Acts of Nature

helped.
    “Those are just my normal age lines,” I said, tightening my face to make the look more severe. “You certainly know that by now.”
    Again the light grin came to her face, accented by the glistening smear of peach juice on her lips.
    “No. That look is you grinding on something. The other is frustration at something that’s beating you.”
    “OK,” I admitted. “There’s got to be a way into that fucking room.”
    I told her what I’d found through the roof, the change in materials that seemed only to surround that half of the building.
    “Why would someone build one part of the cabin one way and the other so much more fortified?”
    “Fortified or waterproof?” Sherry said.
    “Both,” I said. I had traced the electrical fines from the small refrigerator and a waterline from the sink. Both went through the floorboards in the direction of the other room. I’d taken another trip outside in search of a generator room I might have missed. Nothing. The electrical supply was in the other room as well.
    “High-tech lock, waterproofed and fortified. There’s something valuable inside,” she said.
    “Out here, in the middle of nowhere?” I tossed it back to her.
    “Drug drop. Distribution point?”
    “Cop thinking,” I said, with a cynical twinge.
    “Duh, yeah.”
    I might have thought of it myself. But it had been a while since I’d worked narcotics and only in the streets of South Philadelphia, never in the swamp.
    “OK. It’s isolated enough for drop-offs, but the only way you distribute from here is by airboat,” I said. “Only way quick enough.”
    “Too piecemeal and too expensive,” she said and ate more of the peaches.
    I stared off toward the end of the bed, like I was thinking, but really looking at her toes, for discoloration. Though her mind was sharper and her mood higher with the food and rest, we were going to have to get her out of here soon. The chances of someone coming by or looking for us were minimal. Even if Billy started looking for me, which he would, or if Sherry’s supervisors got anxious, would there be anyone dispatched to my river shack? And when they found it, if it were still standing, would they make a jump in reasoning that I’d been stupid enough to take us somewhere by boat? It could be days and we sure as hell didn’t have days. I didn’t see a way to patch my canoe with the materials we had. Whatever was in that room might be our savior if we were to have one.
    “The Fisher Body plant in Lansing, Michigan,” Sherry said. Her tone turned my head because she did not seem to be directing the odd and disconnected words to me but to the wall. She was looking off to a memory.
    “I must have still been a teenager. It was one of those stories in the news that for the first time took my attention away from that bullshit in high school.”
    I knew Sherry had grown up in Michigan, the daughter of blue-collar parents, working class in an area and in a time where working class was a prideful tide.
    “I remember it because I was scared to death back then of being stuck somewhere without air. Maybe I’d been swimming somewhere in the lake and lost my breath or maybe my brothers had locked me in the closet or something when I was little. But I was always scared back then that I would be trapped somewhere without air.”
    I looked closely into her face, then straight into her eyes, checking for the dilation of her pupils. If she was going into some kind of hallucination from the trauma, I might have to just patch the canoe as best I could and make a run for it. I took her hand in mine.
    “There’s plenty of air, Sherry. We’re OK. All right? You can breath here, baby.”
    Her eyes reacted and she shifted them to me.
    “Oh, shit. No, I’m sorry, Max,” she said. “I’m not flipping out on you. No. I was thinking of an old story, back in my hometown.
    “There was this accident at the auto factory. There were these three workers, guys in the paint department on the line at Fisher Body where all the cars for GM were assembled. These guys were doing cleanup in one of these deep pits where they dipped the cars for rust-proofing or something. They were pits that were sealed and waterproof. Maybe it was some kind of maintenance that they had to go down in these things and clean up excess paint or something.
    “But whatever they were using, maybe some new solvent or something to break down the paint, they got themselves surrounded in a cloud of the