ANSELMO PICKS UP ROCKS On Monday morning before the weekly farm meeting, my hand having healed from the auger accident a year before and all the truck painting on hiatus, my father pulls me aside and says, “We don’t need you here today. You’re heading to Osgood. Got a job out there and I need someone with a head on their shoulders to do it.” “What?” I say, though I already know I’m picking up rocks. Keith told me. Dad’s just trying to trick me into thinking that the work’s important. “That dirt we put on the new hay fields, well, the lava rocks are coming through, and I gotta get some guys to spread out and pick them all up.” Dad coughs hard and deep. He’s been sick all spring, and the rain has turned him ornery. “Don’t wanna ruin a swather out there.” “Send Don. He’s new. He deserves some terrible jobs.” “The Mexicans don’t like Don.” “Maybe they’d learn to,” I say. “Don’t get smart,” Dad says. “Look, I need someone like you to run this crew.” “Isn’t there a tractor job?” I say. “I mean, come on, I’m dang near twenty-two.” Dad sighs and checks his watch. “Look, you gonna go, or do I need to do it myself?” A rotten taste mills in my mouth. “Fine. Whatever. What truck am I taking?” “All we got is the van.” “You can’t even get me a truck?” The other workers—Keith, Don, Odell—start showing up for the meeting. They park near the granaries and bypass dad and me like we’re sick with the plague. “Van’s all we got,” Dad says.
I kick a stray bolt into the shop. “Who am I taking?” “Javier and the others. They’re waiting on you.” My father starts to the shop then turns back. “Josh, don’t go screwing around out there.” He coughs up what sounds like slag and hacks a heavy lob of it into the dirt. “It’s supposed to storm. We’re needing this done today.” Before I leave for the Mexican house, I grab Keith round the neck and give him a hard noogie. I’m just getting his size now, solid enough to hold my own. God only knows how many times Keith’s ground his knuckles against my scalp. Dad tears out of the shop and yells, “Now get gone. We got work to do. And check the pivot lights, make sure there’s bulbs in them.” The van’s a piece, and doesn’t start right off. I floorboard the gas pedal until I’m sure the carburetor’s swimming. Finally, the van coughs to life. I drive across the gravel yard, past the quonset that holds all the tires and oil and spare irrigation parts, past the empty oil drums where we burn the garbage, and out to the Mexican house, a simple building of green cinder blocks. The roof trusses are bowed like broken fingers, and shingles skid off every windstorm. The crapper’s a blue portable out back next to the plywood-walled shower. Last summer, Javier and I built a porch so the guys wouldn’t ruin the floor with their dirty boots. The place is divided in thirds: kitchen, big room, little room. I enter though the kitchen, the ceiling stained black from the cooking. A pot and a spoon hang from nails driven into the block, and cases of soda pile up on the cabinets. The only table garnishes are a bottle of hot sauce and a dish of salt. A pan covered in tin foil sits on the stove’s front burner, so I peel the edge and see gelatinous eggs bunched to one side. I break some off and eat it cold. “Hey,” I yell. “Donde están?”
“Aquí adentro,” Javier yells. The four of them lounge in the big room on mattresses. “Get your lunches,” I say to Javier, and then look over the new guys. Two young kids and a wrinkled old man. The three have been here a week, but I haven’t had the chance to work with them as I’ve been in the middle of semester at Ricks, trading off Keith at nights to help with the tractor work, Renae and I burning both ends to try to put away some money. In the van, Javier takes front, the old one sits alone on the middle bench, and the kids squat on overturned buckets in the back. The guys don’t have the right clothes for the day, just sweatshirts, and the old one has a brimmed hat on a string. Won’t do him any good in that Osgood wind. I go back around the house to the turnout—used to be a road all the way around, but dad blocked it off with machinery—and pass the quonset. Outside the shop, Pops, Keith, and Don are talking, hands buried in pockets for the March cold. I hammer down on the van and spin the tires in the gravel, just to piss off dad. The kids on the buckets love it and pretend to ride bucking broncos. The old one doesn’t budge. Javier clamps down on the dashboard and swears in Spanish. I know because he’s taught me the words. “This is the best I can do, drive you around,” I say to Javier. “I’m an adult.” Javier doesn’t answer. The old one gapes a toothless grin, his cheeks and forehead all long brown wrinkles. We lock eyes in the rear-view mirror. “Chinga la madre,” I say. The old man’s jack-o-lantern grin disappears. The van handles poorly, floating from one edge of the road to the other. We ride along feeling every crack in the macadam beneath us. I pull off at the Lightning Nines to fill up. “Javier,” I say, “tell these guys to go inside and get whatever they want. My treat.” The men trail into the station
and come out with sodas and chips and peanuts. Finally, the gas pistol clicks off and I hang it up and walk to the station door. I lean in and shout to the clerk, “Put it all on Claxton’s tab.” “I’m three steps ahead of you,” she calls back. “Saw you coming a mile away.” I’m halfway to the van when I run back to the store and get a bottle of green soda that’s bigger than my forearm. “This one too.” I hold it up and jog out. “Hey Josh,” the clerk says, and I stop. “It’s great to see your big old grin back in the promised land.” This makes me calm a little. But then I get out to the van and the annoyance builds again—one of the kids sits in the driver’s seat, messing with the ignition and shifter. “Javi,” I say. “Tell him to get out.” “He say he know how drive,” Javier says. “Does he got a license?” I ask, opening the door. The kid scoots back to join the other on the oil jugs. “No,” Javier says. “But he say he can.” “Well, if he doesn’t have a license, he can’t drive, unless I say so.” We’re a ways down the road before Javier starts in with his usual questions. “Why he treat like that?” Javier asks. “Why treat you bad tu papa?” “Old Claxy-pad? He’s just trying to make me a man or something.” “Be man. What mean?” “Responsibility, I guess. Always got to be teaching. Make me run a crew.” “Run over crew?”
