Breathe the Sky

by Michelle Hazen

  Safe. Jack snorted. If only this company spent half as much on its own men as it spent protecting mythical animals nobody ever saw. His safety ropes were frayed, harnesses faded and brittle, the work trucks’ tires so bald and cracked they flew apart on the freeway a couple of times a year.

  The corners of her mouth twitched down at his derisive sound, and he tensed, waiting for the holier-than-thou speech all these bios seemed to have at the ready.

  “It’s just a power line,” she offered instead, her soft voice wavering a little. “Nothing should have to die for it.”

  The sound of cracking bone rang through his memory. Vernon had died for it. Not this power line, but another. Jack ran a hand over his face to cover the twitch his shoulders gave in response. “I ain’t hurting any animals.”

  It was plain old desert, all cactuses and squat, ugly bushes. Wasn’t like there were herds of white rhinos parading around. He’d been out here for months. You’d see a lizard, sometimes a bird, that was it. It wasn’t like he was holding them down and running screws through their feathery little wings.

  She took a breath, rushing out the words. “Of course, I’ll be watching and moving any animals out of your way that I see. But the most important thing is, everyone needs to make sure to check under their tires before they move their trucks, because that’s the best shade in the desert. All the animals are attracted to it.”

  “Don’t they have legs? They’ll run off when I start the truck.”

  “The species we’re most concerned with out here are desert tortoises and Coachella Valley or Mojave fringe-toed lizards. Tortoises aren’t known for their sprinting times, and the lizards have a trick where they shake themselves down into the sand to hide from predators. It doesn’t help them much with trucks, unfortunately.” She did a little wiggle, explaining how the lizards got down into the sand, and the curve of her hip caught his attention for a beat too long. He cleared his throat and jerked his gaze up.

  But that wasn’t much better, because the delicate lines of her face drew his eye like something he wanted to look twice at, like he couldn’t catch it all with one glance. She brushed a loose ponytail of dark hair back over her shoulder, the silver strands in it catching the sunlight.

  Belatedly, he realized he was just standing there like an idiot, staring at her hair. “Tortoises got shells. They’ll be fine.” He didn’t intend to burn up any time worrying about a creature who lived inside a protective casing.

  “Yes, but—” She broke off when the wind whipped up into a little dust devil cyclone that sprayed them with sand.

  When it passed, she took off her sunglasses to swipe off the dust. Her eyes met his, squinting a little like she was looking for something she hadn’t quite nailed down yet. “They do have shells, true enough. But animals’ shells are rarely thick enough to protect them from the things that truly hurt.”

  Her eyes were sky-cast blue, and quiet. His pulse gave a lurch, like a truck’s bumper had just skimmed too close on the freeway.

  Jack scowled at her. The last thing he needed on his job site was a good-looking woman. The beautiful ones always expected attention, were used to special treatment. Not to mention his men would be tripping over their own feet, staring at her all day when they should be watching the tower they were climbing.

  He had quotas to hit, never mind that they were so ambitious he’d need five more men or would have to get bitten by a radioactive spider if he didn’t want to fall behind. His boss had made it clear that if Jack couldn’t make quota for just one week, he’d find another guy who could. Jack hadn’t clawed his way up to foreman just to become one more deadbeat Wyatt with their name scribbled across a pink slip.

  And he wasn’t going to let any biologist slow him down enough to lose this job, no matter how blue her eyes were.

  “I don’t give a shit about a bunch of turtles,” he snapped. “Just stay out of our way. You come chasing lizards across my pad, and you get brained by a dropped wrench, your lawyers better not come crying to me.”

  A breath escaped her, like she’d almost laughed, and she popped her sunglasses back on. “As if I could afford lawyers.”

  A chuckle huffed out of him before he realized what he was doing.

