The tanker turned in from Santa Rosa Boulevard and plowed through the boughs of Big Red, the western red cedar that anchored the east side of the entry into the gardens. Then the tanker’s mirror clipped the hedge of rhodies, causing brittle leaves to clatter like playing cards onto the driveway.
Takahashi’s heart went heavy at the sight of it. He couldn’t water everything. That was the new reality. He wanted to shout at yesterday’s board meeting, amidst the budget dithering: Idiots! Have you ever seen Sophie’s Choice? Where the mother has to choose which of her children will live and which the Nazis will take? That’s what I’m doing out there every day without enough water! Choosing between life and death!
He was keeping the reed river alive, for example, but any green on those rhodies was a photosynthetic mirage, a backlog of chlorophyll in a plant that had an underappreciated degree of succulence. Of course everybody’s precious water lilies had to survive, and the scum-sucking koi were sacrosanct, which meant keeping the entire six ponds in full circulation, while the alpine prairie flowers, which looked fine today, were getting shorted on the moisture they required to bloom next month.
Takahashi watched the tanker in disbelief.
Also, dryness in the understory around the tea house was killing the Rock Cap moss that Takahashi had nurtured against incredible botanical odds. Green moss in Phoenix, caressing the visual of a Japanese chashitsu. No one seemed to get how surreal that was. Even with the retreads and slackers they gave him for staff, Takahashi made it all look effortless—that was his problem.
The gardener was primed to holler at someone, so he came up out of the reed river in his hip boots, tossing his water sample—the water was little better than piss, there was your analysis—and he came right through that rhodie hedge himself, scattering leaves and yelling, “Hey! Hey, asshole!” at the tail end of the tanker. Goddamn milk tanker! Michigan plates! What the hell?
The Ikebana Club breakfast ladies had to scatter a second time as Takahashi clomped through with his nasty language and his uncouth scowl. No wa today, ladies. No escape into your fantasy of being delicate Edo princesses arranging sublimated vaginas into negative space. This is your scrub-bucket garden troll, coming through in the heat of the greatest drought in a hundred years.
Enjoy your ice water, he wanted to roar at the cringing trustfund biddies. Savor your precious muskmelon. Flush your every fart.
He was blowing up. Finally.
But he saved himself for the idiot truck driver. This turned out to be a mellow-looking long-haired dude about Takahashi’s age, obviously a stoner, easing down from the cab in cargo shorts and flip-flops, fishing a pack of American Spirit from his open shirt and broadcasting a monster dumbshit grin. For a moment, Takahashi wondered if he were going apply for a job, say he was sent over from the Huber Center.
“’Sup, bro?”
Takahashi was not in good control of what he said. It was garbled and off kilter, profane and unhinged, oaths and curses rattling to the asphalt between them like desiccated foliage cast off from the root of his sanity.
But it felt good. And whatever he said, the truck driver didn’t seem to take it personally.
This Dead Head lit his smoke in the middle of Takahashi’s barrage. He nodded slowly, in sympathy. He said, “Yeah, I figured you’d be about at wit’s end, dealing with this water shortage.”
He extended the cigarette pack.
“You want one of these?”
Danny Tervo walked the garden with this guy. Pretty much the same scene as Tucson, he observed. Things looked ok to the innocent eye—like Bob Marley looked just fine until the day you heard the news about his lungs. The deal here, with these exotic gardens in the southwest, was they were miniature counterfeit ecosystems worth millions of dollars, delicate sisters of the golf course, which obviously was the holy emblem of what would soon become known—to Tervo’s thinking—as the “water class.” The noblesse de l’eau, as he was calling them in his mind.
Shit was coming down. People couldn’t see it. Wasn’t rain, either.
A Japanese garden like this, for example, was no mere ornament. It was a yin in the wholeness of privilege. It was the feminine, the Apollonian, the restful summer palace of the pillaging extractionist yang-wise brain wave. Any of that. Think about it. Water was the new oil, Tervo concluded.
Brent Takahashi didn’t disagree. He seemed a lot like Armando, the hands-on guy at the garden in Tucson. These dudes spent their days taking care of plants. They got pretty wise. They saw the way things worked. They looked a little like village idiots with their muddy knees and squeaking wheelbarrows, but they had the insights of prophets, and they would just about die for their botanical children. Only type more committed, Tervo imagined, would be dope growers.
