Sparks and Saddles

I took the job at the Broken Wheel Ranch for the money, but honestly it was half the money and half the fact that anything sounded better than my apartment in Portland, which still had Greg's dumb recliner in the corner of the living room like a monument to my bad decisions. The divorce had been final for six weeks. I was forty-four years old, I was good with my hands, and I figured two weeks in eastern Oregon wiring a barn would be cheaper than therapy.

The drive took two days because I stopped in Bend and slept ten hours in a motel that smelled like somebody had microwaved fish. By the time I turned off the county road and bumped up the long gravel drive to the ranch, my back was complaining and my coffee was gone. The place looked like it had been holding its breath since the seventies. Good fences, rusted-out buildings, a big house with a wide porch, and past all of it a barn the size of a small airplane hangar.

A woman was waiting for me by the barn door, arms crossed, hat pulled low. She looked to be somewhere in her mid-forties, same as me, built like she'd been thrown off a few hundred horses and gotten back on every time.

"You the electrician?" she said. Not hello. Not welcome to the ranch.

"Michele Takahashi." I got out of the van and offered a hand. She took it, and hers was like a leather work glove.

"Johnnie Massey. I run the horses and most everything else around here." She looked at my van the way you'd look at a cloud that might rain. "You should know the last guy quit. Packed up in the middle of the night after Dale told him his bid was too high."

"So I've heard something like that. Did he quit or did he get run off?"

Her jaw did something. "He quit."

"Well," I said, "I don't quit easy. Where's the panel?"

She walked me into the barn and I have to tell you, my heart did a little drop that had nothing to do with her. It was a beautiful old building, big timbers, forty stalls, and wiring that looked like it had been installed by a man with a grudge against fire codes. Cloth insulation, splices wrapped in what I'm pretty sure was electrical tape over friction tape over hope.

"When's calving season?" I asked, because somebody had to.

"Three weeks. We got mares foaling in the north barn and Dale wants lights and heat lamps in here before then." She leaned against a stall door and watched me. "Three days. That's what Dale promised the board. Can you do it in three days?"

I laughed before I could stop myself. She did not laugh with me.

"I'm serious," she said.

"I know you are, that's the problem." I walked over to the corner where the panel was and pulled the cover off. "Look. This isn't a panel, it's a fuse box from roughly the Truman administration. Every circuit in this barn runs through it. I can rewire every fixture and every outlet in this building, and if I don't replace this box, it's all decoration. You'll have new wire feeding into a fire hazard."

"So order a new box."

"I did. It's on a truck somewhere between here and Boise. Three days for the whole job was never realistic. Five, maybe, if the box shows up when they say it will."

Johnnie pushed off the stall door and came over to look at the fuse box, which I'll admit surprised me. She actually looked at it, traced the feeds with a finger, and frowned.

"Dale's schematic shows all this on breakers," she said.

"Dale's schematic is a drawing of what somebody wishes was here. I've got one in the van that's actually accurate, because I made it. Want to see?"

"Fine." She followed me out to the van and I spread the schematic on the floor of the cargo area, on top of a moving blanket and about four empty coffee cups. She crouched down next to me, close enough I could smell horse and leather and, under that, plain soap. I scooted my brain back to the job.

"See, this leg feeds the north stalls, this one's the tack room, and this, the thing Dale drew as a subpanel, is actually just a junction box with a burn mark on it."

She was quiet a while, studying it. "The burn mark bother you?"

"It bothers me professionally. It means something already tried to catch fire and lost interest."

"Great," she muttered. She stood up and looked off at the hills. "Dale told the board three days. I told Dale it was a fantasy. Now I get to be the one standing here when it isn't done."

"I can work long days," I said. "I'll give you as much as the building gives me. That's all I've got."

"Fine," she said again, and walked back into the barn, and that was the entire conversation.

* * *

The next morning I was set up by seven, tools laid out on a folding table in the aisle, radio on low. Johnnie came through around seven-thirty with a couple of ranch hands, pointed at me, said something I couldn't hear, and the hands both looked over. I waved. They waved back like I was a bear that had learned to wave.

Around ten I reached into my tool bag for my knockout set and it wasn't there. I looked through the bag twice, then the van, then the table. Nothing. That set was the only thing I had left from my old master electrician, a man named Ferrell who taught me more than my dad did. Not expensive, really, but mine.

I mentioned it out loud to nobody, just grumbling at the bag. Twenty minutes later Johnnie came back through and stopped at my table.

"Heard you lost something."

"My knockout set. Maybe I left it at the motel, I don't know."

"That's funny," she said, and the way she said it wasn't funny at all. "Because the last electrician lost his meter the same week he quit. And Dale's been missing a drill from the shop since spring."

I set down my wire strippers. "You're not saying what it sounds like you're saying."

"I'm saying things go missing when outside folks are around. That's all I'm saying." She picked up one of my coffee cups, looked at it, put it back down. "I'd appreciate it if you'd let me search the van."

I will admit I saw red for a second there. Twenty-six years in the trades and I've been accused of plenty, but never theft, and never by a woman in a hat who'd known me for one day.

"No," I said, "you may not search my van. But I'll tell you what. I'll stand here while you look at every inch of it, so you can see I don't have it, and then you can think real hard about taking it back."