  The only people who could pay for lawyers were the ones screwing over the people who actually worked for a living. It was God’s honest truth, and why he couldn’t see a reason in the world for them. Lawyers swooped in to protect you after you’d already taken your beatdown. The fists had flown, the car had been stolen, the lineman had already slipped and fallen off the tower, his blood exploding out of him onto the dirt like a punctured can of spray paint. Jack shook off the memory. Lawyers came in, telling you they could pour spilled milk back into the carton and taking hard-earned money from anybody stupid enough to believe them.

  Lawyers were assholes, and he had no use for them. He half liked that she didn’t, either.

  “Jack . . .” A whiny voice interrupted them. “The forklift won’t start.”

  Jack turned with a ferocious scowl. “Well, dick brain, did you reconnect the battery after I had you clean the terminals yesterday?”

  “Oh!” Joey’s eyes brightened. “I forgot. It was quitting time, and I didn’t get a chance to—”

  “Well, maybe if you paid as much attention to doing a good job as you did to watching the clock, you could start a forklift without my help.” Jack clapped the apprentice on the back hard enough to send him stumbling, then jerked his chin at Mari. “Get off my pad.” He turned back to his crew.

  Bad enough the bios had to stand there all day, watching him work and critiquing his performance just like his family always had. They didn’t need to be underfoot while they did it. It’s like they thought if they took their eyes off him for one second, he’d strangle a dang bunny.

  They didn’t need to watch—they’d hear it if he did. Bunnies screamed when you hurt them, when you sliced off their little paws. That had been his brother Leroy’s thing when they were kids, not his. He didn’t need a biologist to tell him he never wanted to hear that sound again.

  “Wait, um, sorry, Mr. Wyatt?” she called after him.

  Ugly goose bumps clawed to life all across his scarred back at the sound of his family’s name tainting her light, musical voice.

  Joey stopped and turned along with him, and Jack nudged the apprentice to send him on his way. Kid would pop visible wood if he looked straight at their new pretty bio. Hell, Jack was a grown man and he’d nearly needed to grab a tool belt for camouflage before he’d gotten his situation under control.

  She thrust a clipboard at him, her graceful shoulders pulling back all tight and determined. “I just need your signature that you received the environmental mitigation training.”

  Lawyers again. Paperwork never changed anything. Just made it so the suits could claim immunity when one of his guys eventually slipped off a tower. Talking and paperwork wouldn’t save her desert critters any more than it’d save his men. It’d just shift the blame off the head honchos and onto whoever’s name was scrawled on that bottom line.

  “Ain’t signing shit.” Jack spat on the ground and walked away.

  2

  No Glove, No Love

  Later that week, Jack climbed down off the tower, the metal pegs hot through his gloves. His safety leash hung off his belt because you couldn’t hitch it in while you were climbing. He didn’t let himself think of anything until he got to the ground.

  Hand, foot. Hand, foot. It was a quick rhythm as he descended, but solid. His own strength was the only thing holding him on to the tower and grounding him against five stories of open air below.

  Hand.

  Foot.

  Hand.

  Foot.

  He’d hated heights when he started this job. Got dizzy every time his feet left the ground. But being a lineman was the most decent-paying job that they hadn
’t yet shipped overseas, and dizziness wasn’t worth complaining about as long as it got him out of Alabama. It wore off after the second year. He still couldn’t look down without feeling sick, but that just kept him honest. Kept him careful.

  Hand.

  Foot.

  Hand.

  Foot.

  He didn’t pause when his boots hit dirt, because he’d never let his crew see him take that gulp of relief he always, always wanted. Instead, he held his breath until the urge passed, and strode toward his truck.

  “Going to the yard,” he yelled over his shoulder. “If that section’s not done when I get back, nobody’s taking lunch.”

  Their new safety leashes had come in the mail today. Their old ones had finally been certified unusable, six months after he would have tossed them out if it had been his decision. Sure, he could pick them up tomorrow, but if anybody fell this afternoon, that’d be on his conscience.

