Thirteen Ways to Water Read online

  In the Chief’s Name

  Rain pattered on the metal roof of the van. Wolf sat on the carpet scraps in back with his eyes closed, listening, waiting for Peach and Raven to finish setting up the antenna. He opened his eyes when the back door of the van jerked open. As Peach and Raven piled in, Wolf could see the lighted second-story windows of the houses on either side of the alley. Inside the van, he could see the jumble of radio gear and tools on the floor, the tangle of wires. The door shut. It was darker than ever.

  “All set,” Raven said. He dropped something. It sounded like the vice grips. “You ready?”

  Wolf clicked on a dim red bulb overhead. He checked his meters and put on his headphones. “Here we go.”

  Peach put on her own headphones and leaned close to Wolf. She smelled of wet hair and patchouli oil. “Gonna play the loop?”

  “Of course, baby.” The loop had been her idea. She’d heard something like it while listening to short-wave radio. It was supposed to help listeners find the station they were looking for, although in this case, it was just window dressing. The broadcast signal from the van wouldn’t even carry across Lake Washington to Bellevue most nights, and the broadcast schedule was necessarily irregular.

  Wolf started the loop. Over his headphones he heard the hoot of an owl, then a howling wolf, and finally his own recorded voice: “This is Radio Free Seattle, FM.” After a beat, it repeated. He could also hear the signal of the commercial radio station whose signal they were treading on just enough to pull listeners away from it.

  Raven’s hands were cupped over his own earphones. “Sounds good, man. This was a good idea, Peach.”

  Wolf gave Raven a glance that he meant as a warning, but the red light was dim enough that expressions were hard to read. He couldn’t tell if Raven got the message.

  “I mean it,” Raven said. He put his hand on Peach’s shoulder. “It sounds totally professional.”

  Wolf snorted. “Oh, great. We sound totally professional. We can all get jobs doing this. We can all have careers.”

  Peach ignored that and said to Raven, “Thanks.”

  Wolf grabbed his mike and flipped two switches. Peach said, “Hey, let the loop run for a while. The idea is supposed to be—”

  “This is Radio Free Seattle, broadcasting tonight on eighty-nine point seven. Wake up, sleepy heads! It’s time to change the world. Radio Free Seattle is here to tell you how. Tonight, we’ll be giving the city some of the medicine it needs.”

  “That’s right, we’re here to…” Raven started to say. His mike was dead. In the darkness, Wolf suppressed a smile.

  “We’re here to tell you about direct action,” Peach said into her microphone, “the kind of action we’re taking ourselves, tonight, to take back the earth from the corporations.”

  “And what exactly are we going to do?” Wolf said.

  “We’re going to kill machines,” Peach answered. “We’re going to monkey-wrench one small corner of the Evil Empire.”

  “You’re so right, honey,” Wolf said. “Come Monday morning, when the corporations start up their machines, at least one company is going to be in for a nasty surprise.”

  Raven had found the end of his mike cord. “This was plugged in when I left the van,” he said to Wolf.

  “Shit happens,” Wolf said over the air. “But it doesn’t happen nearly enough yet. It’s going to take more than the efforts of Radio Free Seattle to shut down the machineries of enslavement. That’s where you come in, citizens. We’re on the air to urge you to join us.”

  Raven plugged himself in. “That’s right…” His mike was still dead.

  “Now maybe you’re saying to yourself, ‘Who are these criminals, and why in the world do they think I’d want to join them?’ Well, we’re just human beings who don’t want to be slaves. We’re the resistance.”

  “In case you haven’t noticed,” said Peach, “our way of life sucks.”

  “Citizens, wake up! The air is foul. The water is poisoned. Concrete creeps foot by foot over the whole world.”

  “Cities suck,” said Peach.

  Raven flipped a switch. “Yeah,” he said, but his mike still wasn’t working.

  “We’re on our way to logging the last virgin forest. We’re raping the earth with our mines.”

  “Mining sucks,” said Peach.

