Watermind (37 page)

The phone rang again, and as he lifted the receiver, he automatically pulled out his notepad. The caller was shouting, not making sense. Dréclare waited for calm. Out his other window, the wide concrete weir stretched like a mile-long railroad bridge. The caller kept raving, and as Dréclare drew stars and mazes on his pad, he noticed the way the dull light made the crane trolley look like a toy caboose. When the river flooded, the crane trolley would roll along the rails on top of the weir and lift the wooden pins out. Dréclare had seen that happen twice. The last time was during the flood of 1997.

Seven thousand pins, that was the answer Dréclare gave school children and curiosity seekers. The weir had 350 concrete bays, twenty pins to a bay, thick square timbers of creosoted pine with two-inch gaps between. The gaps let the river seep through year-round to irrigate the
marsh and keep it healthy. When the Mississippi rose too high, he told the tour groups how the crane would lift the pins and allow tons of water to pour through the spillway, thus saving the City of New Orleans. There was a time when people thought that mattered. Robert Dréclare still believed it did.

Dréclare had grown up in St. Charles Parish, and the spillway acreage had been his playground. He knew every hillock and creek, every fishing hole, every patch of blackberries. He'd learned the names of the ducks from his daddy and brothers, on cold winter mornings, lying in wait with firearms. He'd been hunting and canoeing St. Charles Parish since he was six years old, and he wasn't about to abandon it because of a few hurricanes.

The caller on the phone wanted to know how long it would take to open the weir. Dréclare sighed with resignation. “Thirty-six hours to lift all seven thousand pins.”

“But you can do it in three, can't you? I mean, if there's a good reason?” The man sounded young and wildly eager.

Dréclare glanced at the black smoke on the horizon and worried about the burning car. “Call our New Orleans office on Monday. They'll mail you a brochure.” He pronounced the word, “bro-shua.”

A new voice came on the line, hoarse and stern. “Open it now. This is an emergency.”

For an instant, Dréclare forgot to breathe. The flood was coming. The monster. This was the moment he'd trained for. The Mississippi was rising out of control. With visions of crashing brown waves, Dréclare tapped his computer to key up the latest hydrologic data. Where would the monster come from this time? The Ohio, the Missouri, the Arkansas? Rapidly, his finger slid down a line of precip numbers. But there were no heavy rains in the heartland. No forecast of flood. “Gawddam, who is this?” His saliva wetted the phone.

When the caller introduced himself as a corporate CEO, Dréclare growled. “Mista, don't be bothering me today.”

“Who has the authority to make this decision?” the man rasped.

Dréclare didn't like his stiff accent. “You call up the president of the Mississippi River Commission. I'll give you the numba.”

“My people will arrive at your site in twenty minutes,” the man said. “Have your crew standing by.”

“My crew. Shua I will.”

Dréclare hung up the phone and sneered at the cold dregs of his tea. Then he tightened his gear belt, snapped on his park ranger hat, and headed out to his Jeep to see about the burning car. But the phone call nagged him. Wicked hoax. Some people were plain mean. Still he doublechecked the charge on his cell phone, and as he bounced along the potholed track toward the guide levee, he called his boss, Joshua Lima, the New Orleans district engineer.

 

Saturday, March 19

2:02
PM

 

Forty jets of colloid now zoomed downstream in tight formation. Another division had occurred. Another doubling of mass. Deep under the surface, the plumes schooled in a giant revolving pack. And they were gathering speed.

As the flotilla raced after them, Roman searched for CJ. He found her aboard the
Chausseur,
curled in an upper bunk, facing the wall. He needed her help, and from the tense set of her muscles, he knew she was awake. But when he touched her shoulder, she jerked away. He dreaded giving her the news about Max.

They'd discovered Max's jetboat tossed against a riprap wing dam, its hull crushed and broken in two. They'd
found blood, a scrap of red bandana—and a severed finger.

Roman took off his ear loop, sat down on the lower bunk and rested his elbows on his knees. He'd been assailing the Corps of Engineers by phone. Opening the Bonnet Carré would be far more difficult than closing the Port Allen lock. Worse, the surrounding population was much larger. Roman broke into a cold sweat, imagining their panic if word leaked out.

