Walter Williams - The Rift

Don’t have a place for myself yet, he thought. That’s the trouble .

“Is it a nice apartment?”

Nick looked out the window at the crowded sidewalk, the people hanging out on the streets. The windows were closed, and the air-conditioning unit in the window turned up high, so that Manon couldn’t hear the boom box rattling away from the front porch. “Well,” he said, “it’s urban, you know, but it isn’t squalid. And my building is nice.”

And would be nicer. Once he finished wallpapering Arlette’s room, he could move her furniture in there, the mattress and frame that were now occupying most of the living room.

“It was Viondi found it, right?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“I can just imagine.”

Sudden resentment sizzled along Nick’s nerves. Manon always knew how to get to him. I can just imagine. His friends weren’t good enough, his apartment wasn’t good enough, his job wasn’t good enough. He wasn’t good enough.

And it wasn’t like she even meant to put him down, not really. Her damn spooky family had been royalty so long in their little part of Arkansas that it was natural for her to judge other people, judge them without even thinking about it. There wasn’t any malice in it, not really.

“Can I talk to Arlette?” he asked.

“She’s in her room. I’ll get her.”

Over the phone he heard Manon’s heels clacking on the polished cypress floor of their old house. Nick paced up and down next to the dinette set, working off his aggravation. Was it his fault he’d been laid off at McDonnell? Or that a weapons systems engineer was a useless occupation in the aftermath of the Cold War?

He looked at the portrait of his father: Brigadier General Jon C. Ruford, U.S. Army, winner of the Distinguished Service Cross for service in Vietnam and the Soldier’s Medal for service out of it. Author of Sun Tzu and the Military Mind (1985), and one of the first dozen or so black men to rise in the Army to the rank of general officer, clearly destined for higher rank until forced to resign by the multiple sclerosis that finally killed him, four years later, in the V.A. hospital here in St. Louis.

You didn’t tell me, Nick silently told the portrait, that I was going to be made obsolete. That I was going to be as much a dinosaur as you are.

Arlette’s young voice brightened his thoughts. “Allo, papa! J’ai des nouvelles merveilleux! Une situation vai a devenu libre!”

Nick tried to find his way through this torrent of half-understood words. His last real exposure to French had been years ago, when his father was stationed at NATO headquarters in Brussels. “Good news?” he said. “Uhhh … bien.”

“Je vais a l’école d’été apres tout! Je vais passer l’été a Toulouse!”

Nick’s heart sank as he deciphered Arlette’s phrases. He glanced into the room he was preparing for her, at the stack of wallpaper and the gilt-edged mirror.. his hand automatically touched the pocket where he carried the gift he’d bought her today, and which he really couldn’t afford. A gold necklace in the shape of a lily, sprinkled with diamonds and rubies, and matching earrings. A real grown-up gift.

He had imagined her eyes lighting up as she opened the gift-wrapped box. He had imagined the way she’d gasp in delight and wrap her arms around his neck and breathe her warm thanks against his neck.

And now he’d never see it. Now he’d just have to give the package to Federal Express and experience his daughter’s joy only in his imagination.

“That’s great, baby,” Nick said. “That’s wonderful.” He tried hard to keep the disappointment from his voice. “When does summer school start?”

“Right after school ends here,” Arlette said, switching- Nick was grateful-to English. “The school in Toulouse doesn’t open right away, but Mrs. Rigby said she’d take some of us to France for ten days of travel beforehand.”

“That’s wonderful, honey,” Nick said. His hand clenched into a fist, and he wanted to drive it through the newly papered wall.

It wasn’t that he didn’t think his daughter shouldn’t spend the summer in France. It was a wonderful opportunity, and she would be staying with a French family and getting a lot of exposure to a world she hadn’t seen, which could only do her good after Manon decided their daughter was going to grow up as African-American royalty in some little half-assed village in Arkansas.

Manon’s family, the Davids, had been royalty for generations. Back before the Civil War they’d been Free Men of Color in New Orleans, and they’d spoken French at home, pronounced their name “Dah-veed,” and sent their sons to France to be educated. After the war the Freedmans’ Bureau had created a Utopian colony of freed slaves in Arkansas, and the Davids had condescended to be put in charge of it.

Unlike most of the colonies the Freedmans’ Bureau planted, the one in Toussaint, Arkansas, had prospered. Partly because of its isolation- none of their white neighbors really wanted the land- and partly because of the Davids. In Toussaint the Davids owned the hardware store, and the grocery, and the pharmacy. And the lumber yard, the feed store, and the town’s one office building. And probably the traffic light, too.

And they still gave their kids French names, and sometimes sent their kids to France for an education. Even if, as in Arlette’s case, it was summer school in Toulouse.

But Nick wanted her here. He craved her presence. He yearned for her. He needed his daughter in his life, not as just a tantalizing, infuriating ghost he could only hear on the telephone.

And besides, he didn’t have a job now. He could spend time with her, not like before, when he was working and barely saw his family at all.

He had rented a two-bedroom apartment, more than he could afford, so that she could have a nice room when she spent the summer with him. Along with the bed with the graceful rococo scalloped headboard, the chest of drawers, the gilt-edged mirror with the decals of roses along the borders.

All money he could not afford to spend. And now he would be expected to pay for half of the cost of Arlette’s trip to France.

“How did things go with Lockheed-Martin?” Arlette asked, almost as if she was reading his mind.

“Same story in Colorado as everywhere else.” Nick tried to keep his voice cheerful. “Over two hundred applicants for the same job, and the ones already laid off from Lockheed get priority over the ones that got laid off from Boeing, McDonnell and Hughes.”

If only, he thought, we could get a nice juicy war started. Not a bad war, he immediately corrected, not with a lot of casualties or anything. Just some murdering old dictator that needs removing. It wasn’t like there weren’t plenty to go around. One lousy dictator, and the defense dollars would start flowing again.

“You’ll find a place, Daddy,” Arlette said.

“Oh yeah,” Nick said. “Sooner or later, baby, somebody’s gonna want an engineer.”

I hear Burger King is hiring, he thought.

And with unemployment running out along with his bank account, it would probably come to that soon.

*

Omar Paxton chose to take the oath under the statue of the Mourning Confederate in front of the courthouse. It was just as well he did it outdoors: there were so many reporters clustered around that they would never have fit inside Judge Moseley’s office. Some of the boys turned up with rebel flags to provide a colorful and ideologically significant background, and Wilona was there to stand beside him, wearing white gloves, a corsage, and the pearls that her great-aunt Clover had left her in her will.