The Devil's Punchbowl

  “This isn’t Northern Ireland. It’s Mississippi. We know how to play rough here too.”

  “I’ll remember,” Quinn says, his voice filled with good humor. “Looking forward to it.”

  He turns and walks back toward the house.

  I climb into the Saab, then check my cell phone. Quinn turned it off while I was inside. Switching it on, I drive toward the gatehouse. As soon as the phone locates a tower, it begins ringing, and also signaling missed calls. The LCD screen reads, Caller: Hans Necker. The Minnesotan is probably calling me from three thousand feet above the river, but as I glance back toward Louisiana, I see only a solitary balloon in the sky, scudding southward like a fast-moving cloud.

  “Hello?”

  “Penn! Hans Necker! Is your family all right?”

  “Ah yeah. I’m really sorry I had to miss the race. Everything’s fine now.”

  “Good! Because we got delayed by wind. A couple of cowboys took off, but they were going the wrong way sixty seconds out. How far are you from the football field behind the prep school south of town?”

  “St. Stephen’s?”

  Necker speaks away from the phone, then says, “Yeah, yeah, Buck Stadium, they call it. Big hole in the ground.”

  “Um five minutes?”

  “Perfect! Get down here. We’re waiting for you. But don’t mess around. We’ll be one of the last to launch as it is.”

  As I near the gatehouse, I slow the car and look back at the stucco boxes on the bluff. When the Natchez Indians looked at the dwellings of the French interlopers who’d appeared on their land in the early 1700s, they probably asked the same questions I’m asking now: Who are these madmen and what do they want? Do they even know themselves? The gate guard looks puzzled by my apparent reluctance to leave. I’ve missed something here. Slowly I pan my gaze across the still-green landscape, past the alien mansion, to the rim of the bluff.

  There.

  In the shade of a scarlet oak, silhouetted against the blue-white sky, sits the white dog that pinned me to my front door while Sands prodded me with his knife. The animal is too far away for me to see its eyes, but he’s not looking out over the river, as I’d first thought. He’s looking at me. He seems a sculpture of alertness, his big head held high, his cropped ears erect.

  As I stare, the dog raises his hindquarters until his huge body is aimed at me like a torpedo. Nearly two hundred yards separate us, but that dog could cover the distance in twenty seconds. Emboldened by the car around me, I raise my hand as though in greeting, then, irrationally, give the dog the finger. He instantly lowers his head and begins to trot toward me. After one last look, I drive through the gate.

  A hundred yards down the road, a rolled newspaper lies at the foot of an asphalt driveway. I stop my car, get out, and take the rubber band off the paper. The front page carries the usual fluff about the Balloon Festival, but below the fold, I see a small story with the headline DEATH MARS POST RACE CELEBRATIONS. The byline reads Caitlin Masters. A quick scan of the story reveals a surprising number of facts, or perhaps not so surprising, considering the network of sources, including cops, that Caitlin developed while she lived here. But in the sixth paragraph I discover something I knew nothing about.

  “Sources close to the investigation say that over a pound of crystal methamphetamine was discovered at the victim’s residence by officers sent there to inform the widow of her husband’s death. The widow had vanished, and the house was open. As of this writing, she remains missing. Anyone with knowledge of the whereabouts of Julia Stanton Jessup is urged to contact police immediately.”

  Caitlin quotes the lead detective: “With this amount of drugs involved, we’re almost certainly looking at a drug murder. We need to find this woman and her child before anybody else does.”

  Consumed by rage, I calmly roll the newspaper back into a tight cylinder and fit the rubber band around it. A pound of crystal meth? I searched Tim’s house myself, and I didn’t find any drugs. And I beat the police there. If the two cops who drove up on me “found” the meth, either they planted it or they found drugs carefully planted by whoever tore up the house before I got there.

  “Hey!” shouts a man in a bathrobe, from far up the driveway. “You work for the Examiner?”

  “No, sorry,” I call, tossing the paper up the driveway.

  “Well, who the hell are you?”

  “Nobody,” I tell him, getting back into my car.

  “Hey, you’re the mayor, aren’t you?” he shouts.

