Water Wars Chapter Five

 I wake in a puddle of sweat. I stink, I’m thirsty, I’m starving and it’s fucking hot. Jesús is asleep, sitting leaned up against a headstone. Jane’s head is on his lap. I say to myself, love’s like that, I suppose…

 For reasons unknown, during my three-hour fitful nap, I dreamed of my teenage suicide attempt. Waking up in a cemetery added to the horror. For a moment, I am not sure if I’m alive or if I succeeded.

As a boy, I believed I could cheat death. I’d walk right up to that line, even poke my toe into its terrifying pool, but escape, and come back to tell the story. I was weak and on drugs, and the drugs made me weaker, but less afraid.

I jumped off a cliff one time, a fifteen-foot cliff, and broke my ankle. You need more than fifteen feet to kill yourself; I wasn’t stupid; I knew that. I wanted to be seen as the sad loner, the misunderstood poet. All I managed was to fuck up my summer that year by having to wear a cast, and the girls didn’t seem to think it was cool that I was so sad I tried to kill myself. The story around town ended up that I was drunk and fell off the cliff, so the story made me even less cool.

I saw myself quite the rock and roll icon in the making, the tortured artist. I only knew three chords and the guys who could actually play told me I sucked.

Teenage boys will do anything for pussy, the drugs, guitars, loud cars, rob a liquor store, fill in the blank. No matter what they do, they do it for pussy. The sad soon to be rock god, jumping off a cliff to end his pain, that was for pussy too. None of my methods worked very well. I find it odd and disconcerting now, in this graveyard, watching Jane sleep with her head on Jesús lap—another girlfriend lost—another song for the rock god in me to write one day, I find it odd that this fragile and fleeting life has great meaning to me in this moment.

My gut tells me it’s less about valuing my life, as it is the fear of what comes next. Nothing, I hope. I’ll be ok with nothing, but what if the stories I’ve been fed since I was a boy are true? What if Jesús late-life revelation is wrong? I realize I’m not much different from the people I mock and call weak. We all seek the higher power because we are fucking scared to roll the dice, so we start wars and kill each other to be on the side that’s winning and get us to the pearly gates. This is a confounding time I find myself in now. Afraid to live and afraid to die.

Day’s first light flicks across the granite monuments. Jesús stirs, looks at me, then down at Jane, then back at me. I shrug my shoulders and say, “Any port in a storm, bro. I’m going to go meet Felix. They’ll be down by the entrance to this place off by Route 11. I’m sure he’d be happy if you want to join us. He promises water and food.”

Jesús skirts to the side and lays Jane’s head on the crunchy dry grass. “You know Felix is fucking crazy, right? Not go clean out a bar for kicks crazy, but certified crazy, right?”

I stand and feel my aching bones creak and snap. “These are desperate days, my friend. I’m looking at either a slow, painful death from dehydration and starvation or takeing a ride on his crazy-ass bus. You can do whatever you choose.”

Jesús stands and joins me in the sweltering early morning. A hot breeze is blowing in on off the Pacific. It makes us sticky and provides no relief. “He sits down on a headstone, rubs his belly and it grumbles. He looks at me and says, “It’s been a few days, you know?”

I reply, “Yeah, those cans of beans were all we had too… I’m desperate enough to take whatever chance Felix offers.”

“Sam, desperation is the acid that wears away the veneer of society. The truth about people who and what we believe or are willing to accept is all right there, staring back at us after desperation has ripped away all the illusions. It lays bare all we have believed all our lives. We are about to see this truth in real time. I’m so tired, Sam, and we haven’t even begun to see what we’re up against.”

The sun is already heating the air to the point I feel I’ll combust. Another brutally hot day is on the way. I’ve given up wearing a watch a long time ago. It must be about 8am and time to get moving and go meet Felix and his crew. I point to Jane, still asleep in the dust and dead weeds and grasses. “So, Jesús, are you two coupled up now?” The big man shakes his head and forces a half smile. Before he says anything, I say, “watch your ass, man, she can weaponize sex as well as any man. Let’s go, Jane, come on, it’s time to go.”

Jane stirs, raises her arm, and flips me off. The only response I can muster is, “Fuck you too Jane, let’s go.”

Jane isn’t a lot of fun on a good day. Good days have been few and far between. She’s a challenge first thing in the morning. Especially now, these hot and hungry mornings. Jesús points us toward his camp on our walk out.

