Storm Runners

by Parker, T. Jefferson

  “We’ll get through this,” said Cedros.

  “I wish there was something more I could do,” said Marianna. “Choat scares me because he’s selfish and cruel and he uses people. He’ll do anything in the name of his precious DWP. But the worst part of him is, he’s smart.”

  “Let’s trust the PI.”

  “So far, I do trust the PI,” said Marianna. “He’s better than the law in some ways.”

  Cedros nodded. “Yeah, he’s got no reason to throw me in jail.”

  “But notice how the risk always falls on you.”

  “Things will be different when we’re up here, honey. We’ll be hundreds of miles from Choat. I’ll be out tending to the water. He’ll be back in L.A. in his dark office. No more favors. No more rainmakers.”

  “Yeah,” she said quietly, lost in thought. “One more thing. A whopper.”

  “No more waiting tables for you, honey.”

  “Something to do with the rain lady.”

  “They say the schools up here are good.”

  “What more can he do to her?”

  “No bangers, no dope on the streets, no ’hood, no mad dogs, no dissin’, no smog.”

  “You have to be careful, John.”

  “I’ve only been sleeping two hours a night I’m so alert. I’m ready. I’m so ready.”

  “Are you thinking clearly?”

  “I’m happy and afraid.”

  “Maybe that’s as good as it gets for now.”

  “I love you. Through all this shit, I love you, Marianna.”

  “I love you too, John. You’re my man.”

  LATE THAT AFTERNOON they left the women and Tony back at the motel and drove up Highway 395 in Choat’s silent, powerful Lincoln.

  Choat was dressed like an Australian adventurer, in shorts and a heavily pocketed shirt, dark socks and chukka boots. His legs were preposterously muscular and white. He wore aviator shades and smoked a big cigar while Cedros drove, the cracked window sucking out the billows of smoke and the air conditioner blasting cold clean air back in.

  “I love it up here,” said Choat. “Miss it.”

  “I’m lucky.”

  “Damned straight. Turn where it says Owens Gorge/Power Plant.”

  Cedros caught a glimpse of the little village where he and his family would soon be living. It was nestled between the gorge walls, down by the river, shaded by cottonwoods ablaze in the advancing fall. The power-plant towers and transformers rose high into the air above the village, looking to him like something from Dr. Frankenstein’s lab—all curls and spikes and dire labyrinths of cable and steel. He could picture lightning arcing from one coiled spire to another, giving life to something contained within. Giving power to the city, was more like it, he thought. Power to the city all those hundreds of miles away. It’s not about the water, it’s about the power.

  But Choat ordered him to turn away from the power plant and follow the dirt road along the gorge, paralleling the big pipe through which the Owens River was guided into the power-plant turbines.

  “Almost a century ago we brought the water,” said Choat. “Wasn’t easy. We built two hundred and fifteen miles of road. And two hundred and thirty miles of pipeline. We built two hundred and eighteen miles of power line and three hundred and seventy-seven miles of telegraph and telephone line. We had fifty-seven work camps for our guys. There were three thousand nine hundred of them and they came from all over the world to work for us—Bulgarians, Greeks, Serbs, Montenegrins, Swiss, Mexicans. We gave them medical for a dollar a month if they made more than forty dollars a month in pay. If they made less, it was fifty cents. Down in the tunnels it hit a hundred and thirty degrees in summer. These guys didn’t just work. They set records. The Board of Engineers estimated we could build about eight feet of tunnel per day—that’s four feet a day at each end. We averaged twenty-two feet. At one point they said it would take five years to finish up the last tunnels and get the water to L.A. We came in twenty months ahead of that schedule. And we killed a lot less people than they did constructing the New York aqueduct, which was built about the same time. They killed a man a week. We killed less than one a month. One was permanently injured. Accidents of a trivial nature totaled one thousand two hundred and eighty-two.”

  Choat turned and looked at Cedros as if predicting which category he’d fall into.

  “It’s humbling,” said Cedros.