  “Some say it’s time to go back to the earth, but before long, there isn’t going to be any earth to go back to. We can’t see our mother earth any more. We’re blinded by money.”

  “Money sucks,” said Peach. “So does farming.”

  “Citizen, the average hunter-gatherer spends three hours a day getting food and shelter. The rest of his time is his own. How does that sound to you, Mr. Suit-and-Tie? How’d you like to have everything you really need with three hours of work a day, Ms. Cell-Phone?”

  Raven reached for a switch in front of Wolf. Wolf swatted his hand away.

  “Asshole,” Raven said.

  “The thing the corporations don’t want you to know,” Wolf said, “is how vulnerable they are. If technological society falls apart, if it all breaks down, then it can’t possibly be started up again. All the easy metals have been mined already. All the easy oil has been pumped. If we stepped back to an earlier time for just a little while, the poisonous technologies and the enslaving corporations would suffer a blow that they could not ever recover from. Are you a happy slave, citizen? You have the power to be free!”

  “Every machine that breaks down is a step in the right direction,” said Peach.

  “A different life is possible,” Wolf said. “Break the machines, stop the corporations, and we can start from scratch. How will we do it? We’ll do it as free humans have always done. We’ll make it up as we go along.”

  “Don’t give in!” Peach said.

  “Some people say to me, ‘Man, don’t you realize that what you’re doing is criminal?’ Hey, I’ll tell you what a crime is. A crime is making people slaves while your advertising convinces them they are free. Most of you don’t even see how far it’s gone, how powerless you are until you resist.”

  Peach said, “So resist!”

  Wolf opened a book to a page he had marked. He squinted in the dim light to read. “In the words of Chief Seattle, the Suquamish Indian whose lands were stolen to make this city, ‘The dogs of appetite will devour the rich earth and leave only desert.’ Chief Seattle saw what we were headed for. Money and technology aren’t the answer. Their time is passing. No more machines. Earth and stone, muscle and bone. That’s the world we’re talking about. That’s anarchy. That’s freedom. And that’s the future. We go out tonight to do battle. We go out in Chief Seattle’s name. Long live freedom!”

  Raven leaned close enough to Peach’s microphone that his voice chimed in with hers when they both said, “Long live freedom!”

  “This is Radio Free Seattle. Good night.” Wolf shut the transmitter off. “Okay. Take the antenna down and let’s get moving.”

  “You take it down, jerk wad,” Raven said.

  Wolf looked at him. “What’s your problem?”

  “You are being a jerk,” Peach said. “We’re all in this together.”

  “What in the world are you talking about? The microphone? We were in the middle of a broadcast! I can’t have Raven fiddling with stuff when we’re on the air!”

  “You really are unbelievable sometimes,” Raven said.

  “You’re cranky because you didn’t get to talk on the radio?” Wolf said. “And I’m the jerk?”

  “Yes! You act like…” Raven looked at Peach, then he looked at the floor of the van. “Just forget it,” he said.

  “No. Say it. I act like what?”

  Raven picked his tools up off the floor. “Light.”

  Wolf just looked at him.

  “Peach,” said Raven, “kill the light.”

  Wolf switched off the red light. Raven opened the door and jumped out.

  “Remember. You don’t own me,” Peach sai
d. Then she followed Raven into the rain.

  Wolf slapped the side of the pre-amp with his palm.

  When they set up again further north, close to Carkeek Park, Wolf made a show of double-checking Raven’s microphone before they went on the air. They broadcast pretty much the same message. Raven didn’t say much. He was sulking.

  This time Wolf read at length from Chief Seattle’s famous speech to the white invaders. Wolf invoked Seattle’s name at the end of the broadcast. He did this again during their third broadcast from a location way down south, toward Renton. By the time they packed up for the last time and headed for the construction site, Raven seemed to have finished sulking.

  “That Indian stuff is good,” he told Wolf.

  “The dude was righteous,” Wolf agreed.

