*
After Nick and Jason fled from the dead city of Helena, the bodies began to rise. Apparently the corpses had been there all along, rolling along the bottom of the river, but now they’d decayed to the point where they came to the surface. They were bloated, horrible dough-figures, facial features submerged in swollen flesh, splayed fingers fat as sausages. Nick told Jason not to look, and Jason did not give him any resistance. Nick kept his gaze away from the corpses himself.
He didn’t want to look down at a body and recognize Viondi.
More than a dozen of these macabre figures appeared in just a few hours, and it was as if the boat somehow attracted them. The bodies kept closing with the boat as if trying to invite themselves on board. Finally Nick decided to keep the motor going all the time, at low speed so as to conserve fuel, so that he could maneuver clear.
“River won’t let us go,” he heard Jason mutter. Jason crouched on the foredeck, rubbing his forearms.
Nick closed his eyes and saw Arlette with the water crawling up to her chin. He snapped his eyes open.
There were other corpses in the river: a surprising number of birds, wings stiffened in startled attitudes of half-flight. Whole flocks of them floated like feathery rafts, or spun in whirlpools. They weren’t just water birds, but land birds like crows and hawks. Nick even saw a bald eagle.
“I’m glad we didn’t catch any fish the other day,” he said.
“Yes?”
Nick indicated a nearby raft of floating birds. “Remember all those dead fish the other day? I bet these birds ate them.”
Jason looked at the birds and swallowed hard. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I see what you mean.”
Nick thought of Arlette, of Manon. All the things that could befall them.
No chemical plants in Toussaint, at least. Whatever happened to Helena wouldn’t happen there. And surely there couldn’t be severe quake damage that far into Arkansas. Surely the bodies weren’t rising on the bayou that flowed past Arlette’s home.
Surely, Nick told himself. Surely that was the case. But he didn’t know, and in the absence of knowledge his mind filled with fantasies, fantasies of Arlette trapped in the cellar as it collapsed, or caught in a burning building, or swept away by flood.
He needed to know.
Jason stood in the cockpit, pointed frantically astern. “Boat!” he shouted. “It’s a boat!”
Nick gave a surprised look over his shoulder. There was a towboat flanking through the bend behind them, exhaust pouring from its stubby stacks as it shoved its pack of barges downriver, moving fast on the heels of the drifting speedboat.
“Yes!” The boat rocked as Jason began a kind of lunging dance. “Yes!”
A grin rose to Nick’s lips. He pushed the throttle forward, felt the big Evinrude respond. He cranked the wheel over and the boat heeled into a turn. Jason gave a whoop and jumped up on the gunwale, balancing with one hand on the struts for the canvas cockpit cover. He edged forward till he was on the foredeck, and then he jumped up and down, waving his arms.
The towboat came on. The water at the bow of the barges whitened as the tow increased its speed.
Better get out of the way, Nick thought. Bet those barges can’t slow down so good.
He swung wide. Jason gave a disappointed shout. Nick swerved back to pass the towboat on its port side.
The towboat was a big one, increasing speed now that it was in a straighter section of the channel. White water surged under its counter. Nick counted eighteen barges in its tow. When Nick cut the towboat’s wake, the boat rocked so much that Jason had to crouch on the foredeck to keep his balance.
Nick saw a dark silhouette in the pilothouse, but he couldn’t see if the crewman had seen him or not.
“They’re not stopping!” Jason yelled.
Nick spun the wheel and rolled into the towboat’s wake. He pushed the throttle forward— the boat skittered on the water, the bass boat swinging like a pendulum on the end of its tow rope— and then he leaped the wake again, the boat’s fiberglass hull banging down on the brown river. The river seemed a lot harder than it had been at lower speeds.
Nick roared up alongside the towboat. Jason stood again, shouted and waved his arms at the figure in the pilothouse. Nick wished he had an air horn to blow, or some other means of alerting the towboat’s crew.
Nick swung closer. Jason waved.
The man in the pilothouse turned, stared out the side window. He’d clearly seen the boat.
The crewman opened the door, waved and shouted. He was a big man, with a big round belly in his green overalls. It looked as if he were waving the speedboat away.
“Stop!” Nick could barely hear Jason’s words over the cry of the Evinrude and the roar of the towboat’s engines. “Stop! Help us!”
The crewman waved the boat away again. Nick felt anger reach for his heart. Who was this man to deny them help?
The man went into the pilothouse again. The towboat’s roaring engines increased in volume. The towboat was moving faster. Nick cranked his own throttle forward.
“God damn it!” Nick shouted. What was wrong with that man?
Jason waved and shouted. The man in the pilothouse resolutely ignored him. Nick wondered wildly what he could do. He and Jason were like a pair of mice trying to stop a charging elephant.
The man in the pilothouse ducked his head. He seemed to be talking into a handset. Jason howled abuse. “Fuckdroid! Cocksucker!”