  “You know what the DWP’s William Mulholland said at the dedication ceremony on November fifth, 1913? I quote: ‘This rude platform is an altar, and on it we are here consecrating this water supply and dedicating the aqueduct to you and your children and your children’s children for all time.’ I think that’s beautiful. It rivals the Gettysburg Address, in my opinion.”

  Choat got out, used a key to open a gate, and Cedros drove the Lincoln through. Choat stood by Aqueduct One holding the gate open and Cedros saw that his head was not nearly as high as the pipe containing the river—it looked close to seven feet tall, not including the short powerful legs on which it was raised. Cedros smiled to himself: the big barrel of Choat’s gut and chest mimicked the curved wall of the pipe behind him, and the bulging calves that supported the man looked something like the staunch legs that held up the aqueduct.

  No wonder he loves the damned thing so much, thought Cedros—it looks like his own father, or the child he never had.

  As Choat opened the passenger door he gave Cedros the only genuine smile that Cedros had ever seen on the man. Even obscured by cigar and mustache, it was an unmistakable expression of a moment’s happiness that was gone by the time he sat and slammed the door.

  Down the dirt road he drove, gravel popping under the carriage like butter in a pan and dust rising behind. The sun was a simple orange ball high in the west but already lowering toward the sharp tips of the Sierra Nevada.

  They trundled down the road in silence for nearly half an hour, following the great pale green pipe.

  Finally the pipe was replaced by the river itself and Choat told Cedros to pull over.

  Cedros cut the engine and got out. He crunched across the desert and looked down to see the Owens River as it blasted into a wide chute, dropped a few feet in elevation into a narrower chute, then charged in a swirling riot against a grate that looked like the bars of a prison cell before being devoured by the huge intake pipe.

  It was not so much loud as vibrational, a subwoofing thrum that he felt in his nerves.

  “Where the river meets man,” said Choat.

  “Impressive.”

  “More than impressive. Eight decades of growth for the greatest city on Earth began right exactly here. Movies, television, musical recording, aerospace, the Dodgers, the Lakers, the Philharmonic, the ’84 Olympics—none of them would have happened in Los Angeles without this pipe. History was created by it. The future begins with it. View it. Not many people have.”

  Cedros obediently looked down into the rush of water. The river, where it left the earth for concrete, was almost black and it burst into a white boil of protest as it left its bed to be channeled down into the first chute. Then, gathering deeper, it dropped again into the smaller channel and burst into wild, wobbling, glassy shards that slammed against the steel grate and fled down. Cedros wondered how many cubic feet per second were charging through that pipe. He felt the vibrations through the soles of his shoes.

  An elevated platform straddled the second intake chute, accessible by metal stairs on either side of the water. The platform had railings to keep anyone from falling to what would be certain death in the water below.

  “Let’s go up,” said Choat. “Get a good look at her. You first.”

  Cedros looked at his boss. “Okay.”

  He led the way up the eight steps. Through the hum of water he couldn’t hear his shoes hitting the stairs, or tell if the gate leading to the platform creaked when he swung it forward and stepped onto the iron-mesh deck. The deck was rusted smooth in the way that only a desert can rust metal.r />
  Cedros walked to the edge of the platform and looked into the swirl. He held on to the railing. He could feel the power of the water all the way up here, miles away from the place where it would formally create power by turning the gorge turbines. Here, the river’s power was invisible—it came off the raging surface as a kind of force field, like when the same polarities of two powerful magnets push stubbornly against each other. Like if you tossed a quarter into this river, thought Cedros, it would float above the water on an impenetrable mattress of pure energy.

  Choat moved up close to him. Cedros noted his burly hands on the railing. Cedros had never known that Choat’s calves were three times the size of his own. He thought of Ampostela.

  “Right here it’s only seven hundred cubic feet per second,” yelled Choat. His voice seemed unnaturally loud and strong, booming out of him like something amplified. “October, always low. By May, June—one thousand cfs. That’s why we built the power plant and the Pleasant Valley Reservoir. So we can break this reckless mule of a river, make it work for us.”

