The Devil's Punchbowl (2 page)

Magnolia Queen,
moored almost directly below Jewish Hill—and midnight marks the end of his shift. But Tim insisted that the cemetery’s isolation was a necessity, for me as much as for him. Swore, in fact, that I could trust neither my own police department nor any official of the city government. He also made me promise not to call his cell phone or his home for any reason. Part of me considers his claims ridiculous, but a warier
clump of brain cells knows from experience that corruption can run deep.

 

I was a lawyer in another life—a prosecutor. I started out wanting to be Atticus Finch and ended up sending sixteen people to death row. Looking back, I’m not sure how that happened. One day, I simply woke up and realized that I had not been divinely ordained to punish the guilty. So I resigned my position with the Houston district attorney’s office and went home to my joyous wife and daughter. Uncertain what to do with my newfound surplus of time (and facing an acute shortage of funds), I began writing about my courtroom experiences and, like a few other lawyers slipstreaming in the wake of John Grisham, found myself selling enough books to place my name on the bestseller lists. We bought a bigger house and moved Annie to an elite prep school. An unfamiliar sense of self-satisfaction began to creep into my life, a feeling that I was one of the chosen, destined for success in whatever field I chose. I had an enviable career, a wonderful family, a few good friends, lots of faithful readers. I was young enough and arrogant enough to believe that I deserved all this, and foolish enough to think it would last.

 

Then my wife died.

 

Four months after my father diagnosed Sarah with cancer, we buried her. The shock of losing her almost broke me, and it shattered my four-year-old daughter. In desperation I fled Houston, taking Annie back to the small Mississippi town where I’d been raised, back to the loving arms of my parents. There—
here
—before I could begin working my way back to earth, I found myself drawn into a thirty-year-old murder case, one that ultimately saved my life and ended four others. That was seven years ago. Annie’s eleven now, and almost the reincarnation of her mother. She’s sleeping at home while a babysitter waits in my living room, and remembering this I decide that Tim Jessup gets exactly five more minutes of my time. If he can’t make his own midnight meeting, he can damn well come to City Hall during business hours, like everybody else.

 

My heart labors from climbing the nearly vertical face of Jewish Hill, but each breath brings the magical scent of sweet olive, still blooming in mid-October. Under the sweet olive simmers a roux of thicker smells: kudzu and damp humus and something dead in the trees—maybe a gut-shot deer that evaded its shortsighted poacher.
When I reach the edge of the table of earth that is Jewish Hill, the land and sky fall away before me with breathtaking suddenness.

 

The drop to the river is two hundred feet here, down a kudzu-strangled bluff of windblown loess—rich soil made from rock ground fine by glaciers—the foundation of our city. From this height you can look west over endless flatland with almost intoxicating pride, and I think that feeling is what made so many nations try to claim this land. France, Spain, England, the Confederacy: all tried to hold this earth, and all failed as surely as the Natchez Indians before them. A sagging wire bench still stands beneath an American flag at the western rim of the hill, awaiting mourners, lovers, and all the rest who come here; it looks like the best place to spend Tim’s last four minutes.

 

As I sit, a pair of headlights moves up Cemetery Road like a ship beating against the wind, tacking back and forth across the lane that winds along the edge of the bluff. I stand, but the headlights do not slow, and soon a nondescript pickup truck rattles past the shotgun shacks across the road and vanishes around the next bend, headed toward the Devil’s Punchbowl, a deep defile out in the county where Natchez Trace outlaws once dumped the corpses of their victims.

 

“That’s it, Timmy,” I say aloud. “Time’s up.”

 

The wind off the river has finally found its way into my jacket. I’m cold, tired, and ready to go to bed. The next three days will be the busiest of my year as mayor, beginning with a news conference and a helicopter flight in the morning. But after those three days are up…I’m going to make some profound changes in my life.

 

Rising from the bench, I walk to my right, toward a gentler slope of the hill, where my old Saab waits beyond the cemetery wall. As I bend to slide down the hill, an urgent whisper breaks the silence of the night:
“Hey. Dude? Are you up here?”

