The Rift (9 page)

It was a great job. She was, for all intents and purposes, in charge of the entire Mississippi River and its 250 tributaries. The drainage basin included all or part of thirty-one of the lower forty-eight states— and also a part of Canada, which was a bit outside of her jurisdiction. All of the federal works on the river— the cutoffs, levees, dikes, revetments, spillways, and reservoirs were in her charge. All the dredges, the dams, the floodwalls, and locks.

All the responsibility. Which didn’t bother her at all— she
liked
being in charge.

Where she told the water to go, it would go, or she would know the reason why.

She turned to the photograph of the President on the wall behind her desk and gave it a wave.

“Thanks, boss,” she said. And tossed her hat across her desk and onto the brass hat stand behind.

By the time her secretary came with the tea, Jessica was seated behind the desk and was halfway through the stack of congratulatory messages and faxes that had arrived from all over the world: from Bob in Sarajevo, from Janice in Korea, from Fred in some place called Corrales, New Mexico.

“Thanks, Nelda,” she said, and sipped at the tea.

“Does it taste okay?”

“Tastes fine. It’s only weeds and water, after all.”

Nelda smiled. “We’re mostly Java drinkers around here.”

“Never cared for it myself.” Jessica preferred not to explain that she avoided caffeine on the theory that it might exaggerate her hyperkinetic manner, which she had been told, occasionally at length, was not her most attractive characteristic.

“Anything else I can do?”

“Can you get me Colonel Davidovich?”

“He’s out at the Riprap Test Facility at the moment, but I can page him if you like.”

Jessica considered. She wanted private meetings with all her senior staff, as well as the officers who commanded the six districts that made up the division. Davidovich was her second-in-command, and she wanted a meeting with him first.

“No— don’t bother. You wouldn’t happen to know when he’ll be in his office?”

“By eleven-thirty, General.”

“I’ll call him then.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

She returned to the congratulatory notes. Then, because it was hard to sit still, she opened her briefcase, took out the photograph of her husband Pat Webster, and put it on her desk. In the photo Pat was leaning back in an old armchair, sleeves rolled up, boots up on a table, playing a banjo.

Next to Pat, she placed the photo of her parents, taken on their fiftieth wedding anniversary, and the photo of her sister with her husband and children.

There were empty picture hangers on the wall where her predecessor had hung various photos and certificates, and she was able to fill the blank spaces with her own. Jessica had an impressive number of credentials to display, even considering her rank and number of years in the service.

One reason for the large number of degrees was the Army’s uncertainty, when she graduated from Engineer Officer Candidate School, as to exactly what to do with a female military engineer. There weren’t very many precedents. Her arrival at her first assignment— in Bangkok, of all places, scarcely then or now a bastion of progressive feminist thought— had been greeted by jeers and catcalls from the enlisted men. But her fellow officers, who appreciated the presence of a round-eyed woman, were supportive enough, though perhaps a little uncertain as to the social niceties.

That uncertainty— what
was
her place, assuming she had one at all?— resulted in the Army’s apparent decision to keep Jessica in school as much as possible. Which resulted in her getting a master’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Virginia and another master’s degree in contract management and procurement from the Florida Institute of Technology. She had graduated from the U.S. Army War College, the U.S. Army Engineer Basic, Construction, and Advanced Courses, Army Command and General Staff College, the Medical Service Corps Advanced course, and even the Naval War College. She belonged to the National Society of Professional Engineers, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Army Engineer Association, and the Society of American Military Engineers.

The end result of all this education, the overwhelming weight of her credentials, was that it had become very difficult to refuse her any job that she really wanted.

She really wanted the Mississippi Valley Division. And now she had it.

And she was only forty-one years old.

She paused, a framed certificate still in her hand. She had run out of picture hooks. Apparently she had a few more credentials than her predecessor.

She laughed. This was probably a good sign.

