Watermind (10 page)

She slapped the jar down hard on the counter and turned away, failing to notice its sudden fluorescence of frost.

 

Friday, March 11

11:19
AM

 

As CJ's Rover caromed over the curb and barreled into the Roach's flooded parking lot, she silently railed at herself. Idiot! You always do that. Like you're back in school, turning yourself inside out to please asshole teachers. You don't need the approval of those pretentious geeks. She stomped the Rover's brake and skidded through a deep puddle of rainwater. When she ground to a stop in wet gravel, she sat clawing the wheel and stewing.

“Harry, get out of my head,” she whispered.

Thirty minutes later, dressed in coveralls and waders, she and Peter Vaarveen were picking their way through the muck of Devil's Swamp. The rain had stopped, and as the sun warmed the earth, humidity settled on every stem and leaf like a residue of oil. In addition to the coveralls, goggles, and hip boots, Peter insisted that they both wear respirators. Worse, he had duct-taped their rubber gloves to their sleeves for added protection. Apparently, he viewed the great outdoors as a death zone. His voice rattled through the respirator as he delineated their sampling procedures.

CJ knew the drill. She'd done more than enough field-work at MIT, and she hated being lectured by this sarcastic twit. She walked fast through the spongy bog, trying to outdistance him. Peter never got in a hurry over anything. Still, with his long legs and handheld GPS, he had no trouble keeping up.

The area around the pond had been trampled to raw mud by Rory's work crew. Stands of green tupelo and palmetto lay chopped and shredded, stumps uprooted, pepper vines slashed. Even the insects had been sprayed. The long comma-shaped pond lay exposed to full sun.

Sweat trickled under CJ's goggles and ran in her eyes.
In her hot coverall, she barely listened at first to Peter's languid instructions. He explained how his sterile collection bottles had been treated with a preservative to maintain sample integrity, and how each bottle had to be kept sealed until the last possible second. Once a bottle was opened, she watched him rinse it with site liquid, then filled it to the top and reseal it so no air was trapped inside. Air might alter the sample's composition, he explained.

Before leaving Miami, he had calculated exactly how much liquid they would need to run all the necessary tests, and he'd studied aerial photographs to identify a grid of sampling sites, both within the pond and in the surrounding sediments. He'd brought measuring devices, stainless steel tools, a list of coordinates, a handheld GPS, and a marker to label each sample by location. He'd also brought a minicassette recorder to dictate field notes.

Grudgingly, CJ began to pay more attention. She felt chagrinned to recall her own sloppy process. No wonder she'd botched the test results. But then, she'd collected her sample at gunpoint. Though she didn't say so, she acknowledged the value of having experts involved, even jerks like Peter Vaarveen and Queen Bitch Yue. The more accurate their process, the quicker they would learn about the ice—and the sooner she could release the findings. So, like a rank intern, she dogged Peter's steps, carried his tools and followed orders.

“You'll want to check for electromagnetic readings,” she suggested, but Peter didn't answer.

Rory Godchaux's crew was just finishing an earthen dam to shut off the small creek that trickled from the pond's lower end. Around the wreckage of steaming mud and stubble, a plastic silt fence sagged under a weight of collected rain, and its drooping black scallops looked like funeral bunting. A few workers were reinforcing the plastic with straw bales.

Rory Godchaux, as dark and knotty as an old walnut tree, sat in his pickup truck supervising. Because the Miami
people were watching, he'd ordered the crew to wear full regulation hazmat gear. Everyone looked alike in their coveralls and breathers, but CJ recognized Max's familiar square shoulders and slim hips. He was operating a heavy spiked roller, tamping down the soil around the muddy dam. She waved to get his attention, but he was too busy to see her.

The sample collection took all morning. As the temperature mounted, a greasy haze rose from the wet ground, and the sun turned their waterproof gear to steam suits. Humidity fogged CJ's goggles, and itchy sweat trickled down her legs. Her duct-taped rubber gloves felt like Byzantine torture devices. When Peter wasn't looking, she removed her goggles.

As he was packing to leave, she said it again. “You need to check for an EM field.”

