Stringer and the Deadly Flood

by Lou Cameron

  Cactus Jack protested, “We can’t! There’s folk downstream and I’m mighty fond of one of ’em! Afore we just stopped it, it was gushing through like a zillion fire hoses, overflowing the ditch on the far side entire!”

  Burke snorted in disgust and roared at the Mexicans in fair Spanish. Some were already scooping muck the other way as Burke told Cactus Jack, “We have even more folk on this side of the tracks. We built that culvert to drain water to the north, and anyone can see it has no other place to go, you idiot!”

  Stringer left them to work it out as he hopped up on the railroad embankment for a look-see on the other side. He whistled at the sight before him. Brown water, not much deeper than what he’d just climbed out of, was boiling ominously out the far side of the culvert as it dug a progressively deeper channel for itself along the original unstabilized irrigation ditch. Way off, across the brushwood tops, he could make out the roofing of a homespread, though he couldn’t tell how far the sheet of water had spread among the stems of the slate-gray greasewood. He dropped back down to rejoin the men arguing by the inside entrance of the timber culvert. He was dismayed to find himself now ankle-deep in water as he called out, “You’re both right. There’s one heap of water on its way to Salton’s Sink right now. As it digs in and speeds up it could add up to a hell of a mess. But trying to hold it all on this side could add up to even worse.”

  He turned and told Cactus Jack, “Jack, you’d best ride hard and fast for your gal’s place. If they have riding stock, have ’em mount up and ride west at right angles to the sheet flooding. If they don’t have stock, make ’em run like hell. The grade’s so gentle there’s no way of telling just where it may go. But if it don’t go down on this side fast, it just has to get worse!”

  Cactus Jack lit out for the remuda. Stringer then turned to Burke and advised, “You’d best get every man and boy who can shovel dirt to cut through that spoil bank on the far side. It ought to drop the pressure building against this railroad bank some.”

  Burke looked sick as he replied, “It won’t work. The ground to the south slopes up!”

  But Stringer insisted, “It can’t slope up that much. It’s flat all the way to the damned ocean to the naked eye. Even if this water only spreads a few inches deep to the south, we’re still talking lots of water. Where on earth could all of it have come from, as clear as the sky looks this morning?”

  Burke swore under his breath. “They just called me about it from Yuma. The goddamned flood crest of the goddamned old Gila has risen higher than it’s ever been recorded afore. Higher than this goddamned desert, in fact.” Then he yelled, “Where do you think you’re going?” as Stringer splashed back the way he’d just come.

  Without breaking stride, Stringer shouted back, “Donovan’s right about there being folk on the far side of that railroad bank. Somebody has to warn them. The floodwater boiling through the culverts back down the line may not do more than water the fields sort of heavy. But if a section of the Southern Pacific goes with the flood crest behind it, I doubt there’ll be time to build many arks!”

  Stringer ran back to his tent to find Kathy Doyle sitting fully dressed and amazingly sedate behind the wheel of her Stanley steamer, now hubcap deep in ominously swirling water. He hastily gathered his own belongings, tossed them in the back seat, and climbed in beside her, soaked to the knees, tersely announcing, “Let’s go, honey.”

  Kathy shook her head. “Not just yet. It takes a few minutes for the steam pressure to build up. That’s the only disadvantage to steamers, next to an electric or gas buggy. Where are we supposed to drive, once we can, by the way? There seems to be more water down the tracks, as far as I can see and… oh, look at what that steam shovel seems to be doing up ahead!”

  There was no seems-to about it as the big black pile of machinery slowly tilted backward toward the ditch it had been digging. Its front tracks undermined by swirling water, it picked up more speed and then suddenly belly-flopped into the wide but now invisible canal with a mighty splash, sending a wave of muddy water surging over the railroad embankment.

  Stringer shouted to Kathy, “Pressure or no pressure you’d better get cracking before this water rises to your kerosene burners.”

