"A little." Her face was flushed beneath the war paint. His heart wa pounding. He took a few deep breaths. He was past being frantic now. He was leveling out; he was cruising on a higher plane; he was exalted. "Darling, I'm going on a secret mission. I think it may be the crux of all our problems, but I may never come back. This may be the last private moment that we ever have together. I know I've upset you. I know I haven't been everything you ex-pected. I may never see you again, but I'm leaving you with such a full and happy heart. I want to remember you looking like this, always. You are so special and dear to me that I can't express it. You're just such a brilliant, radiant creature."

She put her hand to her forehead. "Oh my God. I just don't know what to do with myself when you're like this .... You're just so persuasive! Oh, well, never mind, come on with me, take your clothes off There's plenty of room for us up here on the lab table."

11.

After an extensive discussion of their options, Oscar and Captain Scubbly Bee decided to infiltrate Loui-siana by covert means and in deep incognito. Kevin, boldly lying, told the local Emergency Committee that he was leaving for a recruitment drive. Oscar himself would not even officially leave Buna. He was replaced by a body double, a Moderator volunteer who was willing to wear Oscar's clothing, and to spend a great deal of time in a plush hotel room pretending to type on a laptop.

Their conspiracy swiftly assumed its own momen-tum. To avoid discovery, they decided to airmail them-selves into Louisiana in a pair of ultralight aircraft. These silent and stealthy devices were slow, unpredictable, dan-gerous, painful, and nauseating-basically devoid of crea-ture comforts of any kind. They were, however, more or less undetectable, and immune to roadblocks and shake-downs. Since they were guided by global positioning from Chinese satellites, the aircraft would arrive with pinpoint accuracy right on Fontenot's doorstep-sooner or later.

Kevin and Oscar next took the deeply melodramatic step of dressing themselves as nomad air bums. They bor-rowed the customary flight suits from a pair of Moderator air jockeys. These snug garments were riveted, fiber-filled cotton duck. They were protective industrial gear, painstakingly tribalized by much hand-stitched embroidery and a richly personal reek of skin unguent. Kevlar gloves, black rubber boots, big furry crash helmets, and shatterproof goggles completed the ensemble.

Oscar gave a few final Method-acting tips to his good-natured body double, and wedged himself into his disguise. He became a crea-ture from an alien civilization. He couldn't resist the temptation to stroll around downtown Buna in his nomad drag. The result aston-ished him. Oscar was very well known in Buna; his scandalous per-sonal life was common knowledge and the hotel he had built was locally famous. In the flight suit, goggles, and helmet, however, he was entirely ignored. People's eyes simply slid over him without the fric-tion of a moment's care. He radiated otherness.

Kevin and Oscar had synchronized their departure for midnight. Oscar arrived late. His wristwatch was malfunctioning. He'd been running a mild fever for days, and the contact heat had caused the watch's mousebrain works to run fast. Oscar had been forced to reset his watch with its sunlight timer, but he had somehow botched it; his watch was jet-lagged now. He was running late, and it took far more effort than he had expected to climb to the roof of the Collaboratory. He'd never before been on the outside armor of the lab. In the sullen dark of a February night, the structure's outer boundary was windy and intimidating, a wearying physical trial of endless steps and hand rungs.

Winded and trembling, he finally arrived on the starry roof of the Collaboratory, but the best window of weather opportunity was already gone. Kevin, wisely, had already launched himself. With the help of a bored Moderator ground crew, Oscar strapped into his flimsy craft, and left as soon as he could.

The first hour went rather well. Then he was caught by a Green-house storm front boiling off the sullen Gulf of Mexico. He was blown all the way to Arkansas. Cannily reading thousands of Doppler radars, the smart and horribly cheap little vehicle darted sickeningly up and down through dozens of local thermals and wind shears, stubbornly routing itself toward its destination with the dumb persis-tence of a network packet. Blistered by the chafing of his harness, Oscar fmally passed out, lolling in the aircraft's grip like a sack of turnips.

The pilot's lack of consciousness made no difference to the nomad machine. At dawn, Oscar found himself fluttering over the rainy swamp of the Bayou Teche.

The Bayou Teche was a hundred and thirty miles long. This quiet oxbow had once formed the main channel of the Mississippi River, some three thousand years in the past. During one brief and intensely catastrophic twenty-first-century spring, the Bayou Teche, to the alarm and horror of everyone, had once again become the main channel of the Mississippi River. The savage Greenhouse deluge had carried all before it, briskly disposing of floodproof concrete levees, shady, moss-strewn live oaks, glamorous antebellum plantation homes, rust-eaten sugar mills, dead oil rigs, and everything else in its path. The flood had ravaged the cities of Breaux Bridge, St. Martinville, and New Iberia.

