Water Wars Chapter Three

I’m not convinced Felix didn’t just get in my head. He always had that unique talent. He told me one time he came from a long line of witches in Puerto Rico. He liked to fuck with people’s minds. I remember getting wasted with him more than a few times. His was a kinky, odd sense of humor. To be truthful, Felix was one of the few people I’ve ever known who scared me. He carried within him a true, loose cannon kind of vibe. Now he’s armed, with a band of heavily armed homies he seems to think are his soldiers. Yeah, life here just keeps getting better… living the dream.

I don’t know much, if anything, about his plan to get us all water. I’m sure it will be dangerous and not well thought out, but I’m beyond the point of caring, to be honest. If I die trying to steal water, at least this will all be over. It was a gut punch to find out there ain’t no trucks going east. That was my last plan and what I was banking on. I don’t want to tell Jane. She’s so fragile, I don’t know what will cause her to break. Maybe that’s best for her, simply snap, lose her shit and kill herself or someone else. It’s like that here now.

I am, for the first time, scared as I walk back to Jane’s apartment. Since it all started to fall apart deep, somewhere deep in my mind, I refused to believe it was all this bad. I believed, or wanted to believe, that this was a situation like the dust bowl from a hundred years ago and it would all pass. I think about those farmers and the Okies from that time. I allow my mind to be a little nostalgic and whistle a Woody Guthrie tune, its name lost to me. I think my grandma used to play it on the piano. The good old commie she was. “I just blowed in and I’ve got them Dust Bowl Blues or something like that.”

It’s getting late, the sun is setting a bit later now. We’ve got a few more hours of daylight. It’s still so fucking hot. I’ve walked maybe four miles today total and I’m exhausted. I want to drink this gallon of water Felix gave me, but I want to save it for Jane. With this, we should have three gallons. Knowing this makes me feel oddly rich. I know nothing could be farther from the truth. We have nothing left and now I must tell her even my plan is gone.

As I turn on our street and approach her place, I notice the neighborhood is quiet, eerie. People have been leaving, not all at once, but a few groups at a time. Most of the apartment buildings are now abandoned. As I get closer, I see Janie sitting on the front stairs, the frame and broken screen wide open, the heavy wooden front door looks like it’s been smashed with an axe and its creaking on the single still attached hinge in the evening’s hot breeze. I smell smoke in the air. It’s not thick or heavy, but I definitely smell smoke. Janie sits on the dirty broken wooden stairs up to the front porch naked. Still naked, I assume, she was naked when I left earlier today. Her face is in her hands and she’s crying and moaning.

I call to her as I approach. She doesn’t raise her head and continues to sob into her hands. I walk up on the steps and put down the bag Felix gave me and sit down and put my arm around her. I pull her skinny, dirty body into mine. “What happened, Jane?”

No answer. She’s having a hard time catching her breath. She pulls her left hand from her face and turns and points her arm toward the door. “Go inside, look!”

Standing, I walk past the broken door. My dirty clothes, that I had stuffed in plastic garbage bags when I left, were strewn all over the floor. The rest of the apartment, which was in pretty rough shape to begin with, has been ransacked. Her clothes and a few photo albums of her kids are scattered all over the floor, too. In the dark kitchen area, I checked the closet where the two gallons of water and the last of our canned food were stored. It was gone. All we had between us were our clothes and her photo albums and our small stash of food and the two gallons of water. Now, even that damn near nothing was gone. I am too tired to find anger, I want to cry too.

I re-join her on the porch and lean against one of the thick wooden columns. “Where’s the water, Jane? What the fuck?”

“Gang,” she sobs, “a fucking gang, fifteen or twenty. They came ripping through here. They went through every building on the street. Breaking windows, busting open doors, breaking into cars, they set some on fire. It was a crazed horde. They took everything.” And she put her face back in her hands and started to sob again.

“Janie, did they hurt you? Did they fuck you?”

“No, they didn’t even touch me. I sat here watching, and they took every-fucking-thing. It was like a swarm. Like fucking locusts.”

I pull my dirty t-shirt off and over my head. It stinks of my sweat and body odor. “Raise your arms, Jane. Let’s cover you up a little. And I slide it down and over her naked body. I’m taller than her, my shirt fits her like a baggie dress.

Janie says, “Nothing fucking matters. Nothing, I can sit out here buck-naked with my legs spread wide and play with myself and people just walk past scrounging for water and food. It doesn’t matter. No cops, nobody says a word. The rules we lived by even a few months ago don’t matter anymore. It is where we are. It’s who we are now. It’s all come apart.

“Jane, we are not that broken. If nothing matters here, then we need to get to a place where shit matters. We’ll find it. It’s going to take some time. But for now, put on some clothes. Come on. We can’t slip any farther. We still get to decide what we will allow.”

She looks up at me. “Did you get the truck? Are we going east?”

