bridge in New Orleans, four white cops responding to an “officer down” call received sniper fire from a group of black men, returned fire, and killed two of them. The black group later contended that they had been unarmed. As with so much of what happened in the first days of Katrina’s flood, no one has yet been able to ascertain what really transpired. “I’m sure they’ll eat that up in Park City,” I say with a brittle Chamber of Commerce smile.

Jan draws back in momentary confusion, and Caitlin looks startled. I usually cover my emotions better than this, but tonight I just don’t give a damn.

“You guys have fun. I need to find my daughter.”

And with that I’m away from them. I couldn’t have stood much more, and that knowledge frightens me. Yet as I walk through the festival gate, making for the flashing neon above the rides grouped on the bluff, it’s not heartache that preoccupies me, but some of Caitlin’s last words: working a story… There might be a Natchez angle.

As improbable as it seems, I wonder if she’s somehow picked up the rumors of dogfighting, prostitution, and illicit drugs surrounding the Magnolia Queen. A word from one of her local reporters would be enough to pique her interest, and every facet of that story would engage her. If Caitlin does have reporters working that story, she might well elide it from any conversation with me. At one time we told each other everything. But as our relationship wore on, we found that the professions of lawyer and journalist-even novelist and journalist-gave us separate agendas where privileged information was concerned, and that led to conflict.

Thirty yards ahead, I glimpse the familiar rounded line of Libby’s shoulders, and a blade of guilt pierces me. Though we’ve officially ended our intimate relationship, it would hurt her to learn that a few moments with Caitlin affected me so deeply. As I near Libby, Annie and a friend cannonball through the exit of the Space Walk and roll squealing onto the ground beside her. Only now do I remember that I need someone to stay with Annie while I’m out on tonight’s midnight rendezvous. There’s little chance of getting a high school sitter this late on a balloon-race Friday; I’ll have to ask my mother to spend the night at my house.

“You’ve been gone awhile,” Libby says with a shadow of suspicion.

“They had a lot of questions about Katrina,” I say in an offhand voice.

“We want to ride the Tilt-A-Whirl!” Annie and her friend scream in unison.

I’m hesitant to be alone with Libby, but she nods quickly and they set off for the Tilt-A-Whirl at a run.

“I saw an old flame of yours earlier,” Libby says, her eyes boring into mine with uncomfortable intensity. “Was she there for the interview?”

“One of a dozen or so.”

Libby sucks her lips between her teeth and looks pointedly off into the crowd.

“Have you seen Soren yet?” I ask.

“No. I guess Caitlin heard we broke up.”

“She didn’t mention it.”

Libby tries to suppress a tight smile of judgment or envy. “She wouldn’t.”

“Did Annie see her?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Libby…we knew there were going to be some awkward times, but-”

“Don’t,” she says quickly. “You don’t have to apologize. It’s not even unexpected. I’m just surprised to see her this fast. But I guess I shouldn’t be. Caitlin’s been a quick study all her life.”

I stifle a sigh and turn toward the Tilt-A-Whirl, where Annie and her friend spin through the air, trailing green and fuchsia light.

When I look back again, Libby is gone. Then I catch sight of her moving through the crowd toward the Tilt-A-Whirl. I follow, but time my arrival to coincide with Annie’s disembarking from the ride.

“Should we look for Soren?” I ask halfheartedly.

“Sure,” Annie says. “I haven’t seen him yet.”

Libby forces a smile and pats her in the small of the back. “Oh, he’s with his older friends. You guys go have some fun. I need to get back and let the dogs out.”

This patent lie brings another rush of guilt, but there’s nothing to be done other than to let things take their course.

Libby bends, hugs Annie, then gives my wrist a quick squeeze and musters an almost genuine smile. With an awkward wave she turns and joins the flow of the crowd.

Annie stares solemnly after her diminishing figure, as though watching the departure of a family member she might never see again. After Libby disappears, Annie turns and looks up with wide eyes. “Daddy, I saw Caitlin here.”

A strange numbness fills me, slowing my responses. “Really? Where did you see her?”

“She was talking to a man with a camera. She was far away, but I know it was her.”

I’m not sure how to respond, but I don’t like to lie to my daughter. “I saw her too, baby.”

Annie’s eyes widen still more. “Did you talk to her?”

“She interviewed me a few minutes ago, with some other reporters.”

Annie nods slowly, taking this in. “I miss Libby, Dad.”

“I do too.”

When no explanation follows, she says, “Did ya’ll break up?”

God, she’s perceptive. “What makes you ask that?”

“I don’t know. Did you?”

I take Annie’s hand, then kneel and look into her eyes. “We did. I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you about it first.”

She looks back at the place where Libby vanished, but all that remains is a crowd of laughing revelers.

“She’s really sad,” Annie says, looking back at me with damp eyes. “I am too. I knew something was different.”

“I’m sad too, baby.”

“I think she’s scared about Soren. Do you think so?”

“I think Soren has some problems. Lots of teenagers do. But that’s for Soren and Libby to work out.”

Annie wipes a tear from her eye.

“Come on,” I say, leading her down the long row of brightly lit carnival booths, a sanitized version of the sleazy carnies that used to camp on the edge of town when I was a boy. The barkers shout their come-ons, but their hoarse voices scarcely penetrate the confusion surrounding my little girl. And yet, as sad as she is, I know that the grief Annie feels over the loss of Libby as a potential mother figure is tempered by hope that Caitlin has reappeared for a very different reason than covering a news story. If it weren’t for my fear for Tim Jessup, I might be unable to think about anything else myself.

When the first rocket detonates over Louisiana, filling the sky over the river with sizzling arcs of blue and white light, it takes a couple of seconds for the report of the explosion to reach us. When it does, every muscle in my abdomen clenches, as though steeling against a bullet. This, I realize, is sympathetic fear. My daughter’s hand is in mine, love is near, life is good. But somewhere not far away, Tim Jessup is risking all he has to right what he believes is an unendurable wrong. Please be careful, I intone in a private prayer. Don’t try to be a hero. My father never spoke much about his service in Korea, but one thing he did share has been borne out by my own experience: Heroism is sacrifice.

Most of the heroes I’ve known are dead.