Of course, we weren’t alone in this. You didn’t see couples hugging or holding hands much anymore and at restaurants they sat across the table from each other and as close to the windows as possible. People began to smell a bit off. You especially noticed it on public transportation, which we tried to avoid as much as possible and damn the consequences, because this was all about water, not gasoline, and if we were contributing greenhouse gases to the atmosphere and exacerbating the global warming that was the biggest factor in the drought, then so be it. There was a run on deodorant and various body lavage products for a while there, but eventually people gave up and just lived with their own natural scent. In fact, it became a kind of badge of honor to stink, just as it was to display a lawn as brown as the Gobi Desert.
We were all of us, the whole community, learning to adjust, even the spendthrifts, who were threatened with governors on their intake valves if they exceeded their ration, and I have to admit I took a certain degree of satisfaction in watching their lawns wither and their ivy fade to brown. This was the new normal, and as the days went by I began to feel all right with it, and so did Micki. Then one morning, as I strolled through our modest grove of citrus trees, selecting oranges for fresh-squeezed juice, I noticed something odd. Here were my black plastic drip lines snaking round the root systems of our eight Valencia orange trees, with subsidiary connections for our three lemon, two grapefruit and half a dozen fledgling avocado, but now there seemed to be another line altogether—one that branched off the main line and disappeared under the hard compacted earth of the yard. Which, as I saw now, wasn’t so compacted, after all, but seemed to have been disturbed recently. We didn’t have a gardener, not anymore—what was the point?—so it wasn’t anything he might have done, unless he’d slipped into the yard while sleepwalking. I certainly hadn’t put in a new line—again, what was the point?—and unless Micki had been working in the garden, which I doubted, since she’d never shown much interest in anything outdoors aside from maybe the parking lot at the galleria, then this was simply a mystery.
I bent to tug at the hose, but it was held in place by means of a series of metal fasteners, and this just compounded the mystery. What I did then was fetch a hoe from the shed at the back of the house and very carefully scrape the dirt away from the length of the hose, which was clearly newer than the old line, the plastic glistening blackly under the sun. Puzzled, I kept at it, following the direction of it all the way across the yard to the fence that separated our acre and a half from the acre and a half of our neighbors, the Veniers. Where, even more puzzlingly, it seemed to vanish under the fence.
Now, in this community of pricey homes and expansive lots, we kept our distance for the most part, our adjoining properties walled off with six-foot fences of stone, stucco or redwood, and we knew our neighbors in the vaguely familiar way we knew the birds that formerly gathered on the former lawn to peck about for worms and grubs and such. So it was with the Veniers. His name was Bill—or maybe Will—and the wife, a shoulderless blonde in her forties, must have had a name too, but on the few occasions I did encounter her out on the sidewalk, she never once glanced up from her cell phone, and I don’t think it ever registered with me. Maybe Micki would know, I was thinking, even as I gripped the top rail of the fence and peered over into their yard.
At first, I couldn’t quite comprehend what I was seeing: the Veniers had a virtual oasis back there, shrubs, flowerbeds, trees heavy with fruit crowning a sod lawn as green as creation and stretching all the way across the property to the far wall, on the other side of which lived the Chinese couple (or maybe they were Korean—I never could get that straight). For a long while I just stood there, straining on tiptoe and trying to make sense of the situation. What it looked like to me was that my neighbors—the Veniers, who I’d assumed were decent-enough people with an income level commensurate to buy into the neighborhood—were stealing our water. My next thought was that it couldn’t be. Couldn’t possibly. Not in this neighborhood. Maybe they had a well or a secret spring or something and they’d run the hose into my yard in a gesture of pure altruism, as a way of sharing the bounty. Yeah, right, I told myself, angry suddenly, as angry as I’d ever been, and then I was up and over the fence, my slippers making a telltale indentation in the dense green sod beneath.
Did they have a dog? Not that I knew of—I couldn’t recall having heard any whining or barking nor seen either of them out on the street with an animal on a leash. Still, I tensed for a moment, half-expecting the black slash of a Rottweiler or Doberman to come hurtling out of the shadows and make a grab for me. All was still. It was seven-thirty of a Saturday morning. Were they awake, the Veniers? Sitting in their breakfast nook reading the Times on their tablets and gazing idly out the window to see an intruder in shorts and bedroom slippers planted in the far corner of their secret lawn? Or sleeping in, their faces slack with the moist compress of their dreams? No matter. The length of hose plunged into the ground and ran beneath the sod to where a dense stand of water-hungry carnations and azaleas crowded the foundation of the house. I could see the faint raised outline of it in the sod and was about to follow it, to rip it up if need be and demand an explanation of Bill—or Will—Venier, but then there was the soft whoosh of a sound I hadn’t heard in years and a whole series of sprinklers popped up round the perimeter of the lawn and within moments my slippers were wet.
