Dead Dry

by Sarah Andrews

  She pointed to the south along the fetch of the foothills. “Just down there, a bunch of yay-hoos from Louisiana—Louisiana, damn it, where they’ve got so much water they have to build dikes to keep it off New Orleans—decided they were going to build heaven on Earth for all the golfing bozos. You know how much water your average golf course drinks, especially out here in ninety-degree heat and twenty percent humidity and fourteen inches annual rainfall?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Eighty-eight million gallons per year—another two thousand boxcar loads just to grow sod, thank you very much, so some boys from the country club can wear pastel knits and knock little white balls around. They were going to cram in over one hundred deluxe homes and fifty cottages for transient guests from places where people don’t know what ‘drought’ means. Hey, let’s fly our personal jet up to Colorado for the weekend and loll around in our hot tubs, why don’t we?”

  “How did that get voted down?”

  “A local citizens’ group managed to convince the county commissioners to stop it, at least for the present. You won’t believe this, but they managed to get someone elected who understands the realities of this situation. Shocking, huh?”

  “Someone who’s not just out for the deepest pockets so he can get reelected? I didn’t know that anyone like that made it into office anymore. That’s wonderful. And I’m glad they were able to stop that development. It sounds crazy.”

  “They stopped it for a while, you mean. You know what the developers said when the gavel fell with a ‘no’ vote in the county commissioners’ meeting? ‘I am at a loss to understand why anyone would oppose this plan. It’s not reasonable to think this property is going to stay as it is forever.’ It’s insidious. The developers will just hold on to it for a few years or sell it to some other scoundrel, and they’ll wait until the county commissioners swing toward development again, and off we are to the races again.”

  “What about those houses?” I asked, gesturing toward the little ranchettes that studded the landscape to the east.

  “They’re running out of water.”

  “I hear the latest thing is for municipalities to buy up water rights from the farmers. I wonder where the water will come from to grow food.”

  Julia’s gaze settled into a million-mile stare. “You mean like out by Rocky Ford, out there on the eastern plains? The farmers had been using the water to grow melons. Do you know how much water it takes to grow just one melon?”

  “I have no idea, Julia. You’re the numbers girl.”

  “One hundred and twenty gallons,” she said, without skipping a beat. Julia ran her hands over the rock, as if soothing it. “The last good time we had together was here.”

  “With Afton?”

  “We brought the kids,” she said, a faint smile playing across her face. “Had PB&Js and squashed bananas. The kids ran around on these rocks like a couple of mountain goats.” The smile drained from her face. “It was later that day that he first showed me the ranch. Said he wanted to buy it. And I thought we were just taking a little field trip.”

  “Wait, Afton knew the water was drying up in this aquifer before he bought the ranch?”

  “Sure. He figured no one could develop around him because there wouldn’t be enough water. He thought he’d found heaven on earth, close enough to Denver to drop in on the real world when he felt like it but far enough out and sufficiently drought-stricken that he wouldn’t have many neighbors. Of course, then he had to figure out how to live on a patch of land that had no water, but you know Afton, he had a brain and a will to go with it.”

  I said, “So that’s how he got into this green business? The old geologist’s imperative of being away from it all?”

  She nodded. “And of course one thing led to another. He bought a dry ranch to be alone, but learning how to live on it took him to some pretty quirky conferences with people who see life as a spiritual crisis.”

  “I can’t see how that would appeal to him,” I said, remembering him as the wild man with the presumptuous tattoo.

  “You know how he could be—driven. Happiest when he had a new idea to screw his brain into. But then he decided that these green people weren’t all that smart, and he was of course nothing short of brilliant, so he had to save them all. He started to work with legislators to save the arid lands for aridity, or something like that. First it was the Colorado state congress and then the federal. He developed quite a name for himself in certain circles quite quickly.” She laughed mirthlessly.

  “And somewhere in there, he developed a name for himself with Gilda.” I could just see Gilda working the room at some conference for firebrands and policymakers. People of power. People with their hands on money. “Gilda is an opportunist,” I said.

