The Rift

by Walter Jon Williams

  Russelville, Kentucky, Feb. 26

  “Damn. Look at that. River’s sure high.” Viondi paused at the top of the crumbling concrete ramp. Nick Ruford passed him and kept walking down the ramp. “There’s floods up north, you know.”

  “Hadn’t heard,” Viondi said.

  “Haven’t been watching the news, huh?”

  “Been workin’ double shifts remodeling those old buildings down on Chouteau. Ain’t had time to watch the news.”

  Nick paused at the water’s edge. The swift river rippled purposefully across the boat ramp, as if it resented the presence of the concrete. There was a splash as the wake of a towboat raised a wave that splattered Nick’s shoes. He stepped back.

  Viondi Crowley walked down the worn ramp in his sandals, paused to put down his creel, then stepped into the water, washing the dust from his big, square toes.

  “River’s a cold motherfucker today,” he said.

  “Careful. Or you’ll fall on your ass.”

  The towboat’s wake slopped water over Viondi’s ankles. He backed out of the river, shook the Mississippi off his feet.

  “Hand me the soap,” he said.

  The Mississippi ran blue here—thirty miles above where, at St. Louis, the Missouri dumped half the mud of the Midwest into the Father of Waters. Long wooded islands stretched down the river, though at the moment most of them were half submerged, willow branches trailing listless in the flood. Two towboats were in sight, both pushing long tows against the current. The sound of their powerful turbines whined distantly off the water.

  Nick looked out at the sparkling waters, felt the sun on his face. A mild wind stirred the hairs on his neck. He took a breath, tried to relax. Tried to make himself relax. And then wondered why it was so hard. It’s not like he had a job to worry about. Or a home. Or a family.

  Hell, relaxing should be easy. So why wasn’t it?

  He looked down as Viondi held the bar of soap in one big hand and carved it into chunks with his pocket knife. He retained two of the soap chunks, put the rest in their original wrapper, then put the wrapper in his pocket.

  He reached out a hand, and Nick mutely handed him the fishing rods. Viondi baited them both with chunks of soap, then handed one to Nick.

  “Better cast off the ramp,” he said. “With the river this high, there’s bound to be snags everywhere else.” Viondi stepped away to give himself some casting room, then brought the rod back over his shoulder and let it fly out. The reel sang as the baited line flew out over the river. There was a splash as it struck the water.

  Relax, Nick told himself. You should relax. Fishing is the most relaxing thing in the world. He cast into the water, his movement more awkward than Viondi’s. The hook and its chunk of soap landed about twenty feet from where Nick intended. He had come to fishing late in life—his father, as he was growing up, had always thought the son of a general had more important things to do. Nick’s sports had been wrestling and track, and he’d been expected to stay on the honor roll for academics as well. There’d been Scouting—if a general’s son couldn’t make Eagle Scout, there was obviously something wrong with them both. And afterward there had been more school, and family, and his job with McDonnell.

  Where did fishing fit into all that?

  He hadn’t gone fishing in his life until he met Viondi.

  “Hey, Nick,” Viondi said, as he reeled in. “What do you call a woman who can suck a golf ball through a garden hose?”

  Nick looked at Viondi’s grin. “What?” he said.

  “‘Darling.’”

  A reluctant laugh pushed itself up from Nick’s diaphragm. “Where you hear these?” he asked. Viondi retrieved his lure, cast again. “There’s this rich white lady, see, goes to the doctor. And the doctor sits her down and says, ‘You’re in good health. And in fact I want to compliment you on the fact that your pussy is the cleanest I’ve ever seen.’

  “And the lady says, ‘It better be, I got this colored man comes in twice a week.’” Nick’s laugh bubbled up like a spring.

  “Made you laugh twice in a row!” Viondi said. “Gold star for me.” Nick wished he knew some good jokes he could use to answer Viondi’s. But Viondi was the only person who ever told Nick jokes.

  “Where do you get these from?” Nick asked weakly.

  “Work. Niggas gotta keep themselves amused working eighteen hours a day.” Viondi’s eyes narrowed as he looked at the water. “Strike,” he advised.