 

A shadow is advancing along the rim of Jewish Hill from the interior of the graveyard. From my vantage point, I can see all four entrances to the cemetery, but I’ve seen no headlights and heard no engine. Yet here is Tim Jessup, materializing like one of the ghosts so many people believe haunt this ancient hill. I know it’s Tim because he used to be a junkie, and he still moves like one, with a herky-jerky progress during which his head perpetually jiggers around as though he’s watching for police while his thin legs carry him forward in the hope of finding his next fix.

 

Jessup claims to be clean now, thanks largely to his new wife, Julia, who was three years behind us in high school. Julia Stanton married the high school quarterback at nineteen and took five years of punishment before forfeiting that particular game. When I heard she was marrying Jessup, I figured she wanted a perfect record of losses. But the word around town is that she’s worked wonders with Tim. She got him a job and has kept him at it for over a year, dealing blackjack on the casino boats, most recently the
Magnolia Queen.

 

“Penn!” Jessup finally calls out loud. “It’s
me,
man. Come out!”

 

The gauntness of his face is unmistakable in the moonlight. Though he and I are the same age—born exactly one month apart—he looks ten years older. His skin has the leathery texture of a man who’s worked too many years under the Mississippi sun. Passing him on the street under that sun, I’ve seen more disturbing signs. His graying mustache is streaked yellow from cigarette smoke, and his skin and eyes have the jaundiced cast of those of a man whose liver hasn’t many years left in it.

 

What bound Jessup and me tightly as boys was that we were both doctors’ sons. We each understood the weight of that special burden, the way preachers’ sons know that emotional topography. Having a physician as a father brings benefits and burdens, but for eldest sons it brings a universal expectation that someday you’ll follow in your father’s footsteps. In the end both Tim and I failed to fulfill this, but in very different ways. Seeing him closer now, turning haplessly in the dark, it’s hard to imagine that we started our lives in almost the same place. That’s probably the root of my guilt: For though Tim Jessup made a lifetime of bad decisions—in full knowledge of the risks—the one that set them all in train could have been, and in fact was, made by many of us. Only luck carried the rest of us through.

 

With a sigh of resignation, I step from behind the gravestone and call toward the river, “Tim? Hey, Tim. It’s Penn.”

 

Jessup whips his head around, and his right hand darts toward his pocket. For a panicked second I fear he’s going to pull a pistol, but then he recognizes me, and his eyes widen with relief.

 

“Man!” he says with a grin. “At first I thought you’d chickened out. I mean,
shit.
”

 

As he shakes my hand, I marvel that at forty-five Jessup still sounds like a strung-out hippie. “You’re the one who’s late, aren’t you?”

 

He nods more times than necessary, a man who’ll do anything to keep from being still. How does this guy deal blackjack all night?

 

“I couldn’t rush off the boat,” he explains. “I think they’re watching me. I mean, they’re
always
watching us. Everybody. But I think maybe they suspect something.”

 

I want to ask whom he’s talking about, but I assume he’ll get to that. “I didn’t see your car. Where’d you come from?”

 

A cagey smile splits the weathered face. “I got ways, man. You got to be careful dealing with this class of people. Predators, I kid you not. They sense a threat, they react—
bam!
” Tim claps his hands together. “Pure instinct. Like sharks in the water.” He glances back toward town. “In fact, we ought to get behind some cover now.” He gestures toward the three-foot-high masonry walls that enclose a nearby family plot. “Just like high school, man. Remember smoking grass behind these walls? Sitting down so the cops couldn’t see the glow of the roach?”

 

I never got high with Tim during high school, but I see no reason to break whatever flow keeps him calm and talking. The sooner he tells me what he came to say, the sooner I can get out of here.

 

He vaults the wall with surprising agility, and I step over it after him, recalling with a chill the one memory of this place that I associate with Tim. Late one Halloween night a half dozen boys tossed our banana bikes over the wall and rode wildly through the narrow lanes, laughing hysterically until a pack of wild dogs chased us up into the oak trees near the third gate. Does Tim remember that?

 

With a last anxious look up Cemetery Road, he sits on the damp ground and leans against the mossy bricks in a corner where two walls meet. I sit against the adjacent wall, facing him at a right angle, my running shoes almost touching his weathered Sperrys. Only now do I realize that he must have changed clothes after work. The dealer’s uniform he usually wears on duty has been replaced by black jeans and a gray T-shirt.