Exhaustion fogged his brain. He needed rest. Five minutes, that was the most he could afford. He kicked off his shoes. In the past hour, he had argued with the EPA, pleaded with the president of the Mississippi River Commission, insulted a parish sheriff, and yelled at the governor. Decisions about the Bonnet Carré entailed more political kinks than the snaking Mississippi.

For one, Lake Pontchartrain was a salty tidal basin, and the local fishermen didn't want it contaminated with fresh water. Its high salinity supported an important shrimp industry that was just recovering from the latest hurricane.

Two, a group of highly vocal environmentalists had adopted the spillway wildlife as their personal friends. They held an annual Bonnet Carré bird count, and some of them knew the spillway deer by name. If they found out the weir would be opened, they might try to barricade the wetland with a chain of human bodies.

Three, there was the problem of resource allocation. The fuel. The manpower. The equipment to lift seven thousand heavy wooden pins. The cost. Always the cost. He glanced up at CJ's bunk and ground his teeth.

“What's in this for you?” Ebbs had asked. “You claim this isn't your problem, but you lay out enough cash to sink a ship. Why?”

To save my company, you fool. Roman didn't say these words. He gave a vague answer about public stewardship because, with so many lawsuits pending, he couldn't afford
to hint that Quimicron might be responsible. The old captain didn't trust him. Screw the
vejancón.

He scrubbed his face with both hands. And again, unable to stop himself, he tallied the wreckage. Fourteen barges, three towboats, seven trawlers, a dredge, and twelve private craft lay beached and gutted along the colloid's route downriver. And eight people had died.
Gracias a Dios,
only eight. Still, the cost would run to millions of US dollars. Roman's attorney kept leaving voicemails urging bankruptcy. “A grace period,” the lawyer called it. “Grace.” A blander word than failure.

The gash on Roman's chin had swelled and reddened. His body felt scummy. He hadn't showered in two days. And he was freezing. He didn't want to think about his hemorrhaging bank accounts, his ransomed assets, his debt load—or the eight lost lives.

He stood and unbuttoned his shirt. As he studied the sweep of CJ's back, he noticed how her bottom swelled like a plump young squash, and how she crossed her ankles like a school girl. As he undid his belt and stripped off his pants, he counted the wrinkles in her grimy khaki shorts. Baby-fine hairs curled along her arm. He reached to touch her. His hand hovered over her warm young flesh.

“Was the skin dark?”

Her question startled him.

“The severed finger. Was it from a Creole man?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, comprehending. Meir must have already told her about finding Max Pottevent's boat.

CJ lay rigid in the bunk. “Max is the one who worked out the music lesson, not me. He made the disks. He told me what order to play them in. It was all his idea. A progression, he said. He—”

“Stop.” Roman tried to stroke her arm, but she slung him off.

“Max saved my life. I was planning to leave him.”

When Roman tried to soothe her, she slapped him away, jumped down from the bunk, and banged out of the cabin, nearly tripping over the bulkhead.

After a moment, Roman walked into the shower and turned on the spigot full blast.

 

Saturday, March 19

3:15
PM

 

CJ felt seasick. The
Chausseur
plowed downriver at top speed, and on the stern platform, she zipped up Roman's windbreaker to fend off the cold. Max's death didn't seem real to her. She couldn't accept that such a strong, warm-blooded young man could be . . . gone.

If only she hadn't sent Max away. If only she'd let Roman fire him, then he would be safe.
I should have stayed out of his life. I should have loved him more. I should have loved him. . . .

Dan Meir found her leaning over the stern rail, vomiting into the river. He stood beside her and rubbed her back till she was finished, then handed her his handkerchief to wipe her mouth. She'd been through a lot, he thought, too much for a young girl. No wonder her stomach got upset. “Honey, would you like a drink of water?”

She shook her head.

They gazed at the media boats trailing behind them. There were fewer now since the compression wave had hit, and they were keeping farther back. But a growing crowd of onlookers followed the regatta by road. Pickups, sedans, and SUVs verged along the tops of both levees.

