Distraction

The door opened, without a knock. A middle-aged black woman appeared, toting a net bag full of ca

“This is Clotile,” Fontenot said. “She’s my housekeeper.” He stood up and began sheepishly gathering dead beer cans, while talking in halting French.

Clotile gave Kevin and Oscar a resentful, dismissive glance, then began to lecture her limping boss.

“This was your security guy?” Kevin hissed at Oscar. “This bro-ken-down old hick?”

“Yes. He was really good at it, too.” Oscar was fascinated by the interplay of Fontenot and Clotile. They were engaged in a racial, economic, gender minuet whose context was a closed book to him. Clearly, Clotile was one of the most important people in Fontenot’s life now. Fontenot really admired her; there was something about her that he deeply desired, and could never have again. Clotile felt sorry for him, and was willing to work for him, but she would never accept him. They were close enough to talk together, even joke with each other, but there was some tragic element in their relationship that would never, ever be put right. It was a poignant mini-drama, as distant to Oscar as a Kabuki play.

Oscar sensed that Fontenot’s credibility had been seriously dam-aged by their presence as his houseguests. Oscar examined his embroi-dered sleeves, his discarded gloves, his hairy flight helmet. An intense little moment of culture shock shot through him.

What a very strange world he was living in. What strange people: Kevin, Fontenot, Clotile — and himself, in his dashingly filthy disguise. Here they were, eating breakfast and cleaning house, while at the rim of their moral universe, the game had changed entirely. Pieces swam from center to periphery, periphery to center — pieces flew right off the board. He’d eaten so many breakfasts with Fontenot, in the past life, back in Boston. Every day a working breakfast, watching news clips, pla

Clotile forged forth sturdily and snatched the plates away from Kevin and Oscar. “I hate to be underfoot here when your house-keeper’s so busy,” Oscar said mildly. “Maybe we should have a little stroll outside, and discuss the reason for our trip here.”

“Good idea,” said Fontenot. “Sure. You boys come on out.”

They followed Fontenot out his squeaking front door and down the warped wooden steps. “They’re such good people here,” Fonte-not insisted, glancing warily back over his shoulder. “They’re so real.”

“I’m glad you’re on good terms with your neighbors.”

Fontenot nodded solemnly. “I go to Mass. The local folks got a little church up the way. I read the Good Book these days… Never had time for it before, but I want the things that matter now. The real things.”

Oscar said nothing. He was not religious, but he’d always been impressed by judeo-Christianiry’s long political track record. “Tell us about this Haitian enclave, Jules.”

“Tell you? Hell, telling you’s no use. We’ll just go there. We’ll take my huvvy.”

Fontenot’s hovercraft was sitting below his house. The amphibi-ous saucer had been an ambitious purchase, with indestructible plastic skirts and a powerful alcohol engine. It reeked of fish guts, and its stout and shiny hull was copiously littered with scales. Once emptied of its fisherman’s litter, it could seat three, though Kevin had to squeeze in.

The overloaded huvvy scraped and banged its way down to the bayou. Then it sloshed across the lily pads, burping and gargling.

“A huvvy’s good for bayou fishing,” Fontenot pronounced. “You need a shallow-draft boat in the Teche, what with all these snags, and old smashed cars, and such. The good folks around here kinda make fun of my big fancy huvvy, but I can really get around.”

“I understand these Haitians are very religious people.”

“Oh yeah,” nodded Fontenot. “They had a minister, back in the old country, doing his Moses free-the-people thing. So of course the regime had the guy shot. Then they did some terrible things to his followers that really upset Amnesty International. But… basi-cally… who cares? You know? They’re Haitians!”

Fontenot lifted both his hands from the hovercraft’s wheel. “How can anybody care about Haiti? Islands all over the world are drowning. They’re all going under water, they’ve all got big sea-level problems. But Huey… well, Huey takes it real personal when charismatic leaders get shot. Huey’s into the French diaspora. He tried twisting the arm of the State Department, but they got too many emergencies all their own. So one day, Huey just sent a big fleet of shrimp boats to Haiti, and picked them all up.”

“How did he arrange their visas?”

“He never bothered. See, you gotta think the way Huey thinks. Huey’s always got two, three, four things going on at once. He put ’em in a shelter. Salt mines. Louisiana’s got these huge underground salt mines. Underground mineral deposits twice the size of Mount Everest. They were dug out for a hundred years. They got huge vaults down there, caves as big as suburbs, with thousand-foot ceilings. Nowadays, nobody mines salt anymore. Salt’s cheaper than dirt now, because of seawater distilleries. So there’s no more market for Louisi-ana salt. Just another dead industry here, like oil. We dug it all up and sold it, and all we got left is nothing. Giant airtight caverns full of nothing, way down deep in the crust of the earth. Well, what use are they now? Well, one big use. Because you can’t see nothing. There’s no satellite surveillance for giant underground caves. Huey hid that Haitian cult in one of those giant mines for a couple of years. He was workin’ on ’em in secret, with all his other hot underground projects. Like the giant catfish, and the fuel yeast, and the coelacanths…”

Kevin spoke up. “ ‘Coelacanths’?”

“Living fossil fish from Madagascar, son. Older than dinosaurs. They got genetics like fish from another planet. Real primitive and hardy. You nick off chunks from the deep past, and you splice it in the middle of next week — that’s Huey’s recipe for the gumbo future.”

Oscar wiped spray from his waterproof flight suit. “So he’s done this strange thing to the Haitians as some kind of pilot project.”

“Yeah. And you know what? Huey’s right.”

“He is?”

“Yep. Huey’s awful wrong about the little things, but he’s so right about the big picture, that the rest of it just don’t matter. You see, Louisiana really is the future. Someday soon, the whole world is go

Fontenot suddenly gri

They struggled for two hours to reach the refugee encampment.

The hovercraft bulled its way through reedbeds, scraped over spits of saw grass and sticky black mud. The Haitian camp had been ca

They skirted up onto the solid earth, and left their hovercraft, and walked through knee-high weeds.

Oscar had imagined the worst: klieg lights, watchtowers, barbed wire, and vicious dogs. But the Haitian emigre village was not an armed camp. The place was basically an ashram, a little handmade religious retreat. It was a modest, quiet, rural settlement of neatly whitewashed log houses.