  Nick had reeled his lure close to the shore; he looked down to see a dark shadow in the clear water, an engulfing mouth that opened startlingly wide before closing on the slice of soap and darting away. Nick jerked the rod to set the hook, felt the fish resist, heard the whine of the reel as the fish took the line out. Viondi cranked his reel to get his own line out of the way.

  “Big ol’ catfish,” Viondi said, after they landed the fish. He laid the gasping fish on the fresh-cut grass he’d put in his creel, then smiled up at Nick. “Soap gets ’em every time.” Viondi was a plumber. He ran his own plumbing company with about a dozen employees, and Nick had made his acquaintance when he’d hired Viondi to replumb his old house back in Pine Lawn. He and Viondi had hit it off. Manon hadn’t liked Viondi as much as Nick had. She thought Viondi was crude and irresponsible. “How can he be irresponsible,” Nick had pointed out, “when he’s running a successful company?”

  “He’s irresponsible in his personal life,” Manon said.

  Nick had to admit that this was true. Viondi was either working or playing, either pulling double shifts with his crew, or at a party that could last for days. Nick wasn’t quite certain how often Viondi had been married, but he’d heard reference to at least three wives, and he’d had children by at least three women, not necessarily the same women as his wives.

  And Viondi looked like such a roughneck. He was big, with wide shoulders and big biceps and a short-cropped beard. He looked as if he could tear apart a human being with his large bare hands. Just Viondi’s looks made Manon nervous.

  For weeks Nick would leave messages on Viondi’s answering machine without a reply, and then he’d know Viondi was working. But then he’d get a call, and Viondi would want Nick to pile with a few other friends into Viondi’s Buick and drive off for a weekend’s debauch in Memphis, or a road trip to Chicago, or to spend some time at the Greenville Blues Festival.

  Or sometimes the call was just to go fishing on a Wednesday morning. A Wednesday like today. Whatever the call, it had been easier for Nick to say yes once Manon had gone home to Toussaint. A pair of freshwater gulls wheeled overhead in hopes that someone would clean a fish and give them the remains. Viondi rebaited Nick’s hook with another piece of soap. “You heard from Arlette?” Nick’s heart sank. Just when he’d started feeling good.

  “Yeah,” he said. “She’s going to France in a couple weeks.” Nick frowned at the river. “I’m not going to get to see her till, maybe, Christmas.”

  “Shit. That’s tough. Your old lady ain’t cutting you no slack at all.” Nick found himself wanting to defend Manon. “Well,” he said, “it’s an opportunity, you know. Going to France.”

  “Arlette needs a daddy more than she needs a trip to France,” Viondi said. “I’ve kept all my kids in my life, no matter what else happened.” He finished baiting the hook and let it fall. Nick cast, heard the splash, saw the pale chunk of soap sink into the rippling water. Viondi cast, dropped his hook precisely. One of the gulls dipped toward the splash, then decided it didn’t want to eat soap. Viondi began reeling in.

  “Why don’t you go down to Arkansas,” he asked, “see your girl?” Nick’s heart gave a little jump at the thought. “My old car wouldn’t make it,” he said automatically. It needed new engine and transmission seals that he couldn’t afford. When he drove it, even the driver’s compartment filled with blue smoke.

  “Take the bus.” Viondi gave him a severe look. “It’s not like you’ve got anything critical to do in St. Louis.”

  Nick
thought about it for a long, hopeful moment, calculating how much it would cost, how long he could afford to be away. As Viondi said, it wasn’t as if he had anything important here, a job or anything. There wasn’t a hotel in Toussaint, he’d have to stay at the boarding house run by Manon’s aunt. Man, Nick thought, Manon would be pissed.

  He thought about Arlette’s eyes lighting at the sight of the diamond necklace.

  “Tell you what,” Viondi said. “I could use a little R and R down in N’awlins. I’ll drop you off in Toussaint on the way.”

  Nick looked at him. “What about those buildings on Chouteau?”

