Drought (2 page)

‘No fucking water! What the fuck?'

‘Maybe Ezzie didn't pay her water bill.'

‘It's you. The C-fucking-FS.
You
are supposed to pay for her water bills.'

He smacked the faucet again but it was no use. He had to content himself with rubbing his hair with the gray, mildew-smelling hand towel that hung beside the basin. As he did so, he stared at his own reflection in the shattered mirror and said to Martin, ‘If I catch some lethal infection, you – you will be a dead man, I promise you.'

‘No, Jesus … if you catch some lethal infection,
you
will be a dead man, and the world will be a better place without you, believe me. Now, where's Mario? I have to take Ezzie to the hospital.'

He stepped back into the hallway. Esmeralda was sitting up now, her back against the wall, dabbing her bleeding nose with the hem of her dark red dress. Her curvy brown legs were dappled with bruises – some red, some purple, some yellow.

‘Jesus was just leaving, weren't you Jesus?' said Martin.

Jesus had appeared from the toilet with his wet hair sticking up. He said nothing to Martin, but as he passed Esmeralda on his way to the broken front door, he stopped, and spat at her, and said, ‘
Pisona
!'

‘Hey!' said Martin. ‘You want another dive down the U-bend? Be happy to oblige you!'

Jesus stalked out of the house without saying anything else. A few seconds later, he drove past them in his bright yellow turbocharged Mustang, blasting his horn in defiance.

Martin hunkered down next to Esmeralda and examined her face. Both of her eyes were already crimson and swollen so that she could hardly see out of them, and her nose looked like a large maroon plum. Her upper lip was split, too. He couldn't tell which was blood and which was sticky red lipstick.

‘Come on, Esmeralda,' said Martin, gently. ‘We need to get you to the ER. Where's Mario?'

‘Mario is staying with his friend Billy today. I'm so glad he wasn't here when Jesus came. That Jesus. He's the devil.'

Martin helped her to climb to her feet. Before they left for the hospital, he tore a piece from a cardboard tomato box which he found in the kitchen and stuck it over the broken window in the front door with duct tape. Then he managed to wedge the door shut with another piece of cardboard so that at least it looked as if it were locked.

‘Don't worry, Martin,' said Esmeralda, in a blocked-up voice. ‘I don't have nothing which is worth nobody stealing. Apart from Mario, I don't have nothing worth nothing.'

Martin opened the Eldorado's door for her. He looked up at the sky and it was cloudless. It was June ninth and it hadn't rained since November twelfth, and even then less than a tenth of an inch had fallen. He remembered the date because that was the day that Peta had walked out on him, taking Ella and Tyler with her. He had stood on the sidewalk watching them drive away and it had started to rain, very softly and very quietly, and even then it was the first time in over a year.

He climbed in beside Esmeralda and said, ‘Listen to me, Ezzie. We all have something, more than we know. Most of the time, though, we just don't appreciate it. What does that song say? “You don't know what you've got until you lose it all again.”'

H
e waited forty-five minutes with Esmeralda in the Urgent Care department of San Bernardino Community Hospital, sitting next to an elderly man who reeked of stale garlic and who groaned loudly every two or three minutes. After each groan he croaked out, ‘
Madre de Dios
!' and crossed himself, again and again. At least it was cool inside the hospital, although the sunlight shining through the window was reflected so brightly by the white walls and the white marble floor that Martin felt as if he were sitting in an over-exposed photograph, and put on his Ray-Bans.

Esmeralda dabbed her nose with a tissue and said, ‘I sleep with Jorge because Jorge is always good to me, always helping me. He is married but I don't know his wife. It is wrong, I know that. But sometimes I feel so much alone.'

Martin said, ‘You can sleep with anybody you like, Ezzie, just so long as you're discreet about it with little Mario. So far as I'm concerned, Mario's well-being is my number one priority – and he should be yours, too,
and
Jesus's.'

‘Mario doesn't know about Jorge and me sleeping together. It only happens when he is at playschool. I don't want him to find out. Jesus is still his father, even if he is a
tapado
.'

