The Rift

by Walter Jon Williams

  “Okay.” Uncertainly.

  “I need for you not to be overheard doing this.” She bit her lip. “Pat—the appointment’s for me.” Concern rasped Pat’s voice. “Was there a fight? Did you get hit?”

  “It’s that shiner you gave me. I’ve been seeing flashes and…” She squeezed her eyes shut. “I’ve lost some vision in my left eye. I think it was the helicopter ride, it must have shaken something loose.”

  “My God, Jessie.” Pat was thunderstruck. “My God, you’ve got to get here now.”

  “I can’t. Things are a mess, and—look, you just make that appointment and let me know when I have to be there. And don’t tell anyone. Because if the Army finds out, they’re going to pull me off this job faster than you can spit.”

  There was a pause before Pat replied. “Are you sure that wouldn’t be a good thing?” Jessica clenched her teeth. “Everything’s fucked up, okay?” she said. “Everything I’ve done has been destroyed or compromised or made a mess of. All I’ve been able to do is watch. I’m not leaving this job till I have a win, okay?”

  “Yes,” Pat said. “Yes. I understand.”

  “Make that call, okay? Take care of this for me.”

  “Right away.”

  “Good. Good. Because I need this.”

  “I love you, Jessie.”

  Jessica felt some of the tension ease from her taut-strung body. “I love you too, Pat.” She turned off the cellphone and pulled the rain cape off her head. The air smelled sweet, of rain and the grassy meadow.

  Helicopters throbbed on the horizon, bringing in a company of military police, who would over the next day or two replace the Rangers and Jessica’s engineers, leaving them free for other duties. Jessica hoped to hell she wouldn’t be blind by then.

  Jason rubbed Arlette’s arms, the friction of his palms warming the gooseflesh brought on by the clammy dawn. “Thanks,” Arlette said in a small voice, and shivered. Jason wanted to put his arms around her, hold her close, keep her warm against him. But though he had huddled with her through the storm, flesh to flesh, in the tiny cockpit, so close that he could feel the chill cold of her thigh alongside his, smell the warmth of her breath beneath the improvised plastic rain canopy, still he did not quite dare to put his arms around her.

  Not with Nick and Manon there, looking at him with weary, half-resentful eyes, as if they were on the verge of politely asking him to leave.

  “Come here, baby,” Nick said to Arlette. “Let me get you warm.” Arlette shifted across the little cockpit to sit on the edge of the cockpit next to her father. Nick began rubbing her bare arms, her back. Arlette sighed gratefully against his warmth. A pang of envy throbbed through Jason’s heart.

  Arlette sneezed. “Scat,” her mother said.

  “Thank you, Momma.”

  Arlette sneezed again.

  “Scat,” her parents said in unison.

  Nick caught Jason’s puzzled look. “‘Scat’ is Arkansas for ‘Gesundheit,’” he said. Jason nodded. “I kind of figured that out.”

  He rose stiffly to his feet from his perch on the edge of the cockpit, and gazed about at the fog-shrouded morning. Drops of water pattered down from the dark cypress trees, almost a rainstorm in themselves. The trees, standing on their thick stilt-legs and hung with vines and moss, were ungainly shadows barely visible through the mist. Some had fallen in the quake and lay like dead giants in the water, and elsewhere cypress roots, shorn off by tectonic force, stood in clumps like forlorn soldiers lost on a battlefield. Jason stepped up onto the wet front deck, looked down at the still, dark water, at his reflection fragmented by ripples. All the ripples were from the falling water, he realized. There wasn’t so much as a breath of wind. Hunger burned in his stomach. “What do we do?” he said.

  “Get some food,” Manon said. “It’s been two nights since we ate.”

  “We need to figure out where we are,” Nick said. “The river’s to the east of here, generally—maybe north or south is closer, but east will get us there—but in this fog we can’t tell where east is.”

  “So we just sit here?” Manon said. “In the fog? And starve?”

  “If you have a better idea,” Nick said, “I would like to hear it.”

  “You should have planned better,” Manon said. “You should have made sure that we had food with us when we got away from the camp.”

  “I wasn’t the one who worked in the kitchens,” Nick said. “You didn’t put anything away?”