  “I—I don’t want to talk about her,” she said.

  A low rumbling reverberated across the landscape.

  Julia looked up toward the mountain front as if watching for approaching Valkyries.

  I said, “Let’s head down toward the creek. I saw some red clays in the soils along a cut bank.”

  “No!” She suddenly seemed unnerved by the towering clouds. “We should leave. Get to shelter.”

  “I’ve been watching those clouds, too, Julia. I saw the flash before the thunder and I counted, and it’s at least five miles off. And those clouds don’t look like they’re moving.”

  “No. Field trip over for today, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said, “but first I’ve got to grab a soil sample.”

  “What for?” Julia asked.

  I knew that Julia could help me know where to look, if I could get Michele’s permission. I pulled out my cell phone and punched in Michele’s number. The call rolled over to her message service, which indicated that she was somewhere where she was receiving no signal. I put my phone away. “Roll with me on this,” I said. “I’ve been looking for red clays.”

  Julia shook her head impatiently and pointed at the darkening sky over the Rampart Range. “Em, really! This is bad. Just look at the tops of those clouds. They’ve been getting bigger, and now they’re bulging out toward us.”

  “But there’s still no wind,” I said. I had been watching the sky like any good ranch-bred person would, checking to make sure the clouds weren’t moving our way. Now I realized that she was right, there was something very wrong about these clouds. “You’re right, let’s get out of here,” I said. “Then just one quick stop along the creek, and I’m done.”

  Julia started moving.

  We hurried down off the conical hill, slowing only to glance ahead when we had to jump down over rocks, to make sure we didn’t roust out any rattlesnakes who might be sunning themselves before the storm. Another crash of thunder surprised Julia just as she made one of her leaps. She missed her footing and landed like a sack of potatoes.

  I rushed to her side. “Are you hurt?” I asked breathlessly, winded from our sprint.

  Julia rolled over clutching her knee in a tight embrace, her face twisted with pain. “Oh, no …” she moaned.

  I said, “Can you get up?”

  “I—I don’t know.” Gingerly, she extended her leg and set a hand down to brace herself.

  I bent to help her. “Should I go for help?”

  “No. I can make it, and we shouldn’t stay.” She grabbed my hands and hoisted herself up. She grimaced in pain, but her leg held her weight well enough to hobble along. “So much for hurrying,” she said. “But we’re almost to the Jeep.”

  The Jeep was an older, red, practicality-only model with MCWAIN GEOLOGICAL CONSULTING emblazoned on both front doors. I said, “I’ll drive.”

  “No, I can drive.”

  “Bullshit, you’ll drive.”

  “Okay, I’ll give you the keys if we can just get us the hell away from that storm,” she said.

  “Okay, okay!” I loaded her into the passenger’s seat and climbed in behind the steering wheel. I steered the Jeep down the hill, balancing haste with caution as I r
etraced our route down the track to the road we had come in on.

  Before turning onto the highway, I tried Michele’s number again. This time I had no signal.

  “Who do you keep trying to call?” Julia asked.

  “I’m trying to reach the sheriff’s detective so she can meet us for lunch,” I explained. “She can meet us in Sedalia at that roadhouse there. The jalapeño burgers looked mighty good.”

  “No!” she said.

  I gave her a quizzical look.

  She said, “Those burgers are to die for, but tell her Castle Rock.”

  “Why? Sedalia’s closer. We need to get some ice on that knee of yours.”

  Julia’s agitation was increasing. “Do you remember the Big Thompson flood?”

  We had reached a junction among dirt trails. I waited while several mountain bikers passed, all pedaling madly away from the mountains ahead of the storm, then followed them. “How could I forget?” I said. “I was only about ten years old when it happened, but it was all anyone talked about for weeks. Over a hundred people died.”

  “One hundred forty-four,” Julia said. “Do you remember what set it off?”

  “Well, rain, but—” I bumped over a sharp rock that was sticking up in the middle of the dirt track. “Oops! Sorry about your tires.”

