“The crystal expands the energy field of the water from one foot to ten feet,” his mother had explained, “and then you can drink the energy.”
He had never asked why he would want to drink energized water. The explanation would only have made his eyes glaze anyway.
He drank half the glass of water and refilled it, then returned the jug to the refrigerator. He took an orange from the refrigerator drawer, used a knife to cut it into quarters on the ancient zinc countertop, dropped the knife in the sink, and then—his stomach presumably radiating powerful metaphysical energy ten feet in all directions—he went up the narrow back stair from the kitchen to the second floor. He went into the corner room he thought of as his study, with his computer, desk, and skating posters, and flicked the switch on his computer’s power strip. The sound of his mother’s drumming came faintly through the closed windows. Jason sucked the juice from a slice of orange while he looked out the side window.
To the east, the dirt road dead-ended against the green wall of the levee, the huge dike that kept the Mississippi from flooding into their front yard. The river was normally invisible, hidden by the cottonwood thicket that stretched almost a half-mile from the levee to the riverbed, but the river was unusually full right now, with the spring melt and a long series of rains, and had flooded partway up the levee. Through the tangled trees, Jason could glimpse an occasional patch of gray water.
He had thought, when told he would be living near the Mississippi, that he would at least be able to watch the boats go by, maybe even big white stern wheelers like on television, but the combination of the impenetrable underbrush and the levee’s big green barricade had blocked any view from the flat ground. Even when he climbed onto the old Indian mound behind the house to see well over the levee, he could see water only here and there.
He turned his eyes to the north window, where the rain-soaked cotton field stretched on to a distant row of trees on the horizon. The cotton field was mostly brown earth marked by the wide rows of young green cotton, but here and there the soil was stained with circular pale blooms, as if God with a giant eyedropper had splashed white sand down onto the rich soil. Jason had sometimes wondered about those circular patches, but he hadn’t thought to ask anyone.
The land was so flat that the trees at the end of the cotton field seemed to mark the edge of the world, hedging it to the north just as the levee did to the east. The only thing he could see past the trees was the tall water tower in Cabells Mound, the town where he went to school. The modern tower, all smooth curved metal, looked like a toilet plunger stuck handle-first into the ground. He narrowed his eyes. He had plans for the water tower.
He wanted to climb the spiral metal stair that wound to the top, put on his skates, hop on the metal guard rail, and wheelbarrow down to the bottom: back skate in the royale position, crosswise on the rail, front skate cocked up so he was rolling only on its rear wheel.
He’d go down the spiral rail, fast, with centrifugal force, or whatever it was called, threatening to throw him off the tower at any second.
And then he wanted to do something cool and stylish on landing, like landing fakie, a 180-degree spin on the dismount to land moving backward; act as if zooming at high speed a couple hundred feet to the ground, right on the edge of wiping out the whole time, wasn’t anything, was just something he did every day, and required a little flourish at the end to make it special.
That, he thought, was Edge Living. Edge Living was something to aspire to. His mouth went dry at the thought of it.
The only question, of course, was whether he’d ever dare try it. He’d done the wheelbarrow on rails before, but the rails were all straight, not curved outward, and he’d never wheelbarrowed more than a single story.
Three metal-guitar chords thrummed from the computer. “I am at your service, master,” it said. Jason turned his attention to the screen. His friends in California, he thought, wouldn’t be back from school for another couple hours.
He’d browse the Web, he thought, and check out all the chat lines devoted to skating. For most of the eleven hundred years since the time of the Sun Man, the old Temple Mound had seen little change. The area remained a wilderness, lowlying and marshy and flooded every few years. The Mississippi flung itself left and right like a snake, carved a new course with every big flood. Every time it shifted course, it deposited enough silt over the next few years to raise the area through which it traveled. Then another flood would spread the river wide, and the river would find an area lower than that which it had built up, and carry its silty waters there.
Over the years the Mississippi had carried away the Sun Mound, the big mound where the Sun Man had built his long lodge and where he had lived with his family. Many of the smaller mounds had also been flooded away during inundations, and the rest had been plowed under by farmers, who saw no reason why some aboriginal structure should impede the size of their harvest.
Only the Temple Mound remained, the huge platform structure from which the Sun Man had witnessed the destruction of his people. The Mississippi had spared it, and the white men and their plows, daunted by its size, had spared it as well. The Cabell family, who had grown corn and wheat on the land for three generations, gamely holding on through deluge and drought and civil war, had built their home on one of the mound’s terraces, safe from the floodwaters that regularly covered their corn fields. But even they had given up in the end, abandoning their home in the 1880s after too many floods had finally broken their spirit. The Swampeast had finally defeated them, just as it had defeated so many others. Nothing was left of the home now, nothing but some old foundation stones and a broken chimney covered with vines, and the mound was overgrown, covered with pumpkin oak and slippery elm and scrub. It was the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who finally made the Swampeast habitable. Just south of Cape Girardeau the levee line began, to continue 2,200 miles to the Gulf of Mexico. The long green walls, supported by a mammoth network of reservoirs, floodways, flood gates, flood walls, pumping stations, dikes, cutoffs, bendway weirs, and revetments, were unbroken save for where tributaries entered the Mississippi, and the tributaries were walled off as well, some for hundreds of miles. The levees kept the flood-waters out and finally permitted the farmers to clear the land and till their soil in peace. Cotton replaced wheat and corn in the 1920s, and the farmers grew wealthy on the rich alluvial soil. During the decades of prosperity, the farmers had forgotten that the conditions under which they had prospered were artificial. The natural state of the land was a swampy, tangled hardwood forest, subject to periodic inundations. The People of the Sun, whom the whites later called “Mississippians” or “Mound Builders,” had altered the land for a while, had changed its natural state from a nearly impenetrable hardwood thicket to corn fields dominated by huge earthen monuments, but the land reverted swiftly to its natural state once the Sun Man’s time had passed. Now the cotton fields, graded to perfect flatness by laser-guided blades, stretched west from the levees, but they had been imposed on the land, and so had the titanic earthworks that protected them. The condition of southeastern Missouri was as artificial as that of the Washington Monument, the St. Louis Gateway Arch, or the space shuttle, and, like these, existed as a monument to the infinite ingenuity of humankind. The land, like the space shuttle, had been manufactured.