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He brought the calf.

They finished at dark. She wrote the last tag on the board with her hand wrapped like a fighter's, put the chalk down, and went to her truck.

"Saturday," he said.

"Saturday. Bring the pairs home Friday, the ones that are done. Mama wants to see them."

"I'll bring them. How many's that?"

"Twenty-two pairs. You'd know if you'd read the board."

"I read it."

"Then quit asking me things you know." She got in. "And the tape's in your pocket. I'll want it Saturday."

"I'll bring that too."

She drove. He stood in the alley with his hands cold and went to put the chute up.

He hauled the pairs east Friday at noon, two loads, and turned them out in her trap by the barn with the calves finding their mothers in the wind.

The green tank sat at the corner of the barn where the well ran to it, a big steel tank with the green paint gone chalky and the same float in it Mick had put in. The water was down a foot and a half. The pump was running, and it wasn't the sound a pump ought to make. It was a chug and a catch and a chug, a pump sucking air between drinks, the way it had been doing off and on since January.

He looked at his watch and let it run. Two minutes and it hadn't caught up. Four. He put two fingers in the water and touched them to his tongue. Flat. Wrong. Not bad, not anything a man could put a name to, but the Bateman well had been two hundred feet and sweet since before he was born. He'd drunk from this tank as a boy with his head under the pipe, and this wasn't it.

He looked west. You couldn't see the works from her yard in daylight. You could at night, a mile of lights strung along the seam on his father's ground where the ponds were. In daylight there was grass, then his own fence, then more grass.

The screen door went behind him. Edna stood on the porch with her cane.

"Since the new year," she said. "I told Gary. Gary said call the well man. The well man's got a list."

"How long a list?"

"Long enough I'll be in Midland before he gets to the end of it."

She went back in. Owen put his hat on and got in his truck.

He drove to John's place after dark and didn't go up to the big house. Jett's cabin sat back in the mesquite a half mile from it, one room and a porch, and Jett came to the door in his socks with a beer already in his hand.

"Well, hell," Jett said. "Somebody die?"

"No."

"Then come in, you're letting the cold in. You want one of these?"

"No."

"You want to stand in my kitchen and not want one, then. That's fine too." Jett sat down and put his feet up. "Owen Royston. In my house. On purpose. I've lived here two years and my own daddy's been in it once, and that was to tell me the porch was crooked."

"It's crooked."

"I know it's crooked. I built it. What do you want?"

Owen stood there. He hadn't worked out how to ask it, because he'd never asked it.

"What's it like?" He asked. "Down there. The mine."

The grin went off Jett's face and something plainer came up under it, and he took his feet down.