After a while Marisol sighed and said, “I’m sorry. It just hits a little too close to home is all. My sister in Brownsville—she gave birth to one of those babies. Salvador—he lived for almost a year …”
“Dang it, Marisol. I’m sorry.”
She had returned her gaze to the window but then she looked at him and gave him a smile—not her usual smirky grin, but something sadder. And deeper.
“Not your fault. You’re one of the good guys. One reason I took your case was the environmental angle—you seemed to be going after the sort of corporate polluters who did that to my baby nephew.” She paused and looked out at the road ahead. “It’s grown bigger than that, though. And since New Orleans …”
“I understand. Too close to home, like you said. And besides, you almost died.”
“It wasn’t the brush with death, though. I’ve been through worse. It was coming face to face with the enormity of death. Like I saw a chasm open up before me. That wasted landscape …”
“Eileen’s neighborhood.”
“And the two women who took me in, who saved my life. It’s like they opened my eyes to an eternal emptiness I’d never been aware of.”
As Geoff drove, Marisol’s gaze remained far away. No response came to him, and it seemed improper to interrupt her dark reverie. So for a while then they were silent. They passed by the small city of Tyler, halfway along their journey. In the Piney Woods now. And even through the air conditioning and the highway fumes, the air smelled sweeter.
Then she said, “Geoff, did you ever have any kids?”
His lawyer-brain dissected the question, its strange syntax. With that in mind, he did not hedge. “Janie, my wife, was pregnant when she died. I think I’ve told you it was a car wreck. Drunk driver blindsided her. She died instantly. But at the scene … the paramedics delivered our son. He was born alive. A single heartbeat, and then he died.”
Marisol looked at him wide-eyed. “Oh God, Geoff. That’s awful.”
“Since he was born alive, he got a birth certificate. We were going to name him Geoff, Jr., but I named him Janie Love. I don’t know … it sounded right at the time. I’ve thought about him every day for two years.”
With that understatement, Geoff fell silent. He did not merely think of his dead boy daily—he raised him in his mind. From diaper rash to little league and summer camp, to teen angst and college—the lost life of fatherhood replayed as an obsessive loop. He could acknowledge it as obsessive now—not healthy grieving. For the first time, he had relayed the story of his wife and son’s death without falling into hopeless despair or dark rage. Only sadness.
Marisol placed a hand on his knee. It warmed him, and he loosened his foot on the accelerator in an involuntary relaxation.
When he sped up again, she said: “We can’t fix everything but we can maybe stop one horrible thing.” He looked at her and the crooked smile had returned. “Let’s shut down these fuckers and their little mad science lab.”
•
Geoff and Marisol pulled into the gravel and clay lot beside Dunlap’s Marina. A few yards across the swamp, Geoff caught a glimpse of the marred cypress where Dalia Bordelon had suffered and died. Bobby Henderson, whom they saw backing a trailer down the boat ramp, had pointed out the spot. The deputy had himself carved away the bark around the vile markings the Tatum twins, or possibly Jimmy Lee Monroe, had left on the tree. He had filled in the gash he left with black tar, leaving a strange specimen. As if a mad arborist had been at work on the bayou cauterizing the wounds of the silent trees.
The trailer held a twenty two-foot modified bass boat with the Sheriff’s Department logo painted on the side. To the side of the ramp, Willie Kincaid stood with his hand on his grandson Joey’s shoulder, seeming to gauge the deputy’s progress with silent foreboding.
They left the crisp, refrigerated air of Geoff’s old Mercedes and stood with it between them for long seconds without speaking. Geoff watched the private investigator. She surveyed the scene as if preparing for battle, or for a heist. She donned a military-grade backpack.
Then she turned and looked at him across the hood of the car and gave him her half smile. “The kid’s here.”
They did not speak the obvious truth that this was not the time or place for children, for they both knew that Joey was no ordinary child. And that this—they did not know exactly how or why—was where he must be.
