Ms. Got Rocks

by Jacqueline Colt

  “You are on my claim,” she said flatly but firmly, still standing in the river shallows with her hands at her sides.

  “This isn’t your claim, lady,” he shouted. “I’ve owned this claim for years,” he was waving his arms and moving toward Rocky and the dogs through the hip deep water. His body looked thin and well muscled in his diving gear.

  “Excuse me, that is my marker cairn right over there,and obviously you are over here. Ergo, you are on my claim.” Rocky pronounced firmly, while she pointed to the short rock tower in plain view on the riverbank.

  “Who the hell are you and who gave you permission to be on this claim.” The man shouted at her, as she noticed that the dogs were moving by the inch closer to him as he moved closer to them.

  “I’m Rochelle Clancy; this is my land and claim. You will move off now,” she again stated firmly. She used her maiden name.

  The dogs were moving even closer to him. He either was very stupid or extremely brave to not take a step back when confronted with two dogs, who obviously meant business.

  “Mister, I’ve asked you nicely to leave, I suggest you immediately do so,” her voice was all business.

  Rocky glanced down at the dogs and back into the wonderful eyes that were shooting sparks at her.

  “And what if I don’t want to leave; what the hell can you do about it?” he challenged her.

  He was now standing to his full height and taller than she was. Good Lord give her strength, her stomach had turned flip-flops, he was nothing short of luscious.

  “I can do nothing, but Fang and Brutus will do plenty. Later on, you will be getting a visit from the Sheriff.” Rocky advised him."Claim jumping is illegal in California."

  The dogs were now swimming in circles around him. They were definitely showing him this was their territory.

  Rocky quickly changed tactics when she remembered all diver carry knives.

  “You didn’t tell me your name. Do you live around here?” she tried a more reasonable tone to her voice.

  “The name is Callaghan.” Callaghan had apparently noticed Lovie and Phoebe in their roles as Fang and Brutus. He brought both of his hands to the surface, holding them still and easing himself to the middle of the river. He was taking care to move backward when neither of the dogs were behind him.

  “Okay Mrs. Clancy, I’ll move my dredge over for tonight. But this isn’t your claim and I can prove it and I will. Do not get too comfortable here where you do not belong,” Callaghan continued to yell as he slowly moved backward toward the serenely floating dredge rig.

  Callaghan was now into the swimming depth of the river, he turned and with a two dog escort swam to the dredge.

  “Fang, Brutus, here,” she called the dogs, they ignored her and swam several more times around the man hanging on the pontoon of the dredge.

  “Lovie, Phoebe, to me.”

  Maybe he would not notice the dogs have changed names.

  Lovie the big Boxer abandoned her circle and swam to the shallows and stood in front of Rocky. Phoebe the Lab and mutt was not finished with the intruder. She swam one complete circle around the dredge rig and then she turned to the riverbank to join her family.

  The three of them watched as Callaghan, pushing his dredge in front of him, swam to the upriver side of the marker rock cairn. The trio continued watching as he set the anchors and tied off to a cottonwood tree that shaded the rock cairn. He was not moving off one inch more than he must.

  With obvious disdain for Rocky and her claim, the claim jumper swam back to his dredge, flipped the motor back on and dove to the bottom.

  “Lovie, Phoebe, guard,” she left the dogs on the riverbank.

  “I need to get the Sheriff Deputies out here pronto.” she told them.

  As usual for her, the cell phone was somewhere that she was not.

  “I swear I’m going to pierce my nose and hang that damn thing from it,” she yelled as she ran along the river bank.

  She ran as fast as she could with bare feet, back to the cabin and used the land line to call the substation.

  Even if the claim jumper had moved off, she would still file a report, because claim jumping was serious business in the gold country of the West. It happened frequently when the price of gold went up. Unscrupulous miners move in onto un-worked claims. The claim jumpers dredge as much as they can without doing any reclamation or giving a care for the environment while they steal. Rocky wasn’t buying any excuse from this Callaghan character.

  Knowing the dogs have her back, Rocky waited for the deputies on the porch. She cannot see Callaghan's dredge from this side of the cabin. She knew the dogs would somehow give her warning, should Callaghan decide to come to the cabin. The dredge motor was still chugging vigorously in the distance.

  The evening light was lingering, when the deputy drove onto the meadow.

  He was Deputy Justin Dixon; Rocky went to Auburn High School with him. He had not changed a bit. He was still cute, in a sweet boyish way. Not tall, blonde, but not platinum, eyes almost green, but also almost blue, thin but not buff, every thing about his appearance was medium. But a nice medium, like excellent vanilla ice cream.

  Rocky gave him her data, and he walked down to the river’s edge.

  Rocky called the dogs to the porch and they ignored the Deputy and ran to her side.

  They waited on the porch steps. Rocky no longer heard the dredge motor. She used this wait to change from the roasting hot dive suit into jeans and peach colored cotton shirt and sandals.

  “Ms. Clancy, uh Rocky, he has left for the night.” I advised him to move upriver and stay upriver,” Deputy Dixon told her as they sat on the front steps.

