The Rift (51 page)

Someone came out of the pilothouse and answered Jason’s wave. Only then did Nick permit himself to feel hopeful.

They came right up to the boat before it was clear why the boat wasn’t moving. The boat and its tow had gone gently aground, like the
Michelle S.,
and lay in only a few inches of water. The crew had carried lines astern of the boat, probably to help back her off.

None of the barges, Nick saw, seemed to contain chemicals.

The boat’s skipper met them at the gunwale. He was a short, broad-shouldered white man—“more back than leg,” as Nick’s grandmother would have remarked— and Nick felt a little warning tingle at the sight of him, that
crackers with guns
vibe.

Below his bushy mustache, the captain’s face split in a wide grin.

“Welcome to to
Beluthahatchie,
podnah,” he said in a barking Acadian voice. “Y’all been on the river long?”

Beluthahatchie
was a small towboat, with a crew of four and a tow of twelve barges. The captain was the bandy-legged Jean-Joseph Malraux of Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana. Three hours after the earthquake,
Beluthahatchie,
moving cautiously upstream in the dark, had come aground in what was supposed to be a deep channel.

“We had the depth sounder goin’ all the time,” the captain said, “but the river shallowed too quick for us to stop. It takes a while to stop all these barges, you know.” He barked out a laugh. “You wouldn’t believe the dumb-ass things these people do. Run their little motorboats right up in front of us, and expect us to stop for ’em.” The booming Cajun voice rang off the towboat’s superstructure,
da dumb-ass t’ings dese people do. Run dere liddle modorboats
...

“The whole river’s changed,” Nick said. “There are rapids upstream, new channels ...” Crewmen helped him over the side, and he stood on the solid deck, feeling a strange astonishment at this sudden change in his fortunes.

“Thanks,” Jason said as he jumped to the deck.

“This your son?”
the captain bellowed, tousling Jason’s hair, and then he laughed at his own joke. “Come on and have some chow,” he said. “I’d like to hear about river conditions northaways.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Nick said. Jason, flushing a little, finger-combed his hair back into shape.

“Oh hell, podnah,” the captain said. “Call me Joe.”

“I was wondering,” Nick said, “if I could use your radio to call my daughter and let her know that everything’s all right.”

“Where is she?”

“Toussaint, Arkansas.”

Captain Joe gnawed his mustache thoughtfully. “I don’t know where that is, exactly, but if it’s in Arkansas, there’s a good chance the phones won’t be working. Even Little Rock got hammered bad, I hear. I got a crewman with relatives all over Arkansas, and he can’t reach any of ’em. But c’mon—” He gestured with one long arm and turned to climb a ladder. “We’ll give it a try. If your girl’s anywhere near a working phone, podnah, we’ll find her.”

As Nick followed Joe to the pilothouse, he felt as if his feet weren’t quite touching the deck. He had the breathless sensation of viewing some strange, swift-unfolding miracle.

A few minutes later he was wishing Arlette a happy birthday.

*

It was easy. A communications firm caught the towboat's radio signal, shifted it over to the phone lines for two-way communication, and charged a small fee.

“Cost my company about six bucks,” Captain Joe said. “I figure they can stand the freight.”

“Daddy?”
Arlette cried at Nick's voice, and then, to someone else.
“It's Daddy! He's on the phone!”

A
thousand-ton weight seemed to fall from Nick's shoulders. He could
feel
his heart melting, turning to warm ooze within his chest. The breath came more easily to his lungs. He felt two inches taller.

“Hello, baby,” he said.

“Where are you? Are you okay?”

“I'm okay, baby. I've been on a boat on the river with ...” He looked at Jason. “With someone I met,” he finished, saving that explanation for later.

“On the
river
?”

“The Mississippi.”

“But you were coming by
car
...”

“Nick!” Manon's voice, coming in loudly after the click of the extension picking up. “Nick, are you all right?”

“I'm fine. A little sunburned, that's all.”

“Thank God!” Manon said.

“He's on the
river,”
Arlette explained to her mother. “On a
boat.”

