Chapter 2
Ruin
By nine in the morning I'd broken up three fights, and one of them was between the same two men twice, which I consider one and a half fights but Malachi logs as three because Malachi is a purist.
"It's about a chicken," Bishop said.
"It's not about a chicken."
"It's about a chicken."
I looked at the two of them. Ortiz had a split lip. Pike had somebody's entire fingernail marks down his forearm and was holding a chicken.
"Whose chicken?"
They both started talking. I held up a hand and they stopped, which is the only genuinely useful thing about this job.
"Pike. Is that your chicken."
"It's become my chicken."
"That's not a category."
"It came to my container, Ruin. Repeatedly. That's a chicken making a decision."
Ortiz made a sound like a kettle.
"Bird stays with Pike," I said. "Eggs go to Ortiz for sixty days. If either of you brings me poultry again I'm eating it in front of you both."
They went away unhappy in equal proportions, which is the closest thing to justice available before breakfast.
Bishop watched them go.
"Chicken," he said.
"Don't."
The second fight was Pike and Ortiz again, forty minutes later, and I want the record to reflect that I handled it with restraint.
"It laid an egg."
"Pike."
"In my container, Ruin. Under my bunk. That's a statement of intent."
"Ortiz gets the eggs for sixty days. I said that. It was ninety minutes ago. There were witnesses, one of them was a bird—"
"That was before there was an egg!"
"That is what eggs are, Pike, that's the entire mechanism of the arrangement—"
"I feel," said Pike, with enormous dignity, "that new facts have emerged."
The third fight wasn't about a chicken. The third fight was two men on the night crew who'd been sharing a shift for four years, and it was quiet and ugly and lasted nine seconds, and afterward neither of them would say what it was about, which means it was about money or a woman or the fact that we all live in four hundred acres.
I gave them a week apart on separate rotations and didn't ask.
Bishop watched me not ask.
"You're supposed to ask."
"They'd lie."
"That's not the point of asking," Bishop said, and walked off, having used up most of the week.
The fuel shipment was short forty gallons.
That's the thing that actually mattered, and nobody in that yard knew it, because that's the job too — you handle the chicken in public and the forty gallons in a room with the door shut.
"Forty," Malachi said. "Off the Karnes run."
"Spillage?"
"Not forty. Forty is a decision." He had the ledger open on his knees, which is where it lives. "Third time this quarter. Always the Karnes run, always between the depot and here, always a number small enough that a reasonable man calls it evaporation."
"And you're not a reasonable man."
"I'm an exact man, Ruin, there's a difference and it's the reason this town has a surplus." He tapped the page twice. "Somebody's skimming, or somebody's buying our drivers, and I'd like to know which before it's four hundred gallons and a Tuesday."
"Names?"
"Not yet."
"Get me names."
"I'm getting you names. I'm also getting you a headache, because when I have the names you're going to have to do something about them, and half of them will have families."
"Malachi."
"I'm just saying it before it's a surprise."
"You say everything before it's a surprise."
"That's the job," he said, wounded, and went off to be right somewhere else.
She was on my seawall with a stick.
I want to be fair to her, because I've had six years of people telling this story wrong. It was not a stick. It was a graduated staff gauge, professionally made, with a bubble level and a scale down the face of it.
But at four hundred meters, in the glare, what it looks like is a woman standing in the shallows on the wrong side of an eleven-foot wall, holding a stick in the water, writing things down.
"How long's she been out there?" I asked.
"Since five," said the kid on the gate. Ruiz. Sunburned, earnest, hopeless.
"Five."
"She asked me to let her out and I said no."
"And?"
"And she said okay." He swallowed. "And then she asked me what time the tide turned, and I said about five, and she said thank you, and then she was out there at five."
"Ruiz."
"She never told me she was going out there!"
"She asked you when the water would be lowest."
He processed this.
"Oh," he said, with real distress. "She's sneaky."
"She's not sneaky. She's patient. Sneaky is when you lie to me. Patient is when you let me do it to myself."
"Should I go get her?" Ruiz said.
"Can you swim?"
"...Sort of."
"Then no."
I stood there and watched her work for longer than I'll admit to.
She was quick. That's what got me. I've watched a lot of people pretend to be busy on my property and there's a rhythm to fakery — lots of looking around, checking who's noticing.
She never looked up once. Staff in, read, write, twelve paces, staff in, read, write.
Down the line like she was stitching something.
Bishop came up beside me and stood there for a while in the way he does.
"She's good," he said.
