The Deluge, page 84
Her aim, then, was to catch the sympathetic before they actually reached Sacred Stone. She’d been living out of a camper for the past two years, moving across Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and the Dakotas, changing her appearance, scrubbing her past life clean to cement a new identity. She’d buzzed her head and bulked up with a protein-rich diet and a vigorous workout regimen. Backpacking and climbing, she got into the best shape of her life, moving from town to town, doing under-the-table seasonal work, switching out for better-paying bartending gigs if she could. She made friends and vanished. Had affairs and slipped away. She took her paycheck and left nothing behind. She carried no phone, no laptop, just her pack and a paper map. A butch ski bum drifter just looking for love and adventure after college, man.
She found work at a bar thirty miles north of the reservation in Fort Rice and pretended to know nothing about what was going on down where the Cannon Ball River met the Missouri. Her boss, Nanette, was an old chain-smoker who knew just about everyone who came or went from the bar and recognized almost every vehicle that lumbered down Highway 1806. Shane watched for patrons other than the old Lakota who came in to pound pitchers of cheap beer and the white men who did the same. On her days off, she’d drive south and rotate between convenience stores and groceries where water protectors might go for provisions. She kept an eye out, uncertain of who she’d approach or how. She always drove the limit but got pulled over nevertheless, her age, skin color, and general look simply too suspect to not harass. The cop relaxed when she said she tended bar for Nanette and didn’t give a shit about any pipeline. They got to know her truck and left her alone.
The first time Shane saw her was in the bar. She came in with a group of young people, mostly Native. One man wore a T-shirt that said WE SHOULD HAVE BUILT A WALL. They ordered pitchers and endured the angry and horny glances from the regulars. The woman was tall and wore a firetruck-red tank top and a dirty pair of jeans with a big hole in the hip through which the whole bar could see a patch of creamy skin. She caught Shane staring at her early in the night. Shane couldn’t help herself. She’d been listening to a new pop song by a young singer, and this woman’s eyes were such a peculiar murk. They reminded her of the waters of the Gulf: dark, muddy, sometimes green but always shifting. The image and lyrics clotted together in her head.
“Assume you all are coming from the brouhaha down by Cannon Ball?” Shane asked, swiping their empty pitcher.
“Just a night off before we go back to the tents and bugs,” said Ocean Eyes. Her voice was big and low-pitched.
“Hey, even the people throwing their bodies in front of the imperial-industrial machine need a drink.” Shane could tell she liked that.
“Where you from?” the young woman asked.
“From nowhere. Going nowhere,” she said and walked away.
The crew hung around till close. One of the men behaved with that proprietary air all straight men had. He kept touching Ocean Eyes’s shoulder, and just the body language between them suggested they’d slept together. Still, Shane couldn’t stop staring at the woman with the thick, crazy hair and the big, loud laugh that seemed to rattle the picture frames on the walls. Old West history went timid at the sound of her voice. At the end of the night, with only a handful of regulars finishing up, the woman walked past her to the bathroom.
“Be careful driving,” Shane warned. “They’d love to catch you with a DUI and thin your ranks.”
Instead of answering, she just stared at Shane. Then with the smallest tilt of her head, she nodded to the bathroom. Nanette was busying herself with gossip at a table of Lakota regulars. In the small ladies’ room, the woman pushed her long, thick tongue into Shane’s mouth and slipped her hands up her shirt to twist her nipples. She had huge masculine hands that made Shane feel petite.
“Can I go down on you?” Ocean Eyes asked, and for a moment Shane forgot why she was there working in this lonely dive bar on the hard, forsaken plains.
“Of course,” she whispered.
Sometimes, if Shane had a particularly hard orgasm, she would cry. It was involuntary. The intensity just left her spent, and her emotions would swell. When she came, biting down on her thumb to keep from crying out, her tears were pouring, and she was embarrassed. The woman rose back up and kissed her on the mouth, pushing her own taste between her lips. She took her thick thumbs and wiped away Shane’s tears. “Now you owe me.” And she kissed Shane on the tip of her nose and left.