“So that’s not a milk truck,” Takahashi said. “Soy or otherwise.”
“Nope.”
“I get it,” he said. “You have what I need. Now what?”
They strolled along the reed river to the chashitsu, Danny Tervo beginning with geology and the essential differences between the southwest and the Midwest. He covered the thin soils and shallow aquifers of the desert biome. He noted the eco-drain of misplaced agriculture and disastrously mislocated population centers. He mourned the “tragedy of the commons” represented first by the Colorado River and in turn by numerous other western water “resources.” All of this had been perfectly obvious for minimum a century, Tervo said, but suddenly it was on the mind of Pop-Tart Joe, now that there was a monster drought to pound a little truth through all the government and corporate smokescreening.
Takahashi was down with all that. Tervo paused to look across the sculpted river at a yawning kid dragging a bamboo broom over a stone path, stirring up the prematurely fallen leaves of an ornamental maple. The kid’s Phoenix Suns jersey, orange as a poppy, was the most vivid color in the scene. Tervo noted the tattoos and the sullen, listless sweeping. “Our board is into socially conscious hiring,” Takahashi told him. “That piece of work is less than a week out of the Arizona Boys Ranch at Oracle. Starts work with me at six am. If you want to call that work.”
Tervo met the kid’s sulking stare. “Cool.”
Takahashi telegraphed an invigorated sweeping motion. The kid sat down on a rock in the shade.
Tervo whistled softly to himself. “Number thirteen. Is that a Steve Nash jersey?”
“Yeah.”
Tervo whistled again. Nash was a player. He gave the kid a little nod and proceeded on to the Canadian Shield and then to the wonder of Great Lakes hydrology. Long story short, he told the gardener, as they arrived at the chashitsu, there was enough clean, limestone-filtered agua in Lake Superior alone to cover the entire United States seven feet deep—and that was without recharge. There was no water shortage, Tervo said. There was simply a water distribution problem, not currently addressed by the market.
Takahashi dug it. He took his hip boots off. Tervo released his flip-flops. As they stepped up from the genkan of the tea house, Tervo made a nifty move: he turned, bent, and reversed their footwear so it pointed neatly out, a subtle Japanese courtesy he had picked up somewhere and squirreled away in the Tervo brain for a moment like this.
Takahashi cleared the do not enter signage and they sat cross legged on the tatami. Takahashi slid open the paper-paned shoji door before them, revealing the garden. Tervo observed that the kid in the Nash jersey had relocated. He had crossed the reed river into a wilting stand of Egyptian lilies nearer to the tea house. Tervo could see his acne from this distance, his close-set eyes and busted nose, his greasy brown hair pinched by an orange headband. The kid was maybe five-seven, a hundred and thirty pounds. But he was squinting back with some big attitude now—larval, ready to hatch—squinting right at Tervo.
“Billy Rowntree,” Takahashi said, noting Tervo’s continued interest. “His first day on the job, he figured out how to smoke weed behind the waterfall. But I had to turn that whole re-circ system off. Now we’re finding burnt matches in the rhodies.�
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Tervo nodded. “Been there, man.”
“Huh? My rhodies?”
“In juvie. And out, man. Out is the rush. Out is like, What did I miss? Where did everybody go? It’s like you gotta suddenly be somebody, figure out how to be a player again.”
“Oh, he’s a player all right,” Takahashi said. “He’s selling skank to my whole damn staff. Now everybody’s playing.”
Tervo watched Rowntree a few moments longer. Rowntree watched him back. Tervo pantomimed a free throw, Nash-style, caused the kid to look away.
“Anyway, what I offer is primo stuff,” he continued. “Verified by state-of-the-art hydrologic analysis. Super-low TDS, virtually toxin-free. Some of the very finest mizu in the world.”
Takahashi was a Copenhagenite. He went into the pocket of his coveralls for a tin. He tucked a dank pinch beneath his lip. “Watch this,” he said, looking across the garden before he shot a thin brown stream into the ashes of the fire pit, which primly swallowed the evidence. Tervo smiled. Choice.
