The Water Museum (14 page)

“I ain't driving no delivery car,” Beto said and went back to his game.

Calzones. He smirked. Gringos didn't know that meant underpants.

“If you won't do it, Juan can give that fine job to a deserving white man!”

“Now, Dex,” the rev chided him.

Juan shook his head. “No like. You hurtin' me now.”

Dexter had just about had it with this happy horseshit and was thinking about driving back to his house and cracking a beer and to hell with it. There was a
Deadliest Catch
marathon on the dish. Not a Mexican in sight!

“All right. I am sorry.”

“Have beer,” Juan said.

“Sí, sí.” Dex rubbed his forehead. “Cómo no?”

The three of them stood out on the sidewalk. Juan, Dexter Bower, and Preacher Visser—who had a plastic glass of wine in his mitt. Across the street, Pedro's Velvet Dragon Chinese Restaurant seemed to be doing fair business. Better than Juan's Italian.

Dexter looked down at Araceli's Mom's Cantina. He had scolded her—“cantina” was not American in any way, and didn't go with “Mom's” no matter what language you were speaking. Christ on a waffle—these people were like children.

Pinches gringos,
Juan was thinking.
Sangrones.

Dex had told Araceli to call it Mom's Café, damn it! He had bellowed, “I am just trying to help!” and all the staff at Mom's had hidden in the kitchen and wondered why gringos shouted their heads off all the time. They thought that if you had an accent, you were deaf. If they just screamed their idiotic announcements at you, real-slow-too-just-to-get-the-p-o-i-n-t-across, you'd somehow understand them better.

Just then, Arnie and Ina pulled up to the Velvet Dragon in their Buick Regal. Arnie waved across at Dexter and shouted, “Last month it was Mexican. Now it's Chinese. Ain't had Chinese in ages!”

Dexter nodded expansively, so it could be seen from across the street. He was acting mayor and president of the Chamber of Commerce for the moment.

“Ina,” he called.

Ina steadied herself with one hand on the hood and proclaimed “Spring rolls” before they vanished inside.

And now Dexter almost fell off the curb. He was looking down the block at Araceli's joint. She had changed the sign, all right. It said
MOM'S COFFEE
.

“What the hell is that?” Dexter cried.

“A sign,” Juan explained mildly.

“That's wrong.”

“No, Jefe. Is correct. A sign.”

“The wording, man. The wording. It's wrong.”

“No. Is one hundred percent correct. We put in apostrophe and everything.”

Visser patter Juan on the shoulder.

Dexter shook his head.

Juan said, “You tell us to never write in Spanish. But you made the mistake, Jefe. You said put ‘café.' Pues ya sabes—‘café' es espanish.”

“No, no! ‘Café' is not Spanish.”

“It is.”

“No it isn't.”

“Is too,” said Visser. “Everybody knows that.”

“Oye, no mames,” Juan snapped, patience about evaporated. “Is
coffee.
”

“No,” said Dexter. “Not in this context.”

“Con qué?” said Juan.

“Lookit—‘café' means restaurant.”

“Guah? Are you joking me right now?”

Yoking.

“A café is a fancy li'l restaurant,” Dexter explained. He huffed. He spit. “It's French or something.”

Juan cursed: “Cheezits krize! French is American now?”

“Wel-l-l,” sputtered Dexter, forging ahead in a manly fashion, “it's more American than Mexican.”

Juan sighed.

“You people, Jefe. You no make sense.” He shrugged. “We must go tell Araceli,” he said.

They headed that way.

Juan noted, “You language is for locos.”

“You're welcome to go back to Tollackee-packee and speak Mexican all damned day.”

“Now, boys,” said the rev, sipping his wine.

Araceli was unfazed by the whole crisis.

She had just heard that her sister, uncle, and nephew had made it safely to El Paso and were catching a Greyhound north. She was considering opening a liquor store. Maybe a bar, which is where her heart was. El Farolito, she was thinking. Or El Bar No Seas Burro. Araceli was always happy. But she was done with signs.

“I can sell coffee,” she said. “The sign? No big deal.”

“We need food. American food. Not coffee.” Dexter grabbed Visser's glass and swallowed the dregs of the wine. “Grilled cheese. Chili dogs. What I wouldn't give for a chili dog. Hell, there hasn't been a decent hot dog in this town for months.”