We arrived. It’s an old canvas tarp propped up between a few stones, making a fragile shelter. Shelter from what I don’t know. It doesn’t rain anymore. Felix’s abuela and his parents’ stones are here. He pokes his head inside his tent, scrambling through trash and his worldly possessions. Digging for any kind of food. He reappears in a moment. The look on his face was a cross between apologetic and anger. Jesús stands in silence and we all three march toward the cemetery gate.

Jane is bitching. She has a toothache and Jesús is talking out loud about potential cures. Maybe we can find a drugstore that hasn’t been gutted. He mentions an old woman who cared for him as a boy. She used clove oil and salt water to cure tooth pain. I raise my arm and point out to sea. “Well, there’s a whole fucking ocean full of salt water out there, Jane. Why don’t you go drink some of it?”

I don’t know what happened between Jane and Jesús, and part of me doesn’t care. Jane and I had no kind of agreement between us, even before all this shit went down. I don’t know why I am angry. Part of me believes Jesús. Felix is crazy and I feel like we’re about to walk into a trap. I think again as we walk on the dusty gravel pathway about how afraid I am to die. I am split down the middle the desire to live and the desire to be done with it.

Turning to my tall friend, who looks like he’s walking to war, I say, “Jesús, I need to warn you, I don’t know what we are walking into here this morning. Part of me is scared we will die and a very real part of me is done and doesn’t care. I know we need water and food. That’s about all I know. I don’t give myself another week this way. I don’t think Jane even has that left in her. She’s coming apart.”

Jesús looks pissed at me, “You speak about Janie like she’s not even here, man, you realize that?”

Before I can answer, Jane finally speaks again. “Goddamn, I’ve got a toothache. I’ve needed to see a dentist for months. I guess that’s a luxury now too we no longer enjoy.Jesús, he speaks that way because I don’t even know if I am here anymore! I’m just going through the steps now. And where the fuck is the National Guard? What the fuck is going on? I heard before you got back yesterday, Sam, from the looters that even the government center is shut down. The police barracks too. Like they all picked up and headed south and abandoned us, all of us. Why the fuck isn’t anyone coming to help us?”

Not sure if he’s answering Jane or just talking, Jesús starts to ramble, “A lot of times, I wished my mama didn’t name me Jesús. It made resolving my conflict more difficult. Faith is foundational, right? It’s like breath. You don’t think about your breath at all unless you’re choking, then it’s your only thought. That’s how it felt the day I realized I didn’t believe in anything I was telling others to believe. I saw I was part of the show, employed as an actor. I was a well-paid actor, and I was good at it, but that’s all I was.

“For me, as a preacher, the day I realized my faith was gone and never there in the first place, it felt a lot like choking. I was falling into a deeper and deeper hole, free-falling, gasping and grasping and clawing for anything to hold on to. Then, one day, I stopped grasping and realized I was alright without it. I landed soft in the truth I always knew, deep inside, afraid to acknowledge.

“The truth I always knew was I had to trust myself and my own judgment. I had to put faith in myself and what my gut told me to believe.

“That’s what you’re doing here now, Jane. You’re clawing, holding out hope the cavalry is going to come storming in here on white horses and save you. You’re clawing, Janie. This is it, we are all the salvation that’s coming, and I tell you, what I see, we don’t look like much, so we’d damn well learn to trust and rely on each other.

“I remember as a boy praying hard to God for my mama to come back and not be dead. She was all I had. I wasn’t much more than two when she died. Then the church became my family, and they got me praying hard man. I’d pray all the fucking time. I’d pray, and I thought I was praying wrong, so I must be bad, ‘cause I’d pray the same damn prayer over and over and over and my mama never came back. When I was bad and acted out, those church men, man, they’d lay a beating on me and that made me want to be good, because I figured I was fucking bad and that’s why my mama died.

“I told a church man that one time. I thought I could confide in him. He got big man, his chest all puffed out, and he got big man, scary big, like he grew three feet and he screamed, ‘Who are you to think you can petition to lord God, who are you to bargain with the lord.’ And I started crying, you know, because I wasn’t bargaining with anyone. I wanted my mama back.

“How many hours of my life on my knees talking to, praying to, begging a silent god and receiving not one word? Looking for signs in clouds and butterflies and such. That’s a solitary sadness, my friend. The moment you realize ain’t no one coming to save you. It’s solitary and empty like that feeling as a boy when you realize there ain’t no Santy Clause either. But at least with Santy Clause you can fake it, maybe somebody will still stick something under the tree. It ain’t like that with God, when you realize the lord you’ve been holding onto and calling out to ain’t calling you back. That leaves a hole in you, man. Then one day I realized he took my mama for no damn good reason, just for fucking dope.

