Walter Williams - The Rift

He walked past David and opened his office door. “Merle,” he said.

When Merle entered, Omar closed the door. “Merle, I need you to get my boy across the bayou. Put him on the road heading south.”

Merle nodded. “I’ll take him across in my own boat.”

Omar turned to David, found himself without words, and instead put his arms around his boy. “You keep safe,” he said. Hopeless love and hopeless despair flooded his heart.

And then he heard shooting. A whole rattling volley heard clear as day through his screened-in windows. Thirty, forty rounds, all different calibers.

“What the hell is that?” David demanded. Omar was too astonished to offer an answer.

A few minutes later citizens began to swarm into the courthouse, shouting out that they’d just seen a whole posse of niggers shooting guns into the air as they broke into the Carnegie Library.

*

“Hey,” Jason said. “Hey, that’s our boat.”

He pointed out the side window of the little silver Hyundai. He saw the battered hull of Retired and Gone Fishin’ sitting on a trailer outside a chainlink fence that surrounded a tumbledown clapboard business. The outboard was tipped up over the boat’s stem. The homemade sign by the road proclaimed Uncle Sky’s A-l Metal Building Products and Agricultural Machinery Repair- No Drugs!

The place was padlocked and closed. No lights shone in the building or in the fenced yard.

“Stop!” Jason said. “That’s our boat! We can put it in the water and get out of here!”

“I can’t haul a boat and trailer,” the driver said. “Not in this car. I don’t have a trailer hitch.”

Jason, Manon, and Arlette were crammed in the backseat of the small Korean car, stuck in the middle of the long caravan of refugees following Cudjo away from the A.M.E. camp. They’d left the highway and were heading west along an ill-repaired blacktop road.

“We’ll use one of the trucks behind us,” Jason said. “One of them will have a trailer hitch.”

“I’m not stopping,” the driver said. “It’s not safe to stop.” He was elderly and peered anxiously over the steering wheel at the car in front of them. His wife clutched his arm in terror, with a grip so strong he could barely steer. She hadn’t said a word since she’d entered the vehicle.

“Hush,” Manon said to Jason. “Cudjo said he had a boat.”

“That boat won’t have a motor, I bet,” Jason said. “If we get the bass boat, we can run to Vicksburg and go for help.”

But no one was inclined to pay him any attention, so Jason tried to relax, squashed against the inside of the car, as the caravan moved west down a sagging, rutted two-lane blacktop, slowing to a crawl every so often to negotiate parts of the road ripped across by quakes. The country was mostly uninhabited cotton fields with rows of pine trees planted between them. The sun eased over the horizon, and the western sky turned to cobalt. The caravan moved south, then west again, on narrow gravel roads. Sometimes the cars splashed through areas flooded to the floorboards. Eventually the line of vehicles pulled to a straggling halt in an area filled with young pines. Jason could see car headlights glinting off flood waters to the right.

After getting out of the Hyundai, Manon and Arlette thanked the elderly couple for the ride. Jason couldn’t stop thinking about Retired and Gone Fishin’ sitting in Uncle Sky’s yard. He saw Cudjo walk past with some men carrying rifles, and Jason trotted alongside, his telescope bouncing on his hip. A wind stirred the tops of the pine trees.

“Sir?” he said. “Mr. Cudjo?”

The hermit turned to him, yellow eyes gleaming in the growing night. “Boy, I want you stay with you mama.”

“Could we use another boat right now? As we drove here, I saw the boat we came in sitting on a trailer. We could go back and get it.”

“Put this truck ’cross this road, you,” Cudjo said to the driver of a pickup. “You-” Patting the shoulder of one of his riflemen. “You, là bas, down in them trees, you. Stay quiet, you. Lord High Sheriff come, you flank him, yes? The rest of you, you stay here, behind truck, yes? You no shoot, you, you don’t know who come. Could be Nick and them who come, yes?”

Then Cudjo turned to Jason. “You tell me ’bout this boat, you.”

“It’s a bass boat,” Jason said. “We came down on it from Missouri. There’s a fifty-horse Johnson on it, and we had fuel left. If we put it in the water, we could travel to Vicksburg, send for help.”

Cudjo frowned at him. A gust of wind tugged at his long beard. “Where you see this boat, you.”

“Uncle Sky’s Metal Building Whatever,” Jason said. “The boat was right in the yard. It wasn’t even behind the fence, it was like somebody just dropped it there. The place was closed, nobody around. We could hitch the trailer to a truck and drive it off, no problem.”

Cudjo’s eyes narrowed in thought. “Skyler King, he a Kluxer, that man. But he an old man, that Sky, he live in Hardee with his daughter, that Rachel. Ain’t nobody at his business now, no.”

“That Sky place isn’t five minutes from here,” Jason said. “We can make a quick trip.”

“Jason-” Arlette came up the line of vehicles, took Jason’s hand. “Mama says-”

Jason squeezed her hand. “We’ll go get the boat,” he told Cudjo, “if we can have someone to drive us out there.”

*

Jason and Arlette held hands on the bench seat as they were driven to Uncle Sky’s. Their van was alone on the old road- it was a plush vehicle, carpeted and with soft seats, a Chevy that still smelled new. The driver in front of them was a young light-skinned man named Samuel who scanned the road nervously as he pushed the vehicle to high speed in between slowing down for partially repaired tears and crevasses. Every so often Samuel would drop a hand to finger the pistol at his hip.

“Here it is,” Jason called. Jason leaned into Arlette’s shoulder as Samuel swung the van abruptly into Uncle Sky’s gravel drive. The headlights tracked across a yard over which was scattered building materials, agricultural equipment, then the battered bass boat on its trailer, parked on the grass to one side of the gate.

Samuel backed the van to the trailer. Jason left his telescope on the seat, and he and Arlette went out the van’s sliding side door. Jason felt the night wind ruffle his hair. They went to the trailer, and Jason looked down to see that a padlock had secured the ball on the trailer, making it impossible to hitch the trailer and tow it away.

“Damn,” Samuel said. “Wait here.” He opened the hatch at the back of the van and began searching through his large toolbox for something to cut the padlock.

Jason hoisted himself onto the bass boat’s foredeck. Rainwater sloshed in the boat’s bottom. Jason hopped over the cockpit to the aft deck, then bent to inspect the outboard motor. From what he could see in the dark, the outboard was as he left it, but when he felt with his hand in the well near the motor he couldn’t locate any of the jerricans of fuel they’d brought with them from Rails Bluff.

Jason straightened. “There’s no gas,” he said. “They probably took the cans inside. I’ll go look.”

The fence was two feet away, chain link twined with Virginia creeper. Jason launched himself at the fence, clung with fingers, dug his toes into the gaps between the chain link. He scrambled to the top, put both feet on the pipe that ran along the top of the fence, adjusted his footing, and raised himself to a precarious standing position, arms flung out for balance. The gusty wind tried to pluck him off. He grinned. “Wish I had my skates,” he said. “I could travel on this.”