The Water Thief

by A M Caturello

  These people held signs of their own. With their skeleton arms, they struggled to hold them up, even if the signs were flimsy paper. These signs weren’t quite as elegant as the other people’s in the bright side. But these signs had a message, too. They all had the same message. The message was hard to read on all the signs. The people wrote it using their overgrown fingernails and blood for ink which had dried. Not to mention, they had little skill in writing and spelling. The message on all their signs was alien. It meant to read: “HELP US GOVERNOR VENDICATORE.”

  And that was all. The ship roared as it approached the marina. Those alive, those who garnered the strength, crawled to the dock.

  Soon Vendicatore disembarked the ship with his security detail. A black state car awaited him.

  One of the people ran for him, zombie-like, calling out for the governor.

  Vendicatore’s guards rushed him into the state car. The car sped off, following closely a motorcade of three other cars.

  But the hordes of people, with the bodies of twigs, swarmed and charged at them. The motorcade drove through them, pushing itself up the downstream of people. But they stopped running over people. If they continued, they would have put a dent on the nose of the vehicle.

  The people pounded at Vendicatore’s windows, screaming his name. Watching, Vendicatore held that same face—dead. All he heard was a muffled, drowning mess, underneath the slapping of the glass:

  Governor, save us . . . save us . . .

  Help my family . . . you promised . . . y-y-y-you promised . . .

  Please, stop the Water-Thieves . . . they killed my family . . .

  YOU PROMISED! ——

  Vendicatore’s men jumped out of their vehicles and in a panic pushed back at the people. The people didn’t budge; they swarmed.

  But the guards, with their great muscles, threw the skeletons back. They pulled out their rifles. They shot into the sky. And those who did not back up got shot, killed.

  Vendicatore watched the blood splatter. He cried, but he took a photograph out of his pocket—one of his two dead children and his dead wife. Then he cried for them instead; he slipped the photo back into his pocket.

  More shots fired. Vendicatore watched. He couldn’t help but enjoy the show.

  The crowd backed away. The guards hopped back into their vehicles. And the motorcade sped off.

  In momentary peace, they led Vendicatore toward the distant palace, whose peak stabbed the red sky perched atop a mountain behind smoke.

  CHAPTER 10

  Underneath the flapping sails of The Spirit of the Lake, Davy lied on a pillow of sand on the deck. He held a small piece of paper. His face glowed red—he roasted lying there for hours. As the wind tried to free the note from his fingers his eyes popped awake and he gripped it tighter, punching a hole into it with his long-nailed thumb.

  He sprang up and pressed the note against the deck and flattened it. The dried blood of his father stained it, and some of the words were illegible. But Davy already knew what they read. He read them when the blood was still fresh and running, when he discovered it underneath his father’s bloody chest flat against the crater floor, two years ago.

  Davy knew the content of the letter by heart. Yet, every single day, he still took it from the locked chest in his closet, and read it, like a ritual. Never to forget a word, a line. It was his Holy Bible.

  He read it to remind himself of what truly mattered. He had to. The temptress, Namiane, had always trapped him by exposing her beautiful breasts only to entice him, while in his erotic weakness, with that so-called paradise she called “Hawaii.” Kissing sounds. Yes, baby, okay, we’ll go to Hawaii . . . NO! He always had to catch himself and run out of bed from her beautiful figure. He always had to rush to find the note in his father’s bedroom, in the fire safe. And he always had to read it to cleanse his soul of the lustful, tempting thoughts Namiane would plant inside him.

  Hawaii is an ugly, ugly, ugly place—he would repeat it in his mind. As well as: there was no place like the heart of my father. And Namiane’s breasts were nothing special. Well, I’m a damned liar, about that, but DO try to ignore them.

  He had always read the suicide note in his father’s bedroom. But on this day, he decided to bring it aboard The Spirit of the Lake to read it aloud. Maybe his father would hear it, and he’d appear. And so, while lying on the sand of the deck, Davy read it aloud again:

  “Dear my son Davy,

  I can’t handle the grieving anymore. Cancer stole your mother. And the drought stole my final ounce of my reason for living: our lake.

