Dry: Part One

“Arizona and Nevada just backed out of the reservoir relief deal,” Mom tells him. “They’ve shut the floodgates on all the dams, saying they need the water themselves.”

“Turning off the entire river like it’s a spigot! Can they do that?”

In the kitchen behind me, Garrett opens the fridge and grabs a bottle of Glacier Freeze Gatorade. He begins to guzzle it, but I stop him on the third gulp.

Three more bottles of Gatorade, a gallon of milk that’s down to the dregs, and leftovers.

My parents, Garrett, and I gravitate outside as well, all of us standing, strangely, looking to one another for some kind of guidance, or at least validation that this is actually happening.

But when the Central Valley started to dry up and the price of produce skyrocketed, people started to pay attention. Or at least enough attention to pass laws and voter propositions. Most of them were useless, but made people feel as if something was being done. Like the Frivolous Use Initiative, which made things like throwing water balloons illegal.

Mr. Burnside laughs ruefully, as if taking pleasure in Stu’s misfortune.

“We’ll get through this,” my mom says reassuringly. She’s a clinical psychologist, so reassurance is second nature to her.

And then she gets a little bit red in the face, and turns to leave before it becomes a full-fledged flush.

And even through the children’s laughter there’s this insidious silence that underscores everything; then again, maybe the silence was always there, and I’m only just noticing it now.

And even through the children’s laughter there’s this insidious silence that underscores everything; then again, maybe the silence was always there, and I’m only just noticing it now.

He prefers to spend his time practicing aerial reconnaissance with his drone, shooting critters with his paintball gun, and hiding in his tree house with a pair of night vision goggles, pretending to be Jason Bourne.

“I’ll go get you some caulking,” he says, and hurries off to retrieve the sealant from his garage, obviously happy for an opportunity to put his Boy Scout training into action.

Aside from our complaints about the late-night welding, our families are generally amicable, but there’s always been a sense of polite tension when my parents deal with them.

“You’ll each receive a five-hundred-dollar travel voucher—that’s fifteen hundred dollars,” the agent says, trying to placate them.

He looks around our property, feigning enthusiasm.

Burnside gets a little bristly, but says, “I’ll have a talk with the board. It shouldn’t be a problem.”

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Isn’t that the basic tenet of socialism, Bill?” my dad says.

Sofia smiles genially, even though her eyes tell a different story.

Meanwhile, the cascade effect that has left more than twenty-three million people without running water shows no sign of abating.

She had nearly missed the midmorning update, and now it looks like the news will be preempting more and more programming—which means she won’t be going home anytime soon.

At that moment, their producer had passed by and admonished them both—as if Lyla had been doing anything more than just listening. “We deal in news, people, not rumors.”

“Federal Emergency Management is aware of the situation,” the governor says, “and we are told that tankers of potable water are on their way from as far as Wyoming to satisfy Southern California’s immediate critical need.”

Then he leaves, as always, dodging a barrage of questions.

A man who was shot while trying to get water from a tanker truck heading for a hospital, and—just breaking now—the first official death from dehydration in San Bernardino.

“This is bad,” he says, with the same vocal inflection with which he might have said, “This is fresh,” back in the days when he was a voice actor on fast food commercials—although rumor had it he did other sorts of work.

Someone—or maybe multiple people—has pilfered her water.

I watch a couple of videos, but today, even chess boxing is no match for how listless I feel.

Sure, I love the idea of our family’s archenemies turning into sycophantic suck-ups, but when the strange actually materializes into reality, it definitely leaves you reeling.

It looks like she’s trying to siphon water out of their irrigation system, but that’s not going to work.

“Thanks,” she says, as we put the tools away in their respective places in the garage.

I hold out my canteen to her. “Here, have some,” I say. “You look thirsty.”

I open my mouth to raise such questions, but then suddenly stop myself, remembering what my father always told me about the sheep. Their behavior. How their main instinct is to follow members of the herd directly ahead of them, and how being thrown off course even the slightest bit would elicit an overwhelming primordial sense of panic that can be deadly.

This morning Mom discreetly gave away a couple of gallons to some friends around the corner.

The container, sitting precariously on the uneven edge, begins to slip....

“We have the desalinization machines down by the beach. Mom and Dad are going to stock up, remember?”

He’s not mincing words any more than I am—and clearly, he’s not negotiating.

I’m happy to have found him...but it isn’t long until a thousand thoughts cascade through my head, bursting the levees that maintain my patience.

They take Mom’s Prius, since Dad’s car is still convalescing in the garage.

All his bravado is gone. He wails, thinking he’s dying.