The Devil's Punchbowl

  “Baby girl,” I whisper to the breath-fogged window, “Mama sees you.”

  In this affirmation lies a hope that I’ve never quite been able to sustain, yet still I continue to affirm it. I don’t believe Sarah sits in heaven looking benevolently down upon our daughter; but I do believe she survives within Annie—in her face, her voice, in her quick perception and even temperament. In my years with Caitlin, seeing these avatars of my wife in my daughter brought pleasure, not pain. But now, alone again, I find that each memory carries a sharp edge on its trailing side. Whatever brings you comfort can also bring you pain.

  I turn onto Highway 61 and force my thoughts to the business of the city, which takes more effort than I would have believed possible two years ago.

  Whoever said, “Be careful what you wish for,” must have served as mayor of a small town. If there were ever a case of being punished with one’s dream, being elected mayor of Natchez is it. The mayor of a city like Houston has a certain amount of insulation from his electorate, which he can justify in the name of security. But when you’re mayor of a small town, every mother’s son believes your time is his, no matter where you are or what you might be doing. A call from a Fortune 500 company might be followed by an irate visit from a man whose neighbor’s goats keep eating his rosebushes. If you keep your sense of humor, you can tolerate these situations with equanimity, but I’ve been having difficulty maintaining mine for some time now.

  Today it’s neither goats nor roses, but a Minnesota millionaire with a bold—or possibly crazy—scheme to recycle waste from all the cities along the Mississippi River and its tributaries. Hans Necker plans to gather aluminum, plastic, and paper refuse, compress it at collection points, then float the resulting cubes downstream on barges to a recycling facility at Greenville or Natchez or Baton Rouge—wherever he ultimately decides to locate his plant. One thing is sure: Katrina just scratched New Orleans off his short list. We have three potential sites for such a facility in Natchez, all close to one another. Despite this, Necker has chartered a helicopter to view them, as well as the city and its environs. Even the thought of spending hours bobbing and pitching over the city in a chopper gives me a mild case of airsickness, but what choice do I have? Hans Necker wants a sky tour from the mayor, so a sky tour he will get.

  Halfway to the airport, Paul Labry, one of the few selectman I consider a friend, texts me that Necker is running late. The CEO has already spent more time in Greenville than he’d expected to, and the selectmen are drawing all sorts of negative conclusions from this. I can’t get too stirred up about it. Compared to what I’d have to deal with if Tim Jessup were to uncover proof of his allegations, losing a possible recycling plant seems like small potatoes.

  With the jarring synchronicity I experience so often in life, my cell phone vibrates against my thigh. I take it out, expecting another update from Labry, but I find a text message from a number I don’t know. I don’t even recognize the area code. When I click READ, the words make my mouth go dry.

  Xing the Rubicon. Stay close to ur fon & n range of a tower. Don’t respond 2 this msg! Mrs. Haley.

  “Shit,” I whisper. Mrs. Haley taught Tim Jessup and me Latin in the eighth grade. Crossing the Rubicon? What the hell is Tim playing at? I figured he’d wait at least a few days to try whatever it is he’s been planning. Doesn’t he understand how important this weekend is to the city? “Shit,” I say again, unable to get my mind around the idea that Jessup could be committing any number of felonies at this moment, endangering both himself and the future of the casino industry in Mississippi.

  “Tim, you crazy son of a bitch,” I mutter, and start to reply to his message with a warning. But before I hit SEND, caution wins out over anxiety, and I shove the phone deep into my pocket.

  Locking my car, I march out onto the tarmac where a few single-engine planes wait in lonely silence. There isn’t much to see at the airport. Natchez hasn’t had steady commercial service since the 1970s, when the oil business was booming and the DC-3s of Southern Airways flew in and out every day. I remember being led aboard one of the sturdy old planes by a pretty stewardess when my parents took my sister and me to London as children. I’ve always believed that trip generated my sister Jenny’s love of Britain, a love that eventually pulled her away from us for good. If I close my eyes, I can still feel the buffeting wind from the big propellers as they revved up to carry us to the Pan Am 747 waiting in New Orleans. Two slices of Americana gone forever.

