by A N Sandra
Everyone nodded. Joshua almost expected someone to yell out “Amen!” like at some churches.
There was no dessert. Everyone picked up their empty plates and put them in large grey plastic tubs at the end of every table with the sort of precision that Joshua would have associated with football camp. Except that Joshua had shown up at football camp not knowing anyone at all and had made plenty friends in twenty minutes.
“There was a bag in your truck,” a voice behind Joshua said. “I put it on your bunk. You’re with us in the green.”
One of the bunk rooms had been green and Joshua assumed that was it. He nodded, turning to face the voice. He was next to a brown-haired man covered with freckles and muscles.
“Brooke warned you about using the women’s bathrooms?”
“Yeah.” Joshua smiled.
The smile was not returned.
“You’re leaving with Court tomorrow. We’re going to be up early.”
As the man turned away, Joshua realized that he didn’t know his name.
It had been a long day and Joshua thought he would get to bed early, but everyone else was using the bathrooms already. He waited for other people to finish, standing on the outside looking in.
It occurred to Joshua that having the box in his pocket might have something to do with being on the outside looking in, but he didn’t care if it did. He wasn’t letting go of it. For anything. The air in the hangars was just a little off, and it was hard for Joshua to feel at ease as he showered (the box came inside the shower with him) and put on some running shorts and a tank top to sleep in.
The sheets on his bunk smelled like cheap detergent. Janice had used the same detergent and the sheets at her house had smelled like that. It helped Joshua calm down to pretend that he was in the spare room at his grandmother’s house. Someone was even snoring, and it was easy to pretend it was his grandfather. When Joshua had been small Michael had told him that there was a monster at grandma’s house making that sound. Joshua had told Twilight the same story about the monster, but she was a typical youngest child and expected to be lied to. She’d rolled her eyes and gotten into bed without a pause.
“Up and at ‘em, new guy!” A strange voice shook Joshua slightly.
His eyes flew open even though he’d been in a sound sleep.
“It’s two thirty. Breakfast is at three, and you are hitting the road with the crew at three thirty, sharp. I’ve got you some work clothes, pack ‘em up.”
The irony of getting up at a time when he would not have been ready for bed if he’d been playing a gig was not lost on Joshua. He pulled on the clothes that had been left for him and packed the rest into a camo bag he found at the end of his bed. He packed his own clothes into it as well, mostly because he didn’t know what to do with them. There was a closet and two dressers in the room, but he hadn’t wanted to ask anyone where to put his clothes, so he had just left them in his bag at the foot of his bed.
Breakfast was served buffet style. Joshua had oatmeal with plenty of brown sugar, scrambled eggs, and a small pile of fruit to go with his bacon. The mountain of bacon on the buffet warmed his heart as much as the huge urn of coffee. Joshua sat alone and no one sat by him, but it was too early in the morning to waste energy on feeling excluded.
“Be here ready to leave in five minutes!” a rich alto voice called over the breakfast noises.
Joshua looked toward the woman who had spoken. She was tall with short curly hair, Slavic cheekbones, and light-colored eyes. Loose fitting camouflage covered her frame, but Joshua could tell she was as super buff as everyone else. Most likely she was “Court” who was in charge of the work crew he was going out on. Her voice was the same one that had commanded Brooke to take him to see Curtis. She was more than a crew boss. She was a genuine warrior. He went to get his bag off his bunk and to straighten it up before leaving.
“Have fun,” one of the bunkmates who had neglected to make introductions told him.
Joshua didn’t bother to answer. He was sure that he would have taken his chances with getting shot on his way out the door if it wasn’t for the box helping him stay calm. Don’t be a jerk just because they’ve been jerks.
“Bye,” Joshua turned to him with a smile. The guy didn’t look back at him, but Joshua refused to take offense. There would be plenty of time to make enemies later if it came to that.
Everyone on the departing work crew piled into a huge truck that had no top. Court was up front, the rest hunkered down in the back with their bags and so did Joshua. The truck drove out of the hangar and it seemed like they were driving right into the low desert stars that illuminated the night. Joshua had grown up in a part of the North State that was famous for its night skies, but the desert stars still struck him with their beauty. Since having the box, it seemed easier to take pleasure in beauty. He rested with his back against his bag and let himself enjoy the ride.
“I’ve got four sites going so I need you to work this out for yourselves,” Court told everyone after they had disembarked from the truck around a huge cement culvert. “There are six of these bad boys that need to be gone if we’re going to keep management off our backs.”
Joshua looked at the equipment that surrounded them with relief. They had what they needed to do the job.
“Brett is in charge here. He’s already done this a hundred times. Listen to him!”
Joshua was sure even though Court was talking to everyone she was really addressing him. He was the new one, the person needing instructions. I don’t need to prove myself. My work stands for itself. It was a relatively new thought. Mostly Joshua had shown up at the quarry and worked hard enough that his father would not be embarrassed by him. He’d poured all his best energy into his music. He felt confident that he would make sure everyone on his crew wasn’t sorry to be saddled with him.
“Can you set up the spotlights?” Brett asked Joshua.
