Cemetery Road

“You gonna tell me Buck couldn’t be bought?”

I nod.

Paul gives me a tight smile. “I may not be an official Poker Club member, but I’ve learned one thing by being around those guys: everybody has a price.”

“You sound like Arthur Pine.” Pine, a former county attorney, is the Poker Club member who works every angle of every sleazy deal without hindrance of moral scruples.

“Yeah?” says Paul. “What did that vain old prick say?”

“‘We’re all whores, we’re just haggling over the price.’”

Paul shakes his head. “That sounds like Arthur, all right. King of the Whores.”

A shriek of feedback hits the tents, causing everyone to cover their ears. After it fades, Paul says, “Guess they’re about to start this gong show. You gonna hang in the tent with us?”

“Nah. I’m going to move back and try to see the big picture.”

Paul gives me his sarcastic smile. “Good luck with that. And about that other thing … not a word to Jet.”

I look down the tent at the woman still carrying my seed from yesterday. “No problem, man.”

I FIND A GOOD viewing perch atop a flatbed trailer parked well back from the tents. From here I can observe the main players without seeming too interested. After my exchange with Paul, my mind is flooded with thoughts of Jet and our constant dilemma, which exerts emotional pressure every hour of the day. Only by learning to compartmentalize all she represents have I been able to function in this town. But rather than get caught in an infinite loop of what-ifs—which won’t be resolved until our afternoon meeting—I decide to focus on the men most likely to have ordered Buck’s murder.

The eternally feuding county supervisors and city aldermen have broken precedent to come together for this show. Thirteen gold shovels wait in a stand before the Azure Dragon tent, which matches the number of city and county representatives, plus the mayor. But the real power in Bienville doesn’t reside in its supervisors and aldermen, or even in the mayor. The elected officials in this town are hired hands. They’re the ones standing in the sun in their best suits and dresses, but the ruddy-faced men who control them are under the tents, drinking from crystal highball glasses and watching with the disinterested calm of gamblers who already know the outcome of every race. I’ve spoken to a few already. But to truly understand those men, and the power that they wield, one must understand the unique history of the town where I was born.

Bienville, Mississippi, began as a French fort built by young Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, one year after he founded Natchez and one year before he founded New Orleans. Still a year shy of his twenty-fourth birthday, Governor Bienville initially named the fort Langlois after his housekeeper, who had overseen the French “casquette girls”—twenty-three poor virgins removed from convents and orphanages and shipped to Fort Mobile to keep the soldiers there from taking Native American mistresses. Each casquette girl brought all her belongings in a single trunk or “casket,” and while no one knows their ultimate fates, their arrival succeeded in preventing large-scale sexual exploitation of the Indian women at Mobile. Farther north, however, French soldiers did take Indian mistresses, which triggered the Natchez Indian Revolt in 1729 and the terrible French reprisals that followed. Four years later, Sieur de Bienville—by then back in France—was asked to return to La Louisiane and hunt down the Natchez survivors who had taken refuge among the Chickasaw. During this effort, Bienville rebuilt Fort Langlois, which had fallen into disrepair, and used it as a base from which to attack his enemies.

By the time Bienville sailed back to France, both Indians and whites in the area had taken to calling the fort after its founder. Fort Bienville and its surrounding town grew steadily, and in 1763 it came by treaty under British rule, as did Natchez to the south. Bienville proper began to grow along the pristine bluff above the Mississippi River, and generous land grants by King George created large inland plantations, which produced tobacco and indigo. After sixteen years of British rule, Spain took control of the town, but Charles IV held it only as long as King George. In 1795, Bienville was ceded to the United States, where it became the far edge of the American West. This cosmopolitan history left Bienville perfectly positioned to exploit the cotton gin, which had been developed in 1793.

As the new century clattered to life like a great steam engine, Bienville joined a cotton boom that brought spectacular wealth to the Lower Mississippi Valley, all on the backs of African slaves, who had proved easier to control than enslaved Indians, who knew the land better than their putative masters and had homes to run to when they managed to escape. The moonlight-and-magnolia dream of the Anglophile whites—and the nightmare of the black Africans—lasted only sixty years. By 1863, Ulysses Grant and an army of seventy thousand Yankees were camped four miles outside Bienville, aiming to conquer Vicksburg, forty miles to the north. Bienville waited in schizophrenic expectation, its anxious planters hoping to surrender, its workingmen and planters’ sons ready to fight to the last man.