They walked together to the ramp through air thick but not too hot. The sun had burned away the morning’s mist but did not glare off the surface of the dark, still water. Having left the pickup truck and the trailer, Bobby stood by the boat and waved to them. He said hidy as they approached the ramp, but his greeting lacked any good humor. As if he welcomed them to an execution, or an untimely funeral.
The group joined together then at the boat and began stepping in one by one. Willie sat fore in a raised fishing seat. Marisol sat beside Joey, talking to him. But before he boarded himself, Geoff asked Bobby: “What does the sheriff know?”
“He knows I have the boat, doesn’t know what for. Doesn’t want to know. Doesn’t want to muddy his britches.”
“Okay.” Geoff felt again a twinge of disappointment but did not blame Seastrunk for bowing out. No question remained that the sheriff was more politician than lawman.
Then they boarded the boat and made a slow trip down the bayou toward the island, cutting a path through the mossy water. The May sun warmed their backs, and the air smelled of new life. Lilies bloomed, and water bugs skittered along the surface, but Geoff did not observe any of the odd oversized metallic dragonflies that he now saw as the harbingers of a something unnatural and profane.
The marshy island lay where the bayou widened before opening into a vast area of open water known to the locals as Grand Lake. Bobby piloted the craft along its tangled shore, following Willie’s directions to the narrow channel that led to the interior. Leaves brushed Geoff’s cheek, and he saw Joey reach out and brush his hand over the cypress knees as they glided past.
Geoff said: “Why do they call it China Island, Willie?”
“Because an old Chinaman lived here for a hundred years. Or a long time anyway—way back before the war. Come up from New Orleans. Or maybe from out west someplace. Had a little shack and fished for fresh water oysters, for the pearls. Oil company bought him out. Or maybe he died. Or just moved on when the oysters played out.”
They all heard a chattering from the trees above them.
Bobby said: “Whoa, would you look at them?”
Marisol said: “Dang, those things are ugly.”
Geoff said: “My God. I’ve seen glimpses before, but never like this. And not this … Day-Glo.”
The massive pine ahead of them on the upland portion of the island held a colony of a dozen or more of the rat-monkey creatures. Like nutria with simian hands and the brows of tiny people. Like the one he and Marisol saw in the shadows behind Sally Kincaid’s house. That one appeared gray in the dusk, though Marisol swore it was blue. These burned bright orange, the color of the lizard he had seen with Eileen outside the motel by the fishing camp. In both cases, he had dismissed the creatures, as if their oddness could hold no more interest than a piece of litter in the swamp, not belonging but unremarkable. He could not now fathom his previous failure to recognize their significance. He wished that Eileen could have lived to take this trip, to see these unworldly animals. To study them.
Joey said, “It’s the same ones we saw when we were here before.”
Willie looked at the beasts in the tree with no fascination and no fear, only disgust. “Yeah. It’s like they’re the guards of this god-forsaken place.”
“You called them an abomination.”
“Yes.”
Leaning forward as Bobby piloted the craft to the end of the inlet, Geoff spoke just to Marisol. “According to the Prince, these animals are the by-product of genetic engineering experiments here early on, right after the war. I guess a few got out and thrived.”
>
“And nobody from the government or Texronco or whatever ever came and rounded them up? Or hunted them? Seems like they would be proof that something nasty was going on here.”
“Right. But these bayous are so isolated. We’re a million miles from Washington or Austin, from any big city or major research university—from any of the organizations that would study a place like this and its ecosystem. And the people around here tend to be poor and to keep to themselves—there’s no political base to bring in federal research dollars. When I was getting ready to bring my lawsuit—Willie’s lawsuit—I called around to a lot of the national environmental organizations looking for funding. Most of them had never heard of this place, even though by any measure, ecologically, it’s one of the most important wetland habits in North America. And that’s aside from any genetic abominations, as Willie calls them. Eileen and Dalia, beyond the consulting they did for me, were working to fix that. To publish a paper and shine some scientific light on this whole area.”
Pausing for breath, Geoff looked around and saw that they had come to rest near the foot of an old oil well, its pumpjack still and archaic-looking like the fossil of some primitive beast. Willie approached them as Bobby tied the boat.
