Delusion Read Online Free PDF Page B

now they were bloodshot, too. She kissed his forehead. At the same time, she caught a whiff of that downtown stink that Bernardine had left behind, most noticeable when the breeze blew from the west. Had she left the front door open? She went to check. It was closed.
    C H A P T E R 4
    Alittle ghost brother, going round and round?” said Nellie.
    “Yeah,” said Johnny Blanton. He took her hand. They walked along the Sunshine Road towpath, the road on one side, the bayou on the other, moon overhead. A breeze drifted by, leaving the air the way it had been, soft and warm, so strangely unop-pressive for July, and now smelling of flowers. “There must be some great paintings of the moon,” Johnny said.
    “ Starry Night, ” said Nellie. But other than that she couldn’t think of a single one.
    “That’s it?” Johnny said.
    “Maybe painters didn’t want to do landscapes at night,” Nellie said.
    “Because it’s hard to see?”
    “And colder.”
    “Hey!” said Johnny. “Now you’re thinking like a scientist.” He stopped, faced her. She saw the moon in his eyes, reflected twice. “On the other hand,” he said, “it’s night and I can see you fine.” They kissed. “So that shoots your theory.”
    “Then let’s go home,” Nellie said. “And try getting practical.”
    “Like how?”
    “Maybe you can come up with something.”
    They walked back in the moonlight, unhurried. Nellie’s parents’
    guesthouse stood in the farthest corner of the property; they had 26
    PETER ABRAHAMS
    privacy and all the time in the world. A quiet summer night: nothing to hear but their footsteps, their breathing and the water, making sucking sounds in the bayou.
    “Tide’s coming in,” Johnny said.
    “There are tides in the bayou?”
    “Sure,” said Johnny. “This one anyway. And it’ll be a high one tonight.”
    “How come?”
    Johnny pointed at the moon. “Full,” he said. “Kind of poetic, if you think of it, the ghost brother still clinging on.”
    “Better explain the tides, Johnny.”
    Johnny explained the tides.
    “Who figured all this out?” Nellie said.
    “You mean what causes the tides, and the mathematical frame-work?” he said. “Newton.”
    “When was that?”
    “Sixteen-ninety, give or take.”
    “Wow.”
    “Wow what?”
    “Think of all that time before, when people had no idea,” Nellie said.
    “That’s you.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “That reaction, imagining a whole vanished world. Me, I’m in 1689, trying to find what comes next.”
    She mussed his hair. “My very own Sir Isaac.”
    “Not even close—there’ll never be another Newton,” Johnny said. They were arm in arm now, the Parish Street Pier a dark slanting oblong in the distance. “Fact is, I’ve been thinking about tides a lot lately.”
    “For your thesis?” Nellie said, trying to see some connection to geology.
    “No,” Johnny said. “But being down here got me interested.”
    “In what way?”
    “Everyone knows how low the land is around here,” Johnny said.
    “But there hasn’t been much research on the topography of the sea D E LU S I O N
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    bottom, especially as it relates to the shore contour. There are some obvious conclusions waiting out there, but no one seems in a hurry to—”
    “Topography?” Nellie said. “What’s that?”
    “Land shape,” said Johnny, “but I’m just interested in elevation differences on the sea bottom. Accurate data are a little hard to come by.”
    “But the charts must go way back.”
    He put his arm over her shoulder; she put hers behind his back; they fit together perfectly. Nellie loved the feel of his back, sinewy, the spine in a deep hollow between two long muscles, swimmer’s muscles.
    “They do,” he said as they came to the Parish Street Pier, a rickety old structure once used for launching little catfish boats, back when there’d been catfish in the bayou. “The problem is that the bottom changes over time—the whole earth’s so dynamic,