Page 63 of Devoted

"About that. Mick drilled it. It's been sweet all her life."

"And these two."

"Mine. Both of them."

"Same line, same day." Brody turned the page. "Pump run time. Tank level, morning and night. Taste." He looked up. "You wrote down taste."

"It's flat. Since January. It's not bad. It's just not hers."

"No. It wouldn't be." He went back down the column. "Six feet."

"Five weeks."

"And yours haven't moved."

"Not a hair."

Brody sat back on the stool a while. Then he pulled a carpenter's pencil out of the can and drew on the bench top, a line with a box on the east end of it, two more boxes west.

"Her well," he said, tapping the east box. "Yours. Yours. Two hundred feet's shallow, Owen. That's the sweet water, that's what everybody on this road drinks, and it sits on top. Under it there's the salt water, the brine, and that's what they want, that's what the lithium's in. They go down through the sweet to get at it." He drew a line down through the box and past it. "Which direction's it going? Hers. Down from where?"

"West. There's nothing east of her but the road."

"How deep are the new ones?"

"I don't know."

"I do." He said it to the bench. "Deep. Deeper than the old ones on the seam. They went straight down for the brine and didn't stop till they had it. Where's the brine going once it's up?"

"Ponds."

"What're the ponds lined with?"

"I don't know that either."

"Nobody does. That's the answer to that." He drew two flat shapes west of everything and shaded one. "Jett say they pushed one out?"

"North pond. A hundred yards. February."

"They don't push a pond out because they've got room. They push it out because there's more coming up than they've got a place to put." He put the pencil down and said the rest plain, in a voice Owen hadn't heard him use on anybody. "Her well's two hundred feet down in the sweet water. The new wells are pulling from under it, and when you pull from under a thing it comes down to fill the hole. The water table's coming toward her from the west, from where they're pumping, and it won't stop while they pump. That's your six feet. It's not a dry spring. It's a hole somebody dug nine miles off, filling itself with her."

"How long?"

"Till she can't fill a tank? I'd want a summer of your numbers to say. Less than she's got, probably." He looked up. "Whose crews put them down?"

Owen told him.

Brody didn't move. The lizard went up the glass a foot and stopped. Brody let a breath out through his nose and looked at the box he hadn't written her name in.

"Well," he said. "That'd be us."

"That's what Jett said."

"Jett's right. We've got two crews in this basin on contract and one of them's been on Clay's west line since Thanksgiving. I've seen the paper. I didn't look at where it was." He laughed once, short. "I read rock for a living, cousin. I didn't read that."

"I'm not asking you anything."

"I know you're not. You never do. You put a notebook on a bench and stand there." He tapped the drawing with a knuckle. "So I'll say it, since you won't ask. I can read that. Any man in my office can read that. If I write it down with a date on it and my name under it, it's not Owen Royston's notebook anymore. It's a Burchall geologist saying a Burchall crew is drawing down the well under a kindergarten teacher's kitchen. If I put my name on that, I'm done at Burchall. Not fired. Done."