“Josh Germany? In what capacity?”
Paul raises his eyebrows like, Come on, man. “Him and Jet.”
The rush of adrenaline that flushes through me after these words makes it hard to hold my composure. “You’re kidding, right? The kid’s like, what, twenty-five?”
“Exactly.”
To mask my gut reaction, I look down the tent at Josh Germany. He’s a good-looking guy, blond and fit, but still a boy—not remotely the kind of man that interests Jet. Witness myself, exhibit A. “Dude, there’s no way. What made you ask that?”
Paul doesn’t answer. His eyes are fixed upon his wife.
Wyatt Cash leans over Germany’s shoulder and says something brief, and Jet laughs with obvious enjoyment. “I’d suspect Wyatt before that kid,” I add.
“No way,” says Paul. “It’s a rule.”
“A rule?”
“Poker Club rule. Other members’ women are off-limits. Period.”
“You’re not an official member, are you?”
Paul considers this. “That’s true. But Wyatt knows how bad I’d fuck him up if he crossed that line. The kid, on the other hand, may not realize the risk.”
I need an infusion of morphine. At no time in the three months since I’ve been sleeping with Jet has Paul even hinted at suspicion of infidelity—not to her or to me. In relative terms, this is an earthquake. Then it hits me: Is this why she squeezed my wrist and asked for a meeting at three o’clock?
“For real,” Paul says. “If somebody killed Buck, who do you think it was?”
Thankful for the 180-degree turn, I decide to throw out some bait. “Some people have suggested the Poker Club killed him.”
Paul’s face tells me he doesn’t believe this. “Doesn’t make sense, Goose. Murder creates problems. They’d have bought Buck off, not killed him.”
He’s right. Bribery would be the logical move. And maybe they tried that. “There’s one problem with that theory.”
“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.