by M M Buckner
The empty sample jar floated above her arm on its lanyard, exercising a gentle upward tug. She felt along the front of her suit for the release tabs to dump her weights, and her hands closed on a pair of large cylindrical handles. “Yank ’em hard,” the guy had told her. Okay.
But not yet. Not until she found the colloid and took a better sample. She directed her flashlight beam onto the field finder. Oh yes. The EM field was pulsing. She bent to read the sensor taped to her thigh. The sensor showed weak electrical current zipping through the cold water.
“I was right,” she gurgled aloud through the mouthpiece. “You’re down here on the bottom.”
As she watched the sensor, the electric current alternated rhythmically to and fro, as steady as surf. Then a strange sensation enveloped her—a premonition—so slight at first that she didn’t understand what caused it. But as she continued to fall, its origin became obvious. The water below was glowing.
She sank into a region of a million tiny flashes. Each infinitesimal wink flared almost too swiftly for her eye to register, but together they gave the water a faint milky light. Deeper still, the flashes came thicker and faster, and soon she was surrounded by luminous agitation, like snowy static on a TV screen. Her current sensor went wild, and she laughed. “You!”
The display made her forget how cold the beautiful liquid was growing. She felt like an astronomer sighting a new galaxy. It was just at that moment that her flippers touched down on the bottom and her tank struck a rock.
Metal on stone, the loud clang echoed through the water, and at once, the flickers vanished. As she plunged into the silty bottom, her flashlight showed nothing but muddy clouds stirring up from the canal bed. She came to rest sprawled on her side, and she held still, breathing in shallow pants, hoping the flickers would return. When she switched off her flashlight, chilling darkness closed in.
Minutes passed. She began to shudder with cold. The thought of checking her air gauge weighed on her mind, but she didn’t dare turn on her light and frighten away the flickers.
Frighten them? CJ, you’re an idiot. They don’t have feelings.
Yet she couldn’t shake the sense of a presence in the water. She felt it sucking the heat from her body. You. What are you? You killed once. She took fast shallow breaths.
“Use your logic,” Harry’s voice punched through the cold. “Every phenomenon has a scientific explanation.”
She longed to turn on her flashlight to get a better view of her sensor screen, though the small unit couldn’t give her much data. Damn, she needed better equipment.
So, okay, maybe the flashes came from foxfire. Or maybe from light-emitting diodes like the ones she found in the sample. But why had the flashes stopped?
She chewed the old mouthpiece. It happened when her tank struck the stone.
She had no idea how long she’d been underwater, but her teeth were chattering. She couldn’t lie in the frigid mud forever. She was on the point of pushing up, but her mind kept circling on the flashes. Somehow, the sound of her metal tank hitting the rock had stopped the flashes. Could this extraordinary liquid respond to sound?
Carefully, she switched on her light and unscrewed the sample jar lid. A burble of air rushed from its throat and wobbled upward, rapidly expanding in size. She saw the sphere of air double, then double again as it rushed toward the surface. Then the dark cold water seemed to close around her like a tomb. With a shaky hand, she replaced the lid on the full jar of liquid. Then she checked her air.
“Jesus!” she hissed through the watery mouthpiece. The gauge was verging into the red zone—less than five hundred pounds of pressure left. She had to reach the surface fast.
She grasped the release handles to dump her weights. But she paused. Ascend slowly, the Web site had warned. If she dumped her weights, this clown suit would bob to the surface like a balloon, and her lungs would expand like that air burble from her jar. How was she supposed to ascend slowly? If only she could remember how to inflate the buoyancy compensator.
As an experiment, she pushed off from the muddy bottom and tried to kick her way up in the loose, oversized fins. This merely stirred up more silt and gave her another leg cramp. After a short struggle, she sank back to the canal bed. The rental guy had loaded her down with far too much weight.
She checked her air gauge again. Only three hundred pounds. She was breathing fast, using too much air. She grasped the weight release handles and whimpered.
You’re an idiot, CJ.
“Like your mother,” Harry’s voice resounded. She gnawed the bitter mouthpiece.
Calm down. Think it through. The canal floor slopes up on either side. You can walk out.
