‘I decided maybe it was time to take the joke seriously,’ Bobby said. ‘After all, there’s something in the water of a lot of places that prevents tooth decay. It’s called fluoride.’
He went to Waco accompanied by a trio of research assistants: two sociology grad-students and a full professor of geology who happened to be on sabbatical and ready for adventure.
Within six months, Bobby and the sociology guys had constructed a computer program which illustrated what my brother called the world’s only calmquake. He had a slightly rumpled printout in his tote. He gave it to me. I was looking at a series of forty concentric rings. Waco was in the eighth, ninth, and tenth as you moved in toward the center.
‘Now look at this,’ he said, and put a transparent overlay on the printout. More rings; but in each one there was a number. Fortieth ring: 471. Thirty-ninth: 420. Thirty-eighth: 418. And so on. In a couple of places the numbers went up instead of down, but only in a couple (and only by a little).
‘What are they?’
‘Each number represents the incidence of violent crime in that particular circle,’ Bobby said.
‘Murder, rape, assault and battery, even acts of vandalism. The computer assigns a number by a formula that takes population density into account.’ He tapped the twenty-seventh circle, which held the number 204, with his finger. ‘There’s less than nine hundred people in this whole area, for instance. The number represents three or four cases of spouse abuse, a couple of barroom brawls, an act of animal cruelty — some senile farmer got pissed at a pig and shot a load of rock-salt into it, as I recall — and one involuntary manslaughter.’
I saw that the numbers in the central circles dropped off radically: 85, 81, 70, 63, 40, 21, 5. At the epicenter of Bobby’s calmquake was the town of La Plata. To call it a sleepy little town seems more than fair.
The numeric value assigned to La Plata was zero.
‘So here it is, Bow-Wow,’ Bobby said, leaning forward and rubbing his long hands together nervously, ‘my nominee for the Garden of Eden. Here’s a community of fifteen thousand, twenty-four per cent of which are people of mixed blood, commonly called Indios. There’s a moccasin factory, a couple of little motor courts, a couple of scrub farms. That’s it for work. For play there’s four bars, a couple of dance-halls where you can hear any kind of music you want as long as it sounds like George Jones, two drive-ins, and a bowling alley.’ He paused and added,
‘There’s also a still. I didn’t know anybody made whiskey that good outside of Tennessee.’
In short (and it is now too late to be anything else), La Plata should have been a fertile breeding-ground for the sort of casual violence you can read about in the Police Blotter section of the local newspaper every day. Should have been but wasn’t. There had been only one murder in La Plata during the five years previous to my brother’s arrival, two cases of assault, no rapes, no reported incidents of child abuse. There had been four armed robberies, but all four turned out to have been committed by transients . . . as the murder and one of the assaults had been. The local Sheriff was a fat old Republican who did a pretty fair Rodney Dangerfield imitation. He had been known, in fact, to spend whole days in the local coffee shop, tugging the knot in his tie and telling people to take his wife, please. My brother said he thought it was a little more than lame humor; he was pretty sure the poor guy was suffering first-stage Alzheimer’s Disease. His
only deputy was his nephew. Bobby told me the nephew looked quite a lot like Junior Samples on the old Hee-Haw show.
‘Put those two guys in a Pennsylvania town similar to La Plata in every way but the geographical,’ Bobby said, ‘and they would have been out on their asses fifteen years ago. But in La Plata, they’re gonna go on until they die . . . which they’ll probably do in their sleep.’
‘What did you do?’ I asked. ‘How did you proceed?’
‘Well, for the first week or so after we got our statistical shit together, we just sort of sat around and stared at each other,’ Bobby said. ‘I mean, we were prepared for something, but nothing quite like this. Even Waco doesn’t prepare you for La Plata.’ Bobby shifted restlessly and cracked his knuckles.
‘Jesus, I hate it when you do that,’ I said.
