“Oscar, you’re having a fit. You’re ranting.”
“I am? Really?”
“We can’t go to Louisiana. It’s too dangerous. We can’t leave the Collaboratory now. We’re having an Emergency here. People are afraid, they’re deserting us every day.”
“Get more people.”
“We can attract all the Moderators we want, but there’s no room for them here.”
“Build extensions onto the lab. Take over the town of Buna.”
“Oscar, you scare me when you’re like this.”
He lowered his voice. “Do I?”
“A little.” Her face was flushed beneath the war paint.
His heart was pounding. He took a few deep breaths. He was past being frantic now. He was leveling out; he was cruising on a higher plane; he was exalted. “Darling, I’m going on a secret mission. I think it may be the crux of all our problems, but I may never come back. This may be the last private moment that we ever have together. I know I’ve upset you. I know I haven’t been everything you expected. I may never see you again, but I’m leaving you with such a full and happy heart. I want to remember you looking like this, always. You are so special and dear to me that I can’t express it. You’re just such a brilliant, radiant creature.”
She put her hand to her forehead. “Oh my God. I just don’t know what to do with myself when you’re like this…You’re just so persuasive! Oh well, never mind, come on with me, take your clothes off. There’s plenty of room for us up here on the lab table.”
After an extensive discussion of their options, Oscar and Captain Scubbly Bee decided to infiltrate Louisiana by covert means and in deep incognito. Kevin, boldly lying, told the local Emergency Committee that he was leaving for a recruitment drive. Oscar himself would not even officially leave Buna. He was replaced by a body double, a Moderator volunteer who was willing to wear Oscar’s clothing, and to spend a great deal of time in a plush hotel room pretending to type on a laptop.
Their conspiracy swiftly assumed its own momentum. To avoid discovery, they decided to airmail themselves into Louisiana in a pair of ultralight aircraft. These silent and stealthy devices were slow, unpredictable, dangerous, painful, and nauseating—basically devoid of creature comforts of any kind. They were, however, more or less undetectable, and immune to roadblocks and shakedowns. Since they were guided by global positioning from Chinese satellites, the aircraft would arrive with pinpoint accuracy right on Fontenot’s doorstep—sooner or later.
Kevin and Oscar next took the deeply melodramatic step of dressing themselves as nomad air bums. They borrowed the customary flight suits from a pair of Moderator air jockeys. These snug garments were riveted, fiber-filled cotton duck. They were protective industrial gear, painstakingly tribalized by much hand-stitched embroidery and a richly personal reek of skin unguent. Kevlar gloves, black rubber boots, big furry crash helmets, and shatterproof goggles completed the ensemble.
Oscar gave a few final Method-acting tips to his good-natured body double, and wedged himself into his disguise. He became a creature from an alien civilization. He couldn’t resist the temptation to stroll around downtown Buna in his nomad drag. The result astonished him. Oscar was very well known in Buna; his scandalous personal life was common knowledge and the hotel he had built was locally famous. In the flight suit, goggles, and helmet, however, he was entirely ignored. People’s eyes simply slid over him without the friction of a moment’s care. He radiated otherness.
Kevin and Oscar had synchronized their departure for midnight. Oscar arrived late. His wristwatch was malfunctioning. He’d been running a mild fever for days, and the contact heat had caused the watch’s mousebrain works to run fast. Oscar had been forced to reset his watch with its sunlight timer, but he had somehow botched it; his watch was jet-lagged now. He was running late, and it took far more effort than he had expected to climb to the roof of the Collaboratory. He’d never before been on the outside armor of the lab. In the sullen dark of a February night, the structure’s outer boundary was windy and intimidating, a wearying physical trial of endless steps and hand rungs.
Winded and trembling, he finally arrived on the starry roof of the Collaboratory, but the best window of weather opportunity was already gone. Kevin, wisely, had already launched himself. With the help of a bored Moderator ground crew, Oscar strapped into his flimsy craft, and left as soon as he could.
