by M M Buckner
Seep
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.
Stew
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.
She flopped on his bed and kicked at the loose covers. The room felt muggy and close—why couldn’t Max install an air conditioner? Her lower back burned with dull pain. She wanted her damn period to start.
“Madam Yue went ecstatic over a few silly nanoparticles,” she said, thinking of the sample. “Half-organic, half-synthetic. She thought she’d found a new branch in evolution. But I looked them up on the Net, and they’re just a manmade chemotherapy virus that targets a certain kind of tumor. They probably rotted out of the gut of some cancer patient who suicided in the river.”
Max winced at the image. CJ was twitching, kicking her heels into the mattress. He tried to distract her. “Girl, help me cook this dinner. Ol’ Max teach you a skill. You ever use this tool before?” He held a can opener.
She got up and absentmindedly ran her fin
ger along the cans of tomatoes and sweet corn he’d arranged on the counter. “What if the colloid dissipates, and we never find it again? It can purify water, Max. If we could mass produce that process, think what it could mean.”
Max opened the can of tomatoes. “This stew taste better with fresh vegetables, but the season’s too early.”
“We have to look for it.” She reached across the counter and squeezed his arm. “Now, Max. Tonight. We have to borrow your uncle’s canoe.”
She peered up at him with all that crazy eager shine in her eyes, that shine he could never resist. She witched him, that’s the excuse Max wanted. But he knew it wasn’t true. Everything he did for her, he did with open eyes. The swamp was dangerous, and she was likely to be rash. He knew better than to yield, but when she said his name that way and beguiled him with those eyes, he suffered.
A few weeks ago, he had taken her fishing in Bayou Grosse Tete using his Uncle Nebulon’s pirogue. That was a good day, just the two of them off away from other people. He taught her to bait the hook and watch the current. As a courting gift, he gave her a pair of castanets. She loved them, she said. He showed her how to hold the wooded shells in her palm, hook the cord over her thumb, and clap a zydeco rhythm. They laughed a lot that day, and he never once got the feeling she was sizing him up.
“Please help me find it, Max. I need you.”
He dumped the tomatoes into the pot, and the oil spattered. Before he could answer, she said, “I rented a dive suit.”
He dropped his spoon. “You rented what?”
“I can’t find the EM field anymore. I think it may be lying on the bottom of the canal.”
Max turned off the stove and faced her. “You not going in that evil water again.”
She set her mouth in the way he’d come to recognize, and he groaned softly. “Lamie, it kill once. It’ll kill a second time, I promise you.”
For an instant, her hazel eyes went dark. She remembered the pond, the panicked suffocation, the fear that moved up her spine like a cold hand. But next, she saw only the pixelating fan of rainbows. Those layers. She had to know what made them. Her face flushed with adrenaline. “Are you saying I have to do this alone?”
Dip
Friday, March 11
10:09 PM
The canoe paddle dipped in a steady plash and trickle as Max eased his uncle’s pirogue through the barge canal. Fog blanketed the water, and Quimicron’s mercury floodlights cast a violet sheen through the mist. After moonset, the night had turned damp and chilly. CJ couldn’t get used to how fast the weather changed in Louisiana.
Max sat in the stern, powering them forward with smooth strong jay strokes, while she wrestled into her scuba gear.
“If you see any sign of ice—” he said.
“I promise, Max, I’ll surface immediately.”
“Immediately,” he repeated, giving her a stern look, though she couldn’t see him in the dark.
She’d rented the commercial drysuit from a mom-and-pop outfit in Port Allen. When they asked for her scuba certification card, she’d flashed her Quimicron badge, spun a quick tale about a rush project, and promised to fax her credentials later. It was her Quimicron badge that convinced the owners. The hope of getting more work from one of the largest corporations in the parish made them willing to bend the rules.
HAZMAT blazed in orange letters across the dingy black drysuit. Made of vulcanized rubber and nylon layered with chemical-resistant coatings, the suit crackled and squeaked as she tugged it on. Compared to its bulky squeeze, her coverall had been a light summer dress.
The suit’s baggy legs ended in watertight drysocks, reminding her of the awful bunny feet in her childhood pajamas. She despised the clammy drysocks, almost as much as she hated the locking ring system that connected her gloves to her sleeves. The drysuit felt like a straightjacket. She squeezed into the neck yoke that would connect her integrated dryhood and breathing mask. Once locked into the suit, no part of her skin would be left exposed. That offered some comfort.
Owls cooed as she yanked the shoulder zipper closed, then examined the dryhood, pretending a confidence she wished was real. The guy at Port Allen had showed her how to rig the complicated regulator, and CJ had a quick memory, but it was hard to do everything in the dark. A cold rain had been spitting off and on, pinging their boat with a sharp pecking sound. When she lifted the air tank, it slipped and crashed against the bottom of the pirogue.
Max whispered, “Go easy, child.”
