Water Witch (19 page)

After what seemed to take forever, with Goose cursing and cajoling and greasing and oiling, the old propane-powered motor coughed to life and everything was made ready to begin the drilling.

The roar of the engine and the pounding, pounding of the spudder echoed over the hills and through the arroyos as the assault on the limestone began. Max watched the young man and the old one lift a huge wooden spool from the bed of Jim’s truck. They set it up near the rig and poked a tattered beach umbrella through its middle to make a table.

Mopping sweat from his bald head with a frayed handkerchief, Goose walked over to Max. “We got ‘er goin’,” he shouted over the racket. “Ain’t much you can do around here, little lady. Me and Jim’s gonna play a little gin while Sal does her work.” He glanced up at the late afternoon sun. “We’ll shut her down about dark and start up about daylight.”

Max hesitated to leave her project, but Goose was right. It was out of her hands now. Promising to see him the next day, she left. As a treat, she detoured by the video store and rented a tape player and two of the most gruesome horror movies she could find. They would keep her mind off the drilling. Maybe they would even keep her mind off Sam.

A hundred times today, she’d caught herself wishing he was on the hill to share the excitement with her. She could close her eyes and imagine the warmth and pressure of his arms around her as she leaned back against his chest, almost hear his husky laughter rumble in her ears. Oh, Sam, she thought with a sigh, why couldn’t you understand? Was she expecting too much of him? Was her pride so important?

Sitting in bed at the Trail’s End, she ate a lonely supper and watched one of the films she’d rented. Not once did her hair rise or heart palpitate. In fact, it was kind of boring.

Before she could begin the next one, the phone rang. When she answered, Sam said, “Dowser and I miss you.”

The sound of his voice, lazy and seductive, tripped a flood of feelings deep inside. She almost blurted out, “I miss you, too,” but stopped herself. “I thought he might enjoy some time with Bess and the sheep if you don’t mind. I’ll pick him up on my way out of town Sunday.”

“You’re leaving?”

She swallowed and tried her darnedest to keep the quiver out of her voice. “Yes. Goose started drilling this afternoon, and he thinks we’ll be finished by late tomorrow if everything goes well. I have business in Houston that I need to take care of on Monday.” She didn’t add that with any luck she could pick up the check from Buck Barton and save her house from foreclosure.

“Why don’t you come over for dinner tonight? Loma’s frying catfish hoping you’ll come.”

“I’ve already eaten,” she said, glancing at the remnants of a TV dinner on the bedside table. “But thank you anyway. And thank Loma for me.”

“Angel, I love you,” he said with an intensity that wrenched her heart like a fist. “I love you more than life. There will never be anyone for me but you. Please come back to me. Give us another chance.” When she didn’t respond, he said, “I’ll be here. Waiting for you.”

Max held the phone to her ear for a long time after he hung up, listening to the taunting buzz, unmindful of the tears running down her cheeks. Someday soon he would find someone else. Someone more worthy of his love than she. Someone with a nice, normal background and a good family. Someone who wasn’t as different as she was or as tied up with monsters and witching sticks.

This pain would all pass. It was for the best.

It seemed as if Max had gone up and down the hill a dozen times during the day checking on their progress. She’d been there, nervously drinking coffee from a paper cup, when Goose and Jim had started drilling again at daybreak. She’d watched Goose check and adjust the cable with gloved hands fine tuned, after years of experience, to the subtle differences in tension. She’d watched him flush and bail the cuttings from the hole, and she’d listened to the constant pounding of the tool until the noise reverberating in her head made her feel like a punch drunk fighter.

“It’ll be a while yet, little lady,” Goose shouted each time over the clamor, unendingly patient with her anxiety as he reported fifty feet, sixty feet, seventy feet.

