Deputy Tom Archuleta pulled up at twenty after four with his light bar going, which Mike thought was a little much for an empty substation, and got out with his hat pulled down against the snow.

"Laurie says you've got a lock problem."

Mike showed him. Tom looked at the shiny brass padlock a long time, the way he might look at a set of skid marks.

"That's not yours."

"No."

"Kids?"

"Kids don't go buy a brand-new brass lock to put on our gate," Mike said. "Kids cut ours off and leave it in the weeds."

Tom nodded slowly. He went back to his cruiser and came back with a paper evidence bag, and Donnie got the long bolt cutters out of the truck and cut the brass lock off the chain, and it went into the bag with the deputy's initials on it. Then the three of them walked across the yard together, following what was left of the footprints, to the control house.

The control house door was locked with the co-op's own lock, the old scratched-up steel one, and it didn't look like anybody had touched it. Mike opened it with his key. Inside it was warm and dry and smelled like it always smelled, like dust and hot electronics and the floor wax the janitor used once a year. Everything was where it belonged. Every light that ought to be on was on. Every reading Mike knew how to read was right where it ought to be. He called each one in to Laurie anyway, and she checked them against her board, and they matched.

"So somebody drove in here," Tom said, "walked over to this door, didn't open it, walked back, drove off, and left you a present on the gate."

"That's how it looks."

"Why?"

Nobody had an answer for that.

Outside, Donnie was standing by the fence with his hands in his pockets, looking up toward the ridge, where the big line came down out of the dark. "Mike," he said, "the tracks go up there too. Look. Along the fence, and out the back, and up the hill."

Mike looked. Maybe. It was hard to tell anymore. The snow was coming down so thick that everything outside the yard light was just a gray shape on a gray shape.

"Could be deer," Tom said.

"Could be," said Mike.

- - - - -

Sandra Kane listened to all of it over the radio from the boardroom, and Mike could hear her thinking in the silence before she keyed up again.

"Okay," she said. "Here's what we're doing. Tom, if you could swing by out there once an hour, I'd be grateful. Ralph, I want somebody sitting on Bitterbrush tonight. In a truck, with a radio, engine running, heater on. Not to do anything. Just to be there."

"I'll send Joe Mac," Ralph said.

Joe McCorkle got there at five-thirty in the old service truck, with a thermos and two slices of pizza in a paper towel and the look on his face of a man who had been given an important job and meant to do every bit of it right. Joe had come to the trade late, after six years in the Army, and he was the best apprentice Mike had seen in a long time. He listened. He wrote things down. He never pretended he knew something he didn't.

"Anybody comes, you call Laurie," Mike told him through the window. "You don't get out. You don't go talk to them. You call, and you sit tight, and you let Tom handle it."

"Yes, sir."

"Don't call me sir. I work for a living."

Joe grinned and rolled up his window, and Mike and Donnie headed back to town.

- - - - -

The call came at 8:12.

A pickup coming too fast down Canal Road had hit a patch of ice where the road crossed the drain ditch, slid sideways across the oncoming lane, and gone into a pole. The pole snapped about six feet up. The top of it, crossarm and all, came down across the road with the wires still on it. A hundred and forty members went dark, from the ditch clear out to the end of the line.

Mike and Donnie got there first, Ralph a few minutes behind with the digger truck. In the headlights the whole thing looked like a picture somebody had drawn of a bad night: the snow coming across sideways, the pickup nose-down in the ditch, the broken pole leaning, the wires lying across the road and sagging into the snow.

There was a kid in the pickup. He was maybe seventeen, with a letter jacket and a face as white as the snow. He had the window down and he was about to open the door.

"Stay in the truck!" Mike yelled. "Don't get out! Stay right where you are!"

The kid froze with his hand on the handle.

"You hurt?"

"No, sir. I don't think so."

"Good. Then you sit right there and you don't touch anything and you don't get out until I tell you. Okay? You're doing great."

That's the first rule, and Mike had said it a hundred times in fourteen years: when the wires are down, you stay in the car. People get out to look. People get out to help. Every lineman in the country could tell you about somebody who got out to look.

Laurie had already confirmed the line was dead from her end. Ralph had them test it anyway, and ground it anyway, because that's the rule, and because the rule had a lot of names behind it. Then Mike walked over and told the kid he could get out now, and the kid got out and sat down in the snow by the road and put his head on his knees.

Tom Archuleta showed up a few minutes later, and then the kid's dad, in a bathrobe and snow boots, who looked at the pickup and looked at the pole and looked at his son and started to yell, and then stopped, and hugged him instead.

- - - - -

Setting a pole in a snowstorm at night is not a fast job, and it is not a job you hurry. They pulled the broken one, augered the new hole, set the new pole, and framed it, and went up and moved the wires over one at a time, while the wind tried to take every one of them out of their hands.

At ten o'clock, the radio in Ralph's truck said it was midnight in New York.

Mike was up in the bucket. He could hear it down below, through the open truck door, the crowd in Times Square counting down, and the roar when they hit zero, and the announcer saying the lights were on all up and down the East Coast. Everything working. Everybody fine.

"Well," Donnie called up, "New York made it."

"Two more hours," Ralph said, "and it's our turn."

At 10:20, while they waited on Ralph to check the last of the connections, Mike called home on the truck phone. Tracey answered on the first ring. She'd been watching the news. Behind her he could hear the television, and Kayla, nine years old and allowed to stay up till midnight for the first time in her life, asking was that Daddy.

"You coming home for midnight?" Kayla said when she got the phone.

"Not this year, sweetie. I've got to stay with the trucks."

"Then I'll bang the pots for you. Mom said I could bang two pots."

"You bang 'em loud," he said. "I'll listen for it."

Then Tracey got back on, and said what she always said, which was come home in one piece, and he said what he always said, which was always do.

- - - - -

At 11:02, Laurie closed them back in from the office, and all along Canal Road the lights came back on.

It was the best part of the job, and it never got old. One house, then the next, then the next, porch lights and kitchen windows and a Christmas tree somebody still had up, coming on in a long line out into the snow. Down at the end of the road somebody flashed their porch light three times. Donnie flashed the truck's lights back.

Mike was coiling up the last of the rope when Laurie came on the radio again. Her voice was different.

"Mike. Ralph. You there?"

"Go ahead," Ralph said.

"I just had a call from Boise. Ray Mulvihill's daughter. She's been trying to get Ray on the phone all evening to wish him happy New Year, and he doesn't answer. So she called his neighbor and had him go over and look."

Mike stopped what he was doing.

"Ray's truck is gone," Laurie said. "The neighbor says his house is dark, and his generator's not running. And his old climbing belt and his hooks, the ones he keeps hanging on the porch, they're gone too."

Nobody said anything. The snow came down.

"There's something else," Laurie said. "I've been trying to raise Joe Mac at Bitterbrush for the last ten minutes."

She paused.

"He doesn't answer."

[ END OF CHAPTER 2 ]

Author's note: The part about staying in the car is the one thing in this whole book I want every reader to remember. If a line is down on your car, stay inside, call for help, and wait for the utility to tell you it's safe. If the car is on fire, that's different, and you can ask your local fire department how to get out the right way. The kid's dad in the bathrobe really happened, though not on New Year's Eve, and not in Coldwater County.

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Posted Friday, September 17, 1999