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Javier’s been in the states ten years, and I often wonder why his English isn’t better. I should make fun of him more for it—he never lets me hear the end of my terrible Rigby High Spanish—but I never do. I figure with all the hours we’ve clocked together, we’re better off staying friends. “No,” I say. “Run crew. Be boss.” “Oh,” Javier looks out the window. “So you new boss?” “Just today.” He nods. “You make pretty good boss,” he says. “Good boss son.” “You make a pretty good grunt,” I say. “Pretty good,” he parrots. “Pretty good.” We pass Roberts—twenty bleached trailers on the south side of the road—and leave the blacktop for good. The van handles worse on the pot-holed gravel; knuckles of halfdrowning lava rattle the doors. The van rumbles up a rocky incline. “I ought to be running a farm by now, not playing chauffeur,” I say to Javi. “I’ve put in my time.” “Es cierto,” Javier says, staring out the windshield toward the western horizon. “You good boss, good worker.” In the rear-view, the two bobble-head boys push each other off of their buckets and laugh. The old man stares at me with warm coffee eyes. “Ask him what his deal is,” I say to Javier. He turns halfway around and rattles off some tin can jargon so fast I can’t follow. The old man cracks his knuckles and replies low and deep. “He say he happy today. Been five years since left Michoacán.” “Michigan?” “Michoacán, Mexico.”
“Tell him he’ll be even happier when we get to the fields.” Javier doesn’t translate that, and it makes me glad. It’s hard to be too angry with these guys. Instead, I wonder where Michoacán is, and if it’s as strange as this high desert hole. Worker houses and singlewides pepper the bare rolling hills. The only things moving are quarter-mile lines of corrugated steel pivots that water the thin ground. Snaky gravel roads criss-cross at lonely intersections. The crop-dusters have told me that from above this ground looks flat as Nebraska. But ground level, it’s a killer to drive: left, right, up, down, the van like a mechanical bull. I hear dad’s voice tell me to never go faster than thirty in Osgood, especially in the van. The thought makes me cram the accelerator needle past forty, and the tires lose traction on the loose road cover. Claxton Foster can stick it in his craw—if I’m in charge, I drive how I want. We’re bouncing along like that—I’m squeezing the wheel hard just to expel some crammed-up energy, Javier’s nearly asleep—when the old man starts singing, low and loud. Who knows, really, what the old man sings? His words are unfamiliar, his voice a deep, monotone waver. I’ve only heard songs like his, so gloomy and slow, in church, and the fact we’re listening to him out in the middle of nowhere makes me uncomfortable, like we’re mixing sacred with sin. But the others aren’t affected; Javi’s glossy-eyed, relaxed, his head resting on the seatback, and the two boys stare at the toolcluttered floor, their hands in their sweatshirt pockets. In the mirrors, the kicked-up dirt trails us like a billowing cape. The old man’s sound comes out guttural, then shifts to smooth and high and floating. He doesn’t change the tune, holds the notes like a bear trap. Forceful. Unforgiving. To his tune, the morning darkens; the clear windows of the van
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change with the sky around it. When the old man stops, we travel in silence, the ricochets of rock on the van’s undercarriage snapping the reverence. Javier asks the man a question that the old man quickly answers. “He say he learn that song as boy,” Javier says. “On way to farm in Michoacán, he sing it. He say he sing it every day. Next time, he say he drive and you play guitar.” I look back, and the old man smiles. I don’t know how to play the guitar and, for that reason, don’t return the grin. Javier and the old man talk again. Javi’s questions are fast, but the old man deliberates and answers slow and controlled. “He say song make neck muscles move, wind move, sound alive.” “Tell him he sounds like a mujer,” I say. Surprisingly, Javier relays my words, and I regret I didn’t lay on the sarcasm thicker, knowing it doesn’t translate. The old man waits before answering. Javier listens and says, “He no care. He say he still sing.” The old man’s voice starts again, floating like a thick, hazy promise. I listen contently for a while. I’m pissed to realize that the next time the man stops, we’re lost. I pull over on the gravel shoulder and take out the cell phone. I’ve missed two calls from dad, unheard over the man’s voice. Without a hello, my father answers and says, “You there yet?” “No,” I say. “I’m pretty sure we’re lost.” “You go down the county line?” “Yeah.” “Through Roberts?” “Uh-huh.” “Where are you now?” Dad asks.
