The Water Knife (5 page)

“Zoner for life? That what you’re saying?”

“If I am, you are for sure.”

Jamie glanced back at the other tables, then leaned close. His voice notched lower. “You really think I’m going to stay here? Just keep working for Phoenix Water or Salt River Project, hope they’re going to be able to take care of me?”

“Why, is someone hiring you? SNWA or San Diego give you some kind of offer?”

Jamie gave her a disappointed look. “A
job
? You think I just want another
job
? Like I’m going to take some buyout from the California Department of Natural Resources or something? You think I want to work for some other water department’s legal office? I’m not going to push paper all my life.”

“You don’t have much choice. There aren’t a lot of people offering plane tickets out of Arizona.”

“You know, Lucy, sometimes I think you’re about the smartest person I know, and then you say something like that, and I realize how dumb you are. You think
small
.”

“Did I ever tell you you have amazing people skills?” Lucy asked.

“No.”

“Good. I would have been lying.”

But Jamie wasn’t deterred. He had the maddening smile of a prophet sure of his comprehension of the workings of the heavens, and it made Lucy subliminally anxious, even as they continued drinking and trading comfortable insults.

She’d seen preachers smile the same as Jamie in Merry Perry revival tents when she’d asked them why they thought God would give them their rain when all the climatologists were predicting less, not more.

Rain is coming
, they’d say knowingly.
Rain is coming
.

They knew how the universe worked. They’d unlocked all God’s secrets. And now Jamie looked the same way.

“What have you got?” Lucy asked warily.

“What if I told you I’d found a way to break the Colorado River Compact?”

“I’d say you’re full of shit.”

“How much would you pay to end up on top?” Jamie pressed.

Lucy paused, beer halfway to her lips. “You’re serious?”

“Dead serious. What if I gave you senior rights that you could take right up to the Supreme Court? Rights that you could count on the feds enforcing. No bullshit. No he-said, she-said; no Vegas did-or-didn’t pump how much water; no farmer did-or-didn’t divert how many acre-feet into his field. None of that. The kind of water rights that could get the fucking Marines posted on every dam on the Colorado River and would make sure the water spilled straight down to you. The kind of rights that would let you do what California does to towns all the time.” He was looking at her intently. “What would you think of that? How much would you pay?”

“I’d think you’re high, and I wouldn’t pay you a single Chinese yuan. Sorry, Jamie, I know you. You’re the one who had sex with me just because you wanted to see whether women were any good.”

Jamie grinned at that, unrepentant. “But what if I were telling the truth?”

“About being straight or about water rights?”

“It was just an experiment.”

“You’re such an asshole.”

But still Jamie wouldn’t let up. “You ever wonder how a city like Las Vegas—a city that should have dried up and blown away about a million years ago—does so well, and we’re the ones flapping around like a chicken with our head cut off?”

“They’re a hell of a lot more disciplined.”

“Hell yes! Those fuckers know how to gamble, right? They look
at their cards—their shitty three hundred thousand acre-feet of water from the Colorado River—and they know they’re fucked. They don’t lie to themselves like we did. They don’t try to bluff like they have something they don’t.”

“So what’s this got to do with rights?”

“I’m saying we’re all playing the same game.” He began pulling the olives off his toothpick and eating them. “I do paperwork all day long. I see the game. I dig up the underlying rights. I file the motions. And all of us are doing it. Doesn’t matter whether you’re California or Wyoming. Nevada or Colorado. All of us are seeing what we can get away with—without the feds noticing and declaring martial law on us. And if you’ve got someone like Catherine Case playing for your side, you do okay. Better than the political hacks we’ve got down here anyway.” He stopped eating his olives and favored Lucy with a speculative eye. “But what if I told you that everyone is playing the wrong game?”

“I want to know what that’s supposed to mean,” said Lucy, exasperated.

“I found a joker.” Jamie smiled, leaning back, looking like a satisfied cat.

“You know, you sound like someone trying to sell real estate in New Orleans.”