Araceli turned her huge eyes upon him and stroked his arm.

“Pobrecito,” she cooed.

She had plans for the Bower spread. As soon as she landed Old Man Dex, El Jefe. She could just imagine her new American kitchen at his place with some molcajetes and jarritos and a nice bright red ceramic crowing rooster statue and a tortilla press.

“Pobre Deysterr. Estás tan cute!”

She pinched his cheek and cracked him a cold Corona. He blushed. This is how she knew she had him hooked. She would make him fat and happy and would rub his feet.

Dexter watched her bottom work the bright blue skirt like a couple of tractor motors under a tarp. Holy smokes, that was fine, right there. He drank.

They were seated at a table. Dexter was thinking of them as The Three Amigos now—he, Juan, and Visser. Getting into the swing of things. Trying to apply the therapeutic concepts of the rev, who had given him some good sessions of the talking cure after the funeral.
Bend like a reed
in the wind,
Visser had advised.
The rigid break in strong wind, Dexter. Bend like the reeds. Bend like the grasses. Weather every storm.

Dexter was bending his ass off—like a reed, he told himself. Evergreen. Forever spring. Shit.

Araceli had created her first traditional turkey dinner. She was dying for them to sample this miraculous creation. Dexter didn't think he could eat anything at this point. He was thinking chips and nacho cheese in front of the tube in his easy chair with the fat dog snoring and farting at his feet. He eyed Visser; the pastor seemed ready to eat any number of meals in a row. Juan simply looked miserable, rubbing his head.

“Ay, mi cabeza,” he said.

Visser dug around in his pocket and dropped a stone on the table. It clattered in front of Dexter. Dexter glanced down. “Arrowhead,” said Visser. “Found it in my garden.”

“Yeah,” said Dexter. “Found a million of 'em on the farm. Used to plow 'em up all the time. Gave 'em to the boy.” He sipped his beer. “He glued 'em on a board. Got it…somewhere.”

Juan fingered the arrowhead.

“Wow,” he said. Somehow, he turned it into Spanish.
Guau.

Araceli delivered placemats and silverware and water to them. Then, with a flourish and a sly little wink at Dexter, she produced three plates piled with steaming turkey and deep purple beets and globs of cranberries and wads of orange sweet potatoes.

“Ah,” said Dexter.

“Ajua!” said Juan.

Visser was already eating.

But Araceli wasn't done yet. She came from the kitchen bearing a Talavera pitcher that featured a primary color sun face smiling into the sad blue visage of a quarter moon. She came around the table and managed a deeply suggestive hip bump into Dexter's shoulder with her good right hip.

“Don't forget the bes' part!” she enthused.

She bent over the table and proceeded to tip the pitcher over each plate and spill a thick white goo over everything. It covered the turkey and the yams and puddled all over each plate. Roughly the texture of heavy whipping cream. Dexter couldn't, by God, tell what that was supposed to be.

“What is that?” he asked. “Gravy?”

Stung, Araceli backed away from the table and clutched the pitcher to her heart.

“Is los mash potatoes!” she cried and ran to the kitchen in humiliation. They could hear her crying in there.

Dexter rose.

“God. Damn. It,” he announced. “Look here. This is my country. This is my country. We been here, working this land, forever. We made our lives here. We planted crops here. We had our children and—and we buried our loved ones here. Right here! Is it too goddamned much to ask that somebody pay the slightest fucking attention to our traditions and history and stop wrecking everything? Could you learn the language? Could you cook a simple meal that anybody from here would recognize as real food? Am I asking too much?”

He was red in the face and shaking. He was embarrassed about the whole thing—ashamed of his comment to Araceli, ashamed to have shown his emotions, ashamed that he had tears in the corners of his eyes. Outbursts were simply not the West Linden way.

Reverend Visser just stared at his own hands with his head bowed. Juan fingered the arrowhead, spun it around and around with one finger. He didn't want to eat the goopy mash potatoes either. “Yeah, Jefe. That's what Geronimo said.”

Dexter stared at him. They heard Araceli blow her nose. Visser cleared his throat as if to speak, but apparently thought better of it. Juan spun the arrowhead, and Dexter wondered what tribe it had come from.