*

Cellphone plastered to her ear, Jessica nodded good-bye to her driver, Sergeant Zook, and walked past Pat’s red Jeep Cherokee to the new house, the one with the rustic wooden sign marking it as the dwelling of the Commander, MVD. She could hear Pat playing “Hail to the Chief” on his fiddle. She opened the door, and the fiddle fell silent when Pat saw she was on the phone. “If you’re sure,” she said, “that water at the levee toe is from the rain, and not—” she said as she marched across the polished wood floor of their new house, dropped her heavy briefcase onto the couch, then spun and tossed her hat at the wooden rack by the front door.

Missed. Damn.

Pat already had the place smelling like home, which meant wood shavings and glue. She finished her conversation and snapped the phone shut. A mental image of Captain Kirk folding his subspace communicator came to her, and she grinned. Then she bounded across the room and let Pat fold her in his arms.

“I take it that things went well,” he said.

“Mm-hmm.”

“Careful of the fiddle.”

Pat Webster was a tall, bearlike Virginian, and Jessica’s second husband. Her first marriage, in her early twenties, had been a catastrophe— a pair of obsessive, overachieving bipolar maniacs joined in a relationship was not a recipe for success— and by the time she’d met Pat, she’d pretty much given up on anything but transitory romance with colleagues temporarily stationed at the same base.

It was her friend Janice, when they were both stationed at Army Material Command in Alexandria, who talked her into going to a contra and square dance, overcoming her expectation that she would be encountering women in Big Hair and crinolines. Instead Jessica found herself quickly defeated by the fast-moving patterns, the allemandes and honors and courtesy turns and chains, and she ended up at the head of the dance hall, talking to the members of the band in between numbers.

And there, with his fiddle and mandolin, in his jeans and boots and checked shirt, was Pat Webster, laconic and smiling. She watched his hands as he played, the long expert hands that made light of the intricate music that he coaxed so effortlessly from his instruments.

She fantasized about those hands all the way home. And, a week or so later, when they finally touched her, she was not disappointed.

She found that Pat had a career, but to her utter relief, it was one that could stand uprooting every couple years as one assignment followed another. He was a maker of fiddles, guitars, dulcimers, and mandolins— in fact, a genuine handmade Webster guitar sold for up to a couple thousand dollars, depending on the model, and until Jessica got her general’s star he brought more money into their marriage than she. He brought with him the pleasant scent of seasoned wood, of varnish, of glue. He brought her his calm, measured presence, a balance to her own unbridled energy.

He brought her the eternal gift of music.

Inspired, she had even learned to dance squares and contras.

“So how are the levees up in Iowa?” Pat asked.

“Holding. It was the private levees that broke.”

It had been all Jessica could do to keep from flying north to check the situation personally. But her deputy at Rock Island assured her that there was no significant danger to Corps structures, and she concluded that she would be better employed in Vicksburg, getting her teams up to speed for when the flood waters headed south.

“Private levees,” Pat mused. “Funny we’ve still got so many of ’em.”

“The Corps budget will only do so much,” Jessica said. Corps levees were built to a standard height and width, faced with durable Bermuda grass, and protected by revetments from the river’s tendency to undermine them. But much of the Mississippi’s flood plain was still guarded by levees privately built by local cities, towns, and corporations, and they built what they could afford— to Corps standards when it was possible, but often not.

In the catastrophic floods of 1993, when ten million acres had gone under water, it had been the private levees that had broken, and the Corps levees that stood. When the city of Grand Forks had been submerged by the Red River in the spring of ’97, it had been because the city’s politicians had been reluctant to raise tax rates in order to provide proper flood protection. Upstream, Fargo, with its more realistic government and higher rate of taxation, stayed dry.

Jessica loosened her collar and jacket, headed for her room to change. “What’s for dinner?” she asked.

“There seem to be a lot of breakfast leftovers,” Pat said, following.

Jessica felt her cheeks grow hot. “Sorry,” she said. “I was nervous.”

“I could tell.”

“What
else
is for dinner?”

“I could make some tuna fish sandwiches. You used up practically everything else in the refrigerator.”

