The Rift

by Walter Jon Williams

  Omar nodded. “Tell D.R. we’re not fixing to do anything to the tourists. In fact,” he added, “I’ll talk to him myself.”

  “But Omar.” Jedthus looked pained. “When are we going to get to do something, you know, special?” Omar fixed Jedthus with a steely eye. “Wait for the word,” he said. “We’ve got to get these bloodsucking reporters out of here first.”

  “Churches and meeting halls burn up real nice,” Jedthus said.

  “One damn church,” Omar scowled, “and we’d have the FBI moving in with us for the next five years.” It was one of his nightmares that someone—possibly someone he hardly knew—was going to get overenthusiastic and create what would literally be a federal case.

  The whole point of the Klan, he knew, was violence. The Klan often gave itself the airs of a civic organization, interested in charities and betterment—but the truth was that if people wanted civic betterment, they’d join the Rotary.

  You joined the Klan because you wanted to be a part of an organization that stomped its enemies into the black alluvial soil of the Mississippi Delta. And what Omar had to do now was restrain his followers from doing just that.

  “Concentrate on lawbreakers,” Merle advised. “Just do your regular job.” Jedthus scowled. Omar looked at his deputy and sucked his teeth in thought.

  The problem was, he had been elected by people looking for change. And change wasn’t exactly in his power. He couldn’t change the last fifty years of history, he couldn’t repair the local economy, he couldn’t alter the power of the liberal media or the Jews or the federal government. He couldn’t change Supreme Court rulings, he couldn’t deny black people the welfare that guaranteed their independence from white control. Least of all, he couldn’t alter the situation by cracking heads. Cracking heads would only make the situation worse. Getting himself or one of his deputies thrown in jail wasn’t going to help anybody.

  “Jedthus,” Omar said, “don’t do anything you don’t want to see on the six o’clock news. Remember Rodney King, for God’s sake. That’s all I’m saying.” He winked. “Things’ll change. Our time will come. You know that.”

  “Reckon I do,” said Jedthus, still scowling. He cracked his big knuckles. Omar looked at Merle with a look that said You’ll speak to Jedthus about this little matter, won’t you?, and Merle gave an assuring nod.

  “I’ve got an interview with somebody from the Los Angeles Times,” Omar said. “Guess I’ve kept the little prick waiting long enough.”

  He left the squad room with a wave. “See you-all at the shrimp boil,” he said. Omar lived in Hardee, twelve miles from Shelburne City, just north of the Bayou Bridge. The house he shared with Wilona was of the type called a “double shotgun,” two long, narrow shiplap homes that shared a single peaked roof. Early in his marriage, when Wilona had first got pregnant, he’d borrowed some money from his father and his in-laws, bought both halves of the house, knocked down some of the walls separating the two units, and created a spacious family home. They’d raised their son David here, and saved enough money to send him to LSU.

  Though he and Wilona—chiefly Wilona—had created a pleasant little oasis on their property, with a lawn and garden and a pair of huge magnolias to shade it all in summertime, the rest of the neighborhood was less impressive. The asphalt roads were pitted and badly patched, with grass and weeds springing up here and there. The houses were a mixture of old shotgun homes and newer house trailers, with an occasional clapboard church. Cars and trucks stood on blocks in front yards. Some of the vehicles had been there so long they were covered by vines, and fire ants had piled conical mounds around the deflated tires. Cur dogs lolled in the shade, dozens of them. Laundry hung slack on lines. Old signs were still pegged on front lawns: Omar Paxton for Law and Decency. Confederate flags hung limp in the still air.

  Omar waved to everyone as he drove slowly through the neighborhood in his chief’s cruiser. People waved back, shouted out congratulations.

  These were the people who had turned out in droves to see him elected, who had overturned the local establishment and put him in office.

  Maybe now, he thought, we can get the roads resurfaced.

  He pulled into his carport and stepped from its air-conditioned interior into the Louisiana heat. The air was so sultry, and hung so listlessly in the still afternoon, that Omar thought he could absolutely feel the creases wilt on his uniform. He sagged.

  People used to work in this heat, he thought. He himself had spent one whole day chopping cotton when he was a teenager, and by the end of the day, when he’d quit, he knew he’d better finish high school and get a job fit for a white man.

