Watermind (4 page)

Devil's Swamp glistened under the white-hot sun, and a vaporous stench saturated the air. A line of workers in goggles and respirators shoveled gelatinous orange sludge into barrels, then banged the lids shut with rubber mallets and loaded them on flatbed trucks. It was slow, heavy work. The toluene spill had spread over five flooded acres.

When Rory Godchaux signaled the mid-afternoon break, everyone dropped their shovels and retreated to the shade, where Rory hosed them down from a tank on his pickup truck. Then they ripped off their gloves and goggles and headed for the water coolers.

First thing, Max tried to call CJ. Squatting beneath a water maple, he listened to a recorded voice say the subscriber he was seeking could not be found. She had turned
off her cell phone. Max chewed his lips. The girl didn't go to any hospital. He should have dragged her there by the scruff of her neck. Crazy child. He keyed her number again.

Overhead, the maple branches rustled faintly in the breeze, while blank cellular static whistled in his right ear. She must not want him to find her. He clicked the phone shut and jammed it in his pocket. He knew she was grieving for her
popa.
Her flighty turns were not always her fault, he wanted to believe that. But sometimes she drove him
gen vètij
—dizzy.

He sighted out across the swamp and located the tupelo gums, beyond which lay the frozen pond. His muscles tightened, remembering. Everything about that ice felt wrong. He should never have given his word not to tell. He glanced at the crew chief's white pickup. Rory was sitting inside, talking on the radio. Max worked his lips in and out. The sound of crickets sizzled through the air like hot popping grease.

Sometimes it was right to break a promise. He had half a mind to go find the crazy child, haul her to the doctor, and get her detoxified. Yeah, and if he tried that, he could already hear Ceegie's answer. He looked at his broad rough hands. What was the good of having such strong hands?

Wind sawed the trees back and forth, and sun glittered across the jellied orange mud. Max swallowed a mouthful of ice water and felt its coolness spread down his gullet. He thought about how everything in the world tended to spread. Chemicals through the mud. Sounds through the air. Smells. Words. Someday, maybe everything in creation would spread through everything else, and there would be no difference between anything.

Right now, for instance, the wind was mixing sounds. He listened to the sawing branches, the cricket noise, the beeps from Rory's radio. Mixed together, they made the whole swamp sound menacing. Max dropped his head. He couldn't go on feeling this way about Ceegie.

“Look sharp. We got a bossman from Miami in town,” Rory announced to the crew.

The lethargic workers eyed him. They lay sprawled in the grassy shade, slurping ice water from plastic cups. “Look sharp, ha ha. We do that.”

Rory spat tobacco juice into the grass at his feet. “Clock's tickin',
mes amis.
Back to work. And suit up good, case we get inspected.”

With one last look at the tupelo gums, Max drew on his gloves.

 

Wednesday, March 9

4:25
PM

 

“Water.” CJ spoke aloud in the empty Quimicron lab.

Gene Becnel cocked his ear. Gene had long since alerted his security staff and placed a respectful call to the plant manager's office. Two guards stood outside the lab door, waiting for Gene's order to arrest the intruder, but Gene couldn't give it. He patted sweat from his cheeks and covertly scratched the poison-ivy rash on his forearm. Mr. Dan Meir, the plant manager, leaned on the back of Gene's chair, watching the screen over his shoulder. Mr. Meir said hold off, see what she's up to. Worse, Mr. Meir had brought another man, a stranger from the Miami office. Gene didn't like people coming into his control room, breathing his air. At least Mr. Meir was a bonafide ex-US Marine. The Miami stranger looked foreign.

On the surveillance monitor, the female intruder was running one of her tests again. Gene didn't like the way she kept talking aloud, as if somebody was with her, someone his cameras couldn't see.

“Bizarre,” CJ said, completely unaware that she had an
audience. She'd run all the quick tests twice, but they only confirmed what her eyes and nose told her. The sample she'd taken from the poisonous effluvium of Devil's Swamp was pure water, pure enough to drink.

