Deadly Waters

by Theodore Judson

  “Don’t be,” said Mondragon. “I was in for only a year and a half; did it all in a minimum security federal prison down in Boron. That’s the treatment they dole out to tax evaders.”

  “What did you...?” asked Taylor with some hesitation.

  “Nothing,” laughed Mondragon and waved the matter away. “There’s the rub, as Billy Shakespeare would say. I didn’t do anything. I may have failed to dot every ‘I’ in my time. Not on this occasion. You may remember, my family was in agriculture.”

  Taylor recalled that the Mondragons had owned land in the Central Valley since before California became a state. They had been among the few old Spanish families to support General Fremont and the Golden Bear Republic, and had consequently been able to hang onto most of their wealth when California had entered the Union. The Mondragons had grown cotton when the first wells were drilled after World War I, and avocados and seedless grapes after the irrigation canals were dug.

  Taylor also remembered Erin at Stanford as a carefree party-giver who had broken the hearts of countless co-eds and managed somehow to graduate from the prestigious business school despite having twice been on probation. The last Taylor had heard of Mondragon, the last before he had read of Erin’s prison sentence, was that he had taken over his father’s estate.

  “I was in debt,” said Mondragon, taking a discrete sip from his drink, “what with the farm prices being so low for so long. I was caught in a tight place between the government and a developer. The state wanted to designate half the farm protected wetlands; the developer wanted a place to build condominiums. This isn’t boring you, is it, John?”

  “No,” said Taylor, again gazing out the big bay window at the city’s lights and pondering things he would rather not ponder.

  “Anyway,” said Mondragon, “my accountant--I made the mistake of letting someone else do my taxes--somehow made a series of deductions that were interpreted to be illegal. This happened at the time I was trapped in my impossible situation. I sold as much land as I was allowed to sell in order to cover what I supposedly owed. I could not sell enough, as the state prevented me from selling the irrigated land they had deemed ‘wetlands,’ as if I were growing grapes in a swamp. What I could raise was not enough to satisfy the court. Then came the prison sentence. I know now my accountant--my former accountant, I might say--was the brother-in-law of a certain developer. In the end I lost everything; to the state and to the certain developer. Everything.”

  “Did you go bankrupt, Erin?” asked Taylor.

  Mondragon sighed. “That was the one disgrace I avoided. After the lawyers and the government vultures and real estate criminals had picked my bones, there was enough to get started again, once I had done my time behind bars. As I say, I lost everything else. Just as you lost your company today.”

  “You know?” asked Taylor.

  “Heard it through the grapevine,” said Mondragon. “One learns how to listen in prison. As well as how to make new friends. I made lots of new friends in Boron. What do you plan to do, John, now that you have no responsibilities?”

  While he waited for Taylor’s answer, Mondragon thought of that first terrible moment when the guard had closed the iron door behind him. Mondragon had looked about at the dirty steel toilet and at the weird, frightened Columbian named Gusman cowering in the corner. The idiot had thought his new cellmate was going to hurt him like the other inmates in the prison had. The poor, frightened little drug mule did not realize that this wealthy stranger was going to protect him during the next year and a half.

  Taylor looked at Mondragon more closely. He did not recall the young Erin being very perceptive or even particularly interested in other people. Nor did Taylor understand why a man of Mondragon’s social station would have a butterfly tattoo on his wrist. Erin noted Taylor’s interest in the tattoo and pulled down the sleeve of his shirt to hide it.

  “A souvenir from another jailbird,” he explained. “In there it meant something.”

  “What does it mean?” asked Taylor.

  “I can’t recall at the moment. I’ll have to look it up in an encyclopedia.”

  In truth, Mondragon had designed the butterfly pattern himself. He had read of a French convict on Devil’s Island who had worn a similar tattoo. He had one on his wrist and so did Gusman, the drug mule he had befriended. Mondragon had told the poor fool that the symbol meant they were now brothers. He later put a similar tattoo on the wrist of a Navaho boy he also met in prison. Mondragon offered a similar tale of brotherhood to the gullible youth, and the young Navaho believed him as much as the Columbian had.

