4
The Boss
At the Monday morning meeting, the bios all stood in a loose circle while Marcus eyed his clipboard and Mari brewed coffee and tried not to fidget.
Any crew but Wyatt’s crew. Anybody but Jack.
After the tortoise, she had started to warm to him. After he caught the fringe-toed lizard for her, she figured they’d had something of an understanding. A cease-fire, at least. But on the sixth day of the week, she’d had to ask him to keep secondary containment under his forklift to catch leaks. And the volcano blew.
“I move my damn forklift three hundred times a day! How am I supposed to keep a container under it every time it’s parked?”
“Well, it’s important because you never know when a leak is going to occur, and out here, those toxic fluids sink fast into the sand, which poisons the watersheds that animals—”
“You think I take such shitty care of my forklift that it goes blowing hoses left and right?”
“No, of course not, but you can’t predict—”
“You can predict it! That’s the whole fucking idea behind properly maintaining your shit! Only assholes who can’t predict leaks are the ones who are too lazy to do things right!”
By the end of that fight, Jack’s face had turned a brash red, and Mari had retreated into the desert, guilty and upset all at once so even the silence couldn’t soothe it away. The drip pan, however, had been firmly placed under the forklift.
No matter how much she hated it, she couldn’t hide from conflict if it meant animals might be hurt. Jack didn’t scare her, but even so, a week of having to stand her ground in constant confrontations had left her exhausted.
Marcus sighed. “Mari, is there any way you could put up with him for another week? I hate to do it to you, but Jorge’s the only one who isn’t spoken for and he’s still on HR restraining order from Wyatt.”
Lisa winced in her direction.
Hotaka shook his head. “I’ll take him. There’s no reason to feed our nicest bio to the meanest foreman.”
Mari blinked in shock, and then half laughed and shook her head. “That’s ridiculous. You’re way nicer than I am!”
“I’m a complete dick and I never stop talking about plants,” Hotaka said. “You just like me because I made you a cutting board.”
She sputtered a laugh, but wasn’t sure what to say. They’d worked together a lot on the last job, and even though the Japanese woodworker and botanist was half her age, he didn’t seem to mind her. Mostly because she would listen to him talk about plant speciation for hours without interrupting, since she didn’t want to upset him by mentioning it wasn’t quite as interesting as he thought.
When he saw her chopping vegetables on a flattened cereal box, he’d made her a beautiful hand-sanded cutting board, sized to fit perfectly in her box of cooking utensils. Though Mari still always put a cereal box on top of it when she cut things so that she wouldn’t mar its surface.
“Sorry, Hotaka. I need you on the east end of the project, finishing the rare-cactus survey.” Marcus fussed with his clipboard a little more. “Maybe . . . but no, then . . .”
Shit. But then, if she didn’t take Wyatt, someone else would have to, and he’d made most of the female bios—and Jorge—cry.
Mari put on a placid smile. “Of course, Marcus. Don’t worry, I can handle him.”
That was not, as it turned out, strictly true.
On Monday, it was about his crew checking under their tires.
On Tuesday, they got into it because he was driving too fast. He claimed his eyes weren’t so damn slow that he couldn’t see a tortoise when it was right in front of his face, no matter how fast he was going.
On Wednesday, the drip pan under the forklift cracked, he refused to pause work to get a new one because his boss was “all up his ass to get this tower done,” and she had to write him up for a secondary containment violation.
On Thursday, his crew read the plans wrong and put part of the tower together backward. And, of course, they hadn’t yet gotten that fixed when Jack’s boss showed up.
Mari hated the big boss on sight. He parked in the middle of the road and left his truck running for an hour and a half. He had shiny boots that kept scuffing Jack’s already-scuffed ones when he got up into his space, forcing Jack to back away time and again. Calling him “son,” repeatedly reminding Jack to call him “sir.”
She overheard the words “lazy” and “slow” and “half-assed,” and it made her cringe.