  Wolf parked the van two blocks away. Then the three of them made a walking reconnaissance without any gear, just to check things out. The site looked the same as it had on other nights: a pit two stories deep, no security lights. There was a trailer down there with a light on, but they hadn’t seen any sign of a night watchman. Two trucks. Four big earth movers. A couple of compressors. Plenty of targets.

  Traffic was rare at three in the morning. Maybe half a dozen cars went by during their whole reconnaissance.

  Back at the van, they put on the radio headsets, then covered them with hats so that only the little microphones showed, and those were subtle. Wolf put on black gloves. He slung one of the packs onto his shoulder. Raven took the other. At the site, Raven helped Wolf over the fence and dropped the packs down to him.

  “Sound check,” Wolf said as he walked down the grade into the pit.

  “Check,” came Raven’s voice in his ear. Then Peach: “Check.”

  At the bottom of the pit, Wolf kept to the shadows and waited until Peach and Raven told him they were in position, that there were no cars or pedestrians that might spot him.

  “Okay,” Wolf said. “Keep an eye on that trailer, too. Just in case.”

  He went for the big machines first. Climbing onto the bulldozer, he found and unscrewed the crankcase lid. From one of the packs, he took a caulk gun that was loaded with the mixture they had made at Raven’s apartment: oil-based grinding compound and salt. Wolf said, “In Chief Seattle’s name,” then injected the whole tube into the dozer’s crankcase. On Monday, when the workers started the dozer up, the engine would do the work of grinding itself into junk.

  The hair stood up on Wolf’s neck even before Peach said, “Car.” Wolf crouched in the shadows of the bulldozer and watched the lights sweep by on Madison.

  “Okay,” Peach said.

  Wolf still had the creeps. Someone was watching.

  “You sure?” he said.

  A pause. “Yeah. You’re clear.”

  “Is everybody sure?” They didn’t use names on the radio, not for their broadcasts, and not for their direct actions.

  “You’re clear,” said Raven.

  Wolf still didn’t move. “I got a bad feeling.”

  “Nothing on the street, nothing in the trailer,” said Peach.

  “Quit being paranoid,” Raven said. “You’re clear.”

  Wolf slowly looked over the construction site. Nothing moved. “Okay,” he said. He went to the next bit of heavy machinery. “In Seattle’s name,” he said softly as he monkey-wrenched the crankcase. And he had the same feeling again that he was being watched, that he was being betrayed.

  Paranoid, Raven had called him. Well, what if it turned out that he had good reason to be paranoid? Maybe it wasn’t some stranger who was creeping him out. Maybe it was Raven. Or Raven and Peach together. If they were messing around behind his back…

  Would they turn on him? No, not Peach. Not his Peachy girl. Even if she were going to turn him out, she wouldn’t do it this way. Raven, then.

  Wolf opened the hood of the first truck. An engine this size only needed half a dose of corundum and salt. Chief Seattle had said that the white man lived like a snake eating its own tail, and the tail was getting shorter and shorter. This was like feeding shards of glass into the maw of the corporate snake. Wolf smiled. “Die, snake!” he said.

  “What?” Raven said.

  “Car,” said Peach.

  Wolf hopped down.

  “It’s a cop car,” Peach said. “I don’t think he can see you from that lane. Be cool.”

  Wolf felt his heart beating.

  “On my side, now,” said Raven. “He’s slowing.”

  “Shit.” Peach said. For a moment, that was all. Then, “Two more on my side.”

  “Tuck your mikes under your hats,” Wolf said as he grabbed both packs and ran back to the bulldozer. “Walk away. They can stop you. They can talk to you.” He tripped, got up. “But they can’t make you show ID. They can’t arrest you for taking a walk on a public sidewalk.” He threw the packs between the dozer treads and crawled in after them. A car door slammed. A moment later, a powerful flashlight beam swept over the ground.

  Wolf tried willing them to go away. There’s nothing here, he thought. The lock’s still on the gate. Nothing’s amiss. False alarm.

  Another flashlight beam joined the first. He heard the voices of police radios.

  “They’re talking to her,” said Raven’s voice.