  I need that prop wash this afternoon. Last night’s wind died this morning, and the sun blazes white over the runways, roasting me as I check the northern sky for Hans Necker’s Gulfstream IV. The lack of wind was good for the Balloon Festival’s “media flight” this morning, but it sucks for a man wearing a long-sleeved button-down, even Egyptian cotton. The humidity in south Mississippi could drown a desert dweller if he breathed too fast.

  After shedding another pint of sweat, I finally spy a silver glint in the sky far upriver. As Necker’s jet descends toward me, I hear the whup-whup-whup of a helicopter approaching from the south. The Gulfstream circles and executes its approach from the southeast, landing as gracefully as the first duck of winter on a dawn-still pond. As the jet taxies up to the small terminal, a blue Bell helicop ter descends toward the tarmac twenty yards away from me. Then the aft door of the Gulfstream opens and the steps unfold to the ground with a hydraulic hum.

  Hans Necker emerges alone, a stocky, red-faced man of about sixty with a grip of iron. “Penn, Penn! Face-to-face at last,” he says, walking exuberantly while we shake hands. “Sorry to be late, but we made up most of the time in flight.”

  I greet Necker with as much enthusiasm as I can muster while he guides me past the tail of his jet and toward the settling chopper. Straight to business, then. Suits me. The sooner we go up, the sooner we get back.

  The moment the chopper’s skids touch down, Necker yanks open the side door, pushes me into the vibrating craft, and climbs in next to me. The pilot points at two headsets lying on the seat. I slip one on, then grip the handle to my left in anticipation of takeoff.

  “Take her up, Major!” Necker shouts in my crackling headset.

  The chopper rises like a leaf on a gust of wind. Then its nose dips and we start forward, rapidly gathering speed as we climb into the blue-white sky.

  “Penn,” Necker says over the intercom link, “our pilot’s Danny McDavitt. Flew in Vietnam.”

  “Good to meet you,” I tell the back of the graying head in front of me.

  “You too,” says a voice of utter calm.

  I recognize McDavitt’s name from an incident about six months ago involving a helicopter crash-landing in the river. There was some talk about the pilot and a local doctor’s wife, but there’s so much talk like that all the time that I only pay attention if it involves me or the city. The idea of a crash awakens a swarm of butterflies in my stomach, but in the sixty seconds it takes us to sight the Mississippi River to the west, Danny McDavitt convinces me that he’s an extension of the machine carrying us, or that the machine is an extension of his will. Either way, I’m happy, because this chopper flight is the first I’ve ever endured without my stomach going south on me.

  “How did the media flight go this morning?” Necker asks, his face pressed against the glass beside him.

  “Great!” I reply too loudly. “Weather looks good for most of the weekend. Except maybe Sunday.”

  “Good, good.”

  “How was your visit to Greenville?”

  “Fine. Got some good people up there, and they really want the plant. I still like this place, though,” Necker says almost wistfully. “It’s got a romance to it that the other cities don’t have—apart from New Orleans, and there’s no possibility of making that work now.”

  I figured as much, but it’s a relief to hear it confirmed.

  “I did an overflight three days after the levees broke,” he says, looking down at a string of barges on a bend in the river below. “Hauled some relief supplies down to Biloxi. Christ, it looked like the End of Days down
there. There were still people stranded on the interstate. I couldn’t believe it.”

  I shake my head but make no comment. The enormity of the havoc wreaked by Katrina is beyond words. We do what we can, then start again the next day. “You want to view the industrial-park sites first? Or look at the city?”

  “Let’s head straight down to the old Triton Battery site. I’m pressed for time today. Okay with you, Major?”

  “It’s your nickel,” McDavitt replies.

