Thom Doebler pulled his pickup in front of the steamroller and parked parallel to the length of its cylinder. He let the truck’s engine run for a few seconds, listening to its sound before he cut the ignition. Considerate of the clicks and pings of the cooling engine, he remained still, one hand on the steering wheel and the other not yet withdrawing the key. Down the road, about ten yards, one of the flaggers, Leanne Dobson, leaned into her pole, positioning it with the 'stop' sign turned toward Thom’s truck. She held a walkie before her face as if ready to make a report, but only looked, mouth agape, down the length of road stretching past where Thom had parked. When he, at last, stood up out of the pickup, Thom reached to his back pocket, pulled out a white kerchief, and brushed the breast of his green flannel shirt and the front of his brown work trousers. He then leaned all the way over to flick it at the toes of each of his boots. He executed this ritual with practiced, steadfast movements, not exactly fastidious but always measured. Once finished, he refolded the kerchief and returned it to his pocket.

Thom nodded as he walked up to the flagger.

“Hi, Thom.” Leanne dropped the walkie to her side.

“Been much traffic this morning?”

“Nah. Now that schools been out it’s quiet, mostly.” Still leaning on the pole, she pivoted her weight to face Thom squarely. “I’m glad. Them buses scare me. Sometimes the wheels go off the edge of the road there, and they look like they're just about going all the way over. You can see all them kids in there…” She stepped back and swayed dramatically, emitting a quick laugh. Then her normally broad, slack smile faded into a look of embarrassment and she averted her eyes. “Hey Thom, I heard something, I don’t know if it’s ok to say.”

“What’s that?”

“I heard…” Leanne cast a look up and down the empty road, only allowing their eyes to meet directly for an instant as she turned her head from one side to the other. “Well, I heard about what your wife said at church.”

“Did you now.” Thom's voice was smooth and unsurprised. His eyes shone with either a deep sadness or a bottomless serenity, an indication that the distance between the two is not really so far. “I think she’s more worried than I am.”

“But you seem so healthy. It just don’t seem like that’s how it should be.”

“Oh. Well, these things can be complicated, their causes. But like I said, I’m not sure it’s worth getting too worked up over. Not yet.”

“It’s not like lung cancer, is it?”

“No.” The creases in his face became increasingly pronounced until he forced a cough. “It’s my prostate.”

“You know, sometimes I wonder out here with the fumes and all. Like the cars and that smell the tar gets when your eyes get watery and stuff. Plus, I smoke.” Leanne shook her head. “But, you don’t though.”

“It’s not lung cancer. Maybe my wife didn’t say that.”

“Well, I didn’t hear from her. My cousin heard, or that’s who I heard from. She's the one always going to church. I don't hardly ever.”

“I only go sometimes myself. Not this last weekend.” Thom’s smile settled on bemusement. His skin had been fair in his youth, but years of working mostly outdoors had prevailed to toughen and brown it. Around his eyes were heavily wrinkled lines that seemed to deepen even at times when his face otherwise betrayed no reaction. “There’re still a few tests they want to do at the hospital. Nothing’s for certain. They want to be sure about it all, but the doctors say maybe they won’t need to operate. If it’s not growing, or just real slow.”

“Slow.” She drew the word out then smacked her tongue wetly. “That’s good. Right? We’ll just have to pray it works out that way.”

“I reckon so. Thank you. Right now it’s just wait and see. That’s about all a person ever can do. Certain things have to happen of their own accord. And then I’ll hear whatever they say, after the tests.”

Leanne removed her hardhat to smooth the hair that had worked free from her ponytail. She grinned quizzically at the hat's crown before replacing it on her head.

“You know, there might be something you could help me out with,” Thom said, already reaching into the left pocket of his trousers. He produced a cellphone. “I got this...”

“Oh my god,” Leanne broke in. When her mouth fell open her high cheekbones were set at odds with the round fleshiness of the rest of her face. The ensuing laugher smelled of cigarettes and cinnamon chewing gum.

Thom simply nodded, the ferment of others never so easily souring his disposition. He turned the cellphone over and back in his hand. “My son’s been after me to get it. And now that he’s deployed, it seemed about time I should.”

“Oh, yeah.” Leanne was still slightly breathless. “Yeah, I guess that makes sense.”

