by James Reich
By April 26 of the previous year, the industrial fireball of Deepwater Horizon had set corpses floating on the black-streaked waters of the Gulf of Mexico. A sluggish atmosphere of poison and defeat had fallen over the coast. Beneath the surface of the water, robots worked by remote control to stem the contamination. Despite the passing year, despite the fact the people no longer watched the cruel slick threatening the swamps and wetlands, the oil was still there, in the eyes of the men and women of the Gulf Coast. It had settled there, a black mote of the sins of others.
“Really, it was nothing,” Cash said.
Nona raised her eyebrows.
“That is, compared to a nuclear accident.”
For Cash, the tragedy was that in the wake of the oil-drilling and coalmining disasters of the spring of 2010, the corporate families of nuclear power had seized their moment. She thought of Evelyn Winters being interviewed on television as she and Molly had watched the oil slick spread. The old man smiled into the camera as he spoke of his clean technology, his pristine, safe nuclear plants, and the need for expansion. Now they would all walk on gilded splinters of strontium, and shed their skins in the boneless slither of cesium. Cash explained: “Not far from here, back up the Mississippi, just north of Baton Rouge, I passed the River Bend Nuclear Plant. I wanted to see it because it came online two years after Chernobyl burned up, so by the schedules of obsolescence and accidents, its time is near. I could almost feel the fissures as though they were right inside my skin. And then there’s Waterford, the reactor that’s within twenty minutes of the city here, right on the river.”
Nona stood up. “Wait. Let me get us some beer.”
Cash swiveled and spoke as Nona made for the refrigerator. “It’s in St. Charles Parish. It might as well be inside downtown New Orleans. As the wind blows, it’s about ten miles from Louis Armstrong Airport and little more to us. It could rinse the frat boys off Canal Street in less than an hour. They had to shut it down during Hurricane Katrina, but it’s back online. These decaying nuclear stations are owned by the Winters Corporation. They have dozens. They operated one in Vermont on the banks of the Connecticut River called Yankee. The Senate just condemned the Vermont Yankee plant, and has ordered it to be closed—and they don’t do that every day, but it was truly fucked. The cooling tower collapsed and smashed into the reactor building. Radioactive waste has been leaking from the reactor’s corroding pipelines for decades. The Winters Corporation denied any knowledge of any pipes even existing. The point is that every last nuclear plant in the world is full of death, and leaking. That oil in the Gulf was nothing.”
Foam overflowed from the cold beer bottles as Nona returned.
Cash went on: “There is no such thing as clean, safe nuclear waste disposal, but since 2005, legislation regards nuclear plants as clean merely because their primary emissions are not carbon. As a supposedly clean technology, they qualify for subsidies, and, furthermore, the corporations that build, operate, and own the plants can build them on risk-free government-insured loans. Chernobyl didn’t emit much carbon, but what would you prefer in Louisiana, Deepwater Horizon or a nuclear meltdown? You know, a hurricane passes, and eventually you can go home and rebuild. Meltdown at Waterford, and no one is ever coming down here again.” She stared at her beer bottle, overwhelmed by a sense of futility. “I guess I thought that if I could see you and Janelle, because you know where she is, right, that I could ignite the old gang. Then I wouldn’t be alone.”
“Oh, Cash, I can’t even tell how serious you are—”
“I’m deadly fucking serious, Nona! What can’t you see?”
“Okay, okay . . . Easy . . . I hear you, but this isn’t my bag. I’ve got my own wars to wage.” Nona’s eyes widened with inspiration. “Say, do you know about gris-gris, baby girl?” Nona asked, and Cash shook her head. “Wait here, I have something for you, something of yours.” When Nona retuned from the adjoining room, she was carrying a small pouch. “Cash,” she said, tossing it to her. Cash fumbled the bag, dropping it onto the chaise lounge before retrieving it. “I kept it,” Nona said.
“What is it?” Cash asked. “It feels like skin.”
“Gris-gris. It’s voodoo. Look inside it.”
