Termination Shock

After several minutes’ delay during which she could see that Lotte had typed and apparently decided not to send several messages, Lotte came back with

> How’s the scenery?

which actually made Saskia laugh out loud.

> Looking around . . .

And she did. But there were no realistic prospects on the boat. Alastair was apparently straight and single. But she wasn’t feeling anything for him and it would have been excessively complicated.

> The valley is warm and lush but . . .

she began typing, then blushed and deleted it. Lotte wanted to change the subject anyway.

> Tell the Texans that if they stopped burning so much oil maybe the hurricanes would leave them alone!

Saskia sighed, finding this so much less interesting than what they had been talking about.

It was late the following day when they made their last camp on the Brazos and were reunited with Willem. He introduced Saskia to Jules. The young man was so beautiful that Saskia almost laughed in his face. She in turn introduced Jules to the other members of her group, including Fenna, who smiled at Jules with a light in her eyes that made Saskia wonder if they’d somehow crossed paths with each other in the past and were old friends.

But that wasn’t it. They were new friends. They stuck to each other like magnets that have been brought too close together. They ceased to be aware of the existence of other humans.

After night had fallen and the temperature had dropped a few degrees, they laid plans around a line of folding camp tables zip-tied together under a row of pop-up canopies. Some of the Boskeys’ shirttail relatives had showed up with a vast supply of living crayfish, squirming and shifting in mesh sacks. These had been boiled and heaped up on this table a couple of hours ago, bright and steaming, and had been consumed one by one by the two dozen or so people of the caravan as well as a few neighboring campers who had wandered by to say howdy. So they were surrounded by garbage bags stuffed with empty beer bottles and crayfish shells.

Saskia by this point had overheard many of the Cajuns’ conversations about where they would go and what they would do tomorrow. She’d understood less than half of what she’d heard—she continued to find the accent challenging—but she knew the gist of it. They intended to head generally south of the metropolis, into Galveston County, and use their boats to assist flood victims there.

She liked to think that, up until this point, she and the other members of her party had not been a hindrance and might—solely by dint of Willem’s cash-brick—have been of some help. That would clearly stop being the case very soon. They needed to work out a plan to part ways tomorrow that would create the least inconvenience for the Cajuns. As different versions of that plan were evaluated around the table, Saskia was in touch with T.R. via secure text message.

“My friend in Houston,” she announced, looking up from her phone, “proposes that he can meet us tomorrow in a place called Sugar Land if that is not too inconvenient for you all.”

Alastair threw her a private grin. During their time in Texas Saskia had begun to say “you all” as the equivalent of the Dutch “jullie,” but she hadn’t yet begun running it together into “y’all.” Saskia winked back at him.

Heads were nodding around the table. Saskia continued, “I don’t know what Sugar Land is but . . .”

“It’s a suburb southwest of Houston,” Rufus told her. A wry grin came over his face. “They used to call it ‘Hellhole on the Brazos,’ but Sugar Land sounds like a sweeter investment.”

“Why was it a hellhole?”

“Built by convict labor. Legal slavery, after the Civil War. Sugar plantations are so bad, you almost couldn’t have sugar without slaves.”

“What’s there now?”

“Subdivisions. The Brazos runs right through the middle of it. We can get there direct on a boat, or we can drive.”

A man with a thick accent took exception, and for a minute they talked in a way that Saskia couldn’t follow. Willem had brought up a map on his laptop. He and Saskia played a guessing game of trying to match place-names with the word fragments that they managed to fish out of the verbal gumbo. Just north of Sugar Land, in the western suburbs of Houston, the map showed large bodies of water, obviously artificial given that they were neat polygons outlined by roads. They were labeled as reservoirs. And yet on satellite imagery they appeared to be forests, dotted with recreational facilities. Sometimes, it seemed, these parts of the city were wooded parkland and other times they were underwater. Rufus and the Cajuns were talking about “Energy Corridor” and “Buffalo Bayou.” Willem identified these on the map as well—both ran eastward toward downtown. The former was a row of office complexes, including at least one Shell facility. The latter was a natural watercourse that apparently drained those huge park/reservoir zones.