“He wanted to be able to call us whenever; so if we’re not home, he can still get hold of us. You know the time difference over there’s pretty big.” He was holding the cellphone in his flattened palm as if it were a compass that might point across the breach of time and space that made his son otherwise unreachable. “Just in case anything happens. And he can send me little emails, too.” Without moving his head, he narrowed his eyes at the object. “Just to let us know how it’s going.”

“You can do emails on that?” She squinted. “You mean texts? That’s just a regular phone like I got. You need one of them BlackBerrys for emails.”

“I don’t know what they’re called, but he writes me these little mails, or…” He took the phone in both hands and flipped it open. “Little notes. There’s one he said how there's no grass over there. That’s all it said. I took it that meant he was okay if he had time to comment about something like that.”

“Those are texts. I don’t even know why they’re still sending guys over there anyway. They got Saddam. I mean, I know there’s still all that violence going on, but still. Let them all just fight it out with each other if that’s what they want? And if there’s not even any grass… What’s the point? I mean, I know it’s not about grass why the war started. It was about, well… I’m just saying, it don’t make no sense.”

“Maybe it's too dry for grass, or maybe people there just don't like it.” Thom hesitated as if considering his own suggestions. “I didn’t like it when Sammy said that’s where they were sending him. But he didn't get to choose. He got orders. He’s a good boy.”

“Boy? Jeez, he's older than me. Anyway, what’s wrong with your phone then?”

“Oh, I don’t know anything wrong with it. I can make calls, though it's hard to hear. But, it’s got a camera on it and my wife said I can email the pictures I took. Like this morning I saw a doe with her little fawn. It maybe still had some spots, though it was kind of hard to tell. It was still a bit dark out. But it made for a real pretty scene. Peaceful. The two of them there by the road... If I took a picture of something like that, I reckon he’d like to see it, to remind him of home.”

Leanne looked over his shoulder, maybe trying to conjure an image of the mother deer and its young. “Yeah,” she said, “you can’t email on that, just BlackBerrys.”

“That's different from what I have?” The smile that had remained through the conversation faded now.

“Don't they got deer in Iraq, either?” She blinked and shook her head, then refocused her gaze on Thom. “You need to download your pictures on a computer and send emails that way. You should have a wire for that that came with it.”

“Yeah, I believe there were a couple of different wires.”

“Do you even have a computer?” She started laughing but it turned into a cough. After she cleared her throat she continued, “I know you’re not that old, or maybe you are. I just can’t really picture you sitting down at a computer.” She started to choke on her words as she had another coughing fit which ended with her wiping spittle from the corner of her mouth.

Thom’s smile returned, reposeful and compassionate. He waited until she collected herself, then said, “My wife uses it. It was Sammy’s.”

Leanne shook her head and her neck spasmed twice as if to laugh, though no sound accompanied. She produced a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from the pockets of her jeans, and the ritual of lighting her smoke seemed, at last, to put her at ease. “It depends on the computer, like the program or whatever.” She exhaled smoke, turning her head to look down the road as she did.

Thom looked too. Mike Logan, Wayne Kurtzler, and a bunch of the other guys, including Little Mikey, stood between the front-end loader and a flatbed with a large drainage pipe lashed to it. Too far away to hear what they were saying, it was nonetheless clear the group had taken a speculative interest in Thom and Leanne’s conversation.

“Well, thanks,” Thom said. “I’ll give that a try with the wires.”

Leanne, still looking towards the other workers, blew out another puff of smoke. As Thom turned to walk away she said, “I hope them doctors got good news.”

He paused, turned his head, winked, and gestured as though tipping his hardhat.

It was early enough that the evaporating dew still gave verdant sweetness to the air. Out of sight behind a stand of trees, a freshly manured field added the sickly but enticing smell of oiled leather and molasses cake. There was also dust from the work site where the earth had been stripped naked by the blades of various machines and scarred by the tread of their tires. On the right side of the road, opposite the trees and hidden field, the bare land was shrouded in the long morning shadow cast by the embankment where a new stretch of highway was being built, and to which this secluded two-lane road would connect via an access ramp.

Thom walked down the middle of the closed lane of the country road. Looping over the pavement at various points, wide, muddy tire tracks stitched a series of linking half circles that were completed by deep ruts gouged into the ground along the side of the road. Halfway between Leanne and the other workers, Thom headed toward the line of orange barrels that sequestered the closed lane from traffic. He went to a barrel that had been nudged out of line, put his hand on its top, and gave the base a firm kick. It barely moved, but he did it again and again until it was finally forced more into the rank of the rest. With a satisfied expression, Thom looked up and down the formation then continued along the road. The chatter of the workmen became more discernible with each step.

