While they scrubbed overalls and boiled water, they planned what they’d do with the silver dollars they earned. Buy farmland right on the river! Maytha shouted. With the money they saved, they’d be able to buy some goats and maybe a few sheep, though summers might be too hot for sheep. Chickens? In the winter they might keep them, but when the hottest days of summer came, the hens stopped laying eggs, and they’d have to cook them.
When it was her turn to tell about her plans for her money, Sister Salt hesitated before she spoke. She had so much she wanted to do, she wasn’t sure how much money she would need. First she had to get Indigo home, and Big Candy promised to help her. Then she and Indigo had to find Mama before they returned to the old gardens.
“Good luck,” the twins said in unison, but they sounded uncertain. The soldiers and the Indian police were under orders to keep the people on the reservations. Besides, good farmland along the river was leased to white people friendly with the superintendent.
On the streets of Needles and Kingman there were so many hungry Indian women and children, Candy brought scraps and leftovers to them when he went to those towns. The women begged him for work, any kind of work, as he handed out bones and skin from the roasted chickens and turkeys; he smiled and nodded and promised them all jobs when he opened his hotel and restaurant in Denver.
Big Candy saw the newspapers every week after Wylie finished with them. The heat that summer exceeded all recorded temperatures in Phoenix and Los Angeles; rainfall the previous spring was far below normal. Wells in Los Angeles and surrounding communities ran dry, and drinking water was brought in by railroad tank cars. A week did not pass without some government official or other paying a visit to the construction site to monitor the progress on the aqueduct and the dam. More workers were hired to keep the project on schedule, and the construction site village of flapping canvas over wood crates and tin expanded toward the river. Big Candy was pleased they were closer to his brewery and gambling tents and the laundry.
The heat made the workers more thirsty than ever — the beer business boomed. Candy’s silent partner was his boss, Mr. Wylie; they’d worked together for a number of years from project to project. Wylie came down every evening around sundown to count the empty beer bottles; he liked to have an idea of how much money was taken in each day. After the count, Sister Salt and the Chemehuevi twins washed the bottles and boiled them before they were refilled with fresh brew.
Candy did not allow anyone else to lift the lids on the brewing barrels, and he checked them every day, sniffing at them and tasting them to decide which batches were ready to bottle. The workers joked Candy used river water to make his beer, but he took great care to haul fresh well water from Parker for his beer. He went all the way to Needles to the railroad freight office to pick up the special yeast and hops shipped from Albuquerque. Candy watched the brewing closely because beer was the staple of his business; without beer, the gamblers couldn’t hear those voices that urged them to roll the dice again to see how lucky they were. Those voices they heard were the spirits of the alcohol, and Candy tended those spirits very carefully so none were offended. If the brew was bottled too late, it was flat and yeasty; but if it was bottled too soon, too much pressure built up and the glass bottles exploded. Candy left the wine and moonshine to the bootleggers who drove in from Needles or Prescott; wine and distilled spirits took too much time to make.
Candy worried if the heat got any worse, the yeast in the brewing barrels would die; so he instructed Sister Salt and the Chemehuevi sisters to wrap the oak barrels in layers of burlap sacks soaked in the river. Sister Salt loved the excuse to splash around in the warm water, which was still cooler than the air. The moisture evaporated so fast that for a little while her skin felt cool and delightful.
Big Candy kept his word. On one of his weekly trips to Parker he went to the office of the reservation superintendent and made a written inquiry about Indigo. He was told the inquiry must be sent to the Indian Bureau of the War Department, in Washington, D.C.; that would take months. When Candy told Sister, she began to cry from anger and frustration — they’d never find Indigo if they had to ask Washington! But Candy told her to be patient, and he worked on composing a letter, night after night, even when he was so tired he fell asleep at the table. Sister Salt loved him most then, when he tried so hard to help her find Indigo. He was saving money for the train tickets; they’d go to Riverside if necessary. They’d find that girl!
Now the river was unrecognizable — rechanneled and trapped into narrow muddy chambers outside its old bed. The poor cottonwood trees and willows were ripped out and plowed into mounds of debris, where their roots reached out plaintively like giant skeleton hands. Oh poor trees! I’m sad for you. Poor river! What have they done to you? Sister whispered softly.
Two shifts of men worked day and night to complete the dam and canal on schedule. Layers of fine dust settled over everything, even the food and the bedding, and there was always the noise — the scrape and clank of the earth-moving machines, the whinnies of the mules, and the shouts of the workmen. By night the construction site was lit by big coal oil torches that trailed ribbons of flame whenever the wind caught them.
Down at the casino and bar, Big Candy hung dozens of lanterns from the cottonwood trees and from the corners of the tent frames; every afternoon Sister Salt and Maytha and Vedna refilled the lanterns with coal oil; besides providing light, the lantern fumes kept away the mosquitoes. The lamps were their last task before they got off work, and they discussed what they would do that night. After baths they sometimes went to have a beer and see who was winning at dice or blackjack.
A distance away, up on the gravel terrace of the old floodplain, next to the construction camp and the site superintendent’s big tent, businessmen from as far away as Prescott and Yuma parked canvas-covered wagons filled with mattresses, and with white and black women who charged construction workers ten cents for fifteen minutes. Mr. Wiley required the wagons with the mattresses to be parked within sight of his tent so that he could keep count of the customers to be sure the businessmen didn’t cheat him out of his share. That arrangement was fine with Sister Salt and the twins — they still got more offers than they wanted to have sex for money. Big Candy warned them not to undercut the prices of the wagon women too much, or their managers, the businessmen from Prescott and Yuma, would complain to the authorities and get Mr. Wiley in trouble. Sister Salt and the others took the men into the tamarisks and willows on the smooth clean river sand, so they charged less. Their customers said they much preferred the sand to those smelly mattresses in the wagons. As long as Sister Salt and the twins worked hard at the laundry and brewery, how they earned money in their free time was their business; Candy didn’t interfere.
Big Candy loved women, and he said all a man had to do was to let a woman be and she’d love him all the more. Candy’s mother had been born into slavery, and after the emancipation she continued to reflect on her position as a slave and then as a free woman. Dahlia was six feet tall and weighed three hundred pounds, so when she talked, people listened, even her employer and his wife. “Wage slave,” she called herself and the others; no, they couldn’t be bought or sold anymore — now human beings were worthless, and anything worthless was left to starve.
At night in their cabin, Dahlia loved to tell the stories she heard as a girl about the Red Stick people who adopted the escaped African slaves. Even before the Indians ever saw an African, the old Red Stick dreamers described them and said they had powerful medicine that the people here could use. So they welcomed the fugitives when they appeared, and it wasn’t long before the Red Sticks were given some of this medicine, which allowed their warriors to move through the swamps as silently and swiftly as smoke. Heavy casualties were inflicted on the French soldiers by only a handful of warriors, and later they routed the British. Of course, the swamps’ quicksand and fevers were their powerful allies.