“Maybe. Or maybe you’ve been stuck in the dust so long, you can’t see the big picture.”

“And you do.”

Again he flashed that maddening smile.

“I do now.”

Except now Jamie was dead in the dust, with his eyes pried out of his head, and the big picture he thought he’d seen—gone. Lucy sought another way to return to his side, but the cops were serious about keeping bystanders at bay, and now the reality of her situation was settling in—her better judgment returning too late.

Jamie’s body didn’t matter. The only ones who mattered were the living ones: the cops, the slow procession of drivers passing around the flares, the EMTs all hunched and bug-eyed behind their masks, waiting to be told that they could cart away the bodies. The faces in the Hilton 6 bar, pressed to the glass, watching the action.

Among them, anywhere, there might be a person who wasn’t looking at the carnage but at her.

Lucy started to back away. She knew this kind of killing. She’d seen it before. Everything about it was a feedback loop, building itself into something bigger and more horrifying.

She wondered if she had already been picked out, if it was already too late to run. She fled the scene, wondering if the city was finally going to drag her down and swallow her, just as it had swallowed Jamie.

Who did this to you, Jamie?
she wondered as she fled.

And then, the more important question:

What did you tell them about me?

A
ragged gouge cut the face of the Red Cross/China Friendship water pump—some kind of tool dug in, furrowing carbon plastics like her daddy’s plow had once ripped San Antonio dirt, except deeper, and more angry.

Maria wasn’t sure who had attacked the pump or what they thought they’d accomplish. Fucking hell, that pump was
armored
. She’d seen a bulldozer bounce off its concrete defenses. Sucker wasn’t going nowhere. It had been stupid of someone to try to cut it, and yet someone had.

The price blazed through the scratched plastic:

$6.95/liter—Y4
/gong jin
.

Gong jin
meant “liter” in Chinese.
Y
was for yuan. Everyone who lived anywhere near the Taiyang Arcology knew that number and that cash, because all the workers got paid in yuan, and the Chinese had built the pump, too. ’Cause, friendship, right?

Maria had been learning Chinese. She could count to one thousand and write the characters, too.
Yi, er, san, si, wu, liu, chi, ba
…she’d been learning the tones. She’d been learning as fast as she could from the disposable tablets that the Chinese passed out to anyone who asked.

The liter price glowed in the hot darkness, blue and indifferent, blurry from the human anger that had been hacked into it, but clear enough.

$6.95/liter.

Every time Maria saw the ripped face of the pump, she thought she knew the person who had done it.
Dios mío
, she
was
that person. Every time she looked at the pump’s cool blue numbers, she felt rage. She’d just never been lucky enough to swing a tool that had a chance
of hurting it. You needed something special to make a cut like that. Not a hammer. Not a screwdriver. Maybe one of those Yokohama cutters that construction crews used on the Taiyang, back when her father had still worked there.

“They turn I-beams to dripping water,” he’d said. “Turn steel to lava,
mija
. You can’t believe it, even when you’re standing right next to it. Magic,
mija
. Magic.”

He’d shown her the special gloves he used to keep from slicing off a finger, glittering fabric that gave him a second and a half before his hand disappeared in a puff of smoke.

Magic, he’d said. Big science. Who cared what the difference was? The Chinese knew how to make big things happen. Those
cabrones
knew how to build. The Chinese had money, and they made magic happen—and they’d train anyone to use their tech who was willing to sweat a 12/12 shift.

Every morning as the sun was starting to burn the sky blue, her father would return to Maria and describe the miraculous things he’d seen the night before while working on the high exposed beams of the arcology. He described the massive construction printers that poured solids into form, the shriek of injection molds, the assembled pieces being craned up into the sky.

Just-in-time construction.

They had silicon PV sheeting that they poured over walls and windows to generate power. Dumped it on like paint, and next thing you knew, you were full electric. None of the rolling brownouts that hit the rest of Phoenix for the Taiyang. No way. Those people made their own power.

They fed their workers lunch.