  On any other day, Necker’s haste might worry me, but today I’ll take any excuse to get time alone with my thoughts. As we drone southward, following the vast river, the city unfolds beneath us like an Imax film, the classic city on a hill, one of only three on the eastern side of the Mississippi from Cairo to New Orleans. From two thousand feet, you can see the nineteenth-century scale of Natchez, the church steeples still taller than all but two commercial buildings; yet we’re still low enough to take in the Gone With the Wind aura of the grand mansions set amid the verdant forests of the old plantations. A year ago I could rattle off our claims to fame with poetic enthusiasm: how Natchez in 1840 had more millionaires per capita than any city in America; how we survived the Civil War with our property intact, if not our pride; and how, after the white gold of cotton failed, the black gold of oil replaced it. But experience has drained my enthusiasm, and my ambivalence is difficult to mask.

  Still a more picturesque American town could not be found anywhere. For sheer beauty Natchez is unmatched along the length of the river; with its commanding site above the river Mississippi it surpasses even New Orleans, and one would have to travel to Charleston or Savannah to find comparable architecture. But gazing down from this helicopter, I no longer see the city I knew during the first eighteen years of my life, nor even the town I found when I returned seven years ago. Now I see Natchez through the mayor’s eyes, and what I see is a town crippled by a mistake made thirty years ago, when the majority of whites pulled out of the public school system in response to forced integration. A city whose public schools are 90 percent filled with the descendants of slaves, and whose four private schools struggle to provide a superior but redundant education to mostly white students, leavened by a few lucky African-Americans (the children of affluent professionals or dedicated middle-class parents—or those kids recruited to play football) plus the majority of Asians and Indians in the county, who avoid the public school system if they can. Changing this state of affairs was my primary reason for running for mayor, for until it is changed, we’re unlikely to attract any new industry larger than Hans Necker’s as-yet-unborn recycling plant. But thus far I have failed in my quest—publicly and miserably.

  Necker asks a lot of questions as we fly, and I answer without going into detail. Every road, field, park, school, and creek below holds indelible memories for me, but how do you explain that to a stranger? Necker seems like the kind of guy who’d like to hear that sort of thing, but the truth is, I’m simply not in the mood to sell. That’s one good thing about casino companies: you don’t have to sell them. They come to the table ready to deal. And like the plain girl dreading prom month, we can’t afford to be too picky about whom we say yes to. We got our prison the same way. (It might look like a college athletic dorm, but the razor wire doesn’t let you forget its true purpose.)

  After flaring near the earth beside the river south of town, Major McDavitt sets the chopper down on the partially scorched cement where the gatehouse of the Triton Battery plant once stood. For me this is an uncomfortable visit, because I set the fire that destroyed the shuttered hulk that remains of the factory.

  “You okay?” Necker asks with a smile.

  “Not bad, actually. Thanks to Major McDavitt.”

  The pilot holds up a gloved hand in acknowledgment.

  “Take a walk with us, Danny,” Necker says.

  McDavitt removes his headset.

  “I always use military pilots,” Necker explains, climbing out of the chopper. “Combat pilots when I can get them. They don’t lose their cool when things go awry, which always happens, sooner or later.”

  I follow the CEO down to the cracked concrete, bending at the waist until I clear the spinning rotors. McDavitt gets out and walks a couple of strides to our left, like a wingman on patrol. He looks about fifty, with the close-cropped hair and symmetrical build of a Gemini-era astronaut.

  “Lots of history around this town,” Necker says, walking toward the burned-out battery plant. “Not all of it ancient.”

  I feel Major McDavitt come alert beside us.

  “For example,” Necker goes on, “this plant here was used by a drug dealer as a hideout until somebody in present company took care of business.”

  Danny McDavitt gives me a sidelong glance.

  “And we’re not too far,” Necker continues, “from where somebody ditched a chopper under suspicious circumstances.” The CEO beams with pleasure at the hitch in McDavitt’s step. “I just want you boys to know I do my homework. I’ve checked you both out, and I figure whatever you did, you had good reasons. I check out everybody I plan to do business with, and I’d like to do some business in this town.”

  I stop, and they stop with me. Necker has to look up at me, since I’m three inches taller, but I’m the one at a disadvantage.

  “I’m going to be straight with you, Penn,” he says. “I want to bring my plant here. I want to buy that old factory there and recycle all the debris to show the town I mean business. There’s one obstacle in the way, though. This has been a union town since 1945. I used to be a big supporter of unions—belonged to one myself when I worked as a meat packer. But they got out of hand, and you see the result.” He waves his hand at the abandoned battery plant.

