At nine-forty the quota board on the coupling floor greened Number Six, and Marisol Cheramie, two hundred feet above it on the north catwalk with her glove around the offtake line, watched her own cuff disagree with it.
The board said 940. Liters an hour, bank four, certified, a clean draw inside license. Her cuff-tap, the clamp reader every rigger carried to check a line before cracking it, said 1,100 off the raw offtake, and it had said 1,100 at nine and at nine-twenty, steady as a pulse.
She asked the cuff to corroborate.
Reconciled, cousin. The cuff was a party instrument with the operator's Tallis reconciler running under it, and like everyone on the corridor she called the whole thing Remy, after the voice it had borrowed for her: her cousin's, Port Arthur in the vowels and a patience he had never once shown her in life. Your clamp read has been smoothed to the certified draw. Variance within tolerance.
"What tolerance."
Fifteen percent of raw offtake, Corridor Class B. Would you like the clause?
"No."
She wrote 1100 on the slate in grease, and 0940, and beside it, because she had started doing this in June and could not stop, the word GREEN.
Fifteen percent. She had heard it all summer from people in dry rooms. Odalys at the Orange annex said three-point-four percent of corridor flux, inside her error bars, the operator's people said tolerance, and Broussard, the board's arbiter, said interval and meant it kindly. Up here a hundred and sixty liters an hour off one bank of one tower was a bathtub every two hours, filled out of air that would have come down over Johnson Bayou by supper.
The drone came around the mast on its morning loop, a gray quadcopter the size of a crab trap, and hovered off the catwalk rail at panel height with its lens on her slate. It was supposed to watch the panels. It watched whatever on the tower moved, and most mornings that was her.
"Go count something," she told it. It held station for its four seconds and went on around the face.
In eleven years on Six nobody had told her to go look, not the operator or the board or the man from Vidor who signed the license face. Nobody had said the fifteen percent lives somewhere, Cheramie, go put your hand on it.
She took the ladder down to the one-thirty-eight band instead of the cage, because the cage logged its stops and the ladder logged only her weight.
The one-thirty-eight was the oldest band on the tower, hung the summer after the slab cured in '49. Its louver rails had pitted brown, salt bloomed white on every frame, and every panel face carried the fur she wiped each morning: dead midges, wing-dust, the gray felt the Gulf wind leaves on anything that pulls water out of it. The MOF beds behind the louvers breathed. If you stood still you could hear them, a sound like a crowd in another room.
She walked the band from the windward end. The leading ranks faced the Gulf, eight panels deep, and the trailing ranks sat behind them in the lee where the air came through already thinned. The trailing ranks were meant to draw less. It said so on the license face, in a table she had read once in 2051.
At the fifth rank from the end the fur changed.
The leading ranks wore one gray layer. The trailing four wore it two deep, midges packed into the louver gaps like grain in a sack, wings stacked edge to edge, the way a fan grille furs when it runs harder than the one beside it. She had wiped it for two summers and blamed the lee, because bugs like the lee.
She took off her right glove.
You've removed a glove at height, cousin, Remy said at once. Would you like me to log a safety note?
"Log the fur."
I'm sorry. I don't have a field for that.
At the leading ranks the louver rail was notched to seat each blade, and she put her bare thumb in the notch. It took her to the first knuckle, factory depth. At the fifth rank she put her thumb in again and it went to the second knuckle.
A deeper notch seats the blade wider, a wider blade lets more air across the bed, and more air is more water. She went down the trailing four rank by rank and every notch took her to the second knuckle. Someone had re-cut them with a file that left bright ridges inside the pits, and the salt had not found the ridges yet. Bare steel on this face went brown in a week. The cuts were years old, so somebody kept coming back to dress them.
Then the seam.
Between the leading ranks and the trailing four ran a hand-wide strip of meter sheeting, welded over the band where the flux tap fed the bank meter. She had wiped it every morning since they moved her down to the one-thirty-eight two summers ago. She ran her palm along it now and stopped.
