Alluvial Deposits

People are just naturally hopeful, a term my grandfather used to tell me was more than occasionally interchangeable with stupid. So hopeful were people attempting to tame the arid plains of the West they believed that rainfall would be divinely moved to increase with their coming, that rain followed the plow. Law was at one time you had to plant one quarter of your section in timber, the thinking being that trees increased rainfall. Of course the timber stands did nothing to make the land wetter and served mainly to provide activity for settlers when crops would not grow, that being clearing fallen trees, the steady, powerful wind being the only predictable meteorological event of the great basin and plains.

Indians accepted the natural condition of things and so were nomadic, going to where water, food, and agreeable climate promised to be. The settlers, refining and reaffirming the American character, preferred to sit in one place and wait for nature to change. To sit still for so long required food. To raise food, they needed land. Since 160 acres of Western land could support only five cows, they needed more land. More land, more cows. More cows, more money. More money, more land. More land by hook or crook, usually by adhering to the letter and not the spirit of the law. More land, more cows, more people, no water.

There I was, driving through southern Utah, as dry as it was a hundred years ago, but having benefited from the ambitious efforts of polygamists to irrigate anything flat. A remarkable job, but canals and ditches don’t make water. And if you pump it out of the ground faster than it fills, then the aquifer soon becomes almost empty, or as the hopeful like to say, “not very full at all.” I’d driven from Colorado to do some contract work for the Utah Department of Agriculture and the Fish and Game Commission, to perform flow-projection analyses on a couple of creeks. For all the anxiety over water and too little water and no water, all the complaining and worrying, not many people want to be hydrologists.

In order to carry out my first business at the confluence of Talbert and Rocky creeks I had to get the signature of a woman named Emma Bickers for permission to cross her property to get to where I needed to be. The woman lived at the bottom of the mountain in the town of Dotson. She had been sent the form requesting her signature by Fish and Game, but it had been mailed back unsigned. To save time, I would ask her to sign the form and then finish my work in hopefully two days.

I pulled into a gas station and stepped out to fill my tanks. A skinny fellow with wild red hair watched me from the diesel pump and folded a stick of gum into his mouth. The afternoon sun was bright but the air was pretty cold, the wind steady.

“You ain’t from around here,” he said.

“Pretty good,” I said. “Was it my Colorado tags or the fact that you’ve never seen me before that tipped you off?” I put the nozzle into my front tank.

“Nice truck,” he said.

“Thanks, I like it.” He didn’t say anything. I moved to my rear tank and continued to pump gas. “Maybe you could tell me where Red Clay Road is.”

“Keep on out this road here, past the motel, past the Sears catalog store, two streets on the left.” He folded another stick of gum into his mouth. “What you want over there?”

“Nothing. I was just wondering where it was. Such a pretty name for a road. Red Clay.”

“You’re a funny guy.”

“That’s me.” I finished with the gas, replaced the nozzle, and then gave him thirty-five dollars. “Gas is high around here.”

“Always going up.”

“Well, thanks.” I climbed in behind the wheel and he walked to my window. “What is it?” I asked.

“Yeah, this is a nice truck.”

I nodded, started my engine, and drove away.

Dotson was a small town without threat of becoming a city. The nearby molybdenum mine that had spurred the growth of the town, had died and taken the downtown and all promise of prosperity with it. The main drag was now a row of boarded-up storefronts, but it was close. For reasons too familiar and too tiresome to discuss, I was a great source of interest as I idled at the town’s only traffic signal. I followed the gas-station man’s directions to Red Clay Road and turned the only way I could.

I parked and walked the twenty-yard dirt path to the front door where I gave a solid but polite knock. A woman yelled for me to come in and so I did. I was met by a fluffy, purring white cat and reached down to pet it. The chill of the April air outside was lost and I found myself growing uncomfortable in my coat. The heater or a fire was roaring somewhere. An old woman of medium height and an angular face appeared at the end of the hall and she stared at me as if I was naked. I stood up from the cat and asked, “Are you Mrs. Bickers?”

She just stared.

“I thought I heard someone say come in.”

“Well, you can just get on back out.” She took a half-step toward me.

