The Rift

by Walter Jon Williams

  “It was Viondi found it, right?”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “I can just imagine.”

  Sudden resentment sizzled along Nick’s nerves. Manon always knew how to get to him. I can just imagine. His friends weren’t good enough, his apartment wasn’t good enough, his job wasn’t good enough. He wasn’t good enough.

  And it wasn’t like she even meant to put him down, not really. Her damn spooky family had been royalty so long in their little part of Arkansas that it was natural for her to judge other people, judge them without even thinking about it. There wasn’t any malice in it, not really.

  “Can I talk to Arlette?” he asked.

  “She’s in her room. I’ll get her.”

  Over the phone he heard Manon’s heels clacking on the polished cypress floor of their old house. Nick paced up and down next to the dinette set, working off his aggravation. Was it his fault he’d been laid off at McDonnell? Or that a weapons systems engineer was a useless occupation in the aftermath of the Cold War?

  He looked at the portrait of his father: Brigadier General Jon C. Ruford, U.S. Army, winner of the Distinguished Service Cross for service in Vietnam and the Soldier’s Medal for service out of it. Author of Sun Tzu and the Military Mind (1985), and one of the first dozen or so black men to rise in the Army to the rank of general officer, clearly destined for higher rank until forced to resign by the multiple sclerosis that finally killed him, four years later, in the V.A. hospital here in St. Louis. You didn’t tell me, Nick silently told the portrait, that I was going to be made obsolete. That I was going to be as much a dinosaur as you are.

  Arlette’s young voice brightened his thoughts. “Allo, papa! J’ai des nouvelles merveilleuxl line situation vai a devenu libre!”

  Nick tried to find his way through this torrent of half-understood words. His last real exposure to French had been years ago, when his father was stationed at NATO head-quarters in Brussels. “Good news?” he said. “Uhhh… bien.”

  “Je vais a Vecole d’ete apres tout! Je vais passer I’ete a Toulouse!” Nick’s heart sank as he deciphered Arlette’s phrases. He glanced into the room he was preparing for her, at the stack of wallpaper and the giltedged mirror… his hand automatically touched the pocket where he carried the gift he’d bought her today, and which he really couldn’t afford. A gold necklace in the shape of a lily, sprinkled with diamonds and rubies, and matching earrings. A real grown-up gift. He had imagined her eyes lighting up as she opened the gift-wrapped box. He had imagined the way she’d gasp in delight and wrap her arms around his neck and breathe her warm thanks against his neck. And now he’d never see it. Now he’d just have to give the package to Federal Express and experience his daughter’s joy only in his imagination.

  “That’s great, baby,” Nick said. “That’s wonderful.” He tried hard to keep the disappointment from his voice. “When does summer school start?”

  “Right after school ends here,” Arlette said, switching—Nick was grateful—to English. “The school in Toulouse doesn’t open right away, but Mrs. Rigby said she’d take some of us to France for ten days of travel beforehand.”

  “That’s wonderful, honey,” Nick said. His hand clenched into a fist, and he wanted to drive it through the newly papered wall.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t think his daughter shouldn’t spend the summer in France. It was a wonderful opportunity, and she would be staying with a French family and getting a lot of exposure to a world she hadn’t seen, which could only do her good after Manon decided their daughter was going to grow up as African-American royalty in some little half-assed village in Arkansas.

  Manon’s family, the Davids, had been royalty for generations. Back before the Civil War they’d been Free Men of Color in New Orleans, and they’d spoken French at home, pronounced their name

  “Dah-veed,” and sent their sons to France to be educated. After the war the Freedmans’ Bureau had created a Utopian colony of freed slaves in Arkansas, and the Davids had condescended to be put in charge of it.

  Unlike most of the colonies the Freedmans’ Bureau planted, the one in Toussaint, Arkansas, had prospered. Partly because of its isolation—none of their white neighbors really wanted the land—and partly because of the Davids. In Toussaint the Davids owned the hardware store, and the grocery, and the pharmacy. And the lumber yard, the feed store, and the town’s one office building. And probably the traffic light, too.