“So, you see Janie, I, long ago, realized no one was coming to save my ass from the fires of Hell or starvation or my own evil. I had to own it. The day I realized I was on my own was the first day in my life I was free. If we find any help, I’ll accept it and be thankful, but I ain’t looking for it.”

He waves his big hand and a long finger at the three of us walking in stride and says, “This here, us, we are all the salvation I am counting on.”

We exit the dirt path of the cemetery and stand alongside the highway. It can’t be much past 8:30am and it is sweltering. Wearing nothing but shorts and a t-shirt, I’m hot, but not sweating much. Jane looks pale and Jesús doesn’t look much fresher. We are severely dehydrated. I’m not sure how much longer we are going to make it like this.

Traffic is heavy on the highway all headed south. Long lines of tractor trailers, tankers, filled with water from somewhere and fuel and some freight boxes. The hot air stinks of diesel exhaust, and I notice more than a few helicopters escorting the caravans. Like Felix said yesterday, each truck has three people in the cab. The driver and two other guys. Some display their weapons. I noticed a few peering out at us, threatening. Jesús is waving his arm. At first, I thought he was waving. I noticed the middle finger of his right hand. Then the three of us join in a chorus to the passing trucks of ‘FUCK YOU!’

Looking to my right, I see Felix and some kid, young, twelve or thirteen, sitting in the same discarded lawn chairs I left them in last night. Walking up to the pair, I stand there, hands in my pockets, and wait for someone to speak. Finally, Felix says, “There has been a lot of traffic northbound. Army tractors pulling tankers. Heavily armored National Guard. He motions to the kid, “Go get the radio from the truck.” The kid jumps like a kitten to his feet and runs toward the Toyota pickup parked alongside the road.

Felix smiles. “He’s a good kid, a good soldier. Traffic has increased overnight. I heard from travelers passing through and southbound that there is going to be a major announcement this morning from the government. We should listen before we make our move!”

Jane forces a smile. “The National Guard! They are here! They’ll save us! They’ll bring us food and water and get us somewhere safe!” She actually looks giddy.

Felix looks at me. I look to Jesús, the three of us don’t share her enthusiasm…

The kid returns with an ancient RadioShack portable radio. Felix takes the old dirty beige box, turns the knob on the front and searches the static for a signal. A station comes in clear. Music, finally! I hear some words about some girl named Mandy, Jesús, looks at the sky and says, “Barry Manilow, fuck, am I dead? Is this Hell?” Even Felix manages a laugh, Jane protests she always liked that song. The song ends, and the DJ announces its 8:50am, and one-hundred and fifteen degrees in downtown Vancouver, a Canadian station. I’m shocked at how calm and businesslike this guy sounds. He’s not screaming into the mike, ‘ITS A HUNDRED AND FIFTEEN FUCKING DEGREES AT NINE IN THE MORNING!’ like I’d be, but he just gives the forecast, sunny, hot and no rain in sight and plays another tune, an old Jim Croce song, Bad, Bad Leroy Brown. Felix and Jesús and I are dancing a bit and smiling. A rare occurrence in this place and these days.

As the song finished, I walk over to the radio. “Let me see if I can get some actual local news, ok?” Jane complains. She likes the song currently playing as I switch off the music station. I’m desperate for news, to hear what is going out there in the world. I spin the dial up and down until I hear CBC, “Canadian Broadcasting Company.” Mumbling, I look at Felix and Jesús, “another Canadian station. They seem to have power up there.”

“And water!” Chimes in Felix.

I keep fiddling with the dial until I hear another station come in clear. I hear the call letters KBQC and I recognize it as the local station. An announcer breaks through the static, saying, this is a special announcement. He then broadcasts the schedule of future updates. He says they are running a limited broadcast schedule, their equipment, and the broadcast tower all on generator power. Every six hours, they will be on the air for thirty-minute updates. In this world of no power, no cell phones, no internet. This news is calming to me. I find it strange.

Jane sits on the hot cement-dry dirt next to Felix’s chair. Jesús and I stand next to the kid. I still haven’t bothered to learn his name. The radio announces they will be off the air at 10:15. The M35 Army truck pulls up beside our hot encampment on the outskirts of the graveyard. About nine or ten young men, some dressed in shorts and t-shirts like me, some in US Army surplus fatigues with sleeves and legs cut off for air, jump out and join us. One guy, about twenty, says, excited, almost breathless, “The caravan is on the way. Water tankers and diesel too. Hector,” he points to the kid known as the master truck savant. “He was on the bike this morning. They are gathering by Alger up by Route 5. They’ll be passing through here within the hour!”

