The Devil's Punchbowl (6 page)

 

And that, Julia guessed, was what Tim was trying to do. He wanted to make up for all the years he had wasted, for all the things he could have accomplished and had not. It wasn’t for her, she knew, and this both relieved and wounded her. She’d done all she could to prove to Tim that he owed her nothing—nothing except all the time he could give to her and the baby. But that wasn’t enough for him. Tim’s obsession was rooted in his relationship with his father. He felt he had betrayed his father as well as himself, and something was driving him to prove that he was in fact the man his father had dreamed he might one day become.

 

Julia hopes Tim wasn’t lying about Penn, that he didn’t simply tell her whatever he thought would quiet her while he went off to God-knew-where to earn the right to feel good about himself again. And so she waits, and watches her baby, and prays that someone will take the cross from her husband’s back and carry it for him. For in the inmost chamber of her heart Julia is certain that if Tim goes on alone, he will die before finding the salvation he seeks.

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER
5

 

 

I should probably drive straight home from the cemetery, but as Tim predicted, I cannot free my mind from the terrible images in his photographs. Instead, I drive up Linton Avenue, turn on Madison Street, and cruise past the newspaper building, where my old lover once worked as publisher. While Caitlin Masters lived in Natchez, everything she could uncover and verify about the city was printed in the paper. Now, despite the fact that her father still owns the
Examiner,
much of the investigative fire seems to have gone out of the staff. If Caitlin were still here, I suspect, the rumors that Tim fleshed out tonight would already be halfway to the front page.

 

I turn on State Street and negotiate a series of right angles on the city’s notorious one-way streets, checking for a tail as I make my way to City Hall. The cop at the cemetery proved easy enough to handle, but I’m not sure he bought my explanation of visiting my wife’s grave. He kept glancing over my shoulder as though he expected a half-dressed woman to appear from among the gravestones beyond the cemetery wall. Of course, he might also have been searching for Tim Jessup, and that’s why I’m keeping my eyes on my rearview mirror as I drive. I’d like to know just how interested the police are in my movements.

 

Unlike most Mississippi towns, Natchez has no central square dominated by a courthouse or a Confederate soldier on a pillar. The
lifeblood of this city has always been the river, and the stately old commercial blocks platted in 1790 march away from it as though with regret, toward onetime plantations now mostly subdivided into residential neighborhoods. City Hall faces Pearl Street and abuts the county courthouse at the rear. The courthouse is the larger of the two buildings, but people often see them as a single structure, since only a narrow alley separates them.

 

Parking before the cream-colored stone of City Hall, I walk beneath hundred-year-old oaks to the main entrance. The building is usually locked by 5:00 p.m., but the chandelier in the foyer blazes like the ballroom of the
Titanic,
and I use its light to find the proper key on my ring. A couple of years before I was elected mayor, the previous board of selectmen awarded me a key to the city. This token of recognition didn’t mean much at the time—it was the kind of honor you might dream about as a kid watching a Disney movie—but tonight, unlocking City Hall with the actual key to the building, I feel the crushing weight of my responsibility to the people who elected me.

 

Upstairs, in my office, I kneel before my safe and open its combination lock. The few sensitive documents I deal with as mayor reside in this safe, among them my file on the Golden Parachute Gaming Corporation, the Los Angeles–based company that owns the
Magnolia Queen.
Feeling strangely furtive, I slip the thick file inside my button-down shirt before I walk downstairs and lock the door. With the file still tucked against my belly, I drive the ten blocks required to reach my home on Washington Street three blocks away, my eyes alert for police cars.

