On his fluttering way down, Oscar took quick note of Fonte-not’s new surroundings. The ex-fed had chosen to dwell in a scattered backwoods village of metal trailer homes, which were jacked up onto concrete-block columns and surrounded by outhouses and cheap fuel-cell generators. It was a Southern-Gothic slum for freshwater fishermen, a watery maze of wooden docks, lily pads, flat-prowed straw-and-plastic bass boats. In the pink light of early morning, the bayou’s reedy waters were a lush murky green.
Oscar arrived with impressive pinpoint accuracy — right onto the sloping roof of Fontenot’s wooden shack. He swiftly tumbled from the building, falling to earth with an ankle-cracking bang. The now brain-dead aircraft shuddered violently in the morning breeze, tossing Oscar like a bug.
Luckily Fontenot limped quickly from his shack, and helped Os-car subdue his machine. After much cursing and a finger-pinching struggle, they finally had Oscar unbuckled and freed. They managed to fold and spindle the aircraft down to the size of a large canoe.
“So it really is you,” Fontenot told him, puffing with exertion. He solemnly thumped Oscar’s padded shoulder. “Where’d you get that goofy helmet? You really look like hell.”
“Yeah. Have you seen my bodyguard? He was supposed to be here earlier.”
“Come on inside,” Fontenot said. Fontenot was not a man for metal trailer homes. His shack was an authentic wooden one, a bro-ken-backed structure of cedar and board-and-batten, with gray wooden shingles on top, and spiderweb bed monster pilings beneath. The old shack had been dragged to the water’s edge, and reassembled on-site without much professional care. The door squealed and shud-dered off its jamb as it opened. Inside, the crack-shot wooden floors dipped visibly.
Fontenot’s bare wooden parlor had rattan furniture, a large stout hammock, a tiny fuel-cell icebox, and an impressive wall-mounted arsenal of top-of-the-line fishing equipment. Fontenot’s fishing gear was chained to the shack’s back wall, and arranged with obsessive military neatness in locked plywood rifle cabinets. The nearest cabinet boasted a bright menagerie of artificial lures: battery-powered wrig-glers, ultrasonic flashers, spinning spoons, pheromone-leaking jel-lyworms.
“Just a sec,” said Fontenot, thumping and squeaking into a cramped back room. Oscar had time to notice a well-thumbed Bible and an impressive litter of beer empties. Then Fontenot reappeared, hauling Kevin with one hand beneath his armpit. Kevin had been liberally bound and gagged with duct tape.
“You know this character?” Fontenot demanded.
“Yeah. That’s my new bodyguard.”
Fontenot dropped Kevin onto the rattan couch, which cracked loudly under his weight. “Look. I also know this kid. I knew his dad. Dad used to run systems for right-wing militia. Heavily armed white guys, with rigid stares and bad haircuts. If you’re hiring this Hamilton boy as security, you must have lost your mind.”
“I’m not exactly ‘hiring him,’ Jules. Technically speaking, he’s a federal employee. And he’s not just my own personal security. He’s the security for an entire federal installation.”
Fontenot reached into a pocket of his mud-stained overalls, pro-ducing a fisherman’s pocketknife. “I don’t even wanna know. I just don’t care! It’s not my problem anymore.” He sliced through the duct tape and peeled Kevin free, finally ripping the tape from his mouth with a single jerk. “Sorry, kid,” he muttered. “I guess I should have believed you.”
“No problem!” Kevin said gallantly, rubbing his gummy wrists and showing a great deal of eye-white. “Happens all the time!”
’I’m all outta practice at this,” Fontenot said. “It’s the quiet life out here, I’m out of touch. You boys want some breakfast?”
“Excellent idea,” Oscar said. A peaceful communal meal was just what they needed. Behind his pie-eating grin, Kevin was clearly mea-suring Fontenot for a lethal knife thrust to the kidneys.
