The Rift (87 page)

“Urn,” he said, to cover sudden embarrassment. “We’re moving. There’s a current here.”

He heard the others shifting in the cockpit, testing the notion for themselves. None of them seemed to notice the ominous, long-necked figures in the trees that followed them with glittering eyes.

“The current is going downstream,” Manon said. “All we have to do is go in the direction of the current, right?”

When Nick spoke, it was with slow reluctance. “Not necessarily,” he said. “The storm just dumped a lot of rain upstream from here. When the flood hits us, it might spread out into the country as well as draining toward the Gulf. This current might be taking us further inland.”

“That’s not bad, is it?” Manon asked. “There are
people
inland.”

“Maybe. It could be that we’re just going further into the wilderness.”

There was another moment of silence. “Nick,” Manon said, “we have to get the child some food.”

Jason turned away from the cormorants, saw Nick frowning in the cockpit. “I don’t want to use fuel till we know where we’re going.”

“Anywhere is better than this.”

“The fog will lift sooner or later,” Jason offered, but the adults paid him no attention. It was as if they were locked in a kind of dance, and they couldn’t leave the dance floor till the end of the music, and they couldn’t change to a different dance because these were the only steps they knew.

Arlette, who knew the steps as well as the dancers, left her father’s lap and joined Jason on the foredeck. They hunched in cold silence and watched the cormorants fade away into the mist. At the end of the argument, Nick started the outboard and began to motor along with the current. Jason and Arlette took their oars and stood on the foredeck to fend off floating debris.

At least the activity kept them warm. And Jason enjoyed just being in Arlette’s company, working next to her on the foredeck.

The strange cypress-shadows floated past, as if in and out of a dream. Little aftershocks trembled in the still water, then faded. The motor’s low rumble echoed from the invisible forest around them. Water streamed from the branches above. Jason was morally certain that they were heading in the wrong direction, that they were just getting deeper into the wilderness, but he was part of the adults’ dance now, too, and there was no escaping it.

After an hour or so the cypress swamp came to an end. Instead of trees there was a tangle of bushes and low scrub, much of it covered with creeper and strung with floating debris. Nick cut the motor for a moment, and the boat drifted in the sudden silence. “What is this?” Nick asked. “Is it somebody’s field?”

“If it’s a field, it’s overgrown,” Manon said.

“The current’s strong here,” Arlette said, looking over the bow. “Stronger than in the cypress swamp.”

The boat spun lazily in the current. Arlette reached out with an oar, pushed the boat away from a tangle of scrub. “It’s a flood plain,” Nick said. “We’re in a flood plain.”

“We’re in the batture?” Manon asked, using the old Louisiana name for the country between the levee and the river. “That should mean we’re near the Mississippi.”

“I think we’re going the wrong way,” Nick said. “We’re in a— what’s the name?— floodway. The Corps of Engineers, or somebody, keeps this place clear of trees so that it can be flooded deliberately when the water gets too high. We’re being carried off into an area that’s been set aside intentionally as a place to store flood water.”

“I think that makes sense,” Jason said.
Not that anyone cares what I think,
he added to himself.

Manon’s voice was uneasy. “Well,” she said, “this really doesn’t look like the Mississippi, what we can see of it. But what if we’re in a river, and the current’s taking us
to
the Mississippi?”

“That’s possible,” Nick said. “I’d rather not use any more fuel until we know for certain.”

“Nick,” Manon said, “I am so
hungry.
And Arlette hasn’t had any food since the day before yesterday.”

“I’m okay, Momma,” Arlette said. “I’m getting used to it.”

“We’ll know soon where we’re headed,” Nick said. “If this is taking us to the Mississippi, we’ll get there pretty quick. No mistaking the big river when we find it.”

“I hate to do
nothing,”
Manon said. “Just sit here and do nothing.”

Her voice trailed off into the mist. The current lapped against the bass boat’s chine as it drew the boat into the pale unknown. Jason planted his oar on the deck and leaned his forehead against the smooth wooden haft. River water, trickling down the length of the oar, tracked its cooling path against his forehead. Suddenly Jason was very, very tired. He hadn’t really slept during last night’s rain, just drowsed against Arlette’s shoulder while the rain rattled on the plastic sheet overhead; and the previous night’s sleep on the metal foredeck had not been restful.