Looking down at the broken concrete sidewalk from the porch, I shake my head and say, “The yard, I went there, that guy Harmon’s truck yard. It’s gone, like burned out and gone. Fucking bodies and burned-out cars and trucks. Shit scattered to the wind. I was told it was a gang up from San Francisco. It seems we’re in mob rule now. I’m sorry Jane.”

She buries her face in her hands. “We’re not growing old, are we, Sammy? I’m not going to see my kids grow up and marry and I’ll not get to be the fun, fat old grandma. This is where we die, right here, Sammy. I’m ok with that I suppose. I wish it would hurry up and kill me. God, I hope it ends tonight. All of it fucking ends tonight.

“I’m missing so much now. I miss my daddy. I miss my kids. I hope that son-of-a-bitch took them to a better place than this place. I suppose he must love them and want what’s best for them. That ex of mine was a piece of shit to me, but taking my kids from here may have saved them. The way he took them was wrong, but everything is wrong now. I guess I should be glad, but I miss them.

“I miss my dad so much these final dark days. My daddy could make everything better. No matter how fucked up it was. He was a drunk, a well-known nasty drunk. Always getting picked up for DWIs, we never had shit when I was a kid; me, my mom, and my four older brothers. We didn’t always have food, never had good clothes. He would drive drunk and get arrested and come home a few months later. I understand why my mom divorced him. He died young, like my age now, or forty-five. I didn’t go to the funeral. My mom wouldn’t let us go.

“He was such an asshole, everyone hated him. He was always getting his ass beat in fights. I guess when he was young, he was a pretty good fighter. Golden Gloves, I heard. I never saw any gold anything from him. I guess he’d bet guys for drinks, and they’d go out back of the bar, whatever bar, whatever day, and he’d get his ass beat.

“We were poor, fuck we were poor. To us, the kids who got to eat every day were rich. We never told anyone how broke-down poor we were, but fuck man, we had nothing, but somehow it felt like more than what we have now. I guess because back then there was still hope and some kind of joy, you know? I remember having nothing to eat but a box of cereal between my mom and me and my brothers and sometimes she said, ‘maybe tomorrow will be better,’ and sometimes it was. Sometimes my dad would steal some shit or even get a job for a few days, before he got fired, but we always had some kind of hope. Not much, but a little. Enough for us to get through the day and the night with our growling bellies. But, despite all that, my daddy, he loved me in his own way. He wasn’t around much, but when he was, he was good and kind to me. When he hugged me, I felt safe and protected. I miss that so much now. Even if his protection was a lie, a fabrication in my own head, if felt real in the moment. Nothing feels safe now. Will I ever feel safe again, Sammy?”

“I don’t know, Janie. I haven’t got a clue. I’m going to get you to your kids. That’s my mission now, my plan, my hope. That’s what keeps me putting one foot in front of the other.

“You should go find some pants and pack up what we need to bring. We can eat up those beans in the can I brought back with me. Let’s go sleep in the cemetery tonight. That feels safer to me than here. It looks like the entire neighborhood is gone now. We can go sleep there and in the morning we can meet up with Felix. He seems to have a plan. It’s a bad fucking plan, but it’s a plan. Staying here and getting killed for a gallon of water and a few cans of food seems like a worse plan.”

Janie raises her hands from her face. Her once pretty features have aged decades in the past year. The tears have soaked her in a sadness I fear will be with her forever. “A cemetery? You want to go sleep in a cemetery? That’s creepy as hell. You want to fuck there too?”

I smile, “Sure, we can fuck there if you want. I heard there are still people guarding the cemetery at night. For a while, the gangs were robbing the graves for whatever they could get. I figure if the guys are protecting the dead, they may offer us a little protection, too.”

Janie stands and walks inside. I look down the street to where my apartment used to be, then up the street to where we’ll walk out of here. For the first time it all sinks in. There is no sanctuary. We are living in a war zone. It reminds me of photos I’d seen of bombed-out buildings somewhere in the middle east, from some other war, for some other reason, and it looked just like this. The myth that it couldn’t happen here, couldn’t happen here in good ol’ America has been broken. It did happen here. There are no cops, no government food or water. No-one is coming to help us. I take a deep breath and smell the smoke again. It’s stronger now. I can’t tell what it is or where it’s coming from. It could be a forest fire or a car or an apartment. These gangs seem to pillage and burn. I’m taking Janie to be with Felix. His crew is not much better, if any better at all, than a gang, but at least I know him.

A memory of the bar crosses my mind. I remember winter nights stuck inside with five or ten people and the warm and drunken friendships. Full glasses and times without thirst. That all seems dreamlike to me now. The camaraderie and warmth, laughter as the snow piled up a few inches, making the world appear for at least a few days kind of sugar-coated and magical. This part of the country never got a lot of snow, but when it did, it was a pretty gift. We’d all get cozy in the bar and drink and tell dirty jokes. Smoke a little weed and eat everything in sight. There were good times in the bar sometimes. It could be a sad place full of broken people, but on those nights when it snowed, it was like we were protected from the world by a blanket.