The Teche had always been a world of its own, a swampy biome distinct and separate from the Mississippi proper and the rice-growing plains to the west. The destruction of its roads and bridges, and the consequent enormous growth of weedy swamp and marsh, had once again returned the Teche to eerie, sodden quietude. The bayou was now one of the wildest locales in North America-not because it had been conserved from development, but because its development had been obliterated.

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." The door opened, without a knock. A middle-aged black woman appeared, toting a net bag full of canned goods. She wore rubber sandals, a huge cotton skirt, a tropical-flowered blouse. Her head was wrapped in a kerchief. She barged into Fontenot's home, took sudden note of Kevin and Oscar, and began chattering in Creole French.

"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, planning campaign strategy, choosing the cantaloupe. All light-years behind him now.

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 gonna be just like Louisiana. Because the seas are rising, and Louisiana is a giant swamp. The world of the future is a big, hot, Greenhouse swamp. Full of half-educated, half-breed people, who don't speak En-glish, and didn't forget to have children. Plus, they are totally thrilled about biotechnology. That's what tomorrow's world is gonna look like-not just America, mind you, the whole world. Hot, humid, old, crooked, half-forgotten, kind of rotten. The leaders are corrupt, ev-erybody's on the take. It's bad, really bad, even worse than it sounds."

Fontenot suddenly grinned. "But you know what? It's doable, it's livable!

The fishing's good! The food is great! The women are good-lookin', and the music really swings!"

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 cannily established on an island reachable only by aircraft-or by a very deter-mined amphibious boat.

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. The village was a sizable compound for six or seven hundred people, many of them children. The village had no electricity, no plumbing, no satellite dishes, no roads, no cars, no telephones, and no aircraft. It was silent except for the twittering of birds, the occasional clonk of a churn or an ax, and the distant, keening sound of hymns.

No one was hurrying, but everyone seemed to have something to do. These people were engaged in an ancient peasant round of pre-industrial agriculture. They were literally living off the land-not by chewing up the landscape and transmuting it in sludge tanks, but by gardening it with hand tools. These were strange, rnuseumlike activi-ties. Oscar had read about them in books and seen them in docu-mentaries, but he'd never witnessed them performed in real life. Genuinely archaic pursuits, like blacksmithing and yarn-spinning.

It was all about neatly tended little garden plots, swarming com-post heaps, night soil in stinking wooden buckets. The locals had a lot of chickens. The chickens were all genetically identical. The birds were all the very same chicken, reissued in various growth stages. They also had multiple copies of a standard-issue goat. This was a hardy, bearded devil-eyed creature, a Nietzschean superman among goats, and there were herds of it. They had big spiraling vines of snap beans, monster corn, big hairy okra, monster yellow gourds, rock-hard bamboo, a little sugarcane. Some of the locals were fishermen. Sometime back, they had successfully landed a frightening leathery creature, now a skeletal mass of wrist-thick fish bones. The skeleton sported baleen plates the size of a car grille. The communards wore homespun clothes. The men had crude straw hats, collarless buttoned vests, drawstring trousers. The women wore ankle-length shifts, white aprons, and big trailing sunbonnets. They were perfectly friendly, but distant. It seemed that no one could be much bothered with visitors. They were all intensely preoc-cupied with their daily affairs. However, a small crowd of curious children formed and began trailing the three of them, mimicking them behind their backs, and giggling at them.

"I don't get this," Kevin said. "I thought this was some kind of concentration camp. These folks are doing just fine here." Fontenot nodded grudgingly. "Yeah, it was meant to be attrac-tive. It's a Green, sustainable farm project. You bump people's produc-tivity up with improved crops and animals-but no fuel combustion, no more carbon dioxide. Maybe someday they go back to Haiti and teach everybody to live this way."

"That wouldn't work," Oscar said.

"Why not?" said Kevin.

"Because the Dutch have been trying that for years. Everybody in the advanced world thinks they can reinvent peasant life and keep tribal people ignorant and happy. Appropriate-tech just doesn't work. Because peasant life is boring."

"Yeah," Fontenot said. "That's exactly what tipped me off, too. They oughta be jamming around us asking for cash and transistor radios, just like any peasant always does for a tourist from the USA. But they can't even be bothered to look at us. So, listen. You hear that kinda muttering sound?"

"You mean those hymns?" Oscar said.

"Oh, they sing hymns all right. But mostly, they pray. All the adults pray, men and women. They all pray, all the time. I mean to say, all the time, Oscar."