Fifteen minutes later, after having cut the hose and railed at Micki while her face hardened over this grim evidence of perfidy in our midst, I was standing on the Veniers’ front doorstep depressing the buzzer. They apparently didn’t have chimes (unlike us), but just a hissing mechanical buzz that reverberated through the house like the sound of an oversized electric shaver. It took a moment, during which I mentally rehearsed various speeches and settled finally on a tone of outraged disbelief, and then the wife was standing there before me, blinking against the light. She was dressed in shorts and halter top, and if she was shoulderless I saw that she was breastless too, and her skin was so pale and leached out she might have been dipped in milk from her toes to her transparent eyelashes and fluff of vanilla hair. “Oh,” she said, “hi. You’re from next door, right? Jim? Or is it Joe?”
“Actually,” I said, “the name’s Scooter. But what I wanted to know, I mean, what I’m here for, is this.” I brandished a length of the hose, its black plastic aperture gaping raggedly where I’d hacked it off with the garden shears.
She was a liar of the first stripe, this woman (whose name, I was later to learn, was Alta, married to Will, not Bill). She never flinched. Just narrowed her eyes in a look that suggested puzzlement shading into umbrage and maybe even annoyance. “What is that?” she asked, all innocence. “A hose? You want to borrow a hose?”
“I found this attached to the drip line in my yard.”
She lifted her eyebrows.
“Attached,” I said, giving it some emphasis, “and running under the fence to your, your oasis back there. How do you explain that, I’d like to know. I really would.”
An elaborate shrug. From behind her, in the depths of the house, came the lilt of Debussy’s Images. Cut flowers decorated a vase on a table just inside the door. I could sense the presence of someone else there, the husband, lingering in the shadows and unwilling to show his face. “It must be some mistake,” she said, her hand—beringed, lithe, youthful—already easing the door shut.
“You bet it’s a mistake,” I shouted, a threat about my attorney—my attorney and the town water board—rattling around in my head, but then the door closed firmly and I was left alone with my complaint.
Summer came early that year and lingered late into fall, the afternoons burned clear and the temperatures toppling records day after day. Everett had planned to come home for summer vacation and take up his former job as lifeguard at the community pool, but the pool had been drained and Micki and I encouraged him to stay back east. “Go to summer school,” we said. “Get an internship. Work at McDonald’s.” Forg
ive me if we were both thinking of those showers of his and the extra burden of washing his clothes and dirty dishes and even of the glass of water he kept on his nightstand. We missed him. Of course we did. But we told ourselves we’d see him at the end of the year, at Christmas, when the rains were sure to come and all this privation would be no more than a memory. As for the Veniers, I never heard a word from them, either of apology or denial. I did report them to the water board (if that makes me a snitch, so be it, because everybody was snitching on everybody else all across town and god forbid if anybody should actually be caught wielding a hose) and I made a practice of peeping over the fence now and again to watch their lawn lose its sheen and their azaleas wither. I soaped Micki’s back. She soaped mine. Our knees got in the way. And our sex life dwindled down to nothing.
The next development—inevitable, I suppose—was the appearance of the water trucks. They looked like gasoline trucks—tankers—but with the difference that their insignia, if they carried any at all, bore images of waterfalls or huge trembling blue raindrops. Twice a day, in mid-morning and again after dinner, they began a slow seductive sashay through the neighborhood, dispensing water—with a thousand-gallon minimum—at prices that redefined gouging. We weren’t exactly poor, Micki and I, but we did have Everett’s tuition hanging over our heads and Micki had recently lost her job, while my hours had been reduced, and there was no way we could afford what they were asking. The problem was we both worked in the tourist industry and the tourists just weren’t showing up anymore—they wanted showers, swimming pools, ice in their drinks—and they began to discover that the beaches of Washington and British Columbia really weren’t so bad after all, not if you factored in rising sea temperatures and considered that that was actual water flowing without stint from the taps and showerheads of their motel rooms overlooking Puget Sound and the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
By this point, sad to say, Micki and I had begun to get on each other’s nerves. She was home twenty-four/seven now and I was only going in to work sporadically, so we both had too much time on our hands. We bickered endlessly about the pettiest things—who’d used the last clean towel or let the dishwater seep down the drain—and when Micki shaved her head I knew it was only to spite me, though she claimed it was to save her the trouble of washing her hair. She looked ridiculous. Her ears, shorn of their camouflage, stuck out as if they were somebody else’s ears altogether, random flaps of cartilage grafted to her head, and I wondered how I’d never noticed just how extreme—and unattractive—they were till now. I made the mistake of commenting on it and we wound up not speaking for a week.
Then one morning she came to me at my desk in the makeshift office I’d set up in the guestroom and finally broke the silence. “You see what’s going on next door?” she said, her voice a conspiratorial whisper. The guestroom was on the second floor and from where I was sitting I could just see down into the Veniers’ front yard, albeit at a sheared-off angle. Alta Venier was there in the driveway, which was lined on both sides with French lavender in full bloom, and one of the water trucks was just easing in through the gate as she directed it with hand gestures. She was wearing a two-piece swimsuit in the European style that left her all but naked and I could see that her face, even at this distance, was a mask of greed and seduction. Sure enough, as Micki and I watched, she climbed up on the step of the truck and leaned into the window to give the driver—a guy in his thirties with a baseball cap reversed on his head—a lingering kiss, then took his arm as he stepped out of the truck and led him into the house. My wife and I looked at each other and all our animus seemed to dissolve in that instant: we were in league together, in league once again. How long was that driver in the house? Forty-five minutes. I timed it. We both did. He wasn’t adjusting his belt or anything like that when he finally emerged, but what had gone on—what sort of bargain had been struck—was clear. He looked round him, and maybe he was smirking, I couldn’t say, then paid out his hose, stretched it to the water tank the Veniers had installed at the far side of the house, and began pumping.