“Some boudin,” Fontenot asserted, retreating to a meager gas-fired camp stove in the corner. “Some aigs and ershters.” Oscar watched Fontenot thoughtfully as the old man set about his cooking work, weary and chagrined. After a moment, he had it. Fontenot was in physical recovery from being a fed and a cop. The curse of spook work was finally leaving Fontenot, loosing its grip on his flesh like a departing heroin addiction. But with the icy grip of that long disci-pline off his bones, there just wasn’t a lot left to Jules Fontenot. He was a one-legged Louisiana backwoods fisherman, strangely aged be-fore his time.
The cabin filled with the acrid stench of frying pepper sauce. Oscar’s nose, always sensitive now, began to run. He glanced at Kevin, who was sullenly picking shreds of duct tape from his wrists.
“Jules, how’s the fishing in your bayou here?”
“It’s paradise!” Fontenot said. “Those big lunkers really love the drowned subdivisions down in Breaux Bridge. Your lunker, that’s a bottom-feeder that appreciates some structure in the habitat.”
“I don’t think I know that species, ‘lunker.’ ”
“Oh, the local state fish-and-game people built’ em years ago. The floods, and the poisonings and such, wiped out the local game fish. The Teche was getting bad algae blooms, almost as bad as that giant Dead Spot in the Gulf. So, they cobbled together these vacuum-cleaner fish. Big old channel catfish with tilapia genes. Them lunkers get big, bro. Damn big. I mean to say, four hundred pounds with eyes like baseballs. See, lunkers are sterile. Lunkers do nothin’ but eat and grow. While the lab boys were messing with their DNA, they kinda goosed the growth hormones. Now some of those babies are fifteen years old.”
“That seems like a very daring piece of biological engineering.”
“Oh, you don’t know Green Huey. That’s not the half of it. Huey’s a very active boy on environmental issues. Louisiana’s a whole different world now.”
Fontenot brought them breakfast: oyster omelets and eerie sau-sages made of congealed rice. The food was impossibly hot — far be-yond merely spicy. He’d slathered on pepper as if it were the staff of life.
“That lunker business was an emergency measure. But it worked real good. Emergency all over. This bayou would be a sewer other-wise, but now, the bass are corning back. They’re working on the water hyacinth, they’ve brought back some black bear and even cou-gar. It’s not ever gonna be natural, but it’s gonua be real doable. You boys want some more coffee?”
“Thanks,” Oscar said. He’d thoughtfully poured his first chic-ory-tainted cup through a gaping crack in the floorboards. “I have to confess, Jules, I’ve been worried about you, living here alone in the heart of Huey country. I was afraid that he might have found you here, and harassed you. For political reasons, you know, because of your time with the Senator.”
“Oh, that. Yeah,” Fontenot said, chewing steadily. “I got a cou-ple of those little state militia punks comin’ round to ‘debrief’ me. I showed ’em my federal-issue Heckler and Koch, and told ’em I’d empty a clip on their sorry punk asses if I ever saw ’em near my property again. That pretty much took care o’ that.”
“Well then,” Oscar said, tactfully disturbing his omelet with a fork.
“Y’know what I think?” said Fontenot. Fontenot had never been so garrulous before, but it was clear to Oscar that, in his retirement, the old man was desperately lonely. “People are dilferent nowadays. They buffalo way too easy, they lost their starch somehow. It has something to do with that sperm-count crash, all those pesticide hor-mone poisonings. You get these combinations of pollutants, all these yuppie flus and allergies…”
Oscar and Kevin exchanged a quick glance. They had no idea what the old man was talking about.
“Americans don’t live off the land anymore. They don’t know what we’ve done to our great outdoors. They don’t know how pretty it used to be around here, before they paved it all over and poisoned it. A million wildflowers and all kinda little plants and bugs that had been living here a jillion years… Man, when I was a kid you could still fish for marlin. Marlin! People these days don’t even know what a marlin was.”