The Rift

by Walter Jon Williams

  Omar was perfectly willing to use these people, but he figured he knew just how far to trust them. He stepped out the back door into the dusk. People had spilled out of the crowded bar and onto the grass behind, clustered into the circle of light cast by a yard light set high on a power pole. Wild shadows flickered over the crowd as bats dove again and again at the insects clustered around the light. The day’s heat was still powerful, but with the setting of the sun it had lost its anger. Omar paused on the grass to sip his beer, and Merle caught up to him, “I spoke to D.R. about that camp meeting matter,” he said. “I squared it.”

  “Thanks,” Omar said. “I don’t want people scared of losing their incomes just ’cause I got elected.”

  “Not our people, anyway.”

  “No.”

  “And I think I calmed Jedthus down. Though it’s hard to tell with Jedthus.” Omar frowned. “I know.”

  Merle grinned. “Hey, wasn’t it nice of the Grand Wizard to turn up?”

  “Yep.” Omar tipped his beer back, let the cool drink slide down his throat.

  “He said he wanted to speak with you privately, if you can get away.”

  “Yeah, sure.” Omar wiped his mouth. “Do you know where he is?”

  “Talking to some folks over in the parking lot.”

  “Right.” He put a hand on Merle’s shoulder and grinned. “We’re doin’ good, ain’t we?” Merle grinned back. “You bet, boss.”

  Omar crossed to the gravel parking lot and found the Grand Wizard perched on the tailgate of his camper pickup, talking to some of the locals. He was a small man, balding, who dressed neatly and wore rimless spectacles. He was not much of a public speaker, and even the white satins he wore on formal occasions did little more than make him look like a grocery clerk decked out for Halloween. He had risen to his position as head of the Klan—this particular Klan anyhow—by virtue of being a tireless organizer. He ran things because it was clear that nobody else would do it as well, or as energetically. In his civilian life, he ran a bail bond agency in Meridian, Mississippi.

  “Hi, Earl,” Omar said.

  The Grand Wizard looked up and smiled. “Damn if it ain’t a fine day,” he said. “I was tellin’ the boys here how good you looked on television.”

  “Knowing how to use the media,” Omar said, “that’s half the battle right there.”

  “That’s right.” The Grand Wizard looked down at the ice in his plastic go-cup and gave it a meditative shake. “That’s where the Klan’s always been strong, you know. The uniforms. The burning crosses. The flags. They strike the eye and the heart. They makes you feel something.”

  “That’s why I took the oath in front of the statue,” Omar said.

  The Grand Wizard gave a sage nod. “That’s right,” he said. “Give everyone something to see and think about. The Mourning Confederate. The Cause that our people fought and died for. The Cause that still lives in our hearts. It speaks to everyone here.”

  “Amen,” one of the boys said.

  “We send signals to our people,” Omar said. “The media and the others read it however they like, but our people know the message we’re sending.”

  “That’s right.” The Grand Wizard nodded.

  “Merle said you wanted to talk to me or something?” Omar said.

  “Oh, yeah.” The Grand Wizard slid off his tailgate to the ground. “Now if you gentlemen will excuse us…”

  Omar and the Grand Wizard walked off to the side of the parking lot, where rusty barb wire drooped under the glossy weight of Virginia creeper. The sound of “Diggy Diggy Low” grated up from Ozie’s, where the fiddler was kicking up a storm.

  “I was wondering if you could address our big Klanvention on Labor Day,” the Grand Wizard began.

  “Sure,” Omar said.

  For years, white supremacists had a big Labor Day meeting in Stone Mountain, Georgia. But the Grand Wizard had quarreled with the Stone Mountain organizers, and he’d started his own Labor Day meeting in Mississippi. He was always working hard to get more of the troops to turn out to his Klanvention than to the other meeting.

  The Grand Wizard did not march to anyone else’s drum. He was the leader, and that was that. And if other people didn’t like it, they could just go to Stone Mountain.

