Stringer and the Deadly Flood

by Lou Cameron

  Stringer almost missed the spidery handwritten notations the late Herb Lockwood had added in an even lighter hand, as if meant for his own eyes alone. There was naturally a surveyed contour line around the whole so-called valley, marked, “Mean Sea Level.” Out in the middle of what had once been a vast shallow lagoon lay Salton’s Sink, the deepest part, had there still been a drop of water within miles of its thirsty salt flats. The survey bench marks indicated Salton’s Sink lay a good fifty feet or more below the level of the Gulf of Mexico, many miles to the south. That was not as ominous as Lockwood’s penciled-in notation reading, “Wrong! At least minus 300 feet!”

  Stringer whistled thoughtfully. But even if the dead engineer was right, Salton’s Sink was still a hell of a ways out on bone-dry desert floor. Nobody was ever going to settle on land half that salty, and if the sink was that deep, it figured to take one hell of a lot more water to its salty bosom than anyone would ever be able to drain into it through mere irrigation ditches. The problem on land this flat, or land with such a gentle grade at least, would be getting the water to run anywhere, as it had to eventually lest it salt the irrigated farmland. The Colorado was a semi-saline stream to begin with, and nobody had been joshing when they’d named one of the Gila’s main tributaries the Salt River.

  Stringer held the map slantwise to the light to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. He saw he had. Smack across the route of the temporary diversion canal to the north, Lockwood had impatiently scrawled, “Remember the Alamo!”

  Stringer lowered the penciled-over chart to his knees to think about that. At first reading it had struck him that poor old Herb had been out in the sun too long. For the Alamo was one hell of a ways off in space and time combined. The Mexican border was a lot closer, of course. Could the dead man have meant an attack by mad Mexican ditch diggers?

  Stringer muttered aloud. “That’s just too cock-eyed to consider. Even if some Mexicans were plotting against the gringo water lords, they’d hit first at the south canal, parts of it inside Mexico, for heaven’s sake.”

  He recalled from the morgue material Barca had given him to read on the train that as either the California or Imperial Valley holding company, old Rockwood had negotiated a deal with El Presidente Diaz to dig up parts of otherwise useless Mexican desert. Nobody else was allowed to plot anything all that important down Mexico way these days. Lockwood’s hasty warning made no sense. So why had the subcontractors he’d been working for fired him and then had him killed once they’d found out he’d made off with these very charts?

  Stringer and Juanita resumed their journey, across what appeared to be dead-level desert. But when they stopped just before sunset to make camp before snake time Stringer was not surprised to discover Lockwood’s barometer now said they were a few feet lower. Or else it was going to rain like hell in a little while, despite the cloudless cobalt blue bowl above them.

  “I can see why old Herb had some trouble convincing others,” Stringer told Juanita. “It takes scientific instruments to make out any slope at all out here, and it could still just mean some rain at this time of the year. The winter months are the only time it ever rains, and even then it never rains much.”

  She put the coffee on the coals and huddled closer to him. “Herberto said they had their own ways of measuring such things. Pero, they chose not to… how you say, check, when he warned them they were running the new canal too far to the north of what he called a divide. Does that make any sense to you?”

  Stringer grimaced. “It sure does! I’m no hydraulic engineer. But I’ve slopped over a bathtub or two in my time, and no matter how flat the tile floor ever looked the water always wound up in one corner or another. It hardly takes a college education to see you wouldn’t want more than a fraction of the Colorado River draining inland rather than the other way. I wish I had a map of the Southern Pacific’s land grants with some bench marks giving the altitudes.”

  Although she asked why, in a sleepy voice, he knew she had to be less interested than he was. Still, he answered. “It’s been my experience that big shots only act dumb as hell when there’s money to be made out of sheer stupidity. If they fired Lockwood for stating the simple truth, they must not have wanted to hear the truth. I’ll likely never be an empire-builder. I guess I was stuck at birth with the considerable handicap of a conscience. But if I was a money hungry son of a never-mind and I had a whole mess of land to sell that couldn’t be irrigated as simply as I was offering to do so, I might just ignore things like the laws of nature and go on and peddle gold bricks and promises as long as I could.”

