“Well, now, that’s the funny part, really. He’d seen some documentary about how we was running out of freshwater and the government was trying to keep it a secret, so as to avoid a panic. All over the globe, he said, people was running out of water and the news, they was putting a different spin on it, so we wouldn’t know what was going on. All the violence in third-world countries was over water, he said, but they kept telling us stories about tribal wars and religion to keep us distracted, and them poor countries didn’t have a way of telling people any different.
“Pretty soon, he claimed, the east would be going down. There was too many people over there and not enough water. Then we’d be next. He said the whole environmental movement had shit-all to do with caring about the planet and everything to do with people giving their money to green programs so that desalinization plants could be built for the rich people to survive the coming shortage. It got so bad with him talking about the freshwater shortage that people started avoiding him out of just plain annoyance along with the fear. Nobody took him serious until the Aswan Dam was blown up.”
“Mother told me about that.”
“It was a big deal,” Stebbs said. “That dam had always been a political problem for Egypt, but the rest of the world was always told it was about power, not water. Well, when the guerrilla group over there took it down, a lot of people over here sat up and took notice. Your daddy finally had an audience.
“He took a group of us up to the lake, Lake Erie, you know?” Lynn nodded. “He took us up there to show us this plant that had been built brand new on the Canadian side to clean up the lake water. We rowed out in a boat, pretending to be fishing, and he pointed out there was armed guards all along that plant’s walls, and ‘what was a water purification plant doing with a private army holding M16s?’ he asked me.
“It was a good enough question, I thought, so once we came home, we started taking him serious. By then he’d knocked your mom up—uh, I mean, Lauren was pregnant with you, and the two of them weren’t getting on so well. She needed help at home, but he was all in love with the fact that he had men to lead. He kept saying that the regular army was too busy overseas, and when the time came it was up to militia like us to defend what was ours. Or, in the case of the lake, keep what he felt was Ohio’s away from Canada.
“In any case, as it turns out, the crazier he sounded, the closer to the truth he was. One morning, our taps had all been turned off, and we was told if we wanted water we’d have to go into town to buy it. Now, buying water was no new thing—we’d always had to pay for our water, unless you were lucky enough to have a well. But now the water companies was saying they couldn’t afford the upkeep of the water lines, and if you wanted it, you’d have to come and get it.
“That’s how the Shortage came to be, and it went from there. At first, you had to go into the nearest town with a utility office to get your water. Then pretty soon they said it was too much of a bother to keep those open. So if you wanted your water you had to come to the city to get it, and eventually they just said if you wanted water, you had to live in the city. People started leaving, piling into their cars and going to the city limits to pile on top of each other there. Those of us out here with wells or access to water stayed, and there were bad enough stories coming out of the cities after that to make us glad we did.”
“Like what?”
“The cholera, for one,” Stebbs said. “Pack all those people together, you’re bound to have sicknesses of some kind passing around. They forced a bunch of sick people out of the cities, I heard, but nothing can stop a burn like that once it gets going. Wasn’t just the cholera either. Every now and then, people would pass through here that your mother didn’t shoot and I’d learn a thing or two. Made it sound like the Black Death had come back again, nearly. But out here, with less people, the illnesses weren’t the worst. Out here we mostly just managed be threats to each other.
“Not long after they drove the sick from the cities, your daddy and I, we had a falling-out. I tried to stop him from taking the men up to the lake to take that water plant by force. He said it’d be a proper war, fought by the militia like the first one in our country was. Enough of the men were on his side that I backed down. He had everybody eating out of his hand by then, and I wasn’t half certain that he didn’t have it in for me, seeing as he was always looking over his shoulder and wondering who was causing problems in his little kingdom. So I cut my losses, decided to set up on a little piece of land I owned that had a decent vein of water running under it.”
“Across the field,” Lynn said.
“That’s the place.”
“You just happened to be able to keep an eye on Mother from there?”