He smiled. ‘Sorry, Bow-Wow. Anyway, we started geological tests, then microscopic analysis of the water. I didn’t expect a hell of a lot; everyone in the area has got a well, usually a deep one, and they get their water tested regularly to make sure they’re not drinking borax, or something. If there had been something obvious, it would have turned up a long time ago. So we went on to submicroscopy, and that was when we started to turn up some pretty weird stuff.’
‘What kind of weird stuff?’
‘Breaks in chains of atoms, subdynamic electrical fluctuations, and some sort of unidentified protein. Water ain’t really H2O, you know — not when you add in the sulfides, irons, God knows what else happens to be in the aquifer of a given region. And La Plata water — you’d have to give it a string of letters like the ones after a professor emeritus’s name.’ His eyes gleamed. ‘But the protein was the most interesting thing, Bow-Wow. So far as we know, it’s only found in one other place: the human brain.’
Uh-oh.
It just arrived, between one swallow and the next: the throat-dryness. Not much at yet, but enough for me to break away and get a glass of ice-water. I’ve got maybe forty minutes left. And oh Jesus, there’s so much I want to tell! About the wasps’ nests they found with wasps that wouldn’t sting, about the fender-bender Bobby and one of his assistants saw where the two drivers, both male, both drunk, and both about twenty-four (sociological bull moose, in other words), got out, shook hands, and exchanged insurance information amicably before going into the nearest bar for another drink.
Bobby talked for hours — more hours than I have. But the upshot was simple: the stuff in the mayonnaise jar.
‘We’ve got our own still in La Plata now,’ he said. ‘This is the stuff we’re brewing, Howie; pacifist white lightning. The aquifer under that area of Texas is deep but amazingly large; it’s like this incredible Lake Victoria driven into the porous sediment which overlays the Moho. The water is potent, but we’ve been able to make the stuff I squirted on the wasps even more potent.
We’ve got damn near six thousand gallons now, in these big steel tanks. By the end of the year, we’ll have fourteen thousand. By next June we’ll have thirty thousand. But it’s not enough. We need more, we need it faster . . . and then we need to transport it.’
‘Transport it where?’ I asked him.
‘Borneo, to start with.’
I thought I’d either lost my mind or misheard him. I really did.
‘Look , Bow-Wow . . . sorry. Howie.’ He was scrumming through his tote-bag again. He brought out a number of aerial photographs and handed them over to me. ‘You see?’ he asked as I
looked through them. ‘You see how fucking perfect it is? It’s as if God Himself suddenly busted through our business-as-usual transmissions with something like “And now we bring you a special bulletin! This is your last chance, assholes! And now we return you to Days of Our Lives. ” ‘
‘I don’t get you,’ I said. ‘And I have no idea what I’m looking at.’ Of course I knew; it was an island — not Borneo itself but an island lying, to the west of Borneo identified as Gulandio, —
with a mountain in the middle and a lot of muddy little villages lying on its lower slopes. It was hard to see the mountain because of the cloud cover. What I meant was that I didn’t know what I was looking for.
‘The mountain has the same name as the island,’ he said. ‘Gulandio. In the local patois it means grace, or fate, or destiny, or take your pick. But Duke Rogers says it’s really the biggest time-bomb on earth . . . and it’s wired to go off by October of next year. Probably earlier.’
The crazy thing’s this: the story’s only crazy if you try to tell it in a speed-rap, which is what I’m trying to do now. Bobby wanted me to help him raise somewhere between six hundred thousand and a million and a half dollars to do the following: first, to synthesize fifty to seventy thousand gallons of what he called ‘the high-test’; second, to airlift all of this water to Borneo, which had landing facilities (you could land a hang-glider on Gulandio, but that was about all); third, to ship it over to this island named Fate, or Destiny, or Grace; fourth, to truck it up the slope of the volcano, which had been dormant (save for a few puffs in 1938) since 1804, and then to drop it down the muddy tube of the volcano’s caldera. Duke Rogers was actually John Paul Rogers, the geology professor. He claimed that Gulandio was going to do more than just erupt; he claimed that it was going to explode, as Krakatoa had done in the nineteenth century, creating a bang that would make the Squirt Bomb that poisoned London like a kid’s firecracker.