Water Wars Chapter Seven

It’s beginning to get dark. It’s odd, you’d think that here by what is now a swamp it would be overrun with mosquitoes, but I feel no bugs on my skin. Jesús joins me midway between the mess hall and what was once the shoreline. Shirtless, l see he has cuts on his chest and back and hands. Not big cuts, but I can see blood on his skin.

“I took a walk out into the lake, Sam. I was wondering if the stream that fed this still ran a little. I was hoping I could catch us a fish!”

I reply, “You better watch walking out there, man. I remember as a boy the quick mud when the swamp by my house was drained. Not quicksand, but deep mud that would suck you and trap you if you were alone.”

Jesús let out a small laugh. “Funny thing about these days, Sam, sometimes I find it pretty hard to give a shit if I live or die. Being sucked into the quick mud would be kinder and faster than dying of starvation. Up till today, I was so focused on water I ignored how goddamn hungry I am. I’m feeling weak and sick. I don’t know how much I’ve got left in me.”

I look at him and back at the mess hall. “Yeah, Jane and I did a pretty thorough search. There ain’t shit in there to eat. I guess the three of them headed off to the woods to find some bark or some such shit to chew on.”

Jane walks toward us from the mess hall. She is smiling and carrying something in her hand. As she gets closer, she holds it up and yells, “BEER BITCHES!!”

Jesús and I look at each other. At the same time, we both yell back, “Beer?” Jane joins us on the dirt and rips a can from the plastic ring and hands one to me and one to Jesús. She cracks the pop top on hers taking a slug of the piss warm beer, shrugs her shoulders and says, ‘It’s not too bad…”

As hungry and dehydrated as we are, even with our new windfall of water, I figure two beers apiece will knock us on our asses. That’s not such a bad idea. Pass out and forget this day.

We three sit in the dust and twigs. Sipping the hot beer. It’s hard to keep it down, but I figure on top of the cheap buzz, there must be some kind of nutritional value to it. Any calories are good calories as far as I’m concerned, these days.

Jane speaks, “Those church women, they are excited they found some cattails still growing down by the edge of the swamp. The one, the nun, says she can make flour out of them. I’ll be fucked if I know what good that will do us.”

The three of us sip our hot beers. They taste pretty terrible. I look at Jane, “So, last night, did you fuck Jesús?” They both look at me in some kind of feigned shock. Jane looks at me and says, “No, I just sucked his dick. I mean, it really was like a first date, right? Even in this fucked up new world, I’m still a lady! What business is it of yours anyway, Sam?”

“It is not my business, Jane. I don’t care. I figured since this little tight-knit group is all we have, it would be good to know who is fucking who.”

She pops another beer, and downs it, still bare chested, she stands and wipes the dust off her ass with her hand. “You’re a fucking asshole, Sam. That’s about all I know with certainty.”

Tossing the other two beers to Jesús she says, “I’m so fucking hungry! I’m going to scrounge. I’ll be back. I swear if I find a fucking rat, I’m going to cook it and eat it.”

She leaves Jesús and me to our two remaining beers. It’s getting dark, it is early July or late June, I’ve lost track of such meaningless things. The surrounding woods are eerily quiet. None of the sounds I recall from the noisy summer woods I recall as a boy.

Jesús tosses me my second beer and takes his. “Sam, I didn’t step between you two, did I?”

“Nah, man, Jane and I are not a thing. Friends at best.”

He replies, “Then why are you so hell bent to get her back to her kids? She said it’s all you talk about and focus on. This will not be easy, man. I don’t know how or if they’ll let us cross into Canada and when or if we get there, or where the fuck did her husband take them?”

“Jesús, man, I’m not much. I never have been. I was a lazy kid. They told me my dad was a war hero, Vietnam too, like yours. I think the fucker just ran off. Who knows, maybe he went and joined the enemy, I don’t know or care. I was never one for faith or higher powers. I’ve never prayed. I won’t do it. My life has been one long coast, apply as little energy as possible and ride along, unnoticed and not arrested.

“My mom was a sweet enough lady, but she was fragile. I always felt she was like China glass. I spent most of my childhood expecting to find her dead. Maybe she’d kill herself. About the only thing I took from either of my parents was their weakness. I just got by in school, barely got an honorable discharge from the Army, found a life out of the light of day in the bar, and that was it for me. Wake up at the same time every day, try to not drink before noon, manage drunks, call cabs. That was about the extent of it.

“Now, I’ve known religious men like you, your kind. I have to say you are better than most I’ve ever met. Most are so fucking self-assured that they make men like me, men who question even their own existence and place in this world, let alone if there is anything coming next or if this is all there is, feel less than, weaker, than those who purport to hold the secret and the answer.

