Chapter 10 #2
"You want to give away your model."
"I want to notarize it." Del opened the case.
"Full model, full stations, full confidence intervals — including the ones your people stripped out, which I'll be describing in detail.
Every site on my list, including the ones Cortland's bought, with my assessment attached.
Copies to the Hartwell recorder, the Karnes depot, the two co-ops on the Sabine, and every convoy captain who comes through Bastion, which is all of them, because we make the diesel. "
"That devalues the parcels I hold."
"It values them correctly," Del said. "That's the entire problem. You can sell a town a lie about water. You cannot sell a town a lie about water when the hydrologist is standing on the parcel."
Faulk was quiet for a long moment.
Then she did something I've thought about a great deal since. She laughed — once, short, genuine.
"You understand I'll simply buy the next one."
"There isn't a next one," Del said. "That's what I've been trying to tell you since your delegation rolled into that yard.
I'm not a competitor, Ms. Faulk, I'm a hydrologist, and the reason your model said definitely is that somebody in your building needed it to.
There's one shelf. It's this one. And in about four minutes it's going to be a matter of public record that everybody on this coast knows it. "
"And in exchange?"
"Water," I said.
They both looked at me.
"You've got fourteen thousand people at Hartwell on a borrowed aquifer that's going saline in eleven years.
She's got the model. I've got a refinery that runs on nothing and a crew that can move it.
" I put my hand on the truck hood next to her case.
"You want to talk about a lease, Ms. Faulk, talk to us about your water.
That's a contract. What you drove out here for was a funeral. "
Malachi got out of the truck with the ledger and walked to the folding table like a man arriving at the only event he'd ever been born for.
"Ms. Faulk."
"Mr.—"
"Okonye. Malachi Okonye. Treasurer." He set the ledger down and opened it flat. "Before anyone says another word, I'd like to establish the parcel history, because I have been reading your acquisitions for four years and I believe there are two you've paid twice for."
Faulk's pen stopped.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Section eleven and section fourteen north of the fault.
" He turned the book around. "You bought them in year one from a receiver and again in year three from an estate, and the estate had no title, and I know this because I have been buying diesel from the same receiver for eleven years and he talks too much. "
There was a silence of considerable quality.
"You've had that for three years," Faulk said.
"Four."
"And you didn't use it."
"There was nothing to use it for," said Malachi. "There is now."
Cash leaned over to me and said, at a volume that reached everyone: "That man wears a cardigan."
It took nine hours and three drafts and Malachi wrote all of it in the ledger, longhand, in that miserable exact script, and at the end of it there was a piece of paper on a truck hood on a limestone shelf with four signatures on it, and it was not a shootout, and I'll be defending that to men in bars for the rest of my life.
Faulk shook Del's hand last.
"You'd have made a great deal of money in my industry, Doctor."
"I'd have made a great deal of money," Del agreed, "and one day I'd have taken the confidence intervals out."
Faulk looked at her for a second.
"Yes," she said. "You would have."
I put it to the club at dusk on the edge of the shelf with the sun going down behind eight hundred acres of grass.
I didn't make a speech. I'd used mine on a table in a yard.
"Bastion moves," I said. "All in favor."
I have never heard a noise like that and I don't expect to again.
Bishop came and stood next to me afterward, which he does about twice a year.
"You want to say something."
"No."
"Bishop."
He looked out at the grass a while.
"Your dad asked me not to tell you about the three inches," he said. "I've carried that eleven years and it's the worst thing I ever agreed to."
"It wasn't your call."
"It was exactly my call. That's what a promise is. He asked and I said yes and then I stood at a lot of doors."
I didn't know what to do with that.
"You told me anyway," I said. "In church. Three words."
"Took six years."
"Bishop."
"Yeah."
"Next time it takes less than six years."
"Yeah," he said, and went off to look at a valve, having had the longest conversation of his adult life.
I found her afterward at the edge, sitting with her boots over forty meters of nothing, which is apparently the only way that woman knows how to sit.
"You've got a thing on your face."
"I know. I've had it since yesterday. You keep not telling me."
"I like it."
"You're a strange man." She patted the rock beside her. I sat.
The whole plain was going gold. Somewhere behind us Cash was telling forty people a story about Pike crying, and Pike was disputing it, and Malachi was ruling on the dispute.
"So," I said.
"So."
"You've done the survey."
"I've done the survey."
"That was the job."
"That was the job," she agreed, and did not help me at all, and I understood that this was deliberate and that I deserved it.
I sat there for a while working on it.
"Stay," I said.
Silence.
"That's it? That's the entire—"
"It was a whole sentence!"
"It was a verb, Emmett. You gave me a verb.
" She turned around, and she was trying very hard not to laugh and failing at it in a way I want preserved somewhere.
"I have come eleven hundred kilometers, been thrown out of your gate, told nine children the truth, been robbed, slept in a pipe — and you've given me an imperative verb with no object. "
"You want it again."
"I want it properly."
So I did it properly.
I'm not writing that part down. Some of it's mine.
But I'll tell you what she said at the end of it, because she said it with her hand flat on my chest, over the sternum, that same entirely clinical placement she'd used in a stairwell nine weeks earlier.
"Observation," she said. "Subject asked correctly."
"And?"
"Hypothesis confirmed," said Delphine Okonkwo. "Log it."