“But somebody has to do this!” Lucy accuses him. Vergil cuts his eyes, passes her to me.
“That’s right, Lucy. Somebody designed it and built it.”
We think it over. Now Lucy has the import.
“You mean to tell me,” says Lucy in a measured voice, tapping pencil on table with each word, “that somebody has deliberately diverted heavy sodium from here, through a pipe, through the Tunica Swamp here, to put it in the water supply at Ratliff number one here?”
Vergil gazes at the map as if the answer were there.
“That’s what we mean to tell you, Lucy.”
“Does that mean it is something done officially, with NRC approval, perhaps by NRC, or could someone have done it surreptitiously?”
Lucy looks at me. I look at Vergil. Vergil shrugs.
Lucy puts her head down, raises a finger. “We’re talking about somebody official, right? Nobody could have slipped in there and done it.” We both shrug.
“Well, I’ll be goddamned.”
“Yes.”
“But why?”
“A good question.”
“Now wait,” says Lucy.
We wait for her.
“Assuming there is a pipe there, why is it leaking? Why the yellowing?”
I look at Vergil — he shrugs. “It don’t take much of a leak— especially if somebody was doing the plumbing in secret without routine pipe checks.”
Lucy is gazing at me. “We don’t know this,” she says at last. “We’re guessing.”
“That’s right.”
“We need more to go on, Tom, Vergil. Hard evidence. A piece of pipe. Let’s go back and look. But look for what?”
Vergil clears his throat. “We could check out the pumping station.”
We both look at him.
“Pumping station?” I say.
“Right here.” He puts the point of the pencil on the stippled green of the Tunica Swamp between the tower and the intake.
“Pumping station?” says Lucy. “What for?”
Vergil is almost apologetic. “Well, your liquid here is not going to run by gravity upriver to your intake here.”
“It’s not going to run by gravity upriver,” Lucy tells me.
“That’s right, Lucy.”
“I don’t believe it. Who would put a pumping station there?”
Vergil smiles for the first time. “Ask him,” he says, nodding to the window. There’s the uncle, trudging across the overgrown yard, headed for the woods, down shoulder angled forward leading the way, the pointer at his heels. Vergil, smiling and good-humored, has allowed himself to lapse into local freejack talk. “He the one showed it to me. We went hunting birds last Christmas, you remember, Miss Lucy?”
“I remember,” says Lucy absently. “We still got some of those quail frozen. We had some this morning.”
“Mist’ Hugh think it’s an electric substation. I didn’t say nothing. But there no wires except a little line to run the pump, no insulators. No signs, except a radioactive warning. I told him it is not a substation. But you not going to tell Mist’ Hugh anything.”
“There is something I don’t understand,” I tell Vergil.
“What’s that, Doc-tor?” He almost said Doc.
“You say you and the uncle went quail hunting there.”
“Yes, suh. My daddy evermore love quail and my mamma can evermore cook them, idn’t that right, Miss Lucy?”
Lucy nods absently.
“Mist’ Hugh, he some kind of hunter. A dead shot. I’ve seen him shoot two birds crossing with one shot. He and old Maggie.” Vergil laughs.
We can see Maggie’s tail stiff and high moving through the Johnson grass like a periscope.
“He loan me his automatic and kept his old double-barreled.12 and got more birds than I did. The reason we went to the island was to get woodcock. He claims they like it there, but we didn’t see any. He say he can tell by the way Maggie points whether it’s birds or woodcock.”
“How did you get in there?”
“How you mean?”
“I mean whoever put in that pipeline and pumping station is not going to want people to see it — and there’s that eight-foot fence plus barbed wire up here next to the intake.”
“That’s right. But they don’t watch the other end of the island. Here.” He touches the lower blind end of Lake Mary. “The fence goes right across Lake Mary, but except at very high water you can ease right under it. They don’t care. Nobody bothered us.”
“How would you go about getting in there now?”
“Mist’ Hugh got an old skiff hid up in the willows by Bear Bayou here. You welcome to take it. He happy to take you. You just put into the lake here and ease up under the fence and put in here and walk half a mile on this old jeep trail, used to be a hog trail.”
“How about you?” I ask him.
“Me? I got to work. Ax Miss Lucy.”
“Ya’ll three go,” says Lucy testily. “I’ll get Uncle Hugh to be the guide. You two take a look and see if you can figure out what in the hell is going on.”
“Mist’ Hugh be happy,” says Vergil, laughing.
Lucy can’t or won’t go. She has to collect her thoughts — this is a different ball game; do you mean somebody is doing this on purpose? This calls for different queries, a different epidemiology.
“Tom,” she says, tapping her teeth, “I’m looking for effects, symptoms, a correlation between high Na-24 levels and the attendant symptoms. What are you looking for?”
“Actually it would be the abatement of symptoms — of such peculiarly human symptoms as anxiety, depression, stress, insomnia, suicidal tendencies, chemical dependence. Think of it as a regression from a stressful human existence to a peaceable animal existence.”
“That’s a big help. How in hell can I frame a question in those terms?”
“Try for cases of mindless violence — like a rogue elephant— like Mickey LaFaye shooting her horses — or a serial killer, the fellow who killed thirty Florida coeds. Theoretically the pharmacological effect of Na-24 on some cortices should produce cases of pure angelism-bestialism; that is, people who either consider themselves above conscience and the law or don’t care.”
“Hm. Then I might turn up something from criminal data banks.”
“Try it.”
She watches us, frowning thoughtfully from the great open front door of Pantherburn.
The uncle is delighted to take us. He’s got it into his head that it is some kind of fishing trip, for when we pile into my Caprice, he has a short casting rod with him.
Maggie thinks it’s a hunt and wants to go, nudges her iron head into my crotch, but is not allowed.
We take the Angola road south and at the uncle’s direction two or three turns onto gravel roads and dirt tracks, dip down out of the loess hills onto the flats of the Tunica Swamp. The willows here, often under water, still have dusty skirts from the dried mud of the spring rise.
The uncle leads the way through the willows, fishing pole trailing, right shoulder leading the way, creeper and potato vines singing and popping around his wide, sidling hips.
Bear Bayou is no more than a creek’s mouth. An old cypress skiff, hard and heavy but not waterlogged, is pulled up under bushes and, though even atop it, one can’t see it. Even so, it is locked. With surprising agility the uncle has the boat in the water in no time, hops in it, and works it around to a tiny beach.
“Uncle,” I tell him, “why don’t I row? I feel like it. You sit in the stern and tell me where to go.”
We’re in Lake Mary almost at once. What a beneficence, popping out of the bayou funky with anise and root rot into warm sunshine and open water. Believe it or not, this quiet, almost clear stretch of water, peaceable as a Wisconsin lake, was once Grand Mer, the great muddy sea where the river came booming down into a curve, carving a broad gulf from the mealy loess hills, the roiling water teeming with packets and showboats, loading cotton and indigo and offloading grand pianos, Sheraton furniture, Sheffield silver, Scots whiskey, port wine, cases of English fowling pieces, and even a book or two — Shakespeare, John Bunyan, and later Sir Walter Scott by the hundreds, Sir Walter in every plantation house as inevitable as the King James Bible and the Audubon prints; Sir Walter sending all these English-Americans to war against the Yankees as if they were the Catholic knights in Ivanhoe gone off to fight the infidel.