That’s all gone like the snow is now gone. The world, at least my thin slice of the world, feels like it has failed, collapsed.

Everyone, everywhere, we all seem to be operating only for ourselves now. This weird pairing of Jane and me I don’t understand. I always saw her as right on the verge of breaking, always in crisis, but never quite broken. I guess I admired her strength to deal with whatever came her way. These past few weeks, I see she has broken. I need to try to save her because it gives me something to think about other than dying here on this street in this heat. The threat of thirst or starvation or being  murdered for what you’ve got in your bag is very real.

With the gallon of water in her backpack and a few t-shirts and shorts, she says she’s got clothes for both of us. She’s put on a pair of denim cut-offs and sneakers. She’s still wearing my t-shirt. I guess that makes me happy. Janie has always been an enigma to me. We’ve gotten drunk together, fucked some, but we never paid much attention to each other. Like we sometimes found each other in the same place and time. I knew her husband a little. He used to play softball for another bar’s team. We got drunk on beer together a few times. He didn’t strike me as a good or a bad guy. Just a guy who went to work and played ball in the summer. I never met her kids. Maybe once on the street I saw them playing. Janie and I just seemed to happen for no apparent reason. Now we seem to have bonded as some kind of team. I guess that’s ok.

She swears under her breath she forgot the can opener, puts down her bag and walks back inside. I hear her scream and I run to the door. “Sammy, fuck, look, get in here!” I run to the window to join her. The entire block of apartments behind us seems to be on fire. Hot orange and red flames and thick gray smoke shoot out the windows and open doors, popping and snapping like twigs underfoot when you walk on a forest floor. There is little sound other than that snapping and roar of the inferno. No people screaming, no sirens, only the noise of the fire. I find that frightening and odd. I grab her arm. “Jane, it’s time to go. Did you get the photos of your kids? This is it. We’re gone, we have to go now!”

The fire is spreading through the dry grasses and trees, and it is crossing the street. A big dry pine tree in the back of her apartment explodes in flame. The fire seems to make its own wind that is making the blaze even stronger. It’s a monster, and it’s coming right for us.

I grab Jane’s little hand in mine. “Come on, now! Let’s get out of here.” As we walk, then break into a jog, she is looking back at her apartment, a place she shared with her kids, even her husband, a few times when they were trying to reconcile.

“I’m watching my life fade away, Sam. It’s all gone now. Why isn’t anyone coming to help us?”

Behind us, in the commotion, I hear screams and gunfire and cars. “Gangs, Jane, faster, run! They’ll kill us for cans of beans and a gallon of water. Come on, run!”

Janie looks back at the fire and noise and smoke and flurry and chaos and says, “It’s too fucking hot to run. Whatever is coming for me can have me.”

I pull her hand in closer to mine. With my free hand, I take the backpack from her and sling it over my shoulder with my own bag.

“You can’t just wait here to die, Janie. We’ll find your kids and a better place.”

We take off on a fast walk instead, fast enough to get away from the din behind us. I want to be back at the cemetery by nightfall. I’m not sure why I feel safer there. The dead, I suppose, are no threat. It seems like every other person I encounter is a threat. They’re all trying to take what little is mine.

As we walk, jog, walk, flat-out run, then walk again, it’s as if I’m in a kaleidoscope. Scenes are swirling in my head. It’s all chaos and noise. Gunshots and acrid smoke and flames. We turn down a street with a half mile to go and three cars, late model SUVs, are smoldering. Walking again, I look in the third car and I see a man’s body, burned beyond recognition, just the shape of a head on shoulders, still smoking… “Fuck this!” I swear as I grab Jamie’s hand tight in mine and scream, “Run! Come on! Run!”

I look up, I see the sign for Ocean View Cemetery again. “Come on, Jane. We’ll be safer here. “

She stops running. Just walking, not even fast. She stops and says, “Sammy, look around. Look the fuck around! Do you see anything anywhere that looks safe, or like a good place to be? This dystopian nightmare is unfolding even faster now. We’ve all fallen into chaos and collapse. What’s with the stories I heard? Even the other day, the National Guard was coming our way. Where the fuck are they? Why is no one coming to help us?”

I can’t argue with her. It seems hopeless and even pointless. I am not sure I believe there is a better place for us. Hope is becoming as scarce as water and cool shade.

We make it to the large stone and wrought-iron gate of the burial ground just as the sun was collapsing from a sky of broken clouds that refuse to rain and into the Pacific. In an empty gesture, I motion with my free hand, “Look, a beautiful sunset!”

She glares at me. In her stare is the reality I can’t seem to face. “Pretty sunset, Sammy? What are you, a fucking idiot?”