  And they still gave their kids French names, and sometimes sent their kids to France for an education. Even if, as in Arlette’s case, it was summer school in Toulouse.

  But Nick wanted her here. He craved her presence. He yearned for her. He needed his daughter in his life, not as just a tantalizing, infuriating ghost he could only hear on the telephone. And besides, he didn’t have a job now. He could spend time with her, not like before, when he was working and barely saw his family at all.

  He had rented a two-bedroom apartment, more than he could afford, so that she could have a nice room when she spent the summer with him. Along with the bed with the graceful rococo scalloped headboard, the chest of drawers, the giltedged mirror with the decals of roses along the borders. All money he could not afford to spend. And now he would be expected to pay for half of the cost of Arlette’s trip to France.

  “How did things go with Lockheed-Martin?” Arlette asked, almost as if she was reading his mind.

  “Same story in Colorado as everywhere else.” Nick tried to keep his voice cheerful. “Over two hundred applicants for the same job, and the ones already laid off from Lockheed get priority over the ones that got laid off from Boeing, McDonnell and Hughes.”

  If only, he thought, we could get a nice juicy war started. Not a bad war, he immediately corrected, not with a lot of casualties or anything. Just some murdering old dictator that needs removing. It wasn’t like there weren’t plenty to go around. One lousy dictator, and the defense dollars would start flowing again.

  “You’ll find a place, Daddy,” Arlette said.

  “Oh yeah,” Nick said. “Sooner or later, baby, somebody’s gonna want an engineer.” I hear Burger King is hiring, he thought.

  And with unemployment running out along with his bank account, it would probably come to that soon. Omar Paxton chose to take the oath under the statue of the Mourning Confederate in front of the courthouse. It was just as well he did it outdoors: there were so many reporters clustered around that they would never have fit inside Judge Moseley’s office. Some of the boys turned up with rebel flags to provide a colorful and ideologically significant background, and Wilona was there to stand beside him, wearing white gloves, a corsage, and the pearls that her great-aunt Clover had left her in her will. Trying to ignore the constant whirring and buzzing of the cameras, which sounded louder than the cicadas in the surrounding blackjack oaks, Omar put his hand on the judge’s well-worn Bible and swore to uphold the laws of the State of Louisiana and Spottswood Parish, and added a “So help me God!” for the benefit of his friends and of the media. Rebel yells rang out from the crowd. Confederate flags waved in the air, the sunshine turning their color a brilliant red. Judge Moseley held out his hand.

  “Good luck there, Omar,” he said.

  Omar shook the hand. “Thank you kindly, Mo,” he said. Moseley’s little waxed white mustache gave a twitch. Only certain people in the parish were high enough in caste to call the judge by his nickname, and Omar had just announced that he considered himself among them.

  Omar put on his hat and turned to face the crowd of people. He waved to Hutch and Jedthus and a few of the others, and then turned to kiss Wilona on the cheek. People in the crowd cheered. He beamed down at the crowd, and waved some more, and encouraged Wilona to wave with a white-gloved hand. He looked into the lens of a network cameraman.

  Got you all, you bastards, he thought.

  After the media storm and the court challenge and the recount, after the governor had called him a reptile and the Party had disavowed his ver
y existence, Omar Bradley Paxton had finally taken the oath of office and was ready to begin his term as sheriff of Spottswood Parish.

  “Do you plan to make any changes in the department?” a reporter shouted up. Omar smiled down at him. Little weevil, he thought. “I don’t anticipate any major changes,” he said.

  “Maybe we’ll save the people some tax dollars by putting regular gas in the patrol cars, ’stead of premium.”

  The locals laughed at this. Omar’s predecessor had been prosecuted, though not convicted, for taking kickbacks for keeping Pure Premium in all the county’s cars.

  The next question was shouted up by a little red-haired lady reporter with a voice like a trumpet. “Will there be any change in the style of law enforcement here in Spottswood Parish?”

  “Well, ma’am,” tipping his hat to the lady, “we do plan to continue giving tickets to speeders and arresting drunks.”