“How would I know,” I say. “I’ve only been out here the one time, when you bought it.” “Well, what’s around?” “Fields. Some sort of tank. We came over a cinder hill a while ago.” Coughing in the phone. “You’re probably on Jackrabbit Highway, I imagine. Keep going straight. You’ll pass a blue shop, and a cellar with a lone pine tree alongside it. Keep going. Pass those red Reinke pivots until you see a dead coyote in the gutter. That’s where you start.” “Dead coyote?” “Damn thing ran right out in front of me, couldn’t stop fast enough,” he says, his words tinged with brag. “Now hurry up,” he says. “The guys need to be back by five to move pipe.” The coyote carcass is easy to find, as the patchy sprouts of hay don’t hide anything. I park along the shoulder, and we empty out of the van. “We’ll stretch out,” I say to Javier, who translates for the rest, “halfway across the pivot and walk north.” I point and the four turn and follow my finger. “Whenever we cross a patch of rocks, come together and pile them up.” We walk into the hay. Javier walks with me. “Why no carry rocks out?” “We’ll leave that for the old patrón and his big, fancy truck.” Javi laughs. “You patrón.” “If that’s the case,” I say. “Let’s get us some chicas.” Javi laughs again, slaps my shoulder. “Tell me their names,” I say, pointing to the backs of the other men. Javier gestures to the boys. “Eleazar. Pedro.” He nods to the old man. “Me no know.”
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“Tell him to come back here,” I say. The old man walks to me and I ask him his name. “On-sail-mo,” he says, and thumps his chest with a withered finger. “On-sail-mo.” “Hans Solo,” I say. “No,” he shakes his head. “On-sail-mo.” Thump, thump. He squats in the dirt and scrawls ANSELMO in shaky letters. I point to myself. “Me llamo Josué.” Then I point to the field. “Anselmo, go pick up rocks.” We make the northern edge by ten in the morning, gathering eight waist-high piles of the chalky black rock. My back hurts, but I only massage it away from the guys. They don’t need to see me hurting, since I’m their new boss and all. I stop and make sure the pivot light works, and Anselmo ends up close to me, hunched over to extract a small boulder. He unearths the rock and carries it two-handed, the stone hanging down between his legs like a prison-ball. Anselmo’s hat thrashes around his neck as if alive and breathing. When he drops the rock to straighten his hat, he smiles and then walks back to the next rock. “Javi,” I yell. “Tell them to hurry. We can make it back to the van by noon.” We move to the other side and start back towards the gravel road. When we get close, I yell for Eleazar and tell him to run to the van and pull it closer to us. He doesn’t have a license, but what do I care? We’re miles from the nearest white man, and if he does it, I don’t have to. We make it back to the van— the second side not half as bad with the rocks—and carry out a load of empty beer cans to take back to the shop. Just as the wind picks up, we pile into the van for lunch. I only have the soda. The rest pull out rolled packages of tin foil from plastic grocery bags.
