Chapter 8: The Parley

The dry lake was white as a bone and flat as a table.

We drove out at sundown on Sunday, four of us in a single truck, with the sky turning orange behind us.

Haskell was already waiting.

Thirty riders sat their bikes in a half circle, engines idling, red armbands bright in the dying light.

In the middle stood a flatbed truck, and on the flatbed, in a folding chair, sat a small gray-haired woman in a laundry apron.

My mother had a rifle pointed at her head.

"Stay in the truck," Tova said.

"No."

"Nolan."

"She's right there."

I climbed out with my arm at my side, and the others got out after me.

Bram Haskell stepped down from the cab of a battered pickup.

He was a heavy man with a gray beard and a foreman's cap.

He moved slowly.

He carried a ledger under one arm, a thick book with a cracked leather spine.

"Nolan Greer," he said. "Twenty-seven. Father dead in the war. Mother, one. Water debt, three buckets, six days late."

"I paid it."

"You paid it to a man who didn't write it down." He opened the ledger.

"Everything I own is written down. That's how I keep four hundred people alive."

"You keep them alive by starving them."

"I keep them alive by teaching them what a bucket is worth."

I took a step forward.

Thirty rifles came up.

"Easy," Haskell said, to them and to me. "Nobody is going to get hurt tonight if we are sensible men."

He looked at my arm.

For a long moment he said nothing, and I saw in his face something I had not expected.

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