The water was so wide and still that it seemed almost a lake. It reminded Jason of something, but he couldn’t remember what.
Jason had drowsed through the night, half-conscious of the movement of the water, the trees shivering in aftershocks, the slow grind of pain in his back. By morning he had stiffened to the point where he could barely move. His face hurt. His throat was swollen from his near-strangulation of two days ago, and he could only relieve the sharp pain in his trachea by tilting his head to the left. He could breathe only in short little pants, like a winded dog. He suspected he now bore a strong resemblance to the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
But Arlette was alive. There were cuts on her face, but she was otherwise unharmed. She sat on the foredeck opposite him, her legs dangling into the cockpit. In her hands she cradled her grandfather’s watch, something she’d seen dangling across the chest of the red-haired deputy when he’d threatened her. Just seeing the watch had so overwhelmed her that she hadn’t been able to say a word in answer to the deputy’s questions.
Jason rested one hand on her bare knee. She smiled at him, that close-lipped Mona Lisa smile. When he looked at her, his pain faded beneath a warm surge of pleasure.
“I think we passed it,” Bubba said. “I think Vicksburg is way the hell behind us.” He had replaced Manon at the controls of the boat. He had the AAA map of Louisiana propped in his lap, for all the world as if he was taking a car out for a Sunday outing.
He was a small, wizened man with skin parched and wrinkled as a raisin. He had a little mustache and knobby knuckles and narrow, peglike tobacco-stained teeth.
“What’s the next town, then?” Manon asked.
“Natchez. Thirty, forty mile, I guess.” His face broke into a grin. “Big ol’ gambling boat down there. I won two hundred dollar there, one time.”
“And if we turn around and head back to Vicksburg?” Manon asked.
“Same distance, maybe a little less. Best we go with the current, I reckon.” Jason couldn’t work up much interest in the matter one way or another. He was just glad to be out of Spottswood Parish, glad to be on the river again. The river had become his home, his fate, the thing that nourished him. The longer he and Arlette stayed on the boat, the farther they could get from the forces that would separate them. If only it weren’t for Nick—if only he knew that Nick was safe—he would happily follow the river forever.
But now the river was strange, limpid and stagnant and steel-gray in the morning sun. It reminded him of something, but he couldn’t think what.
The boat swayed as Bubba steered clear of a raft of lumber. Gulls perched in the twisted roots. And then Jason remembered where he’d seen a river like this before. “Oh, no,” he said. Manon looked at him in concern. “What is it, honey?”
Jason straightened, clenched his teeth against the pain. “We’re in a, a reservoir,” he said. “The river’s all dammed up with crap. With—” He gasped in air, pointed at the raft of floating trees. “With that,” he said. The pain in his throat was intense and he tilted his lead to the left. “Nick and I ran into something like this upstream,” he said. “We don’t want to get caught in that dam, and we don’t want to be around when it breaks. You’re going to see rapids like you’ve never imagined, with timber instead of rocks.” Bubba frowned. “Twelve year on the river,” he said, “I never heard of nothing like that. Not on a river big as this one.”
“You’ve never been in an earthquake this big before, either,” Jason said.
“I don’t know,” Bubba said, and scratched his chin. “There ain’t much current, that’s for sure.” Jason looked up at Arlette. “Can you get my scope?” he said. “Look ahead and see if you can find anything ahead.”
Arlette put Gros-Papa’s watch in her pocket, then took the battered red Astroscan from one of the boat’s compartments and set it on the foredeck. Bubba throttled the outboard down, the boat settling onto its bow wave until the bass boat was barely making headway. Arlette put her eye to the scope. “It’s upside-down,” she said.
“Just look at the horizon,” Jason said. “Tell me what you see.” Arlette adjusted the scope the wrong way, overcorrected, then finally found the horizon. “The river bends around to the left, I can’t see much,” she said. “But what I can see is white. Like fog or something.”
“Mist,” Jason croaked. He gulped a shallow breath. “That’s from water going over the falls.” Arlette nudged the scope, panning along the horizon. Then she gave a start. “There’s a boat!” she cried.
“A big boat right ahead of us!”
Bubba grinned, showing his yellow peg teeth. “Now that’s the best news I heard in three weeks.” He pushed the throttle forward. Jason winced at a jolt of pain and turned again to hang over the port side of the cockpit. The bow planed upward, and Arlette put the cap on the telescope to keep spray from spattering the lens, then returned the Astroscan to the nearest of the boat’s coolers. Delight danced in her eyes.
“It’s over!” she cried. “It’s over!”
Jason didn’t know whether he was pleased by this prospect or not.
Debris clattered on the hull, then was left bouncing in the wake. Rafts of logs were overtaken and left astern. Bubba leaned out over the starboard side, frowned at what he saw ahead.
“That’s not a boat,” he said. “That’s a barge.” He reached a hand to the throttle to lower his speed, then hesitated. “Hey, they’s people on board!” he said. “They must have lost their tow in that quake last night.” Jason straightened again, biting back the pain, and peered over the bows. A slab-walled barge was clearly visible downstream, broadside to the current. He could barely make out two people on board, both waving frantically.
“Well,” Bubba said. “At least they can tell us where the hell we are.” He throttled down as the bass boat neared the barge. It was loaded with what looked like huge steel bottles, and mooring hawsers trailed fore and aft.
As the noise of the outboard lessened and the bow dropped into the water, Jason heard a rumbling sound ahead and looked to see the horizon ahead filled with white mist.
“Look!” Jason said, pointing, and he hissed with pain at his own abrupt gesture. “Mist from the falls!” he panted. “There’s a dam ahead! We’ve got to get those people off the barge before it goes over the dam!” Bubba looked startled. He maneuvered Retired and Gone Fishin’ alongside the rust-streaked flank of the barge, looked up at the two hard-hatted men peering over the gunwale.
White men, Jason thought. The pale faces looked strange after his time in the camp.
“Get in, you fellas,” Bubba said. “Before the barge goes into them rapids.”
“We can’t!” one of the men said. “You’ve got to tow us clear!” Bubba made a scornful sound, spread both hands to indicate the bass boat. “This look like a towboat to you? We got a fifty-horse Johnson here.”
“This barge is full of nuclear waste.” the man answered. “If it goes over the falls, it’ll poison the river for twenty years.”
“You’ve got to tow us clear!” the other man said.
Bubba looked bewildered. “Ain’t gonna happen, man! Look at this little boat! How many tons cargo you got there?”
“It doesn’t matter!” the first man screamed. “You’ve got to tow us out of here!” Nuclear waste, Jason thought. What he’d seen already on the river was bad enough, the rafts of dead birds, the terror of the harbor of Memphis and the gassed-out city of Helena, but this… poison the river for twenty years.