Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

By the time Beau made it up to Travis—the closest town of any size to the spew—Rufus had satisfied himself that the answer was upstream—so, generally northward in the direction of Waco. So once Beau’s pontoon boat was in the water, that was the direction they moved. It was an ungainly style of travel, putt-putting a few miles at a go up the meandering river, shadowed by Beau’s son-in-law Reggie driving Beau’s pickup truck ten miles for every one that the boat covered. When road and river came together they would stop and Reggie would drive Rufus back to the starting place and they would move all the vehicles up and park them. It felt agonizingly slow. But all they had to do was move faster than Snout.

A few days of that got them into the heart of Waco. There the river forked in the middle of a park where a smaller tributary, the Bosque, spilled into the main channel. A few miles upstream of that confluence, right next to the airport, the Bosque had been dammed to form Lake Waco. The Brazos for its part wandered off into the heart of Texas. So this was literally a fork in the road for the Snout expedition. There were good reasons to devote some time and some care to making sure they didn’t now take the wrong turn.

They had this embarrassment of huge vehicles. In open country this was fine, but in the leafy neighborhood of Waco where the river split, there was no place for them. Around the shores of Lake Waco, however, were a number of campgrounds with spaces for RVs. In any other year some of those would have been available, but now they were all full because of the problem with the fire ants and the relays. “Relayfugees” had set up unauthorized campsites along the roads that snaked through the wooded land between the lake and the airport, and they encroached on patches of open ground where those were to be found. As in every other human settlement there was good real estate and bad. Good was a legal campsite along the lakeshore, high and dry. Bad was illegal, marshy, and in the woods. With a combination of hustle, social skills, and bribery, Beau was able to secure a place that was only semi-terrible, large enough to create a little compound consisting of Rufus’s dually, Rufus’s trailer, Beau’s pickup, and the flatbed he used to transport the pontoon. Beau’s wife, Mary, flew up from Lake Charles, which was the Boskey clan’s home base, and they hunkered down on the site for a couple of days while Rufus probed up both branches of the river on an inflatable that Beau usually towed behind his pontoon.

Beau was everything Rufus wasn’t: comfortable on the water, interested in large reptiles, gregarious, cheerful, diurnal, and married. He and Mary had raised three kids on the edge of what most people would consider to be a swamp outside of Lake Charles. Their oldest daughter had married this Reggie, who looked to be the heir apparent to Beau’s gator mitigation business. Not that Beau seemed of a mind to retire any time soon. He seemed more the type to keep going until he dropped dead from cardiovascular issues related to his diet (pretty much what you would imagine) and sedentary (sitting in boats all day) lifestyle. But he would do so cheerfully, surrounded by photographs of his grandkids. Three of those were Reggie’s, and Reggie seemed like he was on the phone to them fourteen hours a day. Sometime he would aim his phone at Rufus, and Rufus would flinch as he came in view of some number of kids and the kids would call out, “Howdy, Red!” and he would be forced to answer. He could infer from what they said to him that Beau had spoken of Rufus respectfully and even affectionately. Mary, for her part, once she had shown up and taken over the operation of the compound, seemed unduly open-minded and tolerant of Rufus’s determination to find and kill Snout. Rufus wondered what was considered normal where she came from.

An interesting thing about campgrounds was the way that a little temporary society would spring up, complete with the social hierarchy and attendant drama of more permanent settlements. This place was more complicated than most. Some people were towing palatial trailers behind gleaming Escalades—these tended to be your fire ant relay refugees. There was a middle class of snowbirds who had migrated away from the Mud Bowl—the vast, sodden triangle of former heartland along the Missouri and Mississippi valleys that seemed to be flooded all the time nowadays. The lower class were people of various backgrounds, but quite often Spanish-speaking, living in tents in the woods, blue tarps thrown or pitched over those to provide some additional shelter from sun and rain. Many of them seemed to have found work cooking, cleaning, and doing handyman work for the more upscale trailer dwellers. So, past the Rufus/Beau compound, there was a regular flow of foot and bicycle traffic as such people went to and fro between their camps deeper in the woods and the better-drained sites where the mega-RVs resided in a purr of generator exhaust and a nimbus of light thick with bugs.

There was an old scary story that kids had been telling one another at least since Rufus had been a little boy, the punch line to which was: “The call is coming from inside the house!” Such a moment arrived on their third day in the Lake Waco camp when Rufus figured out that Snout and his herd had been within a mile of them the whole time.

This was an unforeseen consequence of Beau’s suddenly becoming interested in a very large “meth gator” rumored to be lurking around the shore of the lake. For this, and not “mefcator,” was the term he had used during the cell phone conversation.

Another thing Beau was that Rufus wasn’t was easily distractible. So one day it was suddenly all about this alleged meth gator. The pigs were back-burnered. Gators of that size were, in Waco, far more unusual than wild pigs and so the story had that going for it.

Beau’s hypothesis was incredible to Rufus, and yet he stated it with complete sincerity. Gators lived in rivers, which were the ultimate destinations of all sewage. Modern municipalities made efforts to treat their sewage, but sooner or later it did have to go somewhere. Sewage treatment was designed to handle poo, and little else. Complicated molecules such as pharmaceuticals tended to pass through unaltered. You could find evidence of a population’s usage of drugs, legal and illegal, in its sewage.

Meth cookers were notorious abusers of the sewage system. Moreover, they were infamous for bypassing sewage systems even when they were available—which in the sorts of places frequented by meth cookers, they often weren’t. So, by hook or by crook, a lot of meth found its way into rivers. Gators scented it and selectively traveled up those river forks where the scent was strongest, unerringly zeroing in on meth labs. Somewhere around the shores of this lake, someone was cooking meth, and in doing so had attracted this nest of meth gators, who might, for all Beau knew, have followed the scent trail all the way up from the Gulf of Mexico.

Since the inflatable was still in the Bosque, on the downstream side of the dam, they put the pontoon boat into Lake Waco and spent an evening putt-putting around looking for the sorts of habitats that, according to Beau, would be looked on by large gators and meth cookers alike as congenial. Rufus, nervously along for the ride, could not help but see the same sites through the eyes of a herd of feral hogs. He began to feel a gnawing anxiety about what unpredictable consequences might stem from spontaneous hog/gator interactions. He had pulled the infrared scope off his rifle. After night fell over the lake he began using it to survey boggy inlets along the shore. Beau reminded him for the hundredth time that gators were not warm-blooded: a joke he never got tired of. But Rufus wasn’t looking for gators.