They saw each other again and again that summer, whenever she broke away from Sacred Stone to slip past the checkpoints and spend a few hours in the bed in Shane’s van. They would make love and talk about deep ecology, and the woman’s eyes would go stormy for both. Her name was incongruous with her whole being. “Kate” was the name of a sorority girl from a Dallas suburb. Shane said her name was Lucy and that she was from Chicago. She tried not to spin too many tales, to at least fabricate her subterfuge with kernels of truth. In turn, Kate told her about Phoenix and Portland, about her precarious and rootless upbringing. A doting and anxious mother never quite at home in this foreign country, a passionate and cruel father, who was nevertheless likely the reason she was here. She grew up with his activism around uranium mining in Arizona and coal plants poisoning the air on her grandmother’s reservation. It made Shane ache how much they had in common, twinned lives met on a new battlefield. Kate asked if Shane wanted to share her tent at the blockade.
“That really isn’t my scene,” Shane said and caught the disappointed look on her face. “What?”
“I hope one day you understand how silly that sounds.” It killed Shane not to tell her then, but she had to swallow the truth until she was sure.
When Shane heard TigerSwan and law enforcement had shut down Highway 1806, she panicked. The assault on the camp had begun. She saw the armored personnel carriers barreling down the road, hundreds of police in military gear, weighed down with mace, rubber bullets, water cannons, concussion grenades, and attack dogs. Since she had no cell phone, she drove down to where they’d blockaded the road and, despite the risk involved, approached the line. The site was Backwater Bridge, and the police wouldn’t let anyone pass.
“Turn around or you’re a part of it!” snarled a pink-faced cop. She could hear explosions and screaming. Over the rise, it sounded like a war zone. “Get moving!” And he took one step toward her. The pummeling blare of a sound cannon started up in the distance.
Later, she’d find out the police had used pepper spray and freezing jets of water in twenty-eight-degree weather. They nearly blew off a woman’s arm with a concussion grenade. The water protectors were kettled and cleared with CS gas, attack dogs, truncheons, and finally cuffed, tied, and thrown into kennels with a number written on each of their arms in Sharpie. Kate showed up at her van a day later, dirty, shivering, face streaked with tears and pain. She’d been arrested, cut loose, and the cops had never so much as offered her a towel. Shane turned the heat all the way up, stripped her naked, and held her body beneath the covers. Donald Trump had been elected president just thirteen days earlier. She’d watched in the bar on election night, the patronage evenly divided between elation and disbelief depending on one’s ancestry.
“We should’ve seen it coming,” said Kate, still trembling. “I plan on never being surprised by what this country’s capable of ever again.”
It was the first time she’d ever heard her hopeless, and it sounded so strange. Off-brand for a woman who’d truly believed the tribes would set up some tents and the oil companies would fall to their knees. Though some would hang on until the following February, for all intents and purposes that night marked the end of the Standing Rock protest. Done in by TigerSwan and the brutal Dakota winds.
Kate ended up with pneumonia, sweating and aching it out in Shane’s van for the better part of two weeks. “Why don’t we move on?” Shane suggested. “Come with me. You can regroup and get well.”
“I don’t want to move on,” she said. At this point, the color had returned to her face, but her voice would thereafter come with a slight rasp, as if all the coughing had scarred the interior of her throat.
“You need time. It’ll be summer before you know it, and you can plan your next revolt then.”
She was surprised when Ocean Eyes agreed. She knew she was taking a serious risk by associating with this woman. She didn’t care. Their vehicles dueled for the lead all the way to Jackson Hole, a place Shane’s father had always wanted to visit but never did. It was there Shane came to understand she’d fallen in love.