  “He does own the claim and land upriver of you,” Dixon explained.“Do you want to file a complaint?” he asked her.

  “You bet I do Justin,” she answered. “You know how long my family has owned this land and this claim.”

  As they finished filling out the paperwork, Dev and Margie drove up onto the meadow.

  “Hey Justin, how’s it going,” Dev said, joining them, on the porch steps.

  “What did you do Rocky, run off a claim jumper?” Margie said in a joking way.

  The Deputy’s face and Rocky’s face looked up at her at the same time.

  Deputy Dixon asked, “How did you know that?”

  “Know what? No, you’re joking; you had a claim jumper, here?” Margie was stunned, and Devlin was speechless for a change.

  “Yeah, some guy named Callaghan, at the upriver cairn. He’s gone now. Justin ran him off, and I’ve filled out a report,” Rocky said signing the paperwork with a flourish.

  “Okay, I’ll be going now, Ms. Clancy, you should get some No Trespassing signs posted by the river. Give me a call if you see Mr. Callaghan hanging around here, okay?”

  “Nice seeing you again, Dev and Margie,” Deputy Dixon got into the squad car and drove back to the county road.

  Chapter 7

  “Who the heck is that?” Rocky was still in her sleeping bag on her bedroom floor. She could hear a car coming up the driveway. Both the dogs were up and making squeaky noises. Margie and her Border Collie Pokey must be almost at the cabin.

  “Jeez, I overslept,” Rocky commented to the excited dogs.

  “Good morning, Rocky, I got called into work, and Pokey is acting like a doofus this morning. Can you baby-sit her for me today? If I leave her alone, she will probably eat the bathtub or something stupid like that. I think she wants to play with your dogs. She has been squeaking since we turned onto the county road,” Margie was speed talking while Pokey was climbing all over her clean uniform.

  “Sure, let her out. Phoebe will wind her down. Pokey Girl will be happy to go home tonight,” Rocky said as Pokey ran across the meadow to see what Phoebe was doing.

  “In the back are some lawn chairs, I thought you could use some more. I had planned to spend today with you looking for chairs at Furniture Are Us, but duty calls and all that stuff,” Margie said as she
started backing the car around.

  Rocky fetched the lawn chairs out of the back, and with a wave and a blown kiss; Margie was off and down the driveway in a cloud of dust.

  The eggs were cooking when wall phone rang giving Rocky a start and a chuckle at herself.

  “Ms. Clancy this is Terry Spellman, I have the Auburn Times?” Mr. Spellman spoke with the question mark on the end of each sentence to ensure his listener understands.

  “Yes, this is she.” Rocky answered.

  “I need a photographer tomorrow; there is a rally, or maybe a strike by the woman employees of Unistat. Maybe you saw it on TV last night?” Terry asked.

  “No Terry I missed that, I was scaring off a claim jumper, and I don’t have a TV,” Rocky answered.

  “Oh, well, anyway, can you go down there and get some photos, and call me on the cell phone? Give me the description of what you see? You do have a cell phone, don’t you?” he asked.

  Rocky chose to ignore his almost snide patronizing remark.

  “Sure, I have a cell phone,” Rocky answered remembering that she was again unemployed. “How much are you paying and where do you want me to go?”

  Terry brightened up when he was assured that she was in the twenty-first century. Little did he know that she,on any given occasion did not have the vaguest notion where she last left her cell phone.

  Rocky and the newspaper man settled on the deal, and he outlined the scope of the photos that he would like to have shot.

  "By the way, how did you know I was a photographer and get my home number?"

  "I ran into Marge in the parking lot."

  * * *

  Unistat was a unionized factory, which manufactured gelatin capsules then filled them with powdered vitamins. The product was sold under various generic store brands. Unistat employed several hundred men and women.

  One would never know it was even located on the outskirts of a peaceful upscale suburb of Sacramento, except at quitting time when the streets became thronged with Unistat employees anxious to get home.

  Unistat was peaceful until several weeks ago, when a new hire in the payroll department uncovered that her sister, working on the filling line, received a dollar less per hour than the man working next to her.

  The new hire, searching further, checked each of the women union employees’ payroll records. She discovered that they too, brought home less money than the male worker in the same job category. The payroll new hire told her sister what she found.

  The sister promptly went to her shop steward to report this. Her shop union rep told her he had not heard of such a thing and would get back to her.

  The next morning her newly hired payroll clerk sister was terminated and escorted by two security guards off the Unistat property.

  Soon the women working at Unistat knew what had happened. Not only was the sister asking questions, but each woman employee was asking questions. Not just asking questions of the shop steward, but of the company supervisors.

  Each day the answers became increasingly vague and sometimes non-existent. The women met together one evening in small groups or by cell phone, they planned a work slowdown, even though they acknowledged it was an illegal action unless sanctioned by their union.

  They slowed down the next day and the following day. By Friday, any woman involved in any sort of discussion of the matter or who had asked questions was terminated. They went directly to the union hall, which was closed for the day. It was also closed each day the following week.

  A group of women contacted the state labor agency and the national office of their union, and took a number for service.

  After three weeks, the former employees still had not received a response from their union nor the company.