  And now the drought must claim me. It’s only proper.

  Governor Vendicatore, I do not attribute any blame. He’s doing what he must. He is a good leader.

  What he must do is fill the mouths of the thirsty, who tear down his palace walls like animals.

  I blame them, the people of South California. I blame the Hoarders, the elitists, who gave nothing to those in need.

  Yet, at the same time, I blame those in need, who took everything, and gladly pissed everything out.

  They have killed me. They drank my lake. I hate them.

  Stick a straw in their mouths and suck it all back.

  Bring me back to life . . .

  Goodbye, my son. I love you.”

  The handwriting always seemed odd compared to his father’s previous works, but Davy knew it was his. Davy had concluded that the oddness stemmed from the despair his father felt while writing it, making the writing tilted and sloppy. It was not hard for Davy to imagine. Every time he read it, he ran a vivid scene in his mind. He imagined his father, alone, in tears sitting at the end of the dock. There, Davy imagined, his father wrote the letter, paper against his thigh. With his boat sinking in the sand in the crater in the distance as a backdrop.

  He was alone when he wrote it, Davy imagined. Alone with the hot wind. And his body crumbled in the heat as fast as his world did.

  And as Davy imagined this, he began to cry, himself. This was what he felt guilt for: he wasn’t home that evening of his father's death. Well, it wouldn't have happened if he was.

  He had left that morning for the marina, in the city.

  He had gone to examine some sailboats, and to test their capabilities.

  And the wealthy fisherman and merchants spoke with him and asked him for his purpose of attaining a boat.

  “It’s for Hawaii,” Davy told them, with a genuine, excited smile. “My girl and I want to leave the country.”

  Hawaii. Namiane had begged both Davy and his father for it, even two years ago, but his father did not wish to abandon his little cottage.

  Despite his father’s wishes, Davy went to see the boats.

  “Don’t leave me here, boy. Why you entertaining this nonsensical idea? Why? You’re going to spend all the water we got left on a new boat, of all things? You’re both going to leave me here?”

  “It’s a good idea, Dad,” Davy told him. “You need to come with us. We can’t sit here and turn to dust like everybody else. Vendicatore isn’t helping anyone at all.”

  As Davy entered his pickup truck, he waved to his frowning father, and Namiane, who looked from the window of the cottage, with a smile.

  He left. At the marina southwest of South California, he found a boat. He deemed it capable to take the three of them for the long journey through the Pacific. When he returned that evening, Davy hopped out of his truck in the driveway, excited to tell Namiane and his father the news.

  But he heard Namiane cry in hysterics from behind the cottage, in the backyard.

  And he ran around the cottage and saw her lying on the end of the dock, in tears, looking down into the crater.

  “Nam? What’s happened?” he had asked her.

  And when she turned her head and saw Davy: “Y-your father . . .”

  “My father what?”

  She didn’t speak.

  “Nam! What!”

  “He jumped, Davy.” She burst into tears (during
this time, she had the capacity to produce them). “He just . . . jumped. I . . . I tried to stop him. I . . .”

  And to this day, Namiane reminded him of his guilt, every time she opened her mouth and said the name of the damned place:

  Hawaii. Hawaii. Hawaii!

  Davy knew she didn’t intend to trigger this memory. She only wanted to escape from South California. And to where else? Hawaii was all that remained of New America, after all, that hadn’t descended into chaos and destruction. As far as they knew, anyway. He never once blamed her for wanting to leave. Even if she wanted to move to Antarctica and live among penguins, he would understand. Anywhere beat this war-torn, crumbling, dry hellscape that smelled of burning flesh of a thousand bodies. (Which Davy largely created, even if he didn't realize it yet.)

  Davy had tried to rationalize within himself and find peace. He always tried to remember how his father was before he left him that morning, before his father gave him that last look—that frown. That frown. It had been stitched into Davy’s inner eyelids for him to see every time he closed his eyes, and traced into his memory for when they were open.