  “Nearly done. I’ll let Darrell finish the job.” Darrell was Viondi’s eldest son. “Do him good to have a little responsibility for a change.” Viondi smiled. “I’ve got a weekend’s worth of work first, though, that can’t do without me. How about I pick you up on Monday?”

  Hope rose in Nick, but he found that he was wary of hope these days. He didn’t want this to disappear.

  “You sure about this?” he asked. “I mean, this is pretty sudden.” Viondi shrugged. “It’s like I’m always telling you, man, you want a flexible schedule, you get a job like mine. Work hard, play hard, die with your boots on.” He looked at Nick. “It’s not too late for you, you know. I’m bidding up a big contract, could use a new apprentice.”

  “Well,” Nick said “it may come to that.”

  Viondi grinned. “Hey,” he said. “You know why God invented golf?” Nick shook his head. “No idea,” he said.

  “So that white folks could dress up like black people.”

  A few more hours of this, Nick thought, and he might even start to relax.

  As he drove around the bend and the plant came in sight around the pine thicket, Larry Hallock lifted his eyes automatically to the huge cooling tower and found something wrong. His eyes checked in their movement and returned to the tower, the elegant concrete hyperboloid curves whitened by the morning sun.

  Something was missing. The plume of steam that normally floated above the tower. Larry was annoyed with himself. He knew that. He knew that the reactor had been shut down for refueling, something that happened every eighteen months or so. He knew that there would be no plume of steam when the reactor wasn’t in operation.

  But he’d got used to the steam plume being there, perched above the tower. Eighteen months was just long enough for him to forget how the plant looked when the reactor was shut down. He passed by the old Indian mound that archaeologists, somewhat to the inconvenience of the facility’s designers, had insisted remain on the property. The front parking lot looked full. One of the concessions the power company had made to the locals when they’d acquired the site was that one-third of the plant workers had to come from the immediate area. As there are relatively few nuclear engineers and qualified power plant managers in rural Mississippi, the Poinsett Landing plant was blessed with a large and splendidly equipped janitorial, maintenance, and machine-shop force.

  The parking lot was unusually full as workers busied themselves with maintenance and preventative maintenance while the reactor was cold, so Larry turned the Taurus down the fork in the road that led behind the plant, toward the river hidden behind the long green wall of the levee. The long morning shadow of the cooling tower reached across the grass and fell on him as he drove, and in the air-conditioned silence of the car, he felt a chill.

  Larry’s feet rang on metal as he climbed the ladder that led up the maintenance truss that ran up the curved roof of the primary containment building. He tilted his head back in the bright yellow hood of the clean suit he wore and kept on climbing. The structure smelled of emptiness and wet concrete. Masses of concrete and steel loomed around him. Below, in addition to the water-filled chamber and the crane, the building was filled with a chaos of tanks, pipes, valves, conduit, ductwork, electric motors, girders, accumulators, and bundles of cable. All of it on a massive scale, dwarfing the suited figures of the crane operators.

  Jameel, the foreman who was supervising operating the refueling machine, looked up as Larry passed overhead, then gave a wave. Larry waved back.

  “How ’bout the Cubbies?” Larry called down. Jameel was from Chicago and maintained a dogged loyalty to the National League’s perennial losers.

  “Two in a row!” Jameel shouted. He gave the thumb’s-up sign.

  “Guess they didn’t need Gutierrez after all!”

  Jameel made a face. He had complained long and hard about the Cubs’ preseason trade. The refueling was relatively simple, but the scale of it was always impressive. Larry enjoyed his visits to the containment structure, and since the reactor was shut down, and everyone else going through routine maintenance checklists, he had nothing more urgent at the moment than to suit up, enter the containment building, and play tourist.

  The bright yellow clean suit he wore, complete with boots and gloves and a hood over his head, had nothing to do with protecting himself from radiation—the water flooding the space above the reactor would do that. The suit was to keep him from contaminating the water with one of his accidental byproducts, such as, for example, a hair. The demineralized water that was used to cool the reactor and its fuel was carefully maintained in order to make certain that it gave no chemical or mechanical problems. The refueling machine began to hum as chains rattled in. Larry put his hands on the rail, looked down. The machine was large and moved back and forth on tracks placed over the water-filled refueling cavity. Its operators sat atop it, peering into the watery depths below.

