by Tim Weed
We hit pavement on County Line Road and took a right, then veered left at University, which led north through the suburbs to downtown Denver. Buck drove in silence, looking wise and weathered, like an Indian war chief or an old time mariner, with one sculpted, brown hand on the wheel and the other at rest on his dusty, denim-clad knee. I asked him what he’d said to Billy.
“I reminded him that it’s his duty to supervise the summer help when the rest of us can’t. I gave him a few additional tips as well.” He glanced in the rearview and said mildly, as if to himself: “I may have been a little hard on the little bastard, honestly.”
“Did he say how it happened?”
He darted me an angry look. “What are you getting at, kid?”
There was an awkward pause. “Tommy,” he said after a while, “Billy may be a fool, and being of your generation, you’d most likely call him a loser. He’s got a thin skin, and he lacks the skill with words to say his piece in such a way that the other men will shut up long enough to listen. But he ain’t deliberately vicious. It was an accident, just like he said.”
The truck came to a stop at a traffic light and Buck turned to me. “And by the way, don’t ever let me hear about you working in a trench without a hard hat on. You got that?”
I felt my ears redden. “Yeah. Got it.”
We drove on in silence. The sun peeked shyly through the clouds, illuminating a gleam of new snow on the mountains. Nearer at hand, on both sides of the avenue, we were driving through a garish panorama of billboards, condos, and townhouses, unnaturally green lawns with sprinklers going full blast, strips of identical mini-malls of Seven-Elevens and Taco Bells and Kinko’s that seemed to have sprouted up throughout the metropolitan area like colonies of bright, self-cloning mushrooms. We drove into the old suburbs, decaying brick Victorians with drier, weedy lawns, and I reached up to feel my head again, the mat of dried blood. In my grandfather’s day these neighborhoods would have marked the very outer limits of the city.
“It’s a shame,” I said, though I don’t think I meant to say it aloud.
“What’s that, Tommy?”
I hesitated, embarrassed. “It’s a shame what we’re doing to the prairie. Back at Highlands Ranch, I mean.”
“I hear you, kid. But if we weren’t doing it, someone else would.”
I stared out the window, wondering. Was my uncle to blame because he was upper management? Or was it the fault of the greedy developers—or, for that matter, of the young, middle-class families pursuing their prefab version of the American dream? Who could blame them for wanting to watch Rocky Mountain sunsets from their highly affordable decks?
“I’m sorry about what I implied back there,” I said. “About Billy, I mean. I do get the feeling he doesn’t like me very much.”
“And you don’t like him very much either, do you?”
“I think it’s a natural reaction to the fact that he doesn’t like me.”
Buck regarded me coolly. “It’s not as if you’ve really given him a chance, Tommy. You insulted him the other day, remember? Not the other way around.”
I nodded, ears burning once again. I knew Buck was right, and I had the feeling that the trouble between Billy and me was far from over.
The next morning Billy and I were given the job of squaring the trench-bottom together. I don’t know if it was because of the incident of the day before, or because Buck wanted us to work together, or if he truly felt he needed Billy in the trench, but whatever the reason, the fact that he’d been taken off backhoe duty seemed to bother the Oklahoman quite a bit. It was a hot day, hotter in the trench, where we were exposed to direct sunlight and removed from the cooling breezes that came down off the mountains. Billy was using his shovel as a pick to knock off the rough edges left by the teeth of the backhoe, and I was following behind him, scooping the loose dirt and tossing it up and out of the trench.
He’d been absorbed in the work all morning, aggressively silent. Finally, he spoke over his shoulder, his voice thick with suppressed emotion. “Have a nice ride yesterday?”
“What, down to Medical?” Under my hard hat I felt the slight, almost pleasant ache of the little egg-shaped bump where the rock had hit me. The company doctor had tested for concussion, but there had been no cause for concern. “I did have a nice ride, thanks, Billy. Thanks to you, I mean.” I couldn’t resist the urge to spar with him, despite what Buck had said. A certain process had been set in motion within me, an automatic attack mechanism that seemed to have a life of its own.
