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I’d made her stop, and she was sleeping, and that was the most useful thing I’d done all day.

Chapter 6

Priya

The tank truck was older than the permit process.

It had arrived from a rental outfit in Ennis at six, trailing a smell of diesel and warm metal that settled over the arena site. The paint was a green that had given up on itself, and the tank — a fifteen-hundred-gallon steel cylinder bolted to the bed — listed two degrees to the left on a suspension that had opinions about every bump in the ranch road.

Cash had backed it up to the northwest corner of the arena where the hose run would reach the test grid I’d staked that afternoon — ten flags in a line, ten feet apart, marking the area we needed to wet down for the county’s volume demonstration. The hydrologist Doc Whitmore had connected us with was coming Friday to observe and certify. Until then, we needed to prove the system worked.

Ninety minutes, I’d estimated. Fill the tank from the creek, run the hose to the grid, lay down an even application, measure the output, record the time. Simple.

That was four hours ago.

The first leak was at the fill coupling, where the intake hose met the tank’s port. Brass threads stripped just enough to break the seal, and water pressed out in a fan that soaked Cash’s left sleeve to the elbow before he got the wrench on it. He’d tightened it down, and the fan became a drip, and the drip became acceptable, and we’d moved on to the discharge side.

The discharge hose was a four-inch canvas lay-flat that had been stored in someone’s barn since the previous administration. It smelled like mice and dry rot and the mustiness of canvas that had been wet once and never dried properly. We unrolled it from the tank to the test grid — a hundred and forty feet — and connected it to the discharge port with a cam-lock fitting that didn’t quite lock.

“Push harder,” I said.

“I’m pushing as hard as it pushes,” Cash said, both thumbs on the cam arms. The fitting clicked, but the arms sat at different angles, and when he opened the valve, water sprayed from the joint in a flat sheet that hit the ground between us and turned the clay to paste.

He closed the valve. I wiped my face with the back of my wrist.

“Wrong size?” I asked.

“Same size. Wrong fitting. This cam’s been reamed out.” He pulled the fitting apart and held the two halves up to the flashlight I was holding. The female side was worn oval. “We need the backup.”

The backup was in the truck toolbox, which was in the truck, which was at the bunkhouse. He jogged off into the dark and came back eight minutes later with a fitting he’d found in a coffee can of mixed hardware that rattled like a box of teeth.

We tried again.

The fitting locked. The arms sat even. I opened the valve — both hands on the rebar handle, leaning into it — and the hose filled, swelled, went round, and water came out the far end in a heavy, uneven stream that pooled at the first flag instead of reaching the tenth.

“Kink,” Cash called from down the line. He was standing on the hose thirty feet out, his boot on a fold that had developed where the canvas crossed a rut. He stamped it flat. The water surged forward, past the fifth flag, the seventh, and then the hose bucked at a second kink and he was moving again, walking the line, flattening folds with his boots, his hands, his knee.

I held the valve open and watched him work.

The evening had gone blue. The last light sat along the mountain ridgeline, and the valley floor had darkened into shapes — the sale barn, the corrals, the cottonwoods along the creek. The arena site was flat and open, and he moved through the failing light in a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, his hat pushed back, his hands finding each kink before the water did.

I was watching his hands.

I realized it and looked back at the valve.

The water reached the tenth flag. I eased the valve closed and walked the line with him, checking for pooling, for runoff, for the even coverage the hydrologist would want to see. We walked the same line from opposite ends and met in the middle, near the sixth flag, where the ground was dark and evenly wet and the canvas hose lay flat and still.

“Good?” he asked.

“Good.”

We stood there. The flashlight was in my hand, aimed at the ground, and the beam caught the wet clay and the edge of his boot and the hem of his jeans dark with water. He smelled like diesel and canvas and creek water and the faint mineral bite of the clay he’d been kneeling in.

He reached for the flashlight. Not to take it — to angle it, so the beam lit the ground ahead of us instead of between our feet. His fingers brushed mine on the handle. Brief. The backs of his knuckles against the side of my hand, there and gone, the contact lasting less than a second.

I didn’t move my hand.

He didn’t move his.