Cash discovered a small plastic bracelet curled inside the gris-gris bag. It was translucent, pliable rubber, like a hospital bracelet from an infant. Cash recognized it. It had been hers. She began to weep, tears glossing her eyes without falling. Then, as she stared at the tiny bracelet, she began to sob, her shoulder heaving in the candlelight. Nona embraced her, and explained: “You had this on you when we found you.”
“I came to America on a ship, with my parents. I dream about it sometimes.”
“I know you do. I want to help you, Cash. Tie the gris-gris onto your necklace. With this you will have the strength to wage your war.”
Cash fixed the gris-gris to her bicycle chain necklace, next to the shard of trinitite that emitted a ghoulish light in the shotgun room. Cash wiped her eyes with her sleeve. With each word, she punched her breast. “I am Death.”
April 9, 2011. Cash and Nona breakfasted beneath the green palm fronds of Café Freret; hanging moss and tropical mist. To assuage their hangovers, they sipped their Louisiana coffees and ripped into their croissants as the grackles and parakeets plunged between the metal tables. It was still early on Lowerline Street. Streetcars crossed the intersection at St. Charles, rattling coffins in the humid morning. Cash and Nona sat close to one another and spoke quietly as the waitstaff came and went.
“I’ll stay one more night. I’m exhausted.”
“What you told me, about shooting a cop in Texas, was that true?”
Cash nodded.
“Holy shit,” Nona hissed.
“I told you. I thought you wanted to help me. Last night you . . . ”
“We were both pretty drunk. Oh my God.” Nona’s eyes flashed toward the street.
“There must be atonement, Nona.” She pulled the plastic bracelet from inside her T-shirt. “This has to mean something!” It appeared to Cash that Nona was looking for an exit. “Truth, remember? You introduced me to Valerie Solanas, all that stuff, remember?” Cash gripped Nona’s hands across the white metal table.
“Cash, listen to me: Valerie Solanas was crazy.”
Wounded, uncomprehending, Cash stared at her in silence. She began to weep as she asked herself how could she command that kind of unflinching truth from Nona, or anyone, when she couldn’t even tell her surrogate mother about Zelda and her last days in the Tenderloin? For Nona, it was that uncomprehending look that she had received when she had told Cash where and when she had been born. She thought of the way in which the child’s face would brighten when she told her about the Amazon women, whose country had been hers.
“One more night.” Nona declared and raised her hand for the check. Was it possible that she had played some prior role in this new violence bursting out of Cash? An aspect of her refused to believe that it was real. There was no dead cop. Cash would never reach New York in that flashbulb of a car. Something in Cash had given way, a cracked levy, containment wall split with fire. Yet, had it not always been so? Nona pitied her. Most of us, she thought, have some chance to revisit our birthplace, to inhale and touch the ground. Not the children of Chernobyl. Nona remembered the day that she managed to have Cash’s natal bracelet deciphered, the sadness that bloomed out of an empty incubator in her mind. “Dry your eyes, baby girl. Let’s go. I don’t want what I saw in 1987 to happen again, Cash. I’m supposed to protect you.”
“You never told me what happened to my parents.”
“I told you in your sleep, and more, baby, every night, at Herland.”
“I know, Nona. That’s why I didn’t need to ask.”
NONA LAVEAU RECLINED ON HER ANTIQUE CHAISE LOUNGE, HER HEAD resting against a red velvet pillow. She smoked a cigarette, balancing a plastic action figure on her chest, animating its articulated limbs with her other hand. Nona dragged on the tobacco
, exhaling the smoke over the doll, watching her emerge from the gray fog unscathed. The raven-haired doll wore glossy red boots with a white seam at her shins, a blue skirt adorned with white stars, and a red bodice embroidered with a golden eagle. Her wrists were wrapped in impenetrable bracelets, and her hair was held back from her face with a golden diadem with a single red star embedded in the crown. Nona addressed the doll. “Wonder Woman, you have faced the dangers of radiation before, in fiery explosions at bomb test sites, and in the tails of wild frigid comets. You are an Amazon warrior. You represent my friend, my baby, my Cash, breaking through.”