"I know."
"That's a problem."
"I know, Bishop."
Church at eleven.
The chapel's the old bank lobby, and we meet at a table my father welded out of a truck bed, and there are nine chairs and one of them is symbolic.
Cash on my right. Malachi with the ledger.
Bishop at the door because Bishop is always at the door, and I've never been sure if that's the Sergeant-at-Arms or just Bishop.
"Item one," Cash said. "The doctor."
"There is no item one."
"There's absolutely an item one. There's a woman measuring your wall, Ruin. That's not an item, that's a headline."
"She's leaving."
"When?"
"When I say."
"You said last night. She's still here. She's here harder than yesterday." Cash spread his hands. "Half this town thinks she's a prophet and the other half thinks she's an insurance scam, and the beautiful thing is both halves are talking about it at the same volume."
Marisol Deng, who runs the pumps and has never in her life said a word she didn't need, said: "She fixed my impeller."
Everybody looked at her.
"Say again," I said.
"East pump. Number three. Been cavitating since spring." Marisol shrugged. "She came by at six, watched it for ten minutes, asked me one question, and told me my suction line was drawing air on the downstroke. She was right."
"So she's buying you," Cash said, delighted.
"She's helping," Marisol said. "Which is what buying looks like when you can't afford anything."
Malachi cleared his throat. "It's also excellent access. She's now been inside our primary pump house."
"Marisol, is there anything in your pump house that matters to a rival outfit?"
"Water," Marisol said. "Just water."
"Then let's not treat it like a vault."
"Everything's a vault," Malachi said mournfully. "That's the whole trouble."
"Item two," Malachi said. "Since we're pretending item one is closed. Rations."
"What about them?"
"We're at four hundred and twenty liters a day off the desalination stack and we're consuming four hundred and forty, and we've been making up the difference out of the east cistern since June, and in eleven weeks the cistern is a dry hole and the bells stop meaning anything."
"Marisol?"
"He's right." She didn't look up. "Membranes. They're eight years past service and I've been washing them in citric like a woman doing laundry in a river."
"Can we buy membranes?"
"From two places," Malachi said. "One of them wants diesel at a rate I would describe as biblical. The other is Cortland."
"Then we buy from the biblical one."
"Ruin—"
"I'm not putting a Cortland part in the middle of our water, Malachi. That's not paranoia, that's placement. You don't let a man you're negotiating with hold your throat."
Malachi wrote something down, slowly, in a manner intended to convey that he was writing it down slowly.
"Noted," he said, "at a cost of eleven hundred gallons."
"Noted at a cost of eleven hundred gallons," I agreed.
Cash leaned over toward me while Malachi was still ruling lines.
"Hey. Real question."
"What."
"The woman with the stick." He kept his voice low, which for Cash is an event. "If she's right — I'm not saying she is — but if she's right, does anything on this agenda matter? Because we just spent nine minutes on membranes for a desalination stack that lives eleven feet above sea level."
I didn't have an answer.
That's the thing about Cash. He asks the question in the tone of a man making a joke and then doesn't laugh, and you get to sit with it in front of nine people.
"Item three," I said.
The vote came around to Bishop last, because it always does, because a man who speaks four times a day gets listened to when he does.
"She goes," said Pike's brother.
"She goes," said Ruiz's mother.
"She stays," said Cash, immediately, with a grin aimed directly at my face, and I understood exactly what was happening and could do nothing about it.
"Cash."
"What? I'm expressing my conscience."
"You don't have one. I've looked."
"I have a situational one." He leaned back. "She stays. Three days. We watch her, we learn what she knows, and if it's nothing we throw her out and we've lost three days of feeding one woman, which given what Pike eats is a rounding error."
"That's actually reasonable."
"I know. It's upsetting for both of us."
Bishop, at the door: "Stays."
"Reason?"
Bishop thought about it. You can watch him spend the words.
"Three inches," he said.
The room went quiet in that specific ugly way.
"Who told you that?"
"Nobody told me." He didn't move off the doorframe. "Your dad scratched the wall. Everybody saw him do it. Nobody asked, because he didn't want asking." A pause. "I asked."
"When?"
"Year before he died."
"And?"
"He said three inches, and he said don't tell Emmett, because Emmett's got enough."
I didn't say anything for a while. Nobody did. Malachi very quietly closed the ledger, which for him is the equivalent of taking off a hat.
"She gets three days," I said.
Onyx caught me between the chapel and the shop with a plate I hadn't asked for.
"Sit."