“I’m working in the sky,” he’d said. “We’re all good now,
mija
. We’re going to make it. And from now on you’re going to study Chinese, and we don’t just got to go north. We can cross the ocean, too. The Chinese, they
build
things. After this job we can go anywhere.”

That had been the dream. Papa was learning how to cut through anything, and soon he’d be able to slice through the barriers that kept them trapped in Phoenix. They’d cut their way through to Vegas or California or Canada. Hell, they’d cut a path all the way across the ocean to Chongqing or Kunming. Papa could work the upper
Mekong and Yangtze dams that kept water for the Chinese. He was going to
build
. With his new skills, he could cut through anything—fences and California guardies and all the stupid state border-control laws that said you had to stay in a relief zone and starve instead of going where God still poured water from the sky.

“A Yokohama cutter slices through
anything
,” he’d said, and snapped his fingers. “Just like butter.”

So maybe it was a Yokohama cutter that they’d used on the Red Cross pump. But even that tool hadn’t gotten them a drink.

You could cut your way to China, maybe, but you couldn’t cut your way to a cool glass of water in Phoenix.

Maria wondered what price had driven the person to go after the pump.

Ten dollars a liter?

Twenty?

Or maybe it had only been $6.95, just like now, but to those people, $6.95 had seemed like their first Phoenix police baton to the teeth—something they just couldn’t accept. Maybe those way-back-when people hadn’t known that $6.95 was going to be as good as it got, forever after. Didn’t know that they should have been counting their blessings instead of taking a cut at the pump.

“Why are we here?” Sarah asked for the fifth or sixth time.

“I got a hunch,” Maria said.

Sarah made a noise of disgust. “Yeah, well, I’m tired.”

She coughed into her hands. Last night’s storm had messed with her chest more than usual, bits of dust burying themselves deep in the dead-end branches of her lungs. She was coughing up blood and mucus again. More and more, the blood was a common thing that they never spoke about.

“I want to see if something happens,” Maria murmured, her eyes never leaving the pricing gauge.

“Is this like when you dreamed about the fire and the man who walked out of the flames without getting burned? Like Jesus walking on water, but with fire? You told me that was going to happen, too.”

Maria didn’t take the bait. She had dreams, that was all. Her mother used to call them blessings. Whispers from God. The wingbeat of saints and angels. But some were scary, and some didn’t make sense,
and some read clear only afterward, like when she’d dreamed of her father flying, and she’d thought it was a good dream about them getting out of Phoenix, and only later found out it had been a nightmare.

“You want to see if something happens,” Sarah muttered resentfully.

Her shadow moved in the darkness, trying to find some part of concrete that hadn’t absorbed the day’s heat. Finally she gave up and sat on the wagon, pushing aside the plastic bottles that Maria had scavenged. They plunked hollowly against one another. “So now I got to lose my beauty sleep, ’cause you want to hang with Texans.”

“You’re a Texan,” Maria said.

“Speak for yourself, girl. These
shagua pendejos
don’t even know how to take a bath.” Sarah spat something black onto the pavement as she watched the movements of the nearby refugees. “I can smell ’em from here.”

“You didn’t know how to use a sponge and bucket either, till I showed you.”

“Yeah, well, I learned. These people are dirty,” Sarah said. “Just a bunch of dirty fucking Texans who don’t know shit. I ain’t no Merry Perry.”

In a way it was true. Sarah was schooling away her Dallas drawl, scraping away Texas talk and Texas dirt, scrubbing and scraping as hard as her pale white skin could take the burn. Maria didn’t have the heart to tell her that no matter what Sarah did, people saw her Texas coming from a mile away. The point wasn’t worth arguing.

But for sure, the Texans around the pump stank. They stank of fear and stale sweat that had moistened and dried. They stank of Clearsac plastic and piss. They stank of one another from lying crammed together like sardines in the plywood ghettos that they’d packed in close to wherever the Red Cross had spiked relief pumps into the ground.