  “I can feel the power coming off it.”

  “I want you to burn down Frankie Hatfield’s barn with all her rainmaking stuff in it,” ordered Choat. “Right to the ground. Totally hasta la vista. That will be my good-bye to Miss Hatfield. Do it at night. Use a ton of gas or lighter fluid. Do it quickly and get out fast. Then move up here and do your job. Bone your wife and raise your brats. You’ll be free.”

  Cedros looked down at Choat’s hands on the railing. He thought of looking down on Ampostela’s as he waited for the man to draw his gun. He realized that he was in almost as much danger here but he had a choice. Choat was giving him a chance to earn his life whereas Ampostela had valued it at less than nothing.

  Cedros looked up at the director. Through the wavering cigar smoke, Choat’s clear gray eyes and forward-tilted head told a clear and believable story: My God, my God. John lost his footing on the platform and the intake chute took him. Cedros saw himself fastened by the river to the grate like a stain on a wall, permanent and unmoving. They’d have to dam the river upstream just to scrape him off.

  “Every time I do something for you I have to do something else worse to cover it up,” he said.

  “Tavarez made fools of us. We’re done with him. The fire in the barn ends our concern with the rain bitch. You and I go our separate ways. We bear our secrets as gentlemen do. We’ll be judged by God and history, not the changing laws of a squeamish democracy. It’s time for you to demonstrate ultimate spine.”

  “Okay.”

  “Good. Good, John.”

  They stood for a moment and watched the river rage in the chute.

  “I love this place,” said Choat. “Some of the happiest years of my life were spent here. I loved being a ditch rider. But Joan hated the cold and much prefers the Madison Club to the Gorge Transmission Line. A happy wife is a clear conscience.”

  “It’s special up here. I want to learn how to ride a horse and fish.”

  “The simple dreams of a simple man. I hear that cocktail shaker all the way back in Bishop, don’t you?”

  “Can we drive by the cabin in the gorge?”

  “We can do whatever the hell we want, John. I thought you knew that by now.”

  WHEN HE GOT back to the motel, Marianna, already in her little black dinner dress and black heels, pulled the curtains and took John into the spacious bathroom where she untaped the recorder from the small of her husband’s back. They played the conversation on the platform and Cedros was relieved to hear Choat intoning over the deep groan of the captured river. His voice sounded distant, threatened by chaos, but clear.

  I want you to burn down…

  Marianna then wound up the tiny microphone wire that had ridden up his chest and into his shirt pocket. She put everything into the padded FedEx envelope with the PI’s Birch Security Solutions address and account number on the air bill.

  She turned and kissed him hard and deep. He was surprised but in a good way.

  Marianna peeked from the bathroom to see Tony still watching TV then quietly locked the door and faced the counter. She flicked off the heels and hiked the black dress to present herself to her husband, leaning forward on the counter with one hand, the other supporting the bulge of Cathy. Marianna pleasurably watched in the mirror as her husband did his thing. They smiled at each other though each was actually looking straight ahead. Then John’s smile went crooked and his eyes fogged up like a beer mug brought from the freezer. The whole thing was over in less than a minute, as she knew it would be. He was never much for endurance when he was terrified, which he had been a lot lately. Get him relaxed, though, and the little bantam could go forever. He was the most generous, thoughtful, and deliciously nasty lover she’d ever had.

  A moment later Cedros put on a jacket over his bare trunk, drew open the curtains, cracked a beer, and strode outside. The October trees were a blast of red and orange in the ice-colored sky. The Sierra Nevada Mountains loomed beyond him, snow-dusted and sharp. He smoked a cigarette, which he was doing more frequently the last two weeks. He sucked down the warm smoke and celebrated the fact that he had not only cheated death one more time, but made arrangements so that he would never have to do it again. Plus he’d gotten a nerve-tingling quickie from which his heart was still pounding. He pictured her in the mirror.

