Chapter 5 #2
"No, this is the moment. This is exactly the moment, because it's the same subject and nobody's realized it.
" He opened the ledger. "Cortland Oil has adjusted our contracts three times in fourteen months.
Every adjustment is small. Every adjustment is downward.
Cumulatively we are now selling at sixty-one percent of what we sold at two years ago, into a market that has not moved. "
"They're squeezing us," Cash said.
"They're pricing us," Malachi said. "Which is worse, because it's patient." He turned a page. "And the forty gallons. Three times off the Karnes run. I have a name now."
"You have a name," Ruin said.
"I have a name and I would like to give it to you in a smaller room."
"Malachi."
"A smaller room, Ruin."
Ruin caught me in the stairwell.
I'd left fast, because I'd needed to be somewhere that wasn't that room, and the stairwell of the old bank is concrete and dark and about a meter wide, and he came down it after me and I turned around on the half-landing and we had the fight there.
"You should have told me you didn't have a site."
"I told you on day one that you had eighteen months. That's what I had. You didn't ask what came after, you told me the gate was that way."
"You let me sit in that room—"
"You sat in that room. Nobody let you. You're a grown man with a pipe."
"Six hundred and forty-one people, Doctor—"
"Delphine."
"—six hundred and forty-one people just heard the smartest person who's ever walked into this town say I don't know where you go—"
"Yes! Because that's true! Because I'd rather stand up there and say I don't know than do what the man at the desk did, which was pick a comfortable answer and let it kill somebody!
" My voice came off the concrete in three directions.
"You want me to lie to Bishop? I'll lie to Bishop.
Give me a map and forty minutes and I'll put a beautiful red circle on it and you can move your whole town onto a floodplain with excellent confidence—"
"That's not—"
"Then what do you want from me?"
And he stopped.
He was two steps up. I had to look up at him and I hated it, and there wasn't anywhere to go on a half-landing a meter wide, and he had one hand flat on the wall by my head and had clearly not decided to put it there.
"I don't know," he said.
"That's not an answer."
"No," he said. "It's the true one, though. You like those."
I could hear him breathing. I could hear the generator through the wall and somebody upstairs dragging a chair and my own pulse doing something insubordinate.
"Say the rest of it," I said.
"There isn't any rest of it."
"Ruin."
"You put your case on the bench," he said.
"Yes."
"You were supposed to leave today. You put your case on the bench and I watched you do it and I turned around so I wouldn't have to say anything about it, and I've been furious ever since and it took me until right now to work out that I'm not furious at you."
"Then who?"
"Me," he said. "For being glad."
The stairwell was very small.
I want to be honest about what happened next, because there's a version of this in the town's telling where I did something brave, and I didn't.
I put my hand flat on his chest — over the sternum, an entirely clinical placement, and I felt his heart going like something trying to get out of a crate.
Then I said, "I'm going to go now."
"Okay."
"That's not — I'm going to my bunk. That's all that is."
"Okay," he said, and moved out of the way, and did it fast, like it cost him.
I got four steps down.
"Delphine."
I stopped. I did not turn around, because I have learned the local customs.
"Give me a week," he said. "I'll get you the survey. Fuel, a rig, two men, whatever you need to go north and find the other half of the thing."
"Your club just watched you agree with me. They're not going to give you a week."
"They're not giving it," he said. "I'm taking it."
Cash was waiting at the bottom of the stairs, sitting on a crate, eating something.
"How much did you hear?"
"All of it. Concrete." He offered me the bag. I took some. It was terrible. "You want my read?"
"Not especially."
"You're getting it. You've got about six days before this town decides what you are.
" He chewed. "Right now you're the woman who was right about the drain.
That's a very good thing to be. In six days you're either the woman who found us somewhere to go, or you're the woman who told six hundred people they were finished and then went to bed. "
"That's not fair."
"It's not fair, no, it's just what'll happen." He stood up and brushed his hands off. "I like you, Doctor. I want that on the record because I'm about to say the other thing."
"Say it."
"He's going to give you whatever you ask for," Cash said.
"Fuel, men, a week, the bike. You've noticed.
Everybody's noticed." He picked up the bag.
"So be careful what you ask for, because he can't afford any of it, and he'll do it anyway, and then I'm the one who has to hold the room together while he's ninety miles north being in love in a tent. "
"Nobody said anything about—"
"Doctor," said Cash gently, "we have no television."
I lay on the canvas bunk in container nine with the door that sticks and I did not sleep, and at some point around three I got up and wrote in my field notes, and what I wrote was:
Presented model. Subsidence + SLR + surge, three-vector. They understood all of it. Bishop asked the only question that matters and I had nothing.
Cortland Oil — price pressure, 61% over 14 months. Malachi thinks squeeze. I think acquisition. You don't price a supplier down that patiently unless you intend to own the asset, and the only asset here is a refinery that has eighteen months on it, which means either they don't know
I stopped there.
I looked at it for a long time.
Then I finished the sentence.
— or they know exactly, and they're waiting.