  “I’m supposed to be,” I mutter, leaving a foot of stinking rubber on the pavement as I fishtail onto the road.

  CHAPTER

  19

  Two dozen balloons pass over my car in a stately if hurried procession as I drive from Sands’s house to St. Stephen’s Preparatory School, this morning’s new launch site. As I turn into the school’s driveway—painted with royal blue deer tracks the size of a brontosaur’s footprints—a huge yellow sphere rises swiftly from behind the building and sails over my head breathing fire from its gas jets.

  Pulling around the elementary building, I turn onto the access road of Buck Stadium, a massive oval hole in the ground lined with modern bleachers. The stadium makes an ideal launch site, not only because it’s shielded from the wind, but also because its light poles are fed by underground electrical cables, which removes one of the primary risks for balloon flight.

  More than a dozen pickup trucks are parked on the football field, but only two deflated balloons lie stretched on the grass like empty tube socks. The Athens Point sheriff’s department helicopter is parked on the fifty-yard line, its rotors slowly turning. Beyond the chopper, several crew members hold open the mouth of a partly inflated balloon while a large fan blasts cool air into it. They’ll continue until the balloon is round enough to light the burners without risk to the canopy. At the far end of the field, behind the goalposts, a single red balloon sways above the field, a half dozen people clinging to its basket, their weight just sufficient to hold it to the earth. This is the balloon Paul Labry told me to find.

  Descending the hill to the floor of the stadium, I drive along the asphalt track that surrounds the gridiron. Labry’s gold Avalon is parked behind a brightly painted trailer, but it’s the car parked next to Paul’s that brings heat to my face. Caitlin’s rented Malibu. Sure enough, I see her black hair and aquiline form silhouetted against the white T-shirt of one of the big-bellied men holding down the basket of the red balloon. She appears to be badgering Labry about something. When Paul catches sight of me, he abandons the basket and starts jogging in my direction. The balloon lifts from the earth, leaving Caitlin no choice but to take Labry’s place. Sighting me, Hans Necker yells and waves from inside the basket. I wave back, then focus on Paul.

  “Christ, man, you gotta hurry,” he says. “Necker’s about to lose it.”

  “What’s Caitlin doing here?”

  “Asking about Tim’s death. She’s worried she got the story wrong, and she also seems to think you’re mixed up in it some way.”

  Caitlin leaves the balloon and starts trotting toward us. She’s wearing dark jeans and a light sweater. I wave her off and step closer to Labry. “I need you to do me a favor, Paul.”

  “What?”

  “I need the names of all the partners in Golden Parachute. I checked the paperwork I have, and I don’t have the names of the five percenters. The Golden Flower LLC guys. Didn’t you have copies of most everything?”

  Labry looks nonplussed. “Yeah, I’ve still got it in my garage. What’s going on? Why do you need that all of a sudden?”

  Caitlin has halved the distance to us. I step to my right and shout, “Give us a minute! Please.”

  She stops, but it won’t be for long.

  “Listen, Paul, if you don’t have the names at your house, forget about it. Don’t ask anybody else for this information. Don’t try to look anything up downtown, and don’t mention it to me on the phone. Just get the names if you have them at home and tell me the next time you see me in person. Okay?”

  “Sure, sure. But what’s it for? What’
s going on?”

  I look hard into his eyes. “You don’t want to know. The last person who asked that question was Tim Jessup.”

  Paul’s eyes cloud with concern, then Caitlin is upon us. Thankfully, Hans Necker is screaming like a madman from the basket. Without Paul’s and Caitlin’s weight, the balloon is making three-foot leaps off the ground in the gusting wind.

  “I have to go,” I tell her, walking quickly toward the basket.

  “What were you and Paul talking about?”

  “City business.”

  “Really? It looked personal.”

  “How would you know anymore?” I stop ten feet from the basket. “I need to get on board.”

  “Why are you so angry?”

  “Because I don’t know what you’re doing. You show up without warning, get drunk with your boyfriend, but somehow stay up late enough to write a story slandering a dead friend of mine, just in time to screw up the image of the town’s most important festival.”