“Tuna is fine.”

Pat was actually a perfectly adequate cook whose capabilities extended well past tuna sandwiches. But he didn’t
care
about cooking, he didn’t throw his whole being into it, the way Jessica did, to leave the palate delirious and the kitchen a litter of dirty pots and pans.

Pat saved all that for music.

And, strangely enough, for Jessica.

“We could go out, maybe,” Pat said. “And celebrate your ascension.”

Jessica shook her head. “Too much homework,” she said, and looked at the heavy briefcase she’d brought home.

“Okay. Tuna fish it is.”

Jessica followed him into the kitchen. “Why do people say
tuna, fish?”
she asked.

He looked at her over his shoulder as he opened the pantry door. “Maybe because a tuna is a fish?” he suggested.

“But people don’t call a salmon a salmon
fish,
or a grouper a grouper
fish,
or a bass a
bass fish.”

“You’ve got a point there.” He took the can of tuna from the shelf, glanced over the unfamiliar kitchen for an opener. He cocked an eye at her. “Didn’t you say you’ve got some homework?”

He hated it when she hovered over him in the kitchen. “You bet,” she said, and headed for her briefcase.

*

We have the following description of the Earthquake from gentlemen who were on board a large barge, and lay at anchor in the Mississippi a few leagues below New Madrid, on the night of the 15th of December. About 2 o’clock all hands were awakened by the first shock; the impression was, that the barge had dragged her anchor and was grounding on gravel; such were the feelings for 60 or 80 seconds, when the shock subsided. The crew were so fully persuaded of the fact of their being aground, that they put out their sounding poles, but found water enough. At seven next morning a second and very severe shock took place. The barge was under way
—
the river rose several feet; the trees on the shore shook; the banks in large columns tumbled in; hundreds of old trees that had lain perhaps half a century at the bottom of the river, appeared on the surface of the water; the feathered race took to the wing; the canopy was covered with geese and ducks and various other kinds of wild fowl; very little wind; the air was tainted with a nitrous and sulphureous smell; and every thing was truly alarming for several minutes. The shocks continued to the 21st Dec. during that time perhaps one hundred were distinctly felt. From the river St. Francis to the Chickasaw bluffs visible marks of the earthquake were discovered; from that place down, the banks did not appear to have been disturbed. There is one part of this description which we cannot reconcile with philosophic principles, (although we believe the narrative to be true,) that is, the trees which were settled at the bottom of the river appearing on the surface. It must be obvious to every person that those trees must have become specifically heavier than the water before they sunk, and of course after being immersed in the mud must have increased in weight.
—We
therefore submit the question to the Philosophical Society.

Natchez Weekly Chronicle,
January 20,1812

Cover your six o’clock,
as the chopper pilots said. Or, in the language of the marketplace,
cover your ass.

Jessica Frazetta knew that there were two natural forces that could sneak up on her and wreck the Mississippi Valley, and her career along with it.

The first was flood. The second was earthquake.

Flood and the Corps of Engineers were old acquaintances. The Corps had been fighting the river since well before Colonel of Engineers Robert E. Lee, in the 1850s, had been sent to Missouri to prevent the Mississippi from crabbing sideways into Illinois and stranding St. Louis inland, a mission he had performed with his usual efficiency.

Practically all of the Corps’ efforts in the Mississippi went into controlling the water and keeping river navigation safe. It was to secure these goals that all the levees had been built, the dams, the locks, the revetments, the spillways. For these reasons the Corps had planted lights and buoys, dredged the harbors, charted the depths, pulled snags by the thousands from the bed of the river.

But the second, far more dangerous threat was that of earthquake. Jessica knew that an earthquake of sufficient force could undo hundreds of years of the Corps’ efforts in an instant. The levees, the revetments, the dams, the spillways ... all gone at once.

The Mississippi Valley’s last big earthquakes had occurred from 1811-12, when there were less than three thousand people of European descent living west of the Mississippi.