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 can 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.”