The Winemaker's Daughter, page 22
He rises, shakes dirt from his gloves, squints at her through quarter-inch-thick glasses, and sniffs. “Ah, yes.” He smiles, blinking quickly. “How about that VinFaire? I told you then we had something special going in this coulee.”
“Leon!” she yells. “Around back. I found him.”
Gregory Gorton has a frozen, almost skeletal smile on his gaunt face, and he blinks constantly, as if he’s sending out Morse code with his eyes.
“I hope your father is grateful,” he says. He gestures to Leon. “I see the Forest Service is here again. As I recall from our prior conversation, you’re an indigenous American of some sort.”
Leon studies the single row of vines. He takes out his notebook, flips ahead a few pages, and starts with his questions. “We found water near your place a few months ago, what looked like a spring, going into a pipe.”
“That’s surprising,” says Gorton, still smiling while blinking. “I’ve had extensive hydrology mapping done of the entire watershed.”
“You never saw it?”
“I’ve been out of the country since late fall.”
“The spring, the well, the pipe?”
“You have pictures, something you can show me? Because I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“What do you have, five acres up here, Mr. Gorton?”
“Seven, counting the land we keep natural, which is mostly clay.”
“And your water comes from . . . ?”
“The tribe. Two years ago they sold me an allotment.”
“They didn’t have anything to sell at that time, did they?”
“Oh, yes. They were just starting to consolidate some blocks of water, and they agreed to sell me a small portion because I paid a premium.”
“Are you telling me the tribe drained that basin?” Leon says. “It’s national forestland. Do you have any information on that?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m a libertarian. I think Indians should buy and sell whatever commodity they have, without help from anyone. And I don’t believe the government should own any property, which, by implication, would mean your job should be obsolete. With all due respect.”
“If that well isn’t yours, whose is it?”
“All I know is that I paid a fortune for my water, Mr. Treadtoofar, and made a nice little pile selling it back to the aboriginals. But considering what’s about to happen, I missed an even bigger profit by selling too soon. The word is, starting next year, anybody sitting on Columbia River irrigation water can make a claim for permanent market-loss subsidy. If you’ve got water, and you own land that used to be in cultivation, you’ve got yourself a significant entitlement. The government is going to make millionaires out of all these sob stories.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
AFTER TALKING Leon into letting her drive, Brunella steers the Suburban over the swells of brown land east of the Columbia, trying to hold to the lane in the bucking winds. The ground is treeless except for cottonwoods around farmhouses chapped by the dry gusts. Angelo used to tell his children that when he moved to the coulee country the dust storms were such that a farmer would tie a rope to himself and the house just to venture into the backlands of his section; without the cord, the farmer would be lost in a brownout.
The soil no longer lifts itself in great sheets, but the wind remains, of course, especially in the spring. Leon pays no attention to Brunella as she drives; he looks like he is staring into Saskatchewan, his thoughts so far from the front seat.
The river appears at odd turns, flat, moving at a crawl, full of young salmon racing against time to make it downriver, against the biological version of Cinderella’s midnight deadline. They must make it to salt water within a few weeks or die, half morphed into something unable to live in freshwater. A few Indians and a biologist mark the passage at a canyon downriver, counting fish and counting days.
Brunella and Leon follow the river past two dams and then head east, into the heart of the Planned Promised Land, a grid of canals, straight roads, and little towns built to transport wheat and fruit, towns now gasping for life. The big irrigation sprinkler systems, aluminum piping set on huge tractor tires, stretching a half mile or more in some directions, spit water on untended fields. Even the large corporate farms are not making money this year, but they still draw their water from the backed-up Columbia and pour it onto the land, because that’s what the system is set up to do. The towns have no stoplights, no banks, no grocery stores, just lone silos next to railroad stops, the storage bins stuffed with grain that nobody wants except the government, which has to want it by law. They have no banners highlighting spring festivals or coming opportunities, just the odor of an estate sale at a house where terminal illness still lingers.