“You cared a lot about Max. I saw how you looked at each other. I know it's hard,” Dan said.

She turned away to hide her face.

The wind was stiffening. They were rounding a bend. Dan said, “Let's cross to starboard. It'll be less breezy.”

CJ followed with a listless step, and as they sat in the lee of a winch housing, her body seemed to weigh tons. A pungent river smegma burned her nostrils. She pondered the pale full moon peeking between the clouds.

“Look at me.” Dan touched her chin and turned her face toward him. “Honey, this is not your fault. There's only one reason Max is dead. That blamed demon in the river.”

“I let the colloid out of the collar,” she said. “In the canal. I helped him escape.”

Dan continued holding her chin, examining her face. He didn't want to tell her about the forty electronic masses swarming downriver like a pack of marauding sharks. The girl had heard enough bad news. There would be time later to talk about the hydra-headed demon.

“Poor child,” he said. “Didn't you bring along some of Max's zydeco? Let's listen to it, what do you say? Max would like that.”

CJ tilted her head up to keep her eyes from brimming over.

“I'll go find the CD player.” Dan patted her shoulder and got to his feet.

She watched the silver-haired plant manager shuffle off toward the gangway. He was a kind man. She knew he meant well, but his retreating back suddenly wavered and blurred. She lay down on her back and let the hot tears spill down her temples.

To and fro, the yacht rolled—like the motion of Bayou Grosse Tete. She and Max made love that day in his pirogue. Naked, skin to skin, without protection. She touched her belly and counted back the days. That's when it must have happened. A new life. Should she end it? Save it? Right now, all she wanted was oblivion.

Harry, how much of me . . . is you again?

Bayou Grosse Tete. She remembered its tea-colored water steeped in sunbeams, the color of Max's eyes. Until
that day, she knew Max only at work, and just for laughs, she asked him to take her fishing. But once they were alone in his pirogue, neither of them quite knew how to behave.

Shyly, he pointed at things. A snowy white egret, an armadillo, a loggerhead turtle over two feet long. And she asked questions. What does a turtle eat? Where does it sleep? How does it have babies? He answered seriously, drawing his eyebrows together, murmuring in his resonant baritone.

When the bayou opened into a beaver pond, they coasted through clouds of butterflies. Lush green pickerel weed choked the verges, and when Max steered the boat among the waxy yellow blooms, it felt like floating on a carpet of flowers.

She remembered how gravely he showed her the correct way to cast the fly rod. “Keep your thumb on top so your aim don' wander. Now hold the butt steady under your arm. Like this.” He put his hand over hers to demonstrate the grip, and that may have been the first time they touched. Nervously, he described how to thread the line off the reel, while the chemicals in his skin sang arias through her pores.

And later, when he gave her the castanets, he pretended they were a joke, of no value. Yet they were beautifully hand-carved. Two simple wooden shells bound by a leather cord, a
souvenir,
he called them. “I'll teach you how to play,” he offered, sheepishly. Then, looping the cord around his thumb, he made the shells come alive and speak.

Did you make them? she asked. What kind of wood? Why this particular shape? And didn't castanets date back before the time of Christ?

He laughed, his first laugh of the day. “Ceegie, you remind me of a big-eared bat. Gotta hear everything.”

She didn't like being laughed at, and she was getting ready to tell him so, but before she could speak, he wiped the shine from his eyes. “Aw girl, I'm teasin'. You got a
reaching mind. I respect that. I think you're
magie,
you
sav
? You're magic.”

His large hand caressed the back of her neck, and without knowing why, she felt at ease. Gently, his thumb stroked her ear. She eyed his mouth.

“Don't respect me too much,” she whispered.

“Way too much,” he whispered back. And with a motion as natural as falling, they slid together.

Now, aboard the
Chausseur
's rocking deck, she lifted her arm and studied the heavy compass dangling from her wrist. Another gift from Max, the Ranger Joe. It's needle jittered due South. It was pointing toward the colloid. And Max's gentle baritone seemed to fall through the air.