The Devils Punchbowl

I try to recall the girl’s face, but the harder I concentrate on it, the less distinct it becomes. “I really can’t place her. I have this vague

feeling…she reminded me of a girl who used to wait on me across the river somewhere. A store or a restaurant in Vidalia, maybe. But the girl I'm thinking of was really heavy, and a lot plainer. I'm probably way off.”

“Don’t stop thinking about it. Maybe it will come to you later.”

“I do better with remembering when I'm not trying to.”

Despite this assertion, I plumb my memory for some connection to the girl’s face, but as we climb Maple Street toward the hill from which the Charity Hospital used to look down upon the cemetery, a very different memory rises. In the summer after sixth grade, a bunch of us were staying overnight with a friend who lived downtown. Most of us lived in subdivisions, but a few schoolmates still lived in ramshackle Victorians fronted with wrought-iron fences and backed by narrow alleys and deep gullies. We’d ride our jerry-built banana bikes downtown, pretending to be Evel Knievel, then spend the night tearing around the city streets, trying to do enough yelling to get the police to chase us.

We were just old enough that when Davy Cass suggested we should invade the cemetery, no one dared to say he was afraid to do it. I certainly didn't. Partly it was the idea of a deserted graveyard that scared me, but another part knew that the cemetery lay on the north side of town, uncomfortably close to the Negro sections of the city. During that era, no black male with his wits about him would have dared say a cross word to a white child, but we didn't know that. There was old Jim Clay, who lived in a shack on the Fenton property and who would fire rock salt from a shotgun if we got too near his place. Nook Wilson at the gas station had killed his wife with a butcher knife and sometimes looked at you like he’d just as soon kill you too. That was who I thought about when our bike routes took us close to the north side after dark, and not Ruby Flowers, our maid, who lived out that way and would have coldcocked anyone who tried to hurt me. But mostly—and wisely—we feared the unknown.

Our first thirty minutes in the cemetery were euphoric. We flashed down the narrow lanes between the mausoleums like the superheroes we worshipped, riding no-hands and seeing who could shut his eyes the longest without crashing. I rode from the main gate to Catholic Hill without once touching the handlebars, holding my

arms out like wings (and only peeking a couple of times). But this hyperexcited state ended with the sound of a single growl. Barks wouldn'’t have frightened us, since most of us owned dogs. But when Davy suddenly skidded to a stop, the rest of us slammed into him from behind, and then we saw what had stopped him.

Crouching in the middle of the path was a black cur that had to weigh sixty pounds. Behind him a dozen more dogs stood alert, awaiting an attack signal. The cur had his teeth bared and his ears back, and when I saw his feverish eyes glint in the moonlight, I cringed with prehistoric fear. The lane cut between walls of earth twelve feet high, so our only escape route lay behind us. I felt my bladder turn to stone, then communal panic flashed through our little tribe. By the time we got our bikes turned, fifteen or twenty dogs were in pursuit. We’d had trouble with wild packs before, usually in the woods, and every summer our mothers reminded us that Billy Jenkins had been forced to take twenty-three rabies shots in his stomach because of a dog bite. This knowledge made us pedal like madmen for the gates, praying for deliverance as the frenzied animals snapped at our legs.

We didn't have a chance. Only the savant-level survival instincts of Trey Stacy saved us. When he jumped from his bike and dashed for the low-hanging branch of an oak tree, the herd instinct kicked in. Soon seven boys were treed like coons in the great gnarled branches of the oak. The furious dogs leaped and gnashed their teeth, barking and howling like demons among the gravestones, but that was their undoing. Their baying eventually drew the attention of a passing motorist, who called the police. The first cop shot one dog with his pistol, but the pack didn't retreat until his red-haired partner killed the alpha male with a shotgun. Several boys were crying as the police hauled us back to our sleepover, not for fear of their parents, but from the shock of seeing the dogs killed. I was shivering myself and glad when my father arrived to take me home rather than let me stay the night.

Caitlin touches my shoulder again and says, “Penn? We just went through the main gate. Where are we going?”

I point along a rank of oaks that line the nearby lane. When we reach the oak of my memory, I tell Kelly to stop. Its trunk is massive now, and its great branches hang so low that weather-treated four-

by-fours have been propped beneath to keep them from sagging to the ground. Across the lane from the tree, beneath a twisted limb, lies the grave of Patrick McQueen.

With Caitlin trailing, I walk to his gravestone, a tall slab of granite with the text of Housman’s “To an Athlete Dying Young” engraved on its face. One quick scan tells me that no disc is hidden beside the stone, but I'm certain now that Tim told me what I need to know. Leaving the stone, I walk out to where the crooked limb almost touches the grass. Then I set my foot in its crook, grip the rising branch with both hands, and begin climbing toward the trunk of the tree.

I don'’t have to go far. Fifteen feet from where I mounted the limb, wedged into a forked branch, is a hardcover copy of my third novel,

Nothing but the Truth.

The sight of its jacket moves me strangely, but the feeling passes as I look down and see Patrick McQueen’s grave almost directly beneath me. For an infinite second, I feel as though I

am

Tim Jessup, clinging here in the dark, desperate to preserve the evidence I’'ve stolen from the men I hate so deeply. Closing my eyes for a moment, I let this déjŕ vu bleed out of me. Then I fan the pages of my own book.

A flash of silver makes my heart thump. Lying between pages 342 and 343 is a DVD in a transparent plastic sleeve. There’s no mark or label on the disc, and from the purplish color and look of the data side, it appears to be homemade.

“What did you find?” Caitlin calls from below. “It looks like a book.”

“The disc is in it. We need a computer with a DVD drive.”

“I can grab a notebook computer from the office.”

Kelly steps up beside her, his blond hair bright beside her black mane. “I’d feel better with four walls around us. And we need to make some copies.”

“We’re two minutes from the office,” Caitlin says. “We can lock the building. If Sands tried to storm the

Examiner,

that would make national headlines.”

“That doesn’'t mean he won'’t,” says Kelly. “We don'’t know what’s on that disc. I'’ll cover the building while you two check it out. If there’s anything you think I should see, call me on the Star Trek.”

Closing the disc back into the book, I slide a little way down the limb, then drop six feet to the soft earth below.

“Tim died for this.”

Caitlin nods slowly, then puts her arms around me and lays her head on my chest. “You can’t bring him back. All you can do is finish what he started.”

“Is that the plan?” Kelly asks.

My thoughts on Annie, I pull away from Caitlin and put the book into her hands. “What do you think?”

She looks back at me with the least feminine expression I’'ve ever seen on her face. “I'm not your mother. I say nail the son of a bitch to the wall.”

Caitlin and I are sitting in front of an Apple Cinema Display in the office of the

Examiner

’s publisher. Behind us Daniel Kelly stands alert, a Heckler and Koch MP5 submachine gun in his hands. Kelly thought he should stand guard outside, but I want him to see whatever’s on the DVD. He certainly knows more about data encryption than Caitlin and me.