“Yep.” Joshua was glad to know how to do his first task. He wondered if the box had somehow influenced Brett to ask him to do it, but it didn’t matter. In a few minutes the whole crew was attacking the cement culvert so that later they could remake a dry streambed in the spot it had been. Joshua had seen enough Hollister Youth Foundation work to know that when the project was done there would be no trace that humanity had ever built a road in the area.
The sun came up, and everyone kept working. Joshua fell into the rhythm of the group with ease. No one referred to him by name, and no one gave him a hard time over anything. The cement pipe from the culvert was loaded onto a truck to be taken to cement heaven, wherever that was, and plenty of rock had been worked around the existing area by the time the sun was high in the sky and Court came back to check on their progress.
“We need to get out of the sun,” Court said. She walked around the site trying to find something that had been missed, but instead ended up with a slight smile. “I thought this would take at least two days, but you knocked yourselves out.”
Everyone piled into the truck and Court drove them to the Hollister Youth Foundation camp for Kern County. Several construction trailers were set in a haphazard circle. Once, they might have been grey, but currently they were mostly covered with graffiti, looking like they had been rescued from an inner-city train yard. There was a metal fire pit in the center of the cluster with some lawn chairs around it that looked like they came from a dumpster diving expedition.
“This doesn’t look like the work camps the Hollister Youth have in Shasta County,” Joshua caught himself speaking even though he was trying to reciprocate the cool behavior everyone was displaying toward him.
“They’re rig trailers from oil drilling days,” someone said.
Joshua noted that the young man who said it was someone whose name he had not managed to catch the whole last eight hour shift they had worked together. He knew who Brett was, Brooke, Myah was another tall muscular girl that seemed to be almost interchangeable with Court or Brooke, with short dark hair and a formidable look on her fa
ce most of the time. There was another girl who could have been part of the set, whose name Joshua had not been able to determine, and two men, possibly a little older than himself, who did not seem to have names. Somehow Joshua didn’t think they were normally so quiet. He was sure that they weren’t able to relax around him. The feeling of being the group killjoy was brand new to Joshua and he didn’t know what to do with it.
When the second the truck came to a complete stop everyone scrambled down with their bags. The late morning sun had been scorching everyone, and they all dispersed to trailers to get out of it. The hum of a generator sang into the morning air. One of the men who had declined any sort of introduction nodded at Joshua.
“I’ll show you where to put your bag.”
Back to being his tranquil self, Joshua nodded at him with no comment at all.
The rig trailer had a set of bunk beds and a single bed. With a flick of his head the man who had brought him inside demonstrated that Joshua would have the top bunk. Joshua had grown up with two older brothers and two older sisters and was used to getting second hand clothes, the small slice of pizza, squishing in the back of Danica’s minivan with all his baseball stuff on his lap. Without hesitation Joshua threw his bag up. The man turned on a noisy air conditioning unit that was at the end of the trailer. A coffee table was under the unit and there were several books on it. An extremely old couch was to the side of it.
“Is there a shower around here?” Joshua asked.
“The trailer with the green flower painted over the door is the shower guys use. The door that has writing on it is the one the girls use.” The man paused before he went on. “I know it’s hot, but we only take one shower a day. There’s a four-minute timer on the shower. The water tank only gets refilled once a week.”
“Okay,” Joshua told him. He took clean clothes out of his bag and headed for the shower. It wasn’t his imagination. As he walked to the trailer with the green flowers over the door the people who weren’t inside their trailers became still and quiet in his presence.
“Can’t leave now,” Joshua muttered to himself once he was under the refreshingly cool running water. There was no way the group could let him leave after he’d been there. There was also no way that he could bring the rest of his family here even though Curtis had said that he could. “One day at a time,” Joshua promised himself, the four-minute shower ground to a halt and he was already toweling off. No one had been rude to him, but he had questions about his own personal safety in a place where he was clearly unwelcome. His roommate was gone when he got back to his trailer and he wasn’t sure if he was glad to be alone or annoyed to be ditched.
His phone didn’t work. There was no service in the area at all. The books on the table were Joshua’s only option to occupy his mind before falling asleep. It was noon and he was exhausted. He was glad they were going to sleep away the heat of the day in the air conditioning, but he was sorry that he would have to get up in the middle of the night to work.
The truck pulled in with more people. Court had said there were other job sites, so she must have gone to get the rest of the workers. Joshua tried to concentrate on the book, but he could hear other people sharing camaraderie even over the noise of the generator and the air conditioner. Back to the book.
Suddenly, he realized that he was starving. Joshua put on his boots and left the trailer. No one was in the common area. All the noise was coming from one trailer. They’re eating without me.
Calmly, Joshua went into the trailer and there was food spread out across a huge table. Everyone quit talking. A few people looked up at him, mostly with annoyance, although Brooke did look a little embarrassed. There wasn’t much left, but he was hungry, and he saw there was a small stack of cheap plastic plates at the end of the table. He picked one up and filled it with the food that was left. Limp green beans that had probably come from a can, some form of hamburger helper, and salad that was mostly just lettuce left at the bottom of the bowl.
