Drought Page 5

‘Forty-eight hours?’ Susan protested. ‘We could all have died of thirst by then! What are we supposed to drink? How do we take a shower? The toilet is all blocked up already!’

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ said Santos. ‘San Bernardino is a city that was built on water. That is what brought us Yuhaviatam here in the first place.’

  Martin sat down on the steps next to Susan and opened his folder of case notes. ‘From what I’ve been told, even the groundwater wells are running dry, which gives you some idea of how bad it must be in other parts. Right now, though, there’s nothing I can do about it, except ask you to try and be patient.’

  ‘Patient? Why should we be patient? Whose water is it? It was our water long before you people came. Who discovered the Arrowhead Springs? Not the white people. It was us.’

  ‘Yes, well, I know that. But I can’t change history, Santos, even if it is unfair. Now, how are the kids coming along? Mikey – how are you doing at school now, feller?’

  ‘Mikey’s been barred from school,’ said Susan, without pausing in her newspaper-flapping.

  ‘Oh, come on, Mikey, not again!’ said Martin. ‘How long have they barred you this time?’

  ‘This time they don’t want him back, ever.’

  ‘What did you do, Mikey?’

  Mikey shrugged and looked away. He was thin and underweight for a boy of eleven, with long black greasy hair that almost reached down to his shoulders and three silver earrings in his left ear. He was bare-chested, but wearing a baggy pair of cargo pants that were two sizes too big for him.

  ‘He started a fire in the gym,’ said Susan. ‘He didn’t want to do no PE so he torched the changing rooms.’

  ‘That wasn’t very smart, Mikey,’ Martin told him. ‘Why didn’t you just tell the teacher you had the mud thunder, or something like that?’ He turned to Susan and said, ‘I’ll have to see if I can get another school to take him. I can’t say that I’m all that hopeful, with his record.’

  ‘School sucks, anyhow,’ said Mikey. ‘All the other kids kept calling me Tonto.’

  ‘So what? You’re a Native American, you should be proud of it. And Johnny Depp plays Tonto in the movie, and he’s cool. Your people were here in San Bernardino long before theirs were. At least they can never accuse you of being an illegal.’

  ‘It still sucks. Who needs to know about some stupid kid chopping down some stupid cherry tree and then being stupid enough to say that he did it?’

  ‘Did you admit that it was you who torched the changing rooms?’

  ‘I didn’t have to. The janitor caught me doing it. But if he hadn’t, I wouldn’t. I’m not stupid like that cherry tree kid.’

  ‘Ha!’ said Santos. ‘Ha!’ Martin didn’t know if he was ashamed that Mikey was so ignorant, and so immoral; or if he agreed with him that the young George Washington should have had the nous to keep his mouth shut.

  ‘Your mom home?’ he asked Susan.

  Susan jerked her head sideways to indicate that her mother was indoors.

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘How do you think? It’s the middle of the afternoon.’

  ‘OK if I go inside?’

  Susan shrugged. ‘Why not? She won’t care.’

  Martin pulled open the dilapidated screen door and went into the house. There was no air conditioning so it was insufferably hot and stuffy, and there was a strong smell of bad drains and cooking fat and stale urine.

  He found Rita Murillo in the living room. The sagging orange drapes were drawn, so the room was gloomy. Above the fireplace there was a fifty-inch plasma TV. On the opposite wall hung a reproduction of an amateurish painting of a Serrano encampment in the mountains, its large communal lodges covered in snow.

  Rita herself was lying on her side on the sagging white leatherette couch, her short brown dress rucked up around her waist, snoring. On the floor beside the couch lay three empty Coors cans and an empty UV vodka bottle.

  Martin crossed the gray rag rug and stood beside her. He watched her sleeping for a while, and then he said, ‘Rita?’

  She didn’t stir so he bent over and shook her fat, sweaty shoulder. ‘Rita, are you awake?’

  She snorted, and then she opened one eye and peered at him suspiciously.

  ‘Are you awake?’ he repeated.

  ‘No. Can’t you see I’m asleep. Go away.’

  ‘I need to talk to you, Rita. It’s about Mikey.’

  ‘Mikey’s a pain in the ass. Go away.’