It was cruel, and it didn’t even make any sense because the only other tower assembly crew on this section was still working on the same tower while Jack’s crew had finished several. Lisa was the other crew’s monitor, and she always joked that it took them until eleven thirty to get warmed up enough to pick up a wrench and then they needed a two-hour lunch to recover from the trauma of doing actual work. Mari didn’t understand why they weren’t getting this chastising from the big boss. Or at least she didn’t until she got a close look at the boss’s face.
He had a slab of a jaw and heavy brows, like an older version of the foreman in charge of the slower crew. Ah. Well, now she got why Junior was getting special dispensation and Jack was being lectured despite picking up Junior’s slack and then some. They’d been getting the tallest tower assignments, the ones that started in low-dipped washes and had to be built higher and with more-complicated shapes so they could get up high enough to draw even with the towers built on high spots. They still built three of those for every one of the other crew’s shorter ones. And yet this jerk seemed determined to make Jack apologize for it.
The next time the word “lazy” drifted over to her, Mari had had it. Her mother had always warned her that if she didn’t learn when to hold her tongue, it’d cause her a world of trouble. Mom sure hadn’t been wrong, but right now, Mari didn’t care.
She marched right up onto the pad, the crew stopping to stare because she was always so careful to stay out of their way. She went up to the boss and inserted herself into the conversation, even though he didn’t even turn to acknowledge her when she approached. His shirt buttons nearly brushed her breasts before he finally, grudgingly, gave way and stepped back—from both her and Jack.
“Can I help you?”
“Your truck is parked in the road, and if it’s going to be stored on-site, it needs to have secondary containment underneath to catch any engine leaks,” she said crisply.
“Uh, sorry about that, little lady,” he said, sounding anything but. “I don’t happen to have a pan with me to put under the truck. Wasn’t expecting this crew to need so much supervision.”
She wasn’t looking at Jack, but she could feel his chagrin at this latest passive-aggressive swipe. It was probably taking a lot for the normally explosive man to keep from defending himself. She’d already heard the supervisor suggest to Jack that he use a particular method that Jack had discarded last Monday as being too slow.
“In that case,” she told his boss, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to go. We don’t have extra containment pans on-site.”
Jack shifted beside her, and she hoped he wouldn’t blow her cover. He knew all too well she had three shiny new pans in her truck, because she’d shown them to him this morning. She brought them from the yard after the forklift argument, explaining that now they wouldn’t have to lose work time to get a new pan if one of theirs broke, because she’d keep extras on hand for them.
“Listen, darlin’, if you could just look the other way just this once, that’d be real nice. I need to stay and talk to my crew a little more.”
She didn’t smile. “I’m sorry. State and federal regulations don’t have leeway for that. You’re welcome to come back after you get a pan from the construction yard.”
“Well, somebody’s got a stick up their lady parts,” he muttered, and Jack took a sharp step forward. The boss’s eyes widened and Jack reluctantly backed off, his jaw clenching. Something in her stomach curdled at him being forced to back down, like she’d seen something private and too vulnerable.
Mari turned and walked away, not dignifying the boss’s comment with a response. Men like him wanted you to laugh off their poor behavior, and she’d be damned if she would. Behind her back, she heard the supervisor growling something to Jack that sounded like “keep your bio bitch on a leash.”
She walked out toward the road, stooping to check under his tires for animals. Which turned out to be a good thing because the boss didn’t check at all when he jumped in and screeched away a second later, leaving them all to choke on his dust.
She tucked her hands in her pockets and forced herself to keep casually strolling along, even though she wanted to crawl into her truck and gobble the last of her brownies just to wash the taste of that encounter out of her mouth. Why didn’t she call him on that “lady parts” comment? She ought to report him to HR. Darlin’ indeed. What a jerk. Telling Jack to “control” her like she was his property instead of an educated professional.
Jack barked something to his crew and stalked back to his truck. She watched out of the corner of her eye as he pulled his dusty lunchbox cooler out of the back seat. Good. He’d worked through lunch again, and he was even grouchier when he was hungry. She pulled her shoulders back, taking a deep breath. Somehow, she’d slouched right into her old posture from when she was married, her back already aching with the unfamiliar curl of it.