The blocks around the Friendship pump were an oasis of life and activity in the drought-savaged wilderness of the Phoenix suburbs. Here, among the McMansions and strip malls, refugees clogged parking lots and streets with their prayer tents. Here, they erected wooden crosses and begged for salvation. Here, they posted numbers and names and pictures of loved ones they had lost on the bloody
roads out of Texas. Here, they read handbills passed out by street kids hired by the professional coyotes to get out the word:

GUARANTEED ENTRY!

THREE TRIES into CALIFORNIA, or your MONEY BACK!

ONE PRICE, ALL INCLUSIVE:

Truck to border. Raft and Floats. Bus or Truck to San Diego or Los Angeles.

MEALS INCLUDED!

Here, close to the relief pump, there was life: bonfires burning two-by-fours hacked from the husked-out corpses of five-bedroom houses. The tents of the Red Cross, swaybacked with the recent storm’s accumulated dust. Doctors and volunteers wearing filter masks against the dust and valley fever fungus, tending to refugees lying on cots, and crouching over infants with cracked sandy lips as they took saline drips into their hollowed bodies.

“So what’s this about, girl?” Sarah asked again. “Tell me why I’m out here when I should be with a client. I got to earn if I’m going to make the Vet’s rent—”

“Shh.” Maria motioned her friend to keep her voice down. “It’s market price, girl.”

“So? It don’t never change.”

“I think sometimes it does.”

“I ain’t never seen it.”

Sarah’s miniskirt rustled again as she tried to find a more comfortable position. Maria could make out her shadowed silhouette under the dim blue light of the pump’s price readout: the gleam of the glass jewel in her belly, the tight little half-shirt meant to show off the cup of her breasts and the plane of her sleek stomach. The promise of a young body. Every bit of her clothing trying to make Phoenix give a damn that she was here.

We’re all trying
, Maria thought.
We’re all trying to make it
.

Sarah shifted again, shoving aside Pure Life and Softwater, Agua-Azul
and Arrowhead labels. A bottle fell out of the wagon and bounced on the dusty pavement with a hollow rattle. Sarah reached down to pick it up.

“You know, they let you just get water for free in Vegas,” she said.

“Fangpi.”
Maria used the Chinese word that she’d learned from the construction managers who had worked with her father.

Bullshit.

“
Fangpi
yourself,
loca
. It’s true. They let you take it right out of the fountains in front of the casinos. That’s how much water they got.”

Maria was trying to keep her eye on the pump and its price. “That’s only for the Fourth of July. It’s like a patriotic thing they do.”

“Nuh-uh. Bellagio lets you take a cup anytime. Anyone can go and get a cup of water. Nobody neverminds it none.” Sarah tapped the empty Aquafina bottle on the edge of the wagon, an idle hollow thunking. “You’ll see. When I get to Vegas, you’ll see.”

“ ’Cause your man’s taking you there when he leaves,” Maria said, not bothering to hide her skepticism.

“That’s right,” Sarah shot back. “And he’d take you, too, if you partied with him. He’d take us both. Man likes to party. All you got to do is be friendly.” She hesitated, then said, “You know I’d let you be his friend, too. I don’t mind sharing.”

“I know you don’t.”

“He’s good people,” Sarah insisted. “He don’t even want nasty things. He’s not like the Calies in the bars. And he’s got that fine apartment in the Taiyang. You wouldn’t believe how nice Phoenix looks when you got decent air filters and you’re up high. Fivers live good.”

“He’s only a fiver for now.”

Sarah shook her head emphatically. “For life, girl. Even if his company don’t send him to Vegas next like he says, that man is a five-digit forever.”

She went on, waxing romantic about her man’s fiver lifestyle and her own prospects for after he left Phoenix, but Maria tuned her out.

She knew why Sarah thought there was free water in Vegas. She’d seen it, too.
Hollywood Lifestyles
had been following Tau Ox, and Maria had been watching from the doorway to one of the bars where Sarah tried to get men to buy her drinks.

The star of
Undaunted
had pulled up in front of one of those fancy Vegas arcologies in an icy-looking Tesla. The camera had been following Tau Ox, but Maria had lost interest in the star when she saw the fountain.