A Drink Is Owed

Chapter One: Fourteen Months

The road west out of Dry Fork had gone the color of bone, and the wind kept peeling it up and moving it around, so that by the middle of July there were places where you drove by memory rather than by sight.

Faye Crider drove by memory. She had the eighteen-hundred-gallon tank behind her cab full of good sweet water out of the town standpipe, and a route of eleven customers who had run dry between April and now, and a pint of Old Crow riding under the seat in a rolled-up feed sack so it wouldn't clank. She was thirty-four years old. Her hands on the wheel were a fifty-year-old woman's hands, cracked white at the knuckles from lime and sun.

The truck was a 1961 International with a rebuilt transmission and a hand-lettered sign on the door that said CRIDER WATER — POTABLE — 3¢ GAL. She had painted it herself in a motel parking lot in Guymon four years ago, and she had never once liked the look of her own last name in paint.

Her first stop was the Hardesty place, eleven miles out, where the section road bent around a shelterbelt of Chinese elms that were three-quarters dead. Vern Hardesty came out with his hat already in his hand, which was how a man in that country apologized in advance for money.

"Four hundred?" he said.

"Whatever you got, Vern."

"Make it three."

She backed the truck up to his cistern and pulled the hose down and stood in the smell of hot rubber while the water went out of her tank and into his hole in the ground. Sixty feet away, behind his barn, his well casing stood up out of the dirt with a dead windmill over it, and the whole time she stood there the well talked to her.

Not in words. That was the thing people never understood, the few she had ever tried to tell. It wasn't words. It was a pressure behind her back teeth and a taste at the root of her tongue, and a sense of distance the way a blind man has a sense of a wall before he touches it. She could feel the water under Vern Hardesty's barn the way you feel somebody standing behind you in a dark hall. It was thirty-one feet down and falling. It had about four inches of clean over sixteen inches of iron sludge, and the iron was gaining, and in six weeks or eight it would come up the pipe the color of weak coffee and taste like a nail.

He watched her face. He was a hopeful man; that was his whole trouble.

"You hear anything?" he said.

"I don't do that."

"Your granny witched that well. Nineteen and forty-one. My daddy paid her sixty dollars and a heifer."

"I know it."

"Best water in this end of the county for thirty-six years." He turned his hat around in his hands. "It's going bad, Faye. Tastes like a penny in the morning."

She screwed the cap on his cistern and coiled her hose and did not say: it will be dry by October and you will lose your cows and your wife's rosebushes and then your place, and the fact that my grandmother put that well there is not unconnected to the fact that it is dying. She said, "Three hundred gallons. That's nine dollars."

He gave her a five and four ones, soft as cloth. Driving away she watched him in the mirror standing in his own dust with his hat still off, like a man at a graveside, and she got the pint out of the feed sack at the cattle guard and took two swallows without slowing down.

That was the medicine. Two swallows and the county went quiet — or not quiet, but muffled, the way a room goes when snow is falling outside. Whiskey did something to the ear the way a thumb does something to a struck tuning fork. Her grandmother said it was a sin and a waste. Her grandmother had spent sixty years listening on purpose, which Faye considered its own kind of sin.

By noon it was a hundred and four degrees and the sky was the flat white of a dirty sheet. She hauled to the Dockins widow, who wanted her cistern filled and her chickens' pans filled and to talk about her nephew in Amarillo. She hauled to a Baptist church with a dead lawn and a full baptistry, which struck Faye as a joke somebody was telling with a straight face. She hauled to two trailers and a section of state highway where a crew was watering a chip seal that dried before they could roll it.

Everywhere she went the ground talked. She had grown up with it and she had never gotten used to it, the way you can grow up beside a slaughterhouse and never get used to it. Fourteen months without rain had turned Talley County into something she could hear too well. When the water table falls it makes a sound. She had tried to describe it once to a man in a bar in Woodward — she had described it as a big animal in the next room, breathing shallow, breathing up high in its chest — and he had laughed and bought her another and put his hand on her leg, and she had gotten drunk enough to stop hearing either one of them.

She was thirteen the summer she learned to shut it off. That was 1956, and that was the summer her brother died, and she did not think about 1956 if she could help it.

She finished her route at five and drove back into Dry Fork to fill up. The standpipe stood at the end of Main by the grain elevator, and Main was six buildings with tenants and five without. The elevator's shadow lay across the whole street like something laid down flat to cool. While the tank filled she went into the post office because she had a box there, number 19, that she checked about twice a month, and there was a letter in it.

Bertha's hand. Pencil, hard-pressed, the letters standing up straight like fence posts.

She took it out to the truck and sat in the cab with the door open and her boot on the running board and opened it with her thumb. It was half a sheet of tablet paper. It said:

the mark's showing

That was all. No date, no name, no come home. Bertha never wasted a word she could hold onto for later.

Faye sat with the paper in her hand while the water ran and the elevator's shadow crawled another foot up the street. Somewhere under the post office, twenty-two feet down, water moved through gypsum with a sound like a mouth working before it speaks. She had been hearing it all her life. Now, for the first time in seventeen years, she let herself hear it on purpose, the whole dark shelf of it under the county, and it seemed to her that it had a grain to it, a current, all of it leaning very slightly toward the northeast, toward the section where her family's place had stood since before Oklahoma was a state.

Leaning like grass leans toward a hole.

She folded the letter into her shirt pocket. She got the pint out and looked at it and did not open it, which frightened her more than the letter had.

The standpipe kicked off. She wound up her hose, drove out of town with the sun in her eyes and eighteen hundred gallons sloshing behind her, and turned north on the county road toward the home place, and the wind came across the fallow and threw the dirt of somebody's whole future against the side of her truck all the way there.

Twenty-one years, she thought. That's what the mark means. Twenty-one years and a drink is owed.

She had spent seventeen of those years telling herself she had never heard those words, in the same way she had spent them telling herself her brother had drowned by accident, in an hour, in the dark, and had gone on to be nothing but bones and quiet.

The truck crested the rise at the section line and there it was below her: the shelterbelt, the barn with its west door gone, the house with the porch her grandfather had built and never painted. Her grandmother's windmill was turning.

There was no wind at all in the yard. The dust hung in the air like something asleep. But the windmill was turning, slow and steady, three revolutions while she watched, and the rod went up and down in the pipe, and Faye Crider sat at the top of the hill with her engine running and understood that she had come home too late to do anything easy.