Bienville’s Civil War history usually fills a bloody chapter in books on the Vicksburg campaign. All that matters now is that on June 7, 1863, General Grant decided that, despite fierce Confederate resistance that had originated there, Bienville—like Port Gibson to the east—would not burn. Grant’s decision ensured the survival of more than fifty antebellum homes, many mansions that would draw enough tourists during the Great Depression to bring the city back from the dead. The history of the years that followed was as troubled as that in the rest of the South, and it ensured that by the 1960s a crisis would come. Bienville weathered those racial troubles better than most of its neighbors, but the deepest issues were never fully addressed, setting the stage for a reckoning that by 2018 still has not come.

The reason it has not bears a name: the Bienville Poker Club.

When I was a boy, I sometimes heard references to a “poker club,” most often when I was visiting Paul Matheson’s house. Back then, I thought the term referred to a weekly card game Paul’s dad played in sometimes. At that age, I couldn’t have imagined its true nature or function, and my father certainly never talked about it. Dad had to have known about it, of course, for the Bienville Poker Club was founded seventy years before he was born and had exerted profound influence over this area ever since. But though my father published many scathing editorials about Bienville politics, he never once wrote about the Poker Club as a political force. To this day, I’m not sure why.

Thanks to the Poker Club, while the other Mississippi River towns withered during the final quarter of the twentieth century, Bienville continued to grow. Up in the Delta, there are drug dealers living in the mansions of former cotton planters. In Natchez, forty miles downstream, commercial real estate values have been eroding for two decades. But in Bienville business is on the march. Quite a few observers have speculated about the reasons for this. Some tout the foresight of Bienville’s leaders. Others point to economic diversification. One particularly naïve journalist wrote a piece about Bienville’s “uniquely congenial” race relations and cribbed from Atlanta’s old pitch as being “the city too busy to hate.”

All that is bullshit.

The Bienville Poker Club was founded shortly after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. The original members—most of whom were ancestors of the twelve present members—created the shadow organization to defend themselves against the depredations of the “carpetbaggers” who swarmed south like boll weevils to plunder what remained of the Confederacy. Since the Yankees saw Southern gentlemen as habitual gamblers who loved wasting time indulging in whiskey and cigars away from their family homes, nightly poker games provided credible cover for more subversive activities. While men in other towns formed parties of night riders that would soon become the Ku Klux Klan, the pragmatic businessmen of Bienville employed more Machiavellian methods of resistance. Rather than fight under an ideological banner of violence, they worked relentlessly to keep their hands on every lever of power still within reach. They collaborated with the Yankees when necessary, but betrayed them when they could. They employed cardsharps, whores, and criminals to control the carpetbaggers and Negro politicians of the new inverted world, and by the Compromise of 1877—which mandated the removal of the federal troops that enforced Reconstruction laws—the Poker Club had most of the town’s institutions firmly in its hands.

It is testament to the vision of those men that 153 years later, I stand in the shadow of a bluff that still supports their mansions, witnessing their descendants consummating what the Wall Street Journal dubbed the “Mississippi Miracle.” Down in front of the Azure Dragon tent, the governor of Mississippi has introduced a Chinese man in a tailored suit. He takes the microphone with Bienville’s mayor at his side, a local sidekick grinning like an organ-grinder’s monkey. The company man has a Chinese accent, but his vocabulary is better than the mayor’s. When the mayor leans out and calls the aldermen and supervisors forward to the line of shovels to play out their charade for the cameras, I shift my gaze to the Prime Shot tent, where most current members of the Bienville Poker Club stand watching, expressions of mild amusement on their faces.

The 2018 iteration of the Poker Club isn’t nearly so rich as the original group prior to the Civil War, when they ranked only behind New York, Philadelphia, and Natchez in banked millions. But the war gutted those fortunes, and that kind of damage takes a long time to make up. Today’s club controls something north of a billion dollars among the twelve members. That’s a long way from New York rich, but in this corner of Mississippi, it’s enough to mold the shape of life for all.

Blake Donnelly, the oilman, is worth more than $200 million. Claude Buckman, the banker, is in the same league. Donnelly’s in his mid-seventies, though, and Buckman’s over eighty. Max Matheson made his fortune in timber, and together he and Paul run a huge lumber mill north of town, plus the Matheson Wood Treatment plant near the sandbar to the south. They also manage hundreds of thousands of acres of timber all over the state. I’m not sure how much Wyatt Cash is worth. I do know he owns one river island outright, which he operates as an exclusive hunting camp—one frequented by NFL players and college coaches, most from the SEC.