“Ma’am, I’m from the State Department of Agriculture and the Fish—”

She stopped me with her staring and I began to understand what was going on.

“Okay.” I backed through the doorway and onto the porch. She was at the door now. “Ma’am, I need your signature on this—”

But she slammed the door and managed to squeeze the word nigger through the last, skinniest gap.

I sighed and walked back to my truck.

I don’t get mad too much anymore over shit like that. It doesn’t make me happy, but it doesn’t usually make me mad. It doesn’t do any good to get mad at a tornado or a striking snake; you just stay clear. But I couldn’t really stay clear. I needed her signature, probably especially now. Who knew how many misshapen offspring she might have roaming that blasted mountain with no more elk to hunt. My next stop would have to be the sheriff’s office to see if I could get some help obtaining the woman’s scrawl.

As much as I love the West, the character of its contentious dealings with the rest of the country has been defined by a few rather than the many. The few being a self-serving, hypocritical lot who complain about the damn welfare babies of the cities and take huge subsidies to not plant crops and to make near free use of public lands to raise cattle where, if there were a god, no cattle would ever be found. But Westerners, perhaps a function of living in such a harsh landscape, perhaps a function of living in such isolation and distant interdepedence, stick together and so, blindly, the desires of the few become the needs of the many. A man with one section and five sickly cows is a cattleman just the same as a man with four thousand head and a lease on a hundred thousand acres of BLM land. But damn it’s a pretty place.

I drove back to the main street with the intention of returning to the gas station and asking where the sheriff’s office was, but I spotted it on my way. I parked in a diagonal space and walked up the concrete steps and inside. The deputy was a big man, even sitting, and he watched me coming toward his desk.

“What can I do you for?” he asked.

“I need some assistance.” I produced my papers from the Department of Ag and Fish and Game. “I’m supposed to go up and perform some tests on Rocky and Talbert creeks. I’ve got to get Emma Bickers’ signature on this piece of paper so I can take my readings and go home.”

“So, go get it. Her address is right here.”

“I tried. It seems she has a bit of a problem with my complexion.”

The deputy observed my complexion. “Yeah, I can see. I think you’ve got a pimple coming on.” He laughed.

I didn’t, though I appreciated his attempt at humor and his demonstration of something other than sheer amazement that I was there.

He picked up the phone and dialed. “Mrs. Bickers? This is Deputy Harvey … ma’am? … yes, he’s fine … ma’am, I’ve got a fella here from Fish and Game who needs you to sign a paper … yes, ma’am, that would be him … well, yes, but I think it won’t hurt for you to sign … just going to check the water in the creeks … yes, ma’am … yes, ma’am … I reckon, they’ll get a court order and he’ll get to go up there anyway … yes, ma’am.” The deputy hung up and looked at me.

“Well?”

“She said she’ll sign it, but you can’t come in.”

I stepped into the air. It was nearly four and I was hungry. There was a restaurant across the street and so I left my truck where it was and went in and sat at the counter. There were a couple of men sitting at a booth in the back. They gave me a quick look and returned to their conversation. The menu was written on poster boards over the shelves on the wall facing me.

“Coffee?” the waitress asked. She was a pie-faced young woman with noticeable, but not heavily applied, makeup. She held her blond ponytail in her hand at her shoulder while she poured me a cup. “Know what you want?”

“You serve breakfast all day, like the sign says?”

“All day long, every day,” the waitress said.

“Are the hotcakes good?”

“They’re okay,” she said. Then, quietly, “I wouldn’t eat them.”

“Eggs and bacon?”

She nodded. “Toast or biscuit?”

“Toast?”

She nodded. “I’ll bring you some hash browns, too.”

“Thank you, ma’am,”

She moved to the window and stuck the ticket on the wheel, then talked to me from the coffee machine where she seemed to be counting filters. “Visiting or just passing through?”

“I’m working for Fish and Game, doing some work up mountain.”

“What kind of work?”

“Checking the streams, that’s all.”

“We used to go up that mountain all the time when I was a kid. My daddy taught me to fish there.” She came back over and wiped the counter near me. “It was good fishing then.”