  She said she’d try it on three-quarters pressure and threw open the throttle. The rear wheels spun madly in the mud and shot up twin rooster tails of muddy foam before they were on their way.

  As the passenger seat tried to snap his spine, Stringer gasped, “I hope you’re at least aiming this cannon ball. If you are, see if you can get us up and over the railroad bank.”

  She could. It was scary as hell, to a man more used to cow ponies, to tear up and over with all four wheels in the air a spine-jolting part of the time. As the more blasé Miss Doyle drove calmly south, flattening greasewood bushes with her bumper at a respectable speed of fifty miles an hour, she asked again where they were headed now, adding, “I don’t see anything out ahead of us but more of the same, dear.”

  Stringer didn’t either, but he had reached a decision. “All right,” he said, “let’s see if we can cut across the front of that spreading water. Make it ten miles north and then swing east.”

  She said she’d try. He knew distances were hard to judge on the open desert, so he was surprised when she suddenly swung her steamer to the right. “We’re ten miles from those tracks if my odometer still works,” she explained. Then she asked almost plaintively, “Why are we doing this, dear?”

  He answered tersely, “We may be able to warn folk to get to… son of a bitch, there’s not any high ground to get to for miles! But at least we can make sure everyone’s up and dressed and ready to climb ladders in a hurry.”

  Then, as they went on crashing through greasewood and getting sprayed with muddy water, Kathy gasped, “Whee! I just turned into a speedboat! But no fooling, Stringer, ten miles out here, already?”

  He replied, “It’s moving shallow, but it’s moving fast. Even faster than I figured, judging the grade by eye alone. Slow down. The water’s moving fast enough to dig channels and carry a more serious amount of water. This’d be one hell of a time to find out if this thing floats.”

  “It doesn’t,” she said, as she slowed them to a crawl. Thanks to the almost silent steam cylinders driving the rear axle, they could hear running water all around them now above the less violent snapping of the brush they were busting through. He peered over the side. He didn’t like the looks of the brown sheet whipping under the running board or through the wheel spokes.

  “We’re not going to make it much farther,” he told her. “If we don’t turn back now, we might not make it at all.”

  As she turned around, the water now almost hubcap deep again and moving fast enough to argue with her steering wheel, Stringer reached in the back for his Winchester, aimed it up at the blue sky and began to fire bursts of three until he’d emptied the magazine. Kathy waited until her ears stopped ringing before she challenged, “I give up. I know what Jack London thinks of the Yellow Peril. But I didn’t think the Japanese Empire had a war fleet of flying machines yet.”

  He explained. “Hearing distress signals from the distance might inspire folk to take a look outside before they find themselves floating to Salton’s Sink, house and all. It was the least I could do. I reckon it’s everyone for themselves now, and… Jesus H. Christ, where is all this water coming from!”

  Kathy opened her throttle wider. They lit out to the west, hopefully out of the path of the flood, and made it at last. As they reached dry ground she swung back toward the railroad line, saying, “That was fun. Now we have to go back to that work camp and pick up some more boiler water. We started out on less than we should and…”

  “Water?” he cried, waving back the way they’d just come.

  Kathy explained, “It has to be distilled water, or at least clean enough to drink, dear. Otherwise my itsty-bitsy steam valves get too sticky-icky to do whatever steam valves are supposed to do.”

  Stringer made
a wry face. “Cut the baby talk and drive due south. That ought to take us as close to that construction camp as we want to get until we find out if it’s still there.”

  So she cranked her big stiff steering wheel in a show of muscle which might surprise anyone who’d never made love to her and proceeded to raise dust and flatten brush in that direction.

  Had not the steam drive been so silent, Stringer’s sharp ears never would have picked up the faint cries off to their left. At first he dismissed it as a bird call. But then he realized he’d never heard a bird call out for help in Spanish, so he told Kathy to halt. Once she’d stopped splintering greasewood, she could hear it too.

  “Wait here,” Stringer said. “This is no time to bog down, and you’re sure to if you stop over there where the water’s running.”