He sat back down.

He put his napkin in his lap.

He took up his fork and his knife and he bent like a reed in the wind.

“I expect you two,” he said, “to eat every bite.”

The rest was silence.

F
at orange light squatted in the brown sky. It wasn't like that every day—most days were stained-glass blue. But the dust and the smoke tended to hang there more and more. Old-timers told Billy they'd give a dollar to see a good old-fashioned gray sky full of rain. He rode his bike down County Road 120, no cars in sight. And no clouds. Somebody had painted
Droughty Road
on the signs. That was pretty funny, he thought. The corn and soybean fields were so toasted they were just dirt fields now. Billy couldn't remember the last time he'd seen a cow.

Big white wind propellers turned slowly. The kids called them sunflowers. The towers reminded Billy of those crazy alien machines from
War of the Worlds.
He really liked that one. He and his boys would fight the windmill towers with BB guns and slingshots.

The ground was crazed in crack patterns like in the westerns Pops loved, but the boys didn't like those so much.

Billy watched Pops out there in the field, standing between his pickup and the army water unit. Home from work early and working again, but as he pointed out every day—chores were never done. Pops trudged like a mule from job to job. Billy waved. Pops stood there staring at him, then waved back. At least that run of one-hundred-degree days had broken.

A trio of helicopters chugged in the distance, going from east to west. Daily rounds, checking the last crops. They looked like crows, Pops liked to say. Later in the afternoon, they'd show up on the north side of the road, flying from west to east. Going back to base.

Billy biked across the field, ramping off a couple of the crumbly old furrows. He skidded to a halt near Pops and grinned. Dust. Pops waved his hand in front of his face and coughed. He had a big plastic keg attached to the spigot at the foot of the unit.

“Thing about drought, Bill,” he said, “is the air gets baked.”

Billy had heard this a million times.

“Ain't just the dirt. The air gets thirsty. Sucks the water out of the dirt, the plants. And then the sun sucks it out of the air. Till there ain't no water no more.”

Mom would never allow Billy to talk like Pops did. Oh no. Billy had a B+ in English, and Mom wanted him to do even better. She even tried to talk in some kind of made-up elegant way, as if anybody ever really talked like that. Not even his teachers were so phony. They had little bottles of cold water in school. The kids were always thirsty. Higgins and Charlie said it was recycled pee. That grossed him out, but by about 11:00 and 2:00 every day, he didn't care and drank up.

“Way this here works,” said Pops, patting the sci-fi-looking tower, “is some bunch of chemicals is all stacked up inside, in cakes. This shell is mesh, see.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, just to say something.

Billy looked down Route 120. Big flat sheets of land going on forever. Steel sunflowers, most of them rotating. Marching away, smaller and smaller till they blinked out in the yellow distance. He'd heard about the chemicals, too. He'd been here when the army installed them. He'd even read the manual. The Corps of Engineers guy had made it sound like they were going to have swimming pools soon with all the water from the tanks.

“And,” said Pops, “the chemicals attract water through condensation. Can you spell that, Bill?”

“Sure,” hoping Pops didn't give him a quiz right there.

“Idea was water in the air, free for the taking. So the chemicals suck that moisture out of the air and pass it down here through the filter and into the jug.”

Billy looked into the jug. Its white plastic showed the waterline as a gray shadow. Only about two inches had accumulated.

“How long?” he asked.

Pops put his hands in his back pockets, kicked a clod. They watched it bounce away, tossing up small explosions of dust.

“A week.”

“Jeez,” Billy said.

“Even the air, Bill. Even the goddamned air.”

Billy rolled the bike back and forth.

“The one crop a drought can't kill,” Pops said, pointing to his head, “is right here.”

Billy waited for the next part of the liturgy.

Pops pulled his blue bandana out of his back pocket and scrubbed his face and neck.

“Once the bees come back,” he said.

“Then I'll know,” Billy replied.

“That's right. That's right.” Pops got in the truck. “Don't be late for supper.”

“I'll know the drought is over,” Billy said as the truck bumped toward home, “when the bees come back.”

The dust cloud made the truck look like it was a burning fighter plane going down.