“What about now?”

“I don’t know really. I hear tell it’s not good like it used to be.” She looked over at the men in the booth. “You all right back there?”

“Fine,” one of them said.

“You don’t go up there anymore, eh?” I asked.

“Nobody does, really,” she said.

“Why’s that?”

She shrugged.

A hand reached through the window and tapped the bell, then put a plate down. The waitress stepped over, grabbed it, and brought it to me. “You want ketchup or anything?”

“Tabasco?”

She gave it to me.

A couple of young men came in and sat at the opposite end of the counter. “Hey, Polly,” one of them said.

“Hey, Dillard.” She slid along the counter toward them.

She and the men ignored me while I ate and I liked that just fine. I finished, paid the tab, and left a generous tip, figuring I’d be eating there again.

Emma Bickers’ house looked no more inviting than it had earlier. I walked the dirt path to the porch and before I could knock, two loud pops hurt my ears and I could feel the door move, though I wasn’t touching it. I looked at the glass high on the door and saw the small holes. I ran back to my truck, keeping low, my heart skipping. I fumbled with my keys, finally got my engine going, and kicked up dust as I sped away. I don’t like being shot at, always have a really bad reaction to it. I don’t get scared as much as I get really mad. I stayed hunched in my seat until I was well on the main road again.

I parked in the same space and burst into the sheriff’s office. The sheriff was standing beside the deputy and they turned to observe me. I was fit to be tied. “That old lady is crazy as hell and I want her arrested.”

“What happened?” the sheriff asked.

“That nut shot at me. I hadn’t even knocked on the door and she fired two shots.”

“Slow down,” the sheriff said. “Who are you and who shot at you?”

“This is the guy from Fish and Game I told you about,” the deputy said.

“Mrs. Bickers shot at you?” the sheriff asked.

“I don’t know for sure. I was on the other side of the door and when the shooting started I took off. I didn’t see if anyone opened the door once I was running.”

“Harvey, call over to that old biddy’s house and find out what the hell is going on,” the sheriff said. Then to me, “Are you all right?”

“I’m not shot.”

“Well, that’s a good thing.” He seemed even-tempered, but of course he hadn’t been the target. He ran a hand through his graying hair and watched the deputy hang up the phone.

“No answer,” Harvey said.

“Why don’t you ride on out there and see what in hell’s the matter,” the sheriff said to Harvey. “And take that gun away from her before she shoots somebody I give a damn about.”

“I’m going with him,” I said.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Mr.—”

“Hawks,” I said.

“Mr. Hawks. Let Harvey get things unraveled.”

The sheriff was reasonable in his request, but I was hot. “Listen, all I want is this paper signed so I can do my damn job.”

“Let Harvey take the form and get it signed.”

“No, I want to watch her sign it. I want her to see me watching her sign it. I’m going with Harvey.”

The sheriff sighed. “I don’t see why you don’t trespass on her land and get it over with.”

“With all due respect, sheriff, greetings around here are somewhat unpredictable and I would prefer to keep things as simple and clean as possible.” I wasn’t backing down.

“I see your point. Harvey, see to it that Mr. Hawks doesn’t get killed.”

“I’ll do my best,” Harvey said.

The sheriff looked out the window. “Wait a second. It’s too dark to go messing around over there tonight. If she can’t see you, Harvey, she might shoot again.” The sheriff looked at me. “You gonna press charges?”

“Probably not. Not if she signs this form and not if I get to see her do it.”

The sheriff glanced at Harvey and blew out a breath. “Harvey will pick you up in the morning from the motel across the street. How’s that?”

I nodded.

The sheriff walked away, shaking his head, saying, “I hate this fuckin’ job. I want to shoot every idiot who voted for me.”

Harvey sat at his desk. “I guess I’ll see you in the morning then.”

I checked into the motel, which was like any motel anywhere, the same room, the same bed, the same synthetic blanket, the same television with cable, and the same fat clerk in slippers holding a scruffy cat with a terrier standing in the doorway behind him.