  Without waiting for an answer he rolled out his side and passed around the hood to make for the source of the odd wails. He couldn’t see anything ahead but mile after mile of greasewood, swaying like hell now as the water tore through the lower stems. The brush had hidden the water from sight when they were in the car, but now Stringer discovered it was already ankle-deep and warm as spit after spreading over so much sun-baked desert soil.

  He called out, “A ‘onde esta, señorita?’’ as the water got deeper with every step. A weaker voice called back, “Aqui! Precipitar por favor!” Then he got his bearings and hurried toward her as she’d pleaded with him to hurry.

  The Mexican girl, if she was a Mexican girl under all that muck, lay on her side in six inches of muddy water, propped up on one elbow with her left leg pinned under her fallen pony. The pony hadn’t made out so well. Its muzzle was under the swirling brown water and, like its rider, it was caked all over with slimy mud. Stringer grabbed the horn of her saddle, planted both boot heels in the muck, took a deep breath and grunted, “Ahora!” as he lifted the pony as much as he could.

  She had enough spunk to try to work her way out from under the dead animal. Still, it still took them over a dozen tries, working together, and in the end she lost her left boot. By this time she’d figured out what, if not who, Stringer was. So, as he hauled her to her feet in the now shin-deep current, she cried out in pretty good English, “Forget the boot. Where… oh where is the nearest dry ground?”

  “Too far for you to make it half barefoot,” he said as he scooped her up in his arms.

  The girl worried, “Oh, I am getting you all muddy!” But Stringer brushed aside her protests as he started wading with her back to Kathy and the steamer.

  By the time they reached the car, they had established who he was and that she was Maria Herrerra, who vaguely recalled a Juan Donovan, but hadn’t seen him recently and who was a lot more worried about her parents and the others who’d lit out from her spread on horseback when the dooryard suddenly turned into a frog pond in the middle of the desert. Her own pony had bolted with her when it found its hooves coming down in fetlock-deep goo. Then it had fallen with her, as Stringer already knew, and managed to drown itself in just a few inches of water and a heap of blind panic. She didn’t know where the others were and prayed they had made it.

  He assured her they were heading for the only high ground for miles and that anyone else with a lick of sense ought to wind up atop the railroad bank sooner or later.

  When Kathy Doyle saw them coming she quickly hauled out a wool blanket to wrap around the sopping wet little gal. When Maria protested she didn’t want to ruin La Señora’s blanket, Kathy told her to shut up and asked Stringer to put her in the back, which he did, tucking the blanket securely around the wet and unhappy girl. Then they were off and running for the railroad once more. As the Stanley fought its way up the slope a few minutes later it failed to put as much muscle into the effort as before. And when the front wheels got to the first rail, the Stanley gasped its last.

  “Well,” Kathy announced, “that’s that. We’ll have to walk the rest of the way and bring back fresh boiler water from the camp.”

  Then, as she stood up to step down, Kathy got her first clear look at what had been the desert south of the tracks. “Good heavens,” she exclaimed, “we’ve just discovered a whole new ocean!”

  Stringer got out on his side and strode across the tracks to stop and stare incredulously at what seemed to be a greasewood-studded sea, though maybe swamp would better describe it, all the way to the southern horizon. It seemed no more than a foot or so deep in any one spot, but that still added up to a fantastic amount of water.

  He rejoined the girls to inform them, “The culverts under this railbed can’t drain all that water north as fast it seems to keep coming. Don’t ask me where it’s coming from. This has to be the flood of the century, new as this century may be!”

  He was right, although neither he nor anyone else could see the whole picture at that point. Days later they would learn how most of the time, even in flood, the muddy Colorado picked up the lesser currents of the Gila to keep trending seaward between low muddy banks. Failing that, the Colorado spread out across empty miles of its lower delta. But this hadn’t been most of the time. The Colorado had made its way sedately enough to just above Yuma, only slightly swollen by early snow melt and thus still within its banks. But the recent late winter rains had fallen unusually hard on the upper watersheds of the Gila and its tributaries, turning that normally placid river into a snarling wolverine of brawling brown foam that played hell with its banks as it tore west across the Arizona desert at express train speed.