Fontenot paused. "Y'know, outside people do make it over here every once in a while. Hunters, fishermen . . . I heard some stories. They all think these folks are just real religious, you know, weird voodoo Haitians. But that ain't it. See, I was Secret Service. I spent years of my life searching through crowds, looking for crazy people. We're real big on psychoanalysis in my old line of work. That's why I know for a fact that there's something really wrong in the heads of these people. It isn't psychosis. It's not drugs, either. Religion's got something to do with it-but it's not just religion. Something has been done to them."

"Neural something," Oscar said.

"Yeah. They know they're different, too. They know that some-thing happened to them, down in that salt mine. But they think it was a holy revelation. The spirit flew into their heads-they call it the 'second-born spirit,' or 'the born-again spirit.''' Fontenot removed his hat and wiped his brow. "When I first found this place, I spent most of a day here, talking to this one old guy-Papa Christophe, that's his name. Kinda their leader, or at least their spokesman. This guy is a local biggie, because this guy has really got a case of whatever--it-is. See, the spirit didn't take on 'em all quite the same. The kids don't have it at all. They're just normal kids. Most of the grown-ups are just kind of muttery and sparkly-eyed. But then they've got these apostles, like Christophe. The houngans. The wise ones." Oscar and Kevin conferred briefly. Kevin was very spooked by Fontenot's story. He really disliked being surrounded by illegal alien black people in the middle of an impenetrable swamp. Visions of boil-ing iron cannibal pots were dancing in Kevin's head. Anglos . . . they'd never gotten over the sensation of becoming a racial minority.

Oscar was adamant, however. Having come this far, nothing would do for him but to interview Papa Christophe. Fontenot finally located the man, hard at work in a whitewashed cabin at the edge of town.

Papa Christophe was an elderly man with a long-healed machete slash in his head. His wrinkled skin and bent posture suggested a lifetime of vitamin deficiency. He looked a hundred years old, and was probably sixty. Papa Christophe gave them a toothless grin. He was sitting on a three-legged stool on the hard dirt floor of the cabin. He had a wooden maul, a, pig-iron chisel, and a half-formed wooden statue. He was deftly peeling slivers of brown cypress wood. His statue was a saint, or a martyr; a slender, Modigliani-like woman, with a serene and stylized face, her hands pressed together in prayer. Her lower legs were wrapped in climbing flames.

Oscar was instantly impressed. "Hey! Primitive art! This guy's pretty good! Would he sell me that thing?"

"Choke it back a little," Kevin muttered. "Put your wallet away." The cabin's single room was warm and steamy, because the building had a crude homemade still inside it. Presumably, a distillery hadn't been present in the village's original game plan, but the Hai-tians were ingenious folk, and they had their own agenda. The still had been riveted together out of dredged-up automobile parts. By the smell of it, it was cooking cane molasses down into a head-bending rum. The shelves along the wall were full of cast-off glass bottles, dredged from the detritus of the bayou. Half the bottles were full of yellow alcohol, and plugged with cloth and clay. Fontenot and the old man were groping at French, with their widely disparate dialects. Fed with Christophe's cast-off chips of cypress wood, the still was cooking right along. Rum dripped down a bent iron tube into the glass bottle, ticking like a water clock. Papa Christophe was friendly enough. He was chatting, and tapping his chisel, and chopping, and muttering a little to himself, all in that same, even, water-clock rhythm.

"I asked him. about the statue," Fontenot explained. "He says it's for the church. He carves saints for the good Lord, because the good Lord is always with him."

"Even in a distillery?" Kevin said.

"Wine is a sacrament," Fontenot said stiffly. Papa Christophe picked up a pointed charcoal stick, examined his wooden saint, and drew on her a bit. He had a set of carving tools spread beside him, on a greased leather cloth: an awl, a homemade saw, a shaving hook, a hand-powered bow-drill. They were crude implements, but the old man clearly knew what he was doing. They'd left their ragtag of curious children outside the cabin door, but one of the smaller kids plucked up his courage and peered inside. Papa Christophe looked up, grinned toothlessly, and uttered some solemn Creole pronunciamento. The boy came in and sat obe-diently on the earthen floor.

"What was that about?" Oscar said.

"I believe he just said, 'The monkey raised her children before there were avocados,' " Fontenot offered.

"What?"

"It's a proverb."

The little kid was thrilled to be allowed into the old man's work-shop. Papa Christophe chopped a bit more, directing kindly remarks to the child. The rum dripped rhythmically into its pop bottle, which was almost full. Fontenot pointed to the child, and essayed a suggestion in French. Papa Christophe chuckled indulgently. "D'abord vous guette poux-de-bois manger bouteille, accrochez vos calabasses," he said.

"Something about bugs eating the bottles," Fontenot hazarded.

"Do bugs eat his bottles?" Kevin said.