I threw myself onto the bed, switched on the television, and settled on CNN. I must have fallen asleep fairly quickly because I couldn’t recall any of the so-called news when I was awakened by a crash. Then there was shouting. A man’s voice, booming, not so much angry as frustrated.

“I’m telling you it’s not my fault,” the man said.

I couldn’t hear the response.

“Her tire was flat and I offered to change it. When I turned around she had her shirt off.”

There was another crash. Then a silence.

“I’m sorry if you think that, but I didn’t have any interest in her,” he said.

Silence.

“I did not know her!”

“—”

“That’s not true!”

“—”

“Lord Christ, Muriel! Have you lost your mind! Now, honey, you put that down. Muriel!”

A door slammed. I went to the window and peeked out. A bearded man wearing jeans and no shirt was standing in the parking lot, under a bright lamp, looking at the door. His shoulders were fixed in a shrug. The woman was out of the room, too, her back to me, a parka covering what I took to be her naked body; an assumption I made observing her bare feet and legs. She was waving a large and nasty hunting knife.

“Now, Muriel!”

The woman said nothing. She stowed the knife under her arm to free her hands for signing something to the man, then pulled her hair away from her head and let it fall. I, of course, had no idea what she was saying, but the tone of her signing was clear.

“Quiet down, honey.”

“—”

“That’s just not true,” he said. “Muriel, she’s fat. For chrissakes, she was gigantic. And ugly. I was just changing her tire.”

But apparently Muriel didn’t think she was fat and ugly enough because she threw the knife at the man and marched into the room, slamming the door. The man picked up the blade, which had bounced to a stop well in front of him. He saw me watching and offered a half-smile as if embarrassed.

I left the window and stepped into the shower.

Though I had studied water most of my adult life, I could never quite believe the fact that there is never really any new water. Water falls, drains, flows, evaporates, condenses, falls. The same water, different states. That thought can be unsettling, given what we do to water, what we rinse with it, what we put into it. The tailing ponds of the mine up on Blood Mountain were dug into rock, but still the water leeched into the ground, finding the tributaries, finding the creeks, rivers, reservoirs, pastures, spigots.

As I dried with a painfully thin towel I discovered I was again hungry, realized that I should have ordered the hotcakes after all because, though they might have been bad, I would at least still be full. It was not gnawing, belly-stinging hunger, but worse, it was boredom hunger, the kind of hunger that can make a thirty-eight-year-old man fat. But when you’re bored in Dotson, Utah, with the Cartoon Network, Larry King, and the people in the next room, you either eat or drink. I decided to eat.

I went to the same restaurant with my heart set on hotcakes. The place was busier, as it was supper time. There were three men in the booth in the back. I again sat at the counter. Young Polly had been replaced by what she was bound to become, a forty-year-old, wasp-waisted woman made up to hide what years of wearing too much makeup had done.

“Coffee, hon?”

I looked into the tired eyes. The coffeepot was in her mitt and she was staring right through me, but the “hon” was sincere, however frequently used. I turned my cup over and said, “Please.”

“Any idea yet?” she asked.

“I hear the hotcakes are pretty good. I’ll have a short stack.”

“Coming up.”

I heard the bell on the door and felt a blast of chilly air and before I knew it, there was someone seated to the right of me at the counter. It was the bearded man from the parking lot. He had on a T-shirt now, but still no jacket.

“Cold as hell out there,” he said, slapping his arms and blowing into his hands. He had a tattoo on his arm of a moon smoking a cigar with the caption: Bad Moon Raising.

He caught me staring at his tattoo. I said, “Shouldn’t that say—”

He stopped me. “I know, I know. Pissed me off when I found out.” He studied his arm for a second. “My girlfriend, Muriel, told me. She laughed at me. You ever been laughed at by a deaf person? And then she called me a—” He made a sign over the countertop.

“What’s that mean?”

“I can’t say it, but it’s offensive.” He made the sign again.

“None of that language in here,” the waitress said, coming at us with the coffee. “Turn your cup over, Tim. I ain’t got all night.”

Tim did as she asked and smiled at her while she poured. “Why don’t you and me run away, Hortense?”

“So I can have that crazy girlfriend of yours track me down like an animal?” Hortense asked.

