This Country Kills

Chapter One: The Dry Season

The wind quit at ten in the morning, which on the Bitterwater Plateau was the worst thing it could do.

Kate Rudd was forty feet up the Hatcher windmill when it happened. One minute the wheel was turning over slow and steady, the vanes knocking, the sucker rod stroking water up out of two hundred and ten feet of hole. The next minute the whole country went still, and the tower stopped talking, and she could hear her own blood in her ears.

She finished what she was doing anyway. The leathers in the cylinder had gone hard as bark and the pump was passing more air than water. She set her wrench in the loop of her belt, wiped the sweat out of her eyebrows with the back of her glove, and looked out across eleven hundred square miles of sage, lava rock and dead juniper.

Four summers of drought had taken the color out of everything. The sage had gone the gray of old bone. The junipers on the east rim stood in crowds with their needles rusted off, thousands of them, killed standing up. Beyond the junipers the plateau ran flat and pale to the canyon rim, and past that, invisible from here, was pavement — two hours of washboard road away, if you drove it hard and didn't mind what it did to your teeth.

Up here there were four households, a two-room school that had closed in May, and a cemetery with eleven graves in it.

And there was Sawtooth.

From the windmill she could see the ranch's green: an irregular patch of alfalfa out on the flat, eight or nine miles off, so bright against the gray that it looked painted on. Russell Brock's ground. Russell Brock's water. Sawtooth's deep wells had been famous since before Kate was born — three of them, drilled in a drought forty years back when every other hole on the plateau came up dust — and the gravity pipeline that ran off them kept four households, the school and the cemetery alive.

Everybody out here drank Russell Brock's water. Everybody out here remembered it.

Kate came down the tower ladder, rung over rung, feeling the heat come up off the ground to meet her boots.

Buck Hatcher was waiting in the shade of his flatbed with his hat pushed back. He was sixty, red as a brick from the collar up and white as a fish below it, and he had the plateau manner down cold: he would talk to you all afternoon about equipment and never once ask how you were.

"Leathers," Kate said. "Both cups. And your check valve's tired. I've got leathers in the truck. Valve I'll have to order."

"How long?"

"Three weeks. Corliss doesn't stock them anymore."

Buck grunted. He looked at the wheel hanging motionless up there, forty feet of steel with nothing to push it. "Wind's been quitting by nine the last week."

"I know it."

"You could put a solar on this hole."

"I could. It'd cost you nine thousand dollars and it'd still be sucking on a water table that's dropped eleven feet since I came back." She unlatched the toolbox on her truck and dug out the leather cups. "Eleven feet, Buck. I measure it the first Monday of every month. You want the number, I'll write it down for you."

"I don't want the number."

"Nobody does."

He didn't answer that. He watched her work with his arms folded, and after a while he said, in a different voice, "How's your mother?"

"Lungs are lungs."

"Delphia baked. There's a loaf in the cab, you take it."

"Thank you."

That was as much as anybody gave her, and it was more than most. Kate took the bread, and she took the sixty dollars Buck counted out of a snap-front wallet, and she drove the eleven miles home with the windows down and the dust rolling in.

She had been back on the plateau a year. She had not come back to stay.

She'd come back because her mother's lungs gave out in the spring of last year, and the oxygen concentrator needed power the old house couldn't reliably make, and the bottles needed hauling from Corliss, ninety miles each way, and there was nobody else. There had been nobody else for a long time. Kate's father had died in this house with a bottle in his hand. Kate's brother Luke had walked out of a branding pen at Sawtooth twenty-one years ago and never come home.

That was the other reason the plateau tolerated her rather than welcomed her.

She had been twenty-one years old. Luke had been seventeen. She was supposed to collect him at the Sawtooth branding pen at six that evening, and instead she had driven three hundred miles to the state line with a boy named Bo Tillery, who had a Camaro and a cassette collection and a plan that lasted four months.

