Count Backwards from Nine

Chapter One: Low Water

The third summer of the drought took the lake down eleven feet, and Cordell went out to look at what was under it.

Tammy Wooten drove past the boat ramp on her way to work and saw them there at nine in the evening, twenty or thirty people standing in the mud with their phones up. The ramp ended in air now. Below it the lakebed lay cracked and pale as old bone, striped with the rusted lines of fences that had held cattle in when her mother was a girl. Where the water still was, it had pulled back into a gray shape in the middle of the valley, too small for its own shoreline, the way a sick animal draws itself up in the corner of a pen.

And out in the middle of that water, black against the last of the light, stood the steeple.

It had been under for twenty-seven years. It came up in the last week of July, first a bump, then a shape, then a whole tapering box of siding with the cross gone off the top and the bell housing empty, standing out of the flat water like a finger held up to test the wind. The county had said nothing about it. The Cordell paper had run a photograph with the caption OLD TABERNACLE SURFACES AT SORREL LAKE — MEMORIES OF THE VALLEY, as if the valley had memories anybody wanted to shake hands with.

Tammy did not stop to look. She had not looked at it straight on since the day it came up, and she was proud of that in a small, mean way, the way you can be proud of not touching a bruise.

She worked midnights at county dispatch, in the annex behind the courthouse, in a room with no windows and a drop ceiling stained the color of weak tea. She had worked midnights for eleven years. People assumed she'd drawn the short straw. The truth was she had asked for it and asked again and finally traded away every holiday she had coming to keep it, because midnights was where the awake people were, and Tammy Wooten had not slept a whole night through since she was sixteen years old.

She managed three hours some nights. Four if the weather was low and heavy. It came in pieces, twenty minutes at a time, and it never went deep; it was like lying in shallow water and being turned over by waves. She had been to two sleep clinics and one neurologist in Peoria, and she had a shoebox at home with the records in it: no apnea, no restless legs, nothing structural. Idiopathic, the Peoria man had written, which she had looked up and learned meant we don't know.

She treated it with coffee, with nicotine lozenges she chewed until her tongue went numb, and — for eight years, ending badly — with whatever Mitch Sowers could sign out of the ambulance barn and slide into her jacket pocket in the courthouse parking lot without anybody counting.

At 11:52 she badged in, and Angie Dowd was already standing up out of the chair with her bag over her shoulder, the way she always did, like the room was on fire behind her.

"Quiet," Angie said. "Two ambulances all shift, both nursing homes. Oh, and the ramp. They're going to have to put a fence up before some kid walks out on that mud and sinks to his hip."

"They won't."

"They won't," Angie agreed. She paused with her hand on the doorframe. "You look like hell, Tam."

"I look like midnights."

"That's the same thing." And she was gone.

The console came alive under Tammy's hands the way it always did, a spread of screens and a headset gone soft with use. Three towns and four hundred square miles of corn, and at night mostly nothing: a deer in a windshield, a domestic out on County 9, a man in a trailer who called every few weeks to say there were people in his attic and to please not send anybody who would laugh at him.

At 1:10 a.m. she took a call from a woman in the north end of town who wanted to know whether it was legal for a neighbor to run a generator all night. At 1:40 she cleared a false alarm at the grain elevators. At 2:15 she texted her son.

you home?

The reply came at 2:31, which meant Hunter was awake, and it said yeah.

Hunter was seventeen and he worked the marina, gassing up boats that had nowhere to go, hauling docks in on rollers as the water went down. He was a good-looking, closed-up kid with his father's long hands and a phone he held two inches from his face. Since spring he had been sleeping worse than Tammy. She heard him at two, at three, the toilet, the fridge, the back door. She had stopped asking because asking made him lock up tighter.

What she had not stopped doing was noticing.

Twice in July she had come home at 7:40 in the morning and put her hand on the hood of the Corolla in the drive and found it warm. Once she had found mud in the passenger footwell, dried into the ribs of the mat, gray-white silt, lake silt, the exact color of the flat out past the ramp. Two weeks ago she had opened the trunk to put in a case of water and found a shovel lying on the spare, a shovel she did not own, with the blade wet.

She had put the shovel in the garage. She had not asked. She was a woman who had learned at sixteen what happens when you help, and the lesson had settled in her like a stone in a shoe: the last thing she trusted in the world was her own certainty about what ought to be done.

At 3:14 a.m. the console rang.

The number came up in the incoming field, and Tammy read it the way she read every number, in a glance, without thought: 815-266-0009.

Then she read it again.

The 266 exchange had not existed in Cordell County since the valley was flooded. It had belonged to the eleven miles of bottomland along the old creek road — forty-some houses, a feed store, a two-room school, and the Tabernacle. When the Corps put the dam in and let the water come up in the spring of 1997, the phone company had retired the exchange. She knew that the way she knew the exits off I-74, because for two years after 1996 she had dialed 266 numbers on a kitchen phone with the cord wrapped around her wrist, listening to the recording that said the number you have reached is no longer in service, listening to it until her mother took the phone away from her and slapped her once, softly, with an open hand, and then held her.

She put her thumb on the accept key. It was not a decision. It was eleven years of muscle.

"Nine-one-one, what's the location of your emergency?"

Air. Not silence — silence has a shape, and this was air, moving, the sound of a wide room with a high ceiling. Somewhere far off in it, water.

"This is county dispatch. Can you hear me?"

A woman said, "Nine."

Tammy's hands stopped on the keyboard.

"Eight," the woman said.

The voice was low and dry and unhurried, and it came from a long way back in the throat, the way a voice does when the mouth is barely open.

"Seven."

Tammy's own mouth had gone to sand. There was a protocol for this. There were twelve things she was supposed to say. She said none of them.

"Six. Five."

The way she said the numbers — the little dip on the five, the flat run of four-three-two — Tammy knew that cadence the way she knew the smell of her own house. Charlene used to do it in the dark of the room they shared, in the summer, with the window fan turning. Count backwards from nine, Mouse. You'll be out before you get to one. Slow, so your body believes you. And Tammy at seven years old lying on the hot sheet, counting, and Charlene's voice getting further away, and the fan, and nothing after.

"Four," the woman said. "Three. Two."

And then she stopped.

The air went on for a moment. Something small ticked twice, like a nail on wood.

"Goodnight, Mouse," the woman said, and the line closed.

Tammy sat with her hands off the keyboard and her headset on and the whole midnight room humming around her, and she did not move for ninety seconds. Then she pulled up the call record and it was there — a call, 3:14:02, duration forty-one seconds, incoming from 815-266-0009 — and she did the thing that eleven years had made of her.

She typed: 0314 — line fault, no voice contact, no location. Cleared.

She clicked save. She took her hands off the desk and looked at them and they were shaking so evenly it was almost pretty.

Outside, over the dry lake, the sky in the east was going the color of a fish's belly, and out in the middle of the water the steeple stood up out of the flatness, and if there had been anyone out there to hear it, they would have heard the water down at the base of it, tapping and tapping at the siding, twenty-seven years of it, patient as a hand.