Drought (6 page)

Big Puppet smiled at him and patted him on the head. ‘Glad you saw the light, bro. Glad you saw the light!'

Tyler leaned over Maria and guided himself into her with his hand. After a few seconds, Maria opened her eyes again and looked up at him. He kept up a slow, persistent rhythm, trying to be as gentle as he could, but all he could see in her expression was a weary disappointment, as if she were saying
you too, Tyler
?

‘Come on, bro, get your ass moving!' said Big Puppet. ‘What's all this sloppity-slippety-slop? You supposed to be the knight in shining armor, riding to the rescue! How about you ride a little
harder
to the rescue?'

Tyler could feel himself shrinking inside her. He tried to keep going, but he simply fell out. Big Puppet said, ‘What's happening, bro? Don't tell me you a
faggot
or something? Don't go for girls?'

Big Puppet stood up. He was clearly bored with this game now. He took the shotgun from Joker and pointed it directly at Tyler's face. He held it so close that Tyler could smell the burned cordite from the shot that had killed Maria's father. He started to cry. He couldn't help himself. He had wanted to be brave but it had been impossible. There were too many of them, eleven against one, and now they were going to kill him. He had never imagined that his life would end this way, kneeling on the floor in some neighborhood store, with his head blown off his shoulders,

‘
Dad
?' he sobbed: but at that instant a police siren let out a high, weird whoop right outside the store, and Tyler saw red flashing lights shining against the window.

Immediately, there was a mad scramble for the door. Big Puppet threw down the shotgun so that it clattered and bounced across the floor and then he barged his way toward the door, too, pushing his fellow hoods out of his way. From the parking lot outside, Tyler heard a cop shouting out, ‘Stop! Hold it right there! Stop! All of you!'

He reached over and picked up the shotgun. All he could think of was Big Puppet forcing himself into Maria's mouth, and taunting him while he did it, and making him feel completely emasculated. Now he had a chance to get his revenge for Maria, and Maria's father, and to show Big Puppet and all the rest of these punks that he was a man, and an angry man, too.

He pulled open the door and stepped outside. A silver Caprice was already squealing away from the parking-lot in a cloud of burned rubber. Big Puppet was about fifty feet away, running toward a red Toyota pick-up. Three other hoods were close behind him, but Tyler didn't care if he hit all of them. He raised the shotgun, but as he did so a cop yelled, ‘Drop it, kid! Drop it! Drop it, or else I'll drop you!'

Tyler hesitated. His hesitation was long enough to allow Big Puppet to clamber into the pick-up, followed by the other three hoods. They roared off along West 33rd Street with the passenger door still swinging open.

Tyler was left alone, standing in the doorway of Dan's Food & Liquor.

Two cops came toward him, crouching slightly, both of them pointing guns at him. He raised his left hand as a sign that he was surrendering, and then he bent down and carefully laid the shotgun on the ground. He had some fragmentary memory of a movie in which a criminal had dropped his shotgun on to the sidewalk and it had gone off, prompting the cops immediately to shoot him.

‘Assume the position!' shouted one of the cops. ‘Face down, arms and legs spread!'

‘Officer – I was only trying to stop those guys from getting away.'

‘I said, assume the position!' the cop almost screamed at him.

Tyler lay down on the hot, gum-speckled sidewalk. One of the cops came up and picked up the shotgun, while the other gingerly pushed open the door with his shoulder and checked inside the store.

There was a moment's pause, and then he called out, ‘Rick! We need back-up! Plus a bus and a meat-wagon! We got ourselves a dead guy in here, plus a two-six-one by the looks of it!'

‘Don't you move,' said the cop who was standing over Tyler. ‘Don't even fucking
breathe
, you got it?'

W
hen Martin walked around to the back of the Murillo house, he found the whole family sprawled out under the shade of their verandah.

The four younger Murillo children were lying in a tangle of arms and legs on two rusty recliners, looking hot and lethargic. Mina the youngest was three and the oldest Mikey was eleven. On the steps next to them sat their twenty-one-year-old half-sister Susan. She was wearing a sweat-stained yellow dress, unbuttoned at the front, and she was flapping herself with a folded-up newspaper.

Santos, their grandfather, was sitting in the far corner in monotonously creaking rocking chair, sucking at an unlit stogie. He was dressed only in a T-shirt and red-striped boxer shorts and a Panama hat.

‘I rang the doorbell,' said Martin.

‘We heard you, Wasicu,' said Santos, in his dry, cracked voice. ‘We figured it was you, and if it was you, then you would know where to find us. If it wasn't you, then you would go away and leave us in peace. Today is too hot for answering doors.'

‘Is your water off here, too?' asked Martin.

‘Since this morning,' said Susan. ‘I can't do the laundry. I can't wash the kids. All we have left to drink is half of a bottle of Dr Pepper. I went to the store for water and soda but the store is closed, and somebody had busted open the soda machine and stolen all the soda. I mean, like, what's happening, Martin? When are they going to turn the water back on?'

‘I'm sorry, Susan, I don't have any idea. They've set up a special team of people to deal with the drought, and they've been shutting off the water by rotation. First one neighborhood, then the next.'

‘You don't know for how long?'

‘Forty-eight hours each neighborhood, that's what they told me. But I can't tell you for sure. It may not be as long as that.'

‘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 staff usually used around the office.