“Don’t call me child.” She was afraid to tell him she’d never dived before. The closest she’d come was snorkeling in the Bahamas. “It’s only forty-five feet deep,” she said in a fake casual tone.
She’d already raked the Internet for every available fact about the barge canal. She knew the Corps of Engineers maintained its depth at forty-five feet to accommodate ocean-going freighters. And according to an online scuba manual, she could stay at that depth for up to eighty minutes—if her air lasted. CJ had no idea how long a tank of air would last. Her pressure gauge read three thousand pounds per square inch. Three thousand sounded like a lot.
Always keep breathing, the scuba Web site cautioned, and ascend slowly to avoid decompression sickness. The site offered pages of verbiage about the importance of training and certification, but CJ assumed that was propaganda. After all, people did this for fun.
Cool fog seeped around her ears and made her shiver. R-r-r-r-rip! Max yanked a length of duct tape from the roll. In the distance, a night bird screeched, and nearby, something large plopped into the water. CJ could hear it swimming. She assured herself it was a bullfrog.
Max taped the field finder to her left forearm, wrapping the duct tape around and around. To her thigh, he affixed the submersible electric current sensor. She’d rented the instrument to look for electricity trickling through the water. If she found it, that would explain the EM field. Then she’d simply have to track down the source, maybe a faulty connection at one of the nearby factories, loose cable, ungrounded generator, something like that.
Max clicked her submersible flashlight to check the battery. “Ceegie . . .”
She kissed him. “You’re too good to me.”
When she drew away, he touched her cheek, and on impulse, she fell toward him again. They kissed longer, and as their salivas merged, his musky scent brought a flush to her skin. He seemed to be radiating waves of attraction like a hot dark lodestone. Without conscious will, their bodies aligned. As she pressed her mouth against the soft thudding artery in his neck, her air tank smacked the gunwale.
He kissed her ear and laughed. “You want to make love in this pirogue?”
Her hazel eyes glittered. “We did it before.”
He embraced her, but the clumsy tank and scuba gear got in their way. They grappled and bumped awkwardly. “Let’s go back to my room,” he whispered.
His words broke the spell, and she drew away. “Later. After we’re done.”
Where the unnamed creek drained into the canal, Max set their anchor, and CJ fumbled with her flashlight. Fog gathered around them. She sprinkled Listerine over the latex mouthpiece inside the breathing mask. It looked chewed and dented by a hundred sets of teeth. With a grimace, she tugged on the hood and stuck the nasty thing in her mouth. It tasted like an old tire. Max helped her seal the neck yoke.
She found herself panting. The mask obscured her vision, and the circus-clown flippers tripped her up when she tried to move in the pirogue. The tank felt like an anvil strapped to her back. Finally, she swung her flippered feet over the gunwale, sucked a deep breath through the mouthpiece and mentally reviewed the rental guy’s instructions. Had she attached everything properly? Was the air turned on? She lashed her sample jar with a lanyard around her wrist, then rolled over the gunwale and fell in.
Burble
Friday, March 11
11:37 PM
Swirling darkness. A roar of bubbles. The cold penetrated her suit.
Her flashlight splint
ered through turbid green murk, and the mask narrowed her view like side-blinders. Filaments of algae floated in front of her, and through the watery roof above, Quimicron’s floodlights wavered like agitated ghosts. She was sinking.
Where was her depth gauge? Her ears began to ache. She batted through the water searching for the long snaking hose that held her console of gauges, but she couldn’t find them.
Deeper darkness. She felt tipsy, disoriented. When she kicked her ill-fitting flippers, her left calf cramped, and she had to stop. She kept sinking.
Idiot, don’t panic. You can do this.
At last, she remembered the trick of clearing her ears. She squeezed her nose through the latex mask and tried to sneeze. Abruptly the air trapped in her ear canals evacuated with a painful, screeching hiss. Above, the wavering floodlights faded to black.
Weights. The rental guy had stuffed her pockets with lead weights to help her descend. The guy had showed her the quick-release tabs in case she needed to dump the weights. And there was a vest to inflate, to compensate for the weights. The buoyancy compensator, that’s right, the BC. She found the BC pull cord and yanked hard. But instead of inflating, the BC released a fountain of air bubbles, and she sank even faster.
A low raspy wail echoed inside her mask, and she realized it was her own shriek muffled by the mouthpiece. She couldn’t remember what to do. Then Harry’s snide laugh resounded in her memory. “You overestimate your intelligence, Carolyn, as your mother did.”
“No,” she said aloud, biting the mouthpiece. Slowly and deliberately, she reached behind her hood and located the hoses connected to her tank regulator. As she continued to fall steadily into the murk, her glove slid along the left hose and followed it to the end, where the console of gauges dangled. Illuminated by her flashlight, the depth gauge read thirty-four feet. Not so deep. Relax.