Felix says, “Let’s hear this news and then we get to work.”

I walk over to the Army truck and look in the canvas covered bed. It’s an armory on wheels. “For Christ’s sake, Felix, how many guns do you have in here? What, are you planning to ambush the caravan?”

Felix looks at me, annoyed. “Homie, the only thing that ain’t in short supply here in the good ol’ USA is guns and ammo. I’ve got more guys coming. What did you think the plan was going to be? Ask the nice caravan for water and fuel? We got the men and the guns. We got this. Are you in, or are you going to wait here to die of thirst?”

With that, one of the boys turns up the radio. We hear mumbles and sounds of chairs moving around. Finally, a man comes on the radio. I missed the speaker’s name as now all fourteen of us were busy telling each other to be quiet and listen, huddled around the battery powered radio, in the hot dust.

The broadcast continues. “…ending all official government business at this time. Our city government and services as well as all the local governments in the area north of Seattle to the Canadian border are relocating to the greater Seattle area. Here they can combine resources to better and more efficiently serve the people, during this time of crisis… residents of northwest Washington are advised to begin moving south immediately. The state and federal government working with FEMA is in the process of setting up camps to address everyone’s needs for food, water, power, and health care and clothing articles during this time of crisis…”

Some other people come on the broadcast and share further instructions, but I stop paying attention. I look at Felix and Jane and Jesús and our now much larger assembled group. “What the fuck kind of dystopian shit is this? The government has pulled out and left us here?”

Jane immediately jumps in. “No, we need to gather as much food and water as we can and head south. We can be near Seattle by tomorrow morning!”

Felix speaks. “I don’t trust it, man. It sounds like an internment camp.” I agree with him.

Jesús adds, “Man, how many people do you figure are going to be converging on Seattle, a few million? There’s already a million people in Seattle who’ve got no water or power. If they do, it’s very limited. Now you want to bring another five or six million there. This is the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.”

Jane looks like the air has left her relieved and hopeful balloon. “What about the gangs? Fuck, if it’s as bad there as on the streets, I want no part of it!”

Felix yells, “Tool up, let’s go!” There is a mad clamor of men and women and guns and ammo belts and swearing and bravado. I look at Jesús, he shrugs his shoulders, looks at Jane and says, “I guess we tool up…” we grab three assault rifles and a big box of ammunition for them.

Two big Toyota Tundra pickups pull alongside the Army truck followed by a couple of Fords and Chevys. Each is packed full, in the cab and in the back full of men and women. Young, old, all coming to join Felix in his campaign. I say to myself: somehow, inexplicably, Felix has become the revolutionary leader he always saw himself to be.

All total sixty or seventy heavily armed and newly minted soldiers line the edge of the highway. I look toward Jesús. Walking over to his side I say, “Man, sixty people who have never handled anything more powerful that a BB gun are now armed to the teeth with carbines and assault weapons. What could go wrong?”

Felix is motioning for people to move and hide. Some of his lieutenants are corralling people behind headstones and the gate’s stone wall. One of his boys takes the M35 and parks it diagonally across the road, like it was stuck on the hump in the road from the railroad line that runs through the little town. Felix comes next to me and says, “Get in position over there.” He motions across the highway at the hedgerow that runs the length of the railroad line. “I don’t need you all to do much shooting, but one of the trucks rolling by here is a tanker filled with fresh water from the wells in the north. Sammy, driving that truck the fuck out of here is your job. You take your buddy Jesús and Jane. Once the rig is ours, follow us in the pickups. The M35 is a sacrifice today. We can’t get enough fuel to run it, so it’s got to go. It’s big enough to stop their convoy, at least long enough for us to jack them!”

I see helicopters flying far overhead. Even from that distance, there is a palpable thump from them I can feel in my chest. “Felix, those are military choppers. Are they escorting the convoy?”

Felix shades his eyes with his palm and looks skyward. “Nah, man, they are local police, not military. My guess is they are taking those chicken-shit politicians down to Seattle.

Hector roars down the road on his motorcycle. Stopping right before us, breathless, he says, “The convoy is in town, boss. They’ll be here any minute. It’s a long convoy, must be twenty-five trucks. A FEMA Humvee, loaded with National Guard, then a box trailer is in the lead, five trucks back are a line of five water tankers. That’s fifty-thousand gallons of water!”