  Sweat prickled his forehead as he walked the few paces from the carport to his front door. Inside, chill refrigerated air enveloped him, smelling of chopped onion and green pepper. He stopped inside the door and breathed it in.

  “Is that potato salad I smell?” he said cheerfully. He took off his gun belt—damned heavy thing—and crossed the room to hang it from the rack that held his .30-’06, his shot-gun, his Kalashnikov, and the Enfield his multi-great grand-father had carried in the War Between the States. Wilona—who pronounced her name “Why-lona”—came from the kitchen, an apron over her housecoat.

  “Enough potato salad for twenty people,” she said. “There aren’t going to be more, are they?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t do the invitations.” He kissed her.

  Wilona’s expression brightened. “Look!” She almost danced to the coffee table, where she picked up a cream-colored envelope. “Look what else we got!”

  Omar saw the address engraved on the envelope and smiled. “I was wondering when this was going to come.”

  “Mrs. Ashenden invited me to tea on Wednesday!” Wilona’s eyes sparkled. She was happy as a child at Christmas.

  Omar took the envelope from her, slipped the card out of the envelope, opened it. Looked at the elegant handwriting. “Very nice,” he said. “Guess we’re among the quality now.”

  “It’s so exciting!” Wilona said. “We finally got an invitation to Miz LaGrande’s! It’s just what we’ve wanted!”

  What Omar wanted, actually, was for Mrs. LaGrande Davis Rildia Shelburne Ashenden to die, choke on one of her little color-coordinated petit fours maybe, and for her big white house, Clarendon, to burn to the ground. She was the last of the Shelburne family, and they’d been in charge of Spottswood Parish for too long.

  “I’ll have to find a new frock,” Wilona said. “Thank God I have Aunt Clover’s pearls.”

  “Your frocks are fine.” Omar put the invitation back into its envelope and frowned. “You’ll buy a new frock for old Miz LaGrande and you didn’t buy one for my swearing-in?”

  She snatched the invitation from his hand. “But I’ll be going to Clarendon! Clarendon is different!”

  “I wouldn’t buy a new frock for some old biddy who will never give us the vote,” Omar said. “Is there beer in the ice-box?”

  “I bought a case yesterday. There was a sale at the Super-B.”

  Omar found some Coors Light in the icebox, twisted off the tops of two bottles, and returned to the living room to hand one to Wilona. She was sitting on the couch, paging through a copy of Southern Accents that she’d probably bought the second she’d received Miz LaGrande’s invitation. Wilona took the beer she handed him and sighed. He had neglected to bring her a glass. Wilona had always harbored ambitions above her station, probably inherited from her mother, who was a Windridge but who had done something disgraceful at LSU and ended up living with her shirttail relatives in Shelburne and had to marry a filling station owner.

  Wilona longed for the lost world of mythic Windridge privilege. She longed to have tea at Clarendon and join the Junior League and wear crinolines at Garden Club functions. She wanted to be Queen of the Cotton Carnival and every so often invite a select group of friends to a pink tea, where everything, including the food, was color-coordinated, and even the waiter wore a pink tie. Omar knew that
none of this was ever going to happen.

  Even Windridge pretentions had never extended that far. Instead of the pink teas, there would be shrimp boils, and fish fries, attendance at Caesarea Baptist, and meetings where people wore hoods of white satin and burned crosses. This was Wilona’s destiny, and his. This was the fate to which their birth had condemned them.

  And it was the quality, the people like Miz LaGrande, who did the condemning. Whose gracious lives were made possible by the sweat of others, and who somehow, along with their white houses and cotton fields, had inherited the right to tell everyone else how to run their lives. It was traditional, in Spottswood Parish, for anyone running for office to have tea at Clarendon, explain what they hoped to accomplish, and ask for Miz LaGrande’s blessing on their candidacy. Omar had not gone to tea at Clarendon. He had just announced he was running, and then he ran hard. He beat the Party, and then the official candidate, and then the courts. And all the opposition ever managed to do was make him more popular and more famous.

  And he did it all without asking Miz LaGrande for anything. And he never would ask her for anything. Not a damn thing. Not ever.

