Chapter 3
Joe did not move for eleven seconds.
He counted them, because counting kept his hands still, and his hands wanted very badly to do something stupid.
The carrier stayed up for another four seconds after that. Just the open hiss of a keyed mic and somebody breathing into it.
Then it dropped.
He worked the dial up and back down. Nothing. He sat with the little radio in both hands and the cold of the porch step coming up through his jeans and he listened to a dead band for six full minutes.
Then he turned it off, because a radio that receives can also be triangulated by a man who knows what he is doing, and because he did not know anymore what anybody out there knew how to do.
He went inside.
Imogen was awake in the chair beside Tobin Kessick with a candle burning low and a book she was not reading.
She looked up.
"Your face," she said.
"Yeah."
"Sit down, Joe."
He sat.
He told her.
He told her every word of it, twice, because she made him repeat it, and by the end of the second telling her hands had gone still on the arms of the chair in a way that meant she was moving very fast on the inside.
"Family of four," she said.
"Plus a dog."
"They said the dog."
"They said the dog."
Imogen looked at the candle.
"That's not somebody guessing," she said. "That's somebody who has been up our road."
"Or somebody who talked to eleven people who have."
"Which people."
Joe rubbed his face with both hands.
"Anybody," he said. "That's the problem. The propane guy. The gravel guy who did the drive in April. The kid who delivered the hay. The woman at the county assessor's office who has our parcel and our improvements in a file. The solar installer.
The guy at the hardware store in Heber who sold me nine hundred dollars of copper and screen and asked me what it was for."
"What did you tell him?"
"I told him I was building a chicken coop."
"Did he believe you?"
"He looked at the copper for a long time," Joe said, "and then he said, that's a real nice chicken coop, and he rang me up."
Imogen let out a breath.
"So it could be anybody."
"It could be anybody who ever drove past this bench and saw panels on a roof in a valley where almost nobody has them."
He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees.
"I did that," he said. "I put them on the south roof because that's where they belong and I never once thought about what they look like from the county road."
"Joe."
"They look like a house with power in it."
"Stop."
"They look like a sign."
"Stop," Imogen said, and she reached over and put her hand flat on the back of his neck the way she had been doing for sixteen years, and he stopped.
They sat there in the candlelight with a wounded boy breathing between them.
"Okay," Imogen said eventually. "What do we do."
"Tomorrow I take the panels off the roof."
"And put them where?"
"On the ground, behind the shed, angled up, with the aspen screen in front of them. It costs me about nine percent efficiency and it costs me a day of work and it means that from the road this is a dark cabin with a woodstove like every other cabin on this mountain."
"Good."
"And I move the truck into the timber."
"Better."
"And," Joe said, "we stop being four people and a dog."
Imogen's eyes came up.
"Say that again."
"There are eight of us in this house right now. Bill and Delores are eighty one and seventy nine and they have a truck that runs and eleven head of cattle and a hay barn two miles down the road that they cannot defend by themselves.
Sylvie Kessick is fifteen and she is not going anywhere and neither is her brother. Whoever was on that radio has a number in his head. The number is four."
"You want the number to be wrong."
"I want the number to be very wrong."
Imogen was quiet for a moment.
"That's the first thing you've said in twenty six months that didn't come out of a binder," she said.
"Is that good?"
"It's the best thing I've ever heard you say."
She stood up and stretched her back and checked the drip on the second bag of ringers.
"Go to bed," she said. "You're going to need it and there's nothing to do at midnight that can't be done better at six."
"Are you coming?"
"In a while."
"Imogen."
"I want to sit with him a little longer," she said. "His sister finally went down. Somebody should be here if he wakes up and doesn't know where he is."
Joe stood and kissed the top of her head and went up the stairs.
He lay in the dark for a long time listening to his house.
Morning came hard and clear and cold enough that the water in the stock tank had a skin of ice on it.
Joe was up at five thirty.
He got the stove going and put the kettle on and then he went out to the shed with a headlamp and started pulling tools, and by the time the sun cleared the notch he had a ladder against the south eave and a socket set laid out on a moving blanket.
Bill Tandy came out with two cups of coffee and handed one up.
"Taking them down."
"Taking them down."
"Smart."
