by A N Sandra
“You can run, but you can’t hide,” Danica called after him, but her voice had no bite and Bud kept right on moving.
Bud intended to hide all the evidence of the day that he could, and he knew he could work quickly. All six of the Henderson kids were star athletes in one form or another and Bud knew their speed came from his own gene pool. The sharp wit the children possessed came from Danica, but their ability to race down a football field, pass a ball perfectly down the basketball court, or to throw a curveball came from him. Those days were long gone for Bud. His back hurt from too much stationary work, sitting on heavy equipment and truck driving, but he could still “get a move on” when he really needed to.
The evening sun had set almost completely, and the cicadas were singing as Bud approached his truck to take the box of things “discarded” from the past to the old outhouse to bury them.
As he reached into the truck bed Bud remembered the ivory box in his glove compartment. His intellect told him that he should remove that box and bury it with the rest the trash. His hand rested on the passenger window of his truck next to the glove box, with the intent to take the box and throw it away. Somehow, he moved his hand before his mind could justify what he was doing. Instead he reached into the back of the truck and get the box full of dirty relics of a past he couldn’t comprehend.
One more time Bud opened the box and looked in. The evening sun still flickered and caught a piece of platinum causing it to gleam for a moment. It was high quality metal. The pieces were jagged from being crushed by the continuous weight of volcanic rock, for millennia maybe, but Bud felt they must have been worked with skill at one point even though he could not determine what they had been. The same went for the toe of an ancient sandal. It bore no relation to any Native American moccasin he had ever seen. It looked more like a sandal he had seen in an Egyptian artifacts display at a museum in the Bay Area many years before… but it was hard to tell. A life of hard work in the blinding heat and bitter cold, a lot of beer, cigars, and six kids might have dulled his memory.
Working at the quarry had helped Bud to become an expert in the art of concealment. He had already buried numerous things he didn’t want anyone to know about in the outhouse site. Somewhere Jael’s first cell phone with a camera was below the dirt, containing the naughty pictures she had taken of herself, among other things belonging to his children. Various religious tracts that his mother, Katy, had brought were also deep in the soil. When Bud disposed of the quarry relics he artfully arranged dusty earth over the spot and removed his boot prints from the area by using a tree branch as a broom.
No one wanted to go by the outhouse anyway. It didn’t smell, it hadn’t been used for more than eighty years, but the idea of it grossed out his kids. “Hump” had been a cigar aficionado before marrying Roxie and often he had given Bud good cigars, which Bud enjoyed in peace in his special spot not far from the outhouse. Bud wondered if Hump would approve of burying the artifacts. If he didn’t bury them, the whole quarry might well be shut down. That probably would have been enough to garner Hump’s approval, although he was a man of strict ideas of right and wrong. It still felt wrong to walk away from the artifacts dropped into the hole of Grandfather’s outhouse.
It also felt wrong to walk by his truck and not pause to consider the ancient treasure in the glove box. Bud knew that keeping it would anger Randy to no end, and possibly cost him his job if the box were found. It wasn’t really hidden. Somehow Bud couldn’t move the box, though. He felt compelled to leave it just where it was.
Inside his home Bud found his youngest daughter intently plying her business on the laptop she had purchased for herself and his youngest son working out chords for a song that might or might not be the next big country music hit of the year. Joshua didn’t have enough life experience for country music writing, in Bud’s opinion, but there was always the chance of a giant fluke. Bud would never want to stand in the way of his children’s successes, even with negative thinking.
In his sparkling white bedroom Danica was laying across their fluffy bed in a soft white nightgown reading a book. No matter how old she became, Danica was still the pretty girl he had met in her grandparent’s Scandinavian bakery twenty-nine years before. If Bud wasn’t so concerned with future job loss and being caught at what East Coast liberals would have considered deep sin, Bud would have thrown himself on her like a hungry wolf. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever known. But he would take a shower first. The hungry wolf would unleash once he didn’t smell like deceit and confusion and quarry dust. Bud headed for the bathroom to unleash the wolf.
