The Devil’s Punchbowl

‘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.’

‘Touché. 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.

9

It took all my willpower not to call or text Tim once my mother got Annie to bed. That was at ten thirty. The following hour passed like a car stuck in low gear, and I fought the urge to swallow a couple of shots of vodka to help me endure the wait. When it finally came time to leave, my mother saw me off without any question about my destination. She probably assumed I was seeing a woman, and I did not disabuse her of the notion. The only difficulty I had getting out was sneaking a pistol past her. In the end I opted to slip my short-barreled .357 Magnum into my briefcase and carry it right by her to the car.

Now I’m cruising down Washington Street with a half hour to kill before my meeting with Tim. I’m only a couple of miles from the cemetery–as the crow flies–so I have some time to ponder why he thinks I need a weapon when we meet.

Or so I think until my cell phone rings. The caller isn’t Tim, as I expected, but Libby Jensen. She’s so upset that at first I can’t make out what she’s saying. For a moment I labor under the mistaken impression that she’s upset about our relationship, but then it registers–as it should have in the beginning–that she’s calling about Soren.

‘They arrested him!’ she sobs. ‘They say he has to spend the night in jail. They think he was driving the car.’

‘Whoa, whoa, slow down. What happened?’

‘There was a wreck,’ Libby says, her voice still riding the rapids of hysteria. ‘I’m not sure what happened. Soren was in a car that hit another car. The police say he was driving, but Soren says he wasn’t.’ Libby’s voice drops to a frantic whisper. ‘Penn, he’s so drunk I don’t know whether to believe him or not. At least I hope he’s drunk. They might have found some drugs. They won’t tell me. I’m so scared. You know what Mackey said the last time he got in trouble.’

On the occasion to which Libby is referring, Soren was busted with Lorcet Plus and Adderall. On my advice Libby hired Austin Mackey, a onetime classmate and the former district attorney, to represent him. At Mackey’s suggestion–and against all my better judgment–I used my influence with the present district attorney, Shadrach Johnson, to try to ensure that Soren’s case never went to trial. Mackey turned out to be right. After I promised my old political nemesis enough favors, the drug arrest was removed from Soren’s record altogether. If Libby wasn’t in love with me by that point in our relationship, the final transformation was completed that day. I can date my ultimate decision that things would not work out between us to that day as well.

‘Have you left yet?’ Libby asks, the pitch of her voice rising. ‘Where are you? Are you on your way?’

‘Have they booked him?’ I ask, glancing at my watch. Twenty-two minutes till midnight. ‘Have they charged him?’

‘I don’t know! I can’t even think. What will they do to him?’

What they probably should have done last time, I reply silently. Mackey’s final advice to Libby and Soren was that the boy never get within a hundred yards of an illegal drug while he was in Adams County, because the next time he was caught, Shad Johnson would throw the book at him. That day has come, and I feel Libby grasping at me like a drowning woman. But even if I could somehow blunt Shad’s vindictiveness, I can’t go on enabling Soren to ruin his life, and his mother’s with it.

‘Libby, you’ve got to calm down,’ I say in a steady voice. ‘You can’t help Soren if you can’t hold it together.’

‘Tell me you’re on your way,’ she says with single-minded urgency. ‘They’re going to take him to the cell in a minute!’

Damn. I close my eyes briefly as my car drifts across Franklin Street and heads into the Victorian part of town. ‘Libby, I want you to listen to me. I will come down there and try to help, but you can’t—’

She gives a plaintive moan that sounds like the preface to an emotional plea, but then without warning the sound shatters into a shrill scream of terror.

‘What is it?’ I yell. ‘What happened?’

There’s a rattle that sounds like Libby’s cell phone skating across a tile floor. I hear confused shouts, several slaps, then a shriek followed by a bellow of rage and anguish. The phone rattles again, and then I hear sobbing. Libby has the phone. After twenty seconds of gulping air, she begs me in a torrent of words to come to the station. I wait until she runs out of air, then ask again what happened.

‘They’re beating him up! They maced him.’

I try to picture this scene, but I can’t see the Natchez police beating a nineteen-year-old kid without some physical provocation. ‘Did Soren do something first?’

‘He hit one of the cops,’ she whispers. ‘They were dragging him back to the cell, really being rough, and he lashed out at somebody. It was just a reflex! Penn, help me. Please! I’m so scared they’re going to do something terrible to him, or put him back there with somebody horrible. If you ever cared for me at all, please, come now.’

A minute ago, I would have said nothing could keep me from meeting Tim at the stroke of midnight, but guilt is a powerful motivator. With a silent Goddamn it, I wrench the wheel right on Madison Street and speed northward to the police station.

It’s thirteen minutes after twelve when I finally squeal out of the police station parking lot, my hands shaking with anger and fear. Libby is shouting after me, but not as loudly as her son is screaming mindless profanity in the drunk tank. The police found half a pound of grass in the trunk of the car Soren was driving, but I’m almost positive he was high on crystal meth. Soren is essentially a gentle kid, not prone to violence, but when he drinks or ingests any drug but marijuana, his anger at his father surfaces, and he gets unpredictable.

A passenger in the car that he T-boned had to be evacuated by helicopter from St Catherine’s Hospital to University Medical Center in Jackson. Worse than that–for Soren, at least–was the poke he took at the cop who was trying to drag him from the booking area to the cellblock. That blow placed Soren Jensen on the wrong side of a stark line for the Natchez Police Department. The cop required three stitches for the blow to his cheek, and Soren went to the cell with a faceful of pepper spray; but this is merely prologue for what will happen when Shad Johnson gets hold of the case.

All this minutiae drains quickly away as I race westward toward the cemetery. Even if a patrol car doesn’t stop me for speeding, I’ll be nearly half an hour late for my rendezvous with Tim.

Flying up Cemetery Road, past the prepossessing silhouette of Weymouth Hall, I realize why Tim chose Jewish Hill for our meetings. The cemetery’s front lower level, which houses the Turning Angel, is bathed in a yellow-orange glow from the sodium streetlights on Cemetery Road. But because of its height, the tabletop of Jewish Hill remains shrouded in darkness.

Is Tim still here? I see no car parked along the cemetery wall, but then I saw none last night either. I still don’t know how Tim approached me from the back of the cemetery, since the only entrances I know about face Cemetery Road. But an old dopehead like Jessup probably knows a lot of things I don’t about the deserted areas of the city.

An hour ago I planned to park more secretively than I did last night, but there’s no time for that now. I stop at the foot of Jewish Hill, take my pistol from my briefcase, shove it into my waistband, and leave the car. A quick push takes me through the hedge behind the wall, and then I’m climbing the steep face of the hill, toward the wire bench and the flagpole.