Page 80

“He’ll know by noon. Pearl’ll have it.” Clay closed the folder. He looked at it with his hand flat on it a while. “Thirty years I’ve been fighting that man across a fence about what’s under the ground. Thirty years. And it turns out neither of us was looking at the right ground.” He pushed the folder back across the desk. “Take that to Greene. Tell him I’ll come in Monday. Tell him I’ll sit down with John if I have to.” He got up. “There’s paper in the drawer. Write your letter. Then get out of my office, son, before I say something to you I’d have said to your father, and neither of us wants that.”

Brody wrote it. Three lines. He signed it, and dated it, and Clay read it over his shoulder and said, “Uh huh,” and Brody put it in an envelope and put the envelope in his jacket, next to a folded chart.

Carla called at nine, while he was still in the lot.

“Houston wants you Monday. They’re going public on the corridor in December and they want their man in the room, and they’ve decided their man is you, on account of you’re the one who’s been standing on it. It’s a promotion, Brody. It’s the desk with the window.”

“No.”

“I haven’t told you the number.”

“You don’t need to tell me the number. It’s no. There’s a letter in my jacket and it’ll be on your desk Tuesday, and you can tell Houston the man who’s been standing on their corridor has been standing on it for his father, and they’ll have to send somebody else.” He looked at the pumps. “Carla.”

“What.”

“You were good to me. In March. You didn’t have to be.”

“I wasn’t good to you, I was managing an asset.” She was quiet a second. “Go on, then. Play cowboy. I hope she’s worth it.”

“She told me no,” Brody said. “I’m staying anyway.”

Carla didn’t say anything for a while. Then she said, “Well, hell,” in a different voice, and hung up.

Greene had Dean in the second chair.

Dean sat in it with his hat on his knee and looked at the folder on the desk, and at Greene, and at his brother, and said, “Say it once. In words a man who runs cattle can follow. Then I’ll go tell Dad, because it’s not coming from you and it’s not coming from a lawyer, it’s coming from me, at his own table.”

So Brody said it once, the whole of it, the way he’d said it to Clay at seven, and Dean sat with his hat on his knee and listened to all of it without moving, and when it got to Odessa he said, “So they sent you home before the trucks came,” and Brody said, “Yes,” and Dean said, “Go on,” and he went on, to Clay’s office that morning, and Carla at nine, and the letter in his jacket.

“So they used you,” he said, at the end.

“They used me to look at Clay so nobody looked at the scrub. Yes.”

“And you didn’t know.”

“I didn’t know till I stood in a client’s office in Odessa and saw a map on the wall.”

Dean looked at the folder a long time.

“You could’ve told me in June,” he said. “When you came in the barn. You could’ve said, I’ve taken a job with Burchall and I don’t like the smell of it and I want somebody at home to know. I’d have listened.”

“I didn’t know in June.”

“You knew something. You’ve got a face, Brody, I’ve watched it for thirty years. You knew something in June and you took it to Greene in October and you told Clay this morning and you’re telling me now, and every one of those was somebody who wasn’t me.” Dean turned his hat over on his knee. “I said a thing to you in a barn in July. About Mom. About Lucia. I meant every word and I’d say it again. But I’ve watched you in a hay field every morning since, before light, and I watched you in a hallway last Thursday with my son, and I’m sitting in a lawyer’s chair listening to you hand a company back its money for this place, and I’m going to say one more thing and then I’m done, and Greene can witness it.” He looked at his brother. “You could’ve come to me. Next time, come to me. That’s all. Not Greene, not Clay. Me.”

“All right.”

“Say it.”

“Next time I’ll come to you.”

“Uh huh,” Dean said, and put his hat on, and looked at Greene. “Monday. Ten. I’ll have Dad here. God help all of us.”

He didn’t get up. Brody didn’t either.

“There’s one more thing,” Brody said. “It’s not the corridor. Nathan, you’ve got the Hardwick estate.”

Greene looked at him over his glasses.