Everett did come home for Christmas, but there was no water to greet him. It hadn’t rained. Temperatures were above normal, the sun oppressive. There was no snowpack in the mountains, and the Colorado River, from which we’d formerly derived thirty percent of our water via various engineering marvels and pumping stations, was, according to the latest reports, nothing but a muddy trickle. Worse yet, our son, who’d been away so long now, seemed like a stranger to us. In fact, when he walked through the gate at the airport, I didn’t recognize him—he seemed taller, heavier, and he’d grown a beard that swelled his face till he looked more like a professor than a student. When Micki rushed forward to embrace him, he seemed to stiffen and even took a step back. “Mom?” he said.
I could see the consternation on his face even as Micki wrapped her arms around him, the slick smooth dome of her scalp flashing an SOS under the glare of the overhead lights. People stopped to stare. One woman, clearly arriving from some wetter place, stood stock-still on the gleaming tiles, working her fingers through her own hair as if to reassure herself. “It’s not cancer,” I blurted. “Just the drought.”
Everett was holding his mother at arm’s length now, as if she was somebody else’s mother and he’d been wrapped in a counterfeit embrace. Who could blame him if he was confused?
Micki gave him a thick smile, broke away from him, spun out a little pirouette. “It’s my new look. You like it?”
Christmas Day came sere and bright, the hot high sun spoiling the pretense of the season, no wreath on the door and the tree from the lot gone yellow with thirst. I tried spraying it with the lawn paint but half the needles fell off and the whole business wound up being more trouble than it was worth. And, of course, season of good cheer or no, the question of water and what to do about Everett’s usage soured the mood. I’d sprung for a membership at the local health club, just so I could use the shower, but management was wise to that strategy and installed sixty-second regulators on the showerheads and hired an inflated teenage kid in a pair of board shorts to sit on a stool in the shower room and make sure nobody cheated. I took Everett as my guest, but he did cheat, moving from one showerhead to the next, and the inflated kid reported him and they canceled my membership, so it was back to the tub with Micki for me and a frigid salty dip in the Pacific for Everett. And then Everett returned to school and January came, sans rain, followed by a dry February and drier March, and the fourth consecutive rainless rainy season ended not with a bang but a whimper and we braced ourselves for the long dry year to come.
It was around then—at the beginning of the fifth year—that the Veniers showed up on our doorstep late one afternoon. The winds had been especially bad that day and the yard was all but buried in blowing sand, tumbleweed and the flapping tendrils of wind-whipped plastic bags. I don’t know where Micki was—shopping, I suppose, or maybe brooding in the basement. She seemed to do a lot of brooding lately, and whether that was healthy or not I couldn’t say, though I did begin to wonder if she might not want to think about seeking professional help. Just for the short term. Till things eased up a bit, I mean.
At any rate, the carillon chimed and I pulled back the door to see my neighbors, the Veniers, standing there hunched against the wind, and a third figure beside them whom I at first took to be a child. Alta was wearing a chador, but she still had her hair, the ends of which whipped around her face in a blond frenzy. Will (at least I presumed this was Will, though I didn’t really know him well enough to say one way or the other) was in a hoodie, his face haunted and his eyes as inflamed as a seer’s. I saw that he wasn’t as tall as I, and it felt good to look down on him, especially considering what he and his wife had done to us—which I hadn’t forgotten, not by a long shot. The third figure—I saw now that she was a woman, no more than waist high and with a face so rippled and desiccated it might have been hide—stood there between them with her head bowed and her hands clasped before her as if in pray
er. Alta was the first to speak. “Can we come in?” she asked.
I stepped aside, too surprised to respond, the word “effrontery” making a quick tour of my brain as the three shuffled in and I slammed the door against the wind-borne refuse that chased at their heels. We stood there awkwardly in the foyer a moment, the Veniers’ eyes scouring me while their companion—she wore ropes of beads over a faded denim shirt and what looked to be a polyester housecoat in a shade of pink so blanched it was almost white—stared down at the floor, until I heard myself say, “Here, let’s go into the living room where we can be comfortable.”
Custom, manners, the way we respond to and treat one another—these are the first things to go in times of duress, and I have to admit I wasn’t very gracious. I didn’t offer them anything to drink. I didn’t make small talk. I just gestured to the sofa and settled myself wordlessly in the armchair.
Alta stripped back the hood of the chador and shook out her hair. “This may seem like an odd request,” she began, “but Will and I are going around the neighborhood taking up a collection, pooling our money collectively, that is”—she paused, snatching a quick glance at the woman, who’d seated herself between her and Will. “For Yoki, I mean. For her fee.”
Will spoke up now, his face expressionless, his lips barely moving: “It’s a shared responsibility. For all of us. The whole community.”