“But, but …” For the first time since I’d had the misfortune of meeting him, Sapers seemed at a loss for words. “But,” he stammered, waving his hand to take in the entire scene, “I been grading this road for twenty years and there’s never been no pipes in here before.”
Vogelsang laughed, a maniacal, wound-up, child-molester’s laugh. “Christ,” he said, repeating himself, as if the invocation of a higher authority could somehow get him off the hook, “I just don’t know how to explain it, Lloyd. It’s as much a mystery to me as it is to you.” Vogelsang patted frantically at his pockets, searching for the breath neutralizer, which he finally located and used with obvious relief. “I guess we’ll just have to contact the DWP and see what they’ve been doing up here.”
Sapers looked skeptical — he knew as well as I did that the water department had no business out in the hind end of the wilderness, that Vogelsang’s implication was as preposterous and unfounded as if he’d attributed the pipe to Soviet intervention or UFOs. From skepticism, he shifted to suspicion. I could see the change in his face, could see that he was about to say something more, something tougher, something that would poke holes in the entire fabric of lies we’d thrown up to mask our real purpose, when suddenly the gush of water fizzled out. One moment it was spouting like Old Faithful, and the next it was the trickle of a child at a urinal.
“I’ll be damned,” Sapers said.
Vogelsang put on a look of consternation and wonder, a look as phony as mine. The water had given out for a simple and intelligible reason: the pump had shut down. As programmed. We’d gauged the amount of gasoline required to run the pump until all our reservoirs were filled — at that point, the pump ran out of gas and shut itself down. Chuff-chuff, bang. Simple as that.
We were standing around scratching our heads when suddenly a shadow fell across my back, and I swung round to confront a dejected Marlon, the thermos wedged beneath one fleshy arm, his eyes red with weeping. Behind us, the earthmover idled with a subdued chuffing roar, its surfaces glistening with water. Vogelsang had stepped forward to make a show of casually tossing the pipe aside, as if it meant nothing in the world to him — as if, like the rocks and trees and insects, it were just another manifestation of the marvelous in an endlessly puzzling universe — and was assuring Sapers that he’d look into the matter and straighten things out with the DWP or “whoever it was that was responsible.” Marlon began to whimper.
“What’s with you?” Sapers snarled.
The boy pointed a thick accusing finger at me. “He … he yelled at me, pop.”
Sapers gave me a quick withering glance, a glance of contempt, hatred and disgust, then shot his eyes at his son. “Aaah, shut yer face, Fathead.” Then he looked at me again, a wicked little grin tugging at the corners of his mouth. “So,” he roared, “how’s the writin’ goin’, Shakespeare?”
The third problem was neither mechanical nor human. It was instead a manifestation of the wilderness itself, of nature red in tooth and claw, of the teeming, irrational life that surrounds and subsumes us and that our roads and edifices and satellites struggle so hard to deny. It became evident about two weeks after the bulldozer incident. Vogelsang had long since repaired to the cool, umbrageous, sumac-free corridors of his Bolinas lodge, the sun had mounted a degree or two higher in the blistering sky, and the vital, life-sustaining flow of the irrigation system had settled into a pattern of smooth reliability we’d begun to take for granted. Then, one torrid morning (we watered in the morning and evening, for obvious reasons and in accordance with Dowst’s superfluous instructions), as I picked up the hose to drench our Jonestown growing area in cool translucent aqua pura, I was stunned to find that none was forthcoming. Perplexed, I flailed the hose along its coiled length, stretched it, peered into the nozzle like a clown in a slapstick routine. Nothing. Next, I followed the hose to the nearest cluster of 55-gallon drums, only to find them empty, and finally made my lung-wrenching way up the precipitous incline to the main reservoir above the Khyber Pass. There I discovered that all six 330-gallon horse-troughs were dry, and concluded that the pump must have malfunctioned. But after stumbling back down the spine of the mountain, through thorn and briar and banks of stinging nettle, I found that the pump had in fact dutifully consumed its gas, pumped its water and shut itself down. So where was the water?
My cohorts were hunched blearily over breakfast when I stepped through the door and informed them that there was a major break somewhere along the pipeline. They yawned, scratched, farted, their eyes like hunted things. A fork rang out as it made contact with knife or plate, two pairs of lips sucked at the rims of coffee mugs. Since the heat had set in, we’d taken to staying up late into the night, drinking, shooting the bull, playing poker, Monopoly, and pitch, and resting through the ferocious dizzying heat of the afternoon. We alternated morning watering assignments, Dowst pulling his weight like the rest of us — when he was there. On this particular morning, as on most mornings, he was not there. No: he was in Sausalito, in his breezy, ocean-cooled apartment, no doubt knocking himself out to come up with the additional seeds we so desperately needed.
Gesh looked up from a greasy plate of scrambled eggs and chorizo and asked if I’d checked the pump. I nodded. Phil was bent over a sketch pad. The fires of artistic expression had been lately rekindled in him by the proximity of so much antique junk — an entire yardful of bedsprings, machine parts and dismantled automobiles — and he was working out the blueprint for a major new sculpture that promised to be “a monument to our heroic agricultural efforts.” Without glancing up he asked if I’d checked the upper reservoir. “Uh-huh,” I said, pouring myself a cup of coffee that looked and tasted like molasses laced with stomach acid.
There was a ruminative silence, during which a lizard darted out of the breadbox and lashed across the wall, and then Gesh set down his fork and drained his juice glass in a single decisive gulp. “Sounds like there’s a break in the line,” he announced.
We found it almost immediately. The main line from the pump had been breached just below the Jonestown area, punctured in half a dozen places as if savaged with a sharp instrument or blasted at close quarters with a.22. “Kids,” Phil said. “Fourteen-year-old punks.” The pipe, which we’d simply laid out on the surface of the ground, certainly looked as if it had been intentionally vandalized. It was a tense moment. If adolescent vandals were roaming the woods, not only could they wreak havoc on our operation and make off with half the crop, they could expose us to the authorities as well — or perhaps they already had. I watched as the realization filtered through my companions’ faces, fear and loathing and murderous intent flickering in their eyes. “Maybe it was Sapers,” I said, knowing it wasn’t. “Or Marlon?”
It was Gesh, the Angeleno, the city kid, who came up with the conjecture that proved conclusive. “Animals,” he said. “Something big.” We looked closer. Sure enough, there were the telltale signs: coiled heaps of dung flecked with berries, clumps of stinking reddish hair, tracks the size of Ping-Pong paddles. In the first rush of paranoia we’d somehow managed to overlook them, but now we saw clearly that the agency of destruction was animal rather than human. I guessed that the vandal must have been a bear, but if so, the creature’s motives remained obscure. What was the attraction in a twenty-foot length of mottled plastic pipe? Gesh had an answer for this, too: the bear was thirsty. And lazy. Instead of clambering down the hill to the stream, he could drink his fill — and have a shower in the bargain — simply by puncturing any link of our aqueduct he happened across.