  More laughter. “What I meant,” the woman shouted up, “was whether the department will change its racial policy?” Omar’s ears rang with her shrill tones.

  “Ma’am,” Omar said, and tried not to clench his teeth, “the racial policies of the department and the parish are determined by law. You have just heard me swear to uphold and enforce that law. I would be in violation of my oath were I to make any changes upholding illegal discrimination.” Take that, you little red-haired dyke, he thought.

  “Do you plan,” shouted a foreign-accented voice, “to resign your position as King Kleagle of Louisiana?” Omar recognized a German reporter, one of the many foreigners who were putting their pfennigs into the local economy as they covered his story. He couldn’t help but smile.

  “The voters of Spottswood Parish knew I belonged to the Klan when they elected me,” he said.

  “Obviously they decided that my membership in the world’s oldest civil rights organization was not an important issue. I can think of no reason why I should resign at this point, not after the voters and the courts have validated my candidacy. My family has lived in this parish for seven generations, and people knew what they were getting when they elected me.”

  Rebel yells whooped up from the crowd. Confederate flags waved at the election of the first admitted Klan leader of modern times.

  Up your ass, you kraut-eating Dutchman, Omar thought, and smiled.

  “God damn,” Judge Chivington muttered. “Where did all these good-looking Klansmen come from?

  Back when I grew up in Texas, none of ’em had chins, and they all had puzzel-guts and weighed three hunnerd pounds. And that was just the women.”

  The President cast a professional eye over Omar Paxton’s chiseled features.

  “David Duke’s good looks came from a plastic surgeon,” he said. “He looked like a little weasel before Dr. Scalpel and Mr. Bleach made him a blond Aryan god. But this gent,” nodding at the evening news,

  “I believe he just has good genes.”

  “The man was made for television,” sighed Stan Burdett, the President’s press secretary, who, with his bald head, thin lips, and thick spectacles, was not.

  “He was made for givin’ us shit,” the judge proclaimed. “That fucking weevil could cost us Louisiana in the next election.”

  “We kicked him out of the Party,” the President offered.

  “We’ll be lucky if he don’t take half the Party with ’im.”

  The President sat with his two closest friends in one of the private drawing rooms in the second floor of the White House. He had never been comfortable with the formal displays of antiques and old paintings so carefully arranged in much of the public White House—he felt uneasy living in a museum, and privately cursed Jacqueline Kennedy, who had found most of the antiques and furniture in storage and spread them throughout the house, so that every time he turned around he was in danger of knocking over a vase once owned by Mrs. Rutherford B. Hayes, or a pot that James Monroe might have pissed in. So he had filled his own apartments with far less distinguished furniture, comfortable pieces which, even if they might date from the Eisenhower Administration, were scarcely refined. Even Jacqueline Kennedy couldn’t reproach him for putting his feet up on this couch.

  The President settled comfortably into his sofa and reached for his Pilsner Urquell. “So,” he said, “how do you stop Party members from bolting to Omar Paxton?”

  “Discredit him,” Stan said.

  The judge cocked an eye at the younger man. “Son,” he said, “we’re talkin’ ’bout Louisiana. Nothing makes the Louisiana voter happier than casting a ballot for someone he knows is a felon. If Jack the Ripper had been born in Plaquemines Parish, they’d have a statue to the son of a bitch in the statehouse in Baton Rouge.”

  Stan was insistent. “There’s got to be something that’ll turn his people against him.”

  “Maybe if you get a photo of Omar there in bed with Michael Jackson,” the judge said, then winked.

  “But I don’t guess he’s Michael’s type.”

  “What part of Louisiana is he from, anyway?” Stan asked.

  The President smiled. “The part where they name their children ‘Omar,’” he said. It was one of the President’s rare free nights. Congress was in recess. Nobody in the world seemed to be dropping bombs on anybody else. There was little on the President’s schedule for the rest of the week other than a visit to an arts festival at the Kennedy Center. The First Lady was in Indiana making speeches against drunk drivers, a cause with which she had become identified—and a politically safe issue, as Stan had remarked, as there were very few voters who were actually in favor of drunk driving, and most of those were too inebriated to find a polling place on election day. Since everything could change in an instant, the President reckoned he should take advantage of the opportunity to relax while it was offered.

