21. Erin
ERIN
The convoy stages at the aggregate pit on Saturday morning, and I put on a state jacket with the department flash on the shoulder.
Lanyard with a badge that's expired by six days and looks perfect from three feet.
Clipboard, sample kit, a GPS unit, and the truck with the government plates that's been sitting under a tarp behind Owen's shed since the night they took my cabin apart.
Nash hates it in a way he manages not to say out loud until we're at the turn.
"Twenty minutes," he says. "Then I come in whatever condition the road allows."
"Thirty. Twenty isn't enough to be boring, and boring is the entire disguise."
"Erin."
"Nash, listen to me, because this is what you keep having to relearn.
" I check the trackers in my jacket pocket, seven of them.
"The whole reason this works is that I'm the least interesting person on that site.
A biologist with a clipboard is furniture.
If you come over the fence for me, I stop fitting in and start being a target, and so do you.
" I put my palm on his jaw. "Thirty. And you don't move until the truck moves. "
He turns his face into my palm, which undoes me a little.
"Thirty," he says.
The gate guard is bored and young and doesn't want a problem, which is exactly what I'm counting on.
"Department of Environmental Conservation.
I've got a turbidity complaint on the Cutter drainage and your pit's the nearest permitted discharge.
" I hold up the clipboard rather than the badge, because the clipboard is more convincing.
"I need to walk your settling ponds and pull three grabs.
Takes half an hour. If your foreman wants to come, he's welcome. "
"Nobody told me about an inspection."
"Nobody tells me either." I sigh with the exact weariness of a state employee at nine on a Saturday, and he watches me be irritated at my own agency.
"Look, if you'd rather I write it up as refused access, I can do that.
It goes to your permit file and somebody from Albany calls your owner on Monday. "
He opens the gate. Six acres of gravel, and I walk it like I own a soil auger.
The ponds are real and I take real samples, because the samples are what let me stop and crouch and turn my back on people. Every time I kneel to fill a bottle I'm reading the yard.
Nineteen vehicles. Two lowboys with the transformer bank still chained down, a cable reel truck, four flatbeds of switchgear under tarps, and a tracked crane in three pieces on cribbing.
There's a fuel bowser and a light plant, and at the north end a white box truck with reefer running and a generator set humming beside it.
That last one takes the breath out of me. Temperature-controlled, running, on a Saturday, in a gravel pit.
The trackers go on while I'm sampling. Wheel arch of the first lowboy, magnetic, thirty seconds.
Second lowboy. Cable reel truck. The crane's carrier, which takes ninety seconds and a dropped pen and a genuinely convincing amount of swearing.
The reefer truck's chassis rail, low and forward, where nobody looks.
Two left. I put one on the fuel bowser and hold the last. The switchgear is what makes me stupid.
It's under a tarp on the third flatbed and there's a corner lifted where somebody's been checking chains, and I see the nameplate. I should keep walking. I have four bottles in a rack and a fictional turbidity complaint and twenty-one minutes gone.
I go and read it anyway. It isn't switchgear.
It's a rack of what the plate calls harmonic filters, and beside it a skid with a legend etched into the frame — SOURCE HORIZON DRAW, STAGE 3 OF 3 — and a data plate listing a continuous rating in megawatts that makes no sense at all for a mine.
Under the tarp behind it there's a coil, wound in something that isn't copper, with a cryogenic feed line coupled to it and frost already on the fitting.
They're not powering a plant. They're building the thing that pulls. I have my phone up and I'm photographing the nameplate when a voice behind me says, pleasantly, "Ma'am, that load's under wrap."
He's forty-something, with close-cropped dark hair. He's got no dust on his boots and he came from the office trailer instead of the ponds, and he's staring at my lanyard rather than my face.
"Turbidity inspection," I say, and hold up a bottle. "Sorry. My kid's obsessed with cranes and I have absolutely no self-control about heavy equipment."
"You were photographing a nameplate."
"I was photographing the tarp tie-down because your chains are rubbing the frame and that's a citation if a DOT officer sees it before I do.
" I hand him the clipboard, which is the single best trick I know, because people who want control take offered paper without thinking.
"Ponds two and three are within limits. Pond one is turbid, but that's your inflow, not you. I'll write you clean."
He reads the clipboard. His eyes go down the form and back up, and there's nothing in his face at all, and I understand with complete clarity that I am standing in something much worse than the boy on the gate.
"Your badge is expired," he says.
"By six days. Renewals are backed up to July." I take the clipboard back before he decides to keep it. "Do you want me to write you clean or not? Because I've got two more sites and I'd rather be at neither of them."
Behind him, out on the pit road, an engine turns over. Then a second. The lowboys are starting up.
"Wait here," he says, and reaches for his radio.
I say, "Great, I'll get out of your convoy's way," in the chirpiest voice I have ever produced, and I don't wait, I walk, not fast, sampling rack swinging, entirely fitting in, toward my truck at the pond's edge with my back to him as he talks into a radio about me.
Thirty yards. Forty. There's a set of boots crossing the gravel behind me at an angle that will cut me off before the gate.
Then a state truck comes through the open gate at speed with its light bar going, and Nash steps out of it in full uniform with his hat on.
"Lawson!" he barks, across the whole yard. "You're on the wrong site. Cutter Creek's the Hollis pit, not this one, get in the vehicle."
I've never been so happy to be publicly humiliated.
"I'm sampling…"
"You're trespassing on a permitted operation and I'm not doing this argument with the owner.
" He turns to the man with the radio and touches his hat brim, the picture of a rural bureaucrat apologizing for a colleague.
"Sorry about this. State's had her out here three weeks and she can't read a map.
You want to file, file with the department, they're used to it. "
The man looks at Nash, then at the uniform, and the truck, and the badge that isn't expired.
"Get her off my site," he says.
Two miles down the fire road I start shaking and I can't stop.
"You came early."
"I came at twenty-nine." Nash's hands are white on the wheel. "Erin. Who was that?"
"I know he doesn't get dust on his boots and he reads badges before faces, but a name, I've no idea.
" I press my palms against my eyes. "Six trackers are on.
Both lowboys, the reel truck, the crane carrier, the bowser, and the reefer.
Nash, there's a running reefer truck in that yard and it isn't full of rock. "
"And the last one?"
I open my hand. The seventh tracker is still in it, unstuck, because I ran out of yard.
"I got greedy," I say. "I read a nameplate I didn't need to read."
He pulls the truck over onto the shoulder and turns to me, and I brace for it.
"What did it say?"
"Stage three of three," I tell him. "Source horizon draw. It's not a research plant, Nash. The thing on that flatbed is the last component, and it's going down that tunnel tonight."
He puts the truck in gear and drives, and after a mile he reaches over and takes my hand without looking, and I hold on.