“There you go baby there you go aiaaah surfin’ USA careful there goose her yaaah…” The boat swayed, the wave crest looming on over her, and then Beluthahatchie leaped down the wave, picking up speed. Joe’s laugh boomed in the pilothouse.
Golconda was past and the island flashed up to starboard. Joe heard the grinding, grating, booming noise as the tsunami pounded over the island, ripping it and its timber to shreds.
“Roi de la riviere! C’est moil” Joe felt like pounding his chest in triumph. The island caused the wave to lose cohesion, caused ripples and back-eddies to build under the crest. Joe twitched the wheel and throttles to keep Beluthahatchie on course. And then the island was astern, and the tsunami shuddered as it met its twin, the wave that had creamed along the Kentucky side of the island. Joe felt sweat popping on his forehead as the boat surged beneath him.
“Yah, baby, roi de la riviere! Surf’s up!”
He tried to decide what to do about the upcoming bend. He didn’t want to be where he was, near the north bank of the river, when the river turned to the right—he would get caught between the bank and the tsunami and pounded to bits against the timber in the floodplain. So what he needed to do was cross over the front of the wave again and get as close to the south bank as he could…
“Here we go here we go on t’udder side…”
He was traveling along the front of the wave again, the turbines carrying him to starboard, white water creaming behind. The wave’s curl hung overhead, looming over them like a white-fanged monster about to drop on them from above.
“Skip! What are you doing?” the bowman demanded, staring at the curl in horror.
“Hang on podnah.” Joe skated right across the front of the wave, speed building. Then he turned the wheel, got the wave behind him, felt the boat lift…
He could see the silver surface of the water curving to the right. Damn they were going fast. Water boiled white to port as the tsunami slammed into the outer bank of the river bend. There was a rending, crashing, as if the wave was trying to tear the riverbed itself from the earth. But the part of the wave pushing Beluthahatchie seemed to be speeding up, going faster as it skiddered around the inside of the river bend. The boat swerved violently, and Joe steadied it just in time, a bellow of terror and exultation rising in his throat.
The roar to port continued. Joe worked the throttles. “Yah baby you go papa say you go…” The wave kept going, rolling across the curving river to smash into the north bank in a fountain of white foam. Trees went down like ranks of soldiers before machine-gun fire. But Beluthahatchie was flung away, across the river’s inner curve and into the calmer upper river, like a watermelon seed squeezed between the fingertips.
Joe throttled up, intending to get clear of the turbulent water behind him and the reduced reflection of the tsunami as it bounced off the north bank. He looked into the terrified eyes of his bowman and gave a wild laugh.
“The Argonauts ain’t got nothin’ on me!” he shouted, and reached for the horn button so that Beluthahatchie could trumpet his joy, send the sound ringing from Kentucky to Indiana and back again, the triumphant cry of the old river man who has beaten the elements, and is bringing his boat safely home…
About 2 o’clock this morning we were awakened by a most tremendous noise, while the house danced about and seemed as if it would fall on our heads. I soon conjectured the cause of our troubles, and cried out it was an Earthquake, and for the family to leave the house; which we found very difficult to do, owing to its rolling and jostling about. The shock was soon over, and no injury ivas sustained, except the loss of the chimney, and the exposure of my family to the cold of the night. At the time of this shock, the heavens were very clear and serene, not a breath of air stirring; but in five minutes it became very dark, and a vapour which seemed to impregnate the atmosphere, had a disagreeable smell, and produced a difficulty of respiration. I knew not how to account for this at the time, but when I saw, in the morning, the situation of my neighbours’
houses, all of them more or less injured, I attributed it to the dust and soot, &c which arose from the fall. The darkness continued till day-break; during this time we had EIGHT more shocks, none of them so violent as the first.
As soon as the first jolt wakened her from sleep, Jessica was moving. She wasn’t sure whether she’d rolled off her cot as she intended, or whether the tremblers kicked the cot out from under her. No sooner had she landed than the ground rose and punched her in the ribs. She reached blindly for the helmet she’d placed on the ground by the cot, felt it under her fingers, and jammed it on her head. And then pain rocketed through her skull as something lunged under her helmet rim and smacked her in the eye. Sparks shot through her vision. She lay back, stunned, the helmet partly fallen from her head. There was a strange corkscrew motion to the earth this time, something that she didn’t remember from the last big quake, and nausea rose in her throat.
Arms came around her. She felt herself being drawn protectively against Pat’s shoulder. That hadn’t happened in the last quake, either. She huddled against him like a soldier in a bombardment sheltering against a basement wall.
The earth roared like a wounded bull. Pain throbbed through Jessica’s injured eye with every shudder. She heard cracking and snapping sounds, and then rough canvas covered them like a blanket. Their sleeping tent had come down around them.
Which was not unexpected. Though her home had come through the first big quake reasonably intact, she had slept under canvas every night since, and she’d advised everyone else to do the same until the danger of a major aftershock was long over. Being draped by canvas, and at the worst getting hit by a falling tent pole, was a far more preferable fate than having a wall fall on you. Jessica could hear Pat’s teeth rattling next to her ear. The earth rolled under her in waves, giving her a little toss at each peak.
This was not, she thought, a mere aftershock. This was another major quake, one that felt at least as strong as M1.
The earth’s roaring faded. The temblors gradually decreased, although from the way her inner ear still reeled, Jessica suspected they hadn’t diminished entirely. She pushed her helmet back onto her head, began to shift in Pat’s arms, aiming toward the front flap of the tent.
“Sorry I hit you,” Pat said.
“You hit me?” she said.
“With my elbow. I was reaching for you, and the quake just picked you up and threw you at me.” Jessica blinked her wounded eye. Sparks flashed in her vision. “I’m going to get a shiner at least.”
“Sorry.”
She kissed his unshaven chin. “That’s okay. Worse things have happened in earthquakes. Let’s get out of here.”
She belly-crawled beneath the fallen canvas, found the flap, made her way out into the night. Cool drops of dew anointed her bare feet as she helped Pat emerge from beneath the canvas. The camp was in an uproar, a babble of voices rising up on all sides, orders and curses mixed with shouts of bewilderment and cries for help. Almost all the tents had fallen, and fresh fissures had gouged themselves across the landscape. Jessica saw that the satellite transmitter/receivers were down, and she ran across the stretch of ground and rounded up soldiers to set things up again. If any of them saw anything unusual at the sight of a major general helping to wrestle satellite dishes into place while dressed only in her helmet, olive-green boxers, and tank top, they did not venture to say so. Once she had the receiver dishes up again, Jessica wouldn’t have to spend the first three or four hours trying to find a way of communicating with the rest of the country. All key personnel, throughout the area affected by M1, had by now been equipped with modern satellite-based communications gear, ranging from Iridium cellphones to the state-of-the-art Army mobile communications center here in Vicksburg. They could be in contact in a matter of seconds.