“What kind of store?”
“Frame shop. The wallboard leached the water to the ceiling till it fell in. The light fixtures electrocuted the water snakes. They’re still floating on top.”
She laughed without changing her eyes or her mouth. It was just a sound coming from her head.
“I cut through here to dodge the flooding,” Zules said. “All I had to do was make California and I’d be safe.”
“Water runs south.”
“I damn sure wish I never.”
“I got wishes, too.”
“Who don’t.”
“Not like mine,” she said. “I wish I was somebody else. I’m not a good person anymore.”
“Maybe you’re a little drunk’s all.”
“I can hold my liquor.”
“I ain’t saying you can’t.”
“It’s the water,” she said. “We don’t have anywhere to put it. It won’t pile up like snow. It just stays and then it goes bad. Same as me.”
“Maybe you should have some coffee.”
She stood and leaned against the table.
“I’m not drunk,” she said. “I’m sober as a judge.”
“That ain’t saying much where I’m from.”
“Maybe you should go back there.”
The woman walked slowly to the door, taking each step in a careful manner, resting her hand on bar stools for support. Zules wished he was the kind of guy who’d follow her home. He ordered another shot. He couldn’t quite believe that he’d abandoned a full trailer in Oregon. He felt like a turtle who’d run off and left his shell.
In the morning his head hurt. He turned on the TV and learned that a four-foot wave of water had ripped across the valley. The water had spread over the land like batter in a skillet, covering everything, moving on its own. The phone rang and Zules hoped it was the woman from the night before.
“This is Deputy Terry,” a hurried voice said. “We got us a trailer. You’ll have to describe yours.”
“It’s a Peterbilt. Grey and white with Kentucky plates. Mud flaps got chrome bulldogs on them.”
“Son of a bitch. We got somebody else’s rig.”
“Regular yard sale out there, ain’t it.”
The deputy hung up and Zules went to the lounge, suddenly homesick for Kentucky. The hillsides were so steep it was like living in a maze, but it wasn’t a place where you could lose a truck trailer. When Zules was home he stayed with his mother, who was seventy-four. As the youngest child, he was supposed to take care of her, but after a few days he’d be restless, ready for straight roads and flat land. His mother said he was like a cat that hadn’t been neutered. He said she had a heart like railroad steel.
The TV in the bar requested volunteers to help sandbag the town, and the bartender offered Zules a lift. They drove through streets of water past floating propane tanks tied to trees. Sandbags made walls around buildings — the fancier the business, the higher the wall.
A dull grey sky covered the sun. Zules waded to a line of people passing sandbags. He found a shovel and someone squatted before him with an open bag and he filled it with sand. The damp air was heavy in his lungs. Shrubs were dead from too much rain. A man carrying a video camera with a number three on it stepped around the pile of sand. Beside him was a young man with makeup on his face who wore a fly-fishing vest and a duck hunting cap. He was talking into a microphone.
When the sand ran out, Zules walked through drizzle to a water cooler on the back of a National Guard truck. Soldiers in camouflage held walkie-talkies and damp cigarettes. The deputy sheriff was with them and Zules asked about his trailer.
“Nothing,” the deputy said. He spat between his teeth, using a technique that Zules remembered practicing as a boy. “You didn’t see anybody by that dike last night, did you? No hitchhikers or nothing?”
“It was hard to see,” Zules said. “Why?”
“Somebody went up there last night and blew that stinking dike open.”
“How come?”
“Give that water somewhere to go. It flooded ten thousand acres of cropland. Whoever it was didn’t want that river to bust through down here.”
“Hell, that’s probably everybody, ain’t it.”
“You’re the only man I know by the dike last night.”
Zules laughed until he saw the man’s face harden.
“A farmer drowned,” the deputy said. “You’re the only man I know thinks that funny.”
“I wasn’t laughing at him,” Zules said. “I was laughing at you thinking I’d flood my own rig. Ask your state trooper where I come on him. Here I bust my hind end moving sand for your town and you say I’m flooding it. I don’t see you doing any shovel work. Your boots ain’t even wet.”
“Keep it up, son,” the deputy said. “Run that mouth and see where you end up at.”
“You can’t lock a man up for talking. This is America if you didn’t know it.”
“It’s Oregon and I’m the law.”
“Damn good thing crime’s low.”
The deputy’s face turned red. The National Guard glanced at each other, trying to hold back grins. The deputy reached for his handcuffs.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“I ain’t done a thing,” Zules said.
The deputy stepped behind him and slid the cuffs over each wrist, squeezing them hard against the bone. He moved Zules through ankle-deep water to a patrol car.
“Hey!” Zules yelled. “Hey, channel three! Here’s some news!”
“Shut the hell up,” the deputy said.
The camera man began to trot toward Zules and the deputy. Behind him came the man in the fly-fishing vest, holding the microphone over his head like a pistol. A ring of people stood quietly in the flood-water. Zules saw the woman from the bar. She had her hands on her hips, glaring at the deputy. She looked better in the day, the opposite of most women Zules had met in a tavern.
“Officer,” the reporter said. “What exactly—”
“Yes,” the woman from the bar said. “Just what in the hell do you think you’re doing, Kenneth?”
The deputy began moving Zules to the police car. The backseat was bare metal with no door handle, and Zules slumped low to avoid leaning on his cuffed hands. He hoped the video footage stayed on local stations. He’d hate for his mother to see it.
Half an hour later, Zules was sitting in the county jail’s common room, watching a television bolted high on the wall. Below it was a pay phone that didn’t work. The other prisoner had the TV remote in his shirt pocket and a toothbrush in his mouth. He introduced himself as Sheetrock James, kin to Jesse. His hands were small, with the shortest fingers Zules had ever seen. The ends were chewed so badly that the nails were tiny spots surrounded by raw skin. His crime was wrecking a dump truck at a landfill.
“Best thing was me getting arrested,” he said around the toothbrush. “I’m staying right here till the flood’s over. How high’s that water getting to be? You ain’t in here on murder, are you?”
Zules shook his head. A soap opera was playing on TV, what his mother called “the stories.” His mother never talked about neighbors, but gossiped about TV characters in an intimate way.
“Hey,” Zules said to Sheetrock. “Your mama watch TV shows like this?”
“Ain’t got one.”
“No TV?”
“Mama,” Sheetrock said. “I mean I was born from one. Just that she died when I was two. My daddy shot her. She was holding me on the porch, and he shot her twice. They say she set down easy to not let me fall. Daddy, he got twelve years over it. Then he went back to Oklahoma.”
Zules regretted that he’d started talking. He’d been in jail before and the best way to get through it was with silence, same as at his mother’s house.
“Wake me up when the news comes on,” he said.