Chapter 12 Julian
The dust from Wyatt’s truck hangs in the yard long after he’s gone. I watch it from the porch, then I go back inside and rinse the two coffee mugs and put them on the rack.
I stare at them. Anger is bubbling up through my veins. I want to pick up the mugs and smash them against the wall. I’m a damned fool. I should have told him. I knew I should have, but it never seemed like it was the right time.
I end up standing at the sink listening to the pumps. You can hear them from the kitchen if you know to listen.
It’s about an hour later that the second truck pulls into the yard. For a breath I think it’s him, but then I register the different engine and I’m already moving toward the door when Donna comes up the porch steps.
She doesn’t knock. She looks past me into the kitchen, a sour look on her face, and steps outside again without crossing the threshold.
“Out here,” she says.
I follow her onto the porch. Her scent has changed. The usual settled beta warmth has gone, and I know before she opens her mouth that Wyatt has told her.
“You son of a bitch,” she says. Yup, he definitely told her. “You had a mouth all week,” she says. “You chose not to use it.”
“I was going to tell him.”
“I wasn’t born yesterday, asshole. If you were going to say something, you would have.”
“I—”
“You know when would have been a good time? When we had the townhall meeting. That would have been amazing.” She has her arms folded, and I get the impression that she is settling in for a long hard telling off. I am not in the mood for that.
Hell, I’m not perfect. I know that, but it’s not like I was given a choice as to whether I wanted to be here either. And it’s certainly not my fault that Wyatt hasn’t taken the offer he was given.
I open my mouth again, but she gets in before me. Again.
“Pack your things,” she says. “Go back to the city. You don’t sleep in this house tonight.”
“Donna—”
“Don’t.”
“No. Not happening.” She tries to interrupt me but I just keep talking. “I’ve got three days left on the Bureau order, plus the weekend. I’ll leave as soon as they let me off the hook.”
Her face darkens. “I don’t give a shiny shit what penalties you’re going to get. I want you out. I’ll call the Sheriff if I have to.”
“And I said no. Legally, I have a right to be here ‘til end of week. Besides,” I say, “if I get penalties for non-compliance, Wyatt gets penalties for non-compliance. I have no idea what they’ll hit him with but you and me both know that they hit omegas harder with these things. I’ll be on my way as soon as the co-habitation days are done. Just need to run down the clock.”
She grunts, clearly not happy but she knows I’m right.
“Fine, but the boys stay with me. Wyatt is going to have to come back. The cattle need seeing to, and you sure as hell aren’t going to see to them. But you stay away from him.”
“I owe him an explanation.”
“I don’t think there is anything you can say that will make this okay. You son of a bitch,” she says again.
She looks at me, and shakes her head like she just can’t believe my audacity, then she gets back into the truck and drives away.
It is after five when I hear the truck. It comes in fast and stops hard. I wait for the kitchen door. Instead I hear boots on gravel and then the big barn door on its runner, and then the runner again, closing.
I give him ten minutes. I tell myself it’s ten and it’s probably four.
I pull on boots and cross the yard. The light from the barn doorway throws a long yellow stripe across the gravel.
The air smells of cold dust and diesel and, faintly, of him — that scent of his that I have spent a week with my face in.
It hits me harder out here in the open than it did in the kitchen this morning. I make myself walk through it.
He’s at the workbench when I step in. He has his back to me. He has a halter in his hands and he is doing something to the buckle. He doesn’t turn around.
“I need to talk to you.”
He sets the halter down. He picks up a hoof pick. He walks past me without a glance, two feet of space between us that he keeps as carefully as a man stepping around a hole, and goes into the gray mare’s stall.
I follow him as far as the door.
“I know you’re angry. You have a right to be angry. But standing there pretending I’m not in the room isn’t going to fix it.”
He picks up the mare’s near foreleg. He cleans the hoof. He sets it down. He moves to the next one.
I watch the back of his head and the set of his shoulders and the deliberate, methodical way he is working through this horse as if I am not six feet from him.
“For God’s sake, Wyatt.”
Nothing.
“Look at me. Just — look at me. One sentence. You can call me whatever you want. I’ll take it. Just open your mouth.”
He moves to the hind leg.
“Fine.” My voice comes out harder than I mean it to. “This is what we’re doing now, is it? The silent treatment. You’re a grown man, Briggs, not a twelve-year-old who got told off at recess. Sulking in a barn. Fuck’s sake.”
His hands go still on the mare’s hock. Just for a second. Then he picks the hoof clean and sets it down and moves to the last leg as though I haven’t spoken.
I stand there until I can hear my own pulse over the horse’s breathing.
“Right,” I say.
I walk out.
The barn light comes on. I can see it from the window, a pale yellow oblong on the yard.
It stays on.
I tell myself he’ll come inside in a minute. I tell myself it’s his barn and his land and he’ll do with them what he likes. I tell myself I wouldn’t want me in my house either.
The light goes off around three a.m. He doesn’t come in.