  Taylor laughed and felt more at ease with his old friend after Erin made the odd statement about an encyclopedia. “Sure. Why not look it up in the Bay Area Register,” he said. “Tell me: what do you do these days? Do you have any responsibilities now?”

  “I hang out. Mainly I invest. I’ve done quite well in the market. So has everyone else, I suppose, these past few years. My strategy is simple: I buy short in a stock as soon as it peaks on the Dow. Hewllet-Packard was my latest; it was up there in the stratosphere five years ago. Do you ever fish?”

  “You mean in the ocean?” asked Taylor, thinking of the excursion boats that daily went to sea from the city’s marinas.

  “That’s for old men,” said Mondragon. “I meant fly fishing. On the Colorado River. I go four, five times a year. Come with me sometime. Catch up on days gone by.”

  “I don’t know,” said Taylor, who never had many interests outside the family business. “I never was much into outdoorish things. What do you hear from your old roommate Al Harris?”

  “Al became an engineer,” said Mondragon, his mood becoming noticeably more somber at the mention of Harris’ name. “Aerospace. Very fancy government stuff. He worked for Boeing in Seattle during the Seventies. Had his own consulting firm until six years ago.”

  “And?” said Taylor.

  “He was doing something for the Air Force,” said Mondragons. “Something very intimidating. High explosive projectiles on satellites or something. His son--his name’s Ed--he was an engineer in his father’s firm. In 2000 the Air Force decided they could do the same research in Bhopal, India, for half as much, so they cancelled Al’s contract. Unlike me, he went bankrupt. Then he shot himself. In the mouth with a forty caliber revolver. I can even tell you the make of the gun: Smith and Wesson, double action, an antique. Not like Al at all. He preferred the latest model in firepower. His son found him on the living room sofa.”

  Taylor tried to imagine someone he once knew lying in a pool of blood and gore on a living room sofa. He had never seen a human being shot, but he had heard that an exiting bullet makes an ungodly mess.

  “Christ almighty,” said Taylor, and took a large swallow of his Scotch. “I didn’t know.”

  “I still see his boy Eddie now and then,” said Mondragon. “A fine young man. Works for a little firm in Wisconsin that makes airplane kits. He’s still torn up about his dad.”

  The two men were silent for nearly a half minute. Taylor pushed his drink away, for he all at once felt a bit uneasy in his stomach.

  “How about you?” he asked Mondragon. “Do you have kids?”

  “No,” said Mondragon, recovering his smile. “But I do have four ex-wives.”

  “You’ve been busy,” said Taylor. “I wonder when you have time to fish.”

  “Yes, very busy,” agreed Mondragon. “Too busy. The ex-wives keep a man on the move. One step ahead of their attorneys. While I was in prison I made a settlement with each of them. They thought I was a bad bet to make back then. Little did they know.”

  He threw back the remainder of his drink and stood from his chair.

  “Sorry about your trouble with—what’s his name? Benton?” he said to Taylor. “I know his type. He is one of the new men replacing us codgers. We--you and I and poor old Al Harris—we’re the dinosaurs Benton and his smarmy sort feast upon. They’re going to eat us up someday, if we don’t kill ourselve
s first. I know, I’m being overly negative. I tend to do that ever since I had my own troubles. Did I tell you they made my farms into a wildlife refuge?”

  “No.”

  “Turns out the developer, the one that ended up buying my land at ten cents on the dollar, was the cousin of a congressman on the Interior Committee. He sold the whole thing at market value, and everybody in the media said he was a hero. I suppose one could say he did good while doing well. Not that I want to sound bitter.”

  Mondragon smiled over his angry words and buttoned the top buttons of his trench coat. “See you around,” he said and patted Taylor on the shoulder.

  “I’ll give you my number,” said Taylor, reaching for the pack of business cards he kept in his coat pocket.

  “I have your number,” said Mondragon.

  “I don’t believe I have yours,” said Taylor.

  “No, no you don’t. I’m around. I’ll be in touch.”

