there, I ran out and jumped into the jeep before he could say a word. The next
night he was quicker on the draw. “Isn’t Tara beautiful?” he shouted to
Charles. “Eyes like a fish and she’s nearly as smart as one.” It was an old
taunt, blunted by overuse. He must have known I wouldn’t react on the site
so he’d saved it, hoping that in front of Charles it might still have sting.
The next night: “You going to dinner? Don’t get between Wilbur and her
food. Won’t be nothin’ left of you but a splat on the pavement.”
Charles never responded. We entered into an unspoken agreement to begin
our evenings the moment the mountain disappeared in the rearview mirror. In
the universe we explored together there were gas stations and movie theaters;
there were cars dotting the highway like trinkets, full of people laughing or
honking, always waving, because this was a small town and everybody knew
Charles; there were dirt roads dusted white with chalk, canals the color of
beef stew, and endless wheat fields glowing bronze. But there was no Buck’s
Peak.
During the day, Buck’s Peak was all there was—that and the site in
Blackfoot. Shawn and I spent the better part of a week making purlins to
finish the barn roof. We used a machine the size of a mobile home to press
them into a Z shape, then we attached wire brushes to grinders and blasted
away the rust so they could be painted. When the paint was dry we stacked
them next to the shop, but within a day or two the wind from the peak had
covered them in black dust, which turned to grime when it mixed with the
oils on the iron. Shawn said they had to be washed before they could be
loaded, so I fetched a rag and a bucket of water.
It was a hot day, and I wiped beads of sweat from my forehead. My
hairband broke. I didn’t have a spare. The wind swept down the mountain,
blowing strands in my eyes, and I reached across my face and brushed them
away. My hands were black with grease, and each stroke left a dark smudge.
I shouted to Shawn when the purlins were clean. He appeared from behind
an I-beam and raised his welding shield. When he saw me, his face broke into
a wide smile. “Our Nigger’s back!” he said.
The summer Shawn and I had worked the Shear, there’d been an afternoon
when I’d wiped the sweat from my face so many times that, by the time we
quit for supper, my nose and cheeks had been black. That was the first time
Shawn called me “Nigger.” The word was surprising but not unfamiliar. I’d
heard Dad use it, so in one sense I knew what it meant. But in another sense,