Below his bushy mustache, the captain’s face split in a wide grin.
“Welcome to to Beluthahatchie, podnah,” he said in a barking Acadian voice. “Y’all been on the river long?”
Beluthahatchie was a small towboat, with a crew of four and a tow of twelve barges. The captain was the bandy-legged Jean-Joseph Malraux of Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana. Three hours after the earthquake, Beluthahatchie, moving cautiously upstream in the dark, had come aground in what was supposed to be a deep channel.
“We had the depth sounder goin’ all the time,” the captain said, “but the river shallowed too quick for us to stop. It takes a while to stop all these barges, you know.” He barked out a laugh. “You wouldn’t believe the dumb-ass things these people do. Run their little motorboats right up in front of us, and expect us to stop for ’em.” The booming Cajun voice rang off the towboat’s superstructure, da dumb-ass t’ings dese people do. Run dere liddle modorboats…
“The whole river’s changed,” Nick said. “There are rapids upstream, new channels…” Crewmen helped him over the side, and he stood on the solid deck, feeling a strange astonishment at this sudden change in his fortunes.
“Thanks,” Jason said as he jumped to the deck.
“This your son?” the captain bellowed, tousling Jason’s hair, and then he laughed at his own joke.
“Come on and have some chow,” he said. “I’d like to hear about river conditions northaways.”
“Thank you, Captain,” Nick said. Jason, flushing a little, finger-combed his hair back into shape.
“Oh hell, podnah,” the captain said. “Call me Joe.”
“I was wondering,” Nick said, “if I could use your radio to call my daughter and let her know that everything’s all right.”
“Where is she?”
“Toussaint, Arkansas.”
Captain Joe gnawed his mustache thoughtfully. “I don’t know where that is, exactly, but if it’s in Arkansas, there’s a good chance the phones won’t be working. Even Little Rock got hammered bad, I hear. I got a crewman with relatives all over Arkansas, and he can’t reach any of ’em. But c’mon—” He gestured with one long arm and turned to climb a ladder. “We’ll give it a try. If your girl’s anywhere near a working phone, podnah, we’ll find her.”
As Nick followed Joe to the pilothouse, he felt as if his feet weren’t quite touching the deck. He had the breathless sensation of viewing some strange, swift-unfolding miracle.
A few minutes later he was wishing Arlette a happy birthday.
It was easy. A communications firm caught the towboat’s radio signal, shifted it over to the phone lines for two-way communication, and charged a small fee.
“Cost my company about six bucks,” Captain Joe said. “I figure they can stand the freight.”
“Daddy?” Arlette cried at Nick’s voice, and then, to someone else. “It’s Daddy! He’s on the phone!” A thousand-ton weight seemed to fall from Nick’s shoulders. He could feel his heart melting, turning to warm ooze within his chest. The breath came more easily to his lungs. He felt two inches taller.
“Hello, baby,” he said.
“Where are you? Are you okay?”
“I’m okay, baby. I’ve been on a boat on the river with…” He looked at Jason. “With someone I met,” he finished, saving that explanation for later.
“On the river?”
“The Mississippi.”
“But you were coming by car…”
“Nick!” Manon’s voice, coming in loudly after the click of the extension picking up. “Nick, are you all right?”
“I’m fine. A little sunburned, that’s all.”
“Thank God!” Manon said.
“He’s on the river,” Arlette explained to her mother. “On a boat.”
“I’m on a towboat right now,” Nick said. “The captain let me use his radio. But we’ve been drifting on the river for a couple days.”
“Are you with Viondi?” Manon asked.
There was a moment of silence. “No,” Nick finally said. “Viondi didn’t make it.”
“Oh, Nick,” Manon breathed.
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” said Arlette.
Nick licked his lips. “The car wrecked in the quake,” he said. “I got out by water. Somebody picked me up.” He looked at Jason again. The boy was trying not to look at him, to give him privacy. “We’ve been on the river, and we just now got picked up by a towboat.”
“So you’re okay,” Arlette said.
“Yes.” The sounds of the voices were bringing visions to Nick’s mind. The big clapboard house just outside of Toussaint, with its oaks and broad porch. Arlette by the phone in the kitchen, dressed in a checked cotton blouse and blue jeans worn white at the knees. Manon upstairs in the bedroom, pacing back and forth at the full length of the phone cord the way she did, with the lace curtains fluttering in the window behind.
Fantasies. Nick couldn’t know whether they were real or not. But they felt real, very real indeed.
“I’m sorry I missed your birthday yesterday,” he said.
“It wasn’t much of a party. Not with the way—well, not the way things are here.”
“But you’re okay? And Ed, and Gros-Papa, and…”
“We’re all fine,” Arlette said. “The house came through the quake okay. But we’re on an island now. We don’t have electricity, but they managed to repair the phone exchange, at least for the houses in town.”
“We have food from the store,” Manon said. “We have enough boats, we can get away if we want. But there doesn’t seem to be anyplace to go—”
Arlette’s excited voice broke in. “Maybe you can sail here in your towboat!”
“I’ll do that, baby,” Nick said, “if the captain will let me.” And his eyes sought Captain Joe, who stood beaming in a corner of the pilothouse with his hands in his pockets.
“You tell your girl that I’ll do what I can,” he bellowed without knowing what had been asked of him.
“Anybody who got a Gros-Papa is a fren’ o’ mine!”
Nick talked to Arlette for a long while as the captain beamed and grinned. The words just seemed to float out of him. He was having a hard time not floating away himself.
Eventually the words wound down, and he saw Captain Joe standing with a pensive expression on his face, and the man on watch staring neutrally out the window.
“I should go, baby,” he said. “I think I’ve been using the captain’s radio long enough. I’ll call tomorrow if I can, okay?”
He brought the call to an end. Captain Joe turned to Jason. “You want to make a call, son?” he asked. Jason gave a short little shake of the head. “No one to call,” he said, and left the pilothouse. Captain Joe gave Nick a look, brows raised. Nick only shrugged.
“Let’s get us some chow, podnah,” Joe said.
No word from the President. Jessica hadn’t been expecting any as yet: the decision to evacuate was a big one, and she hadn’t expected that it would be made overnight.
Morning birdsong—helicopters—floated through the open sides of her command tent. She looked at the weather photos that Pat had just pulled from the Internet and frowned. The big high-pressure system had stalled right over the Midwest, and that meant continued warm and sunny weather over the disaster area. That was good.
What was bad was what was happening behind the front. The clockwise rotation of the high-pressure zone was pulling up moisture from the Gulf of Mexico—you could see it, the swirl of cloud, there on the photos, a curve from the Gulf sweeping west, then east again over the Dakotas and Minnesota. Once the moisture was over the western plains or the Rocky Mountains, the air cooled and dropped the moisture as rain.