“Good work there, Doeby,” said Mike. As usual, the words from the heavy-set man were threaded with sarcasm.

Thom smiled and nodded. “Fellas.”

“Hey, Doeby, you got something on your hat there.” Wayne’s joke fell into well-worn tracks and the small dust-up of laughter that followed was as familiar as the stutters and coughs of each of the diesel motors on the worksite. “Don’t know how you can miss it, it being all shiny like that.”

“Oh, well, guess I’ll have to take a closer look later.”

The men were too easily amused by themselves to ever give much attention to how Thom responded. They stood beside the flatbed, three of them leaning against it, while Mike, Wayne, and Little Mikey stood nearly shoulder to shoulder in front of them. They all wore jeans, ill-fitting and unwashed, and heavy, lugged, muddy boots.

“What’d you have up there, a cellphone?” Mike jibed. “I didn’t know you were all techno-logical.” Whether his pronunciation was for emphasis or a genuine struggle on his own part, could not be certain. Guffaws followed all the same.

“What happened, you have some of them carrier pigeons and they all fly away?” shot Wayne.

“Well, I figured I'd save on the cost of feed with a cellphone.”

“Hey look, there goes one now. He’s looking for you.” Little Mikey pointed into the air at a bird, not a pigeon, flying high behind Thom toward the lilting tops of the trees. Mike and Wayne broke loose yelling in mock excitement, encouraging Thom to give chase. Two of the men leaning against the flatbed trailer laughed and exchanged a few words between themselves, but never bothered to look in the direction in which Little Mikey had pointed. The other, the flatbed’s driver, shifted his glance among the other men assembled with a self-conscience that appeared to be more a part of his temperament than weariness of, or caution aroused by, the proceedings.

“Can you take pictures with it?” Wayne tried to assume a more congenial tone, drawing the group into an anticipatory lull.

“It does.” Thom’s reply was flat and without malice.

“Well, if you want you can take my picture. That way you can see my pretty face whenever you want to.” With that Wayne folded his hands under his chin and made an extravagant attempt at come-hither-eyes. A buoyant, more genuine, chorus broke out. Mike pulled his glasses from his face and rubbed his free hand over his eyes.

“Doeby. Hey, Doeby,” Little Mikey could barely contain himself. “You can take my picture too.” He turned around and bent over making a motion as if to hike down his pants. One of the men leaning against the flatbed folded his arms and shook his head, not exactly disapproving but maybe disappointed that Little Mikey had only mimed his daring.

“Ok fellas,” Thom said, “let’s behave.”

Little Mikey’s eyes beamed with pride. Laughter is the singing of the shuttle across the loom of time. Its frequency dictates the density of life's pile. The men were happy to allow themselves a moment or two to relish the texture and pattern of their banter.

Then Thom, his voice, as ever, revealing no hard feelings, said, “Ok now, let’s see. I don’t suppose it'd be too much trouble to try and get a few things done today.”

The workers mumbled but made no real protest.

“Wayne, how’s she running now?” Thom indicated toward the loader parked in the shadow of the embankment.

Wayne shrugged a little defensively and walked to the ladder of the loader. However, instead of climbing to the cab, he lit a cigarette, looking at once sullen and impatient. Little Mikey went off at a trot to the skidder. Two of the men who had been leaning against the flatbed climbed onto it and milled about, giving cursory inspection to the straps and fasteners that secured the drainage pipe, the diameter of which came to the shoulders of the taller of the two. The chatter of the morning still reverberating along the pipe’s corrugated length, where it was translated into an elemental hum. Mike hitched his jeans and took a step closer to Thom.

“Rich been around this morning?” Thom asked.

“No. Probably still up top. I heard…” A sudden, uncertain gravity weighted Mike’s voice. He paused, letting the unspoken words sink back into the murk of propriety. “Guess they’re all behind up there now.”

“Up top, yeah. The engineers weren’t happy with the levels. They want to regrade that second bend.”

“That’s probably where he is then. I’m glad I ain’t got to deal with them like that.”

“It’s a big operation. You got to do it how the experts say.” Thom looked back over his shoulder in the direction of the second bend but could not even see the first. “They have it all figured and just want to make sure it’s done right.”

