The Devil's Punchbowl (26 page)

 

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 Natchez’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.

 

Labry went to college at Mississippi State and returned home afterward; he was already working in his father’s office-supply business while I was earning my law degree at Rice. When I returned to Natchez for good, I discovered that Labry was one of the few boys from the top quarter of his class who hadn’t immigrated to another part of the country to earn his living. As mayor, whenever I looked at the Board of Selectmen with frustration, Labry’s constant presence and dogged, conscientious work gave me hope for change. I think he originally harbored dreams of running for mayor, but after I confided to him that I intended to run, he told me that I should go for it, and that I could count on his full support. He has been true to his
word, and I should not repay a loyal friend and family man by dragging him into the mess that has already claimed Tim Jessup’s life.

 

“Look at that!” cries Necker, pointing down to a vast, swampy island enclosed by an old bend in the river. “That’s Giles Island right there. We’re setting up to win this thing, Penn, I can feel it.”

 

“I never had a doubt,” I tell him, which is true. Necker probably studied maps of this area nonstop during his flight back from Chicago.

 

As we start to cross the island, a loud crack unlike anything I’ve yet heard snaps me to full alertness. What frightens me most is Necker. He’s gone from a relaxed posture to total rigidity in less than a second.

 

“What was that?” I ask.

 

Necker doesn’t answer. He has leaned back to look up through the throat of the balloon, and he doesn’t look happy.

 

“Was that a shot?” I ask, almost afraid to voice what my instinct tells me is true.

 

“Yes and no,” Necker answers, still staring up into the canopy. “Somebody just put some lead through the canopy, but that sound we heard wasn’t the gun. It was the bullet itself.”

 

“Jesus.” The balloons to the west of us seem much farther away than they did ten seconds ago. “What’s the difference?”

 

Necker is working fast, checking the digital equipment that rests in a pouch on the inside lip of the basket. He’s as grim as a fireman about to rush into a burning building. “It takes a high-powered rifle to make the sound we just heard. That bullet was supersonic.”

 

My fear is scaling up into panic. I want to suppress it, but some reactions are simply beyond control. “What does that mean for us?”

 

“A stray shotgun pellet is one thing. But you don’t hit a balloon this big with a high-powered rifle unless you’re aiming at it.”

 

Before the wind carries Necker final word away, another
crack
makes me grab the edge of the basket in terror. This time I hear the bullet rip the nylon above our heads. Necker grabs the wooden handle of a rope that stretches all the way to the top of the balloon. It’s fastened inside a carabiner, which Necker carefully opens while gripping the handle tight in his hand. He looks like a man about to pull the rip cord on a parachute.

 

“What are you doing?” I ask, trying to keep my voice steady.

 

His eyes meet mine with an intensity that shakes me to the core. “We’ve got to get down. Somebody’s trying to kill us.”

 

I want to help, but my mind is blank. Before I can say anything more, Necker pulls on the rope, and our balloon begins dropping like an elevator in a Tokyo office building. My stomach flies into my throat, and my feet tingle the way they do when I stand on a cliff edge.

 

“Will the canopy hold together?” I ask above the rush of the wind.

 

Necker nods with confidence. “We can take quite a few holes and maintain buoyancy. But if they hit a cable or cause a big rip, we’ll be in trouble.”

 

“What if they hit the fuel tanks?”

 

Necker gives me a grin of utter fatalism. “If they hit a tank, we’re dead.”

 

The sound of the wind is twofold now, the air blowing past us horizontally, and that rushing upward as we plummet toward the earth.

 

“Can we dump the tanks over the side?”

 

Necker is watching the top of the balloon through its mouth. “That would take four or five minutes in my balloon, and this isn’t my balloon. I’ll have us on the ground in fifty seconds.”

 

He pulls harder on the rope, and we drop still faster. I cannot bear to look outside the basket. “What are you doing?” I ask.

 

“Venting hot air from the top of the balloon. It’s the only way to get down fast.”

 

“How fast are we going?”

 

“A thousand feet a minute.”

 

“How fast is that?”

 

Necker purses his lips, figuring on the fly. “A forty-yard dash straight into the ground. It probably won’t kill you, but it’ll hurt like hell.”

 

Shit….

 

He squeezes my upper arm and winks. “We’ll be all right. I’ll do a burn right before we hit. Try to cushion it a little.”

 

My heart is pounding so hard that my chest hurts. “I feel like we just jumped out of a plane!”

 

Necker actually laughs. “A skydiver falls ten times this fast. Just
keep scanning the ground. Watch for a muzzle flash. Somebody’s going to jail for this.”

 

Steeling myself, I pan my eyes over the swampy ground bounded by the snaky bend of the old river course. There’s a thousand acres of trees down there that a sniper could hide behind. There’s no way we’re going to find him without hearing his gun go off.

 

The ground seems to swoop up toward us with surreal speed. I’m trying to force my gaze away from it when Necker takes out his cell phone and speed-dials a number. “Major McDavitt? We’re taking ground fire…. That’s right, rifle fire, I’d say. Could be hunters, but I don’t think so. I’m hitting the deck right where we are, maximum safe descent.” Necker gives me a quick glance. “Maybe faster.”