She sat in the mud and tried to tug off the flippers, but her gloved hands were numb with cold. Next, she tried to estimate which side of the canal would be nearest. West, she decided, away from the Quimicron plant. She checked the compass in her gauge console, but the needle danced wildly. The EM field was still pulsing. She decided simply to walk in a straight line. But when she tried to move, her flippers caught in the muddy canal bed, and she tripped.
Think, CJ. Turn around. Walk backward.
The gauge read one hundred pounds of pressure. She moved. Lifting one flipper from the mud, setting it down, lifting the other, she hobbled backward through the frigid dark water with no guide but a terrible intuition. Gradually, the canal bed sloped upward. How far was the bank? Which bank? Notions flitted across her mind. Max waiting in the pirogue. Harry scorning her incompetence. Her mother—absent. Will she care when I die?
Without warning, the flashes returned. They didn’t flicker like random static this time. Instead, they pulsed in unison, making the water blink on and off as steady as a heartbeat. CJ watched, amazed. The blinks were synchronized. Almost unconsciously, she paced her steps and breathed in time with the blinks, gliding backward through a nimbus of illuminated milk.
The water grew warmer. Much warmer. Soon, a foam of tiny bubbles seemed to buoy her up. Walking came easier. She no longer had to fight against the heavy weights. The microbubbles rose around her like champagne carbonation, and the effervescence seemed to lift and carry her along.
When air stopped flowing through her mouthpiece, she panicked only for a second. Then a curious detachment overtook her. Here was death. She could simply relax and let it take her. She had imagined it so many times. Maybe this was the moment.
But the water kept blinking and fizzing, buoying her limbs, almost urging her along. She exhaled her last breath very very slowly, wondering not about death at all, but about the bubbles. What triggered their release? And what kind of gas were they? She would have to find out about those bubbles.
And suddenly there was Max, hauling her to the shore. He had followed her movement by the bubbles. She clawed at her suffocating hood. The rubber was so blistered with acid lesions that Max was able to tear it open with his hands. When air touched her face, she inhaled a loud raking wheeze of swampy freshness. Max hugged her to his chest. They were sitting in two feet of silt near the canal’s western bank. She had walked out.
Drool
Saturday, March 12
5:16 AM
Except for an occasional shiver, the canal bordering Devil’s Swamp lay quiet. In the morning cold, its warm upper layer vaporized with glacial slowness, spewing lethargic geysers of mist two inches high. Beneath the surface, digesting microbes effervesced methane, and lazy currents swashed against the banks.
Dan Meir stood on the dock of Gulf-Pac Corporation, Quimicron’s next-door neighbor, one of the five other factories lining the barge canal. Meir zipped his coat one-handed while, with the other hand, he clutched his phone and replayed his wife’s voicemail. She’d left the message sometime yesterday. Their youngest son was getting married.
They’d come to this—he and his wife—exchanging their most intimate messages through voice recordings at AT&T. He would try to remember to call her back. Little Danny was getting married. He gnawed his cold cigar.
Near the end of Gulf-Pac’s ruined dock, Hammer Nesbitt and Roman Sacony inspected broken chunks of concrete. A section of the canal bank had caved in, undermining part of Gulf-Pac’s dock and nearly drowning their surprised night watchman. Gulf-Pac blamed the accident on Quimicron’s recent chemical spill, and Roman had flown back from Miami without stopping to pack.
“This ain’t the only cave-in, just the biggest.” Hammer Nesbitt dug his little finger in his ear. He looked rheumy-eyed and grizzled from lack of sleep. “There’s mud slides all along this section of the canal.”
Hammer managed the Gulf-Pac plant, producing soil conditioners and herbicides for American farmers. He was a jowly large-bellied Texan, over six-and-a-half feet tall, and when he stood next to Roman, Meir thought they looked like Mutt and Jeff.
Meir felt sympathy for the Texan. Hammer had a mess on his hands, what with his dock out of commission. To Meir, the caved-in bank looked like glazed ceramic. He’d seen that effect at a beach once, where lightning struck the sand. But he didn’t mention that point. Hammer was already riled enough.