The old man had told her they’d been lucky not to hit much flint and the drilling was going especially well, but Max thought the process was taking forever. By the time he hit seventy-five feet and stopped to bail the hole, she was a bundle of nerves. Unable to do more than stare at the pictures, she threw down the magazine she’d bought at the drugstore on one of her myriad trips to town and began to pace. She was unaware of the tall, auburn-haired figure on the next hill, partially concealed by a scrub oak and holding binoculars to his eyes. He was every bit as nervous as she was.

When the pounding began again, Max closed her eyes and prayed to every saint she could think of. And she wasn’t even Catholic. She forced herself to sit down in one of the ragged lawn chairs by the makeshift table and read an article about newly discovered Mayan ruins, but the words might as well have been in Bulgarian for all the sense they made to her.

The shadows were getting long when Jim yelled, “Look at that!”

Max jumped up from her chair as if she’d been shot.”What? What?”

Jim pointed. The string of tools was completely slack.

“What does that mean?”

“Might mean we’ve hit a cave,” Goose said solemnly. “Or,” he added with a wry grin, “it might mean we’ve hit the vein.”

Max held her breath as he ran the bailer down. “Well?” she asked a few minutes later.

“Seventy-eight and a half feet. Water, cool and sweet as any I’ve seen. It’ll pump thirty, thirty-five gallons a minute.” He was grinning from ear to ear.

Max let out a whoop that could be heard in San Antonio. Laughing and dancing around, she hugged Jim, then she hugged Goose and planted a smacking kiss on each of his wrinkled cheeks. “We did it, Goose! By damn we did it!”

The old man looked enormously pleased with himself as Jim chuckled and shook his head in disbelief. Goose shut off the motor and said, “Put your ear to the hole. Mind the grease now,” he cautioned as she ducked between the crossbars of the derrick.

Max didn’t care about the grease. She held her braid with one hand and put her ear to the well. Her eyes grew wide and a look of awe came over her face. “I can hear it, Goose. I can hear the water rushing.”

“You’re Dal Maxwell’s grandkid, all right,” the old driller said. “You hit it right on the money. A few yards either way and we coulda missed it.” At the sound of tires crunching on gravel, he glanced up and said, “It looks like we got company.”

When Max saw Buck Barton and a tall, gray-haired woman getting out of a Suburban, she scrambled clear of the derrick and ran toward them, wiping her greasy hands on the seat of her jeans. The gruff old wildcatter introduced her to Olive Barton, Honey Bear.

Max grinned. “I’m glad to finally meet Honey Bear. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

The woman returned her smile, her blue eyes twinkling with humor. “And I’ve heard a lot about you. I understand you’re the one who’s going to drill a well on my hill.”

“No, ma’am,” Max said seriously. When Honey Bear’s smile began to fade. Max broke into an even broader grin. “It’s already drilled. We just hit water. All you’ll ever need.”

Buck let out a loud guffaw and hugged his wife under one beefy arm. “Hot damn! I told you I had a feeling about this little gal. Let me get my checkbook.”

*    *    *

It was already dark when Max put the key in the lock of unit seven and opened the door. Grimy, greasy, and worn to an emotional nub, she dumped her belongings on the table and started for the shower. She was just unlacing her boots when the phone rang. Her first thought was: Sam! She snatched up the receiver before the second ring.

She was disappointed when a man with a nasal twang said, “Max, this is Smith Bullock in Nashville. Glad I finally caught up with you. I’ve been trying to reach you all afternoon.”

When she recognized that it was her agent, she said, “Sorry about that, Mr. Bullock. I’ve been out drilling a water well.”

“To each his own, I suppose,” he said, and cleared his throat. “Say, lady, I’ve got some good news for you. Are you sitting down?”

Max felt her heart skip a beat. “Yes,” she replied, waiting.

“I’ve just sold five of your songs to one of this town’s leading female recording stars for her new album. She went ape over your stuff. And she wants to look at anything else you’ve got.”

When he told her the name of the singer, Max’s mouth dropped open. She was one of Max’s favorites, and almost every album she cut went to platinum. Her mouth dropped even farther when she discovered the “sweet deal” her agent had made for her.