Joshua was sitting stoically at the kitchen table putting away scrambled eggs and toast when Bud came in to help himself to some of the same.
“I have a dentist appointment today, so I probably won’t feel like making dinner,” Danica warned Bud as he reached for the cup of coffee she held out to him. “I’ll probably pick up a pizza on my way out of town.”
“Fine, that will reheat if we can’t get home before six,” Bud said. “But don’t change your mind and get something we can’t just heat up later.”
“We won’t be home before six?” Joshua said. He hurriedly took some more eggs from the serving dish as if the extra protein would hold him over until then. He also grabbed another piece of toast,
“I don’t know when we’re getting home,” Bud admitted. “We’re going to open up Area C. Then we’re going to work like we mean it until we fill every job we’ve got going.”
“Weren’t you behind already?” Danica’s eyes softened with worry.
“It wasn’t bad before. Now that we need to spend time getting into Area C, we’ll get really behind if we don’t get lucky. We’re not as well staffed as we should be, but I called for temps and we’ll get all the overtime we need for a few weeks until they’re trained, and we get the jobs supplied.”
“We need the money.” Danica bit her cheek. “But can your back hold up to that much overtime?”
“My back is just fine,” Bud said. With a start he realized that it really was. For the first time in two years he realized he had rolled out of bed without stretching and taken a normal shower without focusing the showerhead on his aching back to smooth out the pain that several Ibuprofen couldn’t handle.
Danica looked unconvinced, but she sat down to eat with him. The two of them always ate before Bud went to work. Bud could remember the days with several small children in footie pajamas running around the table in the early morning shadows while he and Danica sipped coffee and ate scrambled eggs. Now there was only Joshua, calmly eating thirds, even though he had no extra fat anywhere on his lithe body. Bud would have been jealous of Joshua’s youth, but he remembered his own fondly. His youthful follies had been cut short by marrying young and starting a family right away, but they had been an amazing roller coaster ride at the time.
“Twilight never comes to say goodbye to me anymore,” Bud lamented. The little girl in her ladybug jammies used to smack his cheeks with loud kisses before he left for work.
“She’s not a morning person, Dad,” Joshua reminded him. “We’re lucky she associates with us at all.”
“She needs us for the free advertising,” Danica said. Danica was wearing a shirt that read: I’M HERE FOR THE PARTY to her dental appointment. Twilight had probably made it just for the occasion. Almost certainly someone at the dentist office would order some shirts for an event, inspired by Danica’s shirt.
“Let’s go, son.” Bud finally stood up.
It was going to be a long, hot day in the quarry, but he’d started it the best way he knew how. He was going to have to be quite laconic as the workers asked why Area B was being abandoned. Bud wondered if he could refer people to Joshua who could shrug and look at people as if they were morons for simply asking reasonable questions. Would Joshua lose that ability when he turned twenty? Did that magic belong only to teens?
As he climbed in the truck Bud could see the first rays of sun really begin
to touch down on the valley. Early summer was a lovely time in the North State although Bud had worked overtime so many summers he had missed huge chunks of them. He wished that all the work could be finished early and he could go fishing. With heartfelt desire he pictured himself along Hat Creek, reeling in trout in the early morning sun. It wouldn’t happen, and he knew it, Bud thought, as he organized his coffee and lunch on the small bump between his and Joshua’s seat. Everyone at Macdonald Building Materials was going to pull energy from unknown sources and work until they couldn’t work anymore.
Bud smiled at Joshua, who would wear earbuds all the way to the quarry. Bud’s own mother, Katy, wouldn’t have tolerated Bud, her only child, making himself that comfortable. She would have insisted on religious discourse or talking about uncomfortable family issues for the trip, making both of them miserable. The only way she’d known how to parent was to make Bud unhappy. She still spent most of any time visiting Bud’s family commenting on ways they should be unhappier. Danica was pleasant to Katy, her deep Catholic roots forced her to be respectful to Bud’s mother, but Danica always sighed in deep relief when they were out the door of Katy’s house.
