Chapter 3 #2
"It means I grew up in eleven acres of dead cars with a torch in my hand at eleven years old. It means I can cut a rocker panel out of a Buick and I know what a slide hammer is and I have pulled an engine with a cherry picker and a chain and my father yelling at me in two languages."
"Two languages," said Zachary.
"English and profanity."
Delores Tandy laughed until she had to wipe her eyes.
"It also means," Imogen said, "that I know how to look at a pile of garbage and see eleven useful objects. Which, in case nobody has noticed, is going to be the single most valuable skill anybody in this room possesses in about four months."
"That's true," Bill said.
"It's true because it's arithmetic," Imogen said, and then she stopped, and made a face. "No. It's not arithmetic. It's simpler than that. It's just knowing what things are made of."
Joe set down the pan he was drying.
"And then," Imogen said, "there was my father's friend."
"The sorcerer," Hazel said immediately.
"Hennefrick Tarly."
"Here we go," Joe said.
"He came to the house four times that I remember. Maybe five. The first time I was seven and he called me Imogen the Immortal, which I have told you. The second time I was nine and he brought a wooden box with a lock on it and he told my father there was a demon in it and that my father should keep
it safe for him."
Sylvie's mouth fell open. "Was there?"
"There was a set of encyclopedias and a bounced check," Imogen said. "We opened it in 1994 when he stopped answering the phone."
"That's incredible."
"The third time," Imogen said, "was the good one. I was eleven. He came in the middle of a heat wave in that coat, and he sat at our table, and he read my mother's palm for about forty minutes, and he told her she would live to be a hundred and one."
"Did she?"
"She's eighty three and she has better knees than I do, so the jury is out." Imogen tapped the back of the chair. "But then, at the end, he turned to me, and he looked at me for a really long time. And he said, this one does not die. I have told you that part. Here's the part I haven't told you."
Joe said, "Imogen."
"He said, this one does not die, and everyone around her lives longer for it, and that is a heavier thing than immortality and she will find out."
The kitchen went quiet.
"And then," Imogen said, "he asked my father for eleven hundred dollars."
Bill Tandy howled.
"I knew he was always up to no good," Imogen said over the noise. "Seven years old, and I knew. I could see it. He'd do the whole performance and there'd be a hand out at the end of it every single time, and my father would fill it, every single time, because my father liked how it felt."
"Did Grandpa ever get any of it back?" Hazel asked.
"Not a dollar."
"So he was a fraud."
"Oh, he was a complete fraud," Imogen said. "That's not the interesting part."
"What's the interesting part?"
Imogen looked at her daughter.
"The interesting part," she said, "is that I have thought about that sentence every single time I have lost a patient. Every time. Twenty two years. And I don't believe in him and I don't believe in the coat and I don't believe there was ever a demon in that box.
But I have kept the job of being the person everyone around me lives longer for, and I have kept it well, and if a liar handed me that job when I was eleven years old then I will take it from a liar and I will do it anyway."
Nobody said anything.
Then Joe dropped the dish towel on the counter, hard enough to make a sound.
"I need air," he said, and went out the back door.
Hazel found him behind the shed twenty minutes later.
He was sitting on a stump doing nothing at all.
"Mom sent me."
"I bet she did."
"She didn't, actually. I lied. She's checking Tobin and I came on my own."
Joe looked up at his daughter.
"Then sit down."
Hazel sat on the other stump.
"Why do you hate that story," she said.
"I don't hate it."
"Dad."
Joe pushed his hands through his hair.
"I don't hate the story," he said. "I hate the shape of it."
"What does that mean."
He was quiet for a second, working out how to say it to an eleven year old, and then he decided not to bother making it simple.
"It means that I have spent two and a half years building a case," he said.
"A case with numbers in it. Transformer lead times. Calorie counts. Gallons per minute. Degree days. Rounds per person. Every single thing in this valley that is keeping you alive right now came out of a spreadsheet and a catalog and about eleven hundred hours of reading, and none of it was fun,
and nobody ever laughed at a single part of it."
"Okay."
"And your mother sits down at a table and tells a story about a man in a coat and everybody leans in."
Hazel considered this.
"You're jealous," she said.
"That's not."
"You're a little jealous."
Joe opened his mouth and then closed it.
"Yes," he said. "A little."
"Dad, that's dumb."
"I'm aware."