  She yawned again and apologized. “Forgive me, I am too sleepy for to make fresh tortillas tonight. Would you mind very much if we just had cold beans and coffee, Stuarto?”

  He said he was sleepy too and agreed beans would be more than enough. He opened the can for her while she rustled up some tin cups and saucers. As they lazed by the dying fire after their modest repast, enjoying the cool breezes that sprang up after dark, he began to wonder whether coffee had been such a grand notion after all. It was early evening for him, but sleeping seemed to be the only entertainment the desert had to offer after sundown. Juanita must have felt some effects from her own two cups of strong black coffee, for again she asked him, “Perhaps you would like to know about Herberto and me, no?”

  He grimaced and said, “No. I said it was no business of mine and I meant it.”

  She nodded. “I thought that was what made you feel so hesitant. Is it not the usual custom for a princess to reward the gallant caballero who saves her from the dragon with at least one little kiss?”

  He laughed at the picture despite himself and said, “He wasn’t much of a dragon. But what did old Herb save you from, Juanita?”

  She shrugged. “It was I who saved him. He had been simpatico to my brother before my brother was killed. When the same cruel ones who murdered my poor brother threw poor Herberto out of their work camp to find his way out of the desert on his own, I felt obliged for to take him in. As you may have noticed, there are two beds inside my carreta. I know you find this hard to believe—pero, I hope you do not think I was sleeping with my own brother before he was killed!”

  Stringer shook his head politely but had to ask, “How far did you have to haul the late Herbert Lockwood from that work camp and how come he was still living with you once you made it back to civilization if he was just… whatever he was to you.”

  She said simply, “He was my friend. He said he had to wait in El Centro for someone who might pay him much money for something. I think he meant you. I told him I did not need his money as long as he helped around camp and bought his own liquor. I was made most sad when Cactus Jack shot him. I liked him, as one may like a friendly old gato with nobody else to take him in. But he was no more than that to me. I am most particular about men I may make love with.”

  Stringer didn’t need to be hit over the head with a ton of bricks and it would have been cruel to make the sweet little gal hint more broadly. So he just hauled her in for a howdy kiss. Then he asked her if he might be the sort of gent she had in mind.

  She held him tightly and murmured, “Es verdad. But not out here in front of the mules. Let us make love inside, no?”

  Stringer had long since learned it was the nature of women to lie to him at least as much as he lied to them. But long before midnight Juanita had convinced him that if her relationship with old Herb Lockwood had been anything but platonic the poor sap hadn’t been treating her right.

  Juanita was a natural enthusiast with simple tastes in good old-fashioned loving. The narrow bottom bunk precluded really wild positions, but happily she didn’t need exotic postures to stay hot. In fact she stayed so hot that Stringer needed little in the way of added inspiration, and they simply kept going at it like healthy hard-up kids who’d just found out why boys and girls were built so different. Juanita’s tawny young body was about as different from Zelda’s as it could get and still be sexually utile. She got a char
ge out of the way he could cup her firm little buttocks in his palms while she rubbed her nose like an Eskimo in his chest hair. Her turgid nipples felt odd but nice as far down his torso as she kept sliding them back and forth. But since all good things must come to an end, usually sooner than bad things, there came a time when they just had to stop.

  Being as the bunk was so narrow, Stringer had to sit on the edge of it as he groped for his shirt and the makings while she just lay there, crooning Spanish love words and assuring him he was the first man who’d ever made her climax that many times in a row.

  He’d just found his tobacco pouch and matches when they both heard little wet frogs hopping about on the canvas above them. She laughed and said, “Carramba! That sounds like rain!”

  He replied, “I noticed. It has to rain everywhere now and again, and this is the season for such rain as this desert ever gets.”

  He struck a match to have a look at the barometer hanging in the center of the enclosure. She sighed and said, “Madre de Dios you have a most manly body, querido!” To which he replied with a fond chuckle, “I’d never take your sweet shape for a man’s by sun or shadow.”