A door opened in the superstructure, and another man appeared. He dropped down a ladder with practiced ease, then came to the gunwale. Nick maneuvered the speedboat closer. The crewman shouted and made gestures for the speedboat to clear off, but Nick couldn’t hear what he was saying. He saw Jason’s shoulders slump, though, and saw the boy turn aft.
Nick maneuvered away from the towboat, then cut the throttle and let the big boat’s wake overtake him. The speedboat rose as the wake slapped the stern counter.
“What was that?” Nick demanded. His ears rang with the sound of the speeding engines.
Jason slumped into the cockpit. “Hazardous cargo,” he said in a quiet voice. “It’s too dangerous to take us aboard.”
Disappointment whispered through Nick’s blood. “Well,” he said, “we know all about hazardous cargo, I guess.”
“Don’t want to blow up again.”
“I guess not.”
Nick watched the white water boiling under the swiftly receding stern of the towboat, and sadly turned the wheel.
“The river won’t let us go,” Jason said. “Every time we try to leave, it takes us back.”
The day of the corpses was not yet over.
Two more towboats passed that day, one heading upstream, one down. Neither were pushing barges, and both were moving fast, water creaming at their bows. Nick didn’t try to intercept them. They seemed too determined to get to where they wanted to go.
Which is why it seemed so surprising when, after more dull hours on the river, they found a towboat that didn’t seem to be going anywhere at all.
The boat just sat there behind its tow of barges, facing upstream. Nick was too disheartened to find this sight encouraging. Even Jason seemed only moderately interested.
But as they got closer, signs looked more auspicious. The radar unit atop the pilothouse glittered silver as it spun. They could hear the subdued sound of the boat’s powerful engines, see exhaust rising from the stacks. And when Jason stood and gave a hopeful wave, Nick almost jumped out of his skin as the boat responded with a blast on its horn.
Someone came out of the pilothouse and answered Jason’s wave. Only then did Nick permit himself to feel hopeful.
They came right up to the boat before it was clear why the boat wasn’t moving. The boat and its tow had gone gently aground, like the Michelle S., and lay in only a few inches of water. The crew had carried lines astern of the boat, probably to help back her off.
None of the barges, Nick saw, seemed to contain chemicals.
The boat’s skipper met them at the gunwale. He was a short, broad-shouldered white man—“more back than leg,” as Nick’s grandmother would have remarked— and Nick felt a little warning tingle at the sight of him, that crackers with guns vibe.
Below his bushy mustache, the captain’s face split in a wide grin.
“Welcome to to Beluthahatchie, podnah,” he said in a barking Acadian voice. “Y’all been on the river long?”
Beluthahatchie was a small towboat, with a crew of four and a tow of twelve barges. The captain was the bandy-legged Jean-Joseph Malraux of Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana. Three hours after the earthquake, Beluthahatchie, moving cautiously upstream in the dark, had come aground in what was supposed to be a deep channel.
“We had the depth sounder goin’ all the time,” the captain said, “but the river shallowed too quick for us to stop. It takes a while to stop all these barges, you know.” He barked out a laugh. “You wouldn’t believe the dumb-ass things these people do. Run their little motorboats right up in front of us, and expect us to stop for ’em.” The booming Cajun voice rang off the towboat’s superstructure, da dumb-ass t’ings dese people do. Run dere liddle modorboats ...
“The whole river’s changed,” Nick said. “There are rapids upstream, new channels ...” Crewmen helped him over the side, and he stood on the solid deck, feeling a strange astonishment at this sudden change in his fortunes.
“Thanks,” Jason said as he jumped to the deck.
“This your son?” the captain bellowed, tousling Jason’s hair, and then he laughed at his own joke. “Come on and have some chow,” he said. “I’d like to hear about river conditions northaways.”
“Thank you, Captain,” Nick said. Jason, flushing a little, finger-combed his hair back into shape.
“Oh hell, podnah,” the captain said. “Call me Joe.”
“I was wondering,” Nick said, “if I could use your radio to call my daughter and let her know that everything’s all right.”
“Where is she?”
“Toussaint, Arkansas.”
Captain Joe gnawed his mustache thoughtfully. “I don’t know where that is, exactly, but if it’s in Arkansas, there’s a good chance the phones won’t be working. Even Little Rock got hammered bad, I hear. I got a crewman with relatives all over Arkansas, and he can’t reach any of ’em. But c’mon—” He gestured with one long arm and turned to climb a ladder. “We’ll give it a try. If your girl’s anywhere near a working phone, podnah, we’ll find her.”
As Nick followed Joe to the pilothouse, he felt as if his feet weren’t quite touching the deck. He had the breathless sensation of viewing some strange, swift-unfolding miracle.
A few minutes later he was wishing Arlette a happy birthday.