The first hour went rather well. Then he was caught by a Greenhouse storm front boiling off the sullen Gulf of Mexico. He was blown all the way to Arkansas. Cannily reading thousands of Doppler radars, the smart and horribly cheap little vehicle darted sickeningly up and down through dozens of local thermals and wind shears, stubbornly routing itself toward its destination with the dumb persistence of a network packet. Blistered by the chafing of his harness, Oscar finally passed out, lolling in the aircraft’s grip like a sack of turnips.
The pilot’s lack of consciousness made no difference to the nomad machine. At dawn, Oscar found himself fluttering over the rainy swamp of the Bayou Teche.
The Bayou Teche was a hundred and thirty miles long. This quiet oxbow had once formed the main channel of the Mississippi River, some three thousand years in the past. During one brief and intensely catastrophic twenty-first-century spring, the Bayou Teche, to the alarm and horror of everyone, had once again become the main channel of the Mississippi River. The savage Greenhouse deluge had carried all before it, briskly disposing of floodproof concrete levees, shady, moss-strewn live oaks, glamorous antebellum plantation homes, rust-eaten sugar mills, dead oil rigs, and everything else in its path. The flood had ravaged the cities of Breaux Bridge, St. Martinville, and New Iberia.
The Teche had always been a world of its own, a swampy biome distinct and separate from the Mississippi proper and the rice-growing plains to the west. The destruction of its roads and bridges, and the consequent enormous growth of weedy swamp and marsh, had once again returned the Teche to eerie, sodden quietude. The bayou was now one of the wildest locales in North America—not because it had been conserved from development, but because its development had been obliterated.
On his fluttering way down, Oscar took quick note of Fontenot’s new surroundings. The ex-fed had chosen to dwell in a scattered backwoods village of metal trailer homes, which were jacked up onto concrete-block columns and surrounded by outhouses and cheap fuel-cell generators. It was a Southern-Gothic slum for freshwater fishermen, a watery maze of wooden docks, lily pads, flat-prowed straw-and-plastic bass boats. In the pink light of early morning, the bayou’s reedy waters were a lush murky green.
Oscar arrived with impressive pinpoint accuracy—right onto the sloping roof of Fontenot’s wooden shack. He swiftly tumbled from the building, falling to earth with an ankle-cracking bang. The now brain-dead aircraft shuddered violently in the morning breeze, tossing Oscar like a bug.
Luckily Fontenot limped quickly from his shack, and helped Oscar subdue his machine. After much cursing and a finger-pinching struggle, they finally had Oscar unbuckled and freed. They managed to fold and spindle the aircraft down to the size of a large canoe.
“So it really is you,” Fontenot told him, puffing with exertion. He solemnly thumped Oscar’s padded shoulder. “Where’d you get that goofy helmet? You really look like hell.”
“Yeah. Have you seen my bodyguard? He was supposed to be here earlier.”
“Come on inside,” Fontenot said. Fontenot was not a man for metal trailer homes. His shack was an authentic wooden one, a broken-backed structure of cedar and board-and-batten, with gray wooden shingles on top, and spiderwebbed monster pilings beneath. The old shack had been dragged to the water’s edge, and reassembled on-site without much professional care. The door squealed and shuddered off its jamb as it opened. Inside, the crack-shot wooden floors dipped visibly.
Fontenot’s bare wooden parlor had rattan furniture, a large stout hammock, a tiny fuel-cell icebox, and an impressive wall-mounted arsenal of top-of-the-line fishing
equipment. Fontenot’s fishing gear was chained to the shack’s back wall, and arranged with obsessive military neatness in locked plywood rifle cabinets. The nearest cabinet boasted a bright menagerie of artificial lures: battery-powered wrigglers, ultrasonic flashers, spinning spoons, pheromone-leaking jellyworms.
“Just a sec,” said Fontenot, thumping and squeaking into a cramped back room. Oscar had time to notice a well-thumbed Bible and an impressive litter of beer empties. Then Fontenot reappeared, hauling Kevin with one hand beneath his armpit. Kevin had been liberally bound and gagged with duct tape.
“You know this character?” Fontenot demanded.