“They want heat them up,” says Javier. “Tell them to go to town,” I say. My stomach growls. “No microwave-o.” He reaches over and turns the key, then walks around and pops the hood. The men take their food and rest it on the van’s manifold. “They heat up now,” Javi says. “I know,” I respond. “I’m no retard.” While lunch warms up, we nap. I turn the cell phone off just in case dad calls—he doesn’t need to know about the crew’s siesta. We all wake when the van clanks stopped, overheated. The guys eat what smells like the most delicious food ever wrapped in tortillas. I can’t take it, so I walk up the road in search of water. I fill up my empty soda bottle from a neighbor’s sprinkler pipe and refill the radiator. It’s one by the time they unload. We stretch and start on our third swipe. As we walk out into the hay, Anselmo tugs at my sleeve. He holds an open tinfoil package out to me, the foil still warm. I nod to Anselmo and bite into the taco. The beans are cold and chewy and wonderful. Anselmo looks at the ground and puts his hands together, nods and walks backwards, mumbling to himself as if he’s saved my soul. “Wait,” I say. He’s not wearing his hat. I run back to the van for it. “No, no,” he says. “Mucho…” he makes his mouth into an O and blows. I run back to the van and throw in the hat. Anselmo and I walk fast to catch the others. The weather worsens. To the west, black clouds form, so I tell the crew to pick up the pace or we’ll get caught in the rain. There’s a wetback joke there somewhere—all of us soaked and running for a van—and I almost tell it to Javier, but don’t. I bend down and dig out a rock. It’s four o’clock, and we’re in the last hilly field, headed back towards the van. A half-mile to go. The nearest
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tree—the lone pine by the cellar—is five miles off, so when the wind elevates again, it blasts us like a snowplow. That’s all I hear, the wind, like I’m swimming in it. I bend and lean against that invisible force, and the big gusts push me back on my heels. With every step, my legs ache, heavy as anchors. The young ones take advantage of the draws. Once I’m out of sight, they lie down and rest, trying to stay out of sight. When we’re nearly done, I motion for Javier to jog over. “Tell the kids to go get the van,” I say. “I go move it,” Javier says. “No,” I say, edgy from the closing-in thunderheads. “Send the kids. They’re not doing shit anyways. Then go to the center pad and make sure the light-globo is good.” By the time Javier traverses to the boys, I’m on the backbone of a ridge that meets the gravel road’s highest peak. I trudge along and see Anselmo, alone, in a draw below me. The old man has tied his yellow windbreaker around his neck by the sleeves like Jeremiah and I used to do with our pajamas after Saturday morning cartoons, with mom at the stove cooking scrambled eggs and dad coming in after checking water, eating breakfast at the couch in his green irrigation boots and mud-caked jeans and watching the Channel 8 weather report. I leapt from the couch with my homemade cape in some super-power strike, Transformers and Thundercats my inspiration. I ran circles, wound like a coil, and eventually dad caught me, saying, “Son, you’re crazier than a truckload of your mother’s sisters.” Anselmo quickly tires. I saw that at lunch while he napped, while I re-filled the radiator. His chest moved shallowly up and down, barely visible through the thin jacket. Now, that same jacket flies out behind him, snapping in the wind. Anselmo extends his arms like he’s going to pull up and
take off. His coal-colored hair stands on end, and he jogs arms out, mouth wide open. Anselmo slows to a walk, and then when he sees me staring from the hilltop he quickly returns to work. I feel badly, and want to yell to him that everything’s okay, that I’m not mad. As I walk off, my boots catch on rocks, and I land in the prickly hay. A jagged bunch of lava protrudes behind me. Only fifty feet from the gravel road, I have to dig it out or dad will see. With the wind moaning in my ears, I free the rock and walk towards the road. But something is wrong—the van comes up the hill too fast. Pedro runs alongside, yelling at Eleazar, and Eleazar swerves the van left and right, punching at his friend through the open window. They are both grinning. Anselmo walks up the opposite side of the hill on the road, and I can see the van is going straight for him. I drop the rock and run, screaming for the boys to stop, but the wind sweeps my words away. Just as the van reaches the peak, Eleazar sees Anselmo and locks up the brakes, but it’s too late. The old man has disappeared beneath the wheels. I sprint to the van, fall to my knees, and look underneath. Anselmo is twisted and broken, his legs folded beneath him, one eye closed and bleeding from his forehead. I fumble with the cell phone and turn it on, considering to call dad but instead dial 911. Just as the operator answers, the two boys start to howl in the hay, and Javier runs up and consoles them. “Emergency Services,” a woman says. “What’s the problem?” “I’m in the desert. Anselmo just got run over.” “Is he alive?”