Deep into his thoughts, Leon mumbles to himself.
“What?” she says. “Let me in.”
“Turn there and follow it to Dry Falls.”
The sky is full of drama in the way of spring east of the Cascades, where the mountains pull apart the clouds and the winds rake over the high plateau. They leave the irrigated patches behind and find themselves in the native brown land, with its basalt columns and potholes of water leftover from the ancient flood.
“Stop here,” he says, pointing to what looks like a small abandoned garbage dump. The sun is warm on their skin as they step away from the car and walk to a mobile home tilted on one edge. The trailer is peagreen, with the fading legend U.S. GOVERNMENT on the edge. A cherry tree, shaggy but still blooming, stands alone in front.
“They gave these tin cans out to Hanford workers in World War Two,” Leon says. “Then they abandoned them.”
“Hard to believe anyone could live in something like that.”
“Tell that to my mother.”
“You mean this was—?”
“Three of us slept in the one room in the back, the one that’s partially caved in. Mom had the other room. She was glad to be here. She’s Wanapum, both her parents dead of drink. At twelve, she’s an orphan, gets sent to the Mountain View School for Girls in Helena. They call her squaw slut and throw bottles at her. She moves back here, meets my father, he’s with us for a while and then he goes to the navy, says it’s the only way an Indian can get work out of this country, and we don’t hear from him for a long time. She has nothing. Everyone says, Why don’t you go to the reservation? She’s Wanapum, so she can’t go to Colville; they don’t trust the Wanapum. The Wanapum never signed the treaty; they had Smohalla. Ever hear of him?”
“Nope.”
“Leader of the Dreamers, doomed from the start. Told the Wanapum not to live near whites, eat only Indian food, take nothing from the government. Hard to take anything when they ain’t giving you anything, but that’s what he said. He says don’t be like the Nez Perce; they said yes to everything and the government still sent ’em to Oklahoma. Can you imagine being forced to move there after you’ve lived in the green mountains? The Nez Perce had a term for Oklahoma, called it eeikish pah—the hot place. But the Wanapum don’t budge. When the dams came and flooded their homes, they got alcohol training and some land on the Colville Reservation, if they wanted it, forty acres total. Wanapum have to live between the worlds. But one day my mom, she has a change of mind. She says we have to go north, to move to Colville and wait for my father. Along the way, while we’re moving, she finds this empty trailer and she takes it. Halfway, she says. We’ll go halfway. We lived here six years.”
“Who planted the cherry tree?”
“I did. It was a school project.”
On the other side of the half-overturned trailer, an aluminum door flaps in the wind, the screen long ago ripped out, the bottom of the door partially peeled back, squawking in the gusts.
“Never did fix that door,” says Leon. “We were waiting for my father. He’ll fix it when he comes home, that’s what my mom said. Fix it when he comes home. And let me tell you about the flies. We had ’em in swarms, from April to October, always the flies; no matter how many you killed, they found a way to get in. Big black flies, the kind that bite. And then”— here he starts to smile mysteriously, walking back to the Suburban—“we took care of the black flies.”
They drive away from the last of the irrigated land past narrow lakes, no more geometric fields or big sprinkler systems. Clusters of bright yellow balsamwort, the signature wildflower of the Columbia basin, grow from the hills. He directs her another way, down into a yawning coulee on a dirt road that dead-ends against broad high walls that blot out half of the sky. No wind. He takes her hand and guides her along to a spot he treats as his own. He tells her the story of Dry Falls, where the world’s biggest waterfall once roared, forty times the size of Niagara, four miles across. A surge of water equal to ten times the combined flow of all the world’s rivers poured through here—four hundred million cubic feet of water per second—thundering down at speeds of sixty miles an hour or more, carving out the cavity big enough to hold Manhattan and all its skyscrapers. A thousand years ago, the last of the water retreated, leaving the rock dry, the falls a phantom. They hear nothing today as they huddle inside the fortress of basalt. Brunella feels she has been allowed into a secret club, as free of any sound as a night sky on the prairie is uncluttered by city light.
