Chapter 7 #2
I was right about the map and I was still telling six hundred people that the map was correct. That's the trap and Faulk built it beautifully. I couldn't attack the theft without confirming the content.
"So the water's coming," said Pike's brother, from the crowd.
"Yes."
"And she's got your numbers."
"Yes."
"So she's right."
"She's right about the water and lying about everything else," I said.
"Ask her what happens to the plant after you sell it.
Ask her whether Hartwell has housing. Ask her why, if this town is worthless in eighteen months, Cortland has spent fourteen months pushing your contract price down instead of just waiting for the Gulf to hand it to them for free. "
That one landed. I felt it land.
Faulk smiled at me with what I'm almost certain was genuine appreciation, which was the single most frightening thing that happened that day.
"We'll be at the gate a week," she said. "The offer's open."
And then, because she is who she is, she turned to the yard rather than to us.
"One more thing and I'll stop taking your morning.
" She put both hands in her jacket pockets.
"Some of you will be told, after I drive off, that I came here to frighten you.
I came here to make an offer, which is a different thing, and the test is simple: an offer has a number in it.
Ask whoever tells you I'm frightening you what their number is. "
She walked toward the truck.
Mrs. Adeyemi, seventy-eight, standing at the edge of the crowd with nine children in a line behind her, said quite clearly:
"What happens to the school?"
Faulk stopped.
"I beg your pardon?"
"There are nine of them and there'll be eleven by spring. What happens to the school at Hartwell?"
Two seconds. That's all it was. Two seconds in which a woman with answers ready for the plant, the housing, the hiring and the water did not have one ready for the school.
"I'd have to confirm the arrangements," said Regina Faulk.
"Mm," said Mrs. Adeyemi, and turned her line of children around and marched them back down into a bank vault — and that, not my map and not my speech, is the single most damaging thing that happened to Cortland Oil in Bastion that year.
Ruin got me into the machine shop office and shut the door and I made it about two steps before my legs decided otherwise.
"Sit down."
"I'm fine."
"You're grey. Sit down."
I sat on a crate.
"Somebody here sold my files," I said.
"I know."
"Not copied. Sold, and edited, and it was in the last eleven days because the Sabine interpolation isn't in any version older than the twelfth—" I stopped. "Ruin. It was in the last eleven days. It was someone in this town."
He was standing with his back against the door and both hands over his face, and he stayed like that for a long moment.
Then he dropped them.
I have seen a lot of men be angry. That wasn't what this was. His face had gone completely still and very tired, like a man reading the end of a letter he'd already guessed.
"Malachi has a name," he said.
"For the fuel."
"For the forty gallons off the Karnes run. He gave it to me Thursday and I told him to sit on it for a week." He looked at the ceiling. "It's the same name. Isn't it."
"I don't know your people."
"No," he said. "You don't."
I went back to the yard at four and stood where the folding table had been.
They'd taken it with them. Of course they had. There was nothing left but four dents in the mud and six hundred people who had spent the afternoon doing arithmetic.
Ruiz was on the gate. He didn't say good afternoon.
"Ruiz."
"Ma'am."
"Say it."
"It's not my place."
"Ruiz, you are nineteen and you have the confidentiality of a radio, and I would like you to tell me what's being said, because you're the only person here who won't manage me."
He shifted his rifle.
"They're saying you were right," he said. "That's the first thing. Everybody's saying you were right, and they're saying it like it's a compliment, and it isn't, it's — " He stopped. "My mum said it in a voice she uses about weather."
"And the second thing?"
"That the woman in the truck offered a place and you offered a number." He looked at his boots. "And that a number's not somewhere to sleep."
I stood there in the gate of a town I'd walked into twelve days earlier with a case and a folder and eleven hundred kilometers of feeling righteous.
"Thank you," I said.
"Was that bad? That felt bad."
"That was the most useful thing anybody has said to me all day," I said, "and I'd like you to keep doing it, and I'd also like you to fix my solar panel."
Ramos found me still on the crate an hour later.
"Move."
"I'm thinking."
"You're sitting, which in this town is a medical event." She put a cup down beside me — everyone in Bastion communicates by beverage, it's a whole dialect. "You want the thing nobody's going to tell you?"
"Yes."
"Half of them are relieved."
"I know."
"No, you know it in your head." She sat on the bench.
"Del, I have been listening to six hundred people for nine years, and I'm telling you that some of them have been waiting a decade for a stranger to walk in and say the word out loud, and this morning a woman in a clean jacket said it and offered them a truck.
You can't out-argue that with a confidence interval. "
"So what do I do?"
"You give them a better truck," said Ramos.
I looked at her.
"That's it? That's the medical opinion?"
"I'm a doctor, not a hydrologist," she said, standing. "Also, drink that, you've had nothing since yesterday and you're about to have the worst week of your professional life."
She was, as usual, correct on all counts, and I did not drink it, and that also turned out to be characteristic.
I sat there for a long time with the door shut and the case on the shelf and a folding table out in the yard with my whole professional life laid out on it for strangers, and I did what I always do, which is take out the notebook.
Cortland delegation, 11:00. Faulk, R. Offer: acquisition + relocation + priority hiring at Hartwell.
My model, stripped of intervals. Source: internal. Last 11 days.
Note: the offer is real. That's the difficulty. It is a genuine offer, made by a competent person, and it is better than nothing, and the only thing wrong with it is that it is not as good as the thing that doesn't exist yet.
You have twelve days of being right and no site. Bishop asked in week one.
Find the ground, Del.
And underneath that, last, in handwriting I barely recognized:
Somebody in this town sold it. Somebody who eats at the same table.
Whatever comes next is going to be somebody's child.