CHAPTER 9 #2
He turned. He blinked once, the way a man blinks when a woman says the exact sentence he was about to say. Then he lifted the extinguisher off its wall bracket, set it upright on the concrete pad, and touched the plastic ring at the top with two fingers.
“Pin,” he said. “Ring. Aim at the base of the fire, not at the flames. Sweep. Left to right, right to left. Eighteen pounds. It hits you in the sternum if you drop your elbows.”
He set it in my hands.
Eighteen pounds. It hit me in the sternum.
I raised my elbows. The weight went up into my shoulders and the shoulders held. My knees held. My back held. I set the tank down again very carefully and stepped back.
(And it turns out I know how to hold eighteen pounds.)
He was watching me.
“Good,” he said. Just the one word. He did not decorate it.
We finished the loop with the sun three fingers off the ridge, and I could see the color of the whole valley the way a good aerial photograph would see it — gold going brown at the far edge, the pines a darker green than green, the coin-dust holding a haze at knee height along the fence line.
The wind came off the strip in a slow, steady exhale, five miles an hour, warm on the neck, no relief in it at all.
“How long since it rained here,” I said.
He counted before he spoke. He always counted.
“Fifteen days.”
“Fifteen.”
“June usually gives us something inside ten.”
Some numbers you carry without comment.
At five in the afternoon I ran a saucepan for pasta.
It was one of those decisions you make in a mountain house on a Sunday. You tell yourself dinner is going to be normal and you make it normal, because normal is a small rebellion against the day's clock. I set the saucepan under the tap. I turned the handle a quarter-turn.
The wobble came first — the same tremor at six that had stopped the coffee grinder in my other hand — and I already knew what would follow. A hollow chug. A hiss. A thin sputter of perhaps a quart into the pan, then a rattle of air, then nothing.
I stood there.
I turned the tap off.
I stood there another five seconds and did not move.
Then I walked out onto the porch.
Luke was at the rail. He was not looking west, where the sun was still hard on the ridge; he was looking south — down valley, past the fence corner, past the visible weather, into a piece of the middle distance where a smoke smell I could not smell yet had begun to make itself known to him.
He said, without turning: “It'll come back. It always does. Just — smaller.”
“It just stopped.”
“It'll come back.”
We stood there. There was smoke where he was looking. A strip of southern sky the color of an old page. I had not smelled it. He had.
The well and the man and the ridge all have the same problem tonight, I thought. They are running down. Something is going to give.
He had said this to me the first week, in almost these same words, at almost this same tap, when the pressure had wobbled once and steadied — well pressure; not yet, not much; watch it.
He had been minimizing then and he was minimizing now, and the difference between the two sentences was the size of a summer.
I went back inside and set the saucepan in the drying rack.
By seven-thirty I had boiled two cups of water off the bladder in the woodshed and cooked pasta on the propane range with a jar of Marta's tomato sauce and the small tub of grated Parmesan she had sent up on Thursday with the raspberry jam.
We ate at the pine table by the west window. The light was going gold.
He ate the way he did most things — steady, without commentary. I ate a little slower.
“Sheriff has deputized eleven volunteers,” he said. “Ridge patrols run three-a-day now. Going to four by Tuesday.”
“Four.”
“Sula's fine. Hamilton's fine. Rae Vance's north pasture —” and here he did the thing where his voice dropped one register, the way a man's does when he means to sound neutral about something he cares about, “— Rae's north pasture is holding. She got the second-cut hay in last week. She's clear.”
“Clear.”
“Clear.”
I turned my fork over.
“Luke.”
“Mm.”
“You did well with the pump.”
He looked up. The corner of his mouth moved. No smile reached it, but one was on the way.
“You did well with the extinguisher.”
“Thank you.”
We ate.
There was a silence at the end of the meal that had been in this room since Wednesday night — since the ridge alarm had lifted him off my mouth and off my ribs and turned him into a man with a pistol in his hand in three seconds.
Neither of us had said the word for it. Neither of us had crossed the two feet of pine floor between the couch and the bottom of the stairs, either.
I stood up. I cleared the two plates. I ran the sink not at all, because the sink was off.
He stood at the porch door with his shoulder against the frame and watched me stack the dishes in a bowl of the water I had boiled.
“Celia.”
I kept facing forward.
“Mm.”
“Sleep tonight if you can.”
“I will.”
He went out to walk the perimeter one more time before the light finished going.
By a quarter past ten at night I was in the queen bed alone.
The Remington 870 was propped against the wall on my side of the mattress the way he had shown me on the sixth day: four shells in the magazine, chamber empty, safety on.
The wedding band was on my finger. Luke's flannel was still hung over the back of the chair in the corner because I had not returned it and he had not asked for it. My lamp was off.
I thought about the static water level at two hundred seventy-five feet. I thought about a boot print he had not told me about, because I did not know there was one yet — but I knew the outline of the omission. The boot would fit inside his afternoon face if I looked at it long enough.
Downstairs, the tap he had cracked back to a slow preservation drip beat a single, even count.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
I counted nine before I stopped counting.
The wren did not sing at all tonight.
Something.