  Necker does a quick burn, and the heat of the flames reaches out to us like a living thing. I move toward the balloon, but Caitlin grabs my arm and pulls me to a stop. “Wait! What exactly are you angry about? A man was killed last night, and I wrote the facts as I knew them. Are you seriously pissed because I didn’t follow Natchez tradition and soft-pedal the story until after the festival?”

  “I don’t have time to discuss it.” I start forward again. “Hey, Hans, sorry I’m late.”

  Caitlin obviously isn’t worried about appearances. She catches my wrist and spins me around. “Or is it the getting drunk with my boyfriend part?”

  “Come on, Penn!” Necker shouts. “The wind could kick up any second.”

  On any other day I would have hesitated before climbing into this basket, but today I’m grateful for an excuse to escape Caitlin’s reproving eyes.

  “I never said he was my boyfriend,” she says close to my ear. “Not that it’s any of your business.”

  As I turn away and climb into the basket, a strong hand grips my upper arm from behind. I turn, expecting Hans Necker’s red visage, but instead I find the aging astronaut’s face of chopper pilot Danny McDavitt.

  “Morning, Major,” I say.

  As Hans Necker fires the gas burner with a roar, McDavitt leans toward me. “I hear we’ve got a mutual friend. You need something, let me know. I stuck my cell number in your back pocket.”

  I nod and offer silent thanks to Daniel Kelly.

  The balloon tugs at the basket like an eager horse. Caitlin has walked a few feet away, but suddenly she runs forward and leans between two men sitting on the lip of the basket. “I want to talk as soon as you get down.”

  “I won’t have time. Not today.”

  “Crew!” Necker shouts. “Let go of the basket on my count. Three, two, one, now.”

  The crew members slide off the basket almost as one, and the balloon rises like a dandelion on the wind. Thirty feet off the ground, the butterflies take flight in my stomach. My existence is now dependent on the integrity of a few dozen yards of nylon, a wicker basket, some Kevlar cables, and rope. Caitlin’s angry face dwindles rapidly. As soon as we clear the stadium bowl, higher winds catch us and hurl us westward like an invisible hand. We’re moving as fast as some cars on the road below. They’ve slowed to watch the balloon, which must from the ground look graceful in its flight. But from inside the basket, it isn’t a slow waltz of balloons and clouds; it’s like scudding before the wind in a sailboat.

  My cell phone vibrates in my pocket. When I check it, I find a text message from Caitlin. Something’s wrong. What is it? You’re not yourself. I shove the phone back into my pocket and look westward, toward the river.

  “Only about half the pilots are flying this race,” Necker says. “The winds were running eight to ten miles per hour earlier, and that scares off a lot of people. Means the winds aloft will be running pretty fast.” He grins. “As you can tell.”

  I force a smile and try to look excited, but for me this flight is a necessary evil, a roller-coaster ride on behalf of the city. My strategy is the same I use with Annie in amusement parks: get aboard, tighten my sphincter for the duration, then climb out dazed and kiss the blessed earth. The flaw in that comparison is that few people die on roller coasters, while a significant number die in ballooning accidents, often when the lighter-than-air craft strike power lines. I’ve seen video of these slow-motion tragedies, and the memory has never left me. The canopy always floats into a high-tension wire with the inevitability of a nightmare. People on the ground become anxious, gasp in disbelief. Then comes the strike, a blue-white flash, and for a moment, nothing. Then the fuel tanks explode. The basket erupts into flame as if struck by an RPG, and the heat carries the balloon higher, making it impossible for the passengers to reach the ground alive. Some leap from the basket, others cling fiercely as the canopy collapses and the flaming contraption streaks earthward like a broken toy. When I’ve asked about these accidents, I always get the same answer: pilot error. I’m sure that’s true in most cases, but the knowledge does nothing to ease my anxiety today.

  My cell phone vibrates again. It’s another text from Caitlin. What did I get wrong about the story? P.S. Why isn’t Annie flying with you? Groaning aloud, I switch off the phone.

  “Woman problems?” Necker asks with a wink.

  “You could say that.”

  He chuckles. “That was a pretty girl back at the launch site. And she was giving your friend Labry unshirted hell. I imagine she’s a lot to handle.”