  Glimmering in the glow of floodlights, the squat silver-metal form of a fuel assembly began its descent into the reactor. Its glittering image was broken by the refraction of the little wavelets in the pool. The chains ceased to rattle, and the sound of the engine died. Electric motors gave brief whines. Jameel signaled to another of his crew. There was a subdued metallic clang, and then chains began to rattle again as the hook that had lowered the fuel assembly into the reactor withdrew.

  The refueling process was nearing its end. Over eight hundred fuel assemblies needed to be moved—most were just moved within the reactor, but a third had to be replaced completely, the old assemblies moved through an underwater channel to the Auxiliary Building for storage, while new assemblies were carried the other way.

  With an urgent hum of electric motors, the refueling machine began to move, sliding on its tracks toward the fuel channel, where it would pick up another fresh fuel assembly for movement into the reactor. Larry smiled down at the operation and thought of horses.

  Even with his fifty-five years and his degree in nuclear engineering, Larry Hallock still considered himself a cowpuncher. He had been raised on a ranch near Las Vegas, New Mexico, a long, rambling adobe building, built over generations, with a tin roof and a homemade water tower. Every summer afternoon, as the thermals rose from the valley floor, cool air would flow down from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and bring with it the scent of the high meadows, the star flowers, white mountain daisies, and purple asters, the flowers that flourished in the brief growing season at ten thousand feet. For Larry, this was the perfume of paradise. Sometimes, even now, he woke from a dream with the scent in his nostrils. When he was fourteen, his father had called him, his brother, and his sister into the little office from which he ran the ranch business, the mud-walled room with its old rolltop desk, well-thumbed ledger books, and Navajo rugs. His blue eyes gazed at them all from his leathery face.

  “Do you love this business?” he asked. “Do you want to ranch for the rest of your lives?” All three siblings nodded.

  “Well, then,” their father said, “you better all go to college and become professionals, because it’s the only way you’re going to be able to afford to keep this place alive.”

  They had taken their father’s advice to heart. Larry’s younger brother Robert was a doctor in Santa Fe. Larry had become a nuclear engineer. Both considered themselves cowboys at heart, and spent as much time as possible in New Mexico doing ranch work.
And their older sister Mimi, who still lived on the ranch, commuted in her Chevy pickup truck to her law practice in Las Vegas. She had raised her children to carry on after her, which was more than Larry had managed—his daughter worked in biostatistics, whatever those were, in North Carolina’s Research Triangle, and his son studied Chinese literature at the University of Chicago. Both places were a long way from New Mexico, and when Larry thought about it he felt a breath of sadness waft through his heart.

  He was remembering a grulla mare named Low Die that he had ridden when he was maybe twelve. She would set down wonderfully on her hocks, but for some reason she would not fall off to the right as well as she fell off to the left. When she spun to the left it was a thing of beauty, but when he wanted her to cut right, for some reason her coordination fell apart, and there were strange, unpredictable hesitations in her movement. It was almost as if she were afraid to turn right.

  Experience suggested that such a fault might be the result of a spinal injury or deformity. But after a thorough examination it was concluded that Low Die’s spine was in perfectly fine shape. So Larry had worked that strange horse patiently for weeks. He would work her first on moves that she could do well, moves in which she had confidence. He would praise her lavishly for every successful maneuver. Then he would run her for a while, so that she’d get tired and not think so much, just respond to the touch of his feet and hands.

  And then he’d start turning Low Die in wide circles to the right. And the circles would get smaller and smaller until, eventually, she was falling off to the right just as he wanted. That was how you solved a problem. You broke it down into pieces, and you solved the pieces one at a time. With patience, you could get anywhere, even into the dimwitted brain of a horse. Low Die. A beautiful cutting horse. He’d ridden her for years.