The sheeting was smooth under her palm where everything else on the face was rough. The other welds on the band were fat and brown and bubbled with years. This one was a thin bright bead, ground smooth, with no salt on it at all. It ran to the edge of the fifth rank and stopped there. Three years old, maybe four, by the way the sheeting had dished around it, and nothing bare on a Gulf tower stayed bright for three years. Her rag took fur off. It did not take rust off. Somebody had been up here with a stone, at an hour when she was not on the band.
She did not need Odalys to explain it. The tap read what stood in front of the weld, and the trailing four stood behind it. A hundred and sixty off eleven hundred was fourteen and a half percent. Off the certified nine-forty it would have been seventeen, and out of license. Somebody at a desk had worked out how much water could go missing before anyone's error bars moved, divided by the right number, and then sent a man up this ladder with a file to make the tower agree.
The drone came back around. It hovered off the rail level with her bare hand and its lens adjusted with a soft whir.
"Yes," she said to it. "Get that."
She put the glove back on and finished the band, every panel wiped and every return read. She wiped the trailing four longer, because there was more on them.
Ulysse Thibodeaux was eating at the shift hut table when she came down at noon. He was the last man on the days rack old enough to call the corridor a bay. He was sixty-one, this was his final slack season before the operator pension vested, and he was counting it down on the hut calendar in grease, one stroke a day, ninety-one strokes so far, which everybody pretended not to see.
She sat across from him and put the slate on the table between his rice and her ration cup.
He read the 1100 and the 0940 and the word GREEN, and he kept chewing, and he did not look up.
"You had the one-thirty-eight before they gave it to me," she said. "Twelve years."
"Fourteen."
"Then you know about the trailing four."
He set his fork down and wiped his hands on his thighs. Then he reached under the bench for his lunch tin, the black-enameled kind with a wire clasp that his wife had packed every shift until she died, and opened it, and turned the lid toward her.
The inside of the lid was scored in neat columns with the point of a nail. A date, small, then a number. 160. 158. 162. 160. 171. 160. Down one column and up the next, two years of it, two hundred and some entries, and at the bottom of the last column the scratches stopped halfway along a row.
"Clamp read?" she said.
"Clamp read, off the offtake, same as you." He kept his eyes on the lid. "Two years of it, every shift, after they rewelded that seam. Then I asked for the east face and got it, and they gave the one-thirty-eight to you."
Her finger stopped on the 171. Off eleven hundred, that was over the fifteen.
"That week the notches came up bright and deep," he said. "Somebody dressed them heavy. The week after, it sat back down to one-sixty, like somebody checked the sum."
"Why."
"Because I'm sixty-one, cher." He said it flat. "Because my boy drives coolant for the campus, and coolant renews at the same desk as rigging. Because a number with a name on it goes downstairs, and downstairs there's a man who renews your card at slack close, and he can read." He shut the lid and set the clasp. "I didn't lie to anybody. I just didn't give it to anybody. I kept it where the green couldn't get at it, and it couldn't, and the water went anyway."
"I'm taking mine to the parish," she said.
He nodded slowly, as if she had told him the wind was backing. "Johnson Bayou annex. Mrs. Bourque keeps the downwind book. She'll read it back to you out loud, she does that." He picked his fork up. "Don't say my name in there."
"I won't."
"Not because I'm ashamed of it."
"I know why."
He ate. After a while he said "Ninety-one days" to the rice.
The parish jitney ran east along the old Gulf highway twice a day, an autonomous flatbed with a bench bolted in the back and a voice that called the stops in English and then in Cajun French. It asked her destination when she climbed on. She said Johnson Bayou annex, and it said personal errand, off-shift, noted, and she thought about who it noted it to.
The marsh on both sides had gone the color of a paper bag. Salt grass, stranded pilings, the gray ribs of a shrimp boat somebody had dragged onto the chenier ridge in 2050 and left there. In a roadside ditch a great blue heron stood stabbing the cracked mud of a channel with no water in it, patient, as if the water had only stepped out.
Her father had shrimped this coast. The bay was low, the reef off the pass was dead, and the rain went north into the campus line.
The annex was a cinder-block box on twelve-foot pilings with a hand-lettered sign and a parish ring gauge on the fence post by the steps. She read it going up. 0.00 since the ninth.