Jason lowered his oar to the casting deck, then sat on the deck. If nothing was going to happen, he might as well rest. He began to stretch out along the length of the deck.

“Wait, Jason,” Arlette said. She put down her oar and sat beside him, her legs crossed. “Put your head on my lap,” she said.

Jason felt suddenly awkward. He felt that he ought not to look at her parents, should not receive whatever signal their faces were sending. “Thank you,” he said. He shifted himself on the foredeck and put his head in Arlette’s lap, her crossed ankles below his neck. He looked up at her, saw an enigmatic Buddha smile on her inverted features.

“Comfortable?” she asked.

“Yes. Very.”

He closed his eyes. He felt the warmth of her bearing him up, a yielding touch of softness in the cool mist.

The current rocked the boat lightly. For a moment Arlette’s fingertips brushed his cheek, and he inclined his head slightly, like a cat, to strop his jawline along her fingers.

His thoughts whirled into the warmth of Arlette, into the touch of her fingers, and then his thoughts flew away and were lost to time.

When Jason opened his eyes he saw Arlette, the silent smile still on her face as she bent over him, drowsing. Her fingers lay curled against his cheek. In a pocket of her shorts he could feel the little jewelry box that held the necklace her father had given her. Above her was the whiteness of the mist. The current still chuckled against the bass boat’s hull.

Without moving his head Jason looked left and right, and saw to his surprise that the mist had lifted slightly: it hovered about fifteen feet from the surface of the water, a perfect, featureless shroud of white that hung unbroken in the air, as if the world had simply dissolved into nothing a few feet over their heads.

Jason looked at Arlette against the backdrop of white and for the first time observed the little scar that disrupted the perfect arch of her right eyebrow, the length and richness of the lashes laid against her brown cheeks, the way her eyelids pulsed to the dream-movement of the eyes beneath.

Arlette must have sensed his scrutiny, because her eyes fluttered open. Jason watched the eyes as they sleepily focused on him, the mouth as the smile broadened.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.” Her chin tilted as she looked up. “We can see a little,” she said. “Look.”

He rose reluctantly from her lap, and Arlette straightened her cramped legs with a sigh. He saw that the boat was in a wide flooded channel, with a cypress swamp on one side and a line of cottonwoods on the other. The speed of the current had slowed, and the boat spun like an errant compass needle below the great sheet of mist above their heads.

Jason glanced at the other passengers. Nick was slouched in the cockpit, eyelids half-shut. Manon stood on the after-deck, gazing in silence at the great, dark, silent mass of water. She gave a sigh, her shoulders slumping. “I think you’re right, Nick,” she said. “We’re in the wrong place. This can’t be a real river.”

Nick opened his drowsing eyes, straightened in his seat. “We can head the other way. But I’d rather wait till we’re absolutely sure before I use any more gas. I think we should just tie up to something till we can see the sun.”

He rose slowly from his seat and rolled his shoulders to take the kinks out of them. He turned to Arlette. “Hand me that rope, honey.”

Arlette reached for the neatly bundled mooring rope, turned to hand it to her father, and then said, “Is that some kind of house?”

They all followed her pointing finger. There was a structure of some kind in one of the cottonwoods, a boxy-looking object that clearly had not been put there by Nature.

“Looks like a kid’s treehouse,” Nick said.

“Kids build treehouses near their
real
houses,” Manon said. A smile broke across her face. “I think we may be close to civilization here.”

“If civilization hasn’t been evacuated,” Nick said. He started the engine and motored across the flood.

The object was in truth a treehouse, and a big one, a sort of split-level with two main rooms and a pitched roof of irregularly shaped, homemade wood shingles. The unpainted planks of the structure were green with age. Beneath, cross-pieces of wood had been nailed to the bole of the tree as a primitive ladder.

“Look!” Arlette said. “Power poles!”

As the boat neared the treeline, the passengers were able to see farther into the mist a little beyond the trees. The line of cottonwoods was narrow, and behind it was an embankment, or perhaps a levee. On the embankment two power poles stood with their heads crowned by mist. The lines between them had fallen, and another pole, farther down the line, leaned at an oblique angle, strands of wire hanging limp like the arms of a man in despair.

