Walter Williams - The Rift

“Just a moment, Sheriff,” Mrs. Ashenden said. “I have something here for you.” She reached into her little clutch bag.

“Watch out for those killers, now,” Omar said. “I don’t want you to get shot.” For a brief, hopeful moment he considered shooting the old lady himself- why not finish off as many of the people he hated as he could before vanishing over the bayou? — then concluded it wouldn’t be wise. Not in front of the press. Not in front of the boys, who might well understand eradicating a bunch of niggers, but maybe not an old white lady.

But the press, now, he thought. Why not send Sorrel Ellen off to the library like he wanted? Not as a negotiator but as a hostage? Hell, they’d probably cut his head off.

Now that was a happy thought.

Omar reached out, took Mrs. Ashenden’s elbow again. “Ma’am?” he said.

“Just a minute, Sheriff. It’s a thing I brought for you specially.” Her little bag didn’t have much room for anything, but she seemed to be taking her time finding it.

A silver teaspoon? Omar wondered. Some porcelain knick-knack?

“Ah,” she said brightly. “Here we go.”

It was a gun, Omar saw in surprise. It was small and silver and had two barrels, both of which were very large.

And when it went off, it made a very large noise.

*

Dawn rose over the water, turned the wavelets pale. The bass boat picked up speed, headed downriver as if those aboard knew where they were going.

But they didn’t. They were lost.

Bubba, the former bowman, thought they were in the Mississippi. Certainly the body of water in which they traveled was grand enough to be the great river. But the river had changed its course, he thought, and he wasn’t sure where the Mississippi was in relation to anything else.

They should have seen Vicksburg by now. They had been making fairly good time, at least for a small boat. Bayous were usually still, slack water, but there had actually been a perceptible current in the bayou as they’d set out, rainwater pouring off the land with two or three knots of force. The current alone should have carried them to the Mississippi by morning.

But there was a lot of low-lying back country in Louisiana, with many bayous and horseshoe lakes and chutes that had once been part of the Mississippi system. Bubba was inclined to think that the Mississippi had swallowed these old channels again, at least temporarily, and that they’d traveled along these during the night. They may have bypassed Vicksburg entirely.

In that case, however, they should have crossed an interstate highway and a line of railroad tracks. They hadn’t seen any such thing.

Though, if the highway and the railroad had been washed out over enough of its length, they might have passed through the gap at night without noticing.

Manon and Bubba debated this possibility as Manon headed downstream. The only map that either of them possessed was an AAA road atlas that one of the refugees had in his car, and the road map was singularly lacking in navigational data for inland waterways. Jason lay inert in his seat, turned to the port side, his body swaying slightly left and right as Manon turned to avoid debris. Since the river had broadened to its current magnitude the once-brisk current had grown sluggish, almost undetectable. The river was wide and gray and still, full of rubbish and timber. Sometimes whole rafts of trees moved downstream with their tangled roots uppermost, like floating islands overgrown by strange, bare, alien vegetation.

The water was so wide and still that it seemed almost a lake. It reminded Jason of something, but he couldn’t remember what.

Jason had drowsed through the night, half-conscious of the movement of the water, the trees shivering in aftershocks, the slow grind of pain in his back. By morning he had stiffened to the point where he could barely move. His face hurt. His throat was swollen from his near-strangulation of two days ago, and he could only relieve the sharp pain in his trachea by tilting his head to the left. He could breathe only in short little pants, like a winded dog. He suspected he now bore a strong resemblance to the Hunchback of Notre Dame.

But Arlette was alive. There were cuts on her face, but she was otherwise unharmed. She sat on the foredeck opposite him, her legs dangling into the cockpit. In her hands she cradled her grandfather’s watch, something she’d seen dangling across the chest of the red-haired deputy when he’d threatened her. Just seeing the watch had so overwhelmed her that she hadn’t been able to say a word in answer to the deputy’s questions.

Jason rested one hand on her bare knee. She smiled at him, that close-lipped Mona Lisa smile. When he looked at her, his pain faded beneath a warm surge of pleasure.

“I think we passed it,” Bubba said. “I think Vicksburg is way the hell behind us.”

He had replaced Manon at the controls of the boat. He had the AAA map of Louisiana propped in his lap, for all the world as if he was taking a car out for a Sunday outing.

He was a small, wizened man with skin parched and wrinkled as a raisin. He had a little mustache and knobby knuckles and narrow, peglike tobacco-stained teeth.

“What’s the next town, then?” Manon asked.

“Natchez. Thirty, forty mile, I guess.” His face broke into a grin. “Big ol’ gambling boat down there. I won two hundred dollar there, one time.”

“And if we turn around and head back to Vicksburg?” Manon asked.

“Same distance, maybe a little less. Best we go with the current, I reckon.”

Jason couldn’t work up much interest in the matter one way or another. He was just glad to be out of Spottswood Parish, glad to be on the river again. The river had become his home, his fate, the thing that nourished him. The longer he and Arlette stayed on the boat, the farther they could get from the forces that would separate them. If only it weren’t for Nick- if only he knew that Nick was safe- he would happily follow the river forever.

But now the river was strange, limpid and stagnant and steel-gray in the morning sun. It reminded him of something, but he couldn’t think what.

The boat swayed as Bubba steered clear of a raft of lumber. Gulls perched in the twisted roots.

And then Jason remembered where he’d seen a river like this before. “Oh, no,” he said.

Manon looked at him in concern. “What is it, honey?”

Jason straightened, clenched his teeth against the pain. “We’re in a, a reservoir,” he said. “The river’s all dammed up with crap. With-” He gasped in air, pointed at the raft of floating trees. “With that,” he said. The pain in his throat was intense and he tilted his lead to the left. “Nick and I ran into something like this upstream,” he said. “We don’t want to get caught in that dam, and we don’t want to be around when it breaks. You’re going to see rapids like you’ve never imagined, with timber instead of rocks.”

Bubba frowned. “Twelve year on the river,” he said, “I never heard of nothing like that. Not on a river big as this one.”

“You’ve never been in an earthquake this big before, either,” Jason said.

“I don’t know,” Bubba said, and scratched his chin. “There ain’t much current, that’s for sure.”

Jason looked up at Arlette. “Can you get my scope?” he said. “Look ahead and see if you can find anything ahead.”

Arlette put Gros-Papa’s watch in her pocket, then took the battered red Astroscan from one of the boat’s compartments and set it on the foredeck. Bubba throttled the outboard down, the boat settling onto its bow wave until the bass boat was barely making headway. Arlette put her eye to the scope. “It’s upside-down,” she said.

“Just look at the horizon,” Jason said. “Tell me what you see.”