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I look at Anselmo again. The fingers of one hand contract and relax, picking up stones and digging furrows in the gravel. “Can you hear him breathing?” says the woman. I can’t hear anything because of the boys’ wailing. “His hand is moving,” I say. “If you can’t hear him breathing, you have to check his pulse.” “But his hand,” I say. “Those could be nerves. You have to check his pulse.” “I can’t,” I say. “You could save his life,” she says. I lie flat on my stomach and belly-crawl towards Anselmo’s neck. His hand works at an unpredictable rate— fast, slow, slow, slow, faster, fast—at times as if he’s got a hold of something solid, at times letting it all slip away. I drop the phone and use my elbows to pull myself deeper. The operator’s voice crackles through the speaker. Wedging into position, I touch Anselmo’s warm wet neck. His pulse beats through, soft but evident. I reach for the phone to answer the operator, and Anselmo’s heartbeat begins to fade, fade. The wind stops, the operator pauses, and the pulse ceases completely. I press hard, willing the beat to return, but it doesn’t. “He’s dead,” I tell the woman. “Emergency workers are on the way,” she says. “Hold the line.” The woman talks more, but I hear nothing. The sky splits open, and rain crashes down. The van shifts as Javi and the boys crawl inside to escape the torrent. I crawl out and follow them. Inside, we say nothing. The rain plunks the windows; the wind rocks us side to side. Blood streaks the van’s hood.
I call my mother and tell her everything, then, unable to make the call myself, ask if she’ll call my father and tell him to come to Osgood. The storm breaks after twenty minutes, but the sun never recovers. By the time the emergency workers appear, dusk has settled across the wet desert. The ambulance and police cruiser approach, lights off and no sirens, the truck leading the car. The workers take us from the van and seat us in the cruiser’s backseat. The officer asks me what I saw, then questions Javier and the boys. My father’s diesel pickup, hellbent on arrival, flies across the dirt roads. Dad hangs one leg out the door while the pickup coasts to a stop. He makes his way down the line and talks with the paramedics, then the officer, and then Javier. By the time dad gets to me, the workers have loaded Anselmo’s cadaver into the ambulance and gathered up their gear. Javier and the boys stand along the van, shivering. “You okay?” Dad asks me. We stand in the hay field and gaze out to the main road. “I guess,” I say. Dad coughs into his fist, the sound mud-thick. The emergency vehicles head for town. “I’m sorry about all this,” Dad says. “It was my fault,” I answer. “I shouldn’t let the boys drive.” “Listen to me,” he says, his face as serious as when hail beats down the hay. “It’s not your fault.” I start to answer, but he cuts me off. “No,” Dad says. “It’s no one’s fault. Accidents happen. Hell, I let you drive at that age. We’re lucky we made it this long.” After a pause, dad says, “Come on, let’s get home.” He stands in the dim glow of the pickup’s lights. Dad’s torn up enough without my help. His voice is as brittle as a red thread.
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“Son,” my father calls. “Get in the truck. It’s time to go.” The truck hulks in the darkness. “What about the van?” I say to my father. “We’ll get it tomorrow,” he says. “I’ll take it,” I say. “My car’s at the shop anyways.” Dad stops walking. “Just ride with me,” he says. “No,” I say. “I can drive it. I want to.” Hands on hips, he shakes his head. Instead of looking at me, he stares across his hay field. He sighs, puts his hands in his pockets, and turns back to the truck. I’m about to fold, get in and ride home, when he answers. “Well,” Dad says, talking soft and slow, “if you’re headed that way, may as well take the guys home.” He motions for Javier and the boys to get in the van, then walks over to his pickup. Inside the van, I pull the headlight plunger, and streams of amber light gloss the road rocks. My father pulls beside me and shuts off his noisy truck. “Follow me,” he says. “I know a shortcut.” We start the vehicles and creep across the rough desert roads. The only lights in that coal vista are the firefly specs that blink from the pivot centers. Every time a pivot drives, a light bulb flashes. That way, dad told me, a man doesn’t have to walk the half-mile to the center pad in the dead of night to see if his machine’s working—he can just watch for the light. I don’t push the van a mile over thirty. My father speeds away and then slows to let me catch up, only to speed up again moments later. We leave the hills and enter unfamiliar flats. Even when the gravel turns to pavement, I can’t bring myself to drive fast. My father stops and waves me up to his window. “Everything alright?” he says. “Yeah,” I say. “I’m taking it slow.”
“This road hooks into the county line, leads straight to the shop. Just follow it up.” “Okay,” I say. He goes to say more, but pauses, changes his mind. “Call me if there’s problems, I better go down to Idaho Falls and see what to do with the body.” Dad waits there, and I think for a moment that he’s going to tell me to take the week off. But he doesn’t, just rolls up his window and roars off into the night. “You all okay?” I say to Javier and the boys. They nod through the dim glow of the dashboard lights. I shift the van into drive and take my time easing back onto the pavement. The distance between my father and me builds, and soon the lights from his pickup are nothing more than dying embers.
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