Jason felt his heart stagger into a quicker tempo. These forlorn signs of a once-human presence— the weird old tree-house, the abandoned power poles— were enough to kindle his hope. Suddenly he couldn’t leave
Retired and Gone Fishin’
quick enough. He wanted to leap to the shore and kick out, run down the embankment as fast as his legs would carry him. Or swarm up the tree to the strange old dwelling, stand on the roof, look for rescue as if from the crow’s nest of a sailing ship.

“I’ll check out the treehouse,” Jason said.

“See if someone’s home first,” Nick said. He hailed the treehouse several times. No answer came. Nick maneuvered the boat to the cottonwood, touched it once, and Jason sprang for the homemade ladder.

“Watch out for snakes,” Nick called. “In floods they climb high.”

The thought of snakes didn’t deter Jason. He practically ran up the tree, came to the platform where the treehouse rested. A weathered door of hammered-together planks, four feet high, was closed with a simple hook-and-eye. Jason hoisted himself onto the platform and unhooked the door. A strange smell, rotted vegetation and moldy fur, floated out of the old structure, and for the first time Jason hesitated. Then, slowly, he pushed the door open.

The hinges weren’t metal, but oiled leather. Jason blinked as he gazed into the darkness of the interior. The small room seemed to be full of old junk. He crawled partway through the door and tried to make sense of what he saw.

There were homemade nets, a rusty tackle box opened to reveal old wooden fishing lures, some hand-carved duck decoys. Animal pelts and snakeskins were tacked up on the plank walls, along with pictures from a calendar,
Beautiful Black Women 1992.
Scattered on the floor were metal objects that Jason eventually decided were animal traps.

There was a narrow pathway through the clutter to the shack’s other room, which had been built on a higher level. Jason crawled along the path to the upper room, where he found a stained old mattress with the cotton ticking bursting out of the seams, some plastic plates, cracked porcelain mugs, cooking tins for boiling water. They all looked as if they’d been scavenged from a rubbish heap. In one corner, on a little stand, were some small plastic statues of Catholic saints beneath a tacked-up card of the Virgin Mary. The Virgin was a strange contrast to the calendar girls, who occupied most of the rest of the wall.

The place smelled musty and unused. Jason guessed that no one had been in this place for months, if not years.

Jason backed out of the treehouse and stood on the narrow platform, craning to see through the trees. The mist was thicker here, but he could just make out, through a curtain of leaves, the embankment behind the stand of trees; and he could see that the top of the embankment was paved with a two-lane asphalt road.

He called out this news on the way down the ladder. Nick nudged the bass boat up to the cottonwood, and Jason jumped across.

“Anything in the treehouse?”

“Fishing gear. Animal traps. A few plates and pots.” He looked at Arlette as he recalled the provocative smiles of
Beautiful Black Women 1992,
and looked away quickly.

Manon looked at Nick. “Should we take the pots? They’d come in handy if we find something to cook.”

“They were pieces of junk,” Jason said, “but they were better than what we’ve got.”

Nick considered their course of action. “Let’s check the road first. If we can’t find anything there we can come back.”

They motored along the line of cottonwoods, looking for a break in the vegetation, and found it soon enough: the embankment veered toward them, through the trees, but there it was washed out. The broken asphalt lay on the tumbledown slopes of the embankment as if trying to extend the roadway under water.

The other end of the washed-out road was lost in the mist. Nick drove the boat onto the grassy slope of the embankment. Jason slung the Astroscan over his shoulder, jumped off the boat, and helped Arlette and Manon disembark. Then he tied the boat to a sapling growing on the verge of the line of cottonwoods, Nick stepped off the boat, and they all climbed to the top of the road.

The blacktop stretched forward into the mist. It had not been in good condition before the earthquakes, and the quakes had buckled it in several places. On the far side of the embankment were still more flood waters, lying dark and featureless as far as the mist permitted them to see.

“That’s somebody’s field,” Manon said. “There’s no brush, like in the floodway. Somewhere around here there are people. All we have to do is find them.”