The Rift (43 page)

Emil made a last attempt. “What if we need to talk to you?”

“Is that a cellphone you’ve got there?”

Emil looked at the device peeking out of his jumpsuit pocket. “Um,” he said, “yeah.”

“Give it to me. Someone needs to say howdy, they can call me on your phone.”

He didn’t bother to tell Emil that the cellphone towers were all down. He just stuffed the phone into his pocket and left the tent.

He’d done
his
job, he figured, and more. He’d come up with a plan. Let the others work out the details.

*

They gorged on steak, potatoes, peas. It was the best meal Nick ever had in his life. Then, because they were still hungry, Nick cooked another steak and they split it.

He looked at the boy opposite him. Jason had made some attempt to clean himself up— he’d washed in the sink and tried to scrub off the mud he’d used to paint his face and arms, though not very successfully. His hair hung in dirty strands down his forehead, there was grime caked into his knuckles and streaked on his arms, his clothes were stained with mud and river water. His eyes were red, and in spite of the mud he’d slathered over himself, he’d managed to get a good case of sunburn. Jason looked like a refugee from six months of war, and Nick supposed that he didn’t look any better.

Nick looked at the boy, who was shoveling food into his mouth before he’d finished chewing the last forkful, and sipped thoughtfully at his own glass of milk. “Save room for ice cream,” he said.

Jason looked up at him. “No problem,” he said.

“I’ve got the water heater going,” Nick said. “We should see what the crew has left us in the way of soap and shampoo, and shower while we can.” He rubbed his chin. “I should shave. And there are probably toothbrushes around. And sunburn ointment. And some clothes that should fit us.”

“Okay,” Jason mumbled past a mouthful of steak.

“I don’t want to tell you what to do or anything,” Nick said, “but we should bathe and brush our teeth whenever we can. It keeps up morale. Keeps us from giving up.”

Jason gave him a curious look. “Morale?” he said, as if he’d never heard the word before. “You’re worried about our
morale
?
Are you in the Army or something?”

“I was raised in the Army. But I was never in the service myself.”

“Army brat?”

“My dad was a general,” Nick said. “I learned some things about survival from him and, ah, from the military culture, you know. And I was in the Boy Scouts, too.” He shook his head. “If I can remember all that stuff. It was years ago.”

A wary look entered Jason’s eyes. “So what do you do now?”

Nick saw the look— it was one he knew all too well— and felt surprise roll through his mind. The boy thought he was crazy, or a criminal.

Well. Nick had run a deadly rapid in an unpowered boat rather than ask help from the cops. There was a wound on his arm. And— his mind a little grimmer now— Nick was black, and the kid’s only contact with black people was probably watching pimps and gangsters on TV. What else was Jason to think?

“I’m an engineer,” Nick said. “Got laid off from McDonnell in St. Louis five months ago.” He laughed. “I shouldn’t have any trouble getting an engineering job now. Not with so many things needing to be put back together.”

Jason’s wariness lessened somewhat, but Nick could see that the boy was still a bit on guard. But exhaustion was falling fast on Nick, and he didn’t have the energy to deal with Jason’s suspicions now. Nick stood. “I’m going to shower and shave,” he said. “You think you could put the dirty dishes in the washer? If the crew comes back, I don’t want them to find out we’ve made work for them.”

“Sure.” Jason, his stomach full, seemed content enough.

Nick went into the crew’s little cabins and dug through some of the lockers in search of clothes that would fit him. Photos of the crew’s families looked down at him from the walls. He looked at pictures of smiling families, of kids and spouses and parents, and wondered if those families would ever meet again, if there would always be one or more missing.

He found some clothes that fit fairly well, a disposable razor, some shaving cream, a comb, a towel. In a locker he found a first-aid kit with sterile bandages and disinfectant. In the shower he found shampoo and soap.

He stayed in the little shower a long time, enjoying the hot water, the clean scent of the soap, the pounding droplets that relaxed the muscles of his shoulders and neck. He cleaned the dried blood from the wound on his arm, winced at the sting. The wound itself seemed to be scabbed and, so far as he could tell, healing. At least it wasn’t hot, or oozing pus. He slathered on the disinfectant and bandaged the wound.