  Which brought to mind another problem, Omar thought. Whenever anyone in the Klan had challenged the Grand Wizard’s authority, the Grand Wizard had succeeded in cutting them off or driving them out of the organization.

  Omar was now a good deal more famous than the Grand Wizard would ever be. If he wanted to take control of the entire Klan, Omar could probably do it.

  But he didn’t want to become the new Grand Wizard. King Kleagle of Louisiana, as far as Omar was concerned, was quite enough work. Earl could stay in his office in Meridian and organize and speechify and push papers forever, and with Omar’s blessing.

  Omar wondered if the Grand Wizard understood this. He should find the moment, he told himself, and reassure the man.

  “You come to the Klanvention,” the Grand Wizard was saying, “we’ll get our message on TV. And every time we get media attention, we get more members.” The Grand Wizard grinned out into the night. His teeth were small, like a child’s, and perfectly formed. “The liberal media do us a favor every time they run a story on us. It’s only when they ignore us that people lose interest.” Omar nodded. “I noticed that there were a lot of people in this parish that didn’t care to know me till I got on television. It’s like being on TV makes you more real somehow.”

  “It’s that symbol thing, like I said earlier. They see you standing up for something.” Omar suspected there was more to it than that, that maybe television had changed people’s ideas of what was real, but he was more interested in what the Grand Wizard was getting to. There wasn’t any reason to take Omar aside just to be talking about speaking engagements.

  “I’ve got some other requests for you to speak, but they’re not from our people, so I can’t judge.”

  “Just forward ’em to me,” Omar said.

  “I’ll do that.”

  The Grand Wizard paused, hands in his pockets, and glanced around.

  “I met a fella the other day you might want to talk to,” he said. “His name’s Knox. Micah Knox. You ever heard of him?”

  “Can’t say as I have.”

  The Grand Wizard’s foot toyed with the butt-end of an old brown beer bottle half hidden in the creeper.

  “He belongs to a group called the Crusaders National of the Tabernacle of Christ. He’s got some interesting views about, you know, the situation. Very well informed. He’s on a sort of tour of the country, and you might want to have him give a talk to your boys here.”

  Omar vaguely remembered hearing about the Tabernacle of Christ—they were some kind of Western group, he thought—but there were so many little groups on his end of the political spectrum that he had trouble sorting one out from another. It was hard enough just keeping track of the sixty-odd groups that called themselves the Klan.

  “He doesn’t charge or anything,” the Grand Wizard added, misinterpreting Omar’s hesitation. “He’s just trying to make contacts.”

  “He can come by if he wants, I guess,” Omar said.

  “This isn’t a matter for an open meeting or anything,” the Grand Wizard said. “No cameras, no reporters. Just you and Knox and Merle and a few of the boys you best trust.”

  Omar gave him a sharp look. “Earl, is there a reason this Knox is under cover?” The Grand Wizard gave a little shake of his head as he rolled the old beer bottle under his sole. “No, no. What I’m saying is that this boy is radical. People who haven’t already given their lives completely to the Cause might misunderstand his message. We wouldn’t want that. That’s all.”

  “Okay, then,” Omar said. “He can say whatever he likes, as long as he’s not planning on doing anything radical while he’s here.”

  The Grand Wizard kicked the beer bottle. Restrained by the creeper, it h
opped about three inches, then came to a stop, edge-side up. The Grand Wizard sighed, then began to amble back toward Ozie’s. “I’ll be in touch about him,” he said. “I don’t know what his schedule is, exactly.”

  “Fine.”

  “By the way,” the Grand Wizard said, “I saw that new sign—Hess-Meier Plantation Farm.”

  “Inc.,” Omar added. Then, “Jews. Swiss Jews.”

  “They buy the gin, too?”

  “Of course,” Omar said. “If they took their cotton to someone else’s gin, they wouldn’t make so many sheckels.” Omar shrugged. “Well, at least there’s another gin in the parish, down to Hardee, and that one’s American.”