  “Watch it!” Julia said. “It was not just your ordinary rain. It was about this time of year. I’ve seen pictures, and it was a cloud that looked just like that,” she said, jabbing a finger toward the heavens.

  “You’re right,” I said. “A front stalled out along the Front Range. My dad was down in Denver that day. He said you could see the thunderheads from Pueblo clear up past Fort Collins. And they were tens of thousands of feet tall.”

  “Yes. Cumulonimbus usually don’t grow that tall. They develop the classic anvil head as the winds aloft whip them sideways. And those winds usually push the storm along. The day of the Big Thompson flood, they sat still and grew higher and higher, just like these are doing.”

  I said, “They were forty thousand feet tall over Big Thompson Canyon, and when they finally ripped loose and rained, they dropped six inches in an hour, something astronomical like that. And they hit a watershed that fed into a tight drainage, and that tight drainage had—”

  “—Big Thompson Reservoir in it, which had a dirt dam, and that dam was hit by all that water arriving so quickly, and it failed,” Julia said. “And it came down the canyon like the fury of hell.”

  I glanced at Julia, who knew all about fury. “I remember the stories. People didn’t know to climb to safety. They saw that the creek was rising and tried to outrun the flood by getting in their cars and driving down-canyon.”

  “Bits of them were found clear out to Loveland,” Julia said. “One guy had gotten his family into the car and ran back up to get one more thing out of their vacation cottage. The wall of water came through and swept away the car, killing his wife and all the kids. And it took away their little signs that hung one underneath another, one for each name, leaving just his at the top.”

  I could only imagine what that story meant to her now. “You’re right,” I said. “This is bad.” I opened my cell phone again. It was showing a signal but there were no missed messages from Michele. A heavy feeling settled into the pit of my stomach.

  I came to the end of the dirt track that led down from the mountain and turned onto a well-graded, gravel road that led out past several new thirty-five-acre homesteads that, given the lack of water in that aquifer, probably shouldn’t have been there. I had driven a quarter mile down this road when we heard a thud and the vehicle lurched. Gripping the steering wheel tightly, I piloted the Jeep successfully to the edge of the road and got out to see what I could see.

  Julia lumbered out the opposite side, leaning against the vehicle to spare her hurt knee. “Damn!” I heard her yell and saw the vehicle shake slightly as she kicked what was left of the tire on that quarter.

  I came around to take a look. The tire was not only punctured, it was ruined, a tatter of thin rubberized shreds. “Where’s the spare?” I asked. “Is it underneath that gear box in the back?”

  Julia stood beside the offending mass of rubber, one hand against her face, the other arm wrapped tightly across her chest. Her shoulders shook spasmodically. She was crying.

  I put an arm around her. “What is it, Jules?”

  “The spare,” she whimpered.

  “What about it?”

  “I don’t have one.”

  My last shred of sympathy for Julia snapped like an old rubber band. “This isn’t like you, Julia! First you blast your knee and now you’re out doing fieldwork without a spare! What were you thinking?”

  “I’m sorry!” she blubbered. “It’s—it’s up at the ranch.”

  “Well, now, that’s a good place for it!”

  Julia leaned against the Jeep and sobbed. “It’s—Afton used to drive this Jeep, remember? And I drove the sedan, but this is what we always used in the field. It was on the books as part of the business. When we went through that financial bloodbath we called a divorce, I got the business and he got the ranch, and … well, he’d taken the spare out to make room while he carried some part for the wind generator up to the ranch, and he never put it back.”

  “Fine way to be ecologically responsible,” I said sourly. “Use your wife’s vehicle to make yourself vehicularly independent, if that’s a word. All right, how far is it to the ranch?”

  Julia looked up at the clouds with growing agitation. “You’re not going to make it. Or you’d get there and be soaked to the skin coming back, and rolling a spare tire at least a mile even if you go straight across the hills there.”

  “Let’s call a wrecker.” I pulled out my cell phone. It read NO SERVICE. I bowed my head, wishing the rain would start and cool my overheated brain. “Okay then,” I said, “what do you suggest we do?”

