Walter Williams - The Rift

It was a great job. She was, for all intents and purposes, in charge of the entire Mississippi River and its 250 tributaries. The drainage basin included all or part of thirty-one of the lower forty-eight states- and also a part of Canada, which was a bit outside of her jurisdiction. All of the federal works on the river- the cutoffs, levees, dikes, revetments, spillways, and reservoirs were in her charge. All the dredges, the dams, the floodwalls, and locks.

All the responsibility. Which didn’t bother her at all- she liked being in charge.

Where she told the water to go, it would go, or she would know the reason why.

She turned to the photograph of the President on the wall behind her desk and gave it a wave.

“Thanks, boss,” she said. And tossed her hat across her desk and onto the brass hat stand behind.

By the time her secretary came with the tea, Jessica was seated behind the desk and was halfway through the stack of congratulatory messages and faxes that had arrived from all over the world: from Bob in Sarajevo, from Janice in Korea, from Fred in some place called Corrales, New Mexico.

“Thanks, Nelda,” she said, and sipped at the tea.

“Does it taste okay?”

“Tastes fine. It’s only weeds and water, after all.”

Nelda smiled. “We’re mostly Java drinkers around here.”

“Never cared for it myself.” Jessica preferred not to explain that she avoided caffeine on the theory that it might exaggerate her hyperkinetic manner, which she had been told, occasionally at length, was not her most attractive characteristic.

“Anything else I can do?”

“Can you get me Colonel Davidovich?”

“He’s out at the Riprap Test Facility at the moment, but I can page him if you like.”

Jessica considered. She wanted private meetings with all her senior staff, as well as the officers who commanded the six districts that made up the division. Davidovich was her second-in-command, and she wanted a meeting with him first.

“No- don’t bother. You wouldn’t happen to know when he’ll be in his office?”

“By eleven-thirty, General.”

“I’ll call him then.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

She returned to the congratulatory notes. Then, because it was hard to sit still, she opened her briefcase, took out the photograph of her husband Pat Webster, and put it on her desk. In the photo Pat was leaning back in an old armchair, sleeves rolled up, boots up on a table, playing a banjo.

Next to Pat, she placed the photo of her parents, taken on their fiftieth wedding anniversary, and the photo of her sister with her husband and children.

There were empty picture hangers on the wall where her predecessor had hung various photos and certificates, and she was able to fill the blank spaces with her own. Jessica had an impressive number of credentials to display, even considering her rank and number of years in the service.

One reason for the large number of degrees was the Army’s uncertainty, when she graduated from Engineer Officer Candidate School, as to exactly what to do with a female military engineer. There weren’t very many precedents. Her arrival at her first assignment- in Bangkok, of all places, scarcely then or now a bastion of progressive feminist thought- had been greeted by jeers and catcalls from the enlisted men. But her fellow officers, who appreciated the presence of a round-eyed woman, were supportive enough, though perhaps a little uncertain as to the social niceties.

That uncertainty- what was her place, assuming she had one at all? — resulted in the Army’s apparent decision to keep Jessica in school as much as possible. Which resulted in her getting a master’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Virginia and another master’s degree in contract management and procurement from the Florida Institute of Technology. She had graduated from the U.S. Army War College, the U.S. Army Engineer Basic, Construction, and Advanced Courses, Army Command and General Staff College, the Medical Service Corps Advanced course, and even the Naval War College. She belonged to the National Society of Professional Engineers, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Army Engineer Association, and the Society of American Military Engineers.

The end result of all this education, the overwhelming weight of her credentials, was that it had become very difficult to refuse her any job that she really wanted.

She really wanted the Mississippi Valley Division. And now she had it.

And she was only forty-one years old.

She paused, a framed certificate still in her hand. She had run out of picture hooks. Apparently she had a few more credentials than her predecessor.

She laughed. This was probably a good sign.

*

Cellphone plastered to her ear, Jessica nodded good-bye to her driver, Sergeant Zook, and walked past Pat’s red Jeep Cherokee to the new house, the one with the rustic wooden sign marking it as the dwelling of the Commander, MVD. She could hear Pat playing “Hail to the Chief” on his fiddle. She opened the door, and the fiddle fell silent when Pat saw she was on the phone. “If you’re sure,” she said, “that water at the levee toe is from the rain, and not-” she said as she marched across the polished wood floor of their new house, dropped her heavy briefcase onto the couch, then spun and tossed her hat at the wooden rack by the front door.

Missed. Damn.

Pat already had the place smelling like home, which meant wood shavings and glue. She finished her conversation and snapped the phone shut. A mental image of Captain Kirk folding his subspace communicator came to her, and she grinned. Then she bounded across the room and let Pat fold her in his arms.

“I take it that things went well,” he said.

“Mm-hmm.”

“Careful of the fiddle.”

Pat Webster was a tall, bearlike Virginian, and Jessica’s second husband. Her first marriage, in her early twenties, had been a catastrophe- a pair of obsessive, overachieving bipolar maniacs joined in a relationship was not a recipe for success- and by the time she’d met Pat, she’d pretty much given up on anything but transitory romance with colleagues temporarily stationed at the same base.

It was her friend Janice, when they were both stationed at Army Material Command in Alexandria, who talked her into going to a contra and square dance, overcoming her expectation that she would be encountering women in Big Hair and crinolines. Instead Jessica found herself quickly defeated by the fast-moving patterns, the allemandes and honors and courtesy turns and chains, and she ended up at the head of the dance hall, talking to the members of the band in between numbers.

And there, with his fiddle and mandolin, in his jeans and boots and checked shirt, was Pat Webster, laconic and smiling. She watched his hands as he played, the long expert hands that made light of the intricate music that he coaxed so effortlessly from his instruments.

She fantasized about those hands all the way home. And, a week or so later, when they finally touched her, she was not disappointed.

She found that Pat had a career, but to her utter relief, it was one that could stand uprooting every couple years as one assignment followed another. He was a maker of fiddles, guitars, dulcimers, and mandolins- in fact, a genuine handmade Webster guitar sold for up to a couple thousand dollars, depending on the model, and until Jessica got her general’s star he brought more money into their marriage than she. He brought with him the pleasant scent of seasoned wood, of varnish, of glue. He brought her his calm, measured presence, a balance to her own unbridled energy.

He brought her the eternal gift of music.

Inspired, she had even learned to dance squares and contras.