The shadows had receded enough toward the base of the embankment to permit sunlight to glint in Mike’s glasses. Where the rays focused directly on the men’s skin, they conducted a warmth that bore the message of the coming season. In a few weeks, it would be hot, even in the mornings, and the routine laziness of the day’s beginning would be poisoned by surly lethargy. Sweat in June is the result of ardor, and if men complain about the work they have done it is in part to disguise their self-regard.

“Anyhow, Rich showed us what to do yesterday. We already dug out all along there.” Mike waved vaguely in the direction of the embankment. “Just got to lay that culvert in.”

In the distance, out of sight, a large diesel grumbled and ratcheted its way through its gears. Almost imperceptibly, the idleness of the workmen had transformed into some form of industry. A heavy chain dragged and clanked dully into the dirt. One of the men on the back of the flatbed gave the drainage pipe a kick. Despite its mass and tautly drawn lashing, the thing emitted a subsonic ring that harmonized menacingly with the rattle and purr of the loader’s engine. The pipe sang not to the ears but directly into the spine, the metallic ribs of one fiddling in a dissonant frequency with the bone of the other. Once all of the cigarettes had been finished, a length of chain was put through the pipe so that the loose ends could be brought together over top.

Thom walked to the front of the flatbed. Farther down the road he could see the other flagger standing with his pole leaned back against his shoulder. Thom watched the man for a minute, but the flagger never turned to look back. Sitting in the skidder, Little Mikey did make eye contact, mischief plain in his smile. He jerked the controls of the machine causing it to bounce, toy-like, his head rag-doll-loose on his shoulders, dumb grin never subsiding.

Wayne pulled the loader around and lined the bucket over the pipe. When the chain was secure, he raised the bucket to take up slack. With a final nudge of the controls, it thrummed tight. The men on the back of the flatbed stood clear, one of them already fishing into his pockets for a lighter to apply to the cigarette waiting on his lips. The loader backed away. Wayne looked down from the cab to Mike, who was sidling along the loader’s course. With the slightest of possible nods, they acknowledged each other through that distance. Wayne took care as he maneuvered the large piece of machinery, stopping anytime during its progress that the pipe, suspended from either end by the chain, began swaying too much. Drawing clear of the flatbed trailer, he cut the controls to the left in a slow sweeping arc. After a quick check back down to Mike, and a repetition of their acknowledgement, he inched forward toward the ditch at the base of the embankment.

The men on the back of the trailer chatted, though the specifics of their locution on any occasion were hardly worth any attention. Every time the one who had been so eager to smoke tapped ash from his cigarette, it fell onto the grimy, greased planks lining the trailer bottom where he would, in a reflex retarded by entropy, scuff at them with the sole of his boot. Meanwhile, Thom moseyed into the trail of the loader. He stopped after a few steps to inspect himself, deciding a single tweak of his trousers about his hips would suffice.

When the link broke, the chain threw itself open with searing force. Later, the wrenched, faulty piece of metal would be found near where the flatbed had been parked. Though at the time it would have kicked a tuft of dust as it skipped to that spot, not a man present had witnessed it. In the moment, the general sensation was that the entire atmosphere had been ionized, that some intrinsic and awesome magnetic force locked in the heavy metal cylinder had been unleashed, fraying into bits the fabric of what happened next. It invaded each man and object to the last atom. Gravity and sound were null. All outward perception was replaced by the feeling of each bodily hair standing to its very end, the smell of blood flooding the nose’s capillaries, the pulse of electricity that makes animate the living things of the world surging to the tips of the fingers. The feeling lasted no longer than the time elapsed between two heartbeats. It would not be until afterwards when the men were able to speak with one another, that they would satisfy an account of what they had seen.

The chain did break. The pipe lurched, willing, impossibly, to keep contact with it. Then, having failed, or realizing the hopelessness of the impulse, it twisted angrily to the ground, where, in a final act of malevolence, it struck out. The men would agree that Mike, for his part, had seemed as frozen in the moment as any other present, his eventual attempt to lunge out of the way as futile as it was late.

A thick haze of dust hung about the fallen man. It plastered his face and filled his nostrils. An arm of his glasses had slipped from behind one ear, causing them to dangle against his face. He tore at and threw them to the side once he had shimmied along the ground enough to gain some clearance from the pipe which, after striking him, had rolled to rest no more than two feet away. Mike pounded the ground with a fist and projected a groan beyond his harried cloud.

Little Mikey was the first to the spot, his oversized boots thumping with perilous quickness as he raced across the worksite. “Oh shit.” The words, subsumed by the dust that had yet to settle, did not likely reach Mike’s ears. Little Mikey looked to the others as they arrived and repeated, “Oh shit.”