“I’m not even sure I give a fuck what happens next. I’m figuring the way things are going now, I’ll find out soon enough. If there is a Hell I want to get me into one of the top levels, not down there with the eternal damnation and Hell fire! Like one of the levels where you have to listen to Pat Boone sing Blueberry Hill all day or some shit. You know, Hell, just not that assfucked by the devil and external fire Hell.”

Jesús laughs at this a little and pours back the last of his beer.

“I hope to get shot; dying of thirst or starvation has got to be one fucked up way to go, but I see you and how you are and even with your questions of your faith now I see you as a much stronger, self-assured man than me.

“I’ve got to do one meaningful and good thing in my life so that one person, maybe it will be Jane, maybe you, will say that Sammy wasn’t such a bad guy. Not a complete loser. I need to do one goddamn admirable act in my life. The options are thinning, man, and I think getting Jane back to her kids may be my last chance. Jane reminds me of my mom. She is fragile, like China glass too, and she’s got a few cracks already…”

Jesús looks over at me, sincerity in his eyes. “Sam, all my life, I tried to do the right thing. I saw some awful shit. Poverty, racism. I saw pretty young girls out of options and luck, pimped out and used and sentenced to die from a life of crime and gangs and dope. I saw the hate in men’s eyes and their hearts toward me without ever even knowing my name. That may have been my last straw with the church, man. I was teaching this doctrine of God is love and we are all children of God while watching the hatred of me and people like me for the crime of breathing in some white man’s air. One day, a pretty girl, one of those I lost to the street, they called me to identify her body in the morgue. She’d been gang raped, and she was full of dope, and I was told she was the hooker at a party for a bunch of rich white college boys. Nobody knows this Sam, no fucking body. I left that morgue, and I went back to my church, and I tried to pray on it. I tried to drink my own Kool-Aid, but I was mad, Sam, I was fucking mad.

I went out, and I found that boy who pimped her out and I beat him bad. I couldn’t stop, it was like my hands weren’t my hands. I beat that boy so bad he died the next day in the hospital. But that college boy, Sam, man, I found him. I jumped on his back and knocked him to the ground, he wasn’t much. I flipped him over and was kneeling on his chest, and I was squeezing the life out of his body. I beat him brutally, I watched him die, and it felt right. I felt right and good choking out that boy. That’s my sin, man. My rage. I can’t be a man of God and house all this hatred and rage.”

I look over at him. Even as a big and intimidating figure, I’d never imagine him to be a killer. “Jesús, some people deserve that rage you own. Doesn’t your Bible talk about an eye for an eye? If those boys did what you said they did, it sounds to me you were doing the lord’s work just fine.”

We stand, we are both a little drunk. Funny what a couple of beers on a very empty stomach can do to you. “We should sleep in the truck! Hell, we can even run the AC.  We’ve got three-hundred gallons of fuel, even if we pull that full tanker, we should have a range of fifteen hundred miles. I’d rather try to cross in a car, less paperwork and scrutiny, but we have it if we need it. We should let the engine idle all night and we can finally get some decent sleep. That is, if you keep yourself from fucking Jane in the sleeper.” Jesús smiles a brief smile. “I’ll give it a try, man.”

I yell for Jane to join us, and we all three walk toward the tractor and climb in. Jesús on the passenger side, Jane in front of me. I ask, “Where are Rose and Sister Michelle?” Jane says, “They said they’d stay where they’ve been sleeping. I didn’t ask why or where that is…”

I climb in last and sit behind the wheel. It’s dark now, it must be at least 10pm. The digital thermometer on the dashboard reads one-hundred-five degrees. I start the engine and it settles into its noisy idle. Locking the doors, Jesús asks me, “Why are you locking the doors?”

“I don’t know. I guess it feels safer in here than out there. “The hot woods and swamp are so quiet. I turn up the AC. “Let’s see if we can get some rest.” Looking at Jesús, I ask, “I guess you still plan to bury Felix and Hector? In this heat, it will probably kill one of us.”

Jane, laying alone in the sleeper, adds, “Sam, isn’t that the least we can do? We need to hold on to our humanity.”

“Human or not,” I reply, “Digging a hole deep and wide enough to bury those two men, It’s going to be brutal.”

Jane lays down and offers, “Well, at least we have plenty of water now…”

I turn on the radio and CB, looking for any station or noise from other truckers out on the highway. It’s all quiet. We are at least a mile off the road. Hopefully well hidden.

Drunk on two beers, in the cooling cab, the three of us fall asleep fast and hard. I wake with a start! Jane is moaning. My first thought is it must be her and Jesús fucking. I look to my right, and I see him sound asleep. Jane sits up on the thin mattress. “Sammy, my fucking tooth. You’ve got to pull it. I can’t take it!”

