“Which country?” she says, squinting through harsh sunlight. “Which war?”
He gives her a half-arsed smirk but doesn’t answer. Mumbles into the electronic device. Turns his back, gets back in the truck.
She lets the rock fall to the dusty road. Dusty. It appears the rain didn’t reach this far. Not the strangest thing she’s seen in recent times. “Lachie,” she says, but it’s too late. Too late for Lachie, too late for her and Cracker. The gates slide open with electronic precision. Trucks pass through, one by one, Cracker’s Dodge amongst them—too late for turning back. A voice behind commands her to keep moving. Not to turn. Not to pick up any rocks. Not to make any sudden movements.
She looks up just in time to catch a speck in the wide blue sky. A wedge-tailed eagle, coasting on the updraft, its diamond-shaped tail unmistakable. Those birds partner up for life—something else she learned in school. They fly together, perform acrobatics, but she cannot spot the other one, its mate. When she cranes her neck and shades her eyes, a soldier twists her arm behind her back. Pushes her forwards through the steel Base gates. Metal grates as they snap and lock behind her.
* * *
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CAT SPARKS (catsparks.net) is a multi-award-winning author, editor, and artist whose former employment has included: political and archaeological photographer, graphic designer, and manager of Agog! Press among other (much less interesting) things. She’s currently fiction editor of Australia’s Cosmos Magazine while simultaneously grappling with a PhD on YA climate change fiction.
THE TAMARISK HUNTER
PAOLO BACIGALUPI
A big tamarisk can suck 73,000 gallons of river water a year. For $2.88 a day, plus water bounty, Lolo rips tamarisk all winter long.
Ten years ago, it was a good living. Back then, tamarisk shouldered up against every riverbank in the Colorado River Basin, along with cottonwoods, Russian olives, and elms. Ten years ago, towns like Grand Junction and Moab thought they could still squeeze life from a river.
Lolo stands on the edge of a canyon, Maggie the camel his only companion. He stares down into the deeps. It’s an hour’s scramble to the bottom. He ties Maggie to a juniper and starts down, boot-skiing a gully. A few blades of green grass sprout neon around him, piercing juniper-tagged snow clods. In the late winter, there is just a beginning surge of water down in the deeps; the ice is off the river edges. Up high, the mountains still wear their ragged snow mantles. Lolo smears through mud and hits a channel of scree, sliding and scattering rocks. His jugs of tamarisk poison gurgle and slosh on his back. His shovel and rockbar snag on occasional junipers as he skids by. It will be a long hike out. But then, that’s what makes this patch so perfect. It’s a long way down, and the riverbanks are largely hidden.
It’s a living; where other people have dried out and blown away, he has remained: a tamarisk hunter, a water tick, a stubborn bit of weed. Everyone else has been blown off the land as surely as dandelion seeds, set free to fly south or east or, most of all, north where watersheds sometimes still run deep and where even if there are no more lush ferns or deep cold fish runs, at least there is still water for people.
Eventually, Lolo reaches the canyon bottom. Down in the cold shadows, his breath steams.
He pulls out a digital camera and starts shooting his proof. The Bureau of Reclamation has gotten uptight about proof. They want different angles on the offending tamarisk, they want each one photographed before and after, the whole process documented, GPS’d, and uploaded directly by the camera. They want it done on site. And then they still sometimes come out to spot-check before they calibrate his headgate for water bounty.
But all their due diligence can’t protect them from the likes of Lolo. Lolo has found the secret to eternal life as a tamarisk hunter. Unknown to the Interior Department and its BuRec subsidiary, he has been seeding new patches of tamarisk, encouraging vigorous brushy groves in previously cleared areas. He has hauled and planted healthy root balls up and down the river system in strategically hidden and inaccessible corridors, all in a bid for security against the swarms of other tamarisk hunters that scour these same tributaries. Lolo is crafty. Stands like this one, a quarter mile long and thick with salt-laden tamarisk, are his insurance policy.
