Deadman (3 page)

3

Ditch Bitch

B
lood is thicker than water, they say . . . but not in Montana. Ask Grace Garland.

“Red” Garland was a reasonable woman, a kindly woman, in fact. She tolerated pheasant hunters and elk hunters on her land, if they asked first and closed the gates behind them (if they didn't close the gates, they could ask with their last breath, next time, and it wouldn't matter). She didn't mind trout fisherfolk at all, as they absorbedly drifted or waded through the Ruby River where it flowed across her property, or even crawled on their hands and knees up the twisty but trout-rich Tinstar Creek, which fed down from the mountains behind her spread. She had even welcomed over the years a dozen or so graduate students from the state university in Bozeman who were compiling an exhaustive census of fish, fowl, and mammal life on the Tinstar. But this amiable woman's eyes developed a reddish tint when the basic question of water rights was mentioned. In this she was one with every rancher or fanner in the West. Water is life. You don't mess with a rancher's right to water.

Garland ran a few hundred head of red cattle and cut a few hundred acres of hay on her spread up on the north end of the valley. She was sixty-three, a widow with an accountant son in Seattle who
had recently told her he had AIDS, and a daughter who had become a wildlife biologist in Yellowstone Park (she had initiated the Tinstar Research Project while in graduate school). Red's late husband's father and his grandfather had done pretty much what Red was doing on this same land, although they'd possessed a bit more of it. A few years ago, Garland had sold an entire section to a fast-talking, cheerful young man from somewhere else, Canada he'd said. This fellow, Joseph Humann, had purchased the land above Garland's, on Garland Butte, that abutted on the National Forest and Bureau of Land Management lands that were being considered for inclusion in the Tinstar Wilderness Area. Tinstar Creek arose on that small mountain and trickled down to the Ruby River. All the water rights belonged to Garland, although she had conceded a few miner's inches to Humann for domestic purposes. There was also a lovely little hot springs on the mountain, on Humann's property.

Joseph Humann had been a good neighbor, so far. He kept to himself except for a few times when he'd dropped in at the ranch and shared a bottle of whiskey with Red, talking about the West and how it had been. Red had liked him. You couldn't ask for a better neighbor, although Red was a little uneasy about all the shooting that went on up there. . . . Well, not uneasy—it's certainly no sin for a man to shoot a gun on his own property, particularly out in the West—but a little curious, anyway, although she never said a word about it to the man. He wasn't a hunter, she knew that, somehow, but he sure was a shooter. It wasn't really a problem, it was a distant sound—Red figured he must be doing most of the shooting on the other side of the butte—but every time you hear a shot, even if you know it must be just sport, it kind of nags at your attention. After a while, of course, you ignore it, more or less.

Red tended to think of Humann as a temporary resident, a renter. For one thing, Humann had purchased the land with a provision that Garland (or her heirs—not likely, she feared, although her daughter might still prove out) could buy it back at the purchase price
if Humann died or decided to sell before death. He had also agreed that Garland could pasture cattle on the meadowland, though not more than usual, for no fee. It was almost as if Garland still owned the property.

But a few months earlier, Humann had returned from one of his periodic prolonged absences with a young woman, whom he had introduced as Helen. He hadn't described her as his wife, and Red hadn't inquired further. This Helen was a pretty woman, about Joe's age. She looked as if she could be his sister: small, dark, athletic, with a lot of black hair that featured what Red considered an overly dramatic streak of silver in it—at first Red had been almost certain that it was a wig, but later she wasn't sure. The woman wasn't as cheerful and friendly as Humann. She and Red hadn't really hit it off. Red had been a little annoyed by a remark that Helen had passed, something about it must be difficult for a woman to run a big ranch like this, and didn't she get lonely? Red had simply said, no, it wasn't particularly hard and she'd never been lonely that she knew of. She'd been working on the land all her life; it seemed like a reasonable thing to do, something
worth
doing.

Now Humann had been gone for a month or more and his woman for about as long. They had a separate access road and a gate, which they kept locked. Red didn't see much of them, ever, though she always had a sense of their presence or absence, somehow—if nothing else, several days would go by without any shooting.