  He stripped off his leather gloves and stuffed them into his pocket, already calculating how much work time he’d lose by running to the construction yard. He could send the apprentice, but probably the kid would come back toting a crate of tissues or something that was clearly not what he’d been sent for. Joey was fresh out of high school, and Jack was afraid he was going to have to fire the kid. He was eager, but too head-in-the-clouds for a profession where the consequences were often a lot more dire than a bad employee review.

  There was a little lump under Jack’s tire. He glanced back at the crew to see if anybody was watching. The bios had said that the only way to look under his tires was to go the full 360 degrees, walking all the way around the truck and getting down on his knees to peer underneath. Well, the bad knee a half-drunk forklift driver had bumped back in his twenties wasn’t going to put up with that, even if his dignity could have. But even having never seen one before, it was pretty clear that one of those freaking tortoises had cozied up under his tire.

  Wasn’t a big one. More like the size of a cheeseburger, and not even a double. He eyed it, glanced behind him again. The bio had walked up a wash on the far side of the construction pad, and she was peering at some weird kind of plant as she scribbled on her clipboard. Compared to his men, she moved like a creature made out of a breeze. Weightless and gentle, fading between bushes and over rocks like she never felt the roughness of the world she walked on.

  He’d caught himself watching her so many times over the past four days that he was disgusted at the example he was setting for his men. It figured that the first time one of these fancy turtles decided to show up, he’d have this new soft-spoken bio instead of one of the regular smelly, bearded ones.

  Protocol was to call the bio to move any “sensitive species” out of the way of his work. But if he did that, she’d probably have to do a raft of paperwork, and want him to sign even more crap. She might talk to him, smile at him . . .

  He jerked at his pants, impatient with his own reaction. He needed to make time after work to do a little self-maintenance. In his line of work, he wasn’t used to having women around, and he’d never really gotten the hang of dating.

  Jack walked to his truck, his decision made, and scooped up the tortoise from under his tire. It was cool to the touch and surprisingly heavy. He cupped it in both hands, because sure as shit if he dropped an endangered species, they’d write his company a citation with enough zeros on the end that he’d be looking for new work by morning.

  He strode around the back of his truck, heading out into the desert before anybody could see what he was up to.

  The tortoise poked his head out, craning his wrinkled neck to see where they were going, his scaly legs paddling the air like he wanted to pretend he was in control of this voyage.

  Jack huffed out a breath. “Nice try, little buddy, but you ain’t steering this ship.”

  The shell felt different than he’d expected. Lots of little ripples and bumps, as individual as a fingerprint. And ancient, like something out of a museum case he had no business touching. He smoothed his thumb down the side of the tortoise to feel the texture, careful to keep his grip secure.

  He set the tortoise down a few long strides outside the work area, then glanced toward the crew just in time to see Kipp back the forklift over an empty cardboard box he clearly hadn’t seen. Jack winced, and carried the tortoise a little farther.

  This time, when he bent over, a drop of sweat fell from his forehead onto the shell. Jack chewed his lower lip and picked up the tortoise a third time, stuffing him quickly into the shade of a scraggly desert bush. It was hot today. Too hot to leave it out in the sun, probably.

  “Oh!” a feminine voice said from behind him. “You found a tortoise!”

  He turned with a scowl. “Wasn’t hurting him. Look, he’s fucking fine.” He gestured at the tortoise, sitting snugly in the shade and peering up at Jack as if he didn’t know enough to squeeze up into his shell and hide.

  “I can see that,” Mari said in that gentle way she had. “But I could have moved him for you. That’s my job, after all.”

  “Can carry my own goddamn turtle,” he grumbled.

  Her lips twitched. “It’s just, they’re so rare anymore, you need a permit to handle them. And even if it’s an emergency and I’m not around, you need to use gloves.” She pulled a baggie of blue latex gloves out of her pack.

  He looked at the tortoise, looked at his own grubby hands, all crisscrossed with old steel burns and stained black from messing with the forklift battery earlier. “You afraid I’m gonna get him dirty?” He gestured. “Little sucker lives in a hole in the ground. Probably doesn’t have a shower in there.”

