‘Maybe,’ said Donnell.
Mr Brisbeau blew on his coffee and sipped. He laughed. ‘I jus’ tinkin’ ‘bout my grand-mere. She take wan look at you and she say, “Mon Dieu! The black Wan!” But I know the Black Wan he don’t come round the bayou no more. He’s gone long before my time.’ He squinted at Donnell, as if trying to pierce his disguise, and shook his head in perplexity; then he stood and slapped his hip. ‘You tired! Help me wit these furs and we fix you some pallets.’
The back room was unfurnished, but they arranged two piles of furs on the floor, and to Jocundra, who was suddenly exhausted, they looked like black pools of sleep in which she could drown.
‘In the mornin’,’ said Mr Brisbeau, ‘I got business wit ol’ man Bivalaqua over in Silver Meadow. But there’s food, drink, and me I’ll be back tomorrow night.’
He glanced quizzically at Jocundra and beckoned her to follow him into the front room. He closed the door behind them.
‘Wan time I get crazy wit you,’ he said, ‘and twelve years it takes to forgive? Don’t you know, me, I’m just drunk. You my petit zozo.’ He held out his arms to her.
His entire attitude expressed regret, but the lines of his face were so accustomed to smiling that even his despondency was touched with good humor. Jocundra had the perception of him she had had as a child, of a tribal spirit come to visit and tell her stories. She entered his embrace, smelling his familiar scent of bourbon and sweat and homemade soap. His shoulder blades were as sharp and hard as cypress knees.
‘You was my fav’rite of all the kids,’ he said. ‘It lak to break my heart you leavin’. But I reckon that’s how a heart gets along from one day to the nex’. By breakin’ and breakin’.’
Jocundra lay on her side, waking slowly, watching out the window as gray clouds lowered against a picket line of cypresses and scrub pine. At last she got up and smoothed her rumpled blouse, wishing they had not left the overnight bag in Salt Harvest. She heard a rummaging in the front room. Donnell was sitting beside one of the junkpiles, his sunglasses pushed up on to his head.
‘Morning,’ she mumbled, and went out back to the pump. A few raindrops hollowed conical depressions in the sandy yard, and the sweet odors of rot, myrtle and water hyacinth mixed with the smell of rain. The roof of an old boathouse stuck up above the palmetto tops about fifty feet away; a car rattled on the gravel road which passed in front of the cabin, hidden by more palmettos and a honeysuckle thicket.
She had expected Donnell would want to discuss the events in Salt Harvest, but when she re-entered he insisted on showing her the things he had extracted from the junkpiles. An armadillo shell on which someone had painted a mushroom cloud, five-years-back issues of Madame Sonya’s Dream Book, and a chipped football helmet containing a human skull. ‘You suppose he found them together?’ he asked, deadpan, holding up the helmet. She laughed, picturing the ritual sacrifice of a losing quarterback.
‘What’s he do with this stuff?’ He flipped through one of the issues of the Dream Book.
‘He collects it.’ Jocundra lit the stove for coffee. ‘He’s kind of a primitive archaeologist, says he gets a clearer picture of the world from junk than he could any other way. Most people think he’s crazy, and I guess he is. He lost his son in the Asian War, and according to my father, that’s what started him drinking. He’d pin up photos of the president and target-shoot at them for hours.’
‘Something funny’s happening,’ said Donnell.
She glanced at him over her shoulder, surprised by his abrupt change of subject. ‘Last night, you mean?’
‘The last few days, but last night especially.’ He riffled the pages of the book. ‘When I picked this up earlier, I had no idea what it was, but then I had a whole raft of associations and memories. Stuff about palmists, seances, fortune-tellers. That’s how my memory has always worked. But lately I’ve been comparing everything I see to something else, something I can’t quite put my finger on. It won’t come clear.’ Discouraged, he tossed the book onto a junkpile, dislodging a toy truck. ‘I guess I should tell you about last night.’
His account took the better part of two cups of coffee, and after mulling it over, Jocundra said. ‘You have to consider this in light of the fact that your thrust has been to supply yourself with a past, and that your old memories have been proved false. You remember my telling you about the gros bon ange? Back at the motel?’
‘Yeah. The soul.’
‘Well, you began to see the black figures almost immediately after I told you about them. It’s possible you’ve started to construct another past from materials I’ve exposed to you. But,’ she added, seeing his distress, ‘you’re right. It’s not important to speculate about the reality of what you see. Obviously some of it’s real, and we have to get busy understanding it. I’ll ask Mr Brisbeau to pick up some physics texts.’ She plucked at her blouse. ‘And some clothes.’
‘Oh, yeah. Here.’ He reached behind his packing crate. ‘It might not fit, but it’s clean.’ He pulled forth a dress, a very old, dowdy dress of blue rayon with a design of white camellias. ‘Try it on,’ he suggested.
In the back room, Jocundra removed her jeans and blouse, and then, because it was so sweaty, her bra. The dress had been the property of someone shorter and more buxom. It was flimsy and musty-smelling, and she linked the mustiness with all the women she had known who had been habituated to such dresses. Her mother, musty aunts and neighbor ladies sporting hats adorned with plastic berries, looking as if they had dropped in from the 1930s. The skirt ended above her knees, the bodice hung slack, and the worn, silky material irritated her nipples.
‘I must look awful,’ she said, coming out of the back room, embarrassed by Donnell’s stare.
He cleared his throat. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s fine.’
To cover her embarrassment, she pretended interest in the camellia pattern. Striations of blue showed through the white of the petals; misprintings. But they had the effect of veins showing through pale, lustrous skin. The blossoms had been rendered with exaggerated voluptuousness, each curve and convolution implying the depth and softness of flesh, as if she were gazing at the throat of a seductively beautiful animal.
Throughout the morning and into the afternoon, they puzzled over the ledger. According to Magnusson, if the Ezawa bacterium existed in the southern hemisphere it would tend to be south-seeking, following the direction of the geomagnetic field in those regions; but it would -like its northern counterpart - migrate downward. However, if a south-seeking bacterium could be transported to the north, then it would migrate upward. It seemed evident to her that a north-seeking bacterium could be induced to become south-seeking by exposure to brief, intense pulses of a magnetic field directed opposite to the ambient field, thereby reversing the magnetic dipolar movement of the magnetosome chain. If necessary the bacterium’s north-seeking orientation could be restored by a second pulse delivered anti-parallel to the first. Thus the colony could be steered back and forth between areas of stimulus and deprivation in the brain and its size controlled. Of course the engineering would be a problem, but given the accuracy of Magnusson’s data, the basic scenario made sense.
The rain sprinkled intermittently, but by midafternoon the sun was beginning to break through. They walked down to the tributary in back of the cabin, a narrow serpent of lily-pad-choked water that wriggled off into the swamp. Droplets showered from the palmetto fronds when they brushed against them. The sun made everything steamy, and to escape the heat they went into the boathouse, a skeletal old ruin with half its roof missing. Spiders scuttling, beetles, empty wasp nests. The grain of the gray boards was as sharply etched as printed circuits. A single oar lay along one wall, its blade sheathed in spiderweb, and Mr Brisbeau’s pirogue drifted among the lily pads at the end of a rotting rope. They sat on the edge of the planking and dangled their feet, talking idly, skirting sensitive topics. He had rarely been so open with her; he seemed happy, swinging his legs, telling her about dreams he’d had, about the new story he had begun before leaving Shadows.