At that moment a wide-hipped Hispanic nurse in a pale blue uniform came up and said, ‘Mrs Rivera? If you'd like to come this way, please, Doctor Varga can see you now.'

Martin and Esmeralda stood up. Esmeralda took hold of Martin's hand and said, ‘I see you later maybe, Martin. You are a good man, bless you and bless you. Not like any other social worker I ever know before.'

Martin smiled and shook his head. ‘There's not much that's good about me, Ezzie. In fact I'm not so different from your Jesus. I'm only on the side of the angels by accident.'

‘You should be careful of Jesus. He never forgets. Never. If he thinks you have done him wrong, he will do to you twice as bad as you have done to him, even if he has to wait for years.'

Martin watched the nurse take Esmeralda away to the Urgent Care Department. As he did so, his cellphone played the opening bars of ‘Mandolin Rain'.

‘
Martin?'

‘Oh, hi, Peta. Listen – I'm in the community hospital right now. Let me take this outside.'

He walked out into the hospital parking lot. It was just past midday now and the temperature was well over a hundred and ten. The flag outside the hospital entrance hung lifelessly, and ripples of heat rose off the tarmac so that it looked as if water were running across it. Martin was wearing only a short-sleeved white shirt and khaki chinos, but by the time he had reached the shade of the walkway that led to the ambulance parking zone, his forehead was beaded with perspiration and his shirt was clinging to his back.

‘Martin, we have no water. All of our faucets have run dry and the toilets won't flush.'

‘I had the same thing on East Julia Street, downtown, about an hour ago. What about your neighbors? Do they have water?'

‘No. Nobody does. I've tried calling the water department but their phone is always busy. I looked at their website, too, but it makes no mention of water being cut off. I just wondered if you knew anything about it.'

‘No, nothing. I'll try to find out what's going on and get back to you. I expect a couple of water mains have burst, that's all. They'll probably have them fixed by the end of the day.'

Peta said, ‘I'm worried about Ella, that's the trouble. She has a temperature of ninety-eight-point-eight and she says she's feeling shivery. I don't want to be stuck without water if she's not very well.'

‘Did you call the doctor?'

‘I don't think I need to, not yet, anyhow. I've given her some Tylenol and put her to bed. It's probably nothing worse than period pains.'

Martin didn't respond to that. Ella had always been his favorite little girl and the thought of her becoming a woman when he wasn't around to take care of her was constantly hurtful. But he knew that it had all been his own fault, his marriage to Peta splitting up. No woman could be expected to put up with black moods like his, and his unpredictable bursts of temper. He called them his ‘Djinn Days', after the devils who were supposed to appear in dust storms in Afghanistan, and make everybody depressed or mad.

‘I'm going back to the office now,' he told Peta. ‘I promise you I'll look into this and get back to you. How's Tyler, by the way, is he OK?'

‘Tyler is just fine. When he's not asleep or at school he's stuck in front of his laptop but all his friends are the same.'

‘OK, Peta. Like I say, I'll get back to you.' He was tempted to add, ‘I love you,' but he knew that would only irritate her.

If you love me so much, why did you shout at me and push me around and try to make feel so small? Why didn't you get yourself some help, if you were so disturbed by what happened to you in Afghanistan?

O
n the way back to the office in Carousel Mall Martin switched on the radio in his car. According to the weather reporter on KTIE, there was no foreseeable prospect of what he called ‘measurable precipitation'. In other words, no rain was expected for the next four days at least. Temperatures would reach 100–107 degrees during the day, and drop only to between seventy-five and eight-three degrees by night.

‘San Bernardino's Municipal Water Department is asking every citizen of San Bernardino to conserve as much water as possible. Over the past three years the lack of any significant rainfall has brought us close to crisis point. You should think twice, folks, before washing your vehicle, and make sure you check the watering index online to decide how much water you're going to use to irrigate your plants.'

Martin parked his Eldorado in the basement parking lot and went up in the elevator to the office. As he pushed open the glass door with
San Bernardino County Children &
Family Services
stenciled on it in silver letters, Brenda the receptionist gave him her usual glower, peering at him over her thick-rimmed spectacles. Martin had always thought Brenda would be quite attractive if she didn't wear such schoolmistressy glasses and didn't clench her hair in the tightest of French pleats, like a coil of copper wire. He sometimes wondered if she was always so scathing to him because she thought
he
was attractive, too.