Documentation finished, he unstraps a folding saw along with his rockbar and shovel, and sets his poison jugs on the dead salt bank. He starts cutting, slicing into the roots of the tamarisk, pausing every thirty seconds to spread Garlon 4 on the cuts, poisoning the tamarisk wounds faster than they can heal. But some of the best tamarisk, the most vigorous, he uproots and sets aside for later use.
$2.88 a day, plus water bounty.
* * * *
It takes Maggie’s rolling, bleating camel stride a week to make it back to Lolo’s homestead. They follow the river, occasionally climbing above it onto cold mesas or wandering off into the open desert in a bid to avoid the skeleton sprawl of emptied towns. Guardie choppers buzz up and down the river like swarms of angry yellow jackets, hunting for porto-pumpers and wildcat diversions. They rush overhead in a wash of beaten air and gleaming National Guard logos. Lolo remembers a time when the guardies traded potshots with people down on the riverbanks, tracer-fire and machine-gun chatter echoing in the canyons. He remembers the glorious hiss and arc of a Stinger missile as it flashed across red rock desert and blue sky and burned a chopper where it hovered.
But that’s long in the past. Now, guardie patrols skim up the river unmolested.
Lolo tops another mesa and stares down at the familiar landscape of an eviscerated town, its curving streets and subdivision cul-de-sacs all sitting silent in the sun. At the very edge of the empty town, one-acre ranchettes and snazzy five-thousand-square-foot houses with dead-stick trees and dust-hill landscaping fringe a brown-tumbleweed golf course. The sand traps don’t even show anymore.
When California put its first calls on the river, no one really worried. A couple towns went begging for water. Some idiot newcomers with bad water rights stopped grazing their horses, and that was it. A few years later, people started showering real fast. And a few after that, they showered once a week. And then people started using the buckets. By then, everyone had stopped joking about how “hot” it was. It didn’t really matter how “hot” it was. The problem wasn’t lack of water or an excess of heat, not really. The problem was that 4.4 million acre-feet of water were supposed to go down the river to California. There was water; they just couldn’t touch it.
They were supposed to stand there like dumb monkeys and watch it flow on by.
“Lolo?”
The voice catches him by surprise. Maggie startles and groans and lunges for the mesa edge before Lolo can rein her around. The camel’s great padded feet scuffle dust, and Lolo flails for his shotgun where it nestles in a scabbard at the camel’s side. He forces Maggie to turn, shotgun half drawn, holding barely to his seat and swearing.
A familiar face, tucked amongst juniper tangle.
“Goddamnit!” Lolo lets the shotgun drop back into its scabbard. “Jesus Christ, Travis. You scared the hell out of me.”
Travis grins. He emerges from amongst the junipers’ silver bark rags, one hand on his gray fedora, the other on the reins as he guides his mule out of the trees. “Surprised?”
“I could’ve shot you!”
“Don’t be so jittery. There’s no one out here ’cept us water ticks.”
“That’s what I thought the last time I went shopping down there. I had a whole set of new dishes for Annie and I broke them all when I ran into an ultralight parked right in the middle of the main drag.”
“Meth flyers?”
“Beats the hell out of me. I didn’t stick around to ask.”
“Shit. I’ll bet they were as surprised as you were.”
“They almost killed me.”
“I guess they didn’t.”
Lolo shakes his head and swears again, this time without anger. Despite the ambush, he’s happy to run into
Travis. It’s lonely country, and Lolo’s been out long enough to notice the silence of talking to Maggie. They trade ritual sips of water from their canteens and make camp together. They swap stories about BuRec and avoid discussing where they’ve been ripping tamarisk and enjoy the view of the empty town far below, with its serpentine streets and quiet houses and shining, untouched river.
It isn’t until the sun is setting and they’ve finished roasting a magpie that Lolo finally asks the question that’s been on his mind ever since Travis’s sun-baked face came out of the tangle. It goes against etiquette, but he can’t help himself. He picks magpie out of his teeth and says, “I thought you were working downriver.”