She stared at me and I stared at her, and it went on long enough that one of the ranch hands drifted closer to watch. Then she huffed and said fine, and she went through the van like she was looking for a needle in a haystack that owed her money. Tools, drop cloths, my duffel with my divorce papers still in the folder, all of it. She was almost gentle with the duffel, which I noticed even while furious.

"Not here," she finally said, not looking at me.

"No. It's not here." I closed the van door harder than I needed to. "I've been doing this for twenty-six years, and I've never taken so much as a screw from a job site. You want to apologize, I'll be in the barn."

She didn't apologize. She stalked off toward the corrals and I went back to pulling old wire, and we were both wonderful and professional for the rest of the morning, meaning we didn't say one word to each other.

I broke for lunch around one, drove into Dry Fork, got a burger at the diner, and was walking back to the van when I happened to glance through the window of Johnnie's parked truck. There was a toolbox on the seat behind the cab, one of those steel ones, lid cracked open. Sitting on top, bright as a Christmas ornament, was my knockout set.

I stood there a minute, feeling about four things at once. She'd been in my van at some point that morning, probably, looking for the drill she thought I'd taken from the shop, and pockets being pockets, she'd scooped up my kit by accident without a thought. That's the generous version. The other version was worse and I tried not to feed it.

I got in her unlocked truck, because apparently that's how we did things out here, took my set out, and closed the door quietly. I did not go find her and I did not say a word, and as far as I know she never noticed it was gone from the truck, so we were even in the dumbest possible way.

That afternoon I rewired the tack room with the radio louder than it needed to be, and she came through twice and did not look at me either time, and I thought, well, Michele, you've gotten divorced, how bad can one barn be.

The answer, it turned out, was pretty bad, but not in the way I expected.

By four o'clock I had the tack room branch circuit half done, which for a barn that old was a compliment. The heat had settled in like a renter who pays late. My shirt was stuck to my back and the sweat had washed a clean stripe through the dust on my glasses and I was thinking mostly about the motel shower and a cold anything, when I heard boots on the barn floor behind me.

"We're done for the day," Johnnie said from the tack room doorway. "Dale's got the truck out at the far pasture. I need the main lights back on before I lock up."

"Then you're in luck, because that's literally my job."

She didn't laugh. She came in and pointed at the panel on the tack room wall, the old one, the one with the handwritten labels from some previous owner with handwriting like a spider fell in ink. "Which one is it?"

I came over and looked. "The one marked MAIN, top left. The barn feed is the big double breaker under it. Don't touch anything else, half these labels are wrong."

"Which one turns the tack room lights back on?"

"None of them. I had that circuit locked out while I work on it. It's supposed to stay off."

"Well, it's off and I can't see in the barn, so."

"Main. Top left. I'll do it." But she was already reaching, and I swear I said the word main, and she flipped the wrong one. She flipped the one marked MAIN that some genius had written next to what was actually the barn subfeed, and the whole panel dropped out at once. The lights died, the fan died, the radio died, and the barn went from bright July afternoon to the inside of a boot.

"Oh," she said.

"Yeah."

"I flipped the wrong one, didn't I."

"You flipped the wrong one. It's fine, I'll relatch it, just give me a second for my eyes." I put my hand out and found the wall instead of the panel, which is embarrassing when the person you hate is standing right there. The thing about a windowless tack room at four in the afternoon with the door shut is that the dark is complete. Not city dark. Farm dark. I couldn't see my own boots.

Then I heard the tack room door swing shut behind her, and I heard it swing again, and I heard her try the handle a third time, and I heard the latch click in a way that latches are not supposed to click.

"You're kidding me," she said, calm in the way people are calm when they are not calm.

"What."

"The door. It's got that old hook latch, it only works from the outside if you pull it shut all the way, and it sticks. It sticks sometimes. It's sticking."

I felt my way over and tried it myself. She was right. The hook had dropped into the strike plate and the old wood had swelled in the heat, and that door was not opening from the inside without a screwdriver, which was on my folding table out in the aisle, on the wrong side of the door.

"So we're locked in the tack room," I said.

"Yep."

"In the dark."

"Yep."

"Together."

"You don't have to keep narrating it," she said, but there was something in her voice that wasn't anger, and I realized with a small shock it was a laugh she was holding in. I sat down on what turned out to be a stack of saddle blankets and decided that if I was going to be locked in a dark room with my worst enemy, I might as well be comfortable.

* * *

We tried the door for a while. She knew where Dale kept a pry bar, theoretically, but theoretically was doing a lot of work, because it was in the shop, a quarter mile off, and neither of us had a phone with any charge. Hers was dead. Mine was at the bottom of my duffel with four percent, and I'll be honest, I didn't want to be the person who called the ranch owner to rescue his own head wrangler.

"Cell reception out here is a rumor anyway," Johnnie said. She sat down across from me, and I could hear her hat come off and hit the blanket stack. "Dale will come looking by six. He always does. He's slow but he's regular."

"So we wait."

"So we wait." A pause. Then, "There's a bottle in the grain cabinet."

"Why is there a bottle in the grain cabinet?"

"Because if I kept whiskey in the house, my mother would find