A short laugh rattled through his breather. She couldn't see his face. “Reilly, almost everything radiates an EM field. Cars, buildings, power lines. Force fields practically overlap the planet. So leave the thinking to Yue and me, all right?”

“I found an EM field in this pond!”

He snickered. “You probably read the currents around your digital watch.”

She threw her tools down in the mud. “Mid-range frequency. Wavelength about one meter.”

“Yeah, sure.” Peter lifted the rack of bottles and turned to go.

“At least look at your compass. You'll see the needle dancing.”

“I use GPS,” he said without looking back. “Bring along my tool kit. It's cocktail hour.”

“Bastard.” She threw a lump of mud at him, but Peter kept walking.

Fifty yards away, Max was standing in the shade with his respirator draped around his neck, drinking water and talking to Rory Godchaux. CJ ran toward him, lumbering
sideways through the slurry. When she reached him, she ripped off her sweaty face gear and threw it down. The taped gloves trapped her hands and enraged her. “I need your compass. That jerkwad won't believe I found an EM field.” She flailed her arms as if to sling off the gloves.

“Easy. Cool down.” Max held her shoulders to quiet her, and he made the mistake of grinning. Rory shook his head. CJ was famous for her rages.

“You think it's funny? Couple of clowns. Just give me the damned compass,” she said.

Max tugged off his gloves which, CJ observed, were not duct-taped to his coverall. Neither were Rory's. She scowled at the tape binding her own wrists and found new depths of loathing for Peter Vaarveen. When Max unstrapped his Ranger Joe, she snatched it from his hand and studied the needle, which briefly jiggled back and forth, then settled on one clear direction.

“Tha's true
Noth,
missy, just where it's always been.” Rory's chest shook with silent chuckles. “You satisfied the Earth is still round?”

She ignored them both and headed toward the pond.

 

Friday, March 11

1:44
PM

 

Peter had vanished. He must have found someone else to carry his tool kit. CJ buckled the Ranger Joe compass around her wrist, though the heavy band dwarfed her small arm. The needle pointed steadily North. She took her time, scouting around the pond, watching the needle, and whispering, “Where did you go?”

Sheer curtains of heat wavered in the air, refracting the landscape with shining wet mirages. As CJ clambered
over the earthen dam, she paused on top to consider the small creek that seeped away below the pond. Its flow was all but arrested. Only a little black water still oozed down its silty bed.

Max would have called the creek a
bayou
, the old Choctaw word for “stream.” Yet as CJ shaded her eyes and traced its course across the bog, she saw not a single stream but a tangle of crisscrossing trenches, seeps, and brooks. She gazed toward the horizon where the main channel disappeared. Then she began to follow the water.

Sloshing through warrens of dripping fetterbush and wax myrtle, sinking to her thighs in hyacinth-choked quag, she held the compass out in front like a divining rod and watched its needle for a sign. Fluid welled from the ground like percolating coffee, and the bayou's main channel grew wider and deeper. She hung her breather on a limb and ripped off her duct-taped gloves with her teeth. Everything she touched felt wet and slick. Again and again, she had to wipe moisture from her compass dial.

As she waded along the stream bank, frogs and turtles plopped into hidden pools. A green snake undulated across the water, craning its head at her. Distracted, she stepped into a hole, and the water almost overtopped her hip boots. After that, she took more care, feeling for the bottom with her toe before shifting her weight.

Soon a canopy of hawthorn and deciduous holly closed over her head and transformed the creek into a shady cave. Wild mint lined the banks, and climbing ferns draped in frothy green curtains. CJ didn't know the plant names, but she felt a difference. The cool air smelled fresher. Deep in the shade, a few early white crinum blooms scented the breeze.

The creek grew clear, cool, and dark as it gurgled around sunken branches. In the shallows where the water jetted through gravel, a cloud of minnows schooled. She stooped to watch their ceaseless rotation. First one group would take the lead, then the next, each rank moving into the stronger current to feed and breathe, then dropping
behind to draft and rest. Like synchronized swimmers, they shifted and kept place, adjusting to minute changes in the stream flow.