  ‘Rita … Mikey’s been kicked out of school.’

  ‘Well kick the little shit back in again.’

  ‘I can’t, Rita. They won’t have him back. I need to talk to you because we may have to take him into care.’

  ‘Good. Fine. Take him. He’s a pain in the ass. Always has been, like his father.’ She suddenly sat up. She picked up the vodka bottle and frowned at it, but when she realized it was empty she dropped it back on the floor. Then she shook each of the Coors cans in turn, and dropped them back on the floor, too. ‘I need a drink,’ she said. She had chaotic bleach-blonde hair that was thinning at the top and a squashed, puglike face that might have been qtuite pretty when she was younger and before she started drinking. She had no front teeth at all.

  ‘There’s nothing to drink, Rita. You’ve drunk it all, by the looks of it.’

  She reached down into her cleavage and produced two ten-dollar bills, limp with perspiration. ‘Here,’ she said, waving them at him. ‘Go to the store and buy me two bottles of vodka.’

  ‘Store’s closed, Rita. All the stores are closed.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘We need to talk about Mikey, Rita.’

  ‘I need a drink. For God’s sake, Martin, I really need a drink. At least get me a glass of water.’

  ‘I can’t even do that, Rita. I’m sorry. The water’s turned off. I think Susan has a little soda left.’

  ‘I need a drink, Martin. Anything. I got me such a raging thirst.’

  ‘Let me see what I can do.’

  Martin went back out on to the verandah. Nathan, seven, was listlessly kicking a ball around the dusty back yard, but none of the others had moved. Three-year-old Mina’s cheeks were flushed and her eyelids were drooping as if she had a fever; and George, who was five, was industriously picking his nose.

  ‘Well?’ asked Santos, still without removing his stogie.

  ‘Well, nothing for now. She’s too drunk to talk any sense about Mikey. I’ll have to come back tomorrow morning, when she’s sobered up. But I need to talk to the water department, and I need to talk to them urgent. There’s people like Rita are going to die if they can’t get water. And look at poor little Mina here. She’s burning up.’

  ‘You tell them it’s our water, and they have no right to shut it off. Wasn’t it bad enough they sent their militia here and shot us, in our hundreds, because they wanted our land? For thirty-two days they hunted us down and shot us. Now they want us to die of thirst?’

  ‘Santos, I’m very sympathetic, but that was nearly a hundred and fifty years ago and I don’t think the water department is deliberately targeting Native Americans. Everybody’s having their water shut off, no matter what their ethnic origins.’

  Santos waved his hand dismissively. ‘That’s what they say. So a few beaners die of thirst, too? What do they call that? Collateral damage. So long as they kill off the Yuhaviatam. Finish the job they started in eighteen sixty-six.’

  As if to emphasize his point, they heard sporadic knocking sounds from the front of the house, and two or three young boys’ voices raised in an ululating war cry.

  ‘Those gang kids, tossing rocks again,’ said Santos. He made no attempt to get up out of his rocking chair. ‘Last week they took young Mina’s doll pram and smashed it up. Ripped the head off her favorite doll. Week before they sprayed graffiti all over the front door.’

  ‘What’s their beef with Serranos?’ asked Martin. Serranos was the Spanish name for Yuhaviatam, and the name the CFS sta
ff usually used around the office.

  ‘Who knows?’ said Santos. ‘I guess they don’t like anybody who’s not as dumb as they are.’

  Martin heard three or four more knocking sounds as the boys continued throwing rocks, and then he heard a smash, as a front window was broken. Immediately, he stood up, dropped his folder on the verandah steps, and ran around the side of the house. Out on the sidewalk there were five Hispanic boys, about fifteen or sixteen years old, as well as two young girls in short sparkly shorts. Two of the boys were circling around and around on bicycles while the other three were collecting up lumps of concrete from the curb.

  Martin said nothing, but stormed toward the nearest and the biggest of the boys, an overweight kid in a green T-shirt and Hawaiian-style shorts with palm trees on them. The boy lifted his right arm as if he were going to throw a rock at him, but Martin was advancing on him so fast and with such determination that he staggered backward and tripped over the curb, landing on his backside in the road.