‘Arlene wants to see you in her office,' she told him.

‘OK, Brenda, thanks,' he said, and started to walk down the corridor toward the soda vending machine.

‘I think she wants you in there right
now,
' said Brenda. ‘“Just as soon as he comes through the door,” that's what she said.'

‘I'll be sure to tell her you gave me the message,' said Martin. He continued to the end of the corridor, pushed a dollar into the soda vending machine and noisily bought himself a can of Dr Pepper. Brenda continued to glower at him as he walked back past her desk.

‘Brenda, have a heart. My throat was as dry as a camel's back passage.'

She pursed her lips but didn't say anything. As he reached Arlene Kaiser's office, however, and knocked on the door, he glanced back and he was sure that he caught her smiling.
Women
, he thought.
If only they would come out straight and tell you how they felt, and stopped making you guess
.

‘Come!' called out Arlene Kaiser, in her usual high-pitched screech, and he opened the door and stepped into her office. Arlene was the Deputy Director of Children & Family Services and so she had a gray steel desk the size of an aircraft carrier and a corner office. Out of the windows she enjoyed a view of orange-tiled rooftops and gleaming new office buildings and scaffolding and tower cranes, and the distant San Bernardino mountains, hazy and wavering in the afternoon heat, like mountains seen in a dream.

‘Ah, Martin!' Arlene shrilled at him. ‘At last! Didn't you get my text?'

‘
Text
?' Martin blinked at her.

Arlene was short and bulky, with close-cropped gingery-brown hair and an oddly cherubic face for a fifty-five-year-old woman, with bright blue eyes and a bulbous nose. She was wearing a mustard-colored nylon blouse and a gingery-brown pleated skirt which matched her hair, and a necklace of shiny green beads which looked like olives.

‘Well, anyhow. You're here now. This is Saskia Vane, from the water department, and her associate—'

‘Lem Kunicki,' said a pale, thirtyish man sitting in the corner. In his pale lemon polo shirt and pale gray linen pants he was almost invisible, like a chameleon. He even had bulging eyes like a chameleon.

Saskia Vane, however, was far from invisible. She was sitting cross-legged beside Arlene's desk, dressed in a scarlet suit with a short matador jacket and a very short skirt, and high-heeled Louboutin shoes with bright red soles. Her hair was black and glossy and cut in a severe geometric bob, which emphasized the sharp angles of her cheekbones and her slanting, catlike eyes. She had full, pouting lips, which had been glossed in scarlet to match her suit. Underneath her jacket she was wearing a black scoop-neck T-shirt which revealed a deep suntanned cleavage. Between her breasts dangled a necklace which looked like a shark's tooth set in gold.

She raised her hand toward Martin in an undulating motion, as if she were trying to demonstrate to him how dolphin swim. He took it, and briefly shook it, and smiled at her. She didn't take her eyes off him as he pulled up a chair and sat next to her, but she didn't smile back. She was wearing a strong jasmine perfume with musky undertones, the sort of perfume a woman wears to mask the smell of recent sex.

Martin said, ‘So, Ms Vane, you're from the water department? That's a lucky coincidence. You're just the person I wanted to talk to.'

‘Please, Martin, call me Saskia. And I don't actually represent the water department itself. I'm a member of a special emergency team which Governor Smiley has put together. Our brief is to advise local government officers on how to deal with the ongoing drought situation.'

‘Oh! In that case, I think you're
exactly
the person I want to talk to. My wife just called me from Fullerton Drive to say that her water's been cut off. And this morning, when I was dealing with a case on East Julia Street, there was no water supply there, either. So what gives?'

Saskia gave him one of those queasy smiles that politicians give when faced with a question they don't really want to answer. ‘I'm afraid I'm not personally familiar with those particular locations, Martin, so I couldn't possibly give you a specific response to that. But I can answer you in more general terms.'