Riding her horse across a meadow with flowers in it, riding in a race and winning a prize, everybody cheering, not believing she’d really won, cheering. Then they’d have a barbecue like they used to have, when the second foster father was there, basting the meat with sauce and Jim helping out. The cats walking around, music turned up loud so they could hear it out the window, his foster singing him a dirty song to the tune of “Turkey in the Straw.” It was mostly a funny song, so it wasn’t dirty; and his foster always told him not to hurt anything, so it wasn’t bad. Or his other foster father did — he wasn’t sure. He’d tell his foster about lying on the ground and feeling it shiver in terror, watching the grass and the trees shiver. He might tell him about seeing a little boy trying to crawl away and getting shot. Because his foster father had known Jesus. But he did not know the face of God.
Or did he? Softly, Jim sang, Way down south where the trains run fast / A baboon stuck his finger up a monkey’s ass. / The baboon said, Well fuck my soul / Get your fucking finger out of my asshole. A family came down the stairs, little girls running ahead of their mother. They wouldn’t think his sister would win the prize, but she would; she would race on her horse ahead of everybody, her family cheering for her. Not just her foster family, but her real family, Jim’s real family. Like the Iraqis had cheered when they first came into the town. Before they had shot.
RAW WATER by Wells Tower
“Just let me out of here, man,” said Cora Booth. “I’m sick. I’m dying.”
“Of what?” asked Rodney, her husband, blinking at the wheel, scoliotic with exhaustion. He’d been sitting there for four days, steering the pickup down out of Boston, a trailer shimmying on the ball hitch, a mattress held to the roof of the camper shell with tie-downs that razzed like an attack of giant farting bees.
“Ford poisoning,” Cora said. “Truckanosis, stage four. I want out. I’ll walk from here.”
Rodney told his wife that a hundred and twenty miles lay between them and the home they’d rented in the desert, sight unseen.
“Perfect,” she said. “I’ll see you in four days. You’ll appreciate the benefits. I’ll have a tan and my ass will be a huge wad of muscle. You can climb up on it and ride like a little monkey.”
“I’m so tired. I’m sad and confused,” said Rodney. “I’m in a thing where I see the road, I just don’t comprehend it. I don’t understand what it means.”
Cora rolled down the window to photograph a balustrade of planted organ cactuses strobing past in rows.
“Need a favor, chum?” she said, toying with his zipper.
“What I need is to focus here,” Rodney said. “The white lines keep swapping around.”
“How about let’s scoot up one of those little fire trails,” Cora said. “You won’t get dirty, I promise. We’ll put the tailgate down and do some stunts on it.”
The suggestion compounded Rodney’s fatigue. It had been a half decade since he and Cora had made any kind of habitual love, and Rodney was fine with that. Even during his teenage hormone boom, he’d been a fairly unvenereal person. As he saw it, their marriage hit its best years once the erotic gunpowder burned off and it cooled to a more tough and precious alloy of long friendship and love from the deep heart. But Cora, who was forty-three, had lately emerged from menopause with large itches in her. Now she was hassling him for a session more days than not. After so many tranquil, sexless years, Rodney felt there was something unseemly, a mild whang of incest, in mounting his best friend. Plus she had turned rough and impersonal in her throes, like a cat on its post. She didn’t look at him while they were striving. She went off somewhere by herself. Her eyes were always closed, her body arched, her jaw thrusting up from the curtains of her graying hair, mouth parted. Watching her, Rodney didn’t feel at all like a proper husband in a love rite with his wife, more a bootleg hospice man bungling a euthanasia that did not spare much pain.
“Later. Got to dog traffic. I want to get the big stuff moved in while there’s still light,” said Rodney to Cora, though night was obviously far away, and they were making good time into the hills.
—
The truck crested the ridge into warm light and the big view occurred. “Brakes, right now,” said Cora.
The westward face of the mountain sloped down to the vast brownness of the Anasazi Trough, a crater of rusty land in whose center lay sixty square miles of the world’s newest inland ocean, the Anasazi Sea.
Rodney swung the truck onto the shoulder. Cora sprang to the trailer and fetched her big camera, eight by ten, an antique device whose leather bellows she massaged after each use with neat’s-foot oil. She set up the tripod on the roadside promontory. Sounds of muffled cooing pleasure issued from her photographer’s shroud.
Truly, it was a view to make a visual person moan. The sea’s geometry was striking — a perfect rectangle, two miles wide and thirty miles long. But its water was a stupefying sight: livid red, a giant, tranquil plain the color of cranberry pulp.
The Anasazi was America’s first foray into the new global fashion for do-it-yourself oceans — huge ponds of seawater, piped or channeled into desert depressions as an antidote to sea-level rise. The Libyans pioneered the practice with the great systematic flood of the Qattara Depression in the Cairo desert. The water made one species of fox extinct and thousands of humans rich. Evaporation from the artificial sea rained down on new olive plantations. Villages emerged. Fisherfolk raised families hauling tilefish and mackerel out of a former bowl of hot dirt. American investors were inspired. They organized the condemnation of the Anasazi Trough a hundred miles northwest of Phoenix and ran a huge pipe to the Gulf of Mexico. Six million gallons of seawater flowed in every day, to be boiled and filtered at the grandest desalination facility in the western hemisphere.
A land fever caught hold. The minor city of Port Miracle burgeoned somewhat on the sea’s western shore. On the east coast sat Triton Estates, a gated sanctuary for golfers and owners of small planes. But before the yacht club had sold its last mooring, the young sea began to misbehave. The evaporation clouds were supposed to float eastward to the highlands and wring fresh rain from themselves. Instead, the clouds caught a thermal south, dumping their bounty on the far side of the Mexican border, nourishing a corn and strawberry bonanza in the dry land outside Juárez. With no cloud cover over the Anasazi, the sun went to work and started cooking the sea into a concentrated brine. Meanwhile, even as acreage spiraled toward Tahoe prices, the grid spread: toilets, lawns, and putting greens quietly embezzling the budget of desalinated water that should have been pumped back into the sea to keep salt levels at a healthy poise. By the sea’s tenth birthday, it was fifteen times as saline as the Pacific, dense enough to float small stones. The desalination plant’s reverse-osmosis filters, designed to last five years, started blowing out after six months on the job. The land boom on the Anasazi fell apart when water got so expensive that it was cheaper to flush the commode with half-and-half.