 

“Couldn’t come out here dressed for work,” he says, as though reading my mind. What he actually read, I realize, was my appraising glance. Clearly, all the drugs he’s ingested over the years haven’t yet ruined what always was a sharp mind.

 

I decide to dispense with small talk. “You said some pretty scary things on the phone. Scary enough to bring me out here at this hour.”

 

He nods, digging in his pocket for something that turns out to be a bent cigarette. “Can’t risk lighting it,” he says, putting it between his lips, “but it’s good to know I got it for the ride home.” He grins once more before putting on a serious face. “So, what had you heard before I called?”

 

I don’t want to repeat anything Tim hasn’t already heard or seen himself. “Vague rumors. Celebrities flying in to gamble, in and out fast. Pro athletes, rappers, like that. People who wouldn’t normally come here.”

 

“You hear about the dogfighting?”

 

My hope that the rumors are false is sinking fast. “I’ve heard there’s some of that going on. But it was hard to credit. I mean, I can see some rednecks down in the bottoms doing it, or out in the parishes across the river, but not high rollers and celebrities.”

 

Tim sucks in his bottom lip. “What else?”

 

This time I don’t answer. I’ve heard other rumors—that prostitution and hard drugs are flourishing around the gambling trade, for example—but these plagues have been with us always. “Look, I don’t want to speculate about things I don’t know to be true.”

 

“You sound like a fucking politician, man.”

 

I suppose that’s what I’ve become, but I feel more like an attorney sifting the truth from an unreliable client’s story. “Why don’t you just tell me what you know? Then I’ll tell you how that fits with what I’ve heard.”

 

Looking more anxious by the second, Jessup gives in to his nicotine urge at last. He produces a Bic lighter, which he flicks into flame and touches to the end of the cigarette, drawing air through the paper tube like someone sucking on a three-foot bong. He holds in the smoke for an alarming amount of time, then speaks as he exhales. “You hear I got a kid now? A son.”

 

“Yeah, I saw him with Julia at the Piggly Wiggly a couple of weeks ago. He’s a great-looking boy.”

 

Tim’s smile lights up his face. “Just like his mom, man. She’s still a beauty, isn’t she?”

 

“She is,” I concur, speaking the truth. “So…what are we doing here, Timmy?”

 

He still doesn’t reply. He takes another long drag, cupping the cigarette like a joint. As I watch him, I realize that his hands are shak
ing, and not from the cold. His whole body has begun to shiver, and for the first time I worry that he’s started using again.

 

“Tim?”

 

“It’s not what you think, bro. I’ve just been carrying this stuff around in my head for a while, and sometimes I get the shakes.”

 

He’s crying,
I realize with amazement.
He’s wiping tears from his eyes.
I squeeze his knee to comfort him.

 

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. “We’re a long way from Mill Pond Road, aren’t we?”

 

Mill Pond Road is the street I grew up on. “We sure are. Are you okay?”

 

He stubs out his cigarette on a gravestone and leans forward, his eyes burning with passion I thought long gone from him. “If I tell you more, there’s no going back. You understand? I tell you what I know, you won’t be able to sleep. I know you. You’ll be like a pit bull yourself. You won’t let it go.”

 

“Isn’t that why you asked me here?”

 

Jessup shrugs, his head and hands jittery again. “I’m just telling you, Penn. You want to walk away, do it now. Climb over that wall and slide back down to your car. That’s what a smart man would do.”

 

I settle against the cold bricks and consider what I’ve heard. This is one of the ways fate comes for you. It can swoop darkly from a cloudless sky like my wife’s cancer; or it can lie waiting in your path, obvious to any eyes willing to see it. But sometimes it’s simply a fork in the road, and rare is the day that a friend stands beside it, offering you the safer path. It’s the oldest human choice:
comfortable ignorance or knowledge bought with pain?
I can almost hear Tim at his blackjack table on the
Magnolia Queen:
“Hit or stay, sir?” If only I had a real choice. But because I helped bring the
Queen
to Natchez, I don’t.

 

“Let’s hear it, Timmy. I don’t have all night.”