Probably that was my cue to leave, but all I could manage was to sit up, to sit up and pull myself back near the fire, look into the flames, touch the blood on my face. Strictly speaking, I wasn’t against feeling shame, no more than I was against feeling loss, irritation, anger, isolation. Better than saying thank you to Shane all damn day. Lawrence passed me another beer.

“But what were you doing out there today, with that snapping turtle?” I asked.

“None of your damn business. We were talking to the ancestors, not to you,” Marie said.

“It ain’t what you think,” Lawrence said. “Shane says, You find bones or shards, just let me know so I can bring in one of our archaeologists to verify its authenticity. Yeah, right.”

“I don’t take that money,” Marie said. “I make my money operating machines, not whoring. If you didn’t notice, I got actual skills.”

“I got skills, too, Shane just won’t let me use them,” I said.

“Right. Got to protect the white lady, make sure she’s got walls around her,” Marie said.

“No one’s ever called me a lady before,” I said. I held my beer can to my cheek, cooled the bloody gash.

We drank in silence. I could lie and say it was a companionable silence. I could tell the truth and say it was better than talking to Shane. It was the kind of silence that said, Why the hell don’t you leave? The why wasn’t rhetorical, the why was a question with many possible answers, none of them quite good enough. But I stayed until finally Marie said, “It’s true, you know. What the guys are saying. It’s coming for your family, too. You said you live in the foothills?”

“Down near West Virginia,” I said.

“So think about it. Where do you expect that pipeline is going?” she asked.

“I’m not worried about it,” I said. “We’ve already got a pipeline going through our place. Been there since the sixties. It’s never given us any trouble. We’ve even got a nursery out there. Fruit trees.” I heard myself refer to Rudy as we, nearly felt it to be true.

“Yeah, those old pipelines,” Marie said, “the ones that are out of use, they’re repurposing them. Going to start shooting all this new high-pressure gas through there, whole new level. Jay, what’s the statistic?”

“Blast zone of two miles, could be,” he said, “anything goes wrong.”

“How far is your house from the line?” asked Marie.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe four hundred feet?” She nodded.

“Yeah, but me, I wouldn’t worry too much about that,” Lawrence said. “Thing that worries me is leaking, especially with those old lines, the ones the company calls vintage. My family drank from a well. The industry came around. Can’t drink from that well no more.”