Part 5
He read it to them standing just inside the cookhouse door, still in his parka. The room smelled of coffee and of wet wool drying on hooks.
“Ten past three, yesterday morning. Twenty to two, afternoon. Ten to midnight. Twenty past five this morning. Five after ten. Twelve-forty, when we were standing on the dam and watched it crack open. Two-thirty. Five to four.” He looked up. “Five past five, when you were walking out that door.”
The room stayed quiet. A young man near the stove had stopped with a sandwich halfway to his mouth.
“Ten hours apart at first,” Lyle said. “Then five. Then two. Under two hours now.”
“And the bear told you that,” Hollis said.
A couple of people laughed, not unkindly. Lyle let them.
“The bear got flooded out of his den inside that dam,” he said. “That’s what the bear told me. He told me to go look. The rest of it I saw myself, and so did she.” He nodded at Dana. “The pond’s heaved up six feet. The spillway’s plugged solid. There’s muddy water running out the bottom of the dam, and that only happens one way.”
Hollis set his mug on a table. He looked at Dana, not at Lyle. “You saw it.”
“I saw it.”
“You saw an avalanche chute loaded last March, too.”
“I did,” Dana said. Her voice was steady, but Lyle saw her hand close around a fold of her coat. “And I was wrong, and Marcus paid for it. I remember.”
The young man by the stove looked at his fingers.
“Then tell me,” Hollis said, turning to Lyle at last. “You’ve been up there thirty years. How sure are you?”
Lyle had spent a lifetime being sure in front of other men, about grades and fills and how much a culvert would carry. It was how you stayed boss of a dozer crew. It was how you lived alone at the end of a creek and kept from doubting every noise in the night.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “I don’t know if it goes tonight. I don’t know if it goes at all. I know I wouldn’t sleep down here.”
The kitchen clock clicked from 6:43 to 6:44.
“If it holds to the pattern,” Lyle said, “there’ll be another one before seven. Maybe. I wouldn’t bet your crew’s money on maybe, but I’d bet mine.”
They waited. Someone shifted their boots. The furnace cycled on, then off again.
At 6:51 the coffee in Hollis’s mug trembled. It was a ring of small ripples, there and gone. A second later the windows ticked in their frames, faintly, like a fingernail tapped on glass.
“Felt that,” said the young man with the sandwich. That was Marcus.
Hollis looked at the black window for a long time. Then he picked up his mug, drank what was left in it, and put it in the sink.
“Kyle, start the loader and leave it running up there. We’ll use the cab for heat in shifts. Jen, the crew cab, full tank, heater on high. Marcus, sleeping bags out of the bunkhouse, all of them, and the spares. Ruben, hook the grader to the warm-up shack and drag it up the pit road. Nobody goes back for anything once we’re up. If you forget your toothbrush, you’ll live.” He pulled on his coat. “And somebody block the bridge. If a fuel hauler comes through at midnight, I want him parked on the far side and cussing us.”
Dana started to speak. Hollis cut her off without unkindness.
“It’s your call,” he said. “I’m just the guy who knows where the extension cords are.”
By half past seven they were on the gravel pit bench, sixty feet above the highway bridge, with the wind coming hard off the river. The warming shack stood on its skids beside the idling loader. The camp floodlights still burned below them. They had left the generator running so they could see.
People took turns in the shack and the cab. Lyle stayed outside with Sadie against his legs, because he could hear better there. The booms came at 7:20, then at 7:48, both faint at this distance, a soft thud that was felt more than heard. Each time, every head on the bench turned upvalley.
Marcus came out of the shack with two cups of coffee and gave one to Lyle. “Can I ask why Bishop?”
Lyle wrapped both hands around the cup. “Ruth named him. My wife. Our third summer up the creek.”
“After a real bishop?”
“After the way he walked. He’d come down the gravel bar swinging that big head side to side, slow, like he was blessing the rocks one at a time.” Lyle moved his own head, just slightly, to show him. “She said, look at him, the Bishop of Tenderfoot Creek. That was it. He never had a chance at another name.”
Marcus grinned into his coffee. “Did she talk to him?”
“From the porch. Told him the berries were late. Told him to mind his manners around the cache.” Lyle drank. “He did, too. Thirty years, he never once set foot in the yard.”
“Until this week.”
“Until his bed filled up with water and he had nowhere else to go.” Lyle looked upvalley into the dark. “I don’t flatter myself that it was me he came for.”
It was the first time in four years he had said Ruth’s name to anyone but the dog. Behind them Dana had come out of the shack. She stood with her hands in her armpits, and when Lyle glanced her way she turned toward the river, as if she had only come out for the air.
At 8:10 there was nothing, and at 8:30 still nothing.
“Maybe it’s done settling,” someone said from the cab door. There was a little hope in it, and a little blame.
Lyle was listening to the quiet, and the quiet was wrong. For two days that dam had been talking: cracking, groaning, banging as the pressure built and the ice gave way to it.
“It’s not settling,” he said.
Sadie stood up. Her hackles rose along her back, and she faced upvalley and made a sound low in her chest that Lyle had never heard from her. Then it came from far up the valley, a low sound with no beginning that he could find. It went on, and on, and it did not stop…
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