  “Can we not argue over this?” Arlette demanded in a loud voice. “Can somebody tell me why we’re arguing?”

  The argument had the bitter taste of familiarity to Jason. They sure sound like a family, he thought. Arguing about all the things they can’t change.

  That was his family, too. What he remembered most about his family was the arguments. That and the long, terrible silences that followed the arguments, and the long absences when his father would vanish for weeks at a time, working eighteen hours a day in his office.

  Nick’s family seemed to be entering one of those familiar glacial silences. Jason rubbed the chill out of his upper arms.

  “We could try to find some cattail,” he said. His voice had a strange, hollow ring in the clammy mist. “Or some—what is it?—pokeweed?”

  His voice vanished into the mist. The silence enveloped him. No one bothered to acknowledge his words.

  He dropped to sit on his heels on the foredeck, hunkered against the tendrils of misery he felt floating around him, dank and clammy, like the mist.

  Jason looked up for a moment as he noticed that one of the strange-looking cypress trees, standing tall on its knees in the flood, was moving along his line of vision. He looked up and found himself staring at the range of twelve feet or so into the beady eyes of a cormorant, one of a dozen who occupied the tree’s lower branches—black, sinister silhouettes that sat in the trees as motionless, and as alien, as Easter Island statues, sentinels standing guard over unknown country.

  Surprise brought an exclamation to Jason’s lips. The cormorants didn’t react, didn’t even blink.

  “Urn,” he said, to cover sudden embarrassment. “We’re moving. There’s a current here.” He heard the others shifting in the cockpit, testing the notion for themselves. None of them seemed to notice the ominous, long-necked figures in the trees that followed them with glittering eyes.

  “The current is going downstream,” Manon said. “All we have to do is go in the direction of the current, right?”

  When Nick spoke, it was with slow reluctance. “Not necessarily,” he said. “The storm just dumped a lot of rain upstream from here. When the flood hits us, it might spread out into the country as well as draining toward the Gulf. This current might be taking us further inland.”

  “That’s not bad, is it?” Manon asked. “There are people inland.”

  “Maybe. It could be that we’re just going further into the wilderness.” There was another moment of silence. “Nick,” Manon said, “we have to get the child some food.” Jason turned away from the cormorants, saw Nick frowning in the cockpit. “I don’t want to use fuel till we know where we’re going.”

  “Anywhere is better than this.”

  “The fog will lift sooner or later,” Jason offered, but the adults paid him no attention. It was as if they were locked in a kind of dance, and they couldn’t leave the dance floor till the end of the music, and they couldn’t change to a different dance because these were the only steps they knew. Arlette, who knew the steps as well as the dancers, left her father’s lap and joined Jason on the foredeck. They hunched in cold silence and watched the cormorants fade away into the mist. At the end of the argument, Nick started the outboard and began to motor along with the current. Jason and Arlette took their oars and stood on the foredeck to fend off floating debris.

  At least the activity kept them warm. And Jason enjoyed just being in Arlette’s company, working next to her on the foredeck.

  The strange cypress-shadows flo
ated past, as if in and out of a dream. Little aftershocks trembled in the still water, then faded. The motor’s low rumble echoed from the invisible forest around them. Water streamed from the branches above. Jason was morally certain that they were heading in the wrong direction, that they were just getting deeper into the wilderness, but he was part of the adults’ dance now, too, and there was no escaping it.

  After an hour or so the cypress swamp came to an end. Instead of trees there was a tangle of bushes and low scrub, much of it covered with creeper and strung with floating debris. Nick cut the motor for a moment, and the boat drifted in the sudden silence. “What is this?” Nick asked. “Is it somebody’s field?”

  “If it’s a field, it’s overgrown,” Manon said.

  “The current’s strong here,” Arlette said, looking over the bow. “Stronger than in the cypress swamp.” The boat spun lazily in the current. Arlette reached out with an oar, pushed the boat away from a tangle of scrub. “It’s a flood plain,” Nick said. “We’re in a flood plain.”

  “We’re in the batture?” Manon asked, using the old Louisiana name for the country between the levee and the river. “That should mean we’re near the Mississippi.”

