Breathe the Sky

by Michelle Hazen

  He stared in horror at the cheeseburger-sized tortoise, sitting placidly beside the bush. He might have made the little guy piss itself to death.

  “Hell.” He yanked off his hard hat and turned in a circle, jerking at the knot of his hair where he kept it tied back at work. There was no shame worse than pissing yourself.

  He’d started wetting the bed after his mom died when he was a little kid. Dreaming there was a fire burning in between them and if he could just put it out, he could see her again. But when he would wake with wet sheets clinging to his legs and tears salty on his cheeks, he knew it hadn’t been water at all and that he hadn’t saved his mother.

  He’d always tried to get the sheets in the washer himself, but the one time his father woke up and saw what he’d done, he’d wrapped the soiled sheets around Jack like he was a dog getting its face rubbed in its own mess. That wet ammonia smell suffocating him, his arms pinned to his sides so he couldn’t get away no matter how hard he thrashed . . .

  “Mr. Wyatt? Are you okay?”

  He jerked at the sound of his family’s name.

  “Don’t call me that!” he snarled, whirling on her.

  She jumped back, stumbling when her heel bumped a bush. Light on her feet as always, she caught her balance before she could fall, but the tortoise yanked into its shell at the sudden movement.

  Jack felt like dog shit, his head hanging and shoulders clenching tight. He’d scared the woman and the little turtle.

  “Hate that name,” he muttered, trying to explain why he’d been such a jerk. “Feels like you’re talking to my old man. Name’s Jack.”

  Jack Wyatt. The name echoed in his head, even though he refused to say it out loud. Didn’t have to. Wyatts were quick on the trigger, and women, children, and animals cringed out of their way. Thousands of miles from the Alabama hovel where he grew up and he couldn’t shake the truth of that name, no matter how hard he’d tried not to be like his piece-of-shit dad and brother. This woman had known him only four days and even she could see it.

  He gestured miserably to her, then to the tortoise, reaching harder for words than he usually ever tried. “I—shit, I’m sorry,” he said. “Didn’t know. I could scare them so bad, I mean. Didn’t know. Wouldn’t have . . . you know. If I did.”

  “That’s why the training is important,” she said. Not like she was shoving the I-told-you-so down his throat, but not backing down, either. Her gaze held steady, even as his flicked between her, the ground, and the tortoise that was just peeking its head out of its shell again. “It’s important for you and your crew to hear.”

  The other bios had all tried to give their speech, too, but he’d never allowed them to waste working time on all that bureaucratic crap. But then, he hadn’t known that they could kill the animals around here just by startling them.

  He turned his hard hat in his hands, uncomfortable as all hell, but then he swallowed and jerked a nod. “We’ll come in ten minutes early tomorrow. You can give them your talk. Easy on the bullshit, though, huh? I want the real deal, not a whole bunch of lawyer talk and crap.”

  Mari nodded. “One biological resources training coming up, hold the bullshit.”

  He snorted a laugh, and realized he was just standing there, his unease having drained out of him so subtly he hadn’t even felt it go. Her droll humor must have tricked him into thinking he was shooting the breeze with his buddies instead of with a too-pretty tree-hugging professional interferer.

  He slammed his hard hat back on. “Gotta get back to work.” He stalked toward his truck.

  “And, Jack?”

  He turned back, liking the sound of his first name in her voice.

  A sly smile lit her face. “If you see another tortoise? No glove, no love.”

  3

  Catch More Lizards with

  Honey Than Vinegar

  Mari brought doughnuts to her training. It turned out to be a crowd-pleasing decision, since Jack made all the men show up early (and unpaid) to attend. Before the snacks came out, there had definitely been some grumbling. Jack had also smacked a lineman upside the hard hat for talking during her speech. Jack, on the other hand, had listened so intently that the training went on six whole minutes into their working time before he’d noticed.

  During the part about baby desert tortoises, he looked like he wanted to ask a question, but when she offered him the chance, he denied it with a grunt.

  Once he realized the training had gone late, he cut her off and harangued all the men to get moving with his usual lack of tact. She packed up the scraps of the doughnuts and carried the pink box back to her truck while, out of the corner of her eye, she watched Jack herd his workers toward the tower. He wasn’t what she’d expected, from all the rumors. Not cruel, or even cocky.