  But now Miz LaGrande was fixing to have that tea, after all. And not with Omar, but with his wife. The old lady still had a few brain cells left, that was clear.

  “Miz LaGrande has never been interviewed by the Los Angeles Times,” Omar said. “No Yankee reporter is ever going to ask her for her opinion, I bet. I reckon German television isn’t gonna send a camera crew to Clarendon.”

  “Of course not.” Wilona paged through her magazine, sipped on her beer.

  “What’s so great about the Shelburnes?” Omar asked. “They come out here from Virginia, they ship in a couple hundred niggers from Africa to do their work for them, and they build a Greek temple to live in. Would you call that normal?”

  Wilona looked up from her magazine, her eyebrows tucked in a frown. “Don’t be tacky,” she said.

  “She’s trying to get at you because she can’t get at me. She’s trying to get you on her side.”

  “Oh, darlin’, it’s just tea. And I’m always on your side, you know that.” She turned the page, and then showed Omar a picture. “Look at that kitchen! Isn’t that precious?” Omar looked at the polished cabinets and the cooking implements, some of them pretty strange-looking, hanging from brass hooks. “It’s nice,” he said.

  “It’s precious,” She looked wistfully at the picture, then looked up at Omar. “Can’t we have a kitchen like this? Can’t we have a new house?”

  “Nothing wrong with the house we live in now,” Omar said.

  “Of course there’s nothing wrong with it,” Wilona said. “I just think we deserve something better after all these years. You’ve got a much better salary now, and—”

  “People voted the way they did for a reason,” Omar said. “They voted for us because they thought we were just like them. Because we lived in their neighborhood, because they saw us in their church, because they knew we were born here, because we didn’t pretend to be anything we weren’t. Because we live in a double shotgun that we fixed up, okay?”

  Wilona cast a wistful look at her copy of Southern Accents. “I just want some things in my life to be lovely,” she said.

  He fixed her with a look. “Wilona,” he said, “it’s too late to pledge Chi Omega now.” She looked away. “That was a mean thing to say, Omar.”

  “It’s true, ain’t it?”

  “You should shower and change your clothes. We’ll be late for the shrimp boil.” The phone rang. Omar took a pull from his long-neck, then rose from the couch to answer. It was his son David.

  “Congratulations, Dad!” he said. “I’m popping a few brews to celebrate!”

  “Thanks.” Omar felt a glow kindle in his heart. David was finishing his junior year at LSU and would be the first Paxton ever to graduate from college. Omar had got David through some rocky years in his teens—the boy was hot-tempered and had traveled with a rough crowd—but now David was safe in Baton Rouge and well on his way to escaping the shabby, tiny world of Spottswood Parish. A place that Omar himself planned to escape, rising from his double shotgun home on the wings of a Kleagle. Once you get the people behind you, he thought, who knew how far you could go?

  The concussions of the earthquake still continue, the shock on the 23rd ult. was more severe and larger than that of the 16th Dec. and the shock of the 7th inst. was still more violent than any preceding, and lasted longer than perhaps any on record, (from 10 to 15 minutes, the earth was not at rest for one hour.) the ravages of this dreadful convulsion have nearly depopulated the district of New Madrid, but few remain to tell the sad tale, the inhabitants have fled in every direction… Some have been driven from their houses, and a number are yet in tents. No doubt volcanoes in the mountains of the west, which have been extinguished for ages, are now opened.

  Cape Girardeau, Feb. 15th, 1812

  “This is delicious, Rhoda,” Omar said. He had some more of the casserole, then held up his plastic fork.

  “What’s in it?”

  Rhoda, a plump woman whose shoulders, toughened to leather by the sun, were revealed by an incongruous, frilly fiesta dress, simpered and smiled.

  “Oh, it’s easy,” she said. “Green beans with cream of mushroom soup, fried onion rings, and Velveeta.”

  “It’s delicious,” Omar repeated. He leaned a little closer to speak above the sound of the band. “You wouldn’t mind sending the recipe to Wilona, would you?”

  “Oh no, not at all.”

  “This casserole is purely wonderful. I’d love it if Wilona knew how to make it.” Another vote guaranteed for yours truly, he thought as he left a pleased-looking constituent in his wake.