  Mondragon was on his way out of the bar before Taylor could ask him another question. John watched the light brown trench coat exit the door and returned to contemplating the bay window.

  III

  02/17/06 23:14 Arizona Standard Time

  Coconino County Deputy Sheriff Bob Mathers parked his patrol car opposite the bar and walked across the empty street to a side door. At that time of night things would be beginning to pick up on the streets of Los Angeles, where Mathers had once been a cop. Here in Page, Arizona, everyone was already abed, save for a few miscreants who kept Bob busy while the other sixty-five hundred citizens in the desert town slept the deep sleep of the righteous. Mathers turned the knob and pushed the door open with his foot. Cautiously, he edged the side of his face around the doorjamb to have a look, always keeping his hand on his holster. A drunkard Mathers recognized as a cowboy from Utah stumbled past him muttering:

  “Cops. Good people.”

  Freddy, the owner, met Mathers instants after the officer had taken a couple slow steps across the dirty floor. “He’s gone now,” he told Mathers. “He’s got a gun, that old M-1 his uncle brought back from the war.”

  “Has he gone to the river?” asked Bob.

  “Where else?” said Freddy, not showing much concern about what had happened in his bar a few minutes earlier.

  Bob Mathers drove north from town on Highway 89 with his warning lights blazing and his siren turned off. When the road dipped into the Glen Canyon, where a bridge spanned the Colorado a few hundred yards below the mighty dam named after the canyon itself, he turned off his lights and coasted to a stop.

  The illuminated streets of Page seemed far away amidst the darkness of the nearly empty countryside. Bob saw Wayland leaning against the bridge’s northern railing and the old World War II rifle propped up on its butt a few feet from the intoxicated young man. Deputy Mathers turned off his engine and took care not to slam the door behind him as he left the car. As he walked along the pavement he could hear the dark river murmuring below him. Unlike the high desert country around Page, where the heat lingered for hours after sunset on a warm winter day, the air on the bridge was kept cool by the icy water rolling south from the snowy Rockies on its way to the Grand Canyon. The chill and the danger made Bob’s hands tingle a bit as he stepped closer. Wayland was singing to himself and to the river as Bob approached. The deputy took care to walk on the balls of his feet and stayed on the far side of the bridge.

  “These boots are made for walking,” sang Wayland, making use of only one note.

  “And that’s just what they’ll do.

  One of these days these boots

  Are gonna walk all over you.”

  As much as Bob hated the song, he was oddly charmed by Wayland’s drunken enthusiasm and the way the young man swayed while he sang. He let the singing continue and did not make a sound until he had crept across the roadway and grasped the rifle by its barrel.

  “Too much beer?” he asked.

  His words did not startle Wayland, who finished the final verse in his song and declared, “Once I learn to play the piano, I’m taking this show on the road.”

  “Been here long?” said Bob.

  Wayland staggered from the railing and sat on the concrete ridge that formed a curb

  below the steel buttress. He stretched his legs in front of him and exhaled audibly. “I’ve had quite a day, boss,” he told Bob. “First, there was that fist fight over in the KOA campground—”

  “What fight?” asked the deputy.

  “Forget I said anything,” said Wayland. “Then Henry got bent out of shape just ‘cause I couldn’t pay for my last eleven rounds. So I came out here to take a couple shots at the dam.’

  Mathers glanced up the river to the 708 high foot dam that held back 27,000,000 acre-feet of water and glanced down at the small carbine in his hand. “Did you hit it?”

  “I think I winged it a couple times,” said the young man. “Hard to tell with only those spot lights on it at night. The damn thing sure doesn’t seem to be hurt. You think I could get a bigger gun?”

  “Not tonight,” recommended Bob.

  He helped Wayland Zah stand upright and to walk to the patrol car. Regulations demanded Bob handcuff a reckless endangerment suspect, but he felt sorry for this sad young fellow. Wayland Zah was half Navaho and half something else, no one knew what; people only knew his mother lived on the giant Shiprock Reservation that lay east and south of Page and that his father was someone on America’s endless roadways who had stopped in Arizona for a couple days in the late 1970s.

