The heat came down on Copper Creek like a held breath that never let go.
Caleb Mercer had ridden through three territories of it — a white, hammering glare that turned the flats to powder and the powder to glass beneath a man's boots — but the last ten miles had been the worst of it. The trail dropped through a cut in the red rock and came out above a valley the color of old brick, and there, strung along a dry white scar that had once been a creek, lay the town: a dozen false-fronted buildings leaning into the wind, a church with its paint blistered clean off, and a schoolhouse whose bell hung silent in air too hot to carry sound.
Nothing moved except the dust.
He rode a mule named Juniper, because a well-digger's living depended on patience the way a gambler's depended on luck — and Juniper, fourteen years old, gray-muzzled and swaybacked, had carried his auger and windlass rope, his shovel and pick, and the oilcloth-wrapped fork of willow rods across eleven years of dry country without once complaining.
Caleb was thirty-eight, and he had been digging other men's water since he was sixteen. He had learned the trade from his father in the hill country, learned to read a slope the way other men read a newspaper — the green thread of cottonwoods, the dip in the land, the way the evening air cooled over hidden damp. And eleven years ago, in a canyon that still had water in it, he had cut his own rods from a living willow and never dug a truly dry hole since.
Almost never. There had been one. He did not let himself think about that one — not the name of the town, not the faces. He buried it under new miles the way other men buried bodies, and he rode toward Copper Creek the way he rode toward everything: because standing still had never yet filled a canteen.
The stage-station rumor that had pointed him here was two hundred miles old by now. Dying town. Dry creek. Maybe a rancher desperate enough to pay for a hole in the ground.
The dead cattle were the first thing the town showed him.
They lay in the ditch beside the road, six or seven head, down to ribcage and horn, and the turkey vultures turned their slow circles in a sky the color of old bone. The smell was sweet and thick enough to chew. Juniper flicked her ears and quickened her pace without being asked, and Caleb was glad of it.
The second thing was the creek.
It ran behind the town in a bed of cracked white clay, split into plates that curled at the edges like burnt paper. In the deepest part of the bend, a puddle no wider than a wagon wheel wore a skin of green scum and gave off the only damp smell for miles. A boy crouched beside it with a tin cup, skimming the clearest water he could find off the top.
Caleb looked away. He had seen towns like this before.
Main Street was a study in giving up. The hardware store's windows were papered from the inside. The assay office door hung open on one hinge, showing nothing but shadow and a fallen sign. The Copper Queen Hotel had its porch steps stacked with furniture under a tarp, as if the whole building were holding its breath, waiting to be carried off.
At the far end of the street stood the schoolhouse, its white paint gone gray with dust. In its doorway stood a woman with her sleeves rolled to the elbow and chalk on her fingers, watching him come. Even at fifty yards he could feel the assessment in her eyes — stranger, mule, bedroll, tools — catalogued and filed before he was close enough to nod.
He nodded anyway. She didn't nod back. But she didn't look away, either.
The water wagon was parked in the square like a cannon.
It was a heavy freight wagon with a riveted iron tank on the bed, and VANCE was painted on the tank in flaking white letters a foot high. A thick-necked man with a ledger book sat on the tailgate, a dipper on a chain beside him, and nailed to the wagon's side was a board with the prices burned into it:
WATER — 10¢ BUCKET — $1 BARREL
A thin woman in a sun-faded dress stood at the tailgate counting coins out of a knotted handkerchief, her lips moving. The water man watched her the way a hawk watches a field mouse — patient, certain of the outcome.
She came up short. Caleb saw it in the set of her shoulders before the water man even shook his head. The man reached out and tipped her bucket back, pouring her two cents' worth of water back into the tank with a thin, insulting splash, and the woman stood there holding the empty bucket with both hands, staring at it like it had betrayed her.
Caleb swung down off Juniper before he had decided to.
"Fill it," he said, and put a dime on the tailgate.
The water man looked at the coin, then at Caleb, slow and flat. "Your funeral, stranger."
"My dime," Caleb said.
The woman stared at him. "I can't pay you back."
"Didn't ask," Caleb said, and walked Juniper on before gratitude could make it awkward. Behind him he heard the dipper splash, and then the woman's footsteps hurrying away, fast, like she was afraid someone would change his mind.
A dime. He had maybe forty dollars left in his poke, and the price of staying decent was going up every day.
Past the square stood the bank — the finest building on the street, stone foundation, shutters closed against the heat, brass plaque by the door polished to a mirror shine: COPPER CREEK BANK — C. VANCE, PROPRIETOR. The richest man in a dying town. Caleb had known men like Whitmore in every territory — the ones who got richer while everybody else got thirsty. He had never yet figured out exactly how it was done, but he had learned to recognize the shape of it: the cleanest paint on the street always belonged to whoever was selling what everybody needed.