  He watched the little fish dart away from him in the creek and he engaged Pat and Joan Choat in conversation on their patio as they power-drank cocktails. He glanced back into his room to see Tony smiling at the TV and Marianna with her purse slung over a shoulder, leaving to take the package to the front desk for one-day delivery to Birch Security Solutions.

  32

  That night Brad Lunce let Tavarez into the library and uncuffed his wrists.

  “I heard they’re making room for you in the X.”

  “How good is your information?” asked Tavarez.

  “It comes down from the guys who know. I heard there’s a senator behind it.”

  “State or U.S.?”

  “They’re the same, right?”

  “What else did you hear?”

  “Gyle was for it. He had to be. He’s the warden.”

  “I’ve been a model prisoner.”

  “Except for shit like this.”

  “Nobody knows, do they, Brad?”

  “Not about this they don’t. We ain’t telling. Me and Post have families. We just need a little help.”

  Tavarez studied Lunce’s unintelligent blue eyes for evidence of betrayal. One word of this and he’d get the X, whether Frankie the weather lady lived or died. He saw nothing in Lunce aside from the usual hostility, resentment, and untargeted meanness.

  “You got less than an hour, dude. Enjoy your porn.”

  Over the next fifteen minutes Tavarez got terrible news from almost every part of the country, every area of his life.

  He read the messages—some in code and some not—his eyes hardly moving from the words, his breath slow and shallow, his heart thumping with the frustration of the captive.

  Ruben—his old road dog from the Delhi F Troop—had exhausted his last appeal and would now face the spike at the Q. Tavarez thought of Ruben’s rough voice and hearty laugh, his unquenchable lust for Darla, whom he had impregnated at age thirteen and married three years later after dropping out of Santa Ana Valley High School. It seemed like just a few months ago, not twenty-two years. Tavarez calculated that he hadn’t seen Ruben face-to-face in almost fifteen years. Now he never would.

  His mother and father were “okay” according to the men he had assigned to watch over them. Reina cooked constantly, then gave her creations to neighbors, friends, and relatives. She actually socialized very little. Rolando spent most of his time in the garage in a white Naugahyde recliner, watching TV and reading boxing magazines. They missed Mike, and remained angry at his ex-wife, Miriam, for cutting off their visits to the grandchildren. Tavarez’s heart beat with pure fury at the mention of Mi
riam, then with palpable love at the mention of his children.

  His Laguna sources told him that Miriam was selling the Laguna home. She was asking $9 million and likely to get it. She was still seeing a Miami-based immigration lawyer and it appeared that she would be relocating herself and her children and her parents to Florida. He was divorcing. She recently had cosmetic surgery on her legs and lips.

  His ten-year-old son, John, had been diagnosed with diabetes. Tavarez’s heart plummeted as he thought of John’s future: daily injections, ill health, impotence, blindness. What had the little boy done to deserve this? Does God never tire of His own ceaseless cruelties?

  His second son, four-year-old Peter, had been spending long hours in day care and with nannies, while Miriam shopped and traveled with the lawyer. He was morose.

  Isabelle, eight and a half, was making money on the Internet, selling the high-end clothing and electronic discards of her Laguna Beach friends. Her grades were dismal and she called her teachers terrible things in both English and Spanish. Expulsion seemed imminent.

  Jennifer had broken her leg at a tae kwon do tournament in Las Vegas.

  Tavarez scanned the downloaded e-mails for a note from Isabelle—she was the only one of his children who’d shown the guile and desire to contact him through one of his Laguna men—but she had not written this week. Or the last six weeks, for that matter. Busy making a profit, thought Tavarez. First things first.

  Jaime in Modesto had been killed in a shotgun blast Saturday night. La Nuestra Familia, no doubt.

  God rest his soul, Tavarez thought. He was a good man—faithful and strong and brave. Mike felt a little more of his own soul crumble, as it always did when one of his brothers or sisters died from violence. Sometimes he believed that the fallen part of his soul grew back strong like scar tissue; sometimes he thought it didn’t grow back at all and his soul had been shrunk by the scores of murders that had become as much a part of his life as births, marriages, baptisms, and quinceaneros.