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John went past Brody without a pause and landed on Levi.

“Boy. Where’s that lizard?”

“Still in my room.”

“Lara know that?”

“She said if it started to smell it was going in the trash.” Levi had a biscuit in each hand. “It doesn’t smell. I checked.”

“You check it every morning,” Dean said.

“Every morning and at night.”

Brody laughed. The boy looked at him, pleased. His father didn’t. At the stove the housekeeper turned her head a quarter inch toward the table, and turned it back, and went on with the eggs.

She brought the pot around again. She filled him last again, and this time he looked up when she did it, and she was already looking at him, one straight look with nothing in it he could use, and then she’d moved on to Levi’s milk, and he sat there with a full cup and the back of his neck hot and knew he’d gotten exactly what he’d gotten from her yesterday, which was nothing, and that he’d been awake since four-thirty for it.

Dean got him in the yard. He’d come out behind him with his hat on and his coffee still in his hand, and he stood at the tailgate and looked at the door of Brody’s truck, and then at Brody.

“You’re at Clay’s today.”

“Company’s sending me over. It’s in writing.”

“Dad know?”

“Not yet.”

“He counts trucks off that porch, Brody. He’s counted Jett’s under the Wainwright gate twice a week for two years, and he’s going to count yours, and he’s going to know whose door that is.” Dean drank his coffee. “I’m not telling him. I’m telling you.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“When?”

“When he asks.”

Dean looked at him a while longer, and put his cup on the tailgate, and went to the pens.

The Wainwright gate had his aunt’s family name over it in iron, and he’d driven under it maybe fifty times in his life and never once in a truck that had somebody else’s name on the door.

He drove under it at three minutes to seven. The white house was up on its rise with the columns catching the light. Past the horse barns the works were doing what they did all night and all day: the pump house, the brine ponds, the trucks going out the north road with the dust standing up behind them a mile long. He parked where the crew trucks parked. He sat a minute with the engine off and the Burchall decal on the door beside his elbow. Then he went in.

Clay was glad to see him. He’d known Clay would be, and it was still something, to stand in the office and be looked at that way by a Royston, any Royston, and get a hand across the desk and a grip in it.

“They told me Friday. I told them send whoever you like. They sent me my nephew.” His uncle sat him down. He had a map on the desk under a sheet of clear plastic, the west line and the Bateman fence and the Merritt seam, with red circles on it where the new wells were going in. “You want coffee? Irene.”

“I’ve had coffee.”

“Have some more. You’re on my payroll now, just about.”

“I’m on Burchall’s.”

“That’s a distinction,” Clay said, and smiled at him, and Brody thought, he means it, he’s actually glad, and sat back.

Lithium was the whole of it. A bed of it under his uncle’s ground, in salt water a long way down. Clay pumped the water up, let the sun take it off in the ponds, and trucked what was left to Houston, and it had made him the richest man in three counties. The bed didn’t stop at the fence. The thickest of it ran east under his father’s ground, and Clay had wanted that ground for ten years, and John Royston had said no every time in fewer words than the time before. It took a great deal of pumping. Last fall Clay had put new wells in along his west line, deeper than the old ones. By spring the Bateman place next door had a well that had been sweet for fifty years going down a foot a week. Owen had gone to the state about it. Brody had gone to his own company about it. And here they all were.

It took an hour, and it was mostly the map. Four monitoring wells on the west line between the works and the Bateman fence, going in this month, to be read weekly and reported quarterly to the state and to Houston. Clay laid it out with a finger on the plastic and talked about it the way a man talks about a good bull he’s bought. Somebody else’s steel in the ground. Somebody else’s numbers. Nobody could say, after this, that Wainwright didn’t watch its water.

“Owen’s complaint,” Brody said.