“I’m drillin’ bore holes under my ring levee as we speak. Gotta check and see if it’s still sound.” Hammer pointed his finger menacingly at Roman. “You know what that costs? I guess you’ll find out.”
Meir noticed how Roman’s nostrils widened. Impatience—or contempt? Meir didn’t know his elegant CEO very well. Roman Sacony was too aloof, too focused on business, not a guy you could relax and share a beer with. Meir watched curiously to see how the cool Miami capitalist would mix with his irascible Texas poker buddy. Like matches and gasoline, he expected.
Too bad. Meir believed in getting along with neighbors. A little chitchat, a few favors, a touch of social lubrication went a long way. You just had to know how to communicate.
Crows squawked from the hackberry trees, and a chill wind whipped the men’s nylon jackets. A front had moved down from Canada. Meir mouthed his cigar and examined the dark clouds streaming overhead. When that cold moisture met the warm air over the Gulf, there would be hell to pay.
“It ain’t natural.” Hammer spritzed mud off his tooled leather boots at a water spigot. His Texas drawl rose and fell with the wind. “My people say the canal’s pH is way down. And the water’s too fuckin’ cold for this time of year. You drop a thermometer in there and see.”
A Gulf-Pac skiff milled up and down the canal, illuminating the early morning fog with spectral searchlights. Roman measured the size of the cave-in with his eyes. Above the glazed concavity, tufts of burnt crabgrass still clung to the sheer-cut edge. With quick agility, he jumped down from the dock and climbed into the sandy hollow. The walls felt as hard and smooth as porcelain.
He was still wearing the suit he’d worn in Miami the day before, and the wind cut through his light pants. Through most of his weary flight back, he had teleconferenced with Gulf-Pac’s executives. Now his eyes hurt, and his right ear felt bruised from hours on the phone. One of the other neighboring plants had lost nothing more than a set of stairs leading down to the waterline, yet the manager insisted on compensation. Roman shoved his hands in his pockets and counted his change by feel. Pure greed drove these northern bastardos. They knew his toluene spill couldn’t have caused this.
He took a coin from his pocket—a thin US dime—and scratched the glazed sand. The material flaked away like mica. It looked blistered, almost crystallized. He picked up some of the flakes and folded them in a handkerchief. Then he noticed the smug fat Texan eyeing him.
Americans, these pompous white-skins called themselves. As if they owned the entire Western hemisphere. Wasn’t he American, too? Didn’t his native pampas wave with golden grain? And didn’t his Andes Mountains gleam with purple mist? Could any place be more beautiful than Mar del Plata, his childhood home?
He eyed Hammer Nesbitt and thought of his mother’s yellow porch by the sea. How many afternoons he had languished there, reading his hoard of Time magazines to polish his English. How many hours he had brooded over the slick ads for wristwatches and cars. Didn’t his America shine as spacious beneath God’s shedding grace? Yet the victories and tribulations of his southern continent hardly ever won a place in Time. How he had despised and envied the flashy Anglos for ignoring him.
That was the past, he reminded himself, flipping the U.S. dime in his hand. Today, the Anglos were his customers and neighbors. He turned his back on Hammer and swallowed hard. Subpoenas were already mounting on his desk. Gulf-Pac had more lawyers than profits these days. Ah, but they would not find this Latino easy to bend.
“Hammer’s worried about the EPA,” Meir explained to Roman, warming his hands with his breath. The wind burned his ears crimson.
Hammer took out a handkerchief and noisily blew his nose. “That’s right. I don’t like those yappy government dogs snoopin’ around. You got to clean up this mess pronto.”
“Clean up your own goddamn mess,” said Roman.
Meir relit his cigar. While Nesbitt ranted about the toluene spill, Roman stepped over the orange barrier to get a closer look at the water. A reek of chemicals and rotting vegetation rose from the canal, and one whole corner of the concrete dock had broken away, exposing twisted iron rebar.
Roman noticed a curious fungal growth clinging to the piers under the dock. When he stooped to examine it, he saw a globby buildup of what looked like tree sap or glue clustering in transparent layers. With each small splash of ripples, the growth seemed to drool a few millimeters higher up the piers.