Geoff glanced to his client and said, “I think that’s why they killed them—Eileen and Dalia. I think they learned too much about this place. Could expose too much.”
“The Bordelon girl got inside. That’s why they killed her.” Willie stood over them as he spoke but did not look anguished as he had back on the shore. He spoke as if reciting a history long since accepted and no longer shocking. “It was my fault. I showed her the way. I never should have let her go in alone.”
Their feet sank into the soft ground, the yellow dirt streaked with red clay. Water pooled with a chemical sheen where they left indentations. But the air smelled sweet with blooming things. The silence assaulted Geoff, the buzzing of insect things omnipresent in this watery place somehow absent from the center of the island. Away from the rat-monkeys now, he neither saw nor heard animal life.
With hands on hips, Marisol looked at the well and said, “I’ve lived in Texas my whole life, and this is the closest I’ve been to one of these.”
“This is just a baby, and an antique,” Geoff said. He noted the rust on the crank—the belt long gone, the mover casing an empty shell. “I’ll bet it’s eighty years old.”
“What the hell is it doing here?” Bobby said. “I mean, it’s been capped god-knows how long. Aren’t they supposed to carry the rig away?”
“I don’t think we’re dealing with supposed-to’s here.”
“Looky here,” Willie said.
Leaving Joey squatting by the boat, Willie walked over to the horsehead of the pumpjack. The thick coiled steel bridle hung down, rusty and immobile. Beneath it, the well hole. And hovering above the hole a full three inches, a gleaming disk of some unearthly metal that the ancient corrosion of that place did not touch.
Bobby removed his hat to wipe his forehead. “Man, what is that thing, Kincaid?”
Marisol showed no hesitation as she approached the floating disk. “It’s no more than an eighth of an inch thick—looks like you could just flip it away.”
“You try.”
Marisol first kicked the thing with her boot. It did not budge. Leaning down, she made as if to lift it. But first she passed her hand beneath it, between the disk and the well shaft below.
“It really is just suspended here. I can feel air coming up out of the hole.”
“Yup. I reckon it’s some sort of ventilation system.”
“For the Texronco facility, you mean? This is how we get in?”
“Yep. This is the place.”
She tried to lift the strange metal away from the hole, tried to push and to pull it, and at last lifted her leg and stomped on it, her boot heel eliciting a muted ring like a single chime from a steeple bell through the fog.
“Nothing doing.”
On his periphery, Geoff noticed Joey had left his position poking the mud near the boat. He stood about ten feet back from the group, gazing at the well hole and the disk as if entranced. Even from this distance, Geoff could see the boy’s blue eyes shimmer like never before. They moved without moving.
Geoff turned back to the well. “Let me see.”
He walked to the disk and sat on his haunches, studying it. Not quite glowing, it shimmered. Like Joey’s eyes. He ran a hand across its silvery surface and it did not feel like smooth metal because he did not feel at all. As if it were a hologram. Or an apparition. But like Marisol, he pushed it and rapped it and confirmed its solidity. He thought he felt it give a little, like skin.
“It’s the dangedest thing—I can’t even begin to guess what it’s made of. Some kind of super-thin platinum alloy maybe? But it’s got to be magnetic. A field of some sort’s holding it there …” But its quivering did not look magnetic. It looks alive almost. He shook his head.
Looking up from his crouch, he saw Marisol watching with raised eyebrows as Bobby approached. The deputy looked down at him. “Whatever it is, it’s high tech. And it doesn’t seem to do anything but cover the shaft. So I don’t get it. Why not just weld on a ventilation grate?”
Willie joined them now as Geoff rose, and the four of them stood around the well hole like some new-formed tribe, Joey watching from afar.
“Maybe just to show off,” Willie said.
Geoff nodded. “My source—a Duchamp associate we only know as the Prince. He said kind of the same thing about the animals. The scientists, whoever they work for, just kind of created them on a lark. And they escaped or maybe they let them go just to see them thrive in the wild.” Pausing, he rubbed his face as he rethought his theory of the case. More than just organs—but what? “It really smacks of hubris, doesn’t it?”