Tim shook his head.

“You live in the motel?” I asked.

“House burned down,” Tim said and sipped his coffee. “Staying there until we can get back in.” He called down to Hortense, “Tell Johnny to slap me on a grilled cheese.”

“Grilled cheese!” Hortense called back into the kitchen.

“I heard the son of a bitch,” Johnny said.

“Colorful place, eh?” Tim asked, offering his smile to me.

“Slightly.”

“What are you doing here? Forest Service?”

I looked at him. “Why do you say that?”

The waitress brought my hotcakes and stepped away.

He looked me up and down. “Give me a break. Khakis, double-pocket shirt with the flaps, lace-up boots. Halfway-intelligent eyes. You’re black.”

“Lot of black guys in the Forest Service?” I asked.

“Don’t know, but black people don’t generally show up in Dotson.” He put some sugar in his coffee.

“Anyway, I’m from Fish and Game,” I said.

“Same difference.” He grabbed a napkin from the dispenser and fiddled with it. “Sorry about all the commotion earlier. So, what are you doing here? Counting elk, deer? Redneck poachers?”

“Looking at water, that’s all. I’m a hydrologist.” I offered my hand. “My name is Robert Hawks.”

“Tim Giddy, pleased to meet you.”

“So, what do you do, Tim?”

“Everything. I chop wood, build sheds, drive heavy machinery. But there ain’t no more heavy machines around here. No building.”

“Why’s that?”

“You ain’t looked real close at your map. There is one road that leads into Dotson and it don’t go nowhere else. It leads out of town for a few miles on the other side and turns into an old mining road. This town was built for the mine and the mine is dead.” Tim’s sandwich arrived and he took a quick bite, wiped his lips with his napkin, and talked while he got the food situated in his mouth. “We’re a dead town, mister.”

“Rest in peace,” I said.

Tim laughed loudly, calling attention from the three men in the booth. “That’s funny. Rest in peace. I like you. You’re all right. Rest in peace.” He took another bite. “So, we got a water problem or something? Our wells drying up?”

“No, nothing like that. I’m just here to measure the flow of the creeks. Nothing special.”

“We sure had enough snow this year,” Tim said.

I nodded.

“You know, Muriel’s awright. She’s just a little high-spirited.” Tim polished off the last bite of the first half of his sandwich.

I watched him chew. “High-spirited,” I repeated his words and considered them. “She looked like she wanted to kill you.”

“Aw, that little ol’ knife? She didn’t mean nothing by that.” Tim got Hortense’s attention and pointed to his empty cup. “I just wish I knew what the hell she was signing at least half the time. She gets to going so fast.”

“Well, Tim, it was a pleasure meeting you, but I need some rest.” I put money on the tab and slid it to Hortense while she filled Tim’s cup. “Maybe I’ll see you again.”

“G’night.”

I put myself to sleep as I always did, by imagining myself on a stream, fishing. That night I was on the Madison, fishing a stretch of pocket water that no human had ever seen before. It was about six in the evening in early August, a slight breeze, not too hot. There was no hatch activity and so I was fishing terrestrials off the far bank. I was letting cinnamon ants fall off the weeds into the water. I would cast, let the ant drift, and pull it back before it could get to a fat eighteen-inch brown I could see in the shallows. I wanted the fly to float to him just right. I casted again and again, until finally there was no drag, the ant simply floated at the end of the tippet with no sign of the slightest disturbance to the water behind it. The fat trout rose, gave the ant a looking over, and ate it. I let him sink with it a few inches and then I set the hook.

It was windy and cold the next morning. A light snow had fallen during the night and left everything lightly dusted. I rode with the deputy in his 4 × 4 rig, and my attention was immediately fixed on the radar unit between us. It did not look as high-tech as I had imagined. There were a couple of dinosaur stickers on the housing.

“I’ve never seen a radar thing before,” I said.

“To tell the truth, it doesn’t see much action around here.”

“Not on the way to anywhere, eh?”

“Not that. We just don’t care how fast people drive.”

I nodded and turned to the window as we veered onto Red Clay Road.