  I actually find myself laughing. “You’re a good judge of character, Hans.”

  I shudder as the canopy makes a ripping sound, but Necker only smiles and squeezes my arm with reassurance. “That’s normal. These things seem like they’re coming apart in a high wind, but that’s because the rigging’s so flexible. Can you imagine what an old clipper ship must have sounded like tearing across the Atlantic?”

  As we rush along above Highway 61, rising through five hundred feet, I silently repeat my day’s mantra: Accidents are rare, accidents are rare .

  I hope we stay low today. Last year a different pilot and I got caught in an updraft and “stuck” a mile above Louisiana. Rather than having the romantic ride most people experience, I was stranded in the clouds, with a view much like the one you get from a jetliner: geometric farms and highways, cars the size of ants. But today is different. The landmarks of the city are spread below me with the stunning clarity of an October morning. To my right lies the Grand Village of the Natchez Indians, a carpet of green meadows and ceremonial mounds beside St. Catherine’s Creek. I scarcely have time to orient myself to the mounds before we race onward toward the river.

  “Glad you made it,” Necker says, slapping me gently on the back. “We’re looking good. It’s actually lucky you were late.”

  “Glad to help. It really couldn’t be avoided.”

  The CEO nods but doesn’t question me. “They’ve shortened the race to the first target only. Nobody’s going to be able to maneuver well in this wind.”

  I try to conceal my relief that this will be a short flight. Some balloon races are long and complex, like magisterial wedding processions. Others are brief and chaotic, like car chases through a mountain village, with pilots trying to divine invisible crosscurrents of wind like oracles opening themselves to revelation. Today’s event is the latter type, but there’s a certain majesty to the seemingly endless train of balloons stretching from the Louisiana Delta ahead of us back to Buck Stadium, which is now merely a fold in the green horizon. Two helicopters fly along the course like cowboys tending a wayward herd, but they have no control over their charges. The balloons go where the wind blows.

  Necker has read the winds well. Where Highway 61 veers north toward Vicksburg and the Delta, we continue westward toward Louisiana. Far to my right I see the abandoned Johns Manville plant, to my left, the shuttered International Paper mill, and the scorched scar that is all that remains of the Triton Battery Company. All those plants came between 1939 and 1946, and the last shut its doors only a few months ago. So much for Nat
chez’s smokestack industries. But the beauty of the city remains undiminished. From this altitude it’s plain that the modern town grew over dozens of old plantations, and there’s far more forest than open ground. It makes me long for the days before the lumber industry came, when—the saying goes—a squirrel could run from Mississippi to North Carolina without once setting foot on the ground.

  As downtown Natchez drifts past like a ghost from the nineteenth century, I hear bass and drums pounding from the festival field beside Rosalie. A moment later I sight the crowd swelling and mov ing like a swarm of ants before the stage. Then we’re over the river, its broad, reddish-brown current dotted with small pleasure craft, the levee on the far side lined with the cars of people watching the balloons pass.

  Far ahead, near the horizon, I can see our destination: Lake Concordia, an oxbow lake created by a bend in the river that was cut off long ago. Sometimes Annie and I go water-skiing there with friends who have boats, such as Paul Labry and his family. Thinking of Labry brings a knot of anxiety to my throat. In the rush of boarding the balloon, I asked him to get me the names of the Chinese casino partners for me. So easy to do. But have I needlessly—and selfishly—put him at risk? Probably not, if he follows my orders exactly. But will he, not really knowing what’s at stake?

  Labry and I are only a year apart in age, but we went to different schools, and that can be an obstacle to close friendship in Natchez. After forced integration in 1968, the number of private schools doubled from two to four. Labry and I attended the two original ones: Immaculate Heart and St. Stephen’s. The new schools were “Christian academies” that stressed conservative ideology and athletics over academics. There wasn’t much mixing between the four institutions, and I probably spent more time with the public school kids than with the “Christians” or the Catholics, who stuck together like an extended family. But in the eleventh grade, Paul Labry and I were sent as delegates to the American Legion Boys State in Jackson. I knew Labry only slightly when I arrived, but after spending a week with him among strangers, I knew I’d made a friend I should have gotten to know long before.