Inhabited. Charlie Quimby

the truck for puttering around town on errands like this one.

      Real estate was mostly routine that arrived at unexpected intervals. What appeared to clients as urgent crises could often be eased away with a little timely effort. Redelivering this misdirected packet of fliers could be seen as a waste of her time or an opportunity to bank goodwill with the printer who had screwed up. Everyone bought or sold eventually, and when the printer needed a realtor, Meg Mogrin expected her name to occur to him like a favorite tune.

      Across the lot, Zack Nicolai’s rasta slouch cap flashed its stoplight colors next to a police SUV. Zack, a rabble-rousing member of the Homeless Coalition, had insisted on accompanying the literature drop to announce the tamarisk removal project to the encampments along the river. He leaned toward Amy Hostetter, one half of the police department’s homeless outreach team. Meg knew her going back to their co-ed softball days when Amy’s team had been perennial rec league champions. Her tall, Nordic-blond ambiguity exerted an attraction that was fundamentally physical, yet not precisely sexual. With varying degrees of intrigue and confusion, both men and women found her attractive. Meg had settled somewhere between being in awe and slightly intimidated.

      Zack brightened when he saw a fellow member of the Homeless Coalition. “I’m glad somebody else decided to get their feet wet.”

      Meg wasn’t tramping through any tamarisk thickets, not in suede flats and an Ann Taylor sheath. “Where’s the River Alliance?”

      “Apparently outreach is not their thing.” He screwed up his face. “Unless it’s ecology-related.”

      She had to credit Zack. He called himself an anarchist but he showed up on time.

      He snatched the fliers and squinted at the printer’s sample taped to the wrapper. “Oh, jeez. Tamarisk Removal and River Restoration Project. Nobody but kayakers and birdwatchers are going to wade through this beat-around-the-bush crap. Blah, blah, non-native species, blah, blah, riparian habitat. It should just say, hey, campers, we’re getting rid of the invasive species—and you’re it! Who wrote this crap? It’s like we’re dropping warning leaflets before the bombers come. They’ll see Amy and Richard and think it’s a police action. Nobody’ll stick around to talk.”

      A trim Hispanic man in office-pressed Dickies workwear leaned against a Public Works truck nearby. Was Señor Dickies part of this? Where were the others? Meg had handed off the leaflets but she felt responsibility sticking to her fingers.

      Señor Dickies checked his watch.

      Ugh. She had to stop that. Snap-naming strangers had started as a game she invented to bug Brian, who was so adamantly against stereotyping. She’d give herself three seconds to come up with an original label based on first appearances, to see if she could make him laugh. It was supposed to be ironic, a commentary on his hyper-correctness. Now it was just a bad habit.

      She introduced herself. Richard Diaz said he was along to estimate the pre-cleanup before the tamarisk removal could start. “Can’t mix the waste streams,” he said, looking doubtfully at her feet.

      Zack steepled his hands and made a sad clown face. “Oh, please come along.”

      Such a poor showing. If citizens wanted the river cleaned up, they should do some of this dirty work. They should see the poor people being driven from their homes. The dignitaries would appear to dedicate a new park but where were they today? There was no one important, no one around she needed to impress. What the heck. She kept a ballcap for the sun and a pair of mud shoes in the truck, clodhoppers that would look ridiculous with this dress but perfect to complete the Village People tribute band assembled here in the parking lot.

      They started down the nature trail through the cottonwoods and turned onto an unofficial footpath worn through the saltgrass. Richard Diaz pointed out places he had played while growing up just across the parkway. The riverfront was much cleaner now but his neighborhood had scarcely changed. Two blocks of six-hundred-square-foot houses quartered by alleys and pinched by industrial lots was all that remained of Las Colonias, the settlement for workers at the old sugar beet mill. His grandparents had always pronounced Noland Avenue No-Land, he said, as if they were not certain it was theirs.

      “I was born a spic, grew up a beaner, joined the Navy as a Mexican-American and came home Hispanic. Now my men call me boss…” He paused. It was clearly a line he’d used before. “To my face, anyway.”

      Some days the town seemed immovable. It was good to hear Richard’s perspective and remember some changes took more than a lifetime.

      They reached a sandy catch basin reinforced with tumbled and broken concrete slabs. A mired shopping cart pointed where the trail climbed the far bank and continued through hummocks lush with tall grass too fat to stand. This was the paradox of the valley’s alluvial bottom: stretches of ground that looked suitable only for adobe bricks until water was applied. For decades, this floodplain had been trampled by industry. The introduction of tamarisk to stabilize the eroding riverbanks had seemed like an improvement. But the thirsty guest and its drinking buddy the Russian olive choked out the willows, cottonwoods and native grasses, leaving thorny thickets too dense even for nesting birds. But ideal for concealing campsites.

      Barking set off as they cleared the other side. They waited to see if any dogs came out to challenge them. Meg spotted a flash of red, then a flutter of yellow. A woman draped in a striped bedspread stepped from a green dome tent tucked into the thatch. She glanced their way and then dipped out of sight. From this distance, the encampment looked serene but Meg couldn’t help but think of cavalry descending on a sleeping village.

      A massacre was called for, she supposed. With tamarisk it was all or nothing. Given a foothold, it bunched close as broccoli, withstood drought, fire and flood, sucked up two hundred gallons of water per plant per day, and excreted salt back into the soil so only sea grasses would grow. Like Assyrians laying ruin to conquered lands. The survivors had no choice but to leave their homes.

      Amy Hostetter had walked quietly along with their little band. Now she squared her duty belt and clicked into full officer mode. “Here’s the deal. We’re going to be friendly and safe. Today’s no different than walking up to somebody’s front door. Say hello before you go in. If you see somebody’s home, ask if you can approach. If they say no, tell them you got some information for them and ask where you can leave it. Nobody around, just stick it in plain sight and move on. Stay clear of the dogs. I’m here to head off trouble. If anything makes you uneasy, back off and give me a shout.”

      Two pit bulls lunged against their tethers, defending the clearing around the first tent. The striped bedspread Meg had glimpsed through the tamarisk now hung from a bicycle inner tube stretched between two sturdy Russian olives. If the woman who’d placed it there was still around, she did not respond to Zack’s call. A lawn chair appeared to lie beyond the perimeter guarded by the dogs. As he approached it, Amy motioned him back.

      “Look again,” she said. The pits were tied to the ends of a rope threaded through a ring sunk into the ground. “If one attacks and the other one retreats, he’s got the full length for a run at you.”

      Amy folded a flier into a paper airplane. She lofted it and the dogs followed her arm motion, then braked and looked around in confusion. The glider arced to its apex, wobbled and coasted to a landing near the tent. “Some police action, huh?”

      Meg placed a leaflet under a rock atop a licorice-red sleeping bag, in the lattice of a camp chair, pinned one to a clothesline. Richard stopped to take pictures and make notes about location of the camps. As Zack had predicted, they worked for about twenty minutes without encountering anyone. They all met again where two trails converged on a stretch of beach. A kicked-over fire ring flashed the blackened teeth of a broken shipping pallet. A worn blue comforter spread on the rumpled sand. Fronds of tamarisk bobbed in the breeze. Someone had spent the night here under the moon listening to the river trickle over the gravel shallows.

      “This is going to be a nice park someday,” she said.

      Zack scowled. “It already is nice for the people who are here. But they don’t deserve it because somebody’s