Jesús is awake now. I look at him. I look back at Jane. “Jane, I want to help you. I don’t know what to do. I’m not a dentist.” She’s yelling, “Just get a fucking pair of pliers and pull it!”

I look at Jesús; he shrugs his shoulders. “There are some pliers and other tools in the side box.” Then he looks over at Jane, still topless and in her dirty cutoff jeans. She’s crying. First time I’ve seen her cry in a very long time. Maybe since the night it snowed. “We got to do something for her, Sam!”

“Ok, man, go get the pliers. Jane lay down on the bed. Should I go get Rose and Sister Michelle?”

She opens her mouth to show me the tooth. It’s a molar on the left side, the first molar after the incisor. “Fuck! Jane, that smell, fuck!” Through tears she says, “Fuck you, Sam!”

Outside the truck I hear Jesús scream and he climbs back in the cab and slams the door shut! “Sam, fuck! It’s a bear. A big fucking bear! Fuck!” Jesús looks like he’s seen a monster. “It was back there by the bodies, man. It was eating one of them. It saw me and it came running. It almost caught me!”

Forgetting Jane for a moment, I crawl over to the passenger side along Jesús. I’m standing, looking out the window. I can’t believe it. This monster bear is clawing at the door! I’m scared. Jane is screaming, more pain than fear, I imagine. I look at Jesús. “That’s a lot of meat, man. I never ate bear, but what the fuck. Hand me a rifle.” The damn thing is standing on its hind legs, pounding his massive claws against the fiberglass door. It’s so tall its head is almost looking in the window. “Jesús slides over to the driver’s side. “There are two black valves on the armrest. When I yell, push them in and hold them. That will drop the window!”

Slapping my palm against the bottom of the magazine of shells, making sure it’s in and ready to go. I yell, “Now man!” I hear the rush of air from the valve releasing the window. I point the AR at the bear and unload what must be a hundred slugs in its skull. Chunks of fur and blood and skull spatter up in my face. It falls back over dead. The gun keeps firing. I’m sweating and scared, and I can’t stop shooting. Jesús finally grabs my arm. “I’m sure it’s dead, Sam.” I hand the hot rifle over to someone who grabs it from me. “Fuck, fuck, what the fuck? I never even went hunting before. Fuck! I’m going to get the pliers. Jane lay back down.”

The bear is huge! It’s head, a mangled and bloody mess. I hear Rose screaming from the bunkhouse. I yell to her that everything is ok. Everything is about as far from ok as it could ever be. “Come to the truck!” I scream back into the darkness.

Fumbling my hand inside the side box, I feel a ball peen hammer, a screwdriver and two pairs of pliers and a ratchet and some wrenches. I take the pliers and the hammer and climb back into the cab.

Jesús looks at me. “A hammer, man?”

“What the fuck do I know, hammers, assault rifles, pliers, whatever, man? Now we’re dentists! Let’s do this!

“Sam, I looked in her mouth. She’s got a nasty infection. We need to get the tooth out and get her some antibiotics.” Rose and Sister Michelle joined us in the cab. It’s getting crowded in here. “Who is doing this surgery, anyway?” And I hand the pliers to Jesús. Rose comments, “get some cloth and wrap the pliers in it, Jesús. so, you don’t break the tooth!” He looks back at us. “Ok, so I’m doing this?”

I say, “I’ll hold her down, man, you pull it. Rose, are there any antibiotics left in the mess hall?”

Rose replies, “Work it side to side, Jesús. If you break the tooth in her jaw, it will be an even bigger problem…”

I ask again, and she gives me a cold stare.

Jesús takes the pliers and wraps part of a paper towel he found under his seat. I’m straddling Jane’s forehead, holding down her hands. Rose appears to be trying to help. Jesús works carefully. I watch him wiggle the tooth. Jane screams. He twists the pliers side to side and gives a hard downward tug and the rotted tooth is out.

“It came out clean!” He exclaims, relieved and a bit proud. Rose and I both say, “Good job!” at the same moment. I take another paper towel and jam it in Jane’s mouth into the newly created hole in her jaw to absorb the blood. She sits up, even in this new pain she seems relieved.

Rose says, “up Route 11 about five miles is, or was, a little strip mall. A pharmacy was there. Not sure what shape it’s in. It’s probably ransacked. That may be the best chance of finding an antibiotic.”

I’m dizzy and feeling sick from the excitement, the smell in the cab and the beers I had for dinner. Actually, the only thing I had for any kind of nutrition today. And yesterday was the shared can of beans.

Sister Michelle, standing outside the cab, next to the bear, yells up to us, “We’d better get busy butchering this meat. It won’t keep long in this heat.” It’s about four in the morning. The air has cooled to one hundred degrees.”