Travis glances sidelong at Lolo, and in that one suspicious, uncertain look, Lolo sees that Travis has hit a lean patch. He’s not smart like Lolo. He hasn’t been reseeding. He’s got no insurance. He hasn’t been thinking ahead about all the competition and what the tamarisk endgame looks like, and now he’s feeling the pinch. Lolo feels a twinge of pity. He likes Travis. A part of him wants to tell Travis the secret, but he stifles the urge. The stakes are too high. Water crimes are serious now, so serious Lolo hasn’t even told his wife, Annie, for fear of what she’ll say. Like all of the most shameful crimes, water theft is a private business, and at the scale Lolo works, forced labor on the Straw is the best punishment he can hope for.
Travis gets his hackles down over Lolo’s invasion of his privacy and says, “I had a couple cows I was running up here, but I lost ’em. I think something got ’em.”
“Long way to graze cows.”
“Yeah, well, down my way, even the sagebrush is dead. Big Daddy Drought’s doing a real number on my patch.” He pinches his lip, thoughtful. “Wish I could find those cows.”
“They probably went down to the river.”
Travis sighs. “Then the guardies probably got ’em.”
“Probably shot ’em from a chopper and roasted ’em.”
“Californians.”
They both spit at the word. The sun continues to sink. Shadows fall across the town’s silent structures. The rooftops gleam red, a ruby cluster decorating the blue river necklace.
“You think there’s any stands worth pulling down there?” Travis asks.
“You can go down and look. But I think I got it all last year. And someone had already been through before me, so I doubt much is coming up.”
“Shit. Well, maybe I’ll go shopping. Might as well get something out of this trip.”
“There sure isn’t anyone to stop you.”
As if to emphasize the fact, the thud-thwap of a guardie chopper breaks the evening silence. The black-fly dot of its movement barely shows against the darkening sky. Soon, it’s out of sight and cricket chirps swallow the last evidence of its passing.
Travis laughs. “Remember when the guardies said they’d keep out looters? I saw them on TV with all their choppers and Humvees and them all saying they were going to protect everything until the situation improved.” He laughs again. “You remember that? All of them driving up and down the streets?”
“I remember.”
“Sometimes, I wonder if we shouldn’t have fought them more.”
“Annie was in Lake Havasu City when they fought there. You saw what happened.” Lolo shivers. “Anyway, there’s not much to fight for once they blow up your water treatment plant. If nothing’s coming out of your faucet, you might as well move on.”
“Yeah, well, sometimes I think you still got to fight. Even if it’s just for pride.” Travis gestures at the town below, a shadow movement. “I remember when all that land down there was selling like hotcakes and they were building shit as fast as they could ship in the lumber. Shopping malls and parking lots and subdivisions, anywhere they could scrape a flat spot.”
“We weren’t calling it Big Daddy Drought back then.”
“Forty-five thousand people. And none of us had a clue. And I was a real estate agent.” Travis laughs, a self-mocking sound that ends quickly. It sounds too much like self-pity for Lolo’s taste. They’re quiet again, looking down at the town wreckage.
“I think I might be heading north,” Travis says finally.
Lolo glances over, surprised. Again, he has the urge to let Travis in on his secret, but he stifles it. “And do what?”
“Pick fruit, maybe. Maybe something else. Anyway, there’s water up there.”
Lolo points down at the river. “There’s water.”
“Not for us.” Travis pauses. “I got to level with you, Lolo. I went down to the Straw.”
For a second, Lolo is confused by the non sequitur. The statement is too outrageous. And yet Travis’s face is serious. “The Straw? No kidding? All the way there?”
“All the way there.” He shrugs defensively. “I wasn’t finding any tamarisk, anyway. And it didn’t actually take that long. It’s a lot closer than it used to be. A week out to the train tracks, and then I hopped a coal train and rode it right to the interstate, and then I hitched.”
“What’s it like out there?”
“Empty. A trucker told me that California and the Interior Department drew up all these plans to decide which cities they’d turn off when.” He looks at Lolo significantly. “That was after Lake Havasu. They figured out they had to do it slow. They worked out some kind of formula: how many cities, how many people they could evaporate at a time without making too much unrest. Got advice from the Chinese, from when they were shutting down their old communist industries. Anyway, it looks like they’re pretty much done with it. There’s nothing moving out there except highway trucks and coal trains and a couple truck stops.”
