The Thanatos Syndrome

  “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.

  Now it’s empty and quiet as Lake Champlain: old canny Natty Bumppo facing me in the stern and behind me Vergil Bon, the sure-enough Hawkeye of this age, one foot in the past with his old quadroon beauty and wisdom, yet smart as Georgia Tech; the other foot in the future, a creature of the nuclear age, the best of black and white. But is he? Good as he is, the best of black or white, does he know which he is? And who am I? the last of the Mohicans? the fag end of the English Catholics here, queer birds indeed in these parts.

  It feels good pulling the oars, the sun on my back.

  The uncle thinks he’s going fishing. He’s telling me about his rig.

  “You see this little Omega spinning reel?”

  “Looks like a toy.”

  “That’s right! That’s why it’s light enough to cast a fly. This little sucker cost me two hundred dollars. You see this?” Tied to the line is a crude-looking wet fly weighted with a single shot.

  “What kind of a fly is that?”

  “That’s a no-name fly. You want one? I’ll make you one. I showed Verge, his daddy, this, and he said you can’t cast a fly on spinning tackle and I s
aid the shit you can’t. So I thowed it out like this—but it’s got to be this light Omega reel—and he said, Well, I be dog. He thought he knew it all about fishing.” Vergil Junior behind me is silent. The uncle and Vergil Senior were fishing companions. “You see that gum tree there that’s fallen down in the water?”

  “I see it.”

  “You know what’s up under there, don’t you?”

  “Sac au lait.”

  “You right! White perch. You know what you do, you take and hold us off with a paddle about this far out, circle the tree, and I thow this little sucker right to the edge of the leaves and let it sink. It never misses. I ain’t had nobody to do that since his daddy got sick. We’d take turns holding each other off just right. You got to have another man with the paddle. You talk about sac au lait! But you got to have two. I mean shit, it’s hard to do it by yourself. You want to hold up here a little bit and let me hold you off and you try this little sucker?”

  “He goes out fishing by himself now,” says Vergil behind me. “Ever’ day.”

  The uncle’s only sorrow these days, I see, is that he has no one to go hunting and fishing with.

  “We can’t stop now, Uncle. Maybe later. I’d like to go later. Right now I want you to show me that substation.”

  “Shitfire,” says the uncle, disappointed, “and save matches. What in hail for?”

  “I just want to see it. It’s important.”

  “All right,” says the uncle, pretending to be grudging but in fact glad enough to be going anywhere with anybody. “Just go on up the lake to the narrows.”

  A breeze springs up. The lake sparkles. It’s good to pull the heavy skiff against the wavelets. The lake narrows. I watch the uncle for directions, and presently we duck and slide under the fence which used to cross dry land before the old blind end of the lake, fed by the rainy years, began to creep back toward the river. The river is not as low as we thought. The rise from the northern rains has begun.

  The uncle goes on about his fishing with Vergil Senior in the old days and the great hunts. He decides to get irritated with Vergil Junior, who, however, has said nothing.

  “I mean, shit,” says the uncle. “I can’t even get some folks to go woodcock hunting with me, even when they the one going to get the woodcock to take to their daddy, and I’m telling you it’s the best eating of all, and right here in Tunica Island is the center of all the woodcock in the world. He don’t even like to eat woodcock after we taken him with us. You know why? You remember, Vergil, when you was little I showed you the woodcock—I had just shot him and he had worms coming out of his mouth—they do that—the woodcock is not wormy, he’s been eating worms, he’s full of worms, they swallow worms whole, and when you shoot them, hell, the worms going to come out, why not. Well, this boy takes one look at the worms coming out of the woodcock and ain’t ever touched a woodcock since. Ain’t that right, Vergil?” There’s an edge in the uncle’s voice which embarrasses me.

  But Vergil is not offended. “That’s right, Mist’ Hugh.” I can tell he’s smiling behind me.

  “The thing about a woodcock is, all you got to do is just graze him with one little bird shot and he’ll fall down dead— just brush him, like”—the uncle shows us, brushing one hand lightly against the other—“and that sapsucker will fall down dead.” The uncle frowns and decides to get irritated with Vergil again. He becomes more irritated. “Some folks,” he tells me, as if Vergil can’t hear, “get their nose in a book and they think they stuff on a stick. Ain’t that right, Tom?”

  Past the fence, for some reason we fall silent. I look around. There is no one and nothing to see except the vast looming geometry of the cooling tower and a bass boat uplake and across, the fishermen featureless except for their long-billed orange caps.

  “Pull in right here at this towhead.”

  “Let’s get this thing out of sight,” I tell them. We pull the skiff onto a sandbar under the willows.

  “Who you hiding from?” asks the uncle.

  “I don’t rightly know.”

  “Ain’t nobody going to bother you at this end of the island. I ain’t ever seen a guard but once and he was a fellow I knew. He knew I was after woodcock.”

  “I wish you had your shotgun now.”

  “Shit, they out of season, Tom. You want to get me in trouble?”

  Just beyond the willows we hit an old jeep trail, one of the many that crisscross the island. It doesn’t look recently used. We’re trespassing. I’m thinking of patrols. Vergil hangs back, walking head down, hands in pockets. Perhaps he is offended by the uncle, after all.