  Stinger peered at the barometer. “The needle’s at 30.04 now. I don’t see how this cart could have sunk that deep in the dirt since we stopped here. So I reckon the extra pressure is due to the weather outside.” Then he shook out the match to roll a smoke in the dark as he listened to the rain drumming on the canvas. “I’m sure glad we’re inside. It figures to rain harder before it rains lighter. Anyone who’s been dogging our hoof and wagon sign is welcome to get chilled to the bone, camped out among the soggy greasewood.”

  She asked, “Do you not think this rain will wipe out our trail by morning if it keeps up?” But before he could agree the rain might at least blur it, the sky above split open with a mighty crack of lightning, which they saw even through the wet canvas roof, and then it began to rain in earnest. Raising his voice above the drumming on the hopefully waterproof canvas, he said, “Yep. I’d say you could consider us lost in the desert.”

  He finished rolling and sealing his smoke. As he lit it, he saw she was propped up on one elbow, looking somewhat confused as well as surprisingly tempting to a man who’d just rolled off her. He said, “I didn’t mean we were lost, personal. I meant I doubt anyone but mayhaps a Digger Indian could read any trail we left betwixt here and El Centro, and I doubt we have any Indians after us.”

  She said, “Bueno. Pero, where do we go from here now that we have escaped those bad hombres who want poor Herberto’s papers?”

  It was a good question, and he wasn’t sure he had a good answer. “Well, I seem to have such a story as old Herb wanted to tell us, but I doubt my paper will run it on any front page.”

  “The people he was working for seemed to think it was important enough. Why did they get so rough with all of us if you think there is nothing to it, Stuarto?”

  He blew smoke out his nostrils with a bare-shouldered shrug of annoyance. “Guilty consciences, I reckon. Hired guns don’t know half as much about running a newspaper as we do. To them, the fact they’re slickering settlers with an irrigation scheme that might not work, assuming I could prove that, must sound like the makings of a headline exposé. They just don’t know how cramped a newspaper is for space to print more solid news. I’ll type what I’ve found out once I get back to my old grasshopper. I may even get paid space rates for it. But if they run the few padded paragraphs I can manage at all, it’ll be as a filler on a back page. It’s simply not fresh news that slickers have been selling worthless western land to suckers since Jefferson beat down the price of the Louisiana Purchase.”

  She protested. “Pero, Herberto said it was a most important tale to be told. He said the water company was tampering with nature and that there was going to be great flood for to rival the one in the Bible.”

  Stringer inhaled another drag and let it out thoughtfully. “It would still take a heap of water and a heap of time to fill that natural basin Lockwood thinks he surveyed on his own. Nobody lives out in the heart of this desert. So how much damage could it do? A big fresh water lake betwixt here and Indio might be an improvement on all this dusty nothing-much, right?”

  Then he blew some more smoke out and mused aloud. “Hold on. It wouldn’t wind up a fresh water lake. It would pick up the salt from that dried-up earlier sea and…. All right, so we’d have California’s answer to the Great Salt Lake, only bigger. That would be worth a Sunday feature, if I knew for sure such a thing was ever sure to happen. But I’ve no way to prove it. The land and water mongers would be sure to deny it. It’s not a story worth the risk of a libel suit either way.”

  She lay back yawning and asked how soon he meant to return to the pet grasshopper he seemed so fond of. He laughed and explained. “I call my second-hand Remington typewriter a grasshopper. You’d have to see the way the roll bounces when I push the upper-case shift to understand the nickname. And I’m not that fond of it. It just pays a lot better than working cows. As to when I have to get back to it, I’m not in any great hurry if you have something more interesting in mind.”

  She giggled and said, “I’m a little tired, right now. Pero, I do not have to head back to Sonora just yet. Do you think we could get tired of one another in a month or so?”

  He was sure they could. That was why they called the first month of even a serious relationship the honeymoon. But he knew she didn’t want to hear that. Instead he said, “Well, if you have the time I have the nerve. This is the best time of the year for exploring the desert and I’d like to see just how serious one ought to take old Lockwood’s disaster warnings. The salt flats of that seldom-visited Salton’s Sink can’t be more than twenty to thirty miles to the north—a day each way by cartwheel. Why don’t we talk about what happens next after we have us a look at all that salt?”

