Page 69 of The Lonely Road

“Okay.”

“But we got a problem.”

“Which is?” Sometimes it’s like pulling teeth with Feig. He’ll talk ad nauseam about shit that doesn’t matter, and when it does, he dances around it like a debutante at her coming-out ball.

“He’s ornery, and he hates paperwork.”

Ah, so this will be us digging through his files if he has any.

Excellent!

“Has he seen the site plans?”

“He’s seen the site. He doesn’t read plans. He looks at the land.” Feig waves a hand. “It’s a whole thing with him. You’ll see.”

I look out the window at the valley running north—the creek corridor, the cottonwoods fully committed to green now, the high country still carrying snow on the peaks, but the lower slopes are bare and warm.

It’s April in the North Fork Valley, and the kind of day that makes you understand why people stay in places like this.

But not people like me.

Right?

“Mason, man, you doing okay?” Feig glances at me.

“Tell me about the augmentation plan.”

He tells me in great detail. I listen with the part of my brain that can do two things at once, which is most of it, and I think about Taya and Jessup and Trafton as I watch the road.

The Cottonwood Ditch Company’s office is a converted equipment shed at the end of a dirt road that the county hasn’t graded since last fall. The building leans slightly to the left, which, when we arrive, Jeb Cottonwood explains, is intentional.

“Settles better that way,” he remarks, as if it is self-evident.

Nuts!

He’s seventy-something, angular, wearing a canvas work jacket that has been washed enough times to become a second skin. He shakes Feig’s hand with the warmth of an old acquaintance and mine with the measured assessment of someone deciding whether I’m worth the time.

He apparently decides I am, because he waves us inside.

The interior is what happens when a man has been accumulating records for fifty years and has a philosophical objection to throwing anything away.

Metal shelves along the walls, filing cabinets with handwritten labels, stacks of ledgers on every flat surface, and a woodstove in the corner that has been burning since at least November and smells like it.

There are maps—handmade and hand-annotated—pinned to a corkboard that covers most of one wall. Delivery routes, headgate locations, ditch company shares, and property boundaries are marked in different ink colors representing different decades of notation.

It is, by any conventional measure, a complete disaster.

It is also, I suspect, perfectly organized by a system that exists entirely in Jeb Cottonwood’s head.

“Flow data for the rodeo parcel.” Jeb moves toward a filing cabinet. “That’s the old Hendricks ground. Water’s been running that irrigation claim since 1934. I’ve got all of it.”

“What about the augmentation requirements?” Feig shifts in the uncomfortable chair. “For the new impervious surface⁠—”

And they’re off. The two of them are deep in the details of cubic feet per second and return flow obligations and junior rights and the arithmetic of Colorado water augmentation, and I am not needed for any of it, which is exactly what I was counting on.

“So.” Jeb rubs his chest and looks up at the stairs with the expression of a man who has made a private calculation about those stairs and his knees and arrived at an unfavorable result. “I’ve got the historical flow data you want for the rodeo parcel. It’s in the attic.” He looks at me. “You mind?”

I stand. “Happy to.”