  “Shut up,” Wolf said softly. “What if they’re listening?”

  “If someone’s listening in, then we’re screwed anyway, aren’t we?” said Raven. “She’s cool. I can tell just looking that she’s cool.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m in an alley. They can’t see me.”

  “They’ve got lights, asshole.”

  “Oh, so I’m an asshole for wanting to keep an eye on her?”

  “Just keep walking. Get out of here.”

  “She’s waving goodbye and walking away. Told you she’s cool. I’ll go parallel, make sure she gets back without a hassle. Sit tight, man. Maybe they’ll pack up and go away.”

  “How did they know?”

  “Tall buildings. Lots of windows. Maybe some janitor called it in.”

  “On the weekend? No way, you bastard.”

  Wolf couldn’t see the flashlight beams any longer, but he could still hear the police radios up above.

  “What are you saying?” Raven said, but his signal was weak.

  “What I’m saying, asshole, is that I’m not so sure you want me around. If my ass is in jail, you’ve got Peach all to yourself.”

  “No names,” said Peach. “You are totally losing your cool.”

  “You okay, baby?”

  “I’m fine. Don’t do anything stupid.” Her signal, like Raven’s, was thready.

  “You neither,” he said. He heard another car arrive, something with a rough idle. He ventured a peek. Headlights shone on a section of the fence above. Somebody was unlocking and unchaining the gate. “Shit.”

  After the police dog had found him, after it was already too late because the cops had their flashlights on him, that’s when he thought about his radio. What he should have done, while he still had time, was strip the thing off and feed it into the tread wheels. Or bury it. Anything to get rid of the evidence that he hadn’t acted alone. They hauled him out and read him his rights, which he already knew: He didn’t have to talk to them. He didn’t have to answer any questions. He could even make them stop asking, “Who was on the other end? Who were you talking to?” All he had to do was say he wanted his lawyer present, and they had to shut up.

  He’d been over the procedures a hundred times with Peach and Raven. Get caught alone, take the punishment alone. The important thing was the movement. Even if one of them got sentenced to some prison time, the important thing was to keep someone on the outside doing the work that needed to be done, shutting it all down.

  Now, however, he couldn’t stop thinking about Peach and Raven. Even if Raven were innocent of any betrayal, which Wolf heartily doubted, there they’d be, the two of them. Peach would need comforting. Raven would know just what
to do, just how to console her and take her mind off of poor old Wolf, sitting in some cell. There, there, Peachy baby. There, there.

  So he gave them up. Legal names. Addresses. The garage where they kept a drum of valve grinding compound. It all went so fast that it was still dark outside when the cops finally moved him to a holding cell.

  It must have been a slow night. There was one other guy in the cell, and he was asleep, face to the wall, snoring. Wolf sat down on the opposite side of the cell, on the edge of the shelf that served as a bed.

  He put his face in his hands. He was a jerk. He was an asshole. He was every name he could think of. Where was his commitment? After all that planning, he had caved right in and given it all up. Now they were all screwed. One stupid night of jealousy, and he had pissed it all away.

  “It’s better this way,” said a voice from right beside him.

  Wolf started. There was someone sitting right next to him. Someone who hadn’t been there a moment before. A man wearing a conical hat.

  Wolf’s heart pounded in his throat. “Who…?” He stood up and backed away.

  The man’s hat was dripping. Water puddled at his bare feet. Around his shoulders he wore a blanket and a sort of cape made of woven reeds. His face looked weathered, dark.

  “When you keep speaking the name of a dead person, you hold him or her to this world. The Bostons didn’t understand that. The Bostons didn’t understand lots of things.” He frowned.

  “Bostons?”

  “Your people. The white people.”

  “I don’t…” Wolf’s head felt light.

  “Better sit down.”

  Wolf sat. “S-Seattle?”

  “Close enough.” The Indian frowned. “Even if they don’t ever say my name right, it’s close enough to hold me here.” He pulled the cape and blanket closer. “I should be far away by now. But your people had the bad manners to give my name to this place.”