  Her face softened, and for a second, he thought she was going to laugh, but then she seemed to stop herself.

  Heat crept up Jack’s collar. Why did she keep smiling when he talked? What the fuck was he saying that was so damn funny?

  Pretty women were like that, though, always two steps ahead of you. So a man never had any idea what they were mad about or laughing about or looking so expectantly at you for.

  “It’s for disease, actually,” she said. “You could be carrying all kinds of germs on your hands that might be fine for humans but affect tortoises. Or, without knowing it, you could have touched something out here that a diseased tortoise had already touched, and you might spread that disease. Tortoises were nearly wiped out from disease that we didn’t have a good understanding of until just a few years ago.”

  “You telling me I need to use a turtle rubber?”

  Her lips twitched. Trembled. And then she burst into laughter, so musical and unabashed that he saw a few of the crew’s heads turn their way. His skin flared a red as deep as a sunburn.

  Mari pulled off her sunglasses and wiped her eyes with the back of one hand, still grinning.

  He shifted from one foot to the other, his shoulders bunching as his skin crawled with shame. It wasn’t that stupid a thing to say. She was talking about preventing the spread of unintended disease and—

  “You’re exactly right,” she said, stopping his defensive thoughts as another chuckle shook her slender chest. “I’ve never thought of it that way, and Lord, now I’m not going to be able to think of gloves as anything else.”

  He hesitated, his toes curling and fidgeting in his boots as he tried to decide what to say. She wasn’t making fun of him; she really thought what he said was funny.

  He wasn’t entirely sure what to do with that. He’d sort of expected to be in trouble.

  Seemed like, whenever he took a step outside the construction zone, the other bios were all up his butt about rare-plant this and fancy-ass-bird that, like his boots were the size of Nebraska and they’d crush everything for miles. But then the words Mari said earlier came drifting back.

  Permit to handle.

  Endangered species.

  He frowned down at his boots. “Gonna write me up, aren’t
you? For turtle grabbing.”

  The shy smile tugged its way back onto her lips, her eyes warm before she slipped her sunglasses back on, hiding them from view. A pang echoed in his chest, and he rubbed absently at it. Probably he ought to quit this job before his stupid crew gave him a heart attack.

  “I think it was consensual grabbing, considering you saved the tortoise from danger. There’s a Good Samaritan law for that, though it’s not usually applied on monitored sites.” She cleared her throat. “I guess you were checking under your tires after all.” She gave him a knowing look, the memory of yesterday’s rant about “not prancing three circles before he drove his truck anywhere” hanging between them.

  He grunted, and stuffed his hands into his pockets. “Don’t take any brains to see a turtle under your truck. Not like I get my jollies running shit over.”

  He’d never forget the bump the truck made when Leroy ran over their neighbor’s dog, Bart. Or the softness of the second bump when Leroy backed up “to finish him off the humane way.”

  He shivered.

  Mari said, her voice dropping softly, “That’s not what I was saying. Not at all.” She reached out and touched his arm but then let go so quickly he figured she’d maybe done it by accident. “Come get me next time, okay? I’ll disinfect the tortoise’s shell just in case. But if you moved a tortoise and something bad happened, you could be in a lot of trouble.”

  His arm tingled where she touched him. “You ain’t gonna write me up?” He couldn’t stop frowning at her, though he probably looked like an ungrateful asshole. These bios were all like a bunch of rookie traffic cops, too quick on the draw with the ticket notepad. They didn’t bother much with just talking things out.

  He scrubbed roughly at his arm, trying to get his skin to quit getting all stirred up about one measly touch from a woman who didn’t even mean it like that.

  “You didn’t do any harm. The thing is, some tortoises are more skittish than others, and if you handle them roughly, they can get scared and void their bladders.” Her hint of a smile was gone now. “Out here, losing their emergency store of water can mean they might die of dehydration before the next rain.”