She scooped up a handful of water. The liquid pooled in her palm as clear as glass. It looked pure. She sniffed it and found a clean absence of smell. A sudden intense thirst urged her to taste it. She craved its coolness. She held the water to her lips. Then she remembered the EPA report and flung it away. As water trickled through her fingers, the droplets flashed in a chance ray of sunlight, then struck the stream in a cluster of widening rings.

“You've been here,” she whispered.

Fifty yards down, the green canopy arched open to reveal a punishing blue sky, and beyond lay the dishwater-gray barge canal. Directly across from Quimicron's loading dock, the creek decanted its pure nectar into the canal's gray swill in a plume of dazzling sparkles. CJ waded to the confluence. She could see the creek's clear plume fanning nearly twenty yards out. And the water looked—unreal.

Reflections emanated from deep inside, from
layers.
Astonished, she stooped till her face hovered inches above the surface. The water glinted like a stack of acetate sheets. She could see the layers with her naked eyes—ultra-thin films with iridescent rainbows sliding between.

She plunged both arms into the water, and the layers shattered. Icy rainbows spiraled through her fingers, and the liquid fan seemed to pixelate. Each tiny sparkle grew linear, hard-edged, like a machine-stamped square of quicksilver. For an instant, the glittering fan trembled with agitation around her arms and legs. Then it dashed away and diffused into the gray canal. And CJ's compass danced.

 

Friday, March 11

6:20
PM

 

Carolyn Joan Reilly knew about pure water. When she was just a brainy little school kid, Harry took her along to the Kyoto World Water Forum. Bright-eyed and susceptible to strong impressions, young Carolyn perched in the front row for a week, taking notes.

She knew that water covered eight-tenths of the planet, but it surprised her to hear that less than 3 percent of it was fresh, and most of that was either frozen or locked underground. She'd never imagined fresh water was scarce. Yet humans had fought over water since their earliest history, and human-built reservoirs had shifted enough weight on the Earth's surface to alter its planetary spin.

When Carolyn learned that people dumped two million tons of filth into the Earth's fresh water every day, she immediately got online and transferred her entire personal savings of $3,255 to the World Water Organization. Young Carolyn was not a believer in moderate deeds.

“One child every eight seconds.” That was the phrase that stuck in her mind, that and the graphic photos of babies dying from waterborne illness. Those grainy, black-and-white little faces obsessed her. “Water pollution causes 80 percent of third-world disease,” she wrote in her notebook. When her father's lecture promised salvation through chemistry, she wanted to believe him.

Years later, in Max Pottevent's West Baton Rouge apartment, she paced the narrow path between his bed and the TV, remembering. Hot spring air breathed through the open window, and hot perspiration collected in her hair.

“How does it filter out the impurities? Chemical flocculation? Electrolysis? Maybe it gives the pollutants an electrical charge, then repels them away from its EM field.”

“Tell me again, what is the EM field?” Max liked to watch her theorize. He liked the way her hazel eyes lit up.

“It's both an electric field and a magnetic field. The electric force makes electrons oscillate back and forth, and the magnetic force makes them spin in circles.”

Max laughed gently, trying to picture this craziness. “Sound like cha-cha-chá.”

CJ rapped the top of an oversized stereo speaker. “This minute, the colloid may be dissolving in the canal. We may never know what's in it.”

Max's apartment was barely larger than her motel room, but he'd wedged in a confused assortment of hand-me-down furniture and mismatched audio equipment. A network of wires spread like veins across the ceiling and streamed down the paint-chipped walls to link his various components. His
frottior
, the corrugated rubboard he wore on his chest and rubbed with his fingers to make zydeco rhythm, hung on his wall like tribal armament. He watched CJ twist and pivot and retrace her steps.

“Those dweebs won't listen to me. They aren't finding a damned thing in the lab samples. If it weren't for that dead worker, they'd say I dreamed the whole episode.”

“You'll feel better after you eat.” In the kitchen alcove, Max whistled a soft tune and chopped okra on a small wooden board by the sink. He'd already diced a bowlful of celery, peppers, and tasso smoked pork. In a pot on the stove, garlic and filé powder simmered in olive oil, suffusing the air with a savory tang.