As Wayne approached, he reached down to pick up Mike’s glasses and proffered them uncertainly back to their owner. “Shit man, shit. You ok?” Seeing that Mike wasn’t, he drew the glasses close to his own body and nervously worked them opened and closed. “Damn, I seen it go. I didn’t…”

Mike breathed through his teeth. He looked down his leg to the ankle. He let out another groan, this heavily barbed with curses. His foot was turned askew so that it looked like an empty boot twisted onto the limb of a scarecrow, but instead of straw, there was blood. It oozed over a large portion of the skin, the top layer of which had been burned off by the sudden energy of the impact. It soaked through the denim and stained the top of his sock yet did not flow so quickly as to have begun pooling on the dusty ground. Excepting Thom, each man winced, some ghostly twinge still running through his nervous system, as he came to Mike’s side.

“Alright. Hold on. Well alright, just hold still.” Thom knelt.

“Ah, Christ.” Already Mike’s eyes were red and swollen. He clamped his teeth together making the tense cables of his jaw pop against his flesh and his lips harden and turn the color of solder. Removed from context, looks of agony and bliss appear to be poured of the same ore. There is a polished sheen in the eyes and the surfaces of an expression are burnished by the hot blood coursing beneath. In either case, the fissures of exhaustion that follow are inevitable. “God damn.”

“Okay. Okay.” Thom now had his hand on Mike’s shoulder. “Looks broken. But don’t worry, you’ll be okay.”

“Fuck.”

Blood began to spatter on the bare earth. Looking at it the men’s thoughts might have been briefly transported anywhere, to a sandlot where a runner had come in too hard to home plate or to a desert battlefield half the world away. Then, the dust that had been thrown up in the accident either settled or was carried off in the morning breeze. The sky reemerged, brilliant. The grass and trees on the opposite side of the road pressed themselves eagerly toward it. The normal sounds of the morning filtered with quiet defiance back into consciousness. The men stole glances at each other and up and down the road. Finally, slouching to one side or the other, they looked nowhere in particular.

“They’ll be able to patch that up. Don’t worry, doctors these days, this’ll be no problem.” Mike gave a long series of heavy, focused breaths.

“Hold still now,” continued Thom. “We’ll get this taken care of. You won’t even know anything ever happened.”

“At least, you know, you’ll get some time off. Worker’s comp,” said Wayne, his tone seeking both irony and compassion.

“Shit yeah, soaking up the AC…” Mike leaned his head back and shook it, then looked from Wayne back to Thom. “Fuck, it’s busted pretty good. I’m going to be off my feet for a while.” He turned his head to spit, but just smacked his gums. “Shit. That fucker came right at me.”

The hem of Mike’s jeans grew heavy and matted. Blood, now muddying the dirt that had been kicked up, continued to seep. It caked in his leg hairs and began to fill his boot. The flesh inflated, its color deepening steadily toward black.

“Mikey, get your truck and bring it over. You can take him in,” said Thom. Still kneeling, he reached into his back pocket and pulled out his kerchief. “Here, take it. Try and stop the bleeding.”

Mike took the kerchief and leaned forward to apply it to his ankle. His head came close to Thom’s. Their eyes met, Mike’s steely despite the redness fracturing their edges. A stain appeared on the kerchief and spread. “Shit, it’s really fucked... I mean, it’s bad.”

“They can fix that,” Thom said. “They can fix just about anything these days.”

“Yeah right. They like to say that. But some shit just...” He peeled the kerchief away, but it was too much of a bloody mess to allow for predictions.

“Just keep it on there. It could be a lot more blood, but just keep it on there.”

Mike shifted his weight, leaned closer, and fixed Thom’s eyes. “Hey, I know about... Leanne was saying.”

“Oh, that. Well, there’re more important things right now. We got to get you taken care of.”

“No. But, my brother, too.”

Thom put his hand back on Mike’s shoulder. “Oh. Well, the doctors…”

Wayne stepped away as Little Mikey pulled his pickup just behind Thom. The other two workers and the flatbed driver came solemnly around its side.

“He can’t hardly get out of bed. They say maybe six months.” Mike’s eyes reddened further; the steel began to boil. “If he's lucky. Seems like any day could be the last.”

There was a moment during which neither man took a breath, like the moment before two ends of a rent cloth fall away from each other for good