Then he shaved and splashed on the Mermen’s Skin Bracer he found on the sink.

The sharp, clean scent stung up a memory. His father had used Skin Bracer. At the remembrance, sadness briefly clouded his eyes.

In the mirror he looked better than the refugee he’d seen a few minutes ago, but he still looked as if he’d been worked over with a baseball bat. He didn’t look much like a general’s son, that was for sure.

He found Jason in the galley, eating a bowl of vanilla ice cream with Hershey’s chocolate sauce. The dinner things were gone, and Nick presumed Jason had put them away.

The boy knew how to do a few things, anyway.

“Don’t
you ever stop eating?” Nick said.

Jason looked at him. “I didn’t fill up on cattails, the way you did.”

Damn,
Nick thought.
Ask a question, get a zinger.
What was with this kid?

“I’ve been thinking,” Nick said. “We can stay on this boat awhile, I guess, maybe till someone takes us off. The people who own this boat are going to come back before too long, I imagine. But in case something happens, we should have some emergency supplies ready to put in that bass boat. Canned food, fresh water.”

Jason looked up from his bowl of ice cream. “If there’s an emergency,” he asked, “wouldn’t we be safer here?”

“What if the water rises, and this boat goes floating onto some rocks, or into the trees? What if a snag punches a hole in the hull?”

Jason scraped the bowl with his spoon. “Okay,” he said. “I guess you’ve got a point.”

“I’ll put it together. You might as well take a shower. See if you can find yourself some clothes.”

Nick assembled his emergency food in plastic garbage bags. There were jugs of fresh water right on the shelf. He threw in a container of flour, another of sugar, another of salt. Matches and a skillet. Soap, scissors, sun block, a sewing kit he found in one of the rooms, a bag of disposable razors, and a mirror—
for
signaling,
as the Boy Scout manual might say. He smiled at the memory.

He stowed everything aft on the deck, where
Retired and Gone Fishin’
was tied. Then, since he remembered seeing a long extension cord, he plugged it in, ran it over the side, and plugged in the bass boat’s battery recharger.

If another catastrophe occurred, he thought, the boat’s little electric motor could carry them away. At all of maybe three miles per hour. Maybe he should study the engine controls, find out if he could operate the towboat single-handed.

He could feel exhaustion floating through his mind like fog. Stress, a wound, and a night spent in a tree had caught up with him. He would find one of the unused beds and turn in.

In the morning, he thought, he would figure out how to work the radio. Maybe he could make a radiophone call, or whatever they were called, directly to Arlette, surprise her as she was eating breakfast.

In the morning,
he thought.
First thing.

He found an unused bed, dropped his clothes to the deck, slid between fresh crisp sheets. Before he could turn off the light there was a gentle knock on the door.

“Yes?”

Jason stuck his head in. “Good night,” he said.

“Good night, Jason.”

“And thanks.” Jason’s words came slowly. “Thanks for pulling me out of the water. When I went in. You know.”

“Sure, Jason. You’re welcome.”

Jason nodded, drew back his head, closed the door behind him.

Weird kid,
Nick thought as he turned off the light.
Weird kid.

*

Jason
woke with a cry of terror bottled up in his throat. He gasped for air and stared wildly into the night. His heart throbbed in his chest like a diesel.

He listened to the stillness for a moment and tried to decide what it was that had awakened him. An aftershock? A cry for help?

Broken fragments of his dream rattled in his head. He couldn’t feel anything but a sense of alarm.

Something must be wrong. He swung his legs out of bed, opened the cabin door, and padded down the hall to the crew’s dining area. He opened a door and stepped out onto the narrow steel deck.

A cool spring night floated up around him. Frogs and crickets called to one another in the midst of the silence. The river glimmered like a thread of quicksilver in the moonlight. A distant navigation beacon blinked downriver, marking a channel that probably no longer existed. It was the only sign of humanity in the entire magnificent desolation of the Mississippi.

Nothing had happened, Jason realized. It had been a bad dream, that was all.

He made his way back to his cabin, imagining that it would take forever to fall back to sleep.

Somewhat to his own surprise, he found that slumber reclaimed him with ease.

