had been raining for seven days straight, and on this auspicious night, most of Vanadium’s regulars would decide to “drink in” rather than venture into the wet. It was now 1:30. The neon light of the High Grade Bar switched off. The Busy Bees, the area’s anarchistic motorcycle gang and Lame Horse County’s largest manufacturers of methamphetamine, saddled up their Harleys and pulled out of the parking lot. Although business this evening was slow, the Busy Bees were up 9.5 percent for the second quarter. Their success was no accident, for Cookie Dominguez, the gang’s leader, had modeled his sales and distribution system on an organization he much admired, that being the Mary Kay Cosmetics Company.
Here they came now, grim-faced and rain-slickered, throttling down Main Street heading back to their secure compound twenty miles to the west, giving the town one last defiant crankpin exhaust blast as they passed the town’s proudly misspelled welcome sign suggesting that everyone: “Quit Your Damn Bellyachin’ Your in Vanadium.” As the Geiger Motel sign, with its neon Geiger counter needle that twitched from “vacancy” to “radioactive” shut off, the town was officially closed.
Two bug-encrusted sodium lights illuminating Main Street’s convexly-graded stretch of black asphalt created the image of the back of a giant sperm whale skimming krill near the surface. Water, from gutters and downspouts, poured down both sides of the whale’s spine—flushing its skin clean of cigarette butts, candy wrappers, dead cats, flattened blue jays, snuff spittle, and horse manure. This sluice was then hurried into Vanadium’s storm drains and sent westerly into the San Miguel River. There, it descended two thousand feet into the valley where it took the Dolores’ hand in muddy matrimony and poured through the slickrock canyons of Escalante—rolling like a marble along the linoleum floor of the Great Basin through Utah, Arizona, and Nevada, and out kitchen faucets where Vanadium’s fulsome appellation was unwittingly quaffed by people in Los Angeles. At least, that’s how people in Vanadium liked to think of it. Vanadians were, by way of geography and the fact that most of them were direct descendants of Butch Cassidy’s Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, a naturally xenophobic and suspicious lot. This original outlaw breeding stock was attracted to the canyon in the 1890s for its remoteness and defensibility. Vanadium was miles from the railroad, the transportation of choice for Pinkerton agents—who were, by and large, city boys out of their depth chasing bandits in the backcountry on horseback. If Pinkertons, or any other kind of lawmen, were foolish enough to attempt a sortie on Vanadium, they would find themselves riding the gauntlet of its one steep road into town. The slow-climbing pace the incline demanded offered countless opportunities for boulders to be pushed from above and the children of outlaws to hone their marksmanship skills on live targets. The reputation of Vanadium as a dangerous and hard-to-get-to place stuck. For those living outside the law, Vanadium became the perfect place to raise a family—especially if the breadwinner was away most of the year robbing banks in the neighboring states or stealing cattle across the border in Old Mexico.
Generation after generation had struggled to live on this land—parts of it, beautiful. One might say this community existed much like its native bristlecone pine, which during long periods of drought, allowed itself to mostly die in order to keep alive a small, tiny ember of life until better circumstances presented themselves. For Vanadium and greater Lame Horse County, desiccated and exhausted from years of poor land management and cattle ranching, toxic from reckless mineral mining, that life-saving ember came to them in the form of the atomic bomb. Uranium was everywhere in the hills surrounding Vanadium, and the US government along with its proxy, the Atomic Mines Corporation, wanted as much of it as they could get. And so began Vanadium’s “go-go” years starting with the US Atomic Energy Act of 1946. One need only visit the town’s salvage yard to identify Vanadium’s outlandish prosperity in those years: impractical DeSotos, Cadillac Eldorados, Studebaker Hawks, Buick “Deuce-and-a-Quarters,” stacked one atop each other. And these were only the ones that escaped the bank. Old timers would say it was the one-two punch of the 1982 Start Treaty followed by the accident at Three Mile Island that turned off the bubble machine forcing Atomic Mines to shutter its facility. Vanadium let itself slowly die for twenty years. Then, Marvin Mallomar came to town.
