The Feed Room

I did not plan any of this. That matters to me, because my uncle Ray would read this and assume I engineered the whole evening, and I did not. I have spent seventeen years as an operations planner, which means I audit workflows for a living. I make spreadsheets about cattle feed schedules. Nobody engineers anything from that position.

Here is how it happened. Uncle Ray owns a consulting firm, and one of his clients is the Lazy J Ranch out in eastern Montana. They wanted a site survey of their feeding and fencing operations, and Ray owed the owner a favor going back twenty years, so he sent me instead of billing them. "It'll be good for you, Colby," he said on the phone. "Get out of the office. Smell some actual manure instead of the metaphorical kind."

That is Ray's idea of humor. I have been enduring it since I was eleven.

So I flew into Billings, rented a car, and drove three hours east through country so flat and empty that my brain started inventing hills just to stay awake. I got to the ranch at quarter to eleven, which was later than planned, because I stopped at a gas station outside Forsyth and ate a rotating hot dog that I will be thinking about for years.

The foreman was a man named Hobbs, and he was waiting up for me with the enthusiasm of a man waiting up for a tax auditor, which to be fair is what I was. He was maybe fifty, sun-cured, wearing a canvas jacket even though it was late spring and not cold.

"You're the nephew," he said, looking me up and down. I had dress slacks on. I knew how it looked.

"That's me. Colby Sawyer."

"Huh." He picked up a key off the desk and walked me out across the yard to the main bunkhouse without another word. It was a long low building, and inside there was a hall with four identical doors along one side. At the far end there was a fifth door, and the whole place smelled of hay and saddle soap.

"Room one is Alvie and Tim, room two's me, room three is empty, room four is Dahlia and that other one," Hobbs said, at a speed that did not invite questions. "You take three. Bed's already made. Bathroom's down the hall, shower pressure's bad, don't touch the heater. If anybody gives you grief, tell them Hobbs sent you and they'll give you different grief." He handed me the key, said "g'night," and was gone before I could confirm anything.

Here is where I will admit something to you, reader, because you deserve it: I was exhausted, I had eaten half a hot dog for dinner, and the key Hobbs gave me had a little brass tag with a number on it that I did not look at. I walked down that hall of identical doors and I opened the last one on the left, which I understood to be room three.

It was not room three. The last door on the left was the tack room, the one at the very end, and it was not empty.

There was a hay bale in the middle of the floor, and sitting on the hay bale was a woman. She was somewhere around thirty, wearing a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up and jeans with the knees worn through, and she was holding a tube of lube.

She looked up at me. I looked at her. The lube sat between us like a subpoena.

Neither of us said anything for a solid five seconds. I did the math fast. Room four was Dahlia and somebody. The last door on the left was not room three. This was the tack room. Therefore. And then the other part of the math, the part where a woman sits alone on a hay bale at midnight in a room that smells of saddle soap, with a tube of lube, waiting for nobody.

"You've got to be kidding me," she said finally. She did not sound scared. She sounded exasperated, like I had interrupted her during a personal phone call.

"Sorry," I said, and I did not leave. That is the part I want on the record. A reasonable man would have apologized and backed out. I stood in the doorway like an idiot holding up the house.

She looked me over the same way Hobbs had, but with more interest. "Wait. You're the auditor guy."

"Operations planner."

"That's worse." She tipped her head at me. "He sent you, didn't he. Hobbs."

"Sent me where?"

"To here. To this room." She waved the lube hand at the general darkness. "He's been on my case about hiding out in the tack room all month. So he sends the auditor in here to catch me in the act. That's his idea of a joke. Oh my god, he probably told you there was a bed in here or something."

I could have said no. I could have said, actually, I misread the key tag, I thought this was room three, I am going to walk down four feet and go to bed and never think about this again. That was the truth and it was four feet away.

"Well," I said. And that is what I said. Seventeen years of spreadsheets, and when the moment came, my entire contribution was "well."

Her eyebrows went up. Then she started to laugh, this low reluctant laugh, like the laugh itself annoyed her. "Well. He really didn't