All right.
It's still dark when they arrive, four-fifteen by his watch, and the concrete-all thirty bags of it-is there waiting for them, not ten feet off the road. Andrea is the one who locates it, with the aid of the softly glowing red cap of her flashlight-watchman or no, it would be crazy to go shining lights out here, and the red, she explains, doesn't kill your night vision like the full glare of the white. Silently, they haul the concrete up the road-all of them, even Sierra, though sixty pounds of dead weight is a real load for her. "Don't be ridiculous, Dad," she says when he asks if she's okay — or whispers, actually, whispers didactically- "because if Burmese peasants or coolies or whatever that hardly weigh more than I do can carry hundred — and — twenty-pound sacks of rice from dawn to dusk for something like thirty-two cents a day, then I can lift this."
He wants to say something to relieve the tension no one but him seems to be feeling, something about the Burmese, but they're as alien to him as the headhunters of the Trajan Valley-don't some of them make thirty-six cents a day, the lucky ones? — and the best he can do is mutter "Be my guest" into the sleeve of his black sweatshirt. Then he's bending for the next bag, snatching it to his chest and rising out of his crouch like a weightlifter. The odd grunt comes to him out of the dark, and the thin whine of the first appreciative mosquitoes.
In addition to the concrete, there are two shovels and a pickax secreted in the bushes. Without a word, he takes up the pick, and once he gets his hands wrapped round that length of tempered oak, once he begins raising it above his head and slamming it down into the yielding flesh of the road, he feels better. The fact that the concrete and the tools were here in the first place is something to cheer about — they have allies in this, confederates, grunts and foot soldiers — and he lets the knowledge of that soothe him, his shoulders working, breath coming in ragged gasps. The night compresses. The pick lifts and drops. He could be anywhere, digging a petunia bed, a root cellar, a grave, and he's beginning to think he's having an out-of-body experience when Andrea takes hold of his rising arm. "That's enough, Ty," she whispers.
Then it's the shovels. He and Teo take turns clearing the loose dirt from the trench and heaving it into the bushes, and before long they have an excavation eighteen inches deep, two feet wide and twelve feet across, a neat black line spanning the narrowest stretch of the road in the roseate glow of Andrea's flashlight. It may not be much of a road by most standards, but still it's been surveyed, dozed, cleared and tamped flat, and it brings the machines to the trees. There's no question about it — the trucks have to be stopped, the line has to be drawn. Here. Right here. Our local friends have chosen well, he thinks, leaning on the shovel and gazing up into the night, where two dark fortresses of rock, discernible now only as the absence of stars, crowd in over the road: block it here and there's no way around.
They're tired, all of them. Beat, exhausted, zombie. Though they dozed away the afternoon at the Rest Ye May Motel and fueled themselves with sugar-dipped doughnuts and reheated diner coffee, the hike, the unaccustomed labor and the lateness of the hour are beginning to take their toll. Andrea and Teo are off in the bushes, bickering over something in short, sharp explosions of breath that hit the air like body blows. Sierra, who has an opinion on everything, is uncharacteristically silent, a shadow perched on a rock at the side of the road-she may want to save the world, but not at this hour. He can hardly blame her. He's sapped too, feeling it in his hamstrings, his shoulders, his tender knee, and when he tries to focus on anything other than the stars, random spots and blotches float across his field of vision like paramecia frolicking under the lens of a microscope. But they're not done yet. Now it's the water. And again, their comrades-in-arms have chosen well. Shut your eyes and listen. That's right. That sound he's been hearing isn't the white noise of traffic on a freeway or the hiss of a stylus clogged with lint-it's water, the muted gargle of a stream passing into a conduit not fifty feet up the road. This is what the buckets are for — to carry the water to the trench and moisten the concrete. They're almost home.
But not quite. There seems to be some confusion about the concrete, the proportion of water to mix in, and have any of them-even he, son of a builder and thirty-nine years on this earth-ever actually worked with concrete? Have any of them built a wall, smoothed out a walk, set bricks? Teo once watched a pair of Mexican laborers construct a deck round the family pool, but he was a kid then and it was a long time ago, He thinks they just dumped the bags into a hand — cranked mixer and added water from the hose. Did they need a mixer, was that the problem? Andrea thinks she can recall setting fenceposts with her father on their ranch in Montana, and Tierwater has a vague recollection of watching his own father set charges of dynamite on one of his job sites, stones flung up in the air and bang and bang again, but as far as concrete is concerned, he's drawing a blank. "I think we just dump the bags in the trench, level it out and add water to the desired consistency," he concludes with all the authority of a man who flunked chemistry twice.
Andrea is dubious. "Sounds like a recipe for cake batter."
Teo: "What consistency, though? This is quick-set stuff, sure, but if we get it too runny it's never going to set up in two hours, and that's all we've got."
A sigh of exasperation from Sierra. "I can't believe you guys-1 mean, three adults, and we come all the way out here, with all this planning and all, and nobody knows what they're doing? No wonder my generation is going to wind up inheriting a desert." He can hear the plaintive, plangent sound of her bony hands executing mosquitoes. "Plus, I'm tired. Really like monster-tired. I want to go home to bed."
He's giving it some thought. How hard could it be? The people who do this for a living-laying concrete, that is-could hardly be confused with geniuses. "What does it say on the package? Are there any directions?"
"Close one eye," Andrea warns, "because that way you don't lose all your night vision, just in case, I mean, if anybody-" and then she flicks on the flashlight. The world suddenly explodes in light, and it's a new world, dun-colored and circumscribed, sacks of concrete like overstuffed brown pillows, the pipestems of their legs, the blackened sneakers. He's inadvertently closed his good eye, the one that sees up close, and he has to go binocular — and risk a perilous moment of night-blindness-to read what it says on the bag.
King Kon-Crete, it reads, over the picture of a cartoon ape in sunglasses strutting around a wheelbarrow, Premium Concrete. Mix Entire Bag with Water to Desired Consistency. Keep Away from Children.
"Back to consistency again," Teo says, shuffling his feet round the bag, and that's all that can be seen of him, his feet-his diminutive feet, feet no bigger than Sierra's-in the cone of light descending from Andrea's hand. Tierwater can picture him, though, squat and muscular, his upper body honed from pumping iron and driving his longboard through the surf, his face delicate, his wrists and ankles tapered like a girl's. He's so small and pumped he could be a special breed, a kind of human terrier, fearless, indefatigable, tenacious, and with a bark like — but enough. They need him here. They need him to say, "Shit, let's just dump the stuff and get it over with."
And so they do. They slit the bags and let the dependable force of gravity empty them. They haul the water in a thickening miasma of mosquitoes, swatting, cursing, unceremoniously upending the buckets atop the dry concrete. And then they mix and slice and chivy till the trench is uniformly filled with something like cold lava, and the hour is finally at hand, "Ready, everybody?" Tierwater whispers. "Teo on the outside, Andrea next to Teo — and, Sierra, you get in between me and Andrea, okay?"