“Yeah. That’s my new bodyguard.”
Fontenot dropped Kevin onto the rattan couch, which cracked loudly under his weight. “Look. I also know this kid. I knew his dad. Dad used to run systems for right-wing militia. Heavily armed white guys, with rigid stares and bad haircuts. If you’re hiring this Hamilton boy as security, you must have lost your mind.”
“I’m not exactly ‘hiring him,’ Jules. Technically speaking, he’s a federal employee. And he’s not just my own personal security. He’s the security for an entire federal installation.”
Fontenot reached into a pocket of his mud-stained overalls, producing a fisherman’s pocketknife. “I don’t even wanna know. I just don’t care! It’s not my problem anymore.” He sliced through the duct tape and peeled Kevin free, finally ripping the tape from his mouth with a single jerk. “Sorry, kid,” he muttered. “I guess I should have believed you.”
“No problem!” Kevin said gallantly, rubbing his gummy wrists and showing a great deal of eye-white. “Happens all the time!”
“I’m all outta practice at this,” Fontenot said. “It’s the quiet life out here, I’m out of touch. You boys want some breakfast?”
“Excellent idea,” Oscar said. A peaceful communal meal was just what they needed. Behind his pie-eating grin, Kevin was clearly measuring Fontenot for a lethal knife thrust to the kidneys.
“Some boudin,” Fontenot asserted, retreating to a meager gas-fired camp stove in the corner. “Some aigs and ershters.” Oscar watched Fontenot thoughtfully as the old man set about his cooking work, weary and chagrined. After a moment, he had it. Fontenot was in physical recovery from being a fed and a cop. The curse of spook work was finally leaving Fontenot, loosing its grip on his flesh like a departing heroin addiction. But with the icy grip of that long discipline off his bones, there just wasn’t a lot left to Jules Fontenot. He was a one-legged Louisiana backwoods fisherman, strangely aged before his time.
The cabin filled with the acrid stench of frying pepper sauce. Oscar’s nose, always sensitive now, began to run. He glanced at Kevin, who was sullenly picking shreds of duct tape from his wrists.
“Jules, how’s the fishing in your bayou here?”
“It’s paradise!” Fontenot said. “Those big lunkers really love the drowned subdivisions down in Breaux Bridge. Your lunker, that’s a bottom-feeder that appreciates some structure in the habitat.”
“I don’t think I know that species, ‘lunker.’”
“Oh, the local state fish-and-game people built ’em years ago. The floods, and the poisonings and such, wiped out the local game fish. The Teche was getting bad algae blooms, almost as bad as that giant Dead Spot in the Gulf. So, they cobbled together these vacuum-cleaner fish. Big old channel catfish with tilapia genes. Them lunkers get big, bro. Damn big. I mean to say, four hundred pounds with eyes like baseballs. See, lunkers are sterile. Lunkers do nothin’ but eat and grow. While the lab boys were messing with their DNA, they kinda goosed the growth hormones. Now some of those babies are fifteen years old.”
“That seems like a very daring piece of biological engineering.”
“Oh, you don’t know Green Huey. That’s not the half of it. Huey’s a very active boy on environmental issues. Louisiana’s a whole different world now.”
Fontenot brought them breakfast: oyster omelets and eerie sausages made of congealed rice. The food was impossibly hot—far beyond merely spicy. He’d slathered on pepper as if it were the staff of life.
“That lunker business was an emergency measure. But it worked real good. Emergency all over. This bayou would be a sewer otherwise, but now, the bass are coming back. They’re working on the water hyacinth, they’ve brought back some black bear and even cougar. It’s not ever gonna be natural, but it’s gonna be real doable. You boys want some more coffee?”
“Thanks,” Oscar said. He’d thoughtfully poured his first chicory-tainted cup through a gaping crack in the floorboards. “I have to confess, Jules, I’ve been worried about you, living here alone in the heart of Huey country. I was afraid that he might have found you here, and harassed you. For political reasons, you know, because of your time with the Senator.”
