Part 5
Marcy parked beside the truck, got out, and walked past him to the valve at the back of the tank. It was stiff. She put both hands on it and turned it until the hose went limp.
Russ watched her do it. Then he looked past her, up the hill, at the raw yellow dirt in the north corner and the gray ring of concrete in the middle of it. He looked at it for a long time, his jaw still.
“Well,” he said.
“Her name’s Penny.”
He didn’t pretend he didn’t know. That mattered to her later, more than she wanted it to.
“My dad put that spring in,” he said. “Dug that line by hand with Gus’s brother and a borrowed backhoe the summer I was twelve. I carried the pipe fittings in a feed sack.” He wasn’t angry. He sounded tired, like a man explaining a fence line for the hundredth time. “The Swensons had your place four years and never once looked at that tank. The roses were drinking it. I had a meadow burning up in a dry year and a bank on the phone every week. So I put my dad’s water where it’d do some good.”
“You put it in a truck and gave it back to me.”
“I never charged you a dime.”
“That’s what I mean, Russ.”
He looked at the ground. The old mare had lifted her head from the tank and was looking at both of them with water running off her chin.
“I’ve got a lawyer in Casper who says it’s done in October,” Russ said. “And I’ll tell you what I’ll do anyway, because I’m not trying to see you dry. I’ll run you a line off the pond to a good trough here at the barn. I’ll pay Del what you owe him for the pump. All you sign is a paper saying that old tank’s done with.”
“And when Ava owns your place,” Marcy said, “or somebody who buys it from her, and they decide they need that pond for something else?”
He didn’t have an answer for that. He stood there with the dead hose at his feet.
“Keep what’s in your tank,” he said finally, and climbed into his truck, and drove off with it a third full.
That night Cody’s phone buzzed on the kitchen table. Russ didn’t need him on the crew anymore. Cody read it twice, set the phone face down, and went out to the barn.
Marcy found him there an hour later, sitting on an overturned bucket in Doc’s old stall with the black mare’s head over the half door beside him. He had his phone in his hand again.
“I could call him,” he said without looking up. “Tell him I don’t remember it right. That it was a dry pipe. He’d take me back by Monday.”
She leaned against the door frame. The black mare shifted her weight onto her good feet.
“Were you wrong?” Marcy asked.
He was quiet a long time. “No.”
He put the phone in his pocket. He didn’t call. In the morning he drove into Cutler and put his name in at the county road department and the feed store and the sale barn, and he came home with nothing yet and fed the horses without being asked.
Gus gave her the name of a water attorney in Sheridan, Lena Ortega, who charged three hundred and fifty dollars an hour and talked fast, as if she knew Marcy was paying for every minute. Send him written notice, certified, Ortega said, with a date at least ten days out for restoring the line along its old route. Bring a witness, photograph everything, and put back only what had been there. Then she told Marcy what a full court fight would cost, and Marcy wrote the number on the back of the electric bill and turned the bill over so she didn’t have to look at it.
She wrote the letter on Wednesday night at the kitchen table, three drafts, and mailed it certified at the Cutler counter on Thursday morning before she clocked in. Then she asked the postmaster whether she ought to hand it to somebody else to carry. He read the rule book for a minute, looked at her over it, and said a letter was a letter. By seven-thirty it had come back to her through the sorting case, rubber-banded into the bundle for Route 2 like anything else, with the green card attached.
She delivered it on Friday. At the foot of the Aldine lane she pulled up to the welded box with its steel A on a rocker, and she honked twice, the way she would for anyone.
Russ came down the lane on foot. He looked at the envelope in her hand and at her name in the corner, and he leaned in her passenger window, the way he had for the Casper letters, and signed the green card against her steering wheel. His handwriting was neat. He tore the card off and handed it to her without being asked. Then he stood there holding the envelope, unopened.
“Ten days, I bet,” he said.
“Ten days.”
“Gus help you?”
“Gus and a lady in Sheridan.”
He nodded slowly. He tapped the envelope against his palm. Out in his hay meadow, a pivot sprinkler was turning in the heat, throwing arcs of water that caught the light.
“You want to know why I bid on that pen?” he said. “I loaded her on that trader’s truck myself. Spring of 2012. I’m the one who sold her…”
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