Ralph stayed on Canal Road to clean up. Mike and Donnie took the bucket truck and went.

Twelve miles. On a dry day in July, you could make it in fifteen minutes. Tonight it took twenty-three, with the chains singing on the pavement and the wipers losing the fight and the snow coming at the headlights like they were driving through the middle of a pillow. Tom Archuleta was on the far side of the county at a rollover on the state highway. He said he'd come as soon as he could. Laurie kept trying Joe on the radio every two minutes. Joe kept not answering.

Donnie, for once in his life, didn't say anything at all.

Mike drove, and thought about Ray.

He'd been twenty-three, his first week as an apprentice, the first time he'd gone up a pole with Ray Mulvihill watching from the bottom. He'd been scared to death and trying not to show it, and about halfway up he'd frozen, hugging the pole, hooks dug in, unable to make his hands let go and reach. Ray hadn't yelled. Ray had just leaned back against the truck and started talking, slow and easy, about nothing: his wife's pie, the Jazz game, a horse he'd had as a kid. After a while Mike had realized he was at the top.

"The pole doesn't care how you feel," Ray told him afterward. "So you might as well feel fine."

That was Ray. That had been Ray for forty-two years. And then his wife got sick, and then she was gone, and Ray got quiet and thin and started reading those books. But Mike couldn't make himself picture Ray doing harm to the system he'd spent his whole life keeping up. He just couldn't.

But the hooks. Why would Ray take the hooks?

- - - - -

They came down into the draw at 11:38.

Joe Mac's service truck was sitting outside the substation gate where they'd left it, engine running, headlights on, the driver's door hanging wide open. Snow had blown in across the seat. There was nobody inside.

And behind the substation, parked along the back fence with three inches of snow on the hood, was an old green Ford.

Mike was out of the truck before it had stopped rolling. "JOE!" The wind took it and threw it away. "RAY!"

For a long moment there was nothing. Just the snow, and the yard light humming, and the big transformer humming under it. Then, up on the hill behind the substation, a flashlight came on.

Two figures came down out of the dark, slipping and sliding in the new snow. The first one was tall and lean and moved like he was going down the stairs to bed. The one behind him was carrying a big new flashlight, the kind that came in a cardboard box from the hardware store.

"About time," said Ray Mulvihill.

- - - - -

Joe's radio was dead. That was the first thing. The battery in his handheld had quit in the cold, and the radio in the old service truck hadn't worked right since summer, and he'd been meaning to tell somebody. He told them now, standing in the snow, looking like he wanted the ground to open up.

"And then Ray came and knocked on my window," Joe said, "and said come on. And I know you said don't get out. I know. But it was Ray."

"It's all right," Mike said. It was a long way from all right. But he'd have gone with Ray too.

Ray had been watching Bitterbrush for three nights. His kitchen window looked straight across the draw at it. On Tuesday night, he said, a pickup had pulled in with the lights off, around ten. Two men. They hadn't touched the substation. They'd walked right past it, out the back, and up the hill with flashlights to the big line, and stood around up there for most of an hour, and come back down, and left. On Wednesday they'd come back and done it again.

"Why didn't you call us?" Mike said.

Ray looked at him. "And tell you what? That crazy old Ray, with his generator and his canned peaches, saw some lights on a hill?"

"I'd have believed you."

"Would you," Ray said. It wasn't a question, and Mike didn't have an answer for it.

Tonight, Ray said, he'd turned off every light in his house so he could see out, and sat at the window. He'd seen the truck come down this afternoon. He'd seen it leave. And about an hour ago he'd seen flashlights up on the ridge again, and that was when he'd gotten his coat.

"And the hooks?" Mike said.

Ray almost smiled. "Forty-two years, Mikey. You go to trouble, you bring your hooks."

He and Joe had followed the tracks up the hill, along the line for half a mile, and back down a draw to the highway, where a vehicle had been parked and was gone now. "They're not interested in Bitterbrush," Ray said. "Bitterbrush is just where they park. It's that." He pointed up at the ridge, where the big line ran off north into the snow, carrying everything the valley had.

Mike got on the radio. Sandra came on before Laurie could even answer, and she listened to all of it without a word, and then she said she was calling the sheriff herself, and Mike could hear in her voice that she was standing up.

- - - - -

At 11:58, there wasn't anything left to do but wait.

They stood together by the trucks, the four of them, with Joe's radio turned up and the AM station from Twin Falls counting it down. From the bottom of the draw you couldn't see much, but if you walked up the road a little way you could see the whole valley spread out below: the farm yard lights scattered across the dark like somebody had spilled them, the red light on top of the grain elevator, the glow of Coldwater against the clouds, the hospital up on its hill.

"All crews, stand by," Sandra said on the radio, very calm.

Ten. Nine. Eight.

Mike thought about Kayla, standing in the kitchen in her pajamas with a pot in each hand.

Three. Two. One.

The lights stayed on.

Every one of them. The yard lights, the elevator, the town, the hospital. Nothing blinked. Nothing flickered. On the radio, people were cheering, somebody in the boardroom yelling, somebody laughing, and over all of it Laurie's voice saying, "Happy New Year, Coldwater Valley. Happy New Year, everybody." Donnie let out a whoop and threw a double handful of snow straight up in the air, and Joe shook everybody's hand, one at a time, like a soldier. And Ray Mulvihill laughed, a big rusty laugh Mike hadn't heard in three years.

"Told you," Ray said. "It was never going to be the computers."

Mike let out a breath he felt like he'd been holding for two years. Maybe that was it. Maybe it had just been two guys with flashlights, and a lock, and nothing. Maybe Sandra would be in bed by one after all.

- - - - -

At 12:03, Ray stopped laughing.

"Listen," he said.

Mike listened. In wet snow a big line will hum and crackle, and he'd been hearing it all night without thinking about it, the way you stop hearing a refrigerator. Now, up on the ridge, the sound changed.

And the valley went dark.

All of it at once. The farm lights and the grain elevator and the town and the hospital, gone, like somebody had thrown a blanket over the whole world. Behind them, the yard light at Bitterbrush went out, and for the first time in fourteen years Mike heard the big transformer go silent. He had never known how loud it was until it stopped.

A few seconds later, up on its hill, the hospital came back on, on its own generators. Here and there across the valley a farmhouse flickered back as somebody's generator kicked in. Everything else stayed black.

The radio crackled. Laurie's voice, fast and level, the way it got when things were bad. "All crews, all crews, we've lost the whole..."

Then nothing but hiss.

Nobody moved. The snow came down. Somewhere in that dark, in a kitchen on the south side of Coldwater, a nine-year-old girl was standing with a pot in each hand, waiting for her dad.

Up on the ridge, just once, a flashlight came on, swept across the hillside, and went out.

"It wasn't the year," Ray said quietly, beside him. "It was never going to be the year."

[ END OF CHAPTER 3 ]

Chapter 4 goes up Friday, October 1.

Author's note: Yes, a hospital has its own generators, and so do the radio sites, and Laurie's radio going quiet is something I'll explain next week. No, I won't tell you who's on the hill. I will say this, because a couple of you asked: none of what happens in this chapter is something anybody should try, and none of it is how anybody would do it. It's a story. My lights are staying on. So are yours. Keep the mail coming: [email protected]

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Posted Friday, September 24, 1999