“Old Buck tell you some of his rodeo stories, did he?”
I scooped another shovelful and tossed it up and out. “Why, Billy? You jealous?”
He didn’t reply, occupying himself instead with a flurry of shovel blows at a rock sticking out of the trench wall. I knew that he idolized Buck; in retrospect I see that it was one of the things we had in common.
Several minutes passed. Then he spoke over his shoulder again. “Everything’s easy for you, kid, ain’t it?”
“What are you talking about, Billy?”
He stopped working and turned around, his face pinched with anger. “You told Buck I did it on purpose, didn’t you, you little son of a bitch.”
“No. Why? It was an accident, wasn’t it?” Sweat glistened on my forearms, each little pore marked with a pinpoint of black dirt. I gripped the shovel handle and braced for a fight.
“Of course it were an accident. I just assumed you’d tell Buck it weren’t.”
“What’s your problem, Billy?”
He was leaning on his shovel, gazing at me. “Problem? Ain’t got no problems. You’re my only problem, pindick.” He seemed to have calmed down, but his eyes were unnaturally bright, and there was a weird smile playing at the corners of his lips beneath the drooping moustache. Staring into his face I felt a sensation of vertigo, as if his eyes were exerting some kind of gravitational pull. All of a sudden the walls of the trench seemed to lurch inward, and there was that fresh-dirt smell again, like blood.
I dropped my shovel and heaved myself out of the trench, gasping for air. Up on the open ground I felt a rush of relief, as if I’d just escaped a living burial. Down in the trench Billy shook his head, spat in the dirt, and turned back to the work at hand.
Before I knew it, July and half of August had gone by, and it was my final week on the crew. We’d dug twenty miles of trench and unspooled the equivalent length of cable, splicing dozens of army-green transformer boxes into the circuit as we went. The power grid was nearly done; the gas, water, telephone, and television crews had laid their pipes and cables; and the homebuilders were excavating and pouring eight to ten foundations a day. Highlands Ranch looked less and less like the old prairie and more and more like what it had become: the largest new housing project in the state of Colorado. My time as an agent of the destruction of that patch of wild grassland, the landscape of my childhood, was almost at an end. But I’d be lying if I said I was concerned about it. I was proud of my hardened muscles, basking in the minor triumph of having held my own on a crew of tough workingmen.
Billy Hurley and I had settled into a kind of détente. Once or twice I’d caught him watching me with a strange intensity, brow furrowed and eyes asquint as if he was trying to puzzle something out, but when I met his gaze he would invariably turn away, spitting a stream of tobacco juice in the dirt. He no longer challenged me directly. In fact, we rarely spoke at all unless the work required it.
There were lightning storms every afternoon, fast-moving thunderheads gathering over the Front Range and unburdening themselves on the prairie. Around lunchtime, they would form in the high country for their afternoon march downslope, gaining mass as they zigzagged over the foothills and onto the plains around greater Denver. With these storms it was hit-or-miss. Sometimes they sped away to the east—lightning flashes illuminating the purple clouds like flickering lanterns, and the trailing white blur of rain—but when they were on target, they hit with violence: rain in roaring sh
eets, thick multi-forked bolts of lightning, earth-rattling thunderclaps, and sometimes hail clattering down on the hoods and windshields of the utility trucks. But the storms’ rages were short-lived. The rain broke the heat of the day and left the air fresh and redolent of sage and moist dirt.
On Tuesday, August 21st—I remember the date exactly—all other details having been attended to, we prepared to make the final splices and bulldoze dirt into the remaining sections of trench, thus completing the Highlands Ranch power grid and finishing the job. The sky was clear that morning except for a sparse flock of cotton-ball clouds hovering over the mountaintops, harbingers of the daily pileup and its afternoon assault upon the plains.