  ‘Don’t hit me!’ he screamed, but Martin grabbed hold of his arm and heaved him back on to his feet. Then he seized his podgy thigh, as well as his arm, lifting him clear off the ground. He swung him forward, and then back, and then threw him directly into the dried-up flannel-bush hedge that separated the Murillo’s property from the house next door. The boy screamed again, and struggled his way out of the hedge, his arms and legs covered in criss-cross lacerations. The other boys immediately dropped their lumps of concrete and started to back away, and the two cyclists pedaled off as fast as they could.

  The girls stayed where they were on the opposite side of the street, holding hands and nervously laughing, unsure of what to do, but then Martin began to walk briskly toward the other boys and they both shrieked and ran away.

  ‘Look at me, you mamon!’ protested the boy he had thrown into the hedge. ‘I’m all over scratches! I’m going to call the cops on you, man! I’m going to have you arrested, man – assault and battery!’

  ‘You just do that,’ said Martin. ‘But if I catch you or any of your sorry-ass friends around here again, tossing rocks, I’m going to be guilty of something much worse than throwing you into a hedge. In fact, you’ll be begging me to throw you into a hedge.’

  He stayed in front of the house with his arms folded while the boy limped away down the street. He didn’t really know if he made a mistake, chasing the boys away like that. There was every likelihood that when he had left, they would return to harass the Murillos even more. But it simply wasn’t in his nature to stand by while defenseless people were being attacked. He had suffered too much in that jail in Kabul to tolerate bullies.

  He checked the front of the house. One of the lumps of concrete had left a large hole in the middle of the kitchen window and it would have to be temporarily patched up. Like Esmeralda, the Murillos probably had no possessions of any value, apart from their plasma TV, but in this neighborhood anybody would take anything if it wasn’t nailed down.

  He returned to the backyard, where the family looked at him with almost no interest at all. They were all too hot and thirsty to care about vandalism.

  ‘So … what happened?’ said Santos.

  ‘I chased them away for you, Santos. But they’ve broken your kitchen window.’

  ‘That’s OK. I have a friend who mends windows. He won’t charge us too much.’

  Martin picked up his notes and checked his wristwatch. If he didn’t leave now, he was going to be late for his next appointment.

  ‘Did you ever think about relocating?’ he asked.

  ‘For sure. Many times. But how could we afford it? And where would we go? Mind you, if this drought goes on much longer, maybe we will have to. Maybe we will have to go back and live where the Yuhaviatam used to live, even before they found the Arrowhead Springs.’

  ‘Oh, yes? And where was that?’

  Santos sucked on his stogie and then took it out of his mouth and stared at it, as if it held the answer to everything.

  ‘I shouldn’t tell you this,’ he said.

  ‘OK, then don’t. I don’t want you letting any tribal cats out of the bag.’

  ‘No,’ said Santos. ‘What you did for us today has proved that you are one of the people, one of the Wa’am. You do not have to be born one of the people to become one.’

  ‘Forget it, Santos. I just did what anybody else would have done. Don’t make me out to be some kind of hero, because that’s the one thing I’m not.’

  Santos continued as if he hadn’t heard him. ‘My grandfather told me this, and it was told to him by his grandfather, who was actually there, when he was a boy. When my people first came out of the Mojave Desert, seeking a new place to live, they found a sheltered valley in what we now call the Joshua Tree National Park. When they arrived there, they made camp. One of their girl children went missing, and her mother was wailing and crying. But the girl soon reappeared, and showed the people that she had discovered the entrance to a hidden cave. Inside the cave was a huge underground lake, of the purest water. They named it the Lost Girl Lake.’

  ‘Never heard of it,’ said Martin.

  ‘Well, you wouldn’t, because most of the Wa’am wanted to continue the journey west. Their shamans had told them that the Great Spirit had made them a sign, a giant arrowhead on the side of a mountain, which would point to the place where they were supposed to settle, and they weren’t going to be satisfied until they had found it. But … a few of them decided to stay at Lost Girl Lake and start a small settlement there, including my great-great-grandfather. The valley was sheltered and there was plenty of game and seeds and prickly pears to eat and of course there was always fresh water. I don’t know for sure if it’s true, but my grandfather told me that there were some years when the Arrowhead Springs almost ran dry, but the Lost Girl Lake never did.’