  He tried to remember his father’s final days, all the moments he was in his presence. His father had no obvious sadness, Davy thought. He had drunk more water than the days before, and didn’t thirst himself. He ate from the garden, never starving himself. His father was optimistic. He understood the reality before him. “Eh, who needs a whole lake?” he would often say. “Maybe Vendicatore can cure the drought, after all, with it. Then I’m all for it being gone!”

  But Davy, thinking on the sand-filled deck with the letter an inch from his lips, shook his head. It wasn’t true—his father was miserable leading up to his death. His father dumped tons upon tons of the drinking water he had stashed away into the crater in a deranged tantrum. He cursed at the heavens above. He turned suicidal.

  And the more Davy jumped between both scenarios, his memory became blurred, and the truth plummeted deep in his subconscious beyond reach. It tortured him beyond obsession, the distortion of his memory.

  And how many times had he imagined his father jumping? He wasn’t there to witness it himself. So, how could he not form a million different mental pictures of how it happened?

  The letter flew out of Davy’s hands. He leaped to grab it, but it glided out of the boat with the wind. He ran against the stanchion, almost flipping over, and bounced backward. He recovered and climbed off the boat onto the ramp of sand and slid down; he bolted after the flying letter, but it disappeared in the blinding light of the sun.

  He couldn’t find it. He returned to the boat, climbed onto it, and collapsed to the deck in defeat.

  “Where’s my lake, son?”

  Davy gasped, startled. There was his father, standing in front of him, by the helm, in spirit form. For some reason, he was white and more distinct. Not a hint of green; not a malfunction of light. And his father’s voice felt like he was there in the flesh speaking to him. Not a thunderous echo of a thousand speakers. No; this voice was soft and intimate—his father’s true voice.

  Davy looked at him. He knocked on his own head, trying to wake up from this hallucination, but his father yet stood there.

  “Son, why haven’t you retrieved my lake yet from Vendicatore, the man who stole it?”

  Davy stared, confused. The voice sounded real, but it was unclear. He couldn't understand most of his father’s words, but made some of them out.

  “I’m stopping Tidewater, as you ordered me. Then I’ll be able to take Solas’ water, and finally pour everything back here for good.”

  “Tidewater? What in the heavens is a ‘Tide . . . water?’”

  Davy’s forehead crinkled in confusion.

  “Why haven’t you retrieved my lake? It’s in North California. I saw it there. It’s not here.”

  “What?”

  And the ghost seemed to take on a confused face, too. But parts of its figure faded as the sun shined through it.

  Davy’s eyes widened. The ghost completely disappeared. As the sun sizzled over his head, he felt severe dryness in his throat and dizziness; he struggled to breathe as he fell to the deck. He reached for his bottle of water which he had lodged into the sand of the deck earlier.

  Then he heard his father speak once more, this time as though straight into his ear; he jerked his head. There was his father. His father, in the flesh, an old man, reeling in a rainbow trout as it slapped and flopped against the deck.

  His father laughed his infectious laugh. “Oh, boy. Look at this beauty, Davy!”

  “Very impressive, Mr. Bay.”

  Now this was a hoarse voice. The voice of a chain-smoker.

  Davy turned to the source of it. He saw it came from Governor Vendicatore, in his over-sized suit and that typical yellow necktie. He clapped as Davy’s father handled the fish on the deck.

  “This is what I live for,” Wesley Bay said.

  “And I will do nothing to impede on your lifestyle. It’s a simple agreement between you and me. I understand you already do great charity with your lake here.”

  “And I’ll continue. There is no better feeling than helping the unfortunate by one’s own heart.”

  “It is wonderful. Wonderful. Truly wonderful. You are a reasonable person. I know you would never betray our arrangement. That is why I will never think for a second to betray it myself.”

  “Good. So, a hundred gallons a week, then?”

  “Yes. I’ll have someone come by and collect it every Sunday.”

  “Fair enough.”