The first surprise was Billy’s outfit: he showed up wearing an orange-and-blue Denver Broncos T-shirt instead of his usual western-cut. More strikingly, the stringy moustache and the Custer-length hair were gone, replaced by a clean shave and a barbershop crew cut. The change did not suit him well. Indeed, he looked very odd, his narrow face all out of proportion without the tusk-like whiskers, a white tan-line halfway up his forehead under the enormous, shorn scalp. You would have expected it to fuel a whole week of teasing on the crew, but no one said a word. Apparently none of us felt comfortable joking with him anymore.
Due to the regularity of the thunderstorms, the routine was to take care of any aboveground tasks in the morning and work in the trench in the afternoon. As Buck said, there was no safer place to be with lightning in the air than six feet under the prairie. I was not allowed in the trench, however, when the journeymen were splicing cable. So instead of donning the foam-rubber safety gloves—the elbow-length orange Day-Glos the men wore to protect themselves against unforeseen power surges—I would simply swing up into the truck to read or play solitaire on the wide vinyl seat.
An hour or so after lunch that day, the thunder-heads slid down off the mountains and extinguished the sun, eating back the stunted mid-afternoon shadows and cloaking the dirt piles and trench lines in weak bluish light. Buck told me to drive the utility truck over to the sector transformer to check on Billy. “See if he needs anything,” he said, reaching into his shirt pocket for a plug of tobacco. “You know which transformer I mean, kid?”
I nodded. It was about a quarter mile off, an army-green box the size of a tipped-over phone booth that held the circuits linking the sector to the rest of the power grid. Under no circumstances, Buck reminded me, was I to go down into the trench with Billy. I was just to see if he needed anything and hand him tools if he asked me to.
I started the truck and followed the ridges of dirt along the trench to the transformer in question. Surprisingly, Billy was not down in the trench but sitting on top of the box, his foam-rubber gloves laid out beside him like slightly flexed amputations, radiating a blurry orange light in the overcast gloom.
I stepped out of the truck. He sprang up off the box and held out his hand, beaming at me as if we were long-separated compañeros. I still couldn’t get used to him without the whiskers and the western duds; he looked strangely mischievous, like a spindly, overgrown two-year-old. I took his hand, thinking that it would be a relief not to have to see him every day, now that I was headed back to school.
“That Buck is some kind of thoughtful, ain’t he?” he said, keeping hold of my hand in his vise-like grip. “Sending my favorite college man to wait on me hand and foot? Cain’t tell you how much I appreciate this. It’s truly an honor. Truly.”
“Knock it off, Billy.” I jerked my hand out of his grasp and backed away a step. “Buck told me I was supposed to ask if you needed any help.”
He seemed to consider for a moment and, beaming anew, said that there was one simple thing I could do, which would save him the trouble of climbing out of the trench. When the word came over the radio that it was safe to make the splice, he would give me a signal—he would stand up and wave—and I should open the transformer box and flip the power switch to “off.”
“Got that, Tommy-boy? ‘Off,’ not ‘on.’ That’s simple enough to remember, what with all that college behind you, right?” He attempted the posh British accent I’d used to announce the coffee: “Are we quite clear, my fine young lad?” He patted me on the shoulder. There was something off-kilter about his voice—the last words had seemed to lag behind the movement of his lips, as in a low-budget foreign movie—and his eyes had retreated inward as if drawn by some captivating, private image.
He shook his head and his eyes refocused. He flashed a winning smile, and gave me the thumbs-up signal, like a dashing fighter pilot. Then he walked over to the trench and dropped in. I thought about driving back to let Buck know that Billy was acting strangely, but if I’d done that I would have risked missing the signal, and it was never my intention to put him in any danger.
The storm broke without warning, a sudden darkening in the air and then the rain was pouring down in sheets. I ran for the truck. From the passenger-side window I had a good view of the spot where Billy had dropped into the trench, and I kept the window cracked open, despite the soaking the seat was getting, in case he called for me. I figured he was hunkered down, waiting out the worst of the storm.
Then I noticed a bright, orange blur on the transformer: Billy’s safety gloves. Reluctantly, but duty-bound, I got out of the truck, ran over to the transformer to grab the gloves, and ran on to the trench, where Billy was whittling at the ends of the cables with his utility knife, oblivious to the storm raging above.