“You get a five-thousand gallon tanker down here about once a month, it would be like a regular blood infusion.” Tervo got a lotus going: cross-legged, erect, thumbs and forefingers encircled over his knees. His scrotum felt entirely normal again from the surgery. He exhaled from his diaphragm. “Keep all this lovely shit alive.”
Takahashi spit again. “It’s illegal?”
“Don’t know.”
“What kind of crime would it be?”
Tervo laughed. He didn’t know that either. That was the truth. Nobody knew. This was the future, man. This was the kind of landscape you traveled into when you got out ahead of the curve. Trucking water was interstate, federal—that was as far as he could guess.
Takahashi said, “I’m not a criminal. I don’t want to deal with criminals.”
“Totally understood, my brother.”
“How can I be sure you don’t rip me off, stop at a pond somewhere in Oklahoma and stick a hose in the tank?”
Tervo laughed again. “I came in the driveway earlier,” he said, “you were using that new Hach spectrophotometer, am I right? That’s how you be sure. Verification, my brother. Like a fingerprint. You test my stuff on the spot. It doesn’t meet your specs, I turn the truck around.”
“It’s gonna be you?”
“Nice,” Tervo said. “Nice question.”
He did a bit of Drishti gazing. Billy Rowntree could connect him. That is what he saw.
“Actually, due to some new circumstances up in the U.P., it looks like I’ll be expanding over the next few months. Not sure I could guarantee the driver would be me. Could be a totally cool homeboy of mine.”
Tervo watched as Takahashi gave that a long bit of thought. If this were anything like the situation in Tucson, the gardener was past deciding and into wondering where the money would come from. So now Takahashi would want to know …
“How much you asking?”
“The thing is,” Tervo said, “even if I expand to two, three trucks, I’ll still only be able to service a handful of clients. Round trip with no down-time takes about three days. Work in a little sleep and it’s five. Gotta give the trucks time off for maintenance. I’m thinking since currently I just have the one truck, I’m looking at a three-client limit. I got one on board already, with sales calls ahead at Albuquerque, Amarillo, Wichita Falls, and Tulsa. I’ll have my schedule filled by the time I get home. If you can’t commit now, then in a couple months maybe I can afford to put another tanker on line and work you in.”
“Shit.” Takahashi worried his lip and spat. “A couple months?”
“This is a highly capitalized business,” Tervo told him. “The minimum down on a tanker is twenty grand, man.”
“So how much you asking?” Takahashi insisted.
“How much can you afford?”
Now Takahashi was looking out at his garden. His vegetation was on the very brink, like everything in the southwest that hadn’t already perished. Tervo had driven past golf courses in small communities, city links, that were brown and brick hard, completely dead. Lakes had shrunken and scummed over. Swimming pools sat empty and filmed with dust. Whoever grew the weed Billy Roundtree was selling had to be in panic mode, ready to throw money at water. Tervo mimed another free throw across the garden.
“Keep this in mind, my friend. You don’t have to ask anybody or tell anybody. You don’t have to fight with some mall worm who wants to wash his car. No conflicts. No politics. No paper trail. You just get water.”
Takahashi was nodding, ruminating. He kept that up for a long time. Meanwhile Tervo did some chakra breathing. He watched a dozen or so ladies exit the café and totter blinking onto the garden paths, fitting on big sunglasses and holding one another by the arm. A group of them seemed pleased by the overheated koi that straggled up to suck at food pellets hanging in the algae, tossed there by a little boy with his mother.
Tervo exhaled slowly and completely. He inhaled the same way. Then he exhaled again. After a few more, Takahashi was doing it too.
“Your infinity is inside you, man, it really is.”
“Yeah,” said Takahashi.
Tervo watched Billy Rowntree drop his rake in the Egyptian lilies and skulk away toward a high hedge of rhododendrons. Tervo put two fingers in his mouth and whistled one short, high note. The kid kept going.
Tervo smiled at Takahashi. “Tell you what,” he said. “How about I make you an introductory offer?”
