Walter Williams - The Rift

“Yeah. Maybe. But I’m about fifteen years out of date for anything but what I’ve been doing.”

Viondi thought for a moment. “You get back from seeing your girl,” he said, “we’ll talk. I’ll get you some work.”

“I don’t know anything about plumbing.”

Viondi’s laugh boomed out in the car. “Nick, you an engineer ! You don’t think you can learn plumbing? Only two things you got to know about plumbing. The first is that shit runs downhill, and the second is that payday’s on Friday.”

A reluctant laugh rolled up out of Nick. “Yeah, okay,” he said.

“A man sends his daughter to France, that man needs a job.”

Nick sighed. “I know,” he said.

“Professor Longhair’s what you need,” Viondi said. He slotted in a tape. “Let’s hear a little of that N’Yawlins music, get that Louisiana sound in your soul.”

So they listened to Professor Longhair on their way out of St. Louis, and as they headed south on I-55 they followed it with Little Charlie and the Nightcats, Koko Taylor, and Big Twist and the Mellow Fellows. They avoided the Swampeast by crossing into Illinois at Cape Girardeau, the silver bridge vaulting them over a brown, swollen Mississippi that was packed high between the levees and walls. Even from high above, on the bridge, the slick, glittering river looked fast, deep, and dangerous.

The old town of Cairo was decaying gently behind its tall concrete river walls. Viondi took over the driving because he wanted to stop at a barbecue place he remembered, and he drove around the shabby downtown area for twenty minutes, but the restaurant had closed or he couldn’t find it, so they got some burgers and crossed the Ohio into Kentucky. They followed Highway 51 through Fulton into Tennessee, and then south through Dyersburg and Covington. And as they approached the homeland of the blues, Viondi’s music drifted back in time, a connection to the heat and toil and sadness of the Delta, all the horrible old history, shackles and cotton fields, mob violence and the lash. Lonnie Johnson. Son Seals. Victoria Spivey. Robert Johnson.

“My granddad came north up this road,” Viondi said. “Highway 61 out of the Mississippi Delta to Memphis, then 51 north on his way to Chicago.”

“That’s the way a lot of people went,” Nick said. “My mother’s people came north that way.”

“North to the Promised Land. Get away from the Bilbos and the coneheads. And what they got was South Chicago.” Viondi shook his head. “I remember driving down with my family during the summers to see all the relatives we left behind. All the old folks, still in Friars Point. The backseat all packed with kids and packages and the smell of food.”

They carried their food, Nick knew, because black people could never be sure if restaurants would serve them. And even after segregation ended, the habit of carrying food along continued.

Nick’s stomach rumbled. He found himself wishing there was a full hamper on the backseat.

“You still got people there?” Nick asked.

“A few. All working for Catfish Pride.”

“And one of them owns a samovar.”

“Aunt Loretta isn’t a relative, she’s a used-to-be in-law. She’s kin to Darrell’s momma.” Viondi smiled. “She’ll put us up tonight. You’ll see.” He lifted his sunglasses, looked at Nick out of the corner of one eye. “You getting hungry?”

“Yeah. That burger didn’t last. Maybe we can get something in Memphis.”

“I know a place that’s closer.”

Nick sighed. “Sure we can find it?”

Viondi dropped his sunglasses back on his nose and laughed. “Let’s check it out. You don’t want to eat now, we’ll get some takeout.”

The restaurant was open, an old ramshackle seafood place that loomed above the Hatchie north of Garland, gray weathered clapboards and mossy shakes on the roof. Nick and Viondi ate fish, cole slaw, greens, a bottle of Bud apiece, then stepped out onto the dense heat of the late afternoon and looked down at the thick, slow river, swollen by the backwash of the Mississippi. Nick felt an unaccustomed contentment easing his strung-wire muscles, and he touched the little box in his shirt pocket, the diamond necklace he had bought for Arlette.

Tomorrow he’d give it to her. He imagined her eyes shining.

Tomorrow.

*

Shadows were starting to lengthen. Nick got behind the wheel and crunched away down the gravel drive. “I can get us to Memphis from here,” Viondi said. “We don’t have to backtrack. Just turn right.” He slotted a Lonnie Mack tape as Nick made the turn. “My token white guy,” he said.

They drove down a winding two-lane blacktop. There were few buildings, and no people. Pines clustered thick on all sides.

Lonnie Mack’s voice grated from the car’s speakers.

Viondi adjusted the seat to recline more, leaned back with his hands pillowed on his stomach. The bottle of beer had made him drowsy. “So,” he said, “what do you call a whore with a runny nose?”

Nick looked at him suspiciously. “What?”

“Full.”

Viondi’s laugh boomed out in the car. Nick shook his head. “That’s the third most disgusting joke you’ve told today,” he said. Lonnie Mack’s guitar stung the air.

The car took a leap, left the road for a second, and Nick’s eyes shot to the road, his hands clenching on the wheel. Had they just blown a tire? Hit something?

Nick looked into the rearview mirror to see if there was a dead animal in their wake, but there was nothing.

The Olds made a sudden lurch to the left, then to the right. Blown tire, then. Nick’s foot left the accelerator.

“What happened?” Viondi said, sitting bolt upright.

Nick looked up in surprise as he saw that the pines on either side of the road were leaping, branches waving madly as if in a high wind. Then one of the trees ahead on the right exploded - there was a puff of bark and splinters partway up, as if it had been hit with an artillery shell, and the top half of the tree tipped, began to fall toward the road.

“Lookout!” Viondi shouted, one big hand reaching for the wheel.

Nick flung the Olds to the left and stomped the accelerator. He felt himself punched back in his seat as the car took off. Splinters spattered off the windshield. Viondi gave a yell and leaned toward Nick as he tried to get away from the tree that was about to crash through his window. Nick’s heart pounded in his ears.

Boughs banged on the trunk as the tree crashed to the ground just behind the car. “She’s a natural disaster!” sang Lonnie Mack.

“What’s going on?” Viondi shouted.

Nick tried to get the car into the middle of the road. Trees shot by on either side, and suddenly they were in a clear space, green soybeans in rows on either side of the road. Nick took his foot off the accelerator. Nothing could fall on them here.

And then the earth cracked across, right in front of them, a crevasse ten feet across. Nick yelled and slammed on the brake.

The last words he heard were natural disaster, and then the Olds pitched into the crack.

*

The choir mourned softly in the great space of the National Cathedral. Judge Chivington lay in state in his great mahogany coffin, and around him was a golden pool of light cast by floodlights overhead. Television cameras hunched inconspicuously in the cathedral’s darker recesses. The President sat in the front pew, with the First Lady on one side and the judge’s daughter, her husband and children, on the other.

The stock market, he was given to understand, was going to hell in a handcart. The Fed chairman’s bizarre smile of the previous week had been analyzed and, probably, laid down to indigestion. The G8 summit was going to fall flat, all the President’s initiatives going the way of all the President’s initiatives, and his mark on history would be that of a caretaker, a Grover Cleveland or a Gerald Ford, someone fated to occupy the President’s Office in between the crises that made or tested greatness.