"No, but listen." Hazel turned on the stump to face him. "You know what I was thinking while she was talking?"
"What."
"I was thinking that I already know all your numbers. I know how much wheat is downstairs. I know the spring does three gallons a minute. I know it's fifteen pounds at this elevation because you've said it like nine hundred times."
"Fifteen is important."
"I know it's important! That's my point. I know it because you made me know it. You made all of us know it and you didn't need a story to do it."
She shrugged. "Mom needs stories because Mom is the one who has to keep everybody's head from falling off. You're the one who has to keep everybody alive. Those are different jobs and you're both good at yours."
Joe looked at his daughter for a long moment.
"When did you get like this," he said.
"Like nine months ago. There's no TV here."
He laughed.
Then he stood up.
"Come here," he said. "I want to show you something. And I want to show it to you before I show it to anybody else, because you're the one who'll actually understand why."
He went into the shed and moved the workbench out from the wall.
Behind it was a section of paneling that came off with four wingnuts, and behind that was a space about eleven inches deep between the studs, lined with cedar.
There were three long guns in it.
Joe took out the one in the middle.
Hazel came closer.
It was the most beautiful object she had ever seen come out of her father's shed.
The stock was dark walnut with a grain in it like water, and the metal was blued so deep it looked wet, and there was no magazine on it anywhere that she could see, and the whole thing was clean and simple and looked like it had been made by a person instead of a factory.
"What is it."
"It's a Ruger Number One," Joe said. "Falling block single shot. Nineteen seventy eight."
"Single shot means."
"One round. That's it. You fire, the lever drops the block, the case comes out, you put another one in by hand."
Hazel frowned.
"That seems bad."
"Everybody says that."
"Dad, there are people on the radio making lists about us and you're showing me a gun that holds one bullet."
Joe smiled.
"Sit down," he said. "This is a numbers story, so you'll like it."
Hazel sat on the workbench.
"This is chambered in four fifty eight Winchester Magnum," Joe said. "Do you know what that is."
"No."
"It's a cartridge designed in 1956 for shooting Cape buffalo in Africa. It throws a five hundred grain bullet at about twenty one hundred feet per second. For reference, the deer rifle I took up the hill last night throws a hundred and eighty grain bullet."
"So this one's like three times bigger."
"Almost. And the energy is about five thousand foot pounds at the muzzle, which is roughly twice what my thirty aught six does."
"Why do you need that? There's no buffalo in Utah."
"I don't need it for animals," Joe said.
He turned the rifle over in his hands.
"I bought it in 2019 at an estate sale in Ventura for nine hundred dollars because it was beautiful and because I was in a phase," he said.
"For four years it was a wall hanger. It was the single least practical object I owned and your mother has mentioned that fact approximately eleven hundred times."
"And now?"
"Now," Joe said, "it's the only thing on this property that can shoot through an engine block."
Hazel went very still.
"A truck," she said.
"A truck. An engine. A door. A wall. A tree that somebody thinks is cover."
Joe set the rifle down flat on the workbench between them.
"Haze, every gun in this shed is for a person who is close. This one is for a vehicle that's four hundred yards out and coming, and it is for exactly one job, which is to make the thing that is moving stop moving."
"With one shot."
"With one shot. That's why the single shot doesn't matter. If you need a second one, you didn't get the first one right, and a second one out of a magazine wouldn't have saved you either."
Hazel reached out and touched the wood with two fingers.
"Is it loud."
"It is the loudest thing you will ever hear in your life," Joe said. "It kicks like a mule and I have fired it eleven times total and I flinched on nine of them."
"Then why are you the one who gets it."
Joe looked at her.
"Because it's mine," he said. "And because I'm the one who'll be at the end of the driveway."
He wrapped the rifle back in its sleeve and set it in the wall and started putting the wingnuts back on.
"Does Mom know it's in here?"
"Your mother knows where everything is. She knows where things are that I've forgotten about."
"Are you going to tell the others?"
"Tonight," Joe said. "Tonight I'm going to tell everybody in that house exactly what we have and exactly where it is, because a secret weapon that nobody can get to is just a decoration."
He slid the workbench back against the wall.
Then he stopped.
Mack was standing in the shed doorway.
The dog had not made a sound. He was faced out, toward the driveway, with his head down and his hackles up in a ridge from his shoulders to his tail.
Joe put his hand on Hazel's arm.