The problem was that the flow of water on Garland's land, below the Humann property, had noticeably declined. Part of this could be attributed to a dry summer. But Red Garland was beginning to think that there was more to it. She had ridden on horseback along her entire ditching system and the trout stream itself, but she hadn't ventured onto Humann's property. Because of the drought, water levels were generally down so much that even the most avid anglers were not traipsing up into this usually productive creek. There was minimal flow, and the trout were either hiding out in the pools or had fled
to the Ruby. So it was likely just low water, but in low water the rancher measures each cupful, and Red was thinking that Humann, being an ignorant flatlander, might have left a sprinkler running on a garden or something while he was away, or even left the water running in the bathtub, or maybe the pipes broke, or . . . well anyway, it was being lost somehow, ‘cause there ought to be more water than this.

Garland tried to call Humann, but there was no answer, just some dumb goddamn machine that she refused to speak into because she was damned if she was going to talk to a machine. She rode up there on horseback the first afternoon she could spare a half hour, and the gate was locked. There was no sign that a car had passed that way since the last rain, which was a couple weeks, which confirmed her feeling that he'd been gone a while and his streaky-haired whore not long after. Finally, Garland called the water judge and complained. The judge notified the ditch rider, Sally McIntyre, and asked her to check it out.

A ditch rider works for the irrigation district. They don't ordinarily ride along a ditch. Once upon a time they did, of course, patrolling on horseback the miles of irrigation ditches that make modern agriculture possible in the West. Nowadays, he or she cruises along the dusty access roads in four-wheel-drive pickup trucks, looking for violations. These violations occur at the headgates, usually, where some crafty fanner or rancher has tinkered with the inflow to gain a little more precious water. But sometimes there are problems that aren't visible from the road, such as when a blowout occurs. Say, for instance, that a badger has undermined a ditch, and it finally caves in, and the water flows out into a field, causing considerable loss of water for the downstream users. In mountainous country, such as this was, there could be a rock slide, or a fallen tree, perhaps beaver dams, that create ponds and little rills that run off into the woods. The ditch rider drives out along the system, looking for the break. Often enough
they become ditch walkers. In this case, Tinstar Creek was itself a part of the ditch system.

That was what Sally McIntyre was doing in the lower Ruby Valley that morning. She'd been able to drive her truck along a good deal of Tinstar Creek on Garland's land, but she'd found nothing to account for the loss of water. She came at last to the fence that marked off the Humann property. The upper section was inaccessible by truck.

Sally McIntyre was a lean, rugged-looking woman. She was square-faced, handsome rather than pretty, and tended to dress in jeans and boots, a man's shirt, a sweat-stained cowboy hat crushed on her billowing red hair. She was in her thirties. She'd been a ditch rider for some fifteen years. It was a job she loved. From early spring, before the runoff started, until early winter when the snow and ice closed off the flow of water, she was empowered to roam this entire country, walk onto anybody's land without notice, and look at water. She called it playing with water. Like many people, Sally had loved to fool around with water, especially running water, from the first day she had toddled out into the sunshine—in her case, into a wonderfully muddy and reeking barnyard that was skirted by an irrigation ditch. She wasn't allowed near the ditch, but she could make puddles, divert rivulets, dig channels, and best of all, do all this in the bright sunlight or in the sweetly falling rain. She loved it. Nowadays, she still marveled that she was paid to play with water, to stroll along streams, to watch prairie dogs and badgers and coyotes, to pick flowers and dig river banks. There was a little metal sign on Joseph Humann's fence, warning that it was electrified, but as she expected it didn't react when she tapped it with a screwdriver. Just about every electric fence she encountered was off ninety percent of the time. She didn't hesitate to climb over it in her jeans and rubber boots and go tramping up the meadow, a trash fork over her shoulder. It was a beautiful day in late
September. Her job was almost done for the year. The sky was so blue it broke your heart. You could see stars in mid-morning. The huge golden eagles were wheeling about the sky, the Clark's nutcrackers clacking away in the tall ponderosa pines. She saw three antelope beyond the ridge, bouncing away down the meadow. A fox drifted along the tree line, its red tail like a Chinese windsock. The last meadowlarks sprang up and twittered away, the white panels of their tail feathers declaring their identity.