  Because Wayland was wild and irresponsible, both the Navahos and Page’s white, and predominantly Mormon citizens, rejected him. He had, in other periods of his life, tried very hard to ingratiate himself to both groups.

  Wayland had once worn a wrinkled suit every Sunday to the Latter Day Saint Church in Page. The others in the congregation had left Wayland sitting by himself in a back pew, and he never got invited to the Wednesday night potluck suppers. When Wayland had grown his hair long and had gone to attend the ancient ceremonies on the reservation, the other Navaho said he was a disgrace to the tribal nation and he should go back to the drug dealers and motorcycle outlaws who were Wayland’s friends when he was a teenager.

  Bob Mathers was among the few in Page able to appreciate what it meant to be an outsider in a small town. After he had married Becky and had come to live in her home town, Bob had converted to Becky’s LDS faith--at least formally--and after three years in the local sheriff’s department he was still “the LA cop.” The other deputies made fun of Bob’s fastidious procedural methods and of his eagerness to check everything that appeared out of sorts in the lightly populated and almost crime- free community. “Eager Beaver Bob” the other lawmen called him, the galvanized Mormon known to keep beer in the back of his family’s refrigerator.

  Some in the community whispered that Bob had strayed so far as to have been seen smoking a cigarette and drinking a Coca Cola right in front of his infant daughter. The local church elders had told Bob to try harder to be an upright father and husband, even as the sheriff had coaxed him to be a little less serious about his work. Bob Mathers could only be as he was, and he saw the same inability to change in Wayland.

  “We need to get you out of this river chill, buddy,” Bob told Wayland as he helped him along. “You could ruin your voice. What would life be around here if we didn’t have you to sing to us?”

  “Really?” said the boy. “I’ve been learning some new ones, boss. For Sheriff Anderson. How do you think he feels about show tunes?”

  “They would appeal to his feminine side.”

  “Even stuff from Cats?”

  “He’d insist on a whole medley, were he here. He’s down in Flagstaff most of the time.”

  Bob put Wayland in the back of the car and the M-1 in the trunk. Wayland was bobbing from side to side and talking about a basketball game he had seen on TV.

  “You think I could play in the NBA?” he asked, and laid down in the back seat. “I m
ean, if I grew another two feet?”

  “You’re twenty-eight years old,” said Bob. “I think maybe you’re past your growth spurt.”

  “Another dream shot to hell,” said Wayland, closing his eyes. “I would have been great in the NBA. I could dye my hair like Rodman. Be one crazy warhoop with a tiger-stripe do.”

  “You shouldn’t call yourself names,” said Bob from the driver’s seat.

  “Everybody else does,” said Wayland. “You know what an apple is, boss? It’s somebody red on the outside and white inside. My boys call me that down in Tuba City,” he said, referring to a town on the reservation where his mother lived.

  “They don’t know you well enough.”

  “My old motorcycle homies, like Jeremy Russleman, they used to call me Tonto.”

  “Jeremy Russleman is a punk,” said Bob. “That’s why he’s doing two to four years for distribution of narcotics. Punks end up like that.”

  “I was in prison, too,” said Wayland Zah.

  “For six months,” said Bob, with a trace of guilt in his voice, since he had made the drug bust that had sent his friend behind bars. “And since you are a Native American—”

  “Native American!” sneered Wayland. “That’s Injun to you, kemo sabe. I’m an Injun, boss. Just a plain old vanilla Injun.”

  “Since you are a Native American,” continued Bob, “you were transferred to that federal minimum security facility in California, which is hardly the same as real prison. Your permanent record doesn’t say ‘prison’, it says you got treatment.”

  “I met a guy in there,” said Wayland. “He called me the other day.”

  “Another…” Bob was about to say ‘ex-con’ but he stopped himself, because such a harsh term would have defeated the point he was trying to make. “You need to stay away from bad influences,” he said instead. “Are you still seeing that lady from Chinle? That’s what you need, buddy; get cleaned up, get a job, get married—”