“And you saw the Straw?”
“Oh, sure, I saw it. Out toward the border. Big old mother. So big you couldn’t climb on top of it, flopped out on the desert like a damn silver snake. All the way to California.” He spits reflexively. “They’re spraying with concrete to keep water from seeping into the ground and they’ve got some kind of carbon-fiber stuff over the top to stop the evaporation. And the river just disappears inside. Nothing but an empty canyon below it. Bone dry. And choppers and Humvees everywhere, like a damn hornets’ nest. They wouldn’t let me get any closer than a half mile on account of the eco-crazies trying to blow it up. They weren’t nice about it, either.”
“What did you expect?”
“I dunno. It sure depressed me, though: They work us out here and toss us a little water bounty, and then all that water next year goes right down into that big old pipe. Some Californian’s probably filling his swimming pool with last year’s water bounty right now.”
Cricket song pulses in the darkness. Off in the distance, a pack of coyotes starts yipping. The two of them are quiet for a while. Finally, Lolo chucks his friend on the shoulder. “Hell, Travis, it’s probably for the best. A desert’s a stupid place to put a river, anyway.”
* * * *
Lolo’s homestead runs across a couple acres of semi-alkaline soil, conveniently close to the river’s edge. Annie is out in the field when he crests the low hills that overlook his patch. She waves but keeps digging, planting for whatever water he can collect in bounty.
Lolo pauses, watching Annie work. Hot wind kicks up, carrying with it the scents of sage and clay. A dust devil swirls around Annie, whipping her bandana off her head. Lolo smiles as she snags it; she sees him still watching her and waves at him to quit loafing.
He grins to himself and starts Maggie down the hill, but he doesn’t stop watching Annie work. He’s grateful for her. Grateful that every time he comes back from tamarisk hunting, she is still here. She’s steady. Steadier than the people like Travis who give up when times get dry. Steadier than anyone Lolo knows, really. And if she has nightmares sometimes, and can’t stand being in towns or crowds, and wakes up in the middle of the night calling out for family she’ll never see again, well, then it’s all the more reason to seed more tamarisk and make sure they never get pushed off their patch like she was pushed.
&nbs
p; Lolo gets Maggie to kneel down so he can dismount, then leads her over to a water trough, half full of slime and water skippers. He gets a bucket and heads for the river while Maggie groans and complains behind him. The patch used to have a well and running water, but like everyone else, they lost their pumping rights and BuRec stuffed the well with Quikrete when the water table dropped below the Minimum Allowable Reserve. Now he and Annie steal buckets from the river, or, when the Interior Department isn’t watching, they jump up and down on a foot pump and dump water into a hidden underground cistern he built when the Resource Conservation and Allowable Use Guidelines went into effect.
Annie calls the guidelines “ReCAUG” and it sounds like she’s hawking spit when she says it, but even with their filled-in well, they’re lucky. They aren’t like Spanish Oaks or Antelope Valley or River Reaches: expensive places that had rotten water rights and turned to dust, money or no, when Vegas and LA put in their calls. And they didn’t have to bail out of Phoenix Metro when the Central Arizona Project got turned off and then had its aqueducts blown to smithereens when Arizona wouldn’t stop pumping out of Lake Havasu.
Pouring water into Maggie’s water trough, and looking around at his dusty patch with Annie out in the fields, Lolo reminds himself how lucky he is. He hasn’t blown away. He and Annie are dug in. Calies may call them water ticks, but fuck them. If it weren’t for people like him and Annie, they’d dry up and blow away the same as everyone else. And if Lolo moves a little bit of tamarisk around, well, the Calies deserve it, considering what they’ve done to everyone else.
Finished with Maggie, Lolo goes into the house and gets a drink of his own out of the filter urn. The water is cool in the shadows of the adobe house. Juniper beams hang low overhead. He sits down and connects his BuRec camera to the solar panel they’ve got scabbed onto the roof. Its charge light blinks amber. Lolo goes and gets some more water. He’s used to being thirsty, but for some reason, he can’t get enough today. Big Daddy Drought’s got his hands around Lolo’s neck today.
Loosed Upon the World Page 54