  He was a rough-looking man, with impenetrable dark sunglasses, nearly black hair he kept yanked back in a high knot, and a growling southern accent so harsh it could have scared Rhett Butler straight.

  Even at the best of times, he was gruff, but he mostly only lost his temper when somebody had screwed up enough to put themselves in danger.

  Slamming her truck door, she left the doughnut box in her Toyota and strolled out beyond the bulldozed area. For the first two days, she’d tensely walked her monitoring laps around the construction site, twitching every time she heard Jack’s voice raised in anger.

  She knew how quickly a certain kind of man’s temper could flame, and she seemed to have a talent for setting people off. She’d stayed at a shelter while she saved up to buy her truck, and the social workers told her that her husband’s behavior hadn’t been her fault. He’d been out of line, to be sure, but it was a problem that had dogged her long before her marriage, and as easy as it would be to blame everyone else, she knew she wasn’t entirely innocent. Her stepfather had been perfectly sweet to her mother. It was just Mari who couldn’t get along with him, which was why she’d been so happy to get married fast and out of his house.

  After her divorce, the open desert became her sanctuary. When she was alone, there was no one to get upset at her. But alone wasn’t an option at work, and she needed to eat. Needed to pay the old medical bills that kept coming to her PO Box printed on brighter and brighter colors of paper, as if dye alone could make her more able to come up with the obscene numbers they represented.

  Despite his temper, she knew Wyatt couldn’t touch her at work, and whatever abuse he tossed her way would be laughable compared to what she’d already lived through. But it wasn’t easy, being around another guy with a temper. She even thought of telling Marcus why it was so hard for her to work on this crew, but didn’t want to ask for special treatment so soon into taking a new job. That one bill for the dislocated jaw that she’d gotten right before her divorce . . . it was painfully past due and racking up more interest by the week.

  So she took deep breaths and stuck it out, and the more she watched, the more she realized Jack Wyatt wasn’t the thoughtless bully everyone made him out to be.

  Right now, Jack was pointing at the tower, then jabbing a finger toward the plans, glaring at the confused worker in front of him. After nearly a week on this crew, she could predict exactly what was going on. She’d always watched the world around her, and so she knew that a lot of men yelled because they were trying to cover up how stupid they were. But Jack yelled because he was too smart.

  He saw every mistake before it was even made. He had strategies two and three steps more efficient than all the other men, and he got so frustrated with them when they didn’t automatically get the best way to do things. It wasn’t hard for him, and he never understood why it was so hard for his crew. Why they needed him to explain every little thing he just knew.

  Of course, that was no excuse for his being such a jerk about it. If her people skills were shaky, his were terrible. The man had no idea how to teach, and even less of an idea of how to communicate.


  But on the third day, the apprentice’s shoe had slipped because he was distracted and talking while climbing. Jack had grabbed him, both of them clinging to thin tower struts several stories off the ground. The whole tower had shaken with how hard Jack slammed Joey into the metal when he caught him. That day, his yelling had hit new decibels.

  After that, Mari noticed how closely he watched the other men when they were doing dangerous things. How his eyes missed nothing their hands and feet did, but slid away from their faces like he was afraid to know them, to even get used to seeing them around. How he locked himself away in his truck at lunchtime while the other workers all grouped up in the shade of their one tattered EZ-Up awning. Free of their grouchy boss, they laughed and passed their food around. It reminded her of herself, brewing coffee in her little pot, just outside the circle of the Monday morning meeting.

  Then, yesterday, she’d caught Jack carrying that tortoise. So gently, in both his big hands. Moving it twice when he wasn’t satisfied with its placement, and even thinking to put it in the shade so it would be comfortable. He’d made her laugh, which had surprised her almost as much as it had him. He’d been dismayed when she told him the dire consequences of frightening the shy little desert creature. And there was no mistaking his shame when, for an instant, he’d frightened her, too.

  After all the stories, she’d expected Jack to remind her of her ex-husband, Brad, but he didn’t. He reminded her of herself.

  She tucked her hands into her pockets, pretending to check a bush but actually peeking past it to steal a glimpse of him.

  They were watchers, both of them. But where she tried to stay out of sight and away from all the things that might hurt her, he puffed up bigger and plowed straight toward them as if to bluff his own fear into backing down. She noticed his steps hitched every time he approached the tower to climb it, like he wanted to take a moment and a breath to steady himself but wouldn’t allow himself the luxury.