The mood shifts to excitement for a moment—food! I don’t think any of us saw ourselves as great hunters, but the thought of meat, fatty meat, is almost a shock. This dead bear won’t save us, but it will sustain us for a while. I hope long enough to cross over into Canada.

We decide to let Jane rest. She’s lost a lot of blood. Rose thinks it may be from malnutrition and dehydration. I do not know. We are all about to the edge. The past two weeks have changed what was a horrible situation to the unthinkable.

We bring knives and hatchets and hammers and everything we could find from the mess hall and nurses’ station and the tool shed to the back of the tractor. To me, the bartender, nondescript guy in the corner, this is a surreal and gruesome scene.

Without many words, we begin the task of hacking up the bear’s body. Fur and flesh and blood cover our hands and arms. The air fills with the stink of sweat and fat and rotten fish. I was once told grizzlies live on fish and their meat tastes foul. I’m no hunter or  woodsman, but based on the size and smell, this bear is a grizzly. No one here is a butcher or has any idea what they are doing. We are ripping its flesh from bone. Even though an hour before this beast wanted to kill us and feast on our carcasses, I feel sad such a big and powerful beast is reduced to this carnage.

I look over my shoulder and notice the sky is starting to lighten. That pretty azure blue that betrays the first light of day, and the night’s last stars. I remember seeing that pretty flicker of the new day often as I drove home drunk and tired from the bar. The wonder of this new day is lost on me now.

Someone mentions the need for a fire. My first inclination is no, because of the danger, the forest is a tinderbox. My second inclination is ‘who gives a fuck, let it burn…’

Sister Michelle says she’ll go to the barbecue pit and get ready to cook, while we hack off big chunks of brown and pink and red flesh. I hope it tastes better than it smells. Maybe burned to well-well done it will be edible. I think back to the squirrel Jane and I killed at ate back at the apartment. At the time, that seemed extreme and desperate.

Again, I raise my head from my work. I look at the scene surrounding me, in the tractor’s headlights as the day begins to break. Rose, her gray hair and t-shirt and panties all flecked and stained now with god knows what from this creature. Jane, Jesús and me, our bare chests and hands, some ghoulish mess of flesh and fluids. Someone, maybe me hit the bear’s bladder with a blade and we found ourselves over washed in foul smelling piss.

Carrying as much meat and bone as we can carry over to the pit where Sister Michelle has made a roaring  hot and, I’m sure, dangerous fire. Rose and Jesús place the meat on a large steel racks, coated with the grease, and grizzle of much happier barbecues. Jane and I offer to go get water from the tanker, and Sister Michelle mentions something about parasites, and we need to make sure the meat is well cooked.

The smell that carries across the campground is a fishy burning meat odor. As we fill some gallon jugs with water, I say to Jane, “I hope it tastes better than it smells…”

Jane looks at me, a dribble of blood has run down her cheeks and dried from the pulled tooth. She gives me a cold edged stare and says, “Fuck it! It’s meat.”

The hot fire is searing the bear meat. We sit on the ground at daybreak, anxiously waiting for it to cook long enough so it won’t make us sick, or any sicker than we already are. Jesús stands and grabs a hunk of bear from the fire and we all move at the same time. He is the first to taste and his expression gives away the taste. It is awful. God awful. Not rotten, but a taste of bad fish, even well burned.

The five of us, barely clothed, covered in filth eating the flesh of the animal we just killed with our hands, some of us retching, but still chewing…

I think of Jane’s question from not long ago. “Have we become barbarians?”

I say to myself, it took a while, it wasn’t overnight, but it didn’t take that long either, when you consider how far we have fallen. I wonder if ten-thousand years ago the first people to sit by this lake, when it was full of water and birds and fish made camp and cooked around a fire, looked much like us. Could they sense that the entirety of human history was before them, having no idea of the wonders and discoveries waiting for the generations to come. We now are at the other end of that rainbow, the opposite bookend. The lake is dead and dried up, the fish and birds are gone, the air is hot, even here in the mountains, the sky is gray and full of acrid smoke from the forest fires. We have nothing left to do but look back and wonder where it all went wrong.

I remember when a bad day was a hangover or a fight with some bar girl I’d fallen in love with so many times over. Now we are living the bad days every day, and to call this living is a bit of a stretch. If this meat doesn’t kill us, and we somehow find our way into Canada and find Jane’s kids, what then? The flooding in the east, blizzards in Canada, that just ended in May, according to Sister Michelle. That’s why I know now Jesús and me better get Jane where she needs to be quick! The south is as hot as it is here, but it’s raining and flooding and I hear Mexico and Central America are even hotter than here. How the fuck can that even be. And Europe is every bit as bad as we have it here?

 Do I want to live much past trying to do my one good deed?