 

When I moved back to town, I had the morbid luck to arrive shortly before the patriarch of an old Natchez family died, which resulted in their family home coming up for sale after a century of benign neglect. I bought it the same day, and I’ve never regretted it. An elegant, two-story Federal town house of red brick, it stands at the center of one of the most beautiful enclaves of the city. Town houses of various styles and pedigrees stand along both sides of the street like impeccably dressed ladies and gentlemen from another era, gradually giving way to the Episcopal Church, the Temple B’nai Israel, Glen Auburn—a four-story French Second Empire mansion—and Magnolia Hall, a massive Greek Revival mansion and the
headquarters of one of the once-powerful local garden clubs. The town houses aren’t antebellum for the most part, but rather the dwellings of the merchants, lawyers, and physicians who prospered in Natchez in the Victorian era. The entire downtown length of Washington Street is lined with fuchsia-blooming crape myrtle trees, which are tended by ladies obsessively dedicated to their survival.

 

As I park and exit my car, a faint but steady glow from the second floor of the house across the street catches my eye. My stomach gives a little flip and I pause, trying to recall whether I’ve seen that light in the past few weeks. The question has some importance, for the house still belongs to Caitlin, though she hasn’t lived in it for eighteen months, preferring to spend most of her time in Charlotte, North Carolina, where her father’s newspaper chain is based. But the house remains furnished, and she does not rent it out. Caitlin and I parted on good enough terms that I still possess a key, in theory so that should any kind of emergency befall the house, I could help the proper people to deal with it.

 

The reality is that for six of the past seven years, Caitlin and I lived as a couple. Her owning a house across the street from mine helped maintain the fiction that we were not “living in sin,” which people still say here, and only half-jokingly. Caitlin often spent the night when Annie was in the house, but Caitlin’s an early riser, and she was usually at work by the time Annie got up to get ready for school. As I remember those mornings now, something catches in my chest. It’s been too long since I felt that relaxed intimacy, and I know my daughter misses it.

 

For most of the time we were together, Caitlin and I planned to marry. We took it for granted in the beginning, when we still believed that fate had brought us together. We met during the civil rights case that seized control of my life after I returned here, and before the resulting trial ended, we’d discovered that though we were ten years apart in age and quite different on the surface, we were joined as inseparably as siblings beneath the skin. The only tension in our relationship developed later, when living and working in a small Southern town no longer felt charming to Caitlin, but rather like a prison. She was born and raised for the big canvas (her coverage of our case earned her a Pulitzer at twenty-eight), and while Natchez sometimes explodes into lethal drama, for the most part it
remains a quiet river town, trapped in an eddy of time and history, changing almost imperceptibly when it changes at all.

 

My decision to run for mayor threw our differences into stark relief and ultimately made the relationship untenable. Caitlin came to Natchez as a flaming, Ivy League liberal with no experience of living in the South, but after five years here, she’d developed ideas more racist than those of many “good ol’ boys” I’d grown up with, and she was ready to get out. Our sharpest points of contention were (a) whether the city was worth saving, and (b) if so, was I the person to save it? Caitlin claimed that people get the government they deserve, and that Natchez didn’t deserve me.
She
did, in her view, and added the argument that Annie deserved a culturally richer childhood than she would have here. In short, Caitlin wanted me to leave my past behind. But true Southerners don’t think that way. I was willing to risk being turned into a pillar of salt, if by so doing I could help renew the city and the land that had borne me. More than this, I believed that living closely with my parents would provide my daughter an emotional bedrock that no amount of cultural diversity would ever replace. In the end, I followed my conscience and my heritage, ensuring that my future marriage became the first casualty of my mayoral campaign. Caitlin cried—as much for Annie as for us—then wished me well and went back to North Carolina, to the New South of glass office towers, boutique restaurants, and the Research Triangle. I stayed in the land of kudzu and Doric columns and bottleneck guitars—one short ride away from James Dickey’s Land of Nine-Fingered People.

 

There’s no denying the light glowing softly through the curtain in the upper room across the way. But if Caitlin has returned to Natchez, she’s most likely come back in some connection with the Balloon Festival. Still, something else might have influenced her unexpected appearance, and it’s worth considering. Ten days ago I ended my relationship with Libby Jensen, after seeing her for nearly a year. Was ten days sufficient time for that news to reach North Carolina? Of course. One e-mail from a gossipy
Examiner
employee would have done it, and a text message would be even faster. If Caitlin has returned, her timing is certainly suggestive.