  After he had apologized, gesturing to her and to the tortoise like he was equally upset about having scared both of them, she simply couldn’t be afraid of Jack Wyatt.

  Unfortunately, that did not mean they were friends.

  * * *

  —

  “You telling me I can’t use my own goddamn forklift until a fucking lizard gives me permission?” Jack howled. He couldn’t believe this crap. “Desert’s chock-full of lizards, woman! You gonna tell me I can’t use my forklift when sand touches it next?”

  Mari scooted back from where she’d been crouched under the giant tire of the forklift, her hard hat falling off her head and landing with an annoyed plop next to her. She gave him a determined look.

  “When it’s a lizard that only has a handful of sand dunes left to live in, yes, as a matter of fact, I am.”

  Her cocoa-brown hair was wet with sweat as she ducked and crawled farther under the forklift. “I saw him dart under here. I just need to . . . catch him.” She squeaked as she made another grab, then sighed when the little thing scampered away toward the back of the forklift. “Darn it.” She came out and sat back on her heels.

  Jack’s boss was so not going to care about some lizard when he had to explain why they weren’t done with this tower site today.

  “What the hell am I supposed to do, lift these struts myself? I need my lift to put this shit together!”

  Mari winced. “Sorry. I’ve always been terrible at catching the animals. Too slow.”

  Hearing her say that made his older brother’s voice echo in his head.

  You slow or something, kid? Why the fuck can’t you hit a target?

  Leroy had been angry that his little brother had been practicing with a rifle for a full hour and hadn’t yet learned to hit the bull’s-eye.

  “You ain’t slow,” Jack grunted, not liking the unhappiness in her face. “Lizard’s always gonna be faster than your hand.”

  He spent his whole childhood catching animals. Lizards, toads, squirrels . . . whatever he could grab, and then whatever he could trap or shoot. At first, for pets. Later, for when Leroy forgot to buy groceries. He learned how to cook them over a campfire, too, when his brother went on a bender and forgot to pay the electric bill.

  “Here, I’ll catch it.”

  He stalked over to his truck and jerked the straw out of yesterday’s soda cup.

  “Dick brain!” he hollered. “You still got that box of goddamn jewelry in the truck?”

  “Yes, boss.” Joey came at a trot and grabbed out the tackle box, offering it with a puzzled look but smart enough to know he’d catch the rough side of Jack’s temper if he asked.

  Jack jerked the box open. Kid was always messing with it on the long drives to and from work. Making leather necklaces and stringing up ugly beaded chokers like that was somehow a dignified kind of doodad to wear around one’s neck. Kids these days were so weird. He took some thin fishing line out of the kit and pushed a loop of it up through the soda straw, working as he walked back toward where Mari was waiting next to the forklift.

  “All right, where is the little bugger?”

  She pointed toward the back tire, eyeing his fishing-line-and-soda-straw contraption.

  His face twitched with pain as Jack bent his bad knee, dropping to the sand with an audible oomph and then getting all the way down on his belly in the hot sand, elbow crawling forward into the marginally cooler shade of the forklift.

  “Thing with lizards is, they don’t really pay much mind to things coming up behind them,” he said, keeping his voice pitched low. Steadying himself on his elbows, he eased the soda straw up behind the lizard. To its tail, then up over its back. The loop of fishing line poking out the front dropped down over the lizard’s head without it so much as twitching.

  At his side, Mari was watching so intently he couldn’t even hear her breathe.

  Jack pulled the fishing line at the back of the straw, the noose going tight around the lizard’s neck. It jerked, flipping as it tried to run away. Mari gasped but his hand snapped forward as fast as her breath, cupping over the lizard and scooping it up. He held it gently against the palm of his hand as he pulled the noose free.

  “See? He ain’t hurt. It’s just to slow him down enough to grab him.” He used his free hand to stroke the lizard’s scaly head, the texture weird and cool against his fingertips. Funny how that was exactly the same as when he was a kid, though so much else in his life had changed.

  He glanced up to find Mari watching him. “Ah, shit,” he said, remembering. “I didn’t use a rubber.”

  Her laugh got the whole crew’s heads turning their way. He wriggled out from under the forklift and thrust the lizard into her hands.

  “Keep him away from my lift,” he grumbled. “Got work to do.” But as he walked away, her shy, soft laugh warmed the back of his neck.

  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 c
an 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.