She found work on the ski trails. Kate got a bartending job and insisted on renting her own place. “Not quite ready to move into your van yet.” That was fine. It gave Shane the opportunity to sleep in a real bed from time to time. After just a month, Kate found another gig: advocating for the West’s bison herds, “And I don’t even have to get sprayed by a water cannon to do it.”
Winter receded, and with spring came the lush green of the forests and fields, the glittering beauty of the Snake River, the glory of the Tetons. They spent as much time as they could in the mountains, hiked deep into backcountry, got eaten alive by mosquitoes, crept slowly away from a black bear that wandered into their campground, woke at dawn to watch the sun rise over the eastern plains. They drank at the Cowboy Bar till close most weekends and found a reliable coke dealer to help them burn all these candles at all these ends, but when you’re young it feels like you’ll never run out of wax or wick. Shane knew this woman was a singularity, that she small-talked better than most people dreamed.
Then one night, Shane left the wrong wallet in Kate’s apartment.
“So who’s Simone?” she asked, handing it back.
“Huh?”
“If you’re Simone Schafer of Louisville, Kentucky,” she said, “then who’s Lucy Alvarez of Chicago?”
She thought about how best to steer into the lie. She definitely couldn’t tell her that Simone Schafer was also not her real name and that she’d never even been to Chicago.
“It’s just an ID,” she said. “Everything I’ve told you about me is true. I just need to be careful about who…” Shane struggled for a way to say this. “About who knows me.”
Kate blew a loose curl back from her brow. “You get why this is unsettling, right?”
“It’s not like I killed anyone,” said Shane. “But I have some stuff in my past that I don’t want catching up with me. I’m just trying to live my life now.” She hesitated. “And love who I’m living it with.”
Shane felt the ache of these words, but the woman she’d said them to didn’t seem to hear. “Is that why you didn’t want to come to Sacred Stone?”
“Yes,” she lied, and hoped Kate was picturing her as a bank robber.
“Okay,” she said, nodding, and left it alone.
But things changed after that. Kate started seeing men again and took every opportunity to remind Shane that she found monogamy tedious. Shane swallowed this as best she could. When they were together, Kate was distant in an imperceptible way. They could still talk and laugh. They could still debate for hours. And yet Shane could feel her backing away. Shane walked by a restaurant on a Saturday night, and there she was, clearly on a date. She even recognized the guy: they’d rented a canoe from him a week earlier.
She had no choice; she had to risk it. They went for a hike around the Jenny Lake Loop. The sun beat down, a beautiful cloudless day, and she told Kate everything.
Her face didn’t change much as Shane explained about Kai, Allen, and Quinn, about Kellan Murdock and his skill with explosives. She told her about the people they’d recruited across the Midwest and South. How they were only a few years away from setting their plans in motion. She tried to ground it all, to make it sound as logical and common-sense as possible. They were not kids playing at revolution—they were a genuine clandestine resistance. And they were going to start something real and powerful. She finished, and they kept on walking, one boot in front of the other. Her face remained as placid as Jenny Lake.
“Well?”
Kate didn’t say anything for a moment, and Shane waited.
“No one understands yet,” Kate said carefully. “One day an awful lot of people are going to wake up, look around, and wish they’d done something when they had the chance.”
Shane waited because that wasn’t really an answer.
Kate squinted her murky eyes. “I’m not sure what you want me to do with that information.”
“What do I want you to do? I want you to join us.”
Her smile was sad and disappointed. “You’re a smart woman, Lucy. You and your pals should take a closer look at history.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that extremism always demagnetizes its own moral compass. The righteous start off wanting to kill the tyrant, but that’s never enough. Then they’ve gotta kill the tyrant’s children and family and army and supporters. How we build this path”—she nodded to Shane’s tattoo—“that matters almost as much as the path.”
“I’m not planning to kill anybody.”
