The Devil’s Punchbowl

4

Julia Jessup watches her seven-month-old son sleep in the crib her sister-in-law sent from San Diego. Julia envies her little boy, that he can sleep so soundly while his father is away. A perfect shining bubble of saliva expands from his cherub’s lips as he exhales, then pops on the inspiration. Julia almost smiles, but she can’t quite manage it. Somewhere between her belly and her heart a great fear is working, like a worm eating at her insides. Tim has promised that everything will be all right, that he will return safely from wherever he went, but her fear did not believe him.

Julia has come so far to reach this place, this little haven from the hardness of the world. A hundred years ago, she married her high school boyfriend, the quarterback of St Stephen’s Prep. The school’s golden boy got her pregnant at nineteen, married her a week later, and gave her herpes two weeks before the baby came. Julia discovered this when the baby contracted the virus during delivery and died in agony eight days later. It was hard to hold on to her romantic illusions after that. But she’d tried.

She suffered through the barhopping with his moronic friends and the vacuous sluts they hung out with, his long absences in the woods during deer season, paintball tournaments during the workweek, sweating in a mosquito-clouded bass boat while he fished. But in the end, she’d had to face that she’d bound herself to a boy, not a man, and that any future with him meant sharing him with every trash monkey who caught his eye, and catching whatever STDs she didn’t have yet.

The first years after she divorced him were leaner than she’d known life could be. Julia had come from a good family, but when the oil business crashed in the eighties, her father couldn’t find another way to make a living and ended his erratic job search with a bullet in the head. After her divorce, she was pretty much on her own. She waited tables, worked a cash register, parked cars at parties, and sold makeup to women who paid more for facial creams in a week than Julia paid for a month’s rent. She steered clear of men for the most part, and watched her friends who hadn’t left Natchez screw up in just about every way possible where the opposite sex was concerned. When Julia needed companionship, she chose older men–married ones who had no illusions about where things were headed–and bided her time.

Then she’d met Tim Jessup, or remet him. She’d known him in school, of course, but they’d never dated, since he was three years ahead of her. Back then he’d been one of the cocky ones who thought that the good life lay waiting ahead of him like a red carpet spread by fate. But soon after high school, he’d learned different. Julia hadn’t thought of Tim much after that, not until she took a job serving hors d’oeuvres on the casino boat one night. Tim had watched her from his blackjack table, then waited for her to finish her work. They went for breakfast at the Waffle House, talked about the good old days at St Stephen’s, then, surprisingly, opened up about the not-so-good days that had filled most of their lives since. By the end of that night, Julia had known Tim might be the man she’d been waiting for. There was only one catch. He had a drug problem.

She could see it in his eyes, the itchy anxiety that worsened until he made a trip to the bathroom and returned with a look of serenity. But then he’d disarmed her by admitting it, that first night too. They’d seen a lot of each other after that, and within a month Julia had made a deal with herself. If she could get Tim clean–really clean–then she would take a chance on him. And to her surprise, she had succeeded. Nothing in her life had been tougher, but she’d set her whole being on seeing him through to sobriety, and she’d done it.

The results were miraculous. Tim quit working the boat his druggie friends patronized, hired on with the new outfit, and began working every shift the Magnolia Queen would give him. He’d even talked his father into giving him a loan for a small house, and in his off hours began fixing it up himself, sawing and hammering like a born carpenter, not a privileged surgeon’s son. Julia watched HGTV every chance she got, ripped up the stained carpet of the previous owners, and refinished the hardwood underneath. Installed the bathroom tiles too. Her pregnancy was something they kept to themselves, a treasure they hugged together in the cocoon of their changing house, until they’d gone so far down the road to normalcy that people wouldn’t roll their eyes when she revealed it. By the time she began to show, the change in perception had begun. Even Tim’s father had warmed to her, in his own way. Some days, in the early mornings, or late at night, she would see his silver Mercedes glide past on the lane outside, and she’d know he was checking his son’s progress. When the baby finally came, perfect and round and without flaw because Julia had taken acyclovir for the last month, every pill at the exact moment she was supposed to, the transformation was complete. She could hardly believe this was her life, that by sheer force of will and faith in herself and her husband she could bring goodness out of fear and regret. But she had done it.

If only Tim’s evolution had stopped there….

As her husband slowly regained the bearings he’d lost during his early twenties, he’d begun to experience a kind of emotional fallout. His memory, which had blocked out so much during his lost years, began to fill in the gaps, and waves of guilt and regret would assail him. Tim rediscovered God, which might have been all right had he not acted like a religious convert, more zealous than those born into the faith. He saw choices starkly, as either right or wrong, and despite his own past he judged those who didn’t measure up to his idea of ethical responsibility. It wasn’t a moral prissiness–he didn’t condemn people for the common human lapses–but he began to obsess about the big things in life. Politics. Organized religion. The diamond brokers in Sierra Leone, the starving children in the Sudan, the good Muslims in Iraq. The uneducated blacks right here in Mississippi.

And then it happened. Exactly what, Julia didn’t know. But it was something at work. Tim had witnessed something terrible, or overheard something, and from that night forward he’d been a man possessed. With each passing week he’d grown more withdrawn, more irritable, to the point that she feared he’d begun using again. But it wasn’t that. Tim had apparently discovered something that so outraged him he felt compelled to right the wrong himself. And that terrified her. Tim wasn’t the kind of man to take on that kind of trouble. He was smart, and he was good-hearted, but he wasn’t hard inside, the way her first husband had been. Tim had illusions about people; he wanted them to be better than they were, and you couldn’t fight evil men if you thought that way. You couldn’t win, anyway. Julia had lived enough life to know that.

The only thing that had given her any comfort was Tim telling her that Penn Cage would be helping him. Julia had known Penn in high school too. She’d even kissed him once, beside a car one night at a senior party that she and a friend had sneaked off to. Penn Cage wasn’t like Tim. He wasn’t timid or uncertain; he made decisions and stuck with them, and life had worked out for him. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t suffered; he’d lost his wife to cancer; but everybody paid for the things they got, some way or other. You had to pay just for being alive.

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.

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.