The phone wakes me. I have slept without meaning to. It’s buzzing on the nightstand, face down, and when I turn it over the screen says Mom.
She has been calling since the night of the pasta. I’ve let it go to voicemail three times. I carry the phone down the hall in my socks so I don’t wake Matthew, down the stairs, out onto the front porch. I pull the door shut behind me and sit on the top step before I answer.
“Mom.”
“Finally. I was about to drive up there myself.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“You haven’t answered me since Wednesday.”
“I know.”
“So. Tell me. How is it going?”
There is a silence in which she waits for me to tell her. My mother is good at silences. She raised me on them.
“It’s going fine,” I say. “I should be home next week. I’ll tell you all about it.”
“Julian.”
“Mom.”
“And how is Wyatt?”
“He’s in the barn.”
A beat. “Doing what?”
“Sleeping. He slept in the barn last night.”
“Julian.”
“I have to go. I love you. I’ll call you Saturday.”
“Saturday is the end of the order.”
“Yes.”
“Call me Saturday.”
“I will.”
I end the call and put the phone face down.
I sit on the step and I do the thing I haven’t let myself do since Donna walked off this porch.
I didn’t poison the aquifer. A hydrologist in Denver did, if you want to call it poisoning, which I don’t, because dewatering is the removal of water from a zone where it’s in the way of a foundation, and the water returns.
That’s what the drawdown model says. I’ve read the drawdown model.
I’ve sat in rooms where drawdown was discussed in detail by people whose job it is to discuss drawdown, and not one of them suggested that a rancher in the valley should lose his grandfather’s land because the water table sits six feet lower for forty years.
They offered buyouts. I know they offered buyouts because I designed to the acquisition schedule, and Wyatt’s parcel was on it.
Somebody from Linden sat at that kitchen table, probably with his mother before she got sick, and offered a number, and somebody in this family said no.
That somebody is now watching his south well go dry because of the no, and he is a grown man, and a grown man who sees his livelihood going has options, and one of those options is to talk about it.
To say, out loud, to the alpha the Bureau has sent him, *I am losing my ranch, and I am frightened, and I don’t know what to do. *
He didn’t say that. He has never said that.
He took me to bed instead and let me assume the rest, and then he saw a picture on my laptop and got in his truck, and now I am being treated by this household like the villain of the piece because I did not volunteer something he could have solved in five minutes with a search engine, if he had ever once, in a week, asked me what I actually do for a living.
It does not feel as good as I want it to.
It feels, mostly, correct, and a little shaky underneath in the one place I am not going to look at, which is the part where I knew, the second I saw the pumps on the ridge on Day Three, that this was my project and that the man whose house I was sleeping in was going to lose because of it.
I knew. I didn’t tell him. I told myself I would tell him later, when he was easier to tell, and he was never easier to tell, and that is on me.
The kitchen door opens behind me.
“Matthew’s school bag,” Donna says to the back of my head.
“On the hook by the back door.”
She goes and gets it, not looking at me once.
From the porch I can see the truck. Matthew is in the passenger seat, belted in, school bag at his feet now.
He has his arms folded across his chest and his jaw set, and the look on his small face is pure eight-year-old fury.
He sees me looking. He doesn’t wave. He turns his head a fraction so he is staring at the dashboard instead, the back of his neck pink under the hair that needs cutting.
Donna gets in. The truck door slams. The engine starts.
He doesn’t look at me again.
The next days run together. Wyatt doesn’t come into the house.
Day Fourteen is a Saturday. I wake at four. I have slept maybe two hours. I lie on my back in Wyatt’s mother’s bed and watch the square of the window get brighter.
At five I get up, and carry the suitcase down one step at a time. I wipe the counter in the kitchen. I fold the cloth. I put the cloth over the tap where it belongs.
I don’t write a note. I thought about it most of last night. The yard is cold and the grass is sparkling with dew. The barn is a dark shape against a sky the color of the inside of a shell.
The big barn door stands open about a foot. The light is on inside. I can hear him moving.
I set the suitcase down by the porch and walk across the yard.
He is at the stall nearest the door with the gray mare, brush in one hand, running it down her shoulder in long slow strokes. He doesn’t stop when I come in. The shoulders of his jacket shift — one half-stroke — and then he goes back to brushing as if I’m not there.
I stop six feet away.
“The order was up at midnight,” I say. “I’m going.”
He brushes her shoulder.
“I wanted to say it in person. I didn’t want you to come in and find the suitcase gone.”
He brushes her flank.
“For what it’s worth, I didn’t know it was you when I designed the project. I found out on Day Three. I should have said then. I didn’t.”
He brushes down to her hock. He lifts the brush. He brushes down again. I count the strokes. On the seventh I understand he is going to do eight, and nine, and ten, and he is not going to turn around.
Okay.
Well, fuck you too, Briggs.
I turn around, retrieve my suitcase, get into the rental car and start the engine. I don’t look back.