“How far to the reservation?” Brunella says.
“We can turn around, go back to Seattle, if you want.”
“Are you afraid?”
“The Wanapum don’t belong on the Colville Reservation.”
“Are you Wanapum?”
“Some days I have no choice.”
“So where is home?”
She runs her hand along his face, over the aquiline nose. She moves to kiss him, brushes his cheek, but senses his uneasiness.
“Will you still want to kiss me when I’ve finished the report on the Johnny Blackjack?”
She acts insulted, pulls back, but at heart she is not so sure of her own motives.
“Your father never answered my question the other night, Brunella.”
“I thought he did.”
“Maybe you can help me.”
“I don’t know anything about winemaking.”
“Are you sure?”
“He keeps those secrets to himself.”
They go past the Grand Coulee Dam without stopping, past the generators sending out enough electricity to power a million homes, past the clock that says LIVE BETTER ELECTRICALLY, past the signs advertising the nightly laser light show, which booms out I am the river . . . I am life. The reservoir behind the dam, stretching nearly to Canada, buried ten towns, most of them Indian. The new communities built around the dam, Elmer City, Electric City, Coulee City, are not cities at all but service centers for the Planned Promised Land, oddly retro, frozen in a dream that never advanced beyond 1959. Just like the farm towns, they are dying.
Indian country. The road suddenly turns bad, potholed and uneven, and there is no signage. Rusted mattress springs, tumbleweeds and plastic diapers snagged in the wires, a few cars left where they broke down. Pickup trucks slow as they approach the oncoming Suburban, people staring into the Forest Service car, suspicious, trying to make a connection. The Colville Agency building is like any other government office in Indian country, treated with contempt, peeling paint on the outside, broken steps in front, no landscaping. The reservation was not created out of logic or geography, Leon tells her; it was a casual recipe thrown together as government afterthought. Bands of people, some who got along with one another, some who hated everyone, were given the same homeland, and tossed in with them were a faction of the Nez Perce, the ones who never signed the treaty in which they lost their homeland in the Wallowa Valley, the ones who became Dreamers. They included Joseph, the war hero—at one time, the most famous Indian in America—who died sitting on this wind-lashed ground, staring into a fire, his face heavy with defeat. All these bands had only one thing in common, and when the dams came, the salmon were snuffed out, nearly two-thirds of the river basin drained of a life-giving species with ten thousand years of unbroken ties. After the little towns were buried by the Grand Coulee reservoir, the bands were placed on high windswept ground, just a few miles from the emerald squares and green circles of the Planned Promised Land.
Inside the agency building at Nespelem, Leon settles in with the water records. Brunella strolls outside, gathering stares. Every house in the village has a small satellite dish. Kids ride their scooters. A large banner advertising the Pow Wow competition flaps in the wind. Another group of kids, older, more furtive, lean in the shade against the cinder-block wall of a commodities exchange store, passing a can of hair spray back and forth. One of them covers his face.
Leon walks briskly out of the agency building, a folder of fresh-copied records in his hand. “Let’s go,” he says, avoiding eye contact with the kids sniffing hair spray.
“What did you find?”
“Get in the car. I’ll drive.”
A mile or so out of town, he pulls off the road within view of two mobiles with a basketball hoop out front on a shared driveway. Leon opens the folder and points to a line of figures.
“Alden Kosbleau, five thousand acre-feet, sold on the first of February . . . Kosbleau, six thousand acre-feet, sold on the first of March . . . Kosbleau, three thousand acre-feet, sold on the first of April . . .”
He looks up at her.