Now and then she stopped to clear some debris from the trickle of the stream with her trash fork. She climbed on, up the hillside, appreciating the warm sun on her back. The stream wound around the shoulder of the hill, deepened into a gorge by untold centuries and lined with alder and willow that were turning a bright red. A few aspen were shedding their golden leaves, rattling brittlely in the breeze.

She walked the stream until she was up near the trees, mostly bull pine and ponderosa. Eventually she came to a diversion. She bent and felt the water. It was noticeably warmer than the main body of the creek. She had long heard that there was a hot springs up here—Garland Hot Springs, the old-timers called it, and complained that some flatlander had fenced it off—but she'd never visited it. Now she set off up the warm trickle until she came to a little glade where someone had rearranged a few rocks to form a simple dam. A little digging had been all that was needed to deepen and enlarge what had probably once been a small pool, perhaps no more than a hot mud bath, into a pretty little pond, maybe a hundred feet long and thirty or forty feet wide. The pond backed up against a low wall, or cliff, of granite outcrop and miscellaneous rock, the broken edges softened by wet, steaming moss. Obviously, the springs welled out of the rock, though probably there were many bubble holes, because she could see that there was a partially sandy bottom, which was probably a deposit from the upwelling water.

The pond was completely surrounded with giant old ponderosa
pines, and their long brown needles lay scattered on the surface and collected against the flat rocks that formed the dam. The water was steaming in the cool September day.

Without hesitation, Sally laid aside her trash fork and sat down on a large flat rock that seemed to have been placed there for that purpose and shucked off her boots. She stood up and unbuttoned her denim shirt, tossing it onto the rock. She unhooked her bra and tossed it onto the shirt, then slid off her jeans and socks and her panties. With hardly a glance around, she stepped down into the pool. It was hot, easily ninety degrees or more. With a great sigh she sank down onto the gravelly bottom of the shallow pool. She lay there, her legs outspread, feeling this wonderful heat penetrate her body. She thought about a cowboy she knew, named Gary. She wished he were here right now. She slipped down into the water until only her brows and cheeks were exposed and stared blissfully up into the deep blue sky.

The lofty pines surrounding the pool created a great blue window eighty feet or more above her. Festoons of waving gossamer wove a threadbare canopy into which an occasional Clark's nutcracker or a Steller's jay flitted, calling down raucous comments at her pale pinkening body. Her red hair soaked and fanned out into the hot water as she gazed upward. This was the time of gossamer, the goose summer, when thousands of tiny, nearly invisible spiders spun out these long filaments of silk and then cast off in the autumnal breezes, sailing away to fetch up on pines and sagebrush. She thought about the cowboy's lean body, and her hand crept down between her thighs.

After a while she sighed and crept through the shallow water, drawing herself along with her hands, her body floating, into the deeper water at the head of the pool, against the low cliff. Several little siphons, or outlets, in the sandy bed of the pool kept the sand gently fluttering and soft. Suddenly, her hand fell upon something hard and alien. At first she thought it was a rock. She grasped it and drew up her knees, her shoulders rising out of the warm water. She
looked at the object that she raised through the water. It was a shiny, chromed revolver.

Sally stood up. She felt a little weak, but the feeling was delicious, despite the oddly menacing effect of finding a .38 under one's hand, in a secluded hot pool. With one hand she slicked the water off her body. A gentle breeze chilled her and she stepped into the warm sunlight to hasten her drying. She laid the pistol down on the large rock, next to her trash fork. When she was dry in the sun, she dressed and stood for a moment considering the gun. She left it there with the trash fork and walked up the path toward where she thought Humann's house might be. It was just over the ridge a short ways. But it was soon clear that no one was home, just as Red Garland had told her.

The path came out next to a shedlike garage on the edge of the clearing, in which the low log cabin stood. There were two motorcycles draped with blue plastic tarp, parked against the back wall of the simple, open-fronted structure. A late model Ford Escort was parked in one of its two gravel-floored bays. The other bay was empty.