SURELY I CAN BE FORGIVEN for misjudging Billy Hurley. I was only nineteen that summer, so it’s understandable that I didn’t see him for more than he appeared at first glance: a thirtyish Okie pretending to be something he wasn’t. He couldn’t have been a real cowboy anyway, not in the middle of the 1980s, even if he did look the part: the cowhide ropers, the alternating duo of threadbare western-cut shirts, the greasy, Custer-length hair, the straw-colored handlebar moustache of which he was obviously so proud. The crew gave him plenty of guff for his low-budget cowpoke look, but he wasn’t easily provoked; he would just shake his head and stare off into the distance, his undernourished face taking on an air of moonfaced sadness, like a saint in some old Spanish painting.
I’ll never forget the day I called him out. I don’t know exactly what drove me to it. I was the college boy, the summer help, still uneasy among the full-time journeymen electricians on the crew. I suppose I was eager to overcome my discomfort by joining in on the sarcastic workingmen’s banter. And though it shames me to think of it today, I must have seen Billy as a safe target.
From afar, the scene would have looked like this: two forest-green utility trucks at rest on a rolling yellow prairie among scattered pine glades and cottonwood gullies; beyond that, a band of green foothills; and beyond them, on the western horizon, the massive, blue-dun profile of the Colorado Front Range. Zoom in some and you would smell the air, clean and peppery with sage. Zoom in some more and you would see five men in hard hats, sprawled out around the two trucks in attitudes of insolent relaxation: an electrical line crew on lunch break, and the college kid sitting in one of the trucks leaning out of the open window to vocalize an unthinking insult.
In a surprisingly fluid series of motions Billy whipped off his hard hat, tossed his sandwich into it as he got up, and wiped his hands on his dirty boot-cut Wranglers as he strode over to the truck. “What’d you call me?”
“A cowboy-wannabe?”
“Step on out here and call me that, you little fuck.” His face was only a couple of feet away from mine, and though technically I was bigger, I couldn’t help noticing that the tendons under the freckled skin on his neck stood out like leather cords. His eyes—usually vague and bewildered, as if he’d gone to sleep beside a campfire and woken up beside a six-lane highway—had become small and mean, like one of those black-and-white archive photographs of Appalachian dirt farmers. Beyond him, arrayed on the ground and the fenders of the cable truck, were the other journeymen: Bruce, a middle-aged, ex-Navy man; and Mike and Ignacio, two Mexican-American cousins in their early thirties. Next to me, in the driver’s seat of the utility truck, was Buck Blackshere, the crew chief. I glanced at him for support, but he shrugged noncommittally, making it clear that I was on my own in this. I opened the door and slid down off the seat, letting my weight settle into the soles of my work boots on the hard-packed dirt. It was a cloudless summer day, and the sun was hot on my shoulders. I slammed the door of the truck. The sound rolled out over the prairie like a gunshot.
“High Noon,” I quipped, my attempt at a smile failing because my throat was clenched up with nervousness and I kept needing to swallow. It was the first time I’d seen anyone’s temper flare up on the crew, and it took me by surprise. I felt caught in the act, like a schoolboy who lobs a snowball at a passing car, and the brake lights go on, and the car fishtails to a stop, and both doors swing open.
Billy put his head down and came at me. I ducked, grabbed his arm, and leaned in—I grew up with an older brother, so my reflexes were good for that kind of thing—and he came flying over my shoulder and landed on his backside, his head bouncing against the front tire of the truck. I spun to face him, but he just sat there panting in the dust, as if that one lunge had used up all his energy. By now, the rest of the crew was having a good laugh at his expense.
My uncle was a vice president of the Public Service Company of Colorado. He arranged for me to work on a line construction crew that summer, but the idea was my own. I had two years of college behind me, and although this may sound like a cliché, I felt ready for a passage into manhood. Line crews have a reputation for toughness, and a summer of rugged manual labor struck me as exactly the kind of thing I needed, like boot camp without the crew cut or the long-term commitment.
I was assigned to Buck Blackshere’s crew. Buck was probably in his mid-sixties that summer, short and athletically built, with a handsome, leathery face, his silver hair cropped and slicked back like a 1940s film star’s. He was the kind of chief who inspired his men to hard work without ever raising his voice. I heard him tell jokes, and I heard him recite poetry from memory, but I never heard him bark out an order. If you studied his face, as I did, it was possible to detect a certain tiredness—as if he’d seen too much of life—but he kept up a jolly front. It was well known on the crew that in his youth he’d been the state bronc-riding champ for seven years running, and there was an aura of subdued grandeur about him. I could imagine him as the captain of a privateer, or the good-hearted ringleader of a gang of outlaws.
My first morning on the crew coincided with the first day of the crew’s main job that summer, which was laying down the power grid for the Highlands Ranch project, a big subdivision south of Denver. It was an important job, the vanguard of the suburban development that was then pressing southward over the prairie like the invasion of a fast-growing geometrical fungus. Before we left the PSCo warehouse, Buck unrolled the blueprints to show us the power grid, a spiderweb of pencil lines depicting the network of cables linking the transformers that would distribute the electricity to each new street and cul-de-sac. When he’d finished going over the plans, he asked if there were any questions. The only one came from Billy Hurley, who inquired about what type of transformer we’d be installing. Buck read some numbers off the blueprints. Billy spat tobacco juice into a Coke can and asked about the diameter of the cable. Buck read off a few more numbers, and Billy nodded solemnly, as if it made a difference. I noticed the other men exchange glances. Apparently this was a scenario they’d seen play out before.