  Hitting the already high Colorado, all that water had no place to go but up over the west banks and across the flatter desert in that direction, searching for a channel, any channel, to do what water did naturally, namely run downhill. The wide wall of water found a weak spot at a temporary floodgate, designed to control one hell of a lot less water, and smashed through to flood the incomplete southern diversion. And then, the pent-up water found its way to its old bed along the fossil Alamo channel to Salton’s Sink and piled against the railroad bank blocking its downhill course to below sea level. Even as Stringer watched, although he couldn’t see it yet, the wide sheet of floodwater had reached Salton’s Sink to do two awesome things at once.

  Salton’s Sink was already filling with water, forming a vast inland lake, or salt lagoon. Meanwhile, the somewhat softer silt of the long-gone Alamo River was being cleaned out by the swift currents choosing it as the main course. It would take some time for anyone but lizards to notice, but as the old river bed was being scoured out, a twenty-foot waterfall was moving back up the reborn river about as fast as a human walked. The result was more than just a terribly destructive flash flood. The mighty Colorado was changing its course. Unless someone did something about it fast, the combined waters of the Colorado and all its many tributaries would run down into the Imperial Valley and just keep running until, in years to come, the desert as far north as Indio would be a huge and useless sea, far saltier than any ocean.

  But as Stringer and the girls watched in wonder, only grasping a small part of the bigger picture, the vast shallow sea of floodwater that was still impounded by the railroad embankment kept getting even deeper until, as if tired of screwing around with all those puny gushing culverts, the reborn desert river simply balled up a big wet fist and punched its way through in a house-high wall of swirling wet wreckage.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Good God!” gasped Kathy Doyle as the ground began to tremble under their feet. “I think we’re having an earthquake!”

  But as Stringer heard the thunder rolling their way, he declared, “I sure wish it was just an earthquake. It sounds more like this railroad’s gone out of business to the east and… Jumping Jesus, there she blows!”

  As the three of them stared in stunned dismay they could see tiny human figures down the tracks, heading their way as if the hounds of hell were chasing them. Hell it certainly was, in the form of churning brown water that swept away its pitiful human victims in a meat grinder of churning mud, railroad ballast rocks, and cross-
ties flipping end over end as the water burst through the gap in the railroad bank to tear northward into Salton’s Sink at forty to sixty miles an hour. The water and all the wreckage in its muddy embrace ran fastest where the current was already braiding deeper channels across the hitherto flat desert floor. The silt of the big valley, water-deposited to begin with, cut like brown sugar exposed to the slanting stream of a gigantic fire hose. Behind Stringer and Kathy the blanket-wrapped Maria made the sign of the cross and sobbed, “Oh, my poor little casa!”

  Neither of her American rescuers could make out where, amid all that spreading devastation one particular roof top might have been. As a tiny human figure was whipped atop a spreading wave and flipped twice, limply, in the air beyond, Kathy gasped, “Oh, no, that looked like a child!”

  Stringer didn’t answer. Then a bigger body, in a torn dress, made the same grotesque dolphin jump to vanish just as quickly under the muddy surface again, and Kathy made the sign of the cross as well.

  She screamed, “We can’t just stand here! We have to do something!”

  Stringer tried to calm her. “Let’s not panic,” he declared, as he searched about for a place to start running for. The desert floor was still dry to the north, and on the far side, to the south, the wide shallow sea they’d just noticed seemed to be turning into a big muddy swamp as the Colorado receded, or at least cut itself a new channel. Farther east, along the track, he saw the survivors were no longer running.

  “The gap doesn’t seem to be spreading any wider,” he told the girls. “I guess the river thinks it’s wide enough.”

  “I hope so. What do we do now?” Kathy asked him.