Nona felt herself to exist between two distinct and discrete planes, where what represented truth, physics, natural justice, and morality for one did not necessarily correspond with the other. There was the plane of the brute mundane; and there was the ornate, phantasmagoric plane of Li Grand Zombi. She regarded them as quintessentially masculine and feminine. Their war was broken only by uneasy truces. In one world, Cash was a criminal, but across the muddy water and secret histories and voodoo, the sin lost its sheen and the crime was its own atonement. On the gorgeous green plane of Li Grand Zombi, Cash was a magical heroine. It was on that plane that Nona recalled Cash’s shadowed parents, and it was there that she had rescued and concealed her at Herland almost twenty years ago.
April 19, 1987. Portland, Oregon. In one more stolen week, their daughter Varvara, who they called Varyushka, would be one year old. Fog was suspended in the pine boughs of Silicon Forest and moved in damp billows toward the blue-gray bridges along the river, red brick buildings, and warehouses, gradually conforming to the city as the morning opened. Gulls strutted along the arms of steel cranes. Downtown, the man and the woman pushed their sleeping daughter in her stroller, the plastic wheels rattling, weaving a random pattern between the offices and store buildings, the rising shutters of the cafés and the banks, crossing the paths and cutting across the damp grass of Chapman Square, casting furtive glances back over their coat shoulders. The traffic in the wash of SW Madison Street slowed and stopped for a red light.
“Let’s go across here,” the man, Cash’s father, urged. “Do you remember, on the ship, when I told you that I felt like Leon Trotsky going to Mexico? Well, I don’t intend to feel any ice picks.”
“Do you think they’re still following us?” Her mother wore a brown silk scarf over her hair. She cast it into the gutter, shedding another disguise.
“Yes, I’m sure they are, but I can’t see them, can you?”
Her mother shook her head.
“My heart is breaking and I am terrified, more frightened than when the reactor was on fire and I was giving birth.”
“Hurry!”
“If we could lose them, then we would not have to go through with it.”
“We’re not going to be able to lose them. Someone informed on us, as though we are spies.” Her father coughed into a handkerchief as they reached the opposite sidewalk, and the traffic began to move again. “I’m sorry. But Varyushka will be safer.”
“Damn it, I feel that any of these people, any of these cars might be them.”
“Around this next corner, quick!”
They turned onto SW Fifth Avenue. A young woman was walking toward them. She had light, coffee-toned skin, red-brown dreadlocks pulled back from her freckled face, and she wore denim dungarees and a white T-shirt beneath her open parka jacket, the wet nylon fur curling across her shoulders.
Her mother gripped her father’s elbow sharply and nodded her head in the direction of the young woman, whispering, “Her!” She glanced back over her shoulder once more, seeing no one directly behind them. The man and the woman accosted the girl with their eyes full of tears.
“Please help us!”
“What is your name?” the man asked. They spoke with Russian accents.
“Nona. Nona Laveau.” Nona’s shoulders rose as she cringed back slightly in the shock of being apprehended by the strange couple.
“Nona,” the woman said, “please pick our child up from the stroller.”
“What?”
“Please!” The woman clasped her hands together, wringing them in panic.
“Okay, okay.” Nona lifted the infant nervously from the stroller, and the man held out a small plastic bracelet toward her, before pressing it into her fingers and gripping it there.
“This bracelet will explain. We call her Varyushka. Tell her that her parents love her, and that we are sorry.”
“Hey! What the hell? Wait!” Nona protested.
They could feel the danger collecting behind them, a flurry of black shapes rising into a tenebrous throbbing wave in the swollen street. Suddenly, the two strangers began to run, pushing the empty, rattling stroller along before them. Nona watched in disbelief, holding the sleeping child to her breast, retreating, stunned and pressing herself close to one of the trees that grew between the sidewalk paving slabs. The black van did not register her. It moved smoothly, and then decelerated rapidly as it drew level with the runners without creating brake noise. Nona saw sliding doors open and four men plucked the runners from the street, slipping black hoods over the gasping faces of their quarry that did not have time even to cry out.