The second confrontation came a few days after the first. It was one of those mornings along the Front Range when the outlines of the mountains are so crisp they could be painted on canvas, a flat backdrop of stone-gray peaks and wide bowls under a pure blue sky. We’d been digging trench, and as we did every day at ten o’clock, we broke for coffee. Preparing the coffee was the grunt’s job, so while everyone else relaxed around the utility trucks I hoisted myself up and lifted the industrial-grade orange-and-white thermos from its bracket and eased it down onto the open door of a side cabinet, which doubled as a worktable. I dropped to the ground, got out a sleeve of styrofoam coffee cups, and stood it on end beside the thermos.
“Coffee, your majesties.” Every day I’d been trying out new ways of announcing it, using different accents and titles and such. Billy usually grimaced, as if the sound of my voice made his ears ring.
“Pour me a cup, pin-dick.” He was reclining on a spent cable spool between the trucks and the newly dug trench. Everyone’s eyes came to rest on me.
“Get it yourself.”
“Nope, pin-dick. You get it for me.”
I poured a cup, carefully added the non-dairy creamer and a packet of sugar, stirred, and took a sip, all the while staring coolly at Billy, whose lean, freckled face had gone a deep crimson.
“Last chance, college boy. Final warning.”
“Ease off, men,” Buck said mildly. He was studying a clipboard that he held on his thigh with his elbow, one foot up on the bumper of the truck.
Billy glanced at the crew chief and let out his breath in a long exhalation, the low-drooping sidebars of his moustache trembling like prairie grass. With a kind of full-body shrug he made to get up, but the spool tipped over, pitching him on his backside in the dirt. The big spindle rolled away, seeming to pause for effect at the edge of the trench before it rolled in. There was a moment of dead silence. Then the whole crew burst out hooting and snorting.
Billy sat with his legs splayed on the dirt. The sun was inching higher, and in the heat-shimmer, his scrawny body seemed to quiver and blur, as if it might evaporate or burst suddenly into flame.
I kept an eye on him in case he came at me again, but his expression was more sad than angry, and he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at Buck Blackshere, who was still studying the clipboard, his face hidden in shadow under the brim of his hard hat.
When I was a boy, my grandfather used to take me out to Highlands Ranch to see the West as it used to be. He knew Mr. Carlson, the old rancher whose family had settled the area along Cherry Creek that would later become Denver way back during the Gold Rush. On a good day out at the ranch, you could see deer, antelope, coyote, red-tailed hawks, two kinds of falcon, and the occasional golden eagle. There was a horse-path that started from the old stone mansion and wound along a sandy-bottomed gulch through glades of scrub oak and juniper into the open prairie. After a fall rain, the smell of sage was strong in the air, a sharp, immaculate wilderness scent that will always be linked in my imagination to Arapaho hunting parties and leather-skinned cowboys riding the unfenced plain.
One day—I was probably twelve or thirteen at the time—my grandfather and I came upon a dying calf in a meadow at the edge of a ponderosa glade. We heard it before we saw it; it was caught like the prey of some huge, malignant spider in a length of barbed wire, crying out in hoarse, panicked bleats as it slowly strangled itself, the wire looped around its neck in such a way that the more it struggled, the tighter the wire became.
“Hold it steady while I try to free it,” my grandfather said. I still remember the fragrant warmth of its flanks and the labored heave of its rib cage as I leaned into it and hugged.
We got it loose, but it was bleeding badly from the neck. It tried to run away, but one of its legs was broken or dislocated, and it sank to its knees in the buffalo grass, wild-eyed and softly moaning. My grandfather walked over to his horse and unstrapped his .22 rifle from the saddle.
“Do we have to kill it?” I asked.
The old man pursed his lips. He’d been a large-animal veterinarian, and although he was already retired by then, if there was anyone who could do something to save the calf, it was him.
“But there must be something we can do,” I pleaded.
He put his hand on my shoulder. “Sometimes death is the only kindness we can offer, Tommy.”
He held the barrel to the animal’s forehead. It stopped moaning and gazed up at us, its sad eyes seeming to comprehend what was in store. I averted my gaze, but the shot rang out and I heard the bullet puncture the animal’s skull with a fleshy pop, like cutting into a pumpkin. I turned back in time to see a tremor pass through the calf’s body. Then it lay still. We rode on in silence, in a light drizzle, with the perfume of sage in our nostrils.
After that, my grandfather and I came out to the ranch less often. We would talk about it all the time, but somehow it became harder and harder to arrange. Soon I was a teenager, with plenty of other things on my mind.
