The Devil's Punchbowl (11 page)

 

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.”