  The uncle looks back and moves close to tell me something. He is still angry with Vergil. His feelings are hurt because neither Vergil nor his father will go fishing with him anymore. “Do you know what you get when you cross a nigger with a groundhog?” He lowers his voice, but maybe not enough, I think, for Vergil not to overhear.

  “No.”

  “Six more weeks of basketball.” He gives me an elbow. Get it?”

  “Yes. Uncle, do you know where we’re going?”

  “Sho I know. I know ever’ damn foot of this island.”

  We cross other jeep trails, one with fresh tire tracks.

  Presently the uncle stops. We’re at another fence, an enclosure. In the middle of the weeds there is a nondescript structure, a concrete cube fitted with a hatch on top like a diving bell.

  “There’s a sign here,” I tell Vergil. Fixed to the gate is a small metal placard, the standard NRC sign, warning: RADIATION DANGER KEEP OUT.

  “I never noticed that,” says the uncle.

  We gaze. There is nothing to see, less than nothing. It is the sort of thing, a public-service-utility-government fenced-off sort of thing to which ordinarily and of its very nature one pays not the slightest attention.

  “This is what you wanted to see?” asks the uncle, his head slanted ironically, a dark blade. We could be fishing for sac au lait.

  “Two things,” says Vergil presently in a matter-of-fact voice. “You can see the pipeline in both directions, toward the tower and toward the intake, by the faint yellowing. See?”

  “Yes.”

  “You see the hatch?”

  “Yes.”

  “I judge the pump is waterproofed against high water, which can get up to six feet here.”

  “I see.”

  “I don’t see any nipples or caps like over at the intake.”

  “Nipples? Caps?”

  “You didn’t notice it?”

  “No, I didn’t, Vergil.”

  “Next to the intake. A three-inch fiberglass nipple stubbed off and capped. Not something you would notice unless you were looking for it.”

  “You mean there was a pipe sticking out of the ground?”

  “Yes. Probably with a valve just below ground, coming off a T. As if they might be taking samples from whatever is in the pipe.”

  “Shit, let’s go,” says the uncle.

  “Right,” I say, following them down the trail, thinking of nothing in particular. “Right.”

  “We got time to catch a mess of sac au lait before dinner,” says the uncle.

  “No, we haven’t,” says Vergil, pulling up short.

  Blocking the jeep trail are two men. I recognize the red fishing caps.

  But they’re not fishermen. They’re police, uniformed in brown, green-yoked shirts. Each carries a holstered revolver. I recognize the six-pointed star of the shoulder patch. They’re parish police, sheriff’s deputies. One is youngish, slim and crewcut. The other is even younger, but bolder and fatter. Both are wooden-faced. I am relieved. What did I expect, some secret nuclear police?

  “You fellows looking for us?” I say, smiling.

  They nod, not smiling. The younger, husky one has his hand on the holster strap.

  “Could we see some identification, please,” says the older, wirier one.

  Vergil and I reach for our wallets, hand them over.

  “Shit, I did
n’t bring anything but my fishing license. We were going fishing. Will this do?”

  The older one looks at it, doesn’t take it. “What were you doing here?”

  “I wanted to show them the best place in the parish for woodcock,” says the uncle. “But we ain’t hunting! Y’all from Wildlife and Fisheries? The doctor here is a birdwatcher.”

  “You gentlemen better come with us,” says the older cop.

  “What for?” asks the uncle.

  “What’s the charge, Officer?” I ask.

  “A fellow escaped from Angola last night,” says young and stocky.

  “Do you think it’s one of us?” asks the indignant uncle.

  “These two fellows have identification,” says old and wiry.

  “Jesus Christ, are you fellows telling me you think I escaped from Angola?” asks the uncle. “Wait a minute. Y’all from the sheriff’s office in Clinton, ain’t you? Wait a minute. Don’t I know you?” he says to the younger. “Ain’t you Artois Hebert’s boy?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then you know me. Everybody knows me. Hugh Bob Lipscomb. Ask Sheriff Sharp. I been knowing Cooter Sharp.” The uncle holds out his hand.

  But the older deputy says only, “Let’s go,” and leads the way. The younger falls in behind us.

  “There’s something funny about this,” says the uncle to me. “Those guys are from the sheriff’s office.”

  “I know. Shut up.”

  “They’re not NRC guards or federals! They didn’t even mention trespassing!”

  “I know. Shut up.”

  The lead deputy kicks up a woodcock. It squeals and goes caroming off in its nutty corkscrew flight, eyes in the back of its head. Once, the uncle told me why woodcock have eyes in the back of the head: “So they can stick that long beak, head and all, all the way down in the wet ground—and still see you.”

  “Let’s go to Clinton,” says the older deputy.

  8. BOB COMEAUX SPRINGS US from jail almost before we’re booked. Who called him? Nobody, he explains, a routine telex which flags him down whenever one of his federal parolees runs afoul of the law. Aren’t you glad I’m your parole officer? he asks amiably, shaking hands all around and even giving me a medical-fraternal hug.