Watermind (15 page)

CJ set the soda down. “Do you have a boat to rent or not?”

He ran a splotchy tongue over his teeth. “What it is, is the juxy-position. Water, mud, and heat. Too much of them three items juxy-posed together, they grow things unnatural. Like that baby they found.”

“Baby?” She did not want to hear this story. “Two-headed, I'm sure.”

“Don' be smart, missy. I seen the baby myself. Man-child with a extra leg growin' outta its hip. Little bald stump. Toenails all crowded together like kernels on a corncob. Born right there on the edge of Devil Swamp.”

CJ felt sweat trickle down her neck. The old man's cloudy eyes gave no hint of teasing. She'd seen the blue-collar houses backing up to the levee behind the swamp, and she'd read about the birth defects. God knew what egregious poisons had accumulated in the soils—and leached into the water—and diffused into the air. She tried to shake off her uneasiness by assuring herself that Beauregard Chifferee was the most accomplished liar she'd ever met.

“So what about that boat?”

Thunder cracked overhead, and she jumped in her chair. Punch grinned.

A week's rental on the Velocity Viper, including a trailer and hitch, cost twice what she'd expected. The old man proved to be a crafty negotiator. But cost wasn't an issue to CJ. Harry had left her with deep pockets.

Punch called the Viper his “drugstore special.” For a small boat, the Viper had plenty of cargo space, plus unusual outfitting—behemoth twin engines and four oversized fuel tanks. There was also a beefed-up muffler system Punch had personally designed for hushed moonlight journeys.

He didn't ask a single question as he helped her load the
equipment she'd “borrowed” from Rory Godchaux's supply van, a chemistry field kit, goggles, gloves, boots, three rolls of duct tape, a freshly laundered coverall, and some tools. She'd also packed her field finder, electric current sensor, flashlight, PowerBars and a gallon of Coca-Cola. Punch provisioned her with two extra twenty-gallon cans of boat fuel—which she had to pay for in advance.

Once she cast off from Punch's dock, she cut a few turns across the brown inlet, getting the feel of the Viper's controls. The overhead clouds changed from pewter to iron, and a few heavy raindrops fluttered on the wind. She kept circling back to Roman's words: “Sorry, I do not believe in swamp creatures.”

That belittling tone. Nothing infuriated her more than sarcasm. It had been Harry's sharpest weapon.

“Darling, your sentiment would be charming in a Peter Rabbit story. . . . No need to apologize for your B+ in calculus. You're a B+ sort of person, dear, like your mother.”

CJ opened the throttle and roared across the no-wake zone, churning up eddies of mud. As her bow upended, spray pelted the windshield, and she leaned out to let the wind blow in her face. Why did only the worst moments stick with her? There were many times when Harry had been kind. He'd chosen the best schools for her, the best books. He'd taken her to hear the Boston symphony every month of the season. Why couldn't she remember their long talks about music and art—and chemistry, always that—the fundamental language of the universe.

The problem was, she looked too much like her mother. The color of her hair. The shape of her nose. Even her voice reminded Harry of the other Carolyn Joan. He told her so once, after a particularly long and fiery discussion that left them both out of temper. He said he loathed the sound of her voice.

As she left the inlet and entered the terra-cotta river, the rain came. It plastered her hair and rilled down her face. In seconds, her clothes were drenched. She had to swerve around a fishing skiff. Upstream, two towboats were passing
each other, filling the river with their twenty-barge tows, each barge weighing over a thousand tons. And just across from the downtown waterfront, a colossal Singapore freighter was making a wide turn into the Intracoastal Waterway at Port Allen.

The rain fell in curtains, and as CJ watched for an opening in the heavy traffic, her throat ached with words she couldn't express. Harry, you weren't fair. Why did you leave me?

She steered through the narrow slot between the towboats, bucking through the wake and daring the rain, ignoring the furious yells from the deckhands. At that moment, more than anything, she needed speed.