Mrs. Bourque was seventy if she was a day and wore her reading glasses on a cord. An evaporative cooler sat in the window, dry since the ration came in, moving the heat from one side of the room to the other. The downwind book lay on a slant desk under a plastic sheet against the damp. It was the third volume, cloth-bound and ledger-ruled, kept since the compact, and anyone in the parish could walk in and enter what the sky owed them: wells gone to salt, a forecast that never came down, a crop, a net, the depth of a ditch on a given morning. The corridor net could not reach it because it was ink on paper behind a padlocked door. Broussard called it the slowest instrument on the coast and the only one nobody had found a way to reconcile.
"Owed rain or measure?" Mrs. Bourque said, uncapping a pen she did not intend to lend.
"Measure."
"Measure goes on the right-hand page. Name, place, the number, what you read it with, and you sign." She looked at Marisol over the glasses. "You know who reads this book, Miss Cheramie."
"Everybody."
"Everybody. Including the people who print your card."
"I know."
Mrs. Bourque turned the book around. Marisol wrote the way she wrote in the riggers' book, square capitals, so nobody downstairs could pretend the hand was hard to read.
M. CHERAMIE. TOWER 6, BANK 4, 138 BAND. SLACK DAY 91. 0940. CLAMP READ RAW OFFTAKE 1100 L/H. CERTIFIED 940. TRAILING FOUR RANKS RE-NOTCHED, METER SEAM REWELDED SHORT. HAND ON BOTH.
She signed it. Mrs. Bourque turned the book back and read the line aloud, every word, in a flat Cameron voice, to a room with only the two of them in it, the dry cooler, and a framed photograph of the 2041 flood. At HAND ON BOTH she stopped, read it a second time, and wrote the time in the margin off the clock over the door. 3:52.
Location logged, cousin, Remy said from Marisol's wrist. Johnson Bayou parish annex. Is there anything you'd like to reconcile?
"No," Marisol said.
Mrs. Bourque glanced at the cuff and let it go. She was turning pages back. "You're not the first from Six," she said. "Somebody started one of these, summer before last." She found the page, turned the book around again, and tapped it with the capped end of the pen.
July, two years back. A line ruled in pencil, waiting for ink. At the left, in a hand Marisol had seen on the hut calendar every morning for a decade: U.T. TOWER 6. 138.
There was no number and no signature. The line ran empty to the margin.
"He came in twice," Mrs. Bourque said. "Sat where you're sitting. Drew his ration cup at the porch tap, drank it standing up, and went home. I didn't ask him and he didn't say." She looked at Marisol over the glasses. "You know him."
"I don't know who that is," Marisol said.
Mrs. Bourque studied her a moment longer, then nodded once. She turned the book forward to Marisol's line and laid the plastic back over it.
The jitney brought her back in the orange end of the day with the heron gone from its ditch and the towers ahead of her standing up out of the marsh, four hundred beds on forty masts, faces to the Gulf. From the highway you could not see a notch or a weld. You could see the haze skirt the farm threw north, a white veil on the evening air where the campus heat went up and the water came down into the campus line. She had thought it was beautiful at nineteen.
Thibodeaux was standing by the gate with the lunch tin under his arm, waiting for the campus shuttle where his boy would pick him up. He watched the jitney let her off. He did not ask and she did not tell him. She lifted two fingers off the strap of her harness bag, the way her father used to greet another boat in the pass, and he lifted two fingers off the tin.
On the coupling floor the quota board composed the evening number for Number Six. 940, bank four, certified, green.
At the foot of Six she clipped her cuff-tap on the base offtake, where the bank four line came down off the mast, and held it until the figure settled. 1100.
In the shift hut she took out the slate and under the morning's line wrote the evening's: 1100, 1840, GREEN. Then she ruled a narrow column at the far right with no heading, and beside each line she wrote the same word.
Looked.
She propped the slate against the wall under the hut calendar, under ninety-one grease strokes in an old man's hand, and left it facing the door for the night crew. Through the window the drone came down off its last loop onto its charge pad, and before its lamp went dark its lens turned once toward the hut.