Greg Iles - The Devils Punchbowl

With the jarring synchronicity I experience so often in life, my cell phone vibrates against my thigh. I take it out, expecting another update from Labry, but I find a text message from a number I don'’t know. I don'’t even recognize the area code. When I click READ, the words make my mouth go dry.

Xing the Rubicon. Stay close to ur fon & n range of a tower. Don’t respond 2 this msg! Mrs. Haley.

“Shit,” I whisper. Mrs. Haley taught Tim Jessup and me Latin in the eighth grade.

Crossing the Rubicon?

What the hell is Tim playing at? I figured he’d wait at least a few days to try whatever it is he’s been planning. Doesn’t he understand how important this weekend is to the city?

“Shit,”

I say again, unable to get my mind around the idea that Jessup could be committing any number of felonies at this moment, endangering both himself and the future of the casino industry in Mississippi.

“Tim, you crazy son of a bitch,” I mutter, and start to reply to his message with a warning. But before I hit SEND, caution wins out over anxiety, and I shove the phone deep into my pocket.

Locking my car, I march out onto the tarmac where a few single-engine planes wait in lonely silence. There isn’t much to see at the airport. Natchez hasn’'t had steady commercial service since the 1970s, when the oil business was booming and the DC-3s of Southern Airways flew in and out every day. I remember being led aboard one of the sturdy old planes by a pretty stewardess when my parents took my sister and me to London as children. I’'ve always believed that trip generated my sister Jenny’s love of Britain, a love that eventually pulled her away from us for good. If I close my eyes, I can still feel the buffeting wind from the big propellers as they revved up to carry us to the Pan Am 747 waiting in New Orleans. Two slices of Americana gone forever.

I need that prop wash this afternoon. Last night’s wind died this morning, and the sun blazes white over the runways, roasting me as I check the northern sky for Hans Necker’s Gulfstream IV. The lack of wind was good for the Balloon Festival’s “media flight” this morning, but it sucks for a man wearing a long-sleeved button-down, even Egyptian cotton. The humidity in south Mississippi could drown a desert dweller if he breathed too fast.

After shedding another pint of sweat, I finally spy a silver glint in the sky far upriver. As Necker’s jet descends toward me, I hear the

whup-whup-whup

of a helicopter approaching from the south. The Gulfstream circles and executes its approach from the southeast, landing as gracefully as the first duck of winter on a dawn-still pond. As the jet taxies up to the small terminal, a blue Bell helicop

ter descends toward the tarmac twenty yards away from me. Then the aft door of the Gulfstream opens and the steps unfold to the ground with a hydraulic hum.

Hans Necker emerges alone, a stocky, red-faced man of about sixty with a grip of iron. “Penn, Penn! Face-to-face at last,” he says, walking exuberantly while we shake hands. “Sorry to be late, but we made up most of the time in flight.”

I greet Necker with as much enthusiasm as I can muster while he guides me past the tail of his jet and toward the settling chopper.

Straight to business, then. Suits me. The sooner we go up, the sooner we get back.

The moment the chopper’s skids touch down, Necker yanks open the side door, pushes me into the vibrating craft, and climbs in next to me. The pilot points at two headsets lying on the seat. I slip one on, then grip the handle to my left in anticipation of takeoff.

“Take her up, Major!” Necker shouts in my crackling headset.

The chopper rises like a leaf on a gust of wind. Then its nose dips and we start forward, rapidly gathering speed as we climb into the blue-white sky.

“Penn,” Necker says over the intercom link, “our pilot’s Danny McDavitt. Flew in Vietnam.”

“Good to meet you,” I tell the back of the graying head in front of me.

“You too,” says a voice of utter calm.

I recognize McDavitt’s name from an incident about six months ago involving a helicopter crash-landing in the river. There was some talk about the pilot and a local doctor’s wife, but there’s so much talk like that all the time that I only pay attention if it involves me or the city. The idea of a crash awakens a swarm of butterflies in my stomach, but in the sixty seconds it takes us to sight the Mississippi River to the west, Danny McDavitt convinces me that he’s an extension of the machine carrying us, or that the machine is an extension of his will. Either way, I'm happy, because this chopper flight is the first I’'ve ever endured without my stomach going south on me.

“How did the media flight go this morning?” Necker asks, his face pressed against the glass beside him.

“Great!” I reply too loudly. “Weather looks good for most of the weekend. Except maybe Sunday.”

“Good, good.”

“How was your visit to Greenville?”

“Fine. Got some good people up there, and they really want the plant. I still like this place, though,” Necker says almost wistfully. “It’s got a romance to it that the other cities don'’t have—apart from New Orleans, and there’s no possibility of making that work now.”

I figured as much, but it’s a relief to hear it confirmed.

“I did an overflight three days after the levees broke,” he says, looking down at a string of barges on a bend in the river below. “Hauled some relief supplies down to Biloxi. Christ, it looked like the End of Days down there. There were

still

people stranded on the interstate. I couldn'’t believe it.”

I shake my head but make no comment. The enormity of the havoc wreaked by Katrina is beyond words. We do what we can, then start again the next day. “You want to view the industrial-park sites first? Or look at the city?”

“Let’s head straight down to the old Triton Battery site. I'm pressed for time today. Okay with you, Major?”

“It’s your nickel,” McDavitt replies.

On any other day, Necker’s haste might worry me, but today I'’ll take any excuse to get time alone with my thoughts. As we drone southward, following the vast river, the city unfolds beneath us like an Imax film, the classic city on a hill, one of only three on the eastern side of the Mississippi from Cairo to New Orleans. From two thousand feet, you can see the nineteenth-century scale of Natchez, the church steeples still taller than all but two commercial buildings; yet we’re still low enough to take in the

Gone With the Wind

aura of the grand mansions set amid the verdant forests of the old plantations. A year ago I could rattle off our claims to fame with poetic enthusiasm: how Natchez in 1840 had more millionaires per capita than any city in America; how we survived the Civil War with our property intact, if not our pride; and how, after the white gold of cotton failed, the black gold of oil replaced it. But experience has drained my enthusiasm, and my ambivalence is difficult to mask.

Still…a more picturesque American town could not be found anywhere. For sheer beauty Natchez is unmatched along the length of the river; with its commanding site above the river Mississippi it surpasses even New Orleans, and one would have to travel to

Charleston or Savannah to find comparable architecture. But gazing down from this helicopter, I no longer see the city I knew during the first eighteen years of my life, nor even the town I found when I returned seven years ago. Now I see Natchez through the mayor’s eyes, and what I see is a town crippled by a mistake made thirty years ago, when the majority of whites pulled out of the public school system in response to forced integration. A city whose public schools are 90 percent filled with the descendants of slaves, and whose four private schools struggle to provide a superior but redundant education to mostly white students, leavened by a few lucky African-Americans (the children of affluent professionals or dedicated middle-class parents—or those kids recruited to play football) plus the majority of Asians and Indians in the county, who avoid the public school system if they can. Changing this state of affairs was my primary reason for running for mayor, for until it is changed, we’re unlikely to attract any new industry larger than Hans Necker’s as-yet-unborn recycling plant. But thus far I have failed in my quest—publicly and miserably.