Beau Holland, the asshole I met down on the road with Tommy Russo, is the hungry jackal among the lions of the club. From what Jet tells me, Holland has used inside information to exploit every aspect of the new paper mill, bridge, and interstate. Until last year, Beau had a junior partner named Dave Cowart working for him as a contractor. Cowart built most of Belle Rose and Beau Chene, the two residential developments at the eastern edge of the county. But last year, Jet went after Cowart with a lawsuit alleging rigged bidding on a project partly funded by federal dollars. As a result, Cowart and one alderman ended up doing time in federal prison. This did not endear Jet to the remaining club members, but since she’s Max Matheson’s daughter-in-law, there was little they could do except bitch on the golf course.

The other members span the professions. Tommy Russo has his casino. Arthur Pine handles the legal paper. Warren Lacey is a plastic surgeon and nursing home king whom Jet nearly sent to jail over bribery of state officials. (Dr. Lacey ended up with a suspended sentence and a one-year suspension of his medical license. He’d happily inject Jet with a lethal drug cocktail if he could.) Then there’s U.S. senator Avery Sumner, the former circuit judge whom the Poker Club somehow got appointed to the seat recently vacated by the senior senator from Mississippi for health reasons. Sumner flew in for today’s event on a CitationJet owned by Wyatt Cash’s company. The jet’s livery features a large circular view through a riflescope, with buck antlers centered in the reticle. The other three members of the club I know little about, but they surely fulfill their function of greasing the wheels of commerce while pocketing whatever they can skim from every transaction or building project.

What must those men feel as they watch the local elected officials—nine whites and four blacks—lift the gold shovels from the stand and spade them into the pre-softened earth? The aldermen and supervisors are mugging for the cameras now, trying to look like Leland Stanford at the golden spike ceremony in 1869. A paper mill is no transcontinental railroad, but any project that brings a new interstate to a county containing only thirty-six thousand people comes pretty close to salvation.

When the photographers stop snapping pictures, the ceremony is over. The crowd disperses quickly, and crews miraculously appear to break down the tents. As the governor’s motorcade roars up Port Road, Jet and Paul give each other a quick connubial hug, then separate to find their respective vehicles. Was that hug for show? I wonder. Max and Paul walk side by side to a couple of Ford F-250s, while a few yards to their right, Beau Holland climbs into a vintage Porsche 911.

I half expect Jet to text me, but she doesn’t. She and Josh Germany climb into her Volvo SUV—Jet behind the wheel—and pull onto Port Road, heading toward the bluff without even a glance in my direction. Suddenly Paul’s suspicion doesn’t seem so absurd. As I follow the Volvo with my eyes, I notice something I missed when I arrived: a small fleet of earthmoving equipment parked in the shadow of the bluff, under a line of cottonwood trees. As Jet’s XC60 vanishes at the top of the bluff, black smoke puffs from a couple of smokestacks, and then the low grinding of heavy Caterpillar engines rolls toward me. I had no idea they intended to start work so soon. In fact, I’m pretty sure they didn’t. Nobody made any mention of it today.

They’re going to wipe out all traces of Buck’s digging, I realize. And maybe of Buck himself. Suddenly I’m as sure as I’ve ever been of anything that Buck was murdered here last night.

A chill races over my skin as the big yellow monsters crawl out of the shadows. I’m not sure what I can do to stop them or even slow them down. As I ponder this question, I hear a much higher sound, rapidly increasing in amplitude. It’s the hornet buzz of a drone, the same buzz I heard this morning. Looking up, I see the familiar silhouette of a DJI quad-rotor flying what appears to be a precise grid pattern over the paper mill site.

I want to cheer out loud. Denny Allman didn’t wait for the appointed time to meet me here. He came straight to the site and got down to business as soon as the crowd broke up. For a few seconds I worry that the equipment operators will get suspicious and call someone about the drone, but in all likelihood they can’t even hear the damned thing above the roar of their big diesel motors. Even if they do, they’ll assume that Beau Holland or some other Poker Club member—or even the Chinese—is using the drone for a commercial purpose related to the site. As I glance over at the Flex, trying to decide what to do next, my iPhone pings.

Piloting from the woods, reads Denny’s message. Can you pick me up on top of bluff in 20 mins?

Will do, I reply.

Any place need special attention?

Look for disturbed earth.This is our only chance before those graders and dozers tear it up. I remember Buck telling me that he unearthed the largest Poverty Point fragment near one of the foundation piers of the old electroplating plant. Don’t fly too low, I advise Denny, but get good coverage of the footprint of the old plant. The foundation especially. Understand?