11
APRIL 9, 2011. MOLLY STOOD IN THE SMOKE-SHROUDED GARDEN, considering the pyre as it reduced, not having smelled burning human flesh since Vietnam, embers blowing across her boots. The remains of the man named Spicer were completely incinerated. Thoughts of Cash evoked a nebulous maternal feeling in her, but she had no means of being in contact. She would have to wait for Cash to call from a pay phone or a motel. Her digital watch chimed the hour. It was 8 AM when she lit a cigarette from the remnants of the bonfire. It’s a pity about that rug, she thought. Suddenly, she heard a clear wholesome voice from the front of the house.
“Hello? Hey, anyone here? I heard you fix cars.”
Molly crossed from the back of Cash’s property to her own, stepped in through the back door, and emerged cautiously from the greenhouse workshop, wiping her hands with a rag. “What’s the problem?”
Robert Dresner stood with his back to a battered canary yellow Subaru Baja. He was dressed in dirty jeans and a camouflage jacket, aviator sunglasses pushed up into his hairline. He rubbed his hand along his unshaven jaw. “It’s shifting weird . . . fluids . . . I don’t know. Can you give her a look? Carla at the bar said you were the best around. I’m Dave, by the way.”
Molly walked toward the car. The man looked like a part-time hunter. “Can you pop the hood?” This she said to another man who was sitting inside at the driver’s position, also dressed for the field: camouflage jacket and a brown waxed cap.
“Are you okay?” Dresner asked, half lifting his hand to gesture at Molly’s bruised face, the oxidized blood in the splits in her lips. He scanned the vacant hills as if looking for prey.
“Cut myself shaving.” Molly smiled. “Don’t worry, I won’t smoke while I check your car.” As she lifted the cigarette to her lips to drag on it, something stung her in her throat. Instinctively, her hand reached up to kill the insect that must have bitten her, but instead, she pulled a small needle dart from the flesh close to her trachea.
Dresner stepped through the acrid smoke as the swirling dark tornado of the poison descended upon her, forcing her facedown to the dented hood of the car. He caught her as she lost consciousness. “Royce, give me a hand.” It was Royce whom he suspected that he had to be wary of, who might betray him before he could present some meaningful atonement for Spicer. By involving Royce in this detail, he was determined to make him feel complicit and guarantee his silence. Together, they shoved the flaccid form of Molly Pinkerton into the backseat. “Check the first house and the backyard. I don’t like that fire.” Dresner sat behind the wheel and started the engine, watching Royce disappear. He stared at his watch. It took Royce just under three minutes to return. When he did, his face was white and bloodless. Coughing, he closed the door to the suspect’s house behind him. Dresner
, who had taken the driver’s seat, noticed that he was carrying a plastic grocery bag.
“All I could find.” Royce was trembling.
Looking inside it, Robert Dresner saw only a sack of ashes and the unmistakable form of a shard of human jawbone retaining five teeth. He steadied himself before speaking. “That’s him. Let’s go.”
As they wound through the empty hills with stray dogs on the red escarpments, neither man spoke. Yet, Dresner was aware of the shivering of his subordinate’s lips, and the mercury of occasional tears that would break and race over his cheeks. Wordlessly, Royce’s shock screwed out of him.
When Molly regained herself, the cold of the polished metal gurney penetrated her skin and an arc of blinding white lights craned over her on angular chrome stalks. She had no sense of how much time had passed. There was no point in asking where she was being held. She knew that it was beyond the map. She could tell that her head had been shaved, and that even beyond the beatings, there were fresh cuts and bruises from razors ranged across her scalp. The walls were a pale institutional green. She tested herself, but her limbs had been restrained by squeaking rubber hoses, an octopus arrangement of tourniquets rendering her quadriplegic yet full of an obtuse pain from the poison, a hangover of every nerve and cell. Robert Dresner entered her field of vision, wearing the warm smile of a drunken surgeon, something between cavalier malice and expert sympathy. She recognized him. He addressed her:
“Jack Torma.”