“We ate all the fruit,” Brooke said as he got ready to leave. “I’m sorry. Let me get you an apple.”
Joshua paused while she got up, retrieved an apple from a cupboard, and handed it to him. It wouldn’t be much of a meal, but he wouldn’t starve. He started to walk back to his trailer and from behind he could hear someone say, “Just let him go.”
With a full stomach and a good book Joshua was able to go to sleep. Probably the box kept him from panicking over being stuck with strangers who didn’t want him around. Under any other circumstances he would have fled, but somehow, he was able to think clearly with a touch of humor. I’m not gonna risk my life over eating the salad in the bottom of the bowl. Someone had to eat last. I’m fine. There’s no way I can make a break for it and I don’t even need to. It’s not kindergarten, I’m a man. I can live with being a pariah. For a while.
There was no sun outside but suddenly Joshua was wide awake. The room was dark. He could hear the sounds of breathing roommates. The hum of the generator was gone, so the air conditioner wasn’t running, and it was warm. Sticky even.
An alarm went off and Joshua gave himself permission to sit up. From somewhere in the desert night the generator came on again. One of Joshua’s nameless roommates turned on the light and the three of them got dressed without a single word exchanged for any reason. In the early morning, the silence was more peaceful than ominous, even though Joshua felt that his bunkmates were deliberately unfriendly. They put on their boots, so did Joshua. When they walked out the door, Joshua followed them. Like ducks in a row all three of them walked past the fire pit in the center of the circle of rig trailers to the trailer with food. The smell of coffee filled the air. There was a huge pot of oatmeal, a large box of muffins, and people were fixing their own eggs over small propane burners.
The hum of the generator filled the air as spoons clinked, people chewed, and sipped hot coffee in the middle of the night. The sound of breakfast in the desert wasn’t too different from the sound of breakfast at home. Except there would never be breakfast at home again. A work crew similar to this one would be demolishing the house that Joshua’s great grandparents had built and left to his father. The rich volcanic land that his great-great-great grandparents had purchased when they came from Norway belonged to the Hollister Trust now. Joshua comforted himself with the idea that he would outlive the Hollister’s scheming plans and walk on that land again. For Dad, if for no other reason.
Another work day progressed with little personal interaction at all. Joshua still took it personally, but he didn’t get worked up about it. It was them, not him. There was nothing he could have done to throw a wet blanket over whatever fellowship clearly existed outside his presence.
By the sixth day Joshua was hardened to the situation. He was able to determine his roommates’ names without the humiliation of asking for them. Casey and Steve were decent guys. Casey was on his crew. Steve was on a different one, so Joshua couldn’t vouch for Steve, but Casey worked hard and took suggestions well. Brett, the head of Joshua’s crew, was deliberate in his plans, and the crew blasted through work at a rate that pleased Court, even if she had a suspicious look on her face every time she inspected a site that was completed faster than she expected. With careful observation, Joshua determined that people took turns cooking and washing dishes. He showed up to help fix dinner on the fifth day and he stayed to do dishes the breakfast of the sixth. No one thanked him, but they didn’t thank each other either, and no one stopped him.
“Tomorrow after work we go back to Curtis.” Steve stretched out on the single bed across the room from the bunk beds. They had eaten dinner and come back to their trailer to read and sleep the way they had all week. “I don’t know what’s harder. Being out here and working in the heat or working underground.”
“You didn’t play your guitar all week,” Casey commented.
“I didn’t feel like it,” Steve answered. “And it’s getting harder to tune.”
From under his bed Steve drew o
ut an elderly Gibson acoustic guitar and began to tune it but the guitar resisted his efforts. From the top bunk Joshua knew what was wrong.
“I can fix it,” Joshua told Steve, prepared to be rebuffed.
“Fine,” Steve said, surprising him.
Joshua slid down from his bunk and took the guitar to the couch. In seconds it was making music. On a whim, he played an old Garth Brooks song his father used to dedicate to his mother about two country people in love and building a family.
“I haven’t ever heard that before,” Casey said.
“It was my parents’ song,” Joshua told him, swallowing the urge to ask if Casey knew anything about Garth Brooks at all.
“Are they dead?” Casey asked.
“The head of Urban Relocation for the North State had a sniper shoot my dad last month,” Joshua said. “The Hollister mental health people took my cousin. My dad, my brother and sister, and my cousins took him back.”
“No one comes back from those places,” Steve said in complete disbelief.
“He didn’t come back,” Joshua said. “We took him back. We broke in in the middle of the night. My sister crashed their computers and we took him and someone else out of there.”
“Wow.” Casey looked at Joshua with a mixture of disbelief and respect.
“It almost worked. We hid the people we took, but my father was killed the next day.” With a month of perspective Joshua knew that it had only been a matter of time before Susan had done something else to get them out of their home. Buying the quarry hadn’t worked, but Susan would have kept trying. She didn’t want the Hendersons to be happy. Simply controlling Caleb wasn’t enough; she wanted to control his family. She was almost certainly too busy to come check on the horrid apartment in Sac every day, but at some point, she would determine that Joshua wasn’t there at all, and Danica was in Chico. Susan would have some sort of fit.
