Part 5
“Go,” Walt said.
She was already going. The tires spun on the packed snow and caught, and the house fell away in the mirror, the white plume still standing over the pump house. Walt watched it until the road bent behind the barn.
“Middle of the road,” he said. “If you see water, tell me before you stop.”
“I’m not going to stop.”
“Tell me anyway.”
The gulch road ran three miles down along the creek, never more than a few yards from the bank and sometimes right on top of it. Dana drove the way she probably drove to the clinic at three in the morning, fast and tight-jawed, both hands on the wheel. Walt watched the creek bed in the edge of the headlights. In two places dark water was seeping up through cracks in the old ice and spreading across it, orange at the edges and steaming in the cold.
“Is that it?” Dana asked.
“That’s the front of it. Leaking.” He didn’t say what he was thinking, that the mountain had found more than one way out and was trying them all.
They came around the last bend, and the gulch opened out onto the flat. The old Haugen place sat in the middle of it, a white two-story farmhouse with Christmas lights still strung along the porch, blinking red and green against the dusk. Beyond it lay the frozen river and the line of the old railroad grade along the near bank, a long hump of snow that had once carried the Queen’s ore to the smelter. On the far side, the county road ran toward the highway.
Tess was on the porch before the car stopped. She was twenty-six or twenty-seven, small, in Marco’s big work coat, with the baby strapped against her chest inside it. Mateo stood beside her in a red snowsuit with a stuffed rabbit under one arm and a laundry basket at his feet.
“I said don’t pack,” Walt said, getting out.
“It’s diapers and formula and her medicine,” Tess said. “I’m not leaving her medicine.”
Fair enough. He took the basket.
“Mr. Walt!” Mateo said. “Is Juniper coming?”
“Juniper went up the hill. She’s smart.”
“Is she scared?”
“A little. That’s why she’s smart.”
Dana went straight to Tess’s dead car to take out the second car seat. Tess didn’t follow her. She stood on the top step and looked at Walt with the baby’s head tucked under her chin.
“How sure are you?” she asked.
He could have told her what Corinne had said, or about the well blowing, or the orange ice. He gave her the truth instead.
“I’m not sure when,” he said. “I’m sure about the water.”
She studied him for one second longer. Then she nodded, once, as if she’d signed something.
“Wait,” she said. “I have to call Marco.”
“Tess—”
“We have internet in the house. The phone works over it. Thirty seconds.” She was already inside. Walt heard her voice in the kitchen, fast and low in Spanish, then in English: “No, don’t come up the gulch. Go around by the highway to the river turnout. Don’t come up the gulch, Marco. Promise me.” Then she came out, pulling the door shut behind her, and locked it from habit. She looked at the key in her hand and put it in her pocket.
Dana had the car seat in the back. Tess unbuckled the baby from her coat to move her into it, and the baby woke and started crying. Without asking, Tess put her into Walt’s arms while she adjusted the straps.
He hadn’t held a baby since Dana’s son Caleb, who was now twenty-two and in the Army in Texas. This one was lighter than he expected, all knees and fury, her face red under a knitted hat with bear ears on it. He held her against his coat and swayed without meaning to. She went on crying, but quieter.
“Lucia,” Tess said, taking her back. “Her name’s Lucia.”
“Good name.”
They loaded in. Tess and the children in the back, Dana driving, Walt beside her with the laundry basket on his knees. The lights on the porch blinked red and green behind them as they pulled away.
From the Haugen place, the road crossed the bottom of the creek’s fan on a raised stretch of fill a quarter mile long, with a big steel culvert under the middle where Sauer Creek passed beneath it on its way to the river. From the culvert it was another mile to the county road and the bridge, and after that the highway and high ground.
Dana took the first part of the fill at forty. The car rattled. Mateo was singing something about a bus.
Then the headlights found the culvert, and Dana’s foot came off the gas.
Water was running across the road. It wasn’t much, maybe ankle-deep in a band twenty yards wide, but it was moving. It came over the upstream edge of the fill in a sheet, orange as rust, steaming in the cold and carrying slush and broken plates of ice, and poured off the downstream side toward the river…
To read the rest of the story – CLICK the NEXT button 👇👇👇