Chemicals, Billy thought. They'd pretty much all gone back to using outhouses because there wasn't water to flush the toilets or to bathe. The house well had long ago gone stinky and sludgy. They used it to wash dishes. The government retrofit had siphoned this “gray water” out to Mom's vegetable patch. She did all right with crunchy stuff like potatoes and carrots, but the juicy stuff like cantaloupes ended up tasting like soap. So trucks came and filled the water tanks and that was all you got for the month. The waterman always said the same thing: “It'll break soon!” And more trucks came and dumped chemicals in the outhouse poo-holes—smelled like cherries. Big crazy cherry Life Savers with that dull stink beneath.

One good thing about the drought—the kids got to suck on all the hard candies they wanted. As long as they were sour candies and made their mouths water. It cut their thirst, the grown-ups said. But Billy was pretty sure he'd never eat cherry candies again.

He dropped the bike by the front steps and went in.

Mom was cooking. She mostly did microwave stuff so she wouldn't have to waste water on boiling. They ate on paper plates. She tried to make it an adventure. “Just like camping!” she liked to announce, though the kids had eaten on paper plates so long they didn't remember anything else.

She was kind of a dork, but Billy loved her anyway. He noticed how she took a bit of her water dose for the day and shared it with the rugrats—little Mitch and April. Pops liked to call weepy little April “April Showers.” Billy wasn't able to catch all the yearning nuances in that one. He thought it was all about the tears.

“You crybaby,” Billy'd say to her when she was on a rampage about how unfair his latest Wii or Xbox bullying was.

“It's not fair!” she'd shout.

“If we bottled up all your stupid crying, we could end the drought right now!”

April would run from the room. This was the small triumph both boys enjoyed every day: making April do The Grand Exit. She had gotten so touchy, they could cause her to freak out over ever more absurd things. If they were watching TV, for example, and a hyena ate a baby zebra, all Billy had to do was say, “April, how come you didn't warn that zebra? It's totally your fault it just died!” Or, watching a UFO movie, “April, why did you just blow up the White House with your death ray?”

Her outraged shrieks and stomping journeys upstairs put a saintly smile on Billy's face.

“Kids, be nice!” Mom would holler.

Billy suspected Mom mostly took sponge baths. Judging from his scent, maybe Pops took dust baths. They kept the fans running all night. Sometimes all the dust in the atmosphere made lightning, but they never smelled rain.

“Seen a snake today,” said Mitch.

“Saw,” said Mom.

They were working on their chicken parm.

“Didn't see no saw,” said Mitch, “saw a snake.”

Pops and Billy burst out laughing.

“I swear,” said Pops.

“And I saw a hammer,” Billy offered.

The males all chuckled.

“Where at?” asked Pops. He was piling that cheesy chicken into his cheek like a ground squirrel snarfing up acorns. They still had those. Squirrels, not acorns. Lived under the house.

“He was goin' under the back porch,” said Mitch. He was a noodle man, mostly. Skipped the chicken. Billy called him a carbo-loader, whatever that was.

“Welp,” said Pops. “There go the squirrels.”

“Isn't that a shame,” said Mom.

“I think that cottonwood down to the creek finally died,” Pops announced.

“God, Walt,” Mom said. “What next.”

“I know it,” he replied. “Hate to see that. But those are thirsty trees. Nothing in that creek but dirt.”

Billy didn't tell them, but there were plenty of snakes down in the creek. They lived in the old beater cars and washing machines Pops had buried in the banks when there was water. In case of flash floods. Bummer about the tree, though. Billy always peed on its roots, as if he could keep it alive with his own body.

Changing the subject, Mom turned her eternally hopeful smile to Billy. It made him feel guilty. Like he could only let her down, no matter what he came up with.

“Bill? Have homework?”

“Nah.”

“No, ma'am.”

“…No…ma'am. Not tonight. Got that field trip tomorrow.”

“The school called me about it today.”

Oh, no.

“They asked me to chaperone. Isn't that wonderful? Cool beans, as you might say.”

Cool beans?

Bad enough they had to go to some crappy museum. But now Mom would be on the bus. So much for all the fun he was planning to have with Higgins and Charlie. So much for flirting with Samantha Rember. He called her “Sammy Remember.” She scrunched her nose at him when he did.

