CHAPTER 23 #2
He swung down and crouched at the tank and made himself look.
The water was wrong. He knew dirty stock water — algae, hoof-churned mud, the ordinary filth of a hundred head drinking from one trough.
This went wrong under all of that. A faint oily skin caught the gray light at the downwind edge, a sheen that broke and reformed, and there was a settling at the bottom near the float valve, a cloudiness, a grit that didn't belong.
He cupped a little in his palm and the rotten-sweet smell came up off his own skin and he tipped it out fast and wiped his hand down his jeans hard, twice, like that would do anything.
Be a shame if something else went wrong out here.
“Goddammit,” Beck said, very quietly, to the down calf, to the tank, to the whole dry sky. He never said it casual. He wasn't saying it casual now.
The calf at the rail tried to lift its head and couldn't. Its eyes had gone sunk and dull, the skin tenting up slow when he pinched it along the neck — he knew that much, knew what dehydrated looked like on a thing too small to lose it.
Down the slope another one staggered up out of the dust, took three drunk steps, and folded back down.
A cow was standing splay-legged with her tail out and her back humped, pumping water out of herself she couldn't afford to lose, and she looked at Beck with the dumb, patient confusion of an animal who didn't know what was wrong, only that it was, and that the man might fix it.
He couldn't fix it. That landed on him all at once, cold and clean as the white crack of lightning off the rim.
A cut fence he could ride down and mend.
A grass fire he could cut a line ahead of and beat back with a wet sack.
This was neither. He could read a horse, he could ride anything with hair on it, he could rope and brand and doctor a foot rot and pull a calf in a pinch, but this — twenty, thirty head going down at once, the calves first, the water poisoned under them — this was past him.
Way past him. He knelt in the fouled dust with his hand on the sunk-eyed calf's neck, the little heart running too fast under his palm, racing toward nothing, and he understood that without the right hands here, and soon, he was going to kneel in this same dust and watch them die one at a time in the dry lightning.
There was only one set of hands in the county he wanted.
There was only one set he was scared to call, for reasons that had nothing to do with cattle.
He got his phone out. His thumb hovered.
Three days she'd been pulled back from him, careful, quiet, that stillness he'd put there somehow without ever meaning to.
Three days he'd told himself he'd find the words for the bridge when the time was right, and there was never going to be a right time, there was only ever this — the Calhoun who leaves, calling the one person he can't outrun, because he needs her and not because he's brave enough to deserve her — and he hated, with a clarity that took the breath out of him, that the first thing to crack open the silence between them would be him needing her professionally, in the dark, on the worst possible night, with Vance's envelope still warm against his chest from his own body heat.
He called her anyway. Because the calf's heart was running, and you didn't get points for your feelings while an animal died of them.
She picked up on the second ring. “Cross.”
“Laney.” His voice came out wrong, scraped flat.
“It's Beck.” A beat where he heard her not breathing.
“I need you out here. The cattle. North stock tank, the second one.” He looked at the down calf, the staggering cow, the loose restless ring of them backing away from their own water.
“Something's in the tank. Scours, I think, bad, all at once — calves are down, three, four already, more coming.
The water's — Laney, the water's wrong. Somebody made it wrong.”
The pause on her end wasn't a vet-calm pause. It was shorter than that, sharper, and he heard the change in her, the snap from a person into a function, the thing he'd watched her do across a foaling stall a dozen times.
“How many down.” She didn't ask it so much as start the triage.
“Four down. Maybe thirty showing. Calves first.”
“Pull every animal off that tank right now. Fence it, rope it, scare them off it, I don't care how, but nothing else drinks from it. Don't let a single head near that water. You hear me?”
“Already on it.”
“Get fresh water to the ones standing — the troughs by the corrals, haul it if you have to. I'm loading the truck. I'll bring fluids, electrolytes, lines, everything.” A door slammed on her end. Banjo's bark, far off. The jingle of her kit. “Beck.”
“Yeah.”
A half-second. He could feel her deciding not to say whatever it was. “Keep the down ones in the shade if there's any. Wet them down. I'm twenty minutes out.”
She hung up before he could answer, which was a mercy, because he didn't have anything to say that wouldn't have come out as the wrong thing entirely.
He looked at the phone. Then he put it away and got to work, because that was the only language he'd ever spoken clean.
---
The next twenty minutes ran together into pure body.
He chased the standing cattle back off the fouled tank, hollering, slapping his hat against his thigh, Gunsmoke pinning his ears and helping the way a good ranch horse does, reading the work and leaning into it.
He got the herd moving down toward the corral troughs where the water was clean creek water, decree water, the water Vance wanted and would have poisoned the whole county to get if it bought him the rest.
He raised Hutch on the phone in three sentences and Hutch said four words back — On my way.
Trailer. — and Beck knew without asking that the old man would have the stock trailer and Rafe and the boy and every clean bucket on the place rolling within ten minutes.
He was right. He heard the diesel before he saw it, the old ranch rig grinding up the lane, and then Hutch was out and walking the fence line of the fouled tank with his flat-brim hat low and his jaw set, and he stood over the trough for one long beat, chewing nothing, reading the sheen on the water the way he read everything — slow, then certain.