  The Grand Wizard shook his head. “Wrightson couldn’t at least sell out to Americans?”

  “Hess-Meier was top bidder. Now half the agricultural land in the parish is owned by the fuckin’ Swiss.”

  “It isn’t our country anymore.” The Grand Wizard sighed.

  It never was, Omar wanted to tell him. It’s always been owned by the wrong people, who traded land and money back and forth within their circle, and the people who lived on the land and worked it never figured in their calculations.

  Omar and the Grand Wizard walked up to Ozie’s back door. Wilona was there, a plate in her hand. She was talking to Deb Drury, whose husband ran the towing service. “This fruit salad is so special,” she said. “I can taste something different in it.”

  “Black cherry Jell-O,” Deb said. “Fruit and pecans, and Co-Cola.” Wilona leaned close to Deb and lowered her voice. “I don’t want to impose,” she said, “but could you send me the recipe?”

  Omar looked at his wife and gave her a wink.

  Just treat the people like they exist, he thought, and next thing you know, they put you in charge.

  THREE

  We are informed from a respectable source that the old road to the post of Arkansas, by Spring river, is entirely destroyed by the last violent shocks of earthquake. Chasms of great depth and considerable length cross the country in various directions, some swamps have become dry, others deep lakes, and in some places hills have disappeared.

  Charlestown, March 21, 1812

  Jason craned his neck up at the water tower and pushed his helmet back to give himself a better view. It looked much bigger now that he stood at its base, a metal mushroom that bulged out over Jason’s head, blocking out a sky filled with low dark clouds. Its surface was painted a glossy shade of vegetable green that Jason had never seen on any object not owned by the government. It was as if Cabells Mound had tried to disguise their water tower as something natural, as a peculiarly shaped tree, and failed miserably. The tower stood in a soggy little park planted with overgrown hibiscus. Pumps whined from the cinderblock wellhouse next to the tower. There didn’t seem to be any human beings in the vicinity. Jason hopped off his bike and examined the metal stair that spiraled to the top of the tower. A tall metal pipe gateway stood at the bottom of the stair, with a gate made of chain link secured by a padlock. There was a half-hearted coil of barbed wire on the top, and more chain link on the side, obviously to keep someone from climbing over the lower part of the stair.

  Nothing that would stop a determined, reasonably agile young person. Jason had always thought of chain link as a ladder. The barbed wire had not been extended along the side of the stair, in itself almost an invitation. And from the state of the chain link, it was obvious that he was not the first person to think of climbing the tower.

  That gate and the barbed wire, though, would complicate the dismount at the end of his ride. He couldn’t do a fakie or anything fancy at the bottom, he’d just have to jump off the rail. And he’d have to jump off onto the stair, because if he jumped off onto the soft turf under the tower, he might get hung up on the fence that was draped over the side of the stair.

  Jumping off onto the stair might be a good thing, he finally decided. He could use the mesh of the gate to brake his remaining momentum. It would be like running into a net.

  Jason parked his bike under the stair, hooked his skates around his neck by the laces, and then swarmed up the chain link and dropped onto the metal stair. He ran a hand along the pipe of the guard rail: smooth, round, painted metal, a little scarred by rust. Nothing he hadn’t coped with before. He hiked up the first fifty feet or so, took the rail in his hands, and shook it, tried to find out if it was loose. It was solid. It would make good skating.

  Jason’s heart was racing as if he’d run five miles instead of climbed fifty feet. A delicate sensation of vertigo shimmered through his inner ear.

  He took a breath and looked out over the town, laid out in perfect, regular rectangles that marched down to the levee. On this dark, cloudy morning, Cabells Mound looked drab. The older buildings were frame and often set on little brick piers, and the newer homes tended to be brick and set on slabs or conventional foundations. There was a little trace of the South in the white porticoes with their little pillars that were grafted onto the front of otherwise unremarkable buildings. Elms and oaks stood in yards. The river ran right up to the levee here because there was a landing, and because a little to the north there was a lumber mill that loaded its product onto barges. The river was an uneasy wide gray mass, very full, at least halfway up the side of the levee. Jason realized with a touch of unease that Cabells Mound, were it not protected by the levee, would be under water.