The mud-filled clocks, retrieved in the aftermath of the flood, were in general agreement that it was 2:34 when all hell broke loose. It started with an explosion above the town, muffled by the rain and lightning. A few moments later, there was the horrible sound of trees cracking and boulders thundering as a giant wave of red mud and rocks came crashing down Piñon Street, taking a hard left onto Main. The lava went in and out of escrow at the town’s newly installed Vanadium Premier Properties—smashing its contrived western storefront. It flattened Nature’s Grains Whole Foods, which, until Mallomar came here, had been the Feed and Saddle Shop. It pushed his Einstein’s News and Books off its slab and sent it hydroplaning westerly down the street toward Utah—where some of Professor Einstein’s ideas were first tested underground. It pushed the meat freezers from Lugar’s Prime Meats out the front of the store and sent them careening through Boho Coffee and Poet’s Corner—which used to be El Cid’s Guns before Mallomar arrived—scouring all the books containing the answers to how the planet might be saved, while grabbing hundreds of pounds of gourmet roasted coffee beans, kneading and folding them into the moving brown meringue that already contained similar-looking deer and elk feces. All of Main Street was suddenly moving. A parked car, obediently waiting for its owner to consummate his assignation at the Geiger Motel, was carried away. A dead horse, with its legs up in the air, was swept past the Rodeo Arena—where perhaps it had seen better days. And then a man came moving by. Fighting the muddy undertow, he held an arm up in the air as if calling for help from a lifeguard on a beach in the Hamptons. Then, he too, was gone.
The Vanadium Volunteer Fire Department had been the First Responders. Most of the men were either drunk or hungover when they climbed aboard the two old fire engines that sallied forth into town. By the time Sheriff Shep Dudival showed up, the wheels of social order were already coming off. There was much shouting, obscenity tossing, and blaming. The sheriff stood tight-lipped as he witnessed two volunteer firemen fighting over a five-thousand-dollar Rancilio Epoca Italian espresso maker that they had salvaged from the mud. It was the sheriff’s experience that men often became unglued in the face of an overwhelming task. The cleanup would certainly qualify as that. Authority needed to be established quickly. He let the men see him as he walked to the edge of the mud field and lit a generic cigarette. He wanted to provide the two looters an opportunity to relinquish the espresso maker and regain their self-respect.
Down Main Street, the sheriff could see the hooves of the dead, upside-down horse heading west toward Egnar. A pickup truck was stopping for a naked hitchhiker covered with mud. Lucky sonofabitch, the sheriff mused to himself, some drunk that just missed being swept away. He turned his attention back to the looting firemen who, disappointingly, were not deterred by his presence. They were still squabbling over the booty. The sheriff walked calmly to the first man and kneed him in the vastus lateralis—the “Charlie Horse” muscle as it’s called in schoolyards. He slapped the other man in the Adam’s apple. Both men doubled over in pain and quickly relinquished the espresso machine—letting it drop into the arms of the moving mud. There was some muttering under breath, but nobody had the guts to take it further.
Despite Main Street being a complete disaster, there would be no help from FEMA. There would be no help from the governor in the form of road crews, nor the National Guard, or building loans. There would be no speeches from the president about how all our thoughts and prayers were with the people of Vanadium. The shuttering of Vanadium’s once strategic industry, the Atomic Mine, had reduced them to the invisible status of any small western town with a population of three hundred and sixty-seven. But then, Vanadians would never want the damn government, anyway.
The sheriff would probably be calling the high school principal later in the morning asking if he needed any dirt for the new ball field. The larger ranchers could be called upon for heavy equipment. Vanadium could supply the dump trucks. A full day—maybe two—and the road would be open to traffic. But where exactly had the mud come from? That was the plate of beans in front of the sheriff now. As he peered through the rain, he coolly reverse-engineered the mud’s