“That’s where the tribe got most of its water—Kosbleau. And look at this: I never dreamed there was so much water still in that part of the basin where we had the fire. Yet . . . the trees in that dying forest, they were so dessicated. The trees wouldn’t look like that if there were springs of this magnitude around. He must have been hoarding himself a lake! He must have diverted it all from the original aquifer.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Do you know this guy Kosbleau?”
“He’s my father’s oldest friend. He’s the water king, always has been a wheeler-dealer. But this could be a mistake. Alden Kosbleau is an honor-able man. You’re saying all that water from the pipe on the ridge—”
“Kosbleau.”
“And you think he drained the forest where Niccolo died? Sucked it out and redirected it into the pipe, so he could store and sell it later at a huge markup? And that’s why we couldn’t get anything from the pumps?”
“I don’t know the exact time sequence. But he transferred a shitload of water from that entire drainage. He’s probably sitting on a fair amount of it now, waiting for the big buyout Gorton was talking about. The rest of it—according to these records—he sold to the tribe.”
“Why would he sell to the tribe, knowing there’s a buyout on the way?”
“I don’t know. The tribe has not been leveling with us.”
“With us. You mean, you and me?”
“I mean the Forest Service.”
She looks away to the children playing basketball and speaks as if in a trance. “It must be tough for you, Leon.”
“For me? Why do you say that? I’m a Forest Service lifer. I’m just doing my job.”
“But this looks like the tribe is in pretty deep as well. You must feel . . . conflicted. Imagine if this were your family working that water deal and you knew, if it got out, it would harm your family. What would you do? It’s your family, your blood, your home at stake.”
“I don’t have that choice, so I don’t think about it. I worry about what we know. These water transfers never showed up in the hydrology records until now. They were hidden. Those smoke jumpers got bad information when your brother asked for pumps, and it cost them their lives.”
“You think this bad information . . .” She trails off, her voice falling away.
“Yes?”
“You think it came from a map? Like a really old hydrology map?”
“I’m not sure why they thought there was water in there. We need to talk to the two survivors. I don’t know who would tell them there’s water in there when it was barren.”
“Tozzie Cresthawk. He’s around. We could talk to him.”
“But he has no memory.”
“So he says. You think he’s covering up for the tribe?”
“I didn’t say that. We need to interview Ted Flax one more time. He’s holding something back. Now tell me, Brunella, and look at me, please, when I ask you this: Do . . . you . . . have . . . any idea what Alden Kosbleau was doing with all that water?”
“It doesn’t make sense to me, Leon.”
“Would your father know?”
“My father?”
“I can’t see your eyes. Look at me, please.”
She turns to him, but she will not look him in the face. “I don’t know about Kosbleau; he’s retired. He’s a hobbyist now, grows some cherries and ornamentals, lives well off the subsidies and all his deals. He’s no different from anyone else in this basin, except a little smarter.”
“Where is he now?”
“Out of town. I told him to look after my father when he returns.”
“You what?”
“I left a message. I’ve been worried about Babbo and this delusion he has about trying to climb Mount Stuart. Kosbleau is family to us. He’ll be back in a week.”
“What’s curious is why he hooked up with the tribe. Look at these payments. They drained most of that watershed together. We’ll have to run a clean hydrology test, talk to Kosbleau and Flax. Trace the property ownership on the land that holds that drainage pipe up on the coulee. But it looks clear to me now. I have to call this in.”
Two teenage girls catch his eye, shooting hoops next to the mobile. Outside shot—swish. Foul line—swish. Hook shot— swish. They have a rhythm, drawing Leon in. He gets out of his car and walks up to the girls in front of the basketball hoop. A small dog greets him with a scrappy bark. The girls hold the ball, staring at the Indian forest ranger like he’s an exotic creature. He says, “Hey, how ’bout a shot?” They toss the ball to him. He says, “Hook shot.” He pivots, arcs, misses.
When he returns to the car, Brunella is wiping tears from her face. “I didn’t mean to make you cry,” Leon says.