 

Saturday, March 12

8:27
PM

 

Max sat on his front porch, tipped back in a wooden chair with his bare feet on the rail, fingering an old portable Casio keyboard that lay across his lap. The rain was already tapering off, but a remnant of water still dripped off his roof and made a liquid bead curtain around the porch. One block away, the mighty river hummed background bass, accompanied by cymbals of traffic on Interstate 10. Max hadn't bothered to plug in his amp, so the melody from his keyboard existed only in his mind. But that was enough for Max.

The night was good. He felt the sweaty, exalted relief of just having finished a song. The tune had incubated for months in his mind, drifting in and out of focus, growing humps and appendages, verses out of meter, beats out of rhyme, a mixed-up jumble of nonsense. Still, the lyrics kept collecting in his notebook, circling around an idea without a name. And finally, tonight, the song had emerged
whole and alive on his page, as if placed there as a gift. He tipped back in his chair and smiled at God.

Above the low-pitched tin roofs of his West Baton Rouge neighborhood, a fat half-moon glimmered through clouds. Its rays barely penetrated the urban nimbus of street lamps. Crickets cheeped in the wet grass, and one whippoorwill cooed its lilting query, “Come, come to me?”

Max played the whippoorwill call on his silent keyboard, then improvised an answering riff. He swallowed beer from a sweating brown bottle, set it down beside his chair and played his new song again, voicelessly whispering his lyrics to the angels. This night was good, but the day had not been.

A barge sank, and no one knew why. Lots of people were mad, but Max was tired of worrying about it, tired through and through. Soon, he would put on his good shirt, drive across the river and play three hours of pop tunes for a high school dance. He would play keyboard tonight, not his
frottior,
and pop music bored him. But his ex-wife Sonia had left a brown envelope at his door, stuffed full of Marie's doctor bills.

He hadn't told Ceegie about his daughter, Marie. Although he believed in speaking the truth, he suspected his family obligations might drive Ceegie away. He glanced around the empty old porch. Drive her away?

Wind shifted across the rooftops and blew the clouds West, and for an instant, the river sang louder. The gusting currents distorted all sound. Max took another sip of beer, and the alcohol esters seeped through his flesh. He wondered what Ceegie was doing tonight. One thing he knew—she wasn't answering her phone.

He tipped back in his chair. The moon's half disk glowed through a forest of pipes and cooling towers in the nearby industrial park, and he ground his teeth against the bottle's glass neck. When the whippoorwill called again, its voice echoed through shifting airy distortions. “Come, come to me?”

 

Sunday, March 13

6:30
AM

 

Twenty minutes before sunrise, the canal water stirred with a ceaseless restive sloshing. Its waves left a dark waterline along tree trunks, concrete piers, and barge hulls. Higher it rose with each subtle ebb and flow, higher up the piers and hulls, higher up the rocks, oscillating with heat, wind, and friction, building up layer upon wet glistening layer of surface cohesion, till it succumbed at last to the pull of gravity and collapsed under its own weight.

CJ didn't see it. She was driving her rented Viper upriver from Baton Rouge. She'd intended to start much earlier, but last night, everything went wrong. First, she couldn't find a place to moor the boat. She had to park the trailer at a strip mall. Next, she drove all over town looking for a satellite phone.

Finally, she located a pawnshop near Interstate 10 that carried some of the things she needed. Not all the merchandise looked new. Some of it may have been stolen. In any case, she found a GPS with electronic compassing, a more sophisticated magnetic field finder, a radio frequency spectrum analyzer, a canteen—she bought everything that looked useful.

By the time she'd finished shopping, fatigue forced her back to the Roach to crash. Too bad, she slept through the night, and this morning, there was already too much light and activity on the water to pass unnoticed. Dodging north of the barge canal entrance, she edged along the lush green shore of Devil's Swamp.

Nothing was natural about this part of the lower Mississippi. For hundreds of miles on either side of the river, manmade earthen levees stretched longer and taller than the Great Wall of China. Engineers first started the twin
berms in the early 1700s, but after the infamous flood of 1927, the levees evolved into fortresses.

As the nation's ever-expanding pavements and hardscape constantly increased the volume of drainage runoff, the floods came swifter, higher and more often. And the engineers raised the walls repeatedly. Now the mainline levees towered over forty feet high, like a pair of grassy mountain ridges. Riprap and concrete reinforced them on the river side, and stone dikes winged out at intervals to keep the main current channelized.

