The Devil's Punchbowl

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Midnight in the garden of the dead.

A silver-white moon hangs high over the mirror-black river and the tired levee, shedding cold light on the Louisiana delta stretching off toward Texas. I stand among the luminous stones on the Mississippi side, shivering like the only living man for miles. At my feet lies a stark slab of granite, and under that stone lies the body of my wife. The monument at its head reads:

I haven’t sneaked into the cemetery at midnight to visit my wife’s grave. I’ve come at the urgent request of a friend. But I didn’t come here for the sake of friendship. I came out of guilt. And fear.

The man I’m waiting for is forty-five years old, yet in my mind he will always be nine. That’s when our friendship peaked, during the Apollo 11 moon landing. But you don’t often make friends like those you make as a boy, so the debt is a long one. My guilt is the kind you feel when someone slips away and you don’t do enough to maintain the tie, all the more painful because over the years Tim Jes sup managed to get himself into quite a bit of trouble, and after the first eight or nine times, I wasn’t there to get him out of it.

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