Prologue #2
"I'm not blaming him. I'm telling you the mechanism." She stood up again. "Everything in this town runs through one man. It ran through him and now it's going to run through you, and the day you go off a catwalk we do this again, and there won't be a son standing at the bottom with a wrench."
"So what's the prescription."
"Teach somebody," she said. "Anybody. Start with the thing you're worst at explaining."
I thought about that for six years and did absolutely nothing with it, which I think is a fairly complete account of my thirties.
They gave me the gavel eight days later.
It's not a gavel. It's a piece of pipe. Four-inch carbon steel, twelve inches long, capped at one end, with a leather wrap somebody's grandmother put on it in a year I can't confirm. You bang it on the table and the whole table remembers.
Cash handed it to me because the VP hands it over, that's the tradition, and he did it with a straight face for almost the entire duration.
"Try not to hit anyone with it," he said.
"I make no promises."
"Ruin. Seriously." He leaned in. "You know what this is, right? This isn't him. This isn't you becoming him."
"I know."
"Because you're going to be worse at some things and better at others and everybody's going to notice the first one."
"Cash, if you have a point—"
"The point is I'm going to tell you when you're wrong." He straightened up. "That's the job. That's my whole job. You get the pipe, I get the mouth."
I have thought about that trade a hundred times and I still don't know who got robbed.
The first vote I ever put was three minutes later, and it was about a fence.
Not the wall. A fence — a chain-link run around the north stores that Pike wanted and Marisol didn't, and they'd been arguing about it since June, and my father had been sitting on it because he sat on everything he could.
"All in favor."
Four hands.
"Against."
Four hands.
Everybody looked at me. That's when I found out what the pipe actually is. It isn't authority. It's the seat you sit in when eight people would rather not be responsible for a fence.
"No fence," I said.
"Ruin—"
"No fence. If we can't leave stores unfenced inside our own wall then the wall's already failed and the fence is decoration." I put the pipe down. "Next."
Pike didn't speak to me for eleven days. Marisol brought me a pie, which was a bribe, which I ate.
And that's the whole job, is what I'm telling you.
Everyone thinks running a town in a drowned country is guns and fuel and hard men in a yard.
It's a fence. It's a chicken. It's four hundred small decisions a month that nobody will ever remember, made by a man who has to be steady about all of them, because the one time you aren't is the one they'll remember forever.
Here is the part I've never said out loud, so I'm saying it here, where it doesn't count.
Two weeks after we buried him, I went out to the seawall.
It was a clear night. Water flat as a table, that oily calm you get in late summer, and the moon on it looked like a road you could ride down if you were stupid enough, which I nearly am.
My father used to mark the wall. Just a scratch with a nail, every year on the same day, at the high-tide line. He never explained it. I assumed it was superstition, the way sailors do things.
I found last year's mark.
Then I found the water.
Three inches.
I stood there with my boots in the muck and my hand flat on the concrete and I did the only piece of mathematics that has ever actually frightened me, which is: three inches a year, eleven feet of wall, and a number of years that came out smaller than I wanted it to.
And then I did the thing I want on my headstone, because it's more honest than anything else about me.
I took my hand off the wall.
I walked back inside. I fixed the seal on Tower Two, and the flare burned blue by Thursday, and Malachi said the numbers looked better, and somebody's kid was born in the vault-school and they named her Hope, which is a lot of pressure to put on an infant.
And I didn't think about the three inches.
I want to be precise about that, because it matters later.
It wasn't that I forgot. Forgetting would be forgivable.
I chose. Every morning for six years I got up and chose not to think about it, the way you choose not to look at a mole, and I told myself it was strength, and I called it Bastion doesn't drown, and I put my father's voice in my own mouth and used it to shut myself up.
Six years.
Six years of being the strongest man in a town that was quietly, patiently, three inches at a time, becoming a reef.
She showed up on a Tuesday.
I didn't know her name yet. I didn't know anything yet. All I knew was what Bishop told me over the radio in his six-word monthly allowance:
"Gate. Woman. Buggy's dead. She's arguing."
"Arguing with who?"
Long pause.
"Everyone," Bishop said.
I should have gone down there. I should have looked at her and seen it coming, the way you're supposed to when the thing that ends your whole life walks into it wearing a survey vest and a bad attitude.
Instead I was elbow-deep in a pressure valve that had been threatening me all morning, and I said, "Tell her the gate's that way," and Bishop said nothing, which is Bishop for that's not going to work.
He was right.
She had a case full of instruments and a folder full of numbers and she was about to tell me, in front of my own people, in a voice like a dropped tool, that my town had eighteen months.
And I was going to hate her for it.
I want that on the record too, before any of the rest of it. Before the cistern and the culvert and the eighty-mile marker and everything I did and didn't deserve.
I hated her first.
It's just that it didn't take.
Hand me the three-quarter.
I've decided what it means. I decided a long time after I should have, in a concrete pipe in the rain, with somebody's hand on my jaw and the whole Gulf coming for us.
It means: there's a hole in something, and the world's coming in, and I need you to give me the thing that closes it.
He asked me for a wrench.
He should have asked me for her.