They weren’t down the road five minutes when Joshua’s face suddenly lit up. He pulled out his earbuds and turned excitedly to Bud, turning off the news Bud was listening to on the radio. Bud hated the news, but being a good citizen required a certain amount of information about the world, which Bud took seriously.
“How am I going to know what’s going with Urban Relocation?” Bud asked Joshua, surprised by the young man’s action.
“It doesn’t matter what you know,” Joshua said with the patronizing air of youth. “Any knowledge you have won’t change anything. It doesn’t affect us anyhow. We own our home outright, you have a job related to public works, and we are all in good health.”
“Never think things don’t affect you,” Bud admonished him. “People are more interconnected than you think.” Urban Relocation bothered him a great deal, but it was happening so quickly and so few people were speaking out that Bud didn’t think it could be stopped. The Hollister Foundation was behind it, and the Hollister Foundation upset Bud to no end when he was foolish enough to dwell on the power one family had managed to amass.
“Urban relocation is for people who have no business living so far away from public services. We don’t count. We aren’t the people they want to move. We’re good right now.” Of course, all that ever mattered to Joshua was the moment he was in, the place where he was. “Listen, I’ve caught a song.”
Joshua began to hum while snapping his fingers to a rhythm that was somehow familiar, even though Bud couldn’t place it. The melody intrigued Bud even with no words. He felt drawn into the song, somehow, although he thought maybe he was just touched that Joshua shared it with him before he shared it with Back Pasture. Bud understood that children were supposed to grow apart from their parents and have their own lives. He even knew it was a mark of success for him that his children had done it so well, but it was always just a little sad when telling him things first never occurred to them anymore. Bud was well aware that this might be the last time Joshua ever shared something with him first, and he felt a little teary over the moment.
The hum of the Silverado was a good bass for Joshua’s song, no matter what the lyrics were going to be.
“I like it,” Bud said. He hoped he wasn’t speaking in his encouraging parent voice but rather the real one that he used for transactions at the quarry. Fortunately, Joshua took it that way.
“It just came to me,” Joshua tilted his head, the way Twilight or Danica might when they were carried away. “I never had a song just come to me like that before, unless…”
When Joshua didn’t continue Bud laughed a little.
“Unless you were stoned,” Bud finished for him.
Joshua was only nineteen and his father had embarrassed him. Instead of getting annoyed he laughed a little himself. Suddenly Bud was overtaken with the emotions of the nineteen-year-old boy he had once been and the two of them were laughing loudly in the truck.
“Oh, wow,” Joshua said as they turned into Macdonald Road Materials and saw everyone gathered early before Area C. The temps Bud had called for had already arrived and the whole group, in hard hats, orange vests, and work boots had beaten them there.
“Oh, shit,” Bud said. He caught his breath.
Randy was there, wearing high dollar jeans, a crisp white shirt, and Ray Ban sunglasses even though it was only five fifty-four a.m. Bud was so surprised to see Randy with a clipboard he didn’t park in his usual spot, but drove right to Area C and turned off his truck next to the group of people gathered there.
Looking at Randy standing in the early morning light, with his well-cut face, eyes unreadable behind the sunglasses, Bud was struck at how much Randy reminded him of a better-dressed Hump. Hump had done the same thing every time they had broken a new permitted area, and it hadn’t occurred to Bud that Randy would consider it his duty to be there like Hump. Bud had figured Randy would spend the morning at his home office promising promises and dealing with customers who would have to wait.
To be sure, Hump had not cut a dashing figure. He had no butt at all and his Wranglers were always about to fall off, causing people to make jokes about the “prison pants” fad rubbing off on him. But Hump had held the company together with raw willpower and grown it into a force to be taken seriously. Randy was counting on his brains. His intelligence was the best bet he had going for him. He was incredibly smart and had been given the best education, but raw willpower was a dynamic to be reckoned with in the construction world. Hump had had a hard upbringing and a fierce fight to get the company where it was. Randy had grown up with every advantage. He had Hump’s brains, but the rest was unknown because he had always been in Hump’s shadow. Hump had been a phoenix, rising from the ashes many times, sparing Randy the flames. Now the fire was getting close and Bud wondered if Randy could take the heat.