7
Dog awoke at the exact moment of catheter insertion with a sense of something gone horribly wrong. It was an abstract, druggy feeling, presenting with severe nausea and primal fear, but no specifics.
He lay on his left side. Someone steadied him from behind. A very large nurse held his skewered penis in her blue-gloved hand. She swabbed brown goo around the glans. She tossed stained cotton in a trash can.
Then she trailed the catheter tube off the side of the bed. A small foam block appeared over Dog’s shoulder. They rolled him on top of this, his right hip bone on it. They inserted another block under his left hip. “Just enough space for Mr. Wee-Wee,” the big nurse said as she fit Dog’s face into a padded window at the head of the bed.
He stared beneath, watching his urine drip into a bag. A door closed. Church bells rang. Then it was quiet. Dog began to holler at the floor tiles until they brought him a doctor, who sang to him in flawless Bombay English.
“You were injured dorsally by a twenty-gauge shotgun filled with sharp chloride crystals at a distance of approximately ten meters,” the doctor told him. “This is why you are here.”
“I don’t feel much. What am I on?”
“You have been administered Percocet intravenously at ten milligrams per two hours time.”
Dog’s mouth was dry. A pair of brown shoes appeared beneath his urine bag.
“I counted eleven bells.”
“The current time is 11:26 AM.”
“What day?”
“Your injury occurred yesterday. This is Thursday.”
So he still had time, Dog thought. It took him another few moments to figure out what he had time for.
Mary Jane. Eamon’s birthday. The grave.
Call her. Let her know what happened. Dog thought: Christ, M.J.—and off wandered his mind.
She was picky when he met her. Rich, spoiled, Catholic, icy and hard to get. Fastidious and repressed. She was air-brushed pretty in the mode of a Land’s End catalog model whom you could not imagine out of her high-cut panties, no way. This was the force field of conceit and inhibition that Dog had risen to, like the macho fool he was, and battled through and exhausted himself against until he had little left for marriage and none left when motherhood unleashed M.J.'s fury and Dog was the only target over ten pounds in the house. M.J. hadn’t ever not been angry, Dog discovered in retrospect. She needed a fight.
“Grab the bag, doc. I’m gonna sit up.”
He felt a small, cool hand on the back of his neck. It was eno
ugh to pin his face through the hole. He seemed to have no strength.
“Your buttocks have been injured somewhat as well, sir. We will see, but it is quite likely you will have to remain face down for at least two weeks following debridement without closure.” The hand lingered. “In addition, the multiplicity of sites for potential damage to underlying structure mandates diagnostic arteriography.”
“Uh-huh. Yeah. I need to make a phone call.”
“I am sorry, sir.”
“I need to make a phone call.”
Dog strained against the hand on his neck. He saw the brown shoes move around the front of the bed. Dimly, Dog understood: the IV stand. After the brown shoes disappeared, Dog wrapped one hand around the aluminum post and the other around his catheter. But he could not remember why he had done this. He felt too pleasant to think about it. He counted the church bells ring twelve and he was fishing.
He was on a river in Spain. He had never been to Spain, but he was in Spain. He was fluent in the language, telling Mary Jane why mortar shells exploded along the river bank. She rode his back, nails like claws in the flesh of his chest. Dead fish floated in the river. Many dead fish, large as torsos. But Dog was spot-fishing. He told Mary Jane, “As soon as I hook one, the rest will spook, and we’ll never see him again.” He never hooked the one he wanted. She cursed him as he sank underwater, down with the big Montana sturgeon, touching their rough plates as they finned behind boulders. These were ancient creatures. These were present with the dinosaurs. Apatosaurus. Stegosaurus. Triceratops. Fossils in the limestone—see? Ancient sea bed. No one listening any more. Dog in troll-mode, alone in rough weather, off the map. Huge Dog stepping like Paul Bunyan in a tiny spring creek, all rock and cress and glass-clear water holding big, migrating browns in such chromatic fall splendor they were hard to look at, Dog snicking a chewed black wooly bugger along the edge of a cress bed in the wind and rain and hooking a savage, kipe-jawed, twenty-inch brown painted by Gustav Klimt that thrashed, thrashed, spilling sperm through Dog’s net. He couldn’t stop it. Thrashing.
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