“Oh, that. Yeah,” Fontenot said, chewing steadily. “I got a couple of those little state militia punks comin’ round to ‘debrief’ me. I showed ’em my federal-issue Heckler and Koch, and told ’em I’d empty a clip on their sorry punk asses if I ever saw ’em near my property again. That pretty much took care o’ that.”
“Well then,” Oscar said, tactfully disturbing his omelet with a fork.
“Y’know what I think?” said Fontenot. Fontenot had never been so garrulous before, but it was clear to Oscar that, in his retirement, the old man was desperately lonely. “People are different nowadays. They buffalo way too easy, they lost their starch somehow. It has something to do with that sperm-count crash, all those pesticide hormone poisonings. You get these combinations of pollutants, all these yuppie flus and allergies…”
Oscar and Kevin exchanged a quick glance. They had no idea what the old man was talking about.
“Americans don’t live off the land anymore. They don’t know what we’ve done to our great outdoors. They don’t know how pretty it used to be around here, before they paved it all over and poisoned it. A million wildflowers and all kinda little plants and bugs that had been living here a jillion years…Man, when I was a kid you could still fish for marlin. Marlin! People these days don’t even know what a marlin was.”
The door opened, without a knock. A middle-aged black woman appeared, toting a net bag full of canned goods. She wore rubber sandals, a huge cotton skirt, a tropical-flowered blouse. Her head was wrapped in a kerchief. She barged into Fontenot’s home, took sudden note of Kevin and Oscar, and began chattering in Creole French.
“This is Clotile,” Fontenot said. “She’s my housekeeper.” He stood up and began sheepishly gathering dead beer cans, while talking in halting French.
Clotile gave Kevin and Oscar a resentful, dismissive glance, then began to lecture her limping boss.
“This was your security guy?” Kevin hissed at Oscar. “This broken-down old hick?”
“Yes. He was really good at it, too.” Oscar was fascinated by the interplay of Fontenot and Clotile. They were engaged in a racial, economic, gender minuet whose context was a closed book to him. Clearly, Clotile was one of the most important people in Fontenot’s life now. Fontenot really admired her; there was something about her that he deeply desired, and could never have again. Clotile felt sorry for him, and was willing to work for him, but she would never accept him. They were close enough to talk together, even joke with each other, but there was some tragic element in their relationship that would never, ever be put right. It was a poignant mini-drama, as distant to Oscar as a Kabuki play.
Oscar sensed that Fontenot’s credibility had been seriously damaged by their presence as his houseguests. Oscar examined his embroidered sleeves, his discarded gloves, his hairy flight helmet. An intense little moment of culture shock shot through him.
What a very strange world he was living in. What strange people: Kevin, Fontenot, Clotile—and himself, in his dashingly filthy disguise. Here they were, eating breakfast and cleaning house, while at the rim of their moral universe, the game had changed entirely. Pieces swam from center to periphery, periphery to center�
�pieces flew right off the board. He’d eaten so many breakfasts with Fontenot, in the past life, back in Boston. Every day a working breakfast, watching news clips, planning campaign strategy, choosing the cantaloupe. All light-years behind him now.
Clotile forged forth sturdily and snatched the plates away from Kevin and Oscar. “I hate to be underfoot here when your housekeeper’s so busy,” Oscar said mildly. “Maybe we should have a little stroll outside, and discuss the reason for our trip here.”
“Good idea,” said Fontenot. “Sure. You boys come on out.”
They followed Fontenot out his squeaking front door and down the warped wooden steps. “They’re such good people here,” Fontenot insisted, glancing warily back over his shoulder. “They’re so real.”
“I’m glad you’re on good terms with your neighbors.”
Fontenot nodded solemnly. “I go to Mass. The local folks got a little church up the way. I read the Good Book these days…Never had time for it before, but I want the things that matter now. The real things.”
Oscar said nothing. He was not religious, but he’d always been impressed by Judeo-Christianity’s long political track record. “Tell us about this Haitian enclave, Jules.”
“Tell you? Hell, telling you’s no use. We’ll just go there. We’ll take my huvvy.”
Distraction Page 42