Luke walked. Everybody agreed he walked, because that was what was left to agree on. Two postcards came from Las Vegas over the following year — block capitals, no return address, *doing fine, don't look for me* — and after that nothing, ever, for two decades.

The plateau agreed the boy had run off. And it agreed whose fault it was.

Kate had learned to live under that the way you learn to live under weather.

The Rudd place sat in a shallow swale with a dead orchard on the north side, six apple trees standing like coat racks. The house was low and gray, and the good thing about it was the shop shed behind, which Kate's father had built when he still believed in the future: a forty-foot steel building with a concrete floor, a welder, a chain hoist, and a corner where Kate kept a cot, a hot plate and a footlocker.

She slept out there. It was cooler, and her mother snored through the oxygen, and there was a particular silence in the house that Kate could take in doses but not all night.

Lois Rudd was at the kitchen table when Kate came in with the bread. Seventy-one, ninety-six pounds, cannula in her nose, the clear line running behind her across the linoleum to the concentrator by the wall. The concentrator ticked and sighed, ticked and sighed. In four summers Kate had come to hate that sound the way you hate a dripping tap.

"Delphia sent bread," Kate said.

"Delphia's bread is a punishment."

"It's free."

"So is weather." Lois's hands were on the table, and they looked like something excavated. But her eyes were the same eyes she'd had at forty, which was the hard part. "You were up on Buck's mill."

"How'd you know?"

"Wind quit and you didn't come in."

Kate set the bread down. She got the pill organizer off the sill and checked Tuesday, and Tuesday was full, so she pushed it across the table and stood there until her mother took them.

"The Sparks boy came by with a can of gas," Lois said. "Said Russell's putting a new hand on."

"Good for Russell."

"Everything's good for Russell." Lois swallowed the pills dry, which she did to make a point, and Kate let her make it. "Chase May's been hauling water somewhere every Sunday. Sparks saw his truck on the school road twice."

"There's nothing on the school road."

"I know what's on the school road. I taught in that building for nineteen years." Lois turned her head to the window, where the light came in flat and white. "People do things out here. Then they don't say why. That's the whole plateau in one sentence."

Kate almost laughed. Then the concentrator hitched, caught, went on, and she didn't.

She went out to the shop and worked on a solar controller until the heat inside the steel building became a physical opponent, and then she sat in the doorway with her boots in the dirt and did what she did most evenings, which was arithmetic.

The truck had a hundred and ninety thousand miles on it. She had eleven thousand dollars in a credit union account in Corliss. The plateau paid her in cash and checks and sometimes in beef, and she charged less than she should for a hundred and fifty miles of driving. On the current numbers she could last two more years out here, maybe three.

Beyond that she didn't let herself plan, because the only honest plan involved her mother being dead, and Kate had spent twenty-one years learning what it cost to want something at the wrong time.

The radio in the shop crackled.

Everybody on the plateau ran a base station, because cell service didn't reach and never would. The net was mostly weather and mostly lies. Kate had it on out of habit, a low hiss in the corner of the shop, and when a voice broke through it she was up and moving before she'd consciously heard the tone of it.

It was Chase May. Chase was thirty-four, rode for Sawtooth, had a voice like a man leaning on a fence.

He did not sound like that now.

"— anybody. Anybody on. This is Chase May. I'm at Coyote Sink. I need — " A long pause, with the wind in the microphone. "I need somebody to come out to Coyote Sink. Right now. I need Darren Goodall out here."

Kate took the mic off its hook.

"Chase, it's Kate Rudd. Goodall's ninety miles off, you know that. What have you got?"

The silence went on so long she thought he'd let go of the button.

"I've got Dean," Chase said. "He's in the tank."

Kate stood with the mic in her hand and the shop cooling and ticking around her.

"In the tank," she said.

"He's been in it a while, Kate." Chase's voice broke in the middle and came back. "And the tank's full. The tank's plumb full of water and I don't know how."