It came in bands, each one announced by a gust worrying the lilac and a fresh rattle on the shed roof, and between the bands there was no true quiet β only the creek, louder now, and the pump, and the gauge needle that Amos had begun checking the way a nurse checks a pulse.
At nine the shaft level had risen an inch in the hour. At ten, an inch and a half. Amos called it in, as agreed, and Kowalczyk's voice on the phone was calm and very awake.
"Two inches sustained is our line," she said. "You're approaching it. The county has a pumper truck I can request, but the bridge road is under water at the low crossing β it would come the long way, an hour at best. Amos, I need you to tell me honestly: can your rig hold the draw?"
"It can hold what it can reach," he said. "Both pumps, if I need them. I've got fuel for thirty hours. What it can't do is make the rain stop."
"Then run your rig, and keep logging, and I will move every piece of paper in Columbus at the speed of weather." A pause. "You're not alone out there. Remember that part too."
At eleven he started the second pump. The shed filled with a doubled note, the two machines finding a rough harmony, and the draw on the shaft steadied β not falling, not climbing, holding its breath with him. He slept in the chair in snatches of forty minutes, the way he had taught himself in the bad spring of 2016: alarm set, boots on, waking each time straight into the gauges before his eyes had fully decided to be open. Level. Pressure. Fuel. The logbook filled page by page in handwriting that got slowly worse.
At two in the morning the shed door opened on a gust of wet wind, and Donna Pruitt stood there in a yellow rain jacket over flannel pajamas, holding a thermos in one hand and a travel mug in the other, with rain running off her hood in a bright curtain.
"You look," she said, "like a man being digested by a machine."
"Donna. It's two a.m."
"Coffee." She poured, and the smell of it cut the diesel and the damp. "Steve's asleep in twenty-minute shifts on our couch with his boots on, same as you. Everybody on this court's asleep that way tonight, Amos, don't flatter yourself." She looked at the gauges, at the logbook open on his knees, at the numbers marching down the page in their tired columns. "Your hand's shaking."
"It's been shaking since midnight," he admitted. "It shakes, I write slower. The numbers still get down."
She set the mug on the workbench and reached out, and took the logbook from his hands β carefully, the way you'd take a sleeping baby or a live wire.
"Tell me what to write," she said. "You watch the gauges."
"Donnaβ"
"Column headings. Level, pressure, fuel, time, weather. I can read your writing; I've been reading it in my sleep since the hearing." Something moved in her face that was not quite a smile. "Fifteen years you wrote it alone. It appears to be a two-person job. Tell me what to write, Amos."
So he called the readings across the shed, and she wrote them β level, pressure, fuel, time, rain β in a hand that was steadier than his and got better as she went, and the strange thing was how quickly it became ordinary, the two of them in the yellow shed light with the rain hammering and the numbers coming at their regular intervals, like any night shift in any plant in the world.
At half past two the generator coughed, once, and Amos was out of the chair before the sound finished, one hand on the housing, listening the way he'd listened to engines for fifty years. It caught again on its own and settled, and he stayed kneeling a moment longer than the machine required, his forehead near the warm metal, breathing diesel and rain. Donna had written the reading anyway and marked it with a star, and he didn't correct her.
Near three, Steve arrived with his coat over his shoulders and a hand truck stacked with sandbags, and without ceremony he and Amos started laying them along the low edge of the Pruitt lot and the Hanrahans' drive, where the sheet water had begun to travel. Mrs. Hanrahan came out in her robe and held the flashlight. Nobody made speeches. The court did its work in the rain in the dark, one sandbag, one reading, one hour at a time, and at four the level in the shaft β for the first time all night β dropped a quarter inch, and Donna wrote it down and underlined it twice, and said, to no one in particular, "There. You see. There."
Chapter 19: The Blowout