“It’s wrong, is what it is. And if y’all are through messing around, I’ll show you—”
“No, Paw-paw.”
They all looked at the boy. Willie paused from unbuckling his pouch. “Son, you know it’s time.”
“He’ll come to us.”
“I want it on my own terms.”
The boy looked scared, but he said, “Okay.”
Geoff and Marisol and Bobby traded glances and communicated without speaking an agreed deference to the old man. Squatting now like the others before him, Willie pulled from his pouch a mess of reddish green leaves with blood-red berries.
“What is that?” Marisol said.
“Poke salat.”
She glanced at Bobby and Geoff and saw that they recognized the plant but seemed content to remain silent. “I don’t know what that is.”
“You ate it that night at Sally’s.” He looked up from the hole and his pouch to the three of them. “You all did. I picked it myself, just like this here.”
“I thought those were collard greens.”
“Lord Willie, you could have killed us.”
“Boil them three times to get the poison out, then they’re good eating. Better’n collards.”
Bobby smiled and shook his head. “Not when the leaves go red like that. And not the berries. That’s pure poison.”
“I know it.” The old man glared. “Boy, I didn’t get this old in these woods not knowing what to eat.”
Turning back to the hole and his wild greens, Willie got back to work. Geoff went down on one knee to get a better look. Bobby stood with his arms crossed. Marisol had her hands on her hips and wore her crooked grin.
Willie retrieved from the pouch a small metal grate and a detachable handle. He held the grate between the between the disk and the hole and put the poke salat in a pile on the grate. After squeezing liquid from a little bottle onto the greens, he lit the mess on fire.
Behind him, Geoff heard a sigh. He turned and saw Joey weeping. Looking back at Willie, he saw the disk turn a sick grayish green as the acrid smoke rose around it. The mercurial metal seemed to become both solid and distant in an instant. Like feverish ey
es at the moment of death. Then it fell out of the air, landing and covering the hole with a dull clang far removed from the melodious chime Marisol’s boot hell had made moments before.
Marisol laughed, an unnerving sound in that odd place. “Now how did that work?”
“Don’t get me to lying. I just figured it out camping here one night, boiling up some greens and watching that evil plate, saw it kindly waver in the fumes.”
“It must be something in the plant—poke salat’s got phytolaccatoxin, makes it poisonous. But I’m not sure how it could react with the material …” Unless it really was alive.
The group looked at Geoff without interest and he wished again that Eileen—the real scientist—had lived to see this.
“Anyway, you’ve done this before, Willie,” Marisol said. “That means someone’s gone to the trouble to replace the disk.
“Shoot, I don’t know. I think maybe it repairs itself after a while, floats back up on its own. I’ve never seen anybody else on this island. I see folks come and go from the refinery, usually by night, a mile away. And this here leads to that.
“So let’s get going,” Bobby said, and made as if to move the disk.
Joey wailed, a sound too large for his eleven-year-old frame. Inhuman almost, like the sound of a snow-trapped beast, the last of its kind in a world moved on. Everyone turned and gaped, except the boy’s grandfather. Marisol gave Geoff a look as if to ask if now he might intervene. But he raised two fingers, asking her to pause. Bobby seemed to ignore the scene and moved again to the disk. He bent and lifted it off the hole with ease.
The insects that erupted from the hole were not unlike the oversized dragonflies they all had seen around the bayous of that place from time to time. But these had wings that cut, and they sliced into Bobby’s arms and back as he shielded his face and fell to the soft earth. The young man screamed as if to shatter the sky.
Joey lurched onto the deputy’s back, into the midst of the swarming things. Marisol yelled at him to stop but the boy swatted at the bugs and shooed them and crushed a few into the ground until they were gone and the air returned to its strange stillness. When the boy stood, his face was a mask of blood—his own blood, Geoff knew. He could see the gashes in Joey’s skin from which it oozed. But then the child lifted his t-shirt over his pale, skinny torso and wiped his face clean. There were no wounds.
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