  “I think we’re going the wrong way,” Nick said. “We’re in a—what’s the name?—floodway. The Corps of Engineers, or somebody, keeps this place clear of trees so that it can be flooded deliberately when the water gets too high. We’re being carried off into an area that’s been set aside intentionally as a place to store flood water.”

  “I think that makes sense,” Jason said. Not that anyone cares what I think, he added to himself. Manon’s voice was uneasy. “Well,” she said, “this really doesn’t look like the Mississippi, what we can see of it. But what if we’re in a river, and the current’s taking us to the Mississippi?”

  “That’s possible,” Nick said. “I’d rather not use any more fuel until we know for certain.”

  “Nick,” Manon said, “I am so hungry. And Arlette hasn’t had any food since the day before yesterday.”

  “I’m okay, Momma,” Arlette said. “I’m getting used to it.”

  “We’ll know soon where we’re headed,” Nick said. “If this is taking us to the Mississippi, we’ll get there pretty quick. No mistaking the big river when we find it.”

  “I hate to do nothing,” Manon said. “Just sit here and do nothing.” Her voice trailed off into the mist. The current lapped against the bass boat’s chine as it drew the boat into the pale unknown. Jason planted his oar on the deck and leaned his forehead against the smooth wooden haft. River water, trickling down the length of the oar, tracked its cooling path against his forehead. Suddenly Jason was very, very tired. He hadn’t really slept during last night’s rain, just drowsed against Arlette’s shoulder while the rain rattled on the plastic sheet overhead; and the previous night’s sleep on the metal foredeck had not been restful.

  Jason lowered his oar to the casting deck, then sat on the deck. If nothing was going to happen, he might as well rest. He began to stretch out along the length of the deck.

  “Wait, Jason,” Arlette said. She put down her oar and sat beside him, her legs crossed. “Put your head on my lap,” she said.

  Jason felt suddenly awkward. He felt that he ought not to look at her parents, should not receive whatever signal their faces were sending. “Thank you,” he said. He shifted himself on the foredeck and put his head in Arlette’s lap, her crossed ankles below his neck. He looked up at her, saw an enigmatic Buddha smile on her inverted features.

  “Comfortable?” she asked.

  “Yes. Very.”

  He closed his eyes. He felt the warmth of her bearing him up, a yielding touch of softness in the cool mist. The current rocked the boat lightly. For a moment Arlette’s fingertips brushed his cheek, and he inclined his head slightly, like a cat, to strop his jawline along her fingers.

  His thoughts whirled into the warmth of Arlette, into the touch of her fingers, and then his thoughts flew away and were lost to time.

  When Jason opened his eyes he saw Arlette, the silent smile still on her face as she bent over him, drowsing. Her fingers lay curled against his cheek. In a pocket of her shorts he could feel the little jewelry box that held the necklace her father had given her. Above her was the whiteness of the mist. The current still chuckled against the bass boat’s hull.

  Without moving his head Jason looked left and right, and saw to his surprise that the mist had lifted slightly: it hovered about fifteen feet from the surface of the water, a perfect, featureless shroud of white that hung unbroken in the air, as if the world had simply dissolved into nothing a few feet over their heads. Jason looked at Arlette against the backdrop of white and for the first time observed the little scar that disrupted the perfect arch of her right eyebrow, the length and richness of the lashes laid against her brown cheeks, the way her eyelids pulsed to the dream-movement of the eyes beneath. Arlette must have sensed his scrutiny, because her eyes fluttered open. Jason watched the eyes as they sleepily focused on him, the mouth as the smile broadened.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi.” Her chin tilted as she looked up. “We can see a little,” she said. “Look.” He rose reluctantly from her lap, and Arlette straightened her cramped legs with a sigh. He saw that the boat was in a wide flooded channel, with a cypress swamp on one side and a line of cottonwoods on the other. The speed of the current had slowed, and the boat spun like an errant compass needle below the great sheet of mist above their heads.