The globby masses glistened with wetness. Roman knelt and probed the nearest one with his Montblanc pen. Instantly, all the sap on all the piers splashed back to the water. The growths fell simultaneously—as if they were linked. Not a trace of the sap remained. Roman examined the tip of his pen. It was dry.
He kicked a loose lump of concrete into the canal, and its liquid plunk echoed. This morning, he was scheduled to negotiate pricing with his Panama shippers. Also, he had to firm up an oil refinery deal in Mobile, Alabama. On top of that, a Brazilian banker was flying to Miami to discuss a new natural gas port in Fortaleza. Roman’s thoughts whirled in a mélange of English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
His company was stretching in many directions this year, acquiring new sites, expanding product line, diversifying its business model. For a decade, he had logged eighty-hour weeks, amassing the critical elements for this advance. He’d borrowed a great deal of money, and these three deals would be crucial. He didn’t need this Baton Rouge snafu, not now.
Yet here he stood in the reeking Louisiana wind, shivering with cold and sensing instinctively that his overfed, overbearing Texas neighbor was right. The cave-in was not natural. Neither was the colloidal decoction in the pond, and logic assured him the two phenomena were connected. Something had gone very wrong here. To prevent further lawsuits, he should seal off the canal at once.
But that would not be an easy task. The barge canal was a public waterway serving five other companies besides his own. This had to be handled with discretion, and Roman knew that he, personally, would have to persuade the authorities and the other company owners to agree. He scowled at the green canal water, calculating its depth.
When he tossed his shiny U.S. dime in the water, it sank with a fluent kiss. Down it sifted, glinting reflections, till it vanished in the blurry depths.
“Where did it go?” Roman said.
Meir squinted. “Your dime?”
“No. The sand. There should be a hundred cubic yards of sand from the cave-in. Where is it? There’s no current to wash it away.”
Hammer Nesbitt moved to the dock’s edge and said, “Maybe it spread out over the bottom.”
“Get divers and lights. Get photographs.” Roman scowled. “We’ll talk later.”
His phone vibrated, and while Meir and Hammer Nesbitt took shelter from the cold, he checked the screen to see who was calling so early. A name he didn’t recognize.
Spew
Saturday, March 12
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5:44 AM
Across town in a windowless office, Hal Butler swung his hairy feet off his desk and sat bolt upright. “Roman Sacony? Uh. Hello.” He hadn’t expected to reach Quimicron’s chief executive officer.
The nightshift manager must have routed his call straight through to Sacony’s cell phone. This was a miracle for which Hal Butler had not prepared. He slapped magazines and books off his desk, searching for a pen. The multimillionaire Quimicron CEO was considered visiting royalty in Baton Rouge. What a coup to get Roman Sacony live on the phone.
Fumbling for blank paper, Hal gave his credentials as publisher and editor of the Baton Rouge Eye, the state capitol’s only alternative newspaper. His words spewed out, though he neglected to mention that he was the tabloid’s sole employee. While Roman complained about the early hour on Saturday morning, Hal fished for the pencil he’d stuck in his wiry copper hair.
Hal practically lived in his cubbyhole office, situated above the quick-print storefront owned by his cousin, where his idiosyncratic journalism surfaced each week on crisp fresh newsprint the same color as his skin. Hal looked about forty years old, but in fact he was thirty-two. Thin of limb and chest, his body fat had localized in his low-slung belly. Hal Butler did not get out much.
Without windows, his reality lost the rhythm of day and night. He experienced the world by phone, Internet, TV, streaming audio, and mail order. Through the years, his sheltered existence had sharpened his senses. He often got his best interviews in the odd hours. He scribbled Sacony’s name on the back of a magazine and said, “What’s going on in your swamp?”
Hal hadn’t heard about the frozen pond or the cave-in. His timing was a coincidence. He’d gotten a tip about mysterious midnight lights in Devil’s Swamp. The Eye wasn’t above running an occasional ghost story for local color.
“Wonder what the EPA will think about your secret late-night activities?” Hal pressed.