She rested her chin in her hand and stared at the spectrophotometer display. Her analyte of H
₂
O contained nothing more than a trace of skin particles, probably her own, and mud, probably from inside her boot, plus a fleck of waterproofing material from her coverall pocket. “Okay, Harry, what next?”

Questions swirled in her head. What kind of chemical reaction could form ice in hot weather? And purify toxic slops into clean water? And generate a magnetic field that pulsed in time to zydeco? Why had she fallen through the ice but not Max? And when the ice formed, what happened to all the heat?

She sat in one position, doing and saying nothing, for long enough to make Gene Becnel's thigh twitch. He wanted to stand up and stretch. He wanted to gulp another Kit Kat bar. He wanted the big brass to get the hell out of his booth and let him do his job.

Gene already knew who she was—a college girl, probably a flag-burner, she came from up
North
—a word that, in Gene's lexicon, rhymed with
Goth
. His state-of-the-art Texas Instruments security system, one of the great joys of his life, had already read the Radio Frequency ID tag in her badge. The RFID contained her employee number, which linked to her personnel file in the central server. Carolyn Joan Reilly, female, twenty-two, short-term grunt on Rory Godchaux's cleanup gang. Perfect cover for a terrorist.

“That's weird.”

Her agitated voice tripped Gene's internal alarms. Even Mr. Meir bent closer to watch. Mr. Meir had a good sense about people. Gene acknowledged that much.

The female suspect poured some of the clear liquid into her cupped hand and let out a giggle. Gene used his
camera zoom so they could see the little glassy blob rolling around her palm like a bead of mercury. “Amazing surface tension,” she said. When she poked it with her fingernail, it glued itself to her finger.

She played with it for a while, shaking and blowing at it, making it wobble on her fingertip like a ball of clear Jell-O. With her free hand, she pecked a few notes into her laptop. But when she used the beaker's rim to scrape the little glob off, it smeared all over her finger. A second later, she started shaking her hand really hard and squealing, “Ow, ow, ow!” She rushed to the sink and held her fingers under the gushing tap. Then she dried her hand on a paper towel and examined her skin.

Gene couldn't see anything wrong with her hand. Her finger wasn't even red. After that, she drifted off into lala land, as Gene would later tell his mother. She peered down the sink drain for ten solid minutes.

When she started gathering her things to leave, Gene swiveled in his chair to face the higher-ups. “Want us to apprehend her, Mr. Meir?”

Dan Meir rolled an unlit cigar around in his mouth. He was a short, compact gray-headed man of sixty-two with kind green eyes and a permanent squint from decades in the sun. He wore a military buzz cut that he religiously trimmed and sprayed each morning so it glittered like tin foil. Everybody liked Dan Meir, even Gene, who was hard to please.

Meir spoke to the Miami stranger. “Do you think she's dangerous?”

The brown-skinned foreigner glanced up from something he was reading on his Palm. He needed a haircut, Gene thought. His hair hung down over his collar.

“I know who she is,” the foreigner said. Sure enough, he had an un-American accent. “Let her go, but keep tabs on her. Meir, we're due at a meeting.”

After they left, Gene chomped a savage bite of chocolate. “Stand down. Let her pass,” he commanded his men
over the radio. Yankee leftist. Sure, let her go. “Moselle, hang back and follow, but don't let her see you. Report to me every five minutes.”

“Roger that,” said Ron Moselle.

 

Wednesday, March 9

4:49
PM

 

CJ didn't see the red Toyota pickup follow her out of the Quimicron parking lot. One idea fixed her attention as she drove over the ring levee and waved good-bye to Johnny Poydras at the gate: she had to get a chunk of that ice. After darting into the traffic on Highway 61, she raced the short distance to the Devil's Swamp access road and veered into its rutted lane, trying again to imagine what chemical interactions could have formed that astonishing substance.

Mentally she ticked off its properties: powerful surface tension; rapid phase shift from solid to liquid; a magnetic field that responded to sound; possibly a flashing light; and it could
purify water.

Questions rilled through her mind. Could the chemical-freezing reaction have fused all the pond's impurities, leaving behind the pristine meltwater that saturated her clothing and hair? And what could explain its strong surface tension? Or the peculiar prickling sensation in her finger, as if the substance had suddenly dropped sub zero? The way her finger still tingled, she wasn't positive she'd washed it all off.