"Should have thought of it eleven months ago."
"Son," Bill said, "eleven months ago you were thinking about eleven hundred other things and every one of them was right. You don't get to be mad at yourself for the one you missed."
Joe drank the coffee.
"You want to hear the ugly part," he said.
"I heard it through the floor. Delores hears through floors. She's been doing it since 1966 and she's very good at it."
"Then you know we're a name on a list."
Bill looked out at the timber for a while.
"Joe," he said. "I've lived in this valley since I was six years old. My daddy ran cattle on that bench and his daddy dug the ditch that still waters it. I know every family on eleven miles of this road and I know which ones are good and which ones are nothing but appetite."
"And?"
"And I'd like to make some phone calls," Bill said, "except there's no phones. So instead I'd like to borrow your truck."
Joe came down the ladder.
"Your truck runs."
"My truck runs and everybody knows it's mine. That's the point. If Bill Tandy comes rattling up a driveway, that's Tuesday. If a stranger comes up a driveway right now he gets met at the door."
"What are you going to tell them?"
"The truth. That the power's not coming back for a year at the least. That there's men on the radio making lists. And that there's a bench at the top of county road eleven with water on it and a nurse in the house, and that if things get ugly, that's where you go."
Joe stood with the socket wrench in his hand.
"You'd bring them here."
"I'd bring the right ones here," Bill said. "That's a different job, and it's the one I'm good at. You're good at wire and wheat and laminated cards. I'm good at knowing who not to trust in a county of eleven thousand people. Let a man do his work."
Joe put out his hand and Bill shook it with a grip like a fence post.
They got the panels down by noon.
Eleven of them, four hundred watt units, each one about the size of a door and heavier than it had any right to be, and Joe and Bill and Hazel and Sylvie Kessick carried them one at a time down the ladder and around behind the shed.
Joe built the ground mount out of four by fours and scrap two by six, set at thirty nine degrees, because thirty nine was the latitude and thirty nine was a decent compromise for a man who was going to be too busy to adjust the tilt seasonally.
He screened them with cut aspen and a length of old shade cloth.
Then he walked out to the county road, a full quarter mile, and turned around and looked back up at his own house.
Gray roof. Log walls. A thread of woodstove smoke.
It looked like every other cabin on the mountain.
He stood there a long time.
Then he walked home.
Lunch was elk and beans and bread that Delores Tandy had made on a cast iron lid with coals piled on top, and it was so good that Zachary asked for thirds and Imogen let him have them.
Tobin Kessick drank half a cup of broth sitting up, on his own, and fell asleep again in under a minute, and Sylvie sat and watched him do it like it was a fireworks show.
Afterward, Imogen started talking.
It began innocently. Hazel asked how she learned to put in an IV.
"Nursing school," Imogen said. "And then about four thousand actual arms. Kids' veins roll. You learn to anchor below the site with your thumb or you spend your whole career blowing them out."
"But when did you start. Like the first time you ever did anything medical."
Imogen thought.
"I was nine," she said. "I set my cousin Marguerite's finger with a popsicle stick and two hair elastics on the back porch in Redlands."
"You did not," said Hazel.
"I absolutely did. She came off the top of a chain link fence and the ring finger was pointed the wrong way, and she wouldn't go inside because my aunt had told her not to climb the fence, so she came to me."
"Did it work?"
"It healed crooked," Imogen said. "She's fifty one and it's still crooked and she still says it was my fault, and she's right."
Joe, at the counter, said, "That's a nice story," in a tone that meant something.
Imogen ignored him entirely.
"And then when I was fourteen," she said, "I worked a summer at the county fair in the small animal barn, and I watched a vet do a C section on a ewe under a work light in a barn with about eleven flies on the field, and I did not throw up, and that vet looked at me afterward and said,
you're going to be in medicine."
"Was he right?"
"She. And yes."
Hazel was leaning forward on her elbows now.
"What else."
"Oh, honey."
"No, what else. You never tell us anything."
Imogen looked around the room, at Sylvie and Delores and her own two children and Bill Tandy in the good chair, and she seemed to make a decision.
"Fine," she said. "My father ran a salvage yard."
"I know that."
"You know the words. You don't know what it means."
Imogen pulled a chair around backward and sat on it.