  Because the river was so high it was carrying a lot of junk with it, and Jason could see an entire cypress tree floating past, a splayed clump of roots at one end and still-living foliage at the other. Three crows sat in the green branches and watched the world with curiosity as it moved by. Black against the opalescent surface of the water, a tow of sixteen barges made its way in the opposite direction, heading for St. Louis.

  There were very few people to be seen. It was Saturday morning, and many, perhaps most, of the residents were off at the shopping malls of Memphis or Sikeston.

  He turned south, saw the green of the old Indian mound beneath its tangle of timber, the peak of his house above the line of trees that marked the end of the cotton field.

  Jason was above it all. His heart was racing in his chest like a turbine. He looked down at the ground below, and though he wasn’t even halfway up the tower, the green turf seemed a long distance away. Maybe, he thought, the very first time he went down the rail he shouldn’t start at the very top. He could start partway down, just to get his reflexes back and make sure he could handle the curve that would tend to throw him off the rail as he gathered speed.

  He went down a few stairs, until the distance to the ground did not look quite so intimidating, and then sat on one of the metal steps and took off his sneaks. He leaned around the metal center post of the tower and threw his shoes to the bottom of the stairway. They hit the mesh door at the bottom in a ringing splash of metal. Jason checked his skates, make sure the wheels spun freely and the brakes worked, then laced them on. Stood, adjusted his knee, elbow, and wrist armor, put a hand on the rail so that he’d know where it was.

  Usually, when he was going to ride a rail, Jason would start on the flat, get some speed and momentum, and then jump onto the rail for his grind to the bottom. But now, on the tower, he was going to have to jump straight up onto the rail from a standing start, which meant that his balance was going to have to be perfect right from the beginning.

  His pulse crashed in his ears. His vision had narrowed to the length of that metal rail that spiraled down out of sight to the bottom.

  A gull sailed overhead, cawing.

  Jason bent, jumped up, kicked. Landed on the rail—yes! —clicked in!—back foot athwart the rail in the royale position, front foot bang on the center of the rail, arms out for balance. And began to move. Down—yes! —arms flailing at first, then steadying. Rear skate grinding down the rail, checking his speed. He leaned opposite to the direction of the curve, enough to counter for centrifugal force that threatened to throw him off—yes! —he needed only a slight lean, he was
n’t going very fast.

  The ride was over in mere seconds. Yes! He threw himself off the rail, spun neatly in air, landed fakie—a cool landing after all, even if it was only a few feet—he spread his arms and let himself fall backward into the chain link. It received him with a metallic bang.

  “Yes!” he yelled as he bounced off the mesh. He readied himself to spring back to the top.

  “Reckon not,” said a very grownup voice.

  He told himself afterward that he should have just sprinted for the top, skates and all, hopped on the rail, and wheel-barrowed to the bottom. That would have been Edge Living. That would have been the way to go. Then the experience that followed would have been worth it.

  But instead he turned around and caught sight of the policeman, and then he froze.

  “Get your ass off public property,” said the cop.

  His name was Eubanks, a skinny little bald guy with a big voice, and he seemed to specialize in following Jason around and telling him not to do things. It was Eubanks who told him he couldn’t skate in the courthouse parking lot, or on the streets—old and potholed though they were—or on the sidewalks, which were even more beat up. Eubanks had even chased him off the parking lot at the Piggly Wiggly, and the city didn’t even own the Piggly Wiggly.

  “Get your ass over here!” Eubanks yelled.

  Jason turned, trudged up a few steps to get clear of the chain mesh, and prepared to hop over the rail to the ground below.