  Jason glanced at the other passengers. Nick was slouched in the cockpit, eyelids half-shut. Manon stood on the after-deck, gazing in silence at the great, dark, silent mass of water. She gave a sigh, her shoulders slumping. “I think you’re right, Nick,” she said. “We’re in the wrong place. This can’t be a real river.” Nick opened his drowsing eyes, straightened in his seat. “We can head the other way. But I’d rather wait till we’re absolutely sure before I use any more gas. I think we should just tie up to something till we can see the sun.”

  He rose slowly from his seat and rolled his shoulders to take the kinks out of them. He turned to Arlette.

  “Hand me that rope, honey.”

  Arlette reached for the neatly bundled mooring rope, turned to hand it to her father, and then said, “Is that some kind of house?”

  They all followed her pointing finger. There was a structure of some kind in one of the cottonwoods, a boxy-looking object that clearly had not been put there by Nature.

  “Looks like a kid’s treehouse,” Nick said.

  “Kids build treehouses near their real houses,” Manon said. A smile broke across her face. “I think we may be close to civilization here.”

  “If civilization hasn’t been evacuated,” Nick said. He started the engine and motored across the flood. The object was in truth a treehouse, and a big one, a sort of split-level with two main rooms and a pitched roof of irregularly shaped, homemade wood shingles. The unpainted planks of the structure were green with age. Beneath, cross-pieces of wood had been nailed to the bole of the tree as a primitive ladder.

  “Look!” Arlette said. “Power poles!”

  As the boat neared the treeline, the passengers were able to see farther into the mist a little beyond the trees. The line of cottonwoods was narrow, and behind it was an embankment, or perhaps a levee. On the embankment two power poles stood with their heads crowned by mist. The lines between them had fallen, and another pole, farther down the line, leaned at an oblique angle, strands of wire hanging limp like the arms of a man in despair.

  Jason felt his heart stagger into a quicker tempo. These forlorn signs of a once-human presence—the weird old tree-house, the abandoned power poles—were enough to kindle his hope. Suddenly he couldn’t leave Retired and Gone Fishin’ quick enough. He wanted to leap to the shore and kick out, run down the embankment as fast as his legs would carry him. Or swarm up the tree to the strange old dwelling, stand on the roof, look for rescue as if from the cro
w’s nest of a sailing ship.

  “I’ll check out the treehouse,” Jason said.

  “See if someone’s home first,” Nick said. He hailed the treehouse several times. No answer came. Nick maneuvered the boat to the cottonwood, touched it once, and Jason sprang for the homemade ladder.

  “Watch out for snakes,” Nick called. “In floods they climb high.” The thought of snakes didn’t deter Jason. He practically ran up the tree, came to the platform where the treehouse rested. A weathered door of hammered-together planks, four feet high, was closed with a simple hook-and-eye. Jason hoisted himself onto the platform and unhooked the door. A strange smell, rotted vegetation and moldy fur, floated out of the old structure, and for the first time Jason hesitated. Then, slowly, he pushed the door open.

  The hinges weren’t metal, but oiled leather. Jason blinked as he gazed into the darkness of the interior. The small room seemed to be full of old junk. He crawled partway through the door and tried to make sense of what he saw.

  There were homemade nets, a rusty tackle box opened to reveal old wooden fishing lures, some hand-carved duck decoys. Animal pelts and snakeskins were tacked up on the plank walls, along with pictures from a calendar, Beautiful Black Women 1992. Scattered on the floor were metal objects that Jason eventually decided were animal traps.

  There was a narrow pathway through the clutter to the shack’s other room, which had been built on a higher level. Jason crawled along the path to the upper room, where he found a stained old mattress with the cotton ticking sticking out of the seams, some plastic plates, cracked porcelain mugs, cooking tins for boiling water. They all looked as if they’d been scavenged from a rubbish heap. In one corner, on a little stand, were some small plastic statues of Catholic saints beneath a tacked-up card of the Virgin Mary. The Virgin was a strange contrast to the calendar girls, who occupied most of the rest of the wall. The place smelled musty and unused. Jason guessed that no one had been in this place for months, if not years.

  Jason backed out of the treehouse and stood on the narrow platform, craning to see through the trees. The mist was thicker here, but he could just make out, through a curtain of leaves, the embankment behind the stand of trees; and he could see that the top of the embankment was paved with a two-lane asphalt road.