“You know what I mean. And let’s say you—Lucy or Simone or whoever you are—succeed beyond your wildest dreams. Say that you don’t blow yourself up building your first bomb and you don’t get caught and spend your life in prison. You won’t win what you think you’ll win. Civilization isn’t careening into an ecocide because a few people are getting rich—it’s because we are acquiescing to it. We are allowing it. And you can’t change anyone’s consciousness with a bomb. It’s something that has to come from within.”
“Now you sound like a fucking New Age mystic,” said Shane, hating the bitterness in her voice. “Everyone just green your consumption and get in touch with the Earth mother goddess, and we’ll all be fine.”
“Maybe,” she admitted. “Maybe I’m a froufrou Wiccan blessing the soil with my menstrual blood—who knows, man!” She laughed, revealing so much wet tongue, lip, and teeth. “And maybe I’m wrong and you’re right, and one day I’ll say, Holy fuck, I wish I’d done more. I wish I’d driven a truck bomb into the Department of the Interior to stop oil and gas leases or bought a gun and taken out an entire Exxon shareholders’ meeting. But boy, do I really doubt it.”
The argument lasted all seven and a half miles of the hike, and by the time it was over, Shane realized what a mistake she’d made. It turned out this woman was beholden to all the fables of the people protesting in the streets with their pink pussy hats right before they met for brunch and went home to binge Netflix. It turned out Ocean Eyes wasn’t at all who she thought, and Shane walked around for weeks with that special fury you can feel only toward someone who has utterly captured your imagination.
The last time Shane saw her, Kate said she was moving to D.C. to join some performative do-gooder organization futilely humping the electoral boulder up the hill in the hopes that it wasn’t all a grand masquerade. She was taking that poor pretty-boy canoe-renter with her too, and though Shane wanted to despise that kid, she mostly pitied him—he was so clearly unprepared for her, so evidently at her mercy.
Of course, when the first bombs went off, Shane feared Kate would come forward. In the years leading up to the start of their campaign, Shane convinced herself that even if Kate wanted to turn them in, she wouldn’t know where to begin. She had a face in her memory, a couple of fake names, an utterly falsified geography and set of associations. The more bombs that went off, the more they began to succeed, the more she wondered why Kate never said anything. Maybe because she was afraid even the hint of an association with “terrorists” would jeopardize her own cause. Or maybe she was secretly rooting for Shane. Certainly, watching her grow famous from afar, watching the public come for her, the state erupting to stop her, at some juncture she had to admit to herself that Shane had had a point, right? And seeing Kate now, nearly twenty years on, conjuring this loose and uncertain army to stand arm in arm around arbitrarily chosen gas stations, Shane wondered about the roads not taken. Not if Kate had come to fight with them, but if Shane had gone and fought beside her.
* * *
Shane and Lali rolled over their shattered country beneath an immaculate darkness bedecked with stars. The radio was full of panic: stock market tanking, home foreclosures spiking, insurance companies demanding federal relief, and in the meantime furious wind had kicked loose soil up into a dust storm the size of New Jersey in the Oklahoma Panhandle. It wasn’t until the Ozarks that they entered the haze. With the first wall of particulate mist, the highway seemed to vanish, and traffic slowed to a brake-light crawl. In the dust’s muffled clutch, noise became indistinct, and the honk of horns sounded like phantoms crying out in the murk. Lali had been quiet for most of the ride, drawing on a sketchpad with her earbuds in. When they hit the dust, Shane felt the uneasiness radiating from her daughter. She’d driven through dust storms before, but this one blew with special dread. Conspiracy theories washed over the radio: Vic Love had hung himself; he’d been murdered by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in a military coup; FEMA was fomenting a communist revolution; The Pastor was going to lead a Christian army to the White House gates, shoot fire from his fingertips, and burn it to the ground. Finally, she turned it off and they listened to Tracy Chapman.
A traffic jam met them at the Kansas border. As they crept closer, Shane saw there was a brand-new checkpoint, manned by men with assault rifles, wearing an eclectic mix of military camouflage and SWAT-team black. They were checking the IDs of every passenger in every vehicle.