  He wasn’t planning on staying sheriff forever. He had his machine together. He had his people. The state house beckoned. Maybe even Congress.

  How long had it been since a Klan leader was in Congress? A real Klan leader, too, not someone like that wimp David Duke, who claimed he wasn’t Klan anymore.

  Omar waved at D.R. Thompson, the owner of the Commissary, who was talking earnestly with Merle in the corner by the door to the men’s room. D.R. nodded back at him.

  Ozie’s was jammed. The tin-roofed, clapboard bar past the Shelburne City corp limit had been hired for Omar’s victory party, and it looked as if half the parish had turned out for the shrimp boil and dance. The white half, Omar thought.

  Omar sidled up to the bar. Ozie Welks, the owner, passed him a fresh beer without even pausing in his conversation with Sorrel Ellen, who was the editor and publisher of the Spottswood Chronicle, the local weekly newspaper.

  “So this Yankee reporter started asking me about all this race stuff,” Ozie said. “I mean it was Klan this and militia that and slavery this other thing. And I told him straight out, listen, you’ve got it wrong, the South isn’t about race. The South has its own culture, its own way of life. All everybody outside the South knows is the race issue, and the South is about a lot more than that.”

  “Like what, for instance?” Sorrel asked.

  “Well,” Ozie said, a bit defensive now that he had to think about it. “There’s football.” Sorrel giggled. For a grown man, he had a strange, high-pitched giggle, a sound that cut the air like a knife. Being too close to Sorrel Ellen when he giggled could make your ears hurt.

  “That’s right,” he said. “You got it right there, Ozie.” He turned to gaze at Omar with his watery blue eyes.

  “I think Ozie has a point, don’t you?”

  “I think so,” Omar agreed. He turned to Ozie and said, “Hey, I just wanted to say thanks. This is a great party, and I just wanted to thank you for your help, and for your support during the election. Everybody around here knows that there’s nothing like an Ozie Welks shrimp boil.”

  “I just want you to do right by us now you’ve got yourself elected,” Ozie said. He was a powerful man, with a lumber-jack’s arms and shoulders, and the USMC eagle-and-globe tattooed
on one bicep and

  “Semper Fidelis” on the other. His customers cut up rough sometimes—pretty often, to tell the truth—but he never needed to employ a man at the door. He could fling a man out of his bar so efficiently that the drunk was usually bouncing in the parking lot before the other customers even had time to blink.

  “I’ll do as much as I can,” Omar said. “But you know, with all these damn Jew reporters in town, it’s going to be hard.”

  “I hear you,” Ozie said.

  Sorrel touched Omar’s arm. “I’m going to be running an editorial this Saturday on welfare dependency,” he said. “It should please you.”

  Omar looked at the newspaperman. “Welfare dependency, huh?” he said.

  “Yeah. You know, how we’ve been subsidizing bad behaviors all these years.”

  “Uh-huh.” Omar nodded. “You mean like if we stop giving money to niggers, they’ll go someplace else?

  Something like that?”

  “Well, not in so many words.” Sorrel winked as if he were confiding a state secret. “You’re going to like it.”

  “So I’m going to like it, as opposed to all the editorials you’ve been running which I didn’t like.” Sorrel made a face. “Sorry, Omar. But you know a paper’s gotta please its advertisers. And the folks who pay my bills weren’t betting on you winning the election.”

  Omar looked at the publisher. “You betting on me now, Sorrel?”

  Sorrel gave his high-pitched giggle. “I reckon I know a winner when I see one,” he said.

  “Well,” Omar said. “God bless the press.”

  He tipped his beer toward Ozie in salute, then made his way toward the back of the crowded bar. Sorrel, he had discovered, was not untypical. People who had despised him, or spoken against him, were now clustering around pretending they’d been his secret friends all along. A couple of the sheriff’s deputies, and one of the jailers, standoffish till now, had asked him for information about joining the Klan. Miz LaGrande was more discreet about it, with her hand-written invitation on her special stationery, but Omar could tell what she was up to. People were beginning to realize that the old centers of power in the parish were just about played out, and that there was a new force in the parish. They were beginning to cluster around the new power, partly because they smelled advantage, partly because everyone liked a winner.