  Julia looked past me at the road. “There’s a car coming,” she said. “Surely it will be someone who can help us.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  MARY ANN NETTLETON LOOKED OUT THE WINDOW AT the coming storm. “I don’t like the look of those clouds,” she told her sister.

  Rita Mae said, “Well, you wanted water.”

  “I want water in my well and I want this drought to break, but I don’t want to be washed away by a flash flood.”

  “Do you think there’s any worry of that?”

  Mary Ann lifted her chin with determination to look at things in their best light. “That was the one thing Henry did tell me. He said that Dr. McWain told him that the dry wash beside the house is a place to stay out of if it got to raining hard. And he said those boulders out there might be troublesome, too.” She pointed at one of the garage-sized rocks that nature had left perched on the mesa above the house. “They seemed so picturesque when we were looking at the place.”

  “Then let’s drive into town,” said Rita Mae. “I don’t think you can take a whole lot more of this, and neither can I. We can have lunch, or even pack a bag and go up to my house in Denver. Take a nice, long bath. Relax.”

  “I’ll go to lunch,” said Mary Ann, “but then I need to come back here. I’ll admit that this place has stopped being my dream home and become a nightmare, but still, it’s all I’ve got, and I think Henry would have stayed, so I will, too. I’m going to join Helga Olsen’s citizens’ action group, Rita Mae. I’m going to join it and fight so no one else gets hurt like I did. And I’m going to sign up for that course at the community center. I want to know more about this world, and I want to be able to live in it without being such a sitting duck.”

  Rita Mae hurried off to the guest room to do her hair, then joined her sister in the master suite to help her decide what to wear. That was always the thin spot with Mary Ann, getting her set to be anywhere. She was brilliant as a homemaker, but as a citizen of the world, she was a flop. But maybe this catastrophe with her water supply was a cloud with a silver lining, just the thing to propel Mary Ann out i
nto greater service. As she thought about it, she realized that Mary Ann would indeed be an asset to that group, bringing her fastidious organizational skills, her unflagging ability to stay on track, and her devotion to form.

  Half an hour later, they were loaded into Rita Mae’s Cadillac Coupe de Ville and rolling down the driveway toward the road. With satisfaction, Rita Mae noted that Mary Ann did not even look back, and when Rita Mae looked into the rear-view mirror, she was glad she hadn’t because the clouds had taken on an ominous darkness. Maybe she’d be able to get her away to Denver after all, if only overnight.

  At the end of the lane that serviced the development, Rita Mae turned out onto the narrow blacktopped road that led to the county road. Three-quarters of a mile along that road, they came across two women standing beside the road next to an old red Jeep. “I wonder what they’re doing there,” she told her sister.

  Mary Ann looked up over the dashboard at the scene that had attracted Rita Mae’s attention. “It’s one of those sport-utility vehicles. Maybe they are preparing to drive it off-road.”

  Rita Mae said, “They aren’t going anywhere with only three tires.”

  “Oh. Well, I hope the poor dears have Triple A.”

  Just then, one of the women turned toward the approaching Cadillac and waved at them with both hands, the universal “Please stop” signal.

  Rita Mae said, “I don’t like to leave them out here to get rained on, but I wonder why they’re dressed like that? Do you think it’s all right to stop?” She glanced sideways to see if her sister was up to meeting these total strangers. What she saw surprised her.

  Mary Ann was sitting up straight and smiling for the first time all day. “These women look like rugged individuals, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” said Mary Ann Nettleton. “Let’s help them. It will be an adventure.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  I TURNED TO SEE A CADILLAC COMING DOWN THE ROAD toward us. Julia waved frantically and it pulled to a stop. There were two older women aboard, each neatly coifed and dressed like they were on their way to a party. The one in the passenger seat was wide-eyed with excitement. She had rinsed her hair a fetching shade of blue. The one behind the wheel was a bit huskier in build. Her hair was rinsed lavender. The one with the blue hair ran the little motor that opened her window and tipped her head toward the fresh air. “Are you two young ladies having a little trouble?” she inquired.