“I'm on a towboat right now,” Nick said. “The captain let me use his radio. But we've been drifting on the river for a couple days.”

“Are you with Viondi?” Manon asked.

There was a moment of silence. “No,” Nick finally said. “Viondi didn't make it.”

“Oh, Nick,” Manon breathed.

“I'm sorry, Daddy,” said Arlette.

Nick licked his lips. “The car wrecked in the quake,” he said. “I got out by water. Somebody picked me up.” He looked at Jason again. The boy was trying not to look at him, to give him privacy. “We've been on the river, and we just now got picked up by a towboat.”

“So you're okay,” Arlette said.

“Yes.” The sounds of the voices were bringing visions to Nick's mind. The big clapboard house just outside of Toussaint, with its oaks and broad porch. Arlette by the phone in the kitchen, dressed in a checked cotton blouse and blue jeans worn white at the knees. Manon upstairs in the bedroom, pacing back and forth at the full length of the phone cord the way she did, with the lace curtains fluttering in the window behind.

Fantasies. Nick couldn't know whether they were real or not. But they
felt
real, very real indeed.

“I'm sorry I missed your birthday yesterday,” he said.

“It wasn't much of a party. Not with the way— well, not the way things are here.”

“But you're okay? And Ed, and Gros-Papa, and .. .”

“We're all fine,” Arlette said. “The house came through the quake okay. But we're on an island now. We don't have electricity, but they managed to repair the phone exchange, at least for the houses in town.”

“We have food from the store,” Manon said. “We have enough boats, we can get away if we want. But there doesn't seem to be anyplace to
go
—”

Arlette's excited voice broke in. “Maybe you can sail here in your towboat!”

“I'll do that,
baby,”
Nick said, “if the captain will let me.” And his eyes sought Captain Joe, who stood beaming in a corner of the pilothouse with his hands in his pockets.

“You tell your girl that I'll do what I can,” he bellowed without knowing what had been asked of him. “Anybody who got a
Gros-Papa
is a fren' o' mine!”

Nick talked to Arlette for a long while as the captain beamed and grinned. The words just seemed to float out of him. He was having a hard time not floating away himself.

Eventually the words wound down, and he saw Captain Joe standing with a pensive expression on his face, and the man on watch staring neutrally out the window.

“I should go, baby,” he said. “I think I've been using the captain's radio long enough. I'll call tomorrow if I can, okay?”

He brought the call to an end. Captain Joe turned to Jason. “You want to make a call, son?” he asked.

Jason gave a short little shake of the head. “No one to call,” he said, and left the pilothouse.

Captain Joe gave Nick a look, brows raised. Nick only shrugged.

“Let's get us some chow, podnah,” Joe said.

*

No word from the President. Jessica hadn’t been expecting any as yet: the decision to evacuate was a big one, and she hadn’t expected that it would be made overnight.

Morning birdsong— helicopters— floated through the open sides of her command tent. She looked at the weather photos that Pat had just pulled from the Internet and frowned. The big high-pressure system had stalled right over the Midwest, and that meant continued warm and sunny weather over the disaster area. That was good.

What was bad was what was happening behind the front. The clockwise rotation of the high-pressure zone was pulling up moisture from the Gulf of Mexico— you could
see
it, the swirl of cloud, there on the photos, a curve from the Gulf sweeping west, then east again over the Dakotas and Minnesota. Once the moisture was over the western plains or the Rocky Mountains, the air cooled and dropped the moisture as rain.

Some of those areas had been getting rain every day for a week. Lots of water raining down into Mississippi and its tributaries, joining the ice melt pouring down from the Rockies.

What this meant was that the floods weren’t going away any time soon. The rivers would stay full, and that would delay repair work on the levees and bridges, prevent people from returning to their homes, and hamper the evacuation.

Well, Jessica thought. It was time to work out what she
could
do.

The river below Vicksburg was still under her control, even though she’d lost everything north of it. But she could use the controlled part of the river to affect the flood to the north.

When rivers flowed fast, it was for one of two reasons: either there was an enormous weight of water behind them, pushing the water down its channel at greater speed; or the path of the river was
steeper.
When a riverbed was steeper, gravity pulled the water along it at increased velocity.