  It’s a little more complex than that, I think, but this doesn’t seem the time to argue U.S. trade policy.

  “Mississippi has a right-to-work law, and I plan to use that. But bottom line, I need to know one thing.” A stubby red forefinger shoots up. “When push comes to shove on something—and it always does—am I gonna have your support? Are you going to be in office a year from now, when I need you? If I’m going to bring my plant down here, I need to know you’re going to be the man in charge. I can’t afford some yokel, and I can’t afford the other thing.”

  Major McDavitt cuts his eyes at me. The other thing?

  “Don’t get the wrong idea,” Necker says quickly. “I don’t care what color a man is, so long as he can tell red ink from black. But race politics gets in the way of business, and with your fifty-fifty split, I can foresee some problems. I figure you’re my best shot at solving those problems.”

  “You’re saying that if I answer yes to your question, you’ll bring your recycling plant here?”

  “That’s the deal, Mr. Mayor.”

  “What makes you think I won’t be here in a year?”

  Necker flashes a knowing smile. “For one thing, this is a detour from your main career. For another, I’ve heard you might not be too happy in the job.”

  “I won’t lie to you. It’s been wearing me down pretty fast. It’s tough to get everybody swinging on the same gate, as they say around here.”

  Necker nods. “Politics in a nutshell. But my research also says you’re no quitter, and you’re as good as your word.”

  Yesterday I might have confessed that I might not be here next October. But given my involvement with Tim, I’m not sure how to reply. “Can you give me a few days to answer you?”

  “How does two weeks sound?”

  “I’ll take it.”

  Necker grins and starts to say something else, but his cell phone begins blaring what sounds like a college fight song. He holds up his hand, checks the screen, then with a grunt of apology marches away to take the call, leaving me staring out over the mile-broad Mississippi with Danny McDavitt. A mild breeze blows off the reddish brown water, and the pilot squints into it like a man measuring wind speed by watching waves.

  “What do you think about Necker?” I ask, casually checking my cell phone for further messages. There are none.

  “Kinda pushy,” M
cDavitt says after a considerable silence. “But they’re all like that.”

  “You fly a lot of CEOs?”

  The pilot’s lips widen slightly in what might be a smile. “Not these days. I flew charters in Nashville after I got out of the air force. Don’t ask. At least this guy knows he puts his pants on same as the next guy.”

  I look back toward the Triton Battery plant and see Necker speaking animatedly into his phone. “You think he’ll do what he says? You think he’ll bring his plant here?”

  McDavitt spits on the rocks at the edge of the parking lot. “Yep.” Then he turns toward me, and his blue-gray eyes catch mine with surprising force. “Question is, will you be here when he needs you?”

  While I ask myself the same question, Necker suddenly appears beside me. “I’m afraid we’ve got to head back right away. I’ve got to make an unexpected stop on my way to Chicago.”

  “Chicago?” This is the first I’ve heard about Chicago.

  Necker leads us quickly back to the helicopter. “I thought you knew. I promised my granddaughter I’d watch her first dance recital. And now I have to make a stop in Paducah on the way.”

  The selectmen will panic if Necker isn’t in town for the festival. “Are you coming back for the balloon race?”

  The CEO grins. “Are you kidding? I can’t wait to see your face when the canopy starts flapping and the lines start creaking at three thousand feet. I’ll be back by dawn tomorrow.” Necker turns to McDavitt. “Let’s get airborne, Major. And don’t waste any time getting back.”

  McDavitt nods and climbs into the cockpit. As I clamber in behind him, I feel my cell phone vibrate on my hip. With Necker beside me, I almost ignore the message, assuming it must be Paul Labry asking how my sales pitch is going. But then I remember Tim’s text and decide to check it. This text is from the same number as before. Tilting the phone slightly away from Necker, I read, Tonight, bro. Same place, same time. Don’t respond 2 this message. No contact at all. And bring a gun, jic. Peace.