Jay’s goal for the day—the most immediate goal, at least—was simply to get through it without attracting attention or questions. He thought the truth was as visible on his face as a sunburn, but he survived the morning without drawing so much as a raised eyebrow.
Then came lunch.
They were running switchgear tests at a substation for one of the company’s electrical engineers, a good guy from Ohio who seemed to know the system better than most men knew their own families, and Jay had always liked him, or at least liked him as much as a lineman could like an engineer. That changed at the deli, when the engineer said, “Something wrong with your food, Jay?”
Everyone looked at him. They were all nearly done with their sandwiches, and Jay’s was untouched. He’d tried one of the potato chips and barely got it down. When their eyes went to him, all of them scrutinizing his face, he felt a flush of panic.
“You just gotta observe everything, don’t you, Pete?” he said. “I’ve had the shits, that’s all. I was hoping not to have to announce it, but I guess you’ve got to run diagnostics even during the lunch hour. Frigging engineers.”
That got a small laugh and they turned away again, probably more worried about whether he was contagious than whether he was hiding a secret, but still he felt like he’d made a fatal mistake.
He tried to follow the conversation, people arguing about football now, most of the group Broncos fans, Pete a Cleveland Browns fan, which required heckling, and Jay did his best to grin and chuckle in the appropriate places. His mind was far from the restaurant, though. It was back in Billings, in a darkened bedroom with Sabrina.
They’d been married three months when the power went out in their apartment, and he’d started for the phone automatically, intending to call the control center to see if he was needed. She’d pulled him back to bed, her lips against his ear as she reminded him that he was off that day, and someone else could fix this one.
They’d made love in the darkness with a warm summer breeze blowing through the cracked window, and afterward, spent and breathless, he’d been close to sleep when she spoke.
“So what happens to make it do that?”
“It seems like you understand exactly what happens to make it—”
She’d laughed and smacked his chest. “The outage, smart-ass. There’s no storm tonight. Why’d the lights go out?”
“Could be a lot of things.” He was groggy, drifting blissfully toward sleep, but she was awake and alert.
“Like what? The storms I get. Or equipment failure. But sometimes it’s neither. What triggers those?”
He’d propped himself up on one elbow and searched for her face in the black room.
“Squirrel suicide bombers.”
“I’m being serious.”
“So am I. Now, it may be a tree limb blowing into the lines, but limbs are easy to find. A dead squirrel is tougher. They’ll get down into the switchgear and chew.” He reached out and pinched the base of her throat lightly, tickled up her neck, giving a ridiculous impression of a rodent’s biting sound. Her skin was warm and damp with sweat.
“If that’s all it takes, I’m amazed the lights don’t go out daily. One squirrel in the wrong place can shut off the lights? One tree limb?”
“Well, it depends on the circumstances. The system tries to heal itself.” He put his index finger on her shoulder. “If your limb falls into the lines here, and it gets blown over to here…” He traced the finger to her other shoulder, beading her sweat on his fingertip. “Then the lights might take one hard blink. That’s a transient fault. Brief contact, brief disruption. The system senses that there’s voltage leaving the lines and going to ground somehow, and the system is scared of voltage going to ground. It has an automatic recloser that will test this, open that circuit up and see if there’s still a ground path for the voltage. If it’s a limb that fell and made brief contact, the ground path will be gone, and the lights will stay on. But…” He traced his finger back to her left shoulder. “Let’s say the limb stays tangled in the lines. Or the squirrel suicide bomber gets into some switchgear.” He tickled her left shoulder again, and she laughed. “Then the fault is still there, and the recloser will cycle just once more. You’ll get two hard blinks, and the next time it’s going dark for good. Three strikes and it’s out. Because by then, the system will have decided that the problem is dangerous. It kills the current to prevent larger problems. That’s when yours truly gets sent into the mix.”
“You really think it’s a squirrel that did this?”
He shrugged. “No idea. Clear day like this, equipment failure is possible. Suppose an insulator breaks and two lines touch. If two energized lines touch, say good night for a while. The system does not like that.”
He traced his finger lower, down her shoulder, between her breasts, down. He could barely make out her face in the dim room, but the outage had brought a special silence with it, like a snowfall, and their home felt safe and sacred.
“Not all bad,” he said. “People find ways to pass the time without electricity.”
“Sometimes,” she agreed, guiding his hand, “a little darkness is not a bad thing.”
“Jay? Jay?”
The voice shook him back into the present, and he looked up and saw that he was the focus of the table’s attention again. It wasn’t Pete calling to him now but Brett, one of his own crew, who was looking at him with concern.
“You okay, boss? You’re kind of pale.”
“Yeah,” Jay said, “I’m okay. Just…just fighting through this. I hope it’s not catching.”
He got unsteadily to his feet, picked up his untouched sandwich, crossed the room, and threw it into the trash.