She studied her fingertip. The skin appeared smooth and healthy—though she'd chewed the nail to the quick. The ice's riddle fascinated her. All her instruments showed the substance was chemically pure H
₂
O. Was there something her instruments couldn't see?

“Pure water,” she chirped, bouncing in the driver's seat. If she could figure how the freezing-purifying process worked—well, the potential applications made her giddy. As Harry often said, the greatest discoveries came by accident.

A hundred yards in, she pulled off the muddy road into a patch of willow, shut off her engine, and climbed out. She didn't see Ron Moselle watching through the brush as she stripped down to her underwear and stepped into her coverall. She tugged on the hip boots, still damp with what she now knew was clean, drinkable water. Down the road, the mainline levee rose like a linear green mountain, walling off the riverside wasteland called the
batture.
The Devil's Swamp access road wound over the top of the levee like a brown water snake.

She walked along the road to the patch of bare mud where the cleanup crew usually parked. But all their cars were gone. Only one green van waited by the fence gate. She checked her watch. Still over an hour before quitting time. So where was the crew? As she walked closer, a Quimicron security guard stepped out of the van to meet her. He wore a side-arm, and he was drinking 7UP.

“I work on the crew,” she said, showing her badge. “Where is everybody?”

“Swamp closed, sweetheart. You got the rest of this week off.”

“But I was here this morning. What happened?”

“Take it easy, honey. They don' tell me nothing. Now head on home and enjoy you' vacation. Chief be callin' you next week.”

They found the ice, she thought. And they're concealing it. She hurried back to her car, shoved her gearshift into reverse and roared away, swerving around a red Toyota pickup, and pounding the steering wheel with her fist. “Dammit! They're going to steal my ice!”

 

Wednesday, March 9

10:40
PM

 

CJ shut down her laptop and rubbed her aching temples. All evening, she'd been holed up in her motel room, reading about Devil's Swamp. One thing Harry had drilled into her: When in doubt, gather information—all kinds, through every channel, using every tool available. CJ's online research had turned up plenty.

Before 1950, Devil's Swamp had been a fertile marshy woodland centering around a hamlet called Alsen. Settled by freed slaves, the families had peacefully farmed their land for a hundred years—until 1964. That was the year local officials built the first hazardous waste dump in the swamp. By 1970, against the protests of its mostly poor, mostly black residents, the lush wooded marsh held over a hundred toxic lagoons, incinerators, and landfills, and Alsen faded to a ghost town. At latest count, thousands of tons of unnamed waste simmered in the swamp's two hundred trackless acres.

In 1986, the EPA found PCBs ranging up to 13,200 micrograms per kilogram in its waterlogged soil. They also found arsenic, lead, mercury, volatile organics—and the first of the mutated frogs. So they issued fishing advisories and posted warning signs, and environmental organizations filed lawsuits. The defendant list read like a government advisory board of Big Oil, Big Agriculture, and Big Biotech. In 2004, Devil's Swamp was proposed for the Superfund National Priority List.

Bleary-eyed, CJ wandered out to her concrete balcony and leaned on the rail. The breeze had grown sharp and chilly. “I hate corporations,” she muttered. Then a premenstrual cramp made her clench her ab muscles. On the western horizon, a fat half-moon hovered. Gibbous, she thought, like her belly.

Max waited below in the parking lot, gazing up at her like a swarthy Romeo. She watched him pace along the line of muddy pickups and SUVs, grateful that he had come at her call—again, and even more grateful that he'd forgiven her—again.

Max smiled and waved. Then he stalked to the dark end of the building, pressed against the cinderblock wall, and peered around the corner. The stranger was still there, sitting in his red Toyota truck, talking on his cell phone. He'd parked in the shadow of the Dumpster, not a favorable sign. Max hoped he was waiting for something innocent like a drug buy, something that didn't require his involvement. Max had never liked the Ascension Motel. With an uneasy foreboding, he rolled down the sleeves of his work shirt and buttoned his cuffs. The night was growing cooler. He walked back toward the front of the building.