10-4, comes the reply.

C u in 20 mins, I type, walking rapidly to the Flex.

I don’t need to hang out here on the flats, drawing attention. Where to go? Beyond the twenty-foot-high levee that protects the industrial park from the Mississippi River should be a thirty-foot slope to the water. That would put me out of sight of the equipment drivers. They might know I’m there, but out of sight is usually out of mind.

From the moment I saw Buck’s shattered skull through Denny’s drone camera, I’ve had a sense of disparate threads coming together, of a hidden pattern revealing itself. A town like Bienville is like the river it was founded on, filled with deep and conflicting currents. Most times, the only way to detect such a current is by seeing something unexpected shoot to the surface. Buck’s corpse might be that surprise. There is another way, of course, but it’s usually fatal.

Fall in and get sucked under.

CHAPTER 11 (#ulink_60ddea87-c291-5d59-bca5-cca7e7bb0a16)

YOU DON’T GROW up thinking you’ll sleep with someone else’s husband or wife. But life has a way of taking us places we never planned to go, and the moral restraints we absorb as children tend to fall away in the face of protracted frustration and desire. Many a man or woman has awakened from a months-long oxytocin high and realized that they’ve put their spouse, their children, or even their life at risk in a blind quest to regain a purity and intensity of experience allowed only to the young. Sometimes we’re chasing reflections of romantic ideals unconsciously implanted in us by our parents. Other times we stumble into someone who carries a key that could open or close a door on some formative trauma we might not even remember. Whatever the trigger of our passion, we cross a line that we once believed inviolate, and by so doing throw the world out of balance in such a way that it must eventually right itself, regardless of human casualties.

Ironically, our passion blinds us to our true motives in these cases. Often we perceive our personal world as out of balance and seize on the notion that another person will somehow right the ship, restoring the “happiness” we crave. The mind-altering ecstasy of sexual union further distorts our perception, making it infinitely harder to navigate the maze we have created for ourselves. This self-induced blindness pushes us to take insane risks. I’ve had to restrain Jet more than once during the past three months. The compulsion to be “free” from a perceived trap can be overwhelming, and many a human being has gnawed off more than an arm or leg in their desperation.

I began my affair with Jet with both eyes open. I wasn’t driven by sexual compulsion to possess her body, which I had come to know intimately as a boy. Nor did I crave the thrill of forbidden assignations, which can amplify sex into a druglike addiction. What I wanted from Jet was everything: her present and all that remains of her future. She wants the same. Our general plan is simple: After my father dies, I’ll return to Washington, with or without my widowed mother. A month or two later, Jet will tell Paul that she believes they need some time apart. This will lead to a trial separation, then to discussions of divorce, while I—the cause of this action—will have long been out of the picture. At some point during this phase they will deal with the issue of their son, Kevin, whom Jet wants to bring to Washington to live with us.

The plan is sound, as such things go. The problem is that, for Jet, that final matter is a deal-breaker. She will not leave Bienville without Kevin. Yet she insists that Paul and his father will break every law on the books to ensure that she never takes him away. Since the Poker Club exercises absolute control over the chancery judges in Bienville, Max Matheson can dictate the terms of Jet’s divorce. Yet somehow, we’ve allowed ourselves to ignore this fact. Since my father has not died, we’ve contented ourselves with stolen hours, pretending the risk is minimal. For three months, we’ve drifted along on a tide of bliss, believing our plan must eventually come to fruition of its own accord.

Paul’s suspicion under the Prime Shot tent showed me in one gut-wrenching minute how blind we have become. Our long-range divorce plan is meaningless now. Paul already suspects Jet of infidelity. If we keep taking these risks for even a week, he’ll discover the truth. But if we stop seeing each other, what then? My father could die tomorrow, or he could live another six months. Can we go six months under conditions of absolute separation? Can I live every day as an actor in a theater of the absurd? Can Jet?

Could we live six months without water?

YOU THINK YOU KNOW everyone in a small town, but you don’t. Besides, Bienville isn’t that small. Not like Soso or Stringer or Frogmore. When I was a boy, Bienville proper had twenty-four thousand people in it, and outside the city limits the county held another fourteen thousand. That meant a school system big enough to make a certain amount of anonymity possible. If you went to a private school, for example, there were always kids at the public school you didn’t know. I knew most of the boys in town, of course, from playing ball and riding bikes and swim team and a dozen other things. But the girls—especially the girls at the public school—were mostly a mystery to me.