But she’d stood up to that man. She hadn’t just folded up and let him abuse Jack when he’d done nothing wrong. She had no reason for the shame that clung dark and sticky in her belly. No reason to feel like that supervisor had touched her in a place where she couldn’t push his hand away.
That guy put her on edge in a way that none of her clashes with Jack ever had.
Jack ripped his sandwich out of its bag with such force that the meat flew out of the center and landed on the ground, the mayonnaise immediately going black with dirt. “Fuck!” he hissed, looking at the bread in his hand, then into the cooler, which seemed empty from her angle. He balled his fist, crushing the bread into a doughy ball, and dropped it on the floorboard of the truck, chucking the cooler back in after it.
Mari ducked her head. Did he feel the same shame after the encounter as she did? Probably worse, since it was his work the man had criticized. His livelihood.
Jack yanked the tower blueprints out of his truck and laid them on the tailgate, dropping a hammer on one end and a chunk of discarded metal on the other to hold them down in the wind. Then he went still and glared at the paper, no doubt trying to decode the fastest way to transform his crew’s backward-tower fuckup without having to take every last screw out and start from scratch.
A faint growl traveled her way on the wind, and she wondered if it came from his stomach or his mouth.
Mari turned and slipped away, retreating to her Toyota. Even two long years after her divorce, she still wasn’t the best at making friends. But she did have one trick that never failed to soothe people.
Jack slapped a hand down on the tower plans. That piece. They could leave that whole section intact if they just took off the struts to the east and north and rotated the shape 240 degrees, then reattached—
His thought broke off half-formed when a small shoulder nudged his arm. He flinched away, a curse rising to his lips before he recognized the faint vanilla scent of Mari. She was the only thing in a world of sweat and sand that smelled good. Or maybe that was just the brownie she was holding out to him. She tried a smile, but it looked a little weak today.
“What an asshole, right?”
He choked, coughed, then laughed. “Yeah. Yup, he really is.” He stopped laughing. “Sorry about what he said.” He nodded to her to indicate which comment, not wanting to repeat the man’s filthy remark.
She shrugged. “I’ve heard worse. Brownie?” She offered it again.
He took it hesitantly, not sure why she was being nice to him.
She nodded at the plans. “You know, I’m not totally clear on what you’re doing here, but this piece”—she pointed at the section in the middle that he was going to leave intact—“looks like that piece up there.” She pointed up at the partially finished tower. “Maybe you could leave that piece and just take off the stuff around it, and still use that part?”
He slanted her a sideways look, trying not to look impressed. All lattice towers looked the same to greenhorns, but there were actually thousands of permutations of metal bars to match the towers to the contours of different landscapes. It had taken him years of reading the land and the towers to figure out how to fit them to each other without just following the plans blindly.
He grunted. “Yeah. Maybe we might do something like that.”
She passed him another brownie. He popped it into his mouth and chewed. No idea where she bought these things but he ought to track it down, because they tasted homemade. Which just made him feel worse about what had just happened.
“You shouldn’t have done that.” He jerked his chin toward the road. “Threatened to write him up like that. Rod holds a grudge. He’ll take it out on you any way he can.” His lips twitched. “Was ballsy, though. Damn. Lying about those pans.”
She made a small, disgusted noise, her pert nose crinkling. “Fuck him.”
Jack damn near grinned.
“Huh” was all he could manage, looking at her with new respect. Some part of him really wanted to watch her chew out Rod. The rest of him was worried his fist would find his boss’s mouth fast enough to get himself fired if Rod talked to Mari like that again.
She tossed him a protein bar, and he barely managed to catch it before she strolled away. “Better get started. Looking like it might be a late shift for us tonight.”
A moment ago, he hated his job and everything about it. And now, he didn’t want to admit it, but he was almost looking forward to working overtime.