“Is it gonna get too hot in the truck to leave my phone in here?” Josh wondered. “It’s really warm already and it’s only six.”
“I keep mine in the office, so I don’t fry it,” Bud said. “Give me yours and I’ll put it there.”
Joshua handed Bud his phone and slid out of the truck. An instinct he didn’t quite understand caused Bud to discreetly take the small ivory box out of the glove compartment and slide it into his shirt pocket. No one was watching, and Bud buttoned his shirt pocket to secure it. The bump was not unlike the one a can of Skoal would make even though Danica would have made his life miserable if he had ever thought of using Skoal.
Walking up to Randy, Bud could somehow feel the man’s thoughts. Not exactly like mind reading, but Bud could see that Randy wanted everyone to feel he was in control, like Hump had been in control. Randy didn’t want anyone to contact Hump in Hawaii and tell him the situation. Randy wanted to tell Hump himself, years in the future, how he had handled this day perfectly, and Hump would be proud. Randy’s wife, Isabelle, didn’t understand why Randy had to spend the day at the quarry. Their daughter, Ellie, had her big violin recital that evening, and Isabelle was worried Randy wouldn’t be there. Just like Hump had missed so many of Randy’s football games and events. Hump had worn his flappy-assed Wranglers to Randy’s college graduation and hurried back to work, racing from UC Davis back to the quarry in his huge Dodge truck.
Never had Bud felt compassion for Randy. Randy would have rather drunk boiling road tar than suffer compassion from the quarry crew anyway. But the compassion was there in that moment. The group discussed the basic plans for the day and dispersed to work with a single-minded purpose.
The morning raced by with intoxicating speed. Bud had worked at the quarry almost thirty years before having a day with no misunderstandings. Never, ever, would he have believed a day would come when starting a new project that every person working would execute their tasks perfectly. Donovan worked more than talked for the first time since
Bud had known him. The temps worked so well that no outside observer could have determined they were actually temps. And Jared, the mechanic who worked nights maintaining equipment when no one was using it, had left everything in perfect condition. There were no malfunctions of any kind on the job all day long.
At four o’clock Randy looked around the jobsite and Bud thought he could detect tears of pride beneath the sunglasses still wrapped around his face.
“Couldn’t have prayed for a better day,” Randy said softly. Bud somehow heard him even over the noise the equipment was making. “I think I can make my daughter’s recital.”
Randy left, the crew kept working, and somehow six-thirty appeared with no troubles at all. Bud needed to go to the office to wrap up some paperwork for the day as everyone else left, but even the paperwork flew by. The ancient desktop computer somehow didn’t drag the way it normally did at ordinary tasks. The entire day had been an anomaly.
The sun was very low as Bud climbed into the cab of his truck. Jared, the mechanic who worked nights was just arriving and the two exchanged a crisp wave before Jared disappeared into the shop for the night.
“That was a helluva day,” Joshua commented as Bud started the truck.
“Never had a day that good,” Bud shook his head. Superstition set in. “I suppose we’ll pay for it tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow might be just as good,” Joshua said. “Maybe.”
“Maybe,” Bud said. He didn’t want to appear too superstitious. “Maybe you’ll wish you were home playing music.”
“I always wish I was playing music.” Joshua grinned. “But while we were working I got some lyrics for my song.”
“No joke?” Bud was surprised. He’d had a very clear mind as they worked, and his back hadn’t bothered him once, but he couldn’t imagine creating music in the noise that the quarry generated.
“The song is the song of the quarry,” Joshua said. His face was creased with dust and only the whites of his eyes were remotely clean, but he was so happy about his song that Bud was charmed by his intensity.