  She thought it was such a grand notion that by the time he put out the last of his smoke she was ready to haul him down and wrap her sweet limbs around him again. He didn’t mind. Few men would have. The rain drumming on the canvas above them seemed to inspire them both to a new tempo. But she finally got where she wanted to go and went limp under him while he caught up with her. She protested that she was sleepy and that he’d taken advantage of her weak nature, so he stopped, saying, “I’d best spread some tarps to take advantage of all this free water.”

  Being a woman, she hugged him tighter and insisted they had all the water they needed in the kegs lashed to the chassis outside. So he lay still and just held her, as he knew she wanted to be held, until her soft breathing told him she was asleep. Then he gently rolled off the narrow mattress, covered her with a quilt and, seeing they might not have to worry about water after all, climbed up in the top bunk to stretch out and close his eyes.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The next thing Stringer knew it was morning. Some desert quail were bitching about it outside, and he seemed to be alone in Juanita’s gypsy cart. So he swung down to the floor planks, wiped the sleep gum out of his eyes, and hauled on his boots, jeans, and .38 rig to see what was going on out there.

  The rain had stopped. But the sky above was overcast, and the air felt more like spring in greener country than the way it usually felt out here.

  He walked around the cart to find Juanita, naked as a jaybird, hunkered on her bare heels over the greasewood fire she was kindling. She looked more like a naked Spanish lady than the Digger Indian she seemed to be play-acting this morning. He chuckled and told her so. She shrugged and asked, “Who is there to peek out here who has not seen me, and more, in this costume? For why did you put your pants on, querido? Are you ashamed to let me see what feels so good in the dark?”

  He said, “I’d look mighty dumb in just my boots, and I’m not about to walk through sticker brush barefooted. I’m going to backtrack us a ways as soon as I water and nose-bag the mules.”

  She shook her head and said, “I watered and fed them at dawn, you most sleepy but handsome perezoso. D
on’t go too far. I mean to feed you as soon as I can get this wet wood to behave.”

  He nodded and strode back the way they’d come the previous day. He knew she’d get the greasewood to burn. That was why they called it greasewood. The stuff wasn’t good for much else. It grew slow, twisty, and impregnated with waxy resin. The rain they’d just had would make all the brush he could see for miles sprout perhaps a fraction of an inch. Each greasewood clump was surrounded by a few feet of bare soil. The tough, thirsty bushes hoarded all the water that fell anywhere near them by poisoning the surrounding soil with a toxin given off by their roots. It made for easy passage between the prickly stuff, and it was here that he scouted for sign.

  There wasn’t much now, thanks to that heavy rain. But here and there he could just make out a puddle that might have formed in a soft spot a wagon wheel or hoof had dug into. The puddles were almost gone now, despite the overcast sky and unusually moist air. He spotted a big one, formed naturally where wind had scoured the dust on the lee side of a brush clump. He hunkered down and drew a line in the damp dirt with his finger. The water in the puddle didn’t seem interested in running south. He tried a tiny ditch to the north. The water filled it as fast as he could move his finger through the dirt. He nodded and muttered aloud, “All right, Herb. You were right. I doubt we could be below sea level, therefore we have to be north of an almost dead-flat divide. So, no water on this side has any outlet to the sea.”

  He straightened up, wiping the damp grit from his finger on his jeans, and headed back to rejoin Juanita as he stared due north at what seemed to be dead-flat desolation. There were no signs of erosion, however. Rainwater soaked into the thirsty silt too fast to run enough to matter in any direction. He found Juanita frying bacon in a cast-iron spider. He hunkered down beside her and announced, “I dunno. If they hadn’t shot old Herb, I’d feel more sure he was just a worrywart. If they’re running a mite north of such north-south drainage as there is, north-bound irrigation water ought to just soak in before it can cause any damage. Maybe I’d better have a look at his other charts and see if I can make heads or tails of his fuss with the water company.”