Jessica didn’t want to increase the volume of water, which would only increase flooding. But she could make the river steeper. She could release water through the Old River Control system in Louisiana.

Old River Control was one of the Corps of Engineers’ most colossal and long-term projects. It was designed to keep the wandering Mississippi firmly in its place.

Over its history, the big river had shifted its path through most of the state of Louisiana, always seeking the steepest, shortest route to the sea. It settled into its present path around 900 A.D., around the time of a large earthquake on the New Madrid fault; and when human settlements were built in the years since, they tended to take the Mississippi’s route as given.

By the mid-twentieth century, it had become clear that the Mississippi was ready to make a leap out of its bed and carve itself a new route to the sea. Most likely, it would bypass Baton Rouge and New Orleans and spill out into the Gulf in the vicinity of the modest town of Morgan City, well to the west of New Orleans. The salt ocean would pour upward into the river’s old bed, turning the New Orleans waterfront into a narrow, twisting bay that would soon fill with silt. Whole sections of Louisiana would be turned into unproductive salt marsh— all the fresh-water plants and animals dying in an unprecedented ecological catastrophe— and New Orleans, the nation’s largest port, would be stranded in the midst of the dying land, its economic
raison d’être
gone and its drinking water turned to salt.

The river’s weak point was in middle Louisiana, where the Mississippi, the Red River, and the Atchafalaya came within a few miles of one another. Old River Control was a giant engineering project built to straddle the three rivers, sending water east or west as the situation demanded. The Morganza Hoodway, with its 125 gates, could shift 600,000 cubic feet of Mississippi flood per second into the Red/Atchafalaya system, thus preserving southern Louisiana from flood. Or, if the Mississippi was low, water could be shunted from the Red into the Father of Waters, which made certain that New Orleans remained a deep-water port. To take advantage of the water moving from one system to the other, the Murray hydroelectric plant had been prefabricated in New Orleans, at the Avondale Shipyards, and shipped north on barges to take its place in the Old River system, the largest structure ever to be floated on the Mississippi.

What Jessica needed to do was shift a lot of water from the Mississippi into the Atchafalaya Basin. This would lower the level of the river in Louisiana and make its path steeper, thereby draining the flooded lands more quickly.

She would dump as much water as she could while still retaining New Orleans and Baton Rouge as deep-water ports. If Morganza’s 125 gates weren’t enough— and she didn’t believe they’d all been open together at any point in their history— she could open the Bonnet Carre Spillway above New Orleans, which could shift two million gallons per second from the Mississippi into Lake Pontchartrain.

That should do it,
she thought with satisfaction.

Get this river
moving
.

*

They were fond of frying on the
Beluthahatchie
. Nick, sticking his head into the galley to ask for a glass of water, saw chicken, fish, potatoes, and okra all sizzling away. He took his glass of water and wandered off, stomach rumbling with hunger.

He found Jason straddling the gunwale near the stern, where their boats had been tied up. He was listlessly watching the water as it streamed astern in the growing darkness. Swallows in search of insects skimmed just millimeters above the surface.

“You okay?” Nick asked.

Jason nodded.

It was hard enough, Nick thought, being father to his own child. But it was clear enough, he reflected, that there was no one else here who was going to do the job. He put his glass down on the gunwale and looked at Jason.

“Your father may be in China,” he said, softly as he could, “but I know he’s worried sick about you.”

Jason turned away, gazed out at the far bank of the river, the last red light of the sun that touched the tops of the distant trees. “I don’t know how to reach him.”

“He may be on his way back,” Nick said. “I would be, in his place.”

“What could he do?” Jason asked. “I’m here on this boat. He’ll be in China, or California, or someplace else. But he won’t be
here
.”

“Just relieve his mind, Jason. I know how I felt until I talked to Arlette just now, so I know how your father feels. He’s got to be in agony. Call where he works, call the American Red Cross and give them your name.
They’ll
get ahold of him— that’s what they
do
.”

Jason looked down at his hands. “If I call,” he said, “I have to tell him that my mother’s dead.”