“Cat got your tongue?” he asked when Max was too stunned to reply. “Max?”

“I’m here. I’m just in shock. I can’t believe it.”

Smith Bullock laughed. “Believe it, babe. When word gets out about this, you’re going to be in big demand. You’re on your way. When can you have something else to me?”

“Let me have a couple of days for this to sink in, and I’ll get back to you.”

She sat on the side of the sagging mattress and stared at the toes of her dusty boots. She couldn’t believe it. She, Angela Maxwell Strahan, was an honest-to-goodness, bona fide, professional songwriter. Arms outspread, she fell back on the bed with a silly grin pasted on her face. For so long it had only been a dream. Now it was reality.

Say, that was a great line for a song. Only a dream. Or had that been used? She finished pulling off her boots and did a little strutting jig to the bathroom.

The phone was ringing again when she shut the water off. She quickly wrapped her wet hair in a turban and grabbed a second towel as she dashed for the night table.

“Hello,” she answered, holding the phone against her shoulder as she dried off.

“Max, it’s Beth.” Her roommate sniffled and asked, “Did your agent reach you? I gave him the number there.”

“Yes, and you’ll never guess what he wanted.” Max related the story to Beth’s excited squeals and interjections of, “You’re kidding! That’s fantastic!”

“And on top of everything else,” Max said, “we hit water today.” She told Beth about their find. “It must be my lucky day. I don’t see how anything could get any better.” Yes, you do, a little voice in her head said as a picture of laughing green eyes flashed in her mind.

“Well, hold on to your hat, roomie,” Beth said. “I’ve got some more news for you. The real estate agent just called and he has a contract on the house for your asking price.”

“For real?”

“For real. There’s no question of the client’s credit, and the family wants to move in by the first of next month.”

“I can’t believe this. It can’t be happening. Now that I don’t have to sell the house, it’s sold.”

“You want to back out? He said to let him know by tomorrow.”

“Yes. No. I’m not sure. I don’t know what I’m going to do. Heck, I may even move to Nashville now. I’ll have to think about it. My brain’s on overload.”

After she hung up, Max walked around in a daze. She put on a robe and dried her hair. “It’s a dream,” she kept saying. “It’s only a dream.”

Hairbrush in hand, she sat on the side of the mattress. The creak of the bedsprings and the hum of the refrigerator were the only sounds she heard as she stared at the walls of the small, shabby room. Everything she’d been praying for had come to pass. She should be happy. She’d made a huge profit with the well, and Honey Bear had been so delighted, Buck had thrown in a five thousand dollar bonus. The house was going to sell; her secret dream of being a songwriter had come true. She was a success in anybody’s book. And she’d made it on her own.

But now that the initial hoopla had died down, she felt strangely depressed. A deep, dull melancholy abraded her spirit. Why wasn’t she happy?

Sam.

Her accomplishments were empty without Sam to reflect her joy and share in her triumph. She’d done everything she’d set out to do: her pride had been restored. But pride was a cold lover. And hollow-hearted loneliness was a high price to pay for it.

Pride. Gramps had always said she had more than her share. Sam, too, had cursed her stiff-necked pride. Yet most of her life it had helped her survive the hostile harangues of her father, and without it she would have buckled under the pressure of the past two years. Yes. she’d saved her pride, wrapped it around her like a protective mantle. But there was no warmth in it.

She thought of Sam’s hurtful words and she thought of her father. As she pulled the memories back and examined them, a new understanding began to dance on the edge of her awareness. Sam was right. He was nothing like her father. Her father had been an angry, loveless man who vented his frustration and fury on a meek, unprotesting child. She had never defended herself against him; she’d merely retreated into a silent, miserable world.

Her encounters with Sam hadn’t been like that. She had given as good as she got, matched him word for word. She hadn’t slunk meekly away. In these past nine years, she’d changed. She’d grown up and grown strong. Neither her father nor any other monster had power over her. An old ghost had been exorcized.