My grandfather became ill the summer I worked on the line crew. When I visited him in the hospital, he asked me what I’d been doing with myself, and when I told him I’d been working out at Highlands Ranch, the light came back into his face for a moment. But then he must have realized the nature of the work—falling beef prices and skyrocketing property taxes had forced the Carlsons to sell out several years earlier—and his eyes dimmed as he let his head sink back into the hospital pillow. I had a strange sensation, as though I was sitting on the edge of a precipice and he was tumbling slowly away from me into the dark void below.
When my mother told me he’d died, the nature of my grief surprised me. It wasn’t sadness so much as an overpowering emptiness. And there was something else worrying the edges of that emptiness, a gnawing sense of guilt that I didn’t fully recognize at the time, but that has since grown as familiar as the ache of an ill-fitting pair of boots.
The morning was overcast and gray, a rarity on the Front Range in summer. The peaks were hidden by a dull billow of clouds, and we could have been in Kansas for all the featurelessness of the landscape. Bruce and the Mexicans had gone back to the warehouse to load a new spool of cable, and Buck was pacing out the day’s work. I was shoveling out the bottom of the trench while Billy used the backhoe to open the ground ahead. I couldn’t see the main body of the machine or the man in the cockpit, just the rusted hydraulic arm with its toothed steel bucket as it dipped to scoop a fresh load of dirt, rose and disappeared in the slot of gray sky over the trench, and returned empty a few minutes later.
My job was to square the bottom of the trench so that the cable would lie flat. The dirt was brittle and hard, shot through with rocks ranging from pebbles to boulders the size of anvils; when I came upon one of these bigger rocks I had to use the blade of my shovel to pry it loose. I was concentrating on an especially stubborn slab when I felt the trench walls shudder. I jerked straight, alert to danger, and saw that Billy had let the bucket come to rest, teeth down, on the dirt-pile just above my head. There was a hissing in my ears, and I remember the cascading dirt giving off a rich, metallic odor, like blood.
Then my world went black.
Next thing I knew I was laid out beside the trench, with Billy’s narrow face peering down into mine. His eyes were inscrutable slits, and the sidebars of his stringy moustache trembled with every breath. “Cripes, kid, I thought you was a goner.”
My head throbbed. I seemed to have lost the power of speech.
“Rock slid off the pile and clobbered you on the head. I came down and brung you out.” Pokerfaced, he spat a long stream of tobacco juice, then resumed staring at me. Perhaps it was my imagination, but his voice seemed remarkably unconcerned, and to my ears the words sounded artificial, as if he might have been rehearsing them while I was unconscious. I sat up and felt my head. My hair was sticky and full of grit, matted with blood and dirt. In the corner of my eye I saw Buck’s compact, athletic frame striding briskly toward us with the rolled-up blueprints in one hand. I felt a hot bubble of rage welling up in my esophagus.
“You lads taking coffee break already?” the crew chief called out good-humoredly, but as he got close he must have sensed something wrong, because by the time he came up to us his expression was stern. “What happened here?”
I glanced up at him and shrugged. “Ask Billy.”
The crew chief turned to the wiry journeyman squatting on the dirt pile beside me. Billy twitched nervously. “Rock slid off the pile and hit him in the head, Buck. And, well, he wasn’t wearing his hard hat.”
Bruce and the Mexicans drove up in the other truck. Buck helped me to my feet and led me by the elbow to his truck, where I sat in a kind of daze.
After they’d unloaded the new spool I watched Buck take Billy aside to reprimand him. From my vantage point inside the truck I couldn’t tell what he was saying, but I could see by the way he was jabbing his finger in the air that he was giving the Oklahoman a good dressing down. Billy was shaking his head, and every once in a while he would try to stammer out some kind of defense, but Buck wasn’t brooking interruptions. Eventually Billy stopped trying to argue, and his face took on the pale gray shade of poured cement before it sets. The crew chief made a final angry point, and Billy spun and strode over to the backhoe, kicking dirt as he went. He hoisted himself into the cockpit of the big yellow machine and slouched in the seat, pulling his hard hat down over his eyes as if he wanted to take a cowboy-style nap.
Buck insisted on driving me in to the medical department, though I insisted that the bump on my head was nothing serious. We took the high road, a dirt track along an elevated ridge with a view of the whole area. As I gazed out at that landscape, it dawned on me that our work was having quite an impact on the prairie. The Highlands Ranch my grandfather and I had known was barely recognizable beneath the maze-like ridges of dry clotted earth piled up beside the trenches and foundation holes. I wondered where all the wildlife had gone. South, probably, although before long it would run up against Colorado Springs, which was undergoing its own sprawl northward. To the east was farm and feedlot country, where the soil was mostly used up, eroded by wind and rain, or saturated with chemical fertilizers. All of it had been prairie once. I closed my eyes and imagined the rolling hills, the herds of buffalo, the tall grass nodding in the wind.
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 sheets, 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 and 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.
We drove off the site, past the open trenches and the gaping foundation pits for row upon row of new Highlands Ranch homes. I looked west, hoping to find some kind of relief in the soaring peaks, but the Front Range was obscured by clouds. I tried to put myself in Billy’s shoes, down in the trench under the dying prairie, with the smell of mud and the bare wire of the cable ends, with the rain pouring in and the thunder cracking. Would the smell of sage have reached him down there?