Distraction - Bruce Sterling [183]
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 sausages made of congealed rice. The food was impossibly hot—far beyond 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 otherwise, but now, the bass are coming back. They’re working on the water hyacinth, they’ve brought back some black bear and even cougar. It’s not ever gonna be natural, but it’s gonna be real doable. You boys want some more coffee?”
“Thanks,” Oscar said. He’d thoughtfully poured his first chicory-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 couple 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 different nowadays. They buffalo way too easy, they lost their starch somehow. It has something to do with that sperm-count crash, all those pesticide hormone 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 wild-flowers 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.”
The door opened, without a knock. A middle-aged black woman appeared, toting a net bag full of canned goods.