Harvey looked at me a couple of times and asked, finally, “Are you going to wait in the car?”

“Hell no.”

“I appreciate guts as much as the next guy, but I don’t much want to get shot at either.”

“Okay, I’ll hang back a few steps.”

“Aw, man.” He stopped the rig in the same place I had parked. “Please wait in the car?”

But I was getting out.

As promised I walked three steps behind him up to the door. He knocked, then knocked again. The door opened and we both jumped. It was the old lady.

“Give me the paper,” Mrs. Bickers said.

“I’m going to have to come inside and talk to you, Mrs. Bickers,” the deputy said. “You shouldn’t be shooting at people. You could have killed Mr. Hawks here.”

The old woman cut a glance at me. “I didn’t know it was him I was shooting at.”

I stepped into the house after the deputy. The house was freezing.

“You see, ma’am, that there is the problem,” Harvey said. “It could have been me at the door or the postman. You could have killed somebody. Why were you shooting anyway?”

“I got scared,” she said.

Harvey slapped his arms together. “What’s wrong with your heat? Your fire go out?”

“I reckon.”

“You got any coffee, Mrs. Bickers?” Harvey was looking around the hall and into the adjacent rooms.

I held off making any noise like I wanted to leave, but I didn’t want to linger there. I wondered why he wanted coffee.

“Could you make us some coffee?” he asked.

“I guess so,” she said. She gave me a hard look. We followed her into the kitchen. “You can sit there at the table.” She turned on an electric burner beneath a kettle. “All I got is instant.”

“That’s fine,” Harvey said. “Ain’t that fine, Mr. Hawks?”

“Fine,” I said.

“I’m going have to take your pistol, Mrs. Bickers,” Harvey said, matter-of-factly. He slipped in the line so casually I had a new appreciation of him. He was smarter than I had thought and I felt small for having let my preconceptions get the better of me. The woman complained with her expression and Harvey went on. “Like I said, Mrs. Bickers, that could have been anybody at the door. Mr. Hawks here wasn’t trying to break in or nothing, he was just doing his job. While we’re on the subject.” Harvey looked to me and put his hand out and I gave him the form I needed signed. He flattened the paper on the table, took a pen from his breast pocket, and held it in the air for the old woman. “Right there, ma’am.”

Mrs. Bickers took the pen and scratched her name at the bottom of the page. I didn’t get the satisfaction from watching her sign that I had imagined. She had the eyes of a cornered animal. I felt sorry for the woman, alone in this cold house, scared of noises, scared of me. Then I felt stupid for giving a damn.

While he folded the paper, Harvey said, “Now, if you could get me that gun.” He handed me the form, then looked over at the woodstove, sitting on uneven bricks on the warped linoleum. “Where is the gun, ma’am?”

“It’s in my bedroom. I sleep with it.”

“I’m going to have to take it,” he repeated. “While you’re getting it, I’ll bring in some wood for your stove.”

Mrs. Bickers stared at me for a couple of seconds and then left the room. I had a passing thought she might come back with the pistol and shoot me. She went to her bedroom, returned, and put the gun on the table in front of me. A .22 target pistol. I watched her pour water into two cups, then measure spoonfuls of powdered coffee.

Harvey came in with the wood. “I swear it feels like it’s going to let loose with a real storm.” He stomped his boots clean on the rug inside the door. He put the logs down and came back to the table, looked at the pistol. “Mercy, Mrs. Bickers, how do you even lift that thing, much less fire it?”

“I do just fine. Here’s the coffee.” She put the mugs on the table. “You drink, I’ll start the fire.” She knelt by the stove and began to twist up sheets of newspaper from a plastic crate.

The deputy and I sat and took a couple of sips of the coffee. Finally, Harvey picked up the pistol and popped out the clip, put it in his shirt pocket. “You got any other guns, ma’am?”

“No.”

“Just asking.”

“I’ve got to get to work,” I said.

“Okay, Mrs. Bickers, we’ll be leaving now. Thanks for your cooperation and the coffee and your time.”

The woman nodded and followed close behind us toward the front door. We were on the porch, the door was shut. Mrs. Bickers was on the other side.