  ‘So what happened? There’s no settlement there now, is there? Like I say, I never even heard of it.’

  Santos sucked at his stogie and shook his head. ‘They lived there maybe five or six years, difficult to say. Not too long, anyhow. But then a party of militia came across them, more by accident than anything. They raped the women and then they shot them all. Only my great-grandfather and another man called Broad Face managed to escape, because they were out hunting for deer when it happened. My grandfather and Broad Face left Lost Girl Lake and came to join the rest of their people here in San Bernardino. They never spoke of Lost Girl Lake again, not only because of their grief, but because they believed that they had been punished by the Great Spirit by not following his direction to settle at Arrowhead. But … the lake is still there, even though most of the Yuhaviatam have forgotten it, and no white man has ever found it.’

  ‘Have you ever been there?’ Martin asked him.

  ‘Once,’ said Santos. His dull gray eyes widened, and seemed to grow brighter. ‘Before I died, I was going to tell my grandchildren where it is, but children these days … they are no longer dutiful, like they used to be. They don’t care about the old ways. Not only that, I don’t have too long.’

  ‘What’s wrong with you, Santos?’

  ‘Prostate. Too late to do anything about it now. I got maybe a year if I’m lucky.’

  ‘Hey, I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. If the Great Spirit thinks that it’s time for me to go, there’s nothing that I can do about it. I have been waiting for a long time to find a man I trust, so that I could share my secret. Somehow I think that today is the time, Wasicu, and that you are the man.’

  ‘I’m flattered,’ said Martin. ‘I don’t have to tell you that I won’t be trumpeting this particular piece of information from the rooftops. It stays with me.’

  Santos reached out and took hold of Martin’s hand. His fingers were leathery and claw-like, with large silver rings on every one, and he clutched Martin so tightly that it hurt.

  At that moment, Martin’s cellphone played ‘Mandolin Rain’. He carefully pried himself free from Santos’ grip and said, ‘Excuse
me for just one moment, Santos.’

  He could see that it was Peta calling him. ‘Peta? What’s up? Everything OK?’

  She was crying so much that she could hardly speak. ‘It’s Tyler,’ she told him.

  SIX

  ‘So, how’s my favorite persuader?’ asked Governor Smiley, coming up behind her and leaning over the back of the white leather couch with his usual predatory grin.

  ‘Oh, Halford, you’ve arrived,’ said Saskia, setting aside her laptop. ‘I thought I heard a helicopter. Where’s Mona? Didn’t you bring Mona with you?’

  ‘Mona’s gone to one of her charity bashes. Don’t ask me which one. Spoiled Trophy Wives For One-Eyed One-Legged Tibetan Orphans, something like that. Besides, why would I bring Mona with me when I’m meeting you?’

  ‘For a threesome?’

  Halford came around the end of the couch and sat down very close to her. He was a big man – over six feet three, with broad shoulders and a large rough-cast head. He had tight curly gray hair and an overhanging brow, underneath which his eyes glittered like the eyes of a wolf lurking in a cave. He was wearing a white suit with an orange shirt, and orange alligator shoes, with no socks.

  He wasn’t particularly handsome, but he had almost palpable charisma, which could make the backs of women’s necks prickle, and forget what they were going to say next. One woman delegate from San Diego confessed that after Halford had sat next to her all evening during a fund-raising dinner, her gusset had been soaking. ‘He gives off pheromones like some kind of funky animal.’

  Saskia, however, had known him for a long time, and although she was still aware of how virile he was, she also knew what a self-serving, blustering, untrustworthy man he really was. He even had his own way to describe lying to his electorate: he called it ‘telling the creative truth’.

  Saskia herself was wearing a short Zuhair Murad dress in a slightly paler orange than Halford’s shirt. Apart from being short it was very low cut and he stared into her cleavage and never raised his eyes once.

  ‘Mona?’ he said. ‘Mona wouldn’t go for a threesome. She’s much too possessive. She believes in all this “to have and to hold, till death us do part” stuff.’