  In the meanwhile, the women planned to peacefully picket the factory in the morning. They wanted to make it easy for the media to get the video on the noon news. The organizing committee had done a crackerjack job contacting each newspaper and TV station within a one hundred mile radius of the factory.

  That was how Rocky found herself on the bright summer morning in Sacramento. She stood under the apricot trees on the edge of a large crowd of media trucks, cables, and microwave dishes. The media group was surrounding a smaller crowd of women carrying signs.

  Chapter 8

  The previous day, at the same time as Rocky was driving home to Whiskey Gap, another group was meeting. This meeting was held in a vacant retail space in a strip mall across Sacramento from the Unistat factory.

  A group of glum looking non-descript men sat on metal folding chairs in the stuffy, tobacco smoke laden room. The six men had been sitting for an hour. They were waiting for the man with the job instructions. They are assigned to the Unistat labor action. These half dozen men did not work for Unistat or the Union. They did not know each other, nor did they feel any loyalty to the man who hired them. They would follow instructions from the Boston Cochetti family, get paid and then blend into wherever it was that they had appeared from.

  There was only one handsome man in the group of hardened for hire men. His name was Callaghan and he was not what he seemed.

  * * *

  For fifteen minutes, the women paraded around the perimeter of the parking lot, waving their hand-printed signs and chanting slogans.

  Several men wearing tailor fitted suits appeared in the second story windows of the building. The men using bullhorns called down to the crowd and asked them to leave the property.

  The voices of the women began sounding increasingly shrill as they became louder to be heard over the men in the windows.

  Rocky was still on the fringes of the media, calmly taking photos that came within what Terry assigned.

  Shortly, the men in the windows stopped asking the women to leave. They began telling them that the parking lot was private property and the women would leave.

  Rocky was feeling the hair on the back of her neck rise. Something in the situation was not right.

  The men at the windows shouted a repeat of their demand that the group of women leave immediately, but this time they added a phrase.

  They added, “Leave before someone gets hurt."

  When Rocky heard that phrase she immediately moved forward away from the TV cameras and simultaneously speed dialed the newspaper’s phone number.

  In her right hand Rocky had the camera with her finger on the button, taking shots as fast as the camera could re-cycle.

  “Terry, this is Rocky at Unistat. Call the Sacto. police or Sheriff. This situation is getting ugly.”

  “What is happening? Describe what you see,” Terry asked.

  “To the left of me is a group of approximately fifty women carrying signs. They are not moving, just shouting slogans at the building where moments ago men in suits with bullhorns were standing at the windows.”

  “To my right is another group, they are slowly moving forward toward the locked gate in the chain link fence. The gate leads into the factory proper,” she continued to report.

  “The TV and news people are running forward to get a better look. You can smell that something is going to happen.” Rocky reported in a calm voice that was still easy for Terry to hear.

  At this point Rocky was being physically propelled along with the other reporters by the crush of the people behind them. A security guard walked to the locked gate and yelled to the women. There was so much noise coming from every direction Rocky could not hear what was said to report it to Terry.

  “The security man is waving his arm, like he is shoving the women back. I still cannot hear exactly what he is saying,” Rocky reported to the newspaper owner.

  The women at the front of the group were pushing the gate. They in turn were pushed from behind by the remainder of the crowd. The security man had left the area and returned to the security stand.

  Rocky was tall enough she could see that the man was talking on the phone. He looked as scared as Rocky felt.

  “Terry, I’m scared. This group is going to
take down that fence. Hold on, I have to change hands. Did you call the cops for me?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I did, they are going to be there soon,” Terry replied.

  “Great, I’m getting really bad vibes here,” Rocky was shouting into the phone but she didn’t realize that she was shouting.

  The reporter next to her said, “Yeah, something cool is about to go down, dude. It will be in time for the noon news. This is great.”

  The man pulled forward of Rocky and pushed his way between another group of media.

  Rocky was approaching the back of the crowd now. She was standing on the curb of the parking lot. Out of the corner of her eye, while she was frantically switching cameras, she glimpsed movement from across the street. She turned and watched a group of seven men cross the street coming at an easy lope toward the back of the crowd of media workers.

  She held the shutter down and the camera whirred into auto mode and the photos zipped through with the action.

  The action had crossed the street and to Rocky’s right. The men were moving in and around the media toward the women demonstrators. The men were making no excuses nor were they showing any consideration in how they moved. They moved with a purpose.

  “Terry, I’m going over right behind the men, I’m going in right behind them. Is your Worker’s Comp Insurance current?” Rocky joked.

  “Hell yeah, Baby, it is paid, and are you sure you want to do this, I mean I want you to do this, but shit this is more than you signed up for?” Terry asked her, as she moved forward with the men.

  “Too late for that Terry, I’m filming and I’m right behind the last man. They are running now and pushing people aside. They are still moving through the media people. I can barely see the lead man, and he is at the back of the group of women employees,” Rocky continued reporting.

  “The demonstrators are facing the group of men. The men are shouting something at the women, I can see their mouths working but it is so noisy I can’t hear them,” she yelled into the cell phone to Terry in Auburn.