  And his father, after tossing his catch into a barrel, whipped his rod back against the water. But he saw something in the corner of his eye—a skinny man dunking his hands in the water on the shore, raising the precious, sparkling liquid to his lips.

  “Oi! Davy!”

  Davy jumped, startled. “Yes? What is it?”

  His father ignored him, not even looking at him.

  Quick footsteps clapped against the deck. Davy turned to see himself, two years younger, holding a rifle.

  The younger Davy stood, eager. “Yes, father?”

  His father pointed to the shore, to a distant blur of a man.

  “Shoot that man, my boy. He’s a thief!”

  The younger Davy leaned over the stanchion, aimed his rifle, and shot without hesitation.

  A faint splash sounded as the man’s body fell forward and crashed into the lake.

  “Good boy! Now we’ll needa fish him out.”

  Vendicatore watched the younger Davy with an awestruck smile on his face.

  “Very impressive shot, young man.”

  “I got no tolerance for thieves, Governor,” Davy’s father said. “If that man had an ounce of shame to ask me, I would’ve given him a sip. But look at him now.”

  The younger Davy went to sit against the stanchion, cleaning his gun with a smile on his face.

  A faint voice yelled from the cottage, screaming Davy’s name.

  Davy took a monocular and zoomed in on the source; it was Rodney Bight, flapping his flabby arms.

  Davy! Vendicatore’s goons are here!

  “What . . . ?”

  Davy looked at Vendicatore on the boat, whose head seemed to tilt in the direction of Rodney’s voice; but his head was rather tilted at the younger Davy.

  The younger Davy's face held a smile: he had pleased his father.

  With intrigue, Vendicatore crossed his arms as he studied the boy. Then he faded into dust and scattered into the wind, as well as Davy’s father, and the young Davy. Davy was alone again with the sand-drowned deck.

  CHAPTER 11

  Walking along the crater floor, Davy headed back home. He walked past the fish stick, the eggshells, and the plastic bottle—the things which Rodney threw into the crater the night before. He walked past the dock’s legs and began to climb the wall.

  But Rodney began to climb down, and in his bout of nervousness, he slipped. He slid down on his belly, the plank steps clippin
g him in the chin one-by-one as he cried. During his fall he collected Davy. They collapsed together against the floor.

  Davy suffocated and fought Rodney, who lied on top of him. “Get off me!”

  Rodney jumped and ran. He hid behind the gravestone of Davy’s father, in the shadow it cast. Davy saw Rodney at the gravestone, but he looked away immediately. He hated seeing the symbol of his father's death, which was also the spot of the suicide. Rodney was lucky. In looking away, Davy did not see him grip the stone with his greasy fingers. Nor did he see Rodney pull it out of the ground to cover him like a starfish. For if Davy caught even a glimpse of this, Rodney would have been dead by his snapping wrath. He was the Water Thief, after all.

  Davy looked away still. “What is happening, Rodney?”

  “Did you not hear me scream at you?”

  “Something about Vendicatore, I heard.”

  “He’s here,” Rodney whispered.

  Davy made a puzzled face. He looked up at the surface. “Why the hell is Vendicatore here?”

  “I don’t know. I wanted to come by super early to go over our plan, but when I came to knock on the door, I saw that black car pull up. It’s the one he uses. I swear I saw his crinkly face staring me down in the window. I ran. Now here I am.”

  Davy still looked up at the surface. He tried to hear a ruckus, but all he heard was the plastic bottle dragging along the crater floor with the wind. And behind him, he heard loose papers flapping, and turned to see dozens of them in a mini-twister.

  “No!” Rodney yelled. “My plans! I was up late drawing ‘em up! I can’t let Vendicatore see ‘em!”

  “Then go get them.”

  And Davy heard a loud thump against the ground, and the crater floor vibrated beneath his feet. He feared it was the second coming of the Great Earthquake of California’s past. But if he peeked, he would see it was his father’s gravestone which generated the thump. The stone now lied flat on the crater floor, as Rodney dropped it.