Chapter 73 The Second Chair

The country past the quiet line did not feel empty, which was the first wrong thing about it. Kell had driven empty country his whole working life — the dead hours between job sites, wheat and wire and telephone poles, land so indifferent to people it didn't bother being hostile. This was not that. The desert southwest of the coal fields had been emptied the way a theater is emptied: recently, and with the seats still warm. Ranch gates stood open on nobody's business. A school bus rusted at a crossroads with its door folded politely shut. And everywhere, in every town where they stopped for fuel, the same small strangeness repeated itself with variations, like a tune hummed by different mouths: dogs that would not bark after dark, sat instead on porches facing southwest with their ears up; windmills turning, all of them, no matter the wind's mood, in slow strokes timed like breathing; and over every person they passed, when Kell let his listening go, soulhomes leaning — a degree, two degrees, off vertical — toward the Sink. He watched it happen to strangers at seventy miles an hour. A waitress in a diner outside Capa City set down their coffee and stood a moment at the window with her dishcloth gone still, staring at nothing, and above her the tidy little house of her — Kell saw it whole for once, porch swing, garden, every window lit — tipped almost imperceptibly toward the horizon, one flame among ten thousand across three states all bending the same way, like candles carried carefully into a draft. Torres watched him watching. "Keeper." Quietly, under the radio. "Mine's leaning too. Isn't it." "Everybody's is." "Even yours?" Kell turned his coffee in its cup. Outside, the windmill stroked. "Even mine," he said. "It isn't obedience. It's attention. Whole country's got its head turned, listening for the same knock." He left it there because the true end of the sentence was *and I don't know yet whether that's a congregation or an audience*, and some sentences you finish only once, out loud, ever. The radio was worse than the flames, because the radio had numbers. Wednesday noon, a public station out of the desert country reported that the Geological Survey had opened docket 79-114 concerning a thermal anomaly in the basin country south of Redrock — ground surface averaging nineteen degrees above ambient air for eleven days running, no volcanic signature within four hundred miles, aquifer data contradictory, comment period open through February. A professor at the state college used the phrase *dry geothermal prospect* twice, and a man identified as a mineral-rights broker from the city used the phrase *once-in-a-generation opportunity* nine times, and Harriet wrote the broker's name on the margin of her route map in pencil she did not ink, though her hand wanted to. The unbuilder rode up front with Brant and slept most of each day, genuinely, heavily, the sleep of the new-bodied, and woke each evening ravenous for news of the smallest kind. What she could not do was remember stories. Her memory came in through her hands. Set her on loose ground and she read it like Brant read a yard board: *there was water here* — pointing at a dry wash two hundred miles from anything wet, and the wash bottom, when Wynn dug, came up gray-blue clay stinking of pond. *Stone was carried here* — at a rail cut, touching a boulder the railroad had blasted around rather than move. *This road is newer than its own ruts,* she said once, laughing at nothing, delighted, drunk on weight and friction. But ask her what the architect's face looked like and she would sit silent until dark, and then say, *I never once saw it. She wore work like other women wear perfume.* Thursday night they took rooms at a motor court on the edge of the shortgrass, a string of cabins with a frost-furred water heater and a sign advertising COLOR TV, and Kell slept four hours and dreamed, and the dream knew things before he did. His cabin stood in its rain — the dream-rain that smelled of iron and old earth — but the cabin had not been the cabin of those first nights for years now. Roof tight, floor level, stove drawing clean, window whole, the crack in the foundation long since reset and mortared and mended so thoroughly he had to hunt for it. He walked his own architecture the way he walked his apartment, half asleep, checking. There was a second chair beside the hearth. One room, his room, always one room, one bed, one table, one chair, thirty-four years plus change of singular furniture — and now, placed neatly at the fire's right hand, a chair. Old style, ladder-back, rush seat worn pale in the middle, made by somebody who knew exactly how much a person weighs and built for more than that. Warm. Not freshly sat-in warm; kept warm, the way you keep a bed warmed for someone expected home late. His heart was doing something complicated against his ribs when he crossed the room and put his hand on the seat. Wood shavings lay on the rushes. One shaving, curled like a fingernail, white pine, bright as a fresh cut — and there was no pine in the cabin anywhere, no pine in any part of him he had ever toured. Around the back, where no door had ever been, the wall now held a doorway: jambs plumb, lintel true, tool-marks fine as thread — older pattern than Wynn's, older pattern than anything, chisel-work he had seen exactly once before, on a keystone gap shaped like cupped palms. It stood closed. From behind it came no sound at all, which frightened him worse than carpentry would have, because his whole life had taught him that occupied houses make noise. He woke in the motor court cabin with his hands open on the blanket, palms up, the way a man wakes who has been carrying something and has set it down without deciding to. Gray light. Frost on the inside of the glass. Down the row, Brant already had coffee going on the field stove, and Harriet was standing in the middle of the road holding her compass out level at arm's length, watching the needle slide, slowly, smoothly, like a lazy fish, around to point southwest, and stay. "The needle's been drifting since yesterday," Harriet said, without turning around, in her reading voice. "It finished settling overnight. Every instrument I own now agrees with every other instrument." She lowered the compass and looked at Kell across the frost-smoke rising off the trucks. "Ground's level here, keeper. Level past level. We're inside whatever the flat is doing already." She rolled the map. "Redrock by tonight."