The Thanatos Syndrome

a handle?”
    â€œEasy. She’s a volunteer nurse at Belle Ame Academy. So she takes the same physical all schoolteachers and staff take. Try State Public Health.”
    â€œRight. That’s—ah—Van Dorn’s outfit, isn’t it?” she asks carefully.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œYou got her SS number?”
    â€œYes.” It’s with mine in my wallet. I read it out to her.
    She hits keys without comment.
    The screen nixes. She looks at me neutrally.
    â€œWhat name did you use?”
    â€œEllen More.”
    â€œTry Ellen Oglethorpe. That’s her maiden name and tournament name.”
    A nod, no comment, not an eye flicker. She hits keys. “There she is.”
    NA-24—2.
    We look in silence. “That’s not much, Tom.”
    â€œNo, not much. But too much. Let’s try Van Dorn. I don’t have his number.”
    â€œNo problem,” she says, as neutrally as I. “I can get it from Fedville file.”
    She gets it, hits more keys. The screen answers laconically.
    NA-24—O.
    â€œHow could that be?” I ask nobody in particular.
    Lucy waits, like a stenographer, watching the keyboard. After a while she looks up at me. “What’s the matter?”
    â€œNothing. Let’s go,” I say. “Vergil will be waiting.”
    We pile into Lucy’s big pickup, Vergil standing aside so I’ll sit in the middle next to Lucy. The uncle is nowhere in sight. Maggie, the pointer, thinking she’s going hunting, jumps clear over the tailgate into the truck bed.
    â€œWe’re not going to have any trouble,” Vergil tells us in a soft voice. “There’s only one fellow at the intake gate. I know him. He used to fish with my daddy. He’s from Baton Rouge.” The only sign that Vergil is black is the way he pronounces Baton Rouge, with a rough g, Roodge.
    He’s right. There is no trouble. We swing off the Angola road to a chain link gate, Lucy not even showing her pass to the uniformed guard in his booth, who probably recognizes her truck, out and over the Tunica flats between the high-rises of Fedville on the right and the barbed-wire chain link fence of the Grand Mer facility on the left. The gravel road slants up and over the levee. There across the still waters of old Grand Mer, now Lake Mary, and not half a mile away looms the great lopped-off cone of the cooling tower, looking for all the world like a child’s drawing of Mt. St. Helens after it blew its top. The thin flag of vapor flies from its crater. From the pumping station below a brace of great pipes strapped together like the blood vessels in the thigh humps directly up and over the levee, making an arch high enough for a truck to pass under. Across the upper blind end of Lake Mary is the old revetment, great mattresses of concrete, old, moldering, lichened, laid down years ago in a vain attempt to thwart the river’s capricious decision to jump the neck of the loop and take a shortcut south—to no avail. Ol’ Man River done made up his mind.
    Lake Mary, once the broad gulf of the river where sternwheelers made their stops at plantation landings, stretches peaceably beyond the willows. Directly in front of us the new river booms past down Raccourci Chute as if it had just discovered the shortcut, half a mile wide, foam-flecked in excitement, sparkling brown wavelets crisscrossing in angry sucks and boils. A powerful towboat pushing an acre of barges labors upstream. There is no easy water here.
    A short concrete L-shaped pier sticks out into the river. A privy-size guardhouse houses a guard not even uniformed and listening to his headset. He waves us past.
    â€œI don’t know what we’re looking for,” says Lucy.
    In fact, there is not much to see. The concrete ell encloses the intake, a grid of steel bars some twenty feet square. It is girded around by a protective strainer of steel fins like whale teeth in which is lodged river junk, driftwood, beer cans, chunks of Styrofoam, the whole mess coated in yellow froth.
    We stand looking down. “Well, that’s it,” says Lucy. “The grossly strained water goes down there, then up there in that pipe—how big is that pipe, Vergil?”
    â€œSeventy-two-inch diameter.”
    â€œâ€”then over to the pumping station and purification plant. Actually, it’s good water when you drink it. We’re above the big chemical plants. For the life of