Page 30 of South of Nowhere

Now it was Shaw who gave the single letter acknowledgment.

He started back up the gulley, under the bridge, getting a whiff of the mold and fungus that were coating the old stones. Then to the Yamaha.

Shaw was no more than four feet from the bike when he heard two things.

One was the snap of a twig behind him.

The other was that nearly imperceptible sound that someone makes drawing a breath when they’re about to swing a deadly weapon—say, a pipe or baseball bat—your way.

12.

Dorion Shaw felt an urge to salute, though, of course, she did not.

Both the large corporal—L. Williams, on the chest—and the considerably smaller and paler one—identified asR. Mcpherson—stood at attention in front of a dump truck that had just off-loaded a huge mound of sand. Strewn here too was a sloppy pile of burlap bags.

She told them, “I’ve got a half dozen people on their way up here now.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Williams said in a baritone.

Again she felt the urge to lift a flattened hand to her temple, although her only experience with the military was watching movies likeSaving Private RyanandCrimson Tidewith William and wine, after the girls had gone to bed.

Damn, they had good posture. She was always after her daughters to sit up straight; today’s youth was developing what she called a “texting slump.”

The men turned back to the supplies and began laying out the bags for the fillers of what must have been fifty tons of sand.

This sounds like a lot but people are always surprised when theyorder a ton of topsoil or sand or gravel. The pile in the driveway isn’t nearly as big as they’d expected. Mother Nature is heavyset.

This rain-darkened and pocked mountain of sand, though, dominated the southern end of broken Route 13.

The state and county had marginalized Hinowah but the feds had not. Usually the opposite was true. Dorion was impressed that the engineers had gotten the supplies here so quickly. She suspected this was due to the blunt touch of Tamara Olsen, the definition of a no-nonsense woman.

Sandbags prepared in a factory—and presumably within the military—came filled and stitched on both ends. But these bags were empty and sealed only on the bottom; the townspeople would fill them and use zip ties at the top. Corporal Williams had made a few now—so he could illustrate how it should be done. They looked like bags of loot from a stagecoach robbery.

Dorion thanked them both and asked about the arrival of the Hydroseal.

Williams answered crisply, “I don’t know, ma’am. Sergeant Olsen would have that information.”

The vehicles of the “volunteers” Debi Starr had recruited began to arrive from town. Two men climbed out of the first one, a dually pickup. One of the them, in a crew cut and of military retirement age, fifties, actuallydidsalute Williams, who mirrored the response. Dorion believed there was a wistful look in the townsman’s eye, hinting at cherished memories. Another vehicle arrived, an SUV with two more men, followed by a battered sedan with a man and woman.

The rain and wind persisted and it was clear that these people, accustomed to arid climes, had not experienced these types of conditions. They wore multiple jackets, ski parkas and one man a Burberry raincoat, as if he’d been interrupted on his commute to his job as bank vice president.

Soon an assembly line was going, and it broke down according to natural order. The slighter men and the woman would fill the bags and zip-tie them closed, while the beefier carted them to the edge of the asphalt, where Williams and McPherson would place them in the water.

The goal was to build a wall to slow the erosion of the top and keep it intact until the Hydroseal arrived. It seemed to Dorion that the flow was too powerful and the cascading water would simply launch the sandbags down the town-side of the levee. But she would let Tamara Olsen make that call.

The sergeant’s SUV arrived and she climbed out. She offered another fast smile to Dorion, then walked to the edge of the highway and looked down. She called over her shoulder, “Make the bags four wide, Corporals.”

“Yes, Sergeant,” McPherson called.

The sandbag wall grew slowly, and so far it was holding. To Dorion it seemed that the roiling water that struck it was more energetic than on the rest of the banks, as if it was angry that its path of least resistance—down into the town of Hinowah—was being thwarted by human interference.

She drove down the steep road along the south side of the valley, over the spillway bridge and into the center of the village. She parked near Ed Gutiérrez’s Explorer, climbed out and found the man just exiting a large frame house. A family of four followed, with gym bags and backpacks. Each of them—husband and wife and two elementary-school-age daughters—gave nervous glances at the levee and then climbed into their SUV and fled west, to the two-lane road that would take them to the college and safety—a route already badly congested.

“Sandbagging?” Gutiérrez asked.

“Moving along.”

The most cowboy of her employees—lean, denim-wearing, easy-moving—Gutiérrez offered, “had some luck. Somebody posted on atown watch website that God is going to bring down the levee for the miners’ sinful ways during the Silver Rush. Guess it was kind of a bawdy place. Somebody else posted that it’s divine retribution for stealing Indigenous land. Which set off a troll war online. But whatever your evil deed of choice, divine wrath is motivating people to leave. Their ancestors’ bad behavior was a long time ago, sure, but there’s no expiration date on sin.”

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