*

Jason woke to feel gooseflesh on his arms. The weather had cooled during the night, and the sheet he’d used for a cover was not enough to keep him warm.

He blinked open gummy eyes and looked at his watch. 8:13. He smelled bacon. His stomach rumbled.

Time to get up.

Jason pulled on some of the clean clothes he’d found in one of the crewmen’s lockers— they were too big, but he could roll up the legs of the jeans, and if the sleeves of the shirt hung down past his elbows, it would just help to protect him from the sun.

He strapped on a pair of sandals that he’d found— the other footwear was too large— then made his way forward. He found Nick sitting at the dinner table, looking through a stack of manuals. Dirty dishes were piled up in front of him.

“Smells good,” Jason said.

Nick looked up from his manuals, his chin propped on one fist. Shaved, cleaned, in clean clothing, Nick looked a lot less like an escaped felon than he had the previous day. Maybe, Jason conceded, he really
was
an engineer.

“Bacon,” Nick said. “Eggs. English muffin. Want some?”

“Sure.”

“Want coffee and orange juice with that?”

“Juice, sure. I don’t drink coffee.”

Nick stood, stretched, yawned. “Young people don’t need coffee in the morning,” he said.

Jason frowned down at the manuals, tried to read them upside-down. “What are you reading?” he said.

“I’m going to try to work the radio. Maybe I can get a message to my family.” He looked at Jason. “Your family, too, maybe.”

“My dad’s in China.”

“I can’t get China with that radio, I suppose, but I can get someone to try to pass a message to him. I know that the Red Cross does that sort of thing.”

“I don’t know where he is, exactly.” Jason tried to remember his father’s itinerary. Would he still be in Shanghai? Or was he in Guangzhong by now? He hadn’t paid his father’s schedule much attention since he found out he wasn’t going himself.

Nick looked at him. “Any other family here in the States?”

Jason thought for a moment. Aunt Lucy lived in Cabells Mound, and he had watched Cabells Mound burn. Even if she survived, her home probably had not. Also she was elderly and wouldn’t be able to look after him. There was another elderly aunt in upstate New York, but he hadn’t seen her in years.

“My dad’s the best bet,” he said.

“Well,” Nick shrugged, “I’ll try. How would you like your eggs?”

“Scrambled.”

Thoughts of his family left Jason downcast. When Nick went into the galley, Jason decided he didn’t want to hang around waiting and being depressed, so he stepped out onto the deck and was surprised to discover that
Michelle S.
was now high and dry. The river had dropped to a lower stage since the middle of the night, and the mud reef on which the towboat had grounded was now above the level of the water, a muddy plain that stretched several hundred feet in all directions. The island had caught a lot of debris, and its upstream flank was walled with driftwood, logs, and with what looked like a green-roofed metal storage shed, deposited on its side with a door hanging open.

The whole island was covered with dead fish. Flocks of crows and water birds were feasting on the corpses. Their croaks and calls were almost deafening.

The day was gray and cooler than yesterday, for which Jason was grateful. A wind made singing sounds as it gusted over the superstructure.

Jason made his way forward to the blunt bow. The steel knees used to push the barges reared on either side. The tow stretched out before him, fifteen long barges laid out three abreast, all lashed together with steel wire held taut by big ratchets. The nearest barges were domed with pale green metal, and a complex network of pipes ran fore and aft along their length. There was a short mast on the middle barge, with a red flag and a light on top.

Jason jumped up on the prow, balanced for a precarious moment, and then jumped across to the nearest barge. Metal rang under his feet as he landed. The wind gusted toward him, bringing a sharp chemical smell.

He sneezed.

There were a pair of huge blue rubber gloves lying on the barge near his feet.
Why blue?
he wondered. He wandered forward along the green roof of the barge. More blue gloves were scattered here and there. A gust of wind ruffled his hair. He sneezed again.

He jumped easily to the next barge in line. He wondered if it would be possible to skate on the barges, roll along the smooth metal tops and hop over the piping. Do it fancy, land fakie and jump the next pipe going backward. It would be easy enough to leap from one barge to the next.

Pity that the pipes were mostly horizontal. Otherwise he could ride them as he’d ridden the tower rail in Cabells Mound.