But no levee protected Devil's Swamp. It lay exposed in the
batture,
the miry borderland between river and levee, because the engineers had not judged Devil's Swamp worth saving. That fact made it easier for CJ to conceal her landing.

Instead of docking at a treeless riprap wall, her Viper nosed in among overhanging willows and grounded in mud beneath a canopy of green branches. After tying up to a tree trunk, she tugged on her coverall and hip boots, then hiked through the swamp to a high solid knoll and settled in to spy on the activities in the canal.

She lay flat in the grass and studied the ravaged canal banks with her binoculars. The eroded places gleamed like melted glass. Four times she paged Max before he returned her call. Rory had him hustling with a repair crew, shoring up another undermined area near the Quimicron dock. He called her on his cell phone from the men's port-a-let.

“A barge sank yesterday afternoon,” he whispered. “Merton, he say the canal stink like sulfur around that barge. He say the water eat through the hull.”

“Impossible.” CJ batted away mosquitoes and remembered the ruined dive-suit she'd had to pay for with her credit card. “The canal's not acidic enough to dissolve steel.”

“I saw the hull,” Max said. “Eaten up with little holes. And some of the cargo leak out. It just
disparét.
Divers look all over to find it, but no trace left.”

CJ's throat tightened. “What kind of cargo was it?”

“What they call ‘moly',” he answered. “Merton say it's the
loa
spirits. They outraged by how bad we disturb the Earth.”

She frowned. “You don't believe that voodoo stuff.”

“Voudon,”
he said. “Gotta go,
lam.
I see you later.”

CJ turned off her phone, rolled on her back and stared at the brightening sky. She thought about the stolen barge cargo. Was the colloid
feeding
?

The clear dry air chapped her lips, and she bit off loose flecks of skin. Moly. Molybdenum. She tried to remember what she knew about this element. Silvery-white, tough as nails, a transition metal used as a catalyst in petroleum refining. It was used for something else, too. Filaments. Ultrafine microscopic wires used in electronic devices.

Her thoughts kept circling the colloid's response to sound. Sound traveled faster underwater, but what
was
sound? Compression waves. Crests and troughs of high and low pressure.

An owl flapped its wings and startled her. When it swooped down from a nearby tree, a small rodent screamed a death cry, and CJ jumped. Then she wrinkled her nose and tried to scratch an itch through her stiff coverall. She'd been working on another theory. Something about field attraction.

She knew an EM field could develop a kind of cohesion or coherence—like the surface tension on a water droplet. And its force could move charged particles. Could that be how the colloid maneuvered? Maybe, through alternating waves of attraction and repulsion, the EM field steered its charged particles through the water like a flock of birds. But what was controlling the EM field? A mix of curiosity and fear turned CJ's skin to gooseflesh.

 

Sunday, March 13

6:42
AM

 

While CJ lay in the swamp grass, pondering riddles and picking at mosquito bites, Roman Sacony paced in the fifth-floor conference room of Building No. 2. The recycled office air smelled of bodily exhalations and cleaning fluid. None of the plate-glass windows would open. Elaine Guidry, Meir's buxom blond assistant, sat watching him while he speed-read her memo. But the typewritten words filtered through to his brain more slowly than usual. He was still thinking about the Gulf-Pac exec who'd just slammed out of the room.

Elaine had written the memo at his request to remind the plant's employees of their nondisclosure agreements and the penalties for leaked information. Elaine's wording was too polite, and he feared it might not have the intended effect, but he had no leisure to edit. “Cut the first sentence, and send it,” he said.

Elaine batted her mascara-rimmed eyelashes. Most men paid her more attention. She wore her coral-pink cashmere sweater belted tight at the waist, and last night she'd touched up her highlights. But despite the rumors she'd heard about her lascivious CEO, Roman Sacony was all business. She gathered her notes and bustled out.

A line of people waited to see him, and a stack of message slips indicated the number of calls the switchboard had fielded. He wasn't ready to deal with voicemail yet, but he flipped through the handwritten messages. Insurance people. Lawyers. Worse, Rick Jarmond had faxed another Corps of Engineers form.