“Come sit in the truck,” I shouted, “until the storm passes!”
“Fuck off,” he growled, not looking up from the cables. At that point lightning bolts started hitting nearby—I’d been counting off the ever-shorter delays between the bright forks and the booming thundercracks—and I squatted to lower my profile, heart pounding in my chest.
“Well, at least put these on, for Christ’s sake,” I yelled, tossing the safety gloves down to him as I turned to sprint, doubled over, back to the truck. The rain fell in torrents, drumming the windshield and splattering in through the gap in the window. Every few seconds the lightning illuminated the transformer and the muddy dirt piles, and loud claps of thunder shook the truck and the ground it stood on. I thought about shutting the window and turning on the heat to dry myself off a bit, but I didn’t do it, and I kept a close watch on the trench.
In one of the breaks between thunderclaps I might have heard a faint pop over the drum and sizzle of raindrops, but I can’t be sure; there are a lot of noises in a storm, and it might have been my imagination. When the rain stopped and the lightning had moved off to a safe distance, I got out of the truck and walked over the slick dirt to the trench. The smell of prairie sage was strong, along with the mineral pungency of wet earth, but there was something funny mixed in, a sort of chemical tang.
With a sinking feeling in my stomach, I paused at the edge of the trench. The first thing I saw was the pair of safety gloves, lying on the trench-bottom exactly where I’d thrown them, palms up as if to catch the raindrops before they dissolved in the mud. Beyond them, Billy lay on his side in the fetal position, his pale, hairless face half-submerged in a mud puddle.
My uncle happened to be in the vicinity and heard the radio distress calls, so he got to us first, even before the ambulance. He took me aside and led me over to his car, a white Chrysler with maroon velvet trim, and I sat numbly in the passenger seat while he went to confer with Buck and the other men. They’d already pulled Billy out of the trench and laid him on the ground beside the cable truck. No one had been able to get his eyes to close, so they stayed open, with bits of mud sticking to them as though they were peeled hard-boiled eggs.
The ambulance arrived, and its flasher was a hypnotic red pulse inside the Chrysler. I felt numb as the technicians lifted the body onto a stretcher, covered it in a shroud, and loaded it in the ambulance. I could summon no feelings other than relief that my time on the crew was over. I was certain that I would never see any of them again.
My uncle came back an
d got in the car, and I sank into the comfortable seat as he turned the key in the ignition. But there was a tapping at my window, and I looked up to see Buck regarding me through the glass. I straightened in my seat and rolled down the window. His leathery face was close, and I could smell his chewing tobacco.
“The only thing I don’t understand, Tommy,” he said quietly, “is how the power came to be on when Billy was making the splice.”
I felt a spasm of panic down in my crotch. It hadn’t really occurred to me that I could be in trouble.
“Well, kid?”
“There was lightning hitting all around. I tried to get him to come sit in the truck, but he wouldn’t. I must have missed his signal.”
“Signal, Tommy? What signal?”
“That’s good enough, Buck,” my uncle put in. “Tommy, you don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to.”
“It’s okay.” I swallowed, staring up at Buck. “He said he was going to stand up and wave when he was ready. I was supposed to flip the switch on the transformer to ‘off.’”
“So he had the switch on to begin with?” I nodded. Buck shook his head slowly. Patchy gray stubble was beginning to show along his jawline; suddenly he looked his age. “And he wasn’t wearing his safety gloves.”
I was going to point out that I’d thrown the gloves down into the trench for him, but just then several police cruisers pulled in, blue lights flashing.
“Okay, Buck.” My uncle leaned over to address the crew chief. “I’m going to take him home, now. You got it from here, right?”
Gazing at me, Buck gave an absent nod. There was something in his expression that I’d glimpsed before, a terrible weariness. He tapped the roof of the Chrysler and my uncle drove away. I watched Buck in the rear-view mirror: the way his shoulders slumped and the effort he made to straighten them; how he seemed to take possession of himself, striding briskly over to the officers and the men gathered by the utility truck.