  It was characteristic of him, though, that his idea of relaxation consisted of spending an evening watching CNN, drinking Bohemian beer, and talking politics with two of his cronies.

  The President removed a briefing book on economics that sat on his couch—the G8 economic summit in London was coming up in a few weeks—and then he put his feet up and raised his beer to his lips. “We can hope that Omar over there is just a fifteen-minute wonder,” he said. “He’s just some deputy lawman from the sticks, you know—he’s not used to this kind of scrutiny. He could self-destruct all on his own.” Stan’s spectacles glittered. “So I suppose you won’t be discussing Sheriff Paxton when you have that meeting at Justice next week.”

  “I don’t believe I said that.” The President smiled.

  “Oh God, you’re not gonna investigate the boy, are you?” the judge interrupted. “You’ve already halfway made him a martyr.” He waved one arm. “What you want to do, hoss, is buy the next election for his opponent, even if the man belongs to the other party. Then Omar there will be a loser. That’ll tarnish his damn badge for him.”

  The President looked at the Judge and smiled. Chivington was one of his oldest allies, the heir to an old Texas political family that had once controlled fifty thousand votes in the lower Rio Grande Valley—a hundred thousand, if you counted the voters in the cemeteries. He had spent ten terms in the House of Representatives, and then, having lost his seat in one of those vast political sea-changes that swept the country every dozen years or so—that in his case swept even the graveyards—he’d been a federal judge known for outspokenness on the bench, extravagant behavior off it, and the highest number of calls for impeachment since the glory days of Earl Warren. Since his retirement he’d joined a law firm in D.C. and become an advisor to the powerful—including the young telegenic fellow he’d helped to win the White House.

  “I am keeping all my options open in regard to Sheriff Paxton,” the President said.

  “That’s fine for now.” The judge nodded. “But you’ve got to take care of that problem before the next election. Trust me.”

  The President nodded. “He’s on the agenda.”

  Stan looked at the television again,
at the picture of Omar Paxton taking the oath. “Made for television,” he said, and his voice was wistful.

  “There’s a thousand reporters here,” Omar said later, addressing his deputies in the little high-ceilinged lounge the parish pretended was something called a “squad room.”

  “Most of them are going to go home before long, but there’s still going to be a lot of attention placed on this parish.”

  “So,” Merle said as he stood by the machine and poured himself coffee. “No incidents.”

  “Particularly no incidents that could be described as racially motivated,” Omar said.

  “We don’t get to have no fun at all?” Jedthus asked. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the air conditioner that rattled in the window. “We don’t even get to knock the heads of the niggers we’re used to knocking?”

  “We live in a video world,” Omar said. “Let’s remember that half the people in this state have camcorders, and they’d just love a chance to earn ten grand selling the tabloids pictures of one of us whacking some coon upside the head. And then you’d be on network news, and we’d all be so surrounded by federal agents and judges and lawsuits we wouldn’t be able to do anything.”

  “Damn.” Merle grinned. “For ten grand, I’d sell pictures of y’all.” Merle settled with his coffee onto the cheap sofa. Cracks in its orange plastic had been repaired with duct tape.

  “Just take it easy for now,” Omar said.

  “By the way,” said Merle, “I heard from D.R. at the Commissary. He was afraid that the election might scare all the little niggers away from the camp meetings this summer.”

  “Awww.” Jedthus moaned with mock sympathy.

  “Well,” Merle said defensively, “they bring a lot of money into this parish. And a lot of it gets spent at the Commissary. It ain’t like D.R.’s got that much money to spare.”

  The Commissary was the general store in Shelburne City, and had retained its name from the time when it was the company store of the Shelburne Plantation, which had once occupied much of the parish. Now it was owned and run by D.R. Thompson, who had married Merle’s sister Cordelia. D.R. was all right, Omar figured. He had slipped Omar some under-the-table contributions during Omar’s campaign and was a prominent business leader, for all that his business was just a general store. So he deserved some reassurance.