“Cool,” he said. He smiled wanly. “Beans.” Thinking:
Dang it.

The kids all excused themselves and scattered.

Pops lit his pipe, and Mom took one cold beer from the fridge and poured most of it in his glass and saved a bit for herself. They had stocked up a few cases, and they tended to be parsimonious with it. Coors. She liked the “mountain spring water” part.

She took his fingers in her hand.

“Walt…sometimes…” She shook her head and took a sip. “Lord, Lord.”

He squeezed her hand.

“I know,” he said. “It'll be over soon. The government's going to make rain. They do it in China, I heard. You'll see.”

Mom thought about some silly thing and laughed, and so did Pops, and they went to watch TV.

Before school, Billy had to help Pops adjust the solar panels. What a major pain. “You like your light and TV and computer,” Pops groused, “you'll stop bitching and just help me with this goddamned panel!” Good old Pops.

His farming was on hold, but he kept busy. He was on a foundation-reaffirmation crew. Fancy words for guys who went around the state fixing drought creep: the shrinkage from dried-out soil pulling away from house foundations. There was government subsidy money in it. All those houses with cracking foundations and sloping floors from the desiccated earth pulling into itself. They hauled a slurry of cement and soil-expanding chemicals into the gaps around the houses. Everybody had to laugh because the slurry also made the basements waterproof. In his spare time, Pops installed rebuilt air-conditioning units on roofs. Insurance had started to cover that as a necessity, so business was pretty good.

Mom managed to coax enough water out of the windmill to garden an okay corn patch. Nothing like they used to, but enough for the neighbors and themselves.

She helped out at the church, too. Typing up the weekly newsletter. And she did some small jobs at the old folks' home. “Mad money,” she called it. One of her terms Billy didn't get. Like when she said things were “boss.” Whatever.

“All aboard!”

“Gotta go,” Billy told Pops. “Mom's calling.”

Pops muttered something that sounded like
Smuffle whazick.

Billy tapped his arm and trotted away.

She drove a Windstar. It was old and nerdy and embarrassed the boys. The radio was crackly with static, and a booming voice was pontificating about how solar desalinization of seawater was a socialist plot by big government. Cheap water was a ploy by Washington to undermine the constitutional…Billy turned it off. Mom glanced at him, but said nothing.

April and Mitch went to Prairie Elementary. Mrs. G had already volunteered to take them home after school. Mom drove into the parking lot of the middle school. The Panthers sign had faded to ochre above the yellow ball field. The
VISITORS
scoreboard had lost letters:
VIS T RS
.

Bright school buses stood outside the auditorium. Billy was thinking of trying acting. The drama coach told him he'd be great in
If the Boys Wore the Skirts.

He'd said, “You have a flair for the comedic, Billiam.” What a freak!
Billiam?
WTF. Still…Could be interesting. Sammy Remember was in Drama Club. But Higgins and Charlie would never give up mocking him for wearing a dress onstage.

Mom got busy with all the boring church ladies circling around the lot, more excited than the kids. Billy piled into the back of the bus with the gang. Sammy Remember tried not to look at him. Her red hair was hot in the sun and smelled like coconuts and pineapples. Billy tried to bump into her as he passed her seat. She made him swallow when he saw her. She ignored him and attended to the weird little folding-paper game her friend Peanut was showing her. But the way the girls laughed, he just knew they were talking about him.

Sammy glanced back at him and smiled once. Blushing.

“Oh crap!” Charlie proclaimed, digging in Billy's ribs with his elbow.

Sammy and Peanut giggled, but never looked back again.

“Second base,” Charlie predicted. “Today in the museum.”

“For sure,” Higgins agreed. “Bra. Boobs.”

They had read
Playboy.

“Knock it off,” said Billy, red in the ears. “I mean, jeez.”

“Billy's got a boner,” Higgins said.

Billy grabbed him and they wrestled until Mom came back and said, “Do I have to separate you gentlemen?” This made Billy feel good. Sammy Remember would not forget that he was, in fact, a badass and had gotten in trouble for being too wild even before the bus pulled out. Though it was, like, a total fail that Mom was the one to scold him.