Felix tries to hide his nervousness. He looks me in the eye. “The first water truck is yours. We secure it, you get it the fuck out of here. We’ll take the second one too and one of the gasoline tankers.”

Hector grabs an assault rifle from the trailer and runs back to Felix. “The first gas tanker is number twelve in the line. Four guys on that one. It’s a white Kenworth conventional. So’s the first water tanker.”

Jesús and Jane have already crossed the highway. Jane looks sad and confused and terrified. Jesús looks determined. I’m confused and terrified. Odd, it occurs to me; we are looking at living less than a week the way things are, without water or food. It’s the idea of killing someone for their water. How many of gallons of fresh clean water I shit in and flushed down a toilet and now… I’m going to kill a guy for ten-thousand gallons.

I hear the loud convoy approaching. They are moving about twenty-five miles per hour throughout the streets. I see the lead trucks, the Humvee and the box truck. Then I see the Kenworth, the first water tanker. I tap Jesús on the arm, “It looks like our ride is here…”

No sooner do the words pass my lips when an all living three-sixty-degree shit-storm opens up. Gunfire is everywhere at once. Bullets hitting metal and flesh and pavement and stone sounds like the opening of a hailstorm. The gunfire is coming from our crew and the oncoming trucks. I see Felix’s boys falling like dominos. Six of them, three on each side, run toward the tanker truck, and are picked off and fall dead. Kneeling in the hedgerow, Jesús starts to shoot in the water truck passenger window. The guy returns fire and disappears; I think fuck it and make a run for the truck; the convoy has stopped. The driver of the water truck aims a big gun right at me and fires. Bullets strafe the dusty dry blacktop, sending chunks of hot tar flying in the air. I look up as I run forward and I see the driver is slumped over the wheel. There is so much gunfire, smoke, and dust, screaming, engines revving, horns blowing I can’t think, I can only react.

I hear the choppers coming back. That deep rhythmic thud. Running around the Kenworth and the steps to the cab, I pull open the door and grab the bloody driver by the shirt and throw him to the ground. In the driver’s seat, I’m screaming for Jane and Jesús, but they are hunkered down in a hail of gunfire and smoke, still in the hedgerow.

Reaching over and opening the passenger door, I push the other two dead guys out with my sneaker. Pushing in the clutch and trying to remember how to shift a thirteen speed Road Ranger, I find reverse, stomp the fuel and back hard into the tractor behind me. Cranking the wheel, happy for power steering, I make a turn so tight the corner of the tanker is buckling the left side mirror of my tractor. Finding the low gear, I pull out of this turn, and circle back, providing cover for Jane and Jesús. Opening my door, they climb up and in over me. Bullets are still flying everywhere. Two slugs fly through the cab, just missing Jane. She dives for the sleeper behind me. She buries her face in a pillow back there and screams. I can relate.

The slugs exit the roof of the cab. I look to my left and see two gaping holes in the passenger side door. Jesús unloads his gun in the fire’s direction.

Turned now and headed north against the traffic. Oddly, no one is firing on us. The rest of the convoy must assume we are trying to escape the carnage. They have broken rank too and are turning back north. I say to no one, “This is the best cover we could have hoped for….”

Jane is in the sleeper, still screaming and beating the thin mattress. Up ahead, a group of Felix’s guys are in a gunfight with the fuel and gas tanker crew. Jesús yells, “Fuuuuuck. Look in your mirror, Sam!” I cannot believe it, the helicopters. Jesús gives a play-by-play from the cracked mirror on his side as I try to navigate the mess in the road before us. He says they are Apache army choppers, not police. They are strafing what’s left of Felix’s men, who are falling hard to the blacktop.

Behind us and to our front, we hear the lead hitting our tanker. Again Jesús says “Fuuuuck!” And we both at the same second say, “The water!” Jesús bows his head to pray. Jane is still screaming. I want to cry or puke. My belly is too empty to puke. Jesús lifts his head, gives me a sheepish look, and says, “What’s the line about atheists in foxholes?”

The Apaches fly past and turn around about a half-mile past us, and return, they hover, not firing this time. I assume they are looking for anyone outside a truck cab to kill. I don’t see any movement at all. I’m looking in my mirror for the FEMA and National Guard guys. Finally spying a few, they seem to be focused on the other water tankers in the lead. Guns up, they climbed on the running boards.

Up ahead we see two men laying in the road. Jane, looking out the window points and cry’s out, “It’s Felix, and Hector…”