Chapter 74 The Warm Flat

Redrock, when they reached it at dusk, turned out to be a filling station with ambitions: four pumps under a lean-to, a café with six stools and a pie case, a trailer court strung along the arroyo, a church whose steeple did double duty as the town's water tower leg. Population forty-one said the sign, and somebody had amended it in house paint to forty-three, which Brant declared the most hopeful thing she'd seen in a week. The town lived on the county road and the school bus loop and not much else, but it lived facing southwest, because from the rise behind the church, on clear days, you could see the Sink: a bowl of bone-white flat maybe three miles across, rimmed in red rock, so bright at noon that men who worked it wore snow-goggles, an old prospector told them over coffee. He was seventy if he was a day, hands like root stock, and he talked the way desert men talk, in inventories. "Salt down two feet, then hardpan, then nobody knows, 'cause it eats augers." He counted on his fingers. "Government boys surveyed her in thirty-eight, CCC outfit out of Redrock camp, and their instrument wouldn't hold level — not wouldn't, mind, but wouldn't need to. Bubbles sat dead center anywhere on that flat, any direction you set the tripod, like the ground couldn't decide to be anything but level. Old man Prewitt called it the politest ground he ever ran a line over, and Prewitt never called anything polite." The prospector sipped his coffee. "Birds circle it. Have since I was a boy. Never land. You want pie with that?" The unbuilder stood at the café window through all of it, looking at the Sink's white gleam ten miles off, and when the old man mentioned the birds she nodded slowly, twice, like a woman checking figures against a receipt. "There was water here," she said, for the second time in a week, but this time she said it to Kell, and her pale eyes were doing arithmetic. "Reeds to that first rise. Mud you could lose a truck in, and song under the mud, and the singing went on for — I don't have the word for how long. Words for time are the first thing I lost." She touched the glass, and outside, half a mile beyond the last streetlight, a jackrabbit that had been crossing the road sat down on its haunches, faced the café, and stayed there, ears up, until they came out. They took the gravel at eight the next morning with the permission of nobody, because there was nobody to ask, and topped the rim at nine to see the whole of it laid out below: three miles of white, dead level past sense, red rims running around it like the lip of a thrown pot. December owned everything else in the world — frost smoke off the trucks, breath like steam fittings — but over the center of the flat the air bent and shimmered, a column of heat rising off nothing into the cold blue, wobbling like the road ahead of a fast car. And the wind was wrong. It had been wrong for two days, Harriet confirmed, logging hourly, but here at the source the wrongness had a texture: a steady, gentle exhalation flowing outward from the flat in every direction at once, warm, carrying rain-smell — wet stone, creosote, pond-bottom — out into a country that had forgotten ponds before the survey of 1938. The drain had changed address; everyone had felt it happen; but nobody had expected the new address to be breathing *out*. "Doors," Wynn said, when Torres asked him what it meant, "don't care much which way they swing. Care that they're open." He stood at the rim a long time, reading the flat the way he read failing walls, and whatever he concluded he kept behind his teeth until he had chalk evidence. They camped at the rim because driving onto a surface that polite seemed, to all seven of them independently and without discussion, like rudeness. Flatbed backed to the wind. Generator run one hour for batteries, then dark discipline. The unbuilder sat wrapped in two blankets in a camp chair facing the shimmer, and would not come inside the truck, and no one made her, because she had spent longer than anyone alive being weather instead of a person in it. Harriet worked by lamplight inside the cab, overlay out, instruments lined up on the seat like surgery. Her levels agreed with Old Man Prewitt's transit: level everywhere, level past argument, the whole basin reading flatter than physics issued flatness. The thermal gradient she plotted in pencil rose toward the exact center of the mark on her master — the circle in her own stolen lettering, ARCHITECT — and the numbers matched the tracing from Cold Harbor to within the width of her pencil lead. "It's here," she said, at ten o'clock, unnecessarily, because everyone knew, and she knew everyone knew, and Harriet believed in saying the weighed thing anyway. Then she sat very still, because across the flat, out where the shimmer stood, where nothing had been at sunset — A light came on. It was small and low and steady, yellow as lamp-oil yellow, one point at the center of three miles of nothing, and it did not waver, and it did not move, and it had absolutely not been burning five minutes earlier. Torres swore with feeling. Brant put her glasses on their chain down her front so she could rub her eyes with both hands. Out on the cold rim, jackrabbits sat up in a ring around the camp, facing inward, ears printed black by the generator's dying bulb. The unbuilder leaned forward out of her blankets until the moonlight found her face, and she looked — for the first time since the bench in the counting dark — exactly like something older than old, wearing a new woman the way you wear a borrowed coat. "She always did keep a trimmed wick," she said. "Nobody sweeps like her. Nobody trims like her. Get your sleep, children, and polish your manners." She lay back and closed her eyes. "Tomorrow we go meet the finest builder this world ever broke its heart on." Nobody slept much after that either. But at dawn the light was still burning, small and patient and yellow, and the flat breathed warm around it, and the way down onto the white was a ramp of packed salt that some old flood had left just there, just wide enough for men on foot.