 

The casino file has grown damp under my shirt by the time I climb the porch and reach for my front door. Before my hand
touches the knob, the door squeaks open, startling me, and the tenth-grade honor student who babysits Annie speaks uncertainly through the crack.

 

“Mr. Cage? Is everything okay?”

 

Because of my experiences with Mia Burke, the senior who used to sit for Annie, I no longer allow babysitters to use my first name. “Everything’s fine, Carla. What about here?”

 

She pulls back the door, revealing her blue-and-white jumper and eyes red from sleep or studying. “Yeah. I was kind of scared, though. I heard the car stop, but then you didn’t come in…”

 

I smile reassuringly and follow her inside, keeping the file pressed inside my shirt with my left hand while I dig for my wallet with my right. Having no idea how long I’ve been gone, I pull a couple of twenties and a ten from my billfold and give Carla permission to go with a wave.

 

“Annie did all her homework,” she says, slinging a heavy backpack over her slight shoulder. “Paper’s written.”

 

“Did she do a good job?”

 

“Honestly?” Carla laughs. “That girl knows words I don’t know. I’d say she’s about one year behind me, gradewise.”

 

“I feel the same way sometimes. Thanks again. What about this weekend?”

 

Carla’s smile vanishes. “Um…maybe some late at night, if you need me. But I’m going to be at the balloon races most of the time. They have some decent bands this year.”

 

“Okay. Any time you can spare, I’ll pay you extra. This weekend is crazy for me.”

 

She smiles in a way that doesn’t give me much hope.

 

After closing the door behind Carla, I pour a tall iced tea from the pitcher in the kitchen fridge, carry it to the leather wing chair in my library, and spread the file open on the ottoman.

 

Golden Parachute Gaming Corporation pitched itself to the city as the Southwest Airlines of the casino industry. Capitalized by a small, feisty group of partners led by a Los Angeles entertainment lawyer, the company evolved a strategy of moving into secondary gaming markets and undercutting the competition’s prices in every way possible, while simultaneously providing personable and personalized service, even to its less moneyed patrons. They run a phe
nomenally efficient operation, but what’s opened many stubborn doors for them is their practice of forming development partnerships with the communities they move into, building parks, ball fields, community centers, and even investing in the development of industrial parks in some cities. Small town officials eat this up, and Natchez was no exception.

 

More than anything, though, Golden Parachute’s success in penetrating our market came down to timing. They applied for their gaming license in the aftermath of Toyota’s disastrous decision to build a new plant in Tupelo versus Natchez. Citizens were bitter about the lost jobs and ready to climb into bed with someone else—almost anybody else—on the rebound. Golden Parachute already had successful casinos up and running in Tunica County, near Memphis, and Vicksburg, just sixty miles north of Natchez. With that track record, they had no trouble getting local heavyweights to lobby the state gaming commission to grant a fourth license for Natchez.

 

Bringing another casino boat to town had not been one of my goals when I ran for mayor. (In truth, none of the floating casinos are navigable vessels; they are barges built to look like paddle wheelers from the era of Mark Twain, but at five times historical scale.) My platform was reforming education and revitalizing local industry. But after considerable persuasion by the board of selectmen, I agreed to help close the casino deal. My reasons were complex: exhaustion in wake of the Toyota failure; a savior complex running on adrenaline after the depletion of my initial inspiration; disillusionment with my colleagues in government and with many of the citizens I was supposed to be serving. I was also frustrated that the board of selectmen were often divided along racial lines: four black votes and four white, with me the deciding factor. I voted my conscience every time, but few people saw it that way, and with every vote, I lost more allies on one side or the other. The only thing the board could agree on was any proposition that could bring money or jobs to their constituencies. And so…Golden Parachute found a receptive audience for its sales pitch.

 

The problem, as it so often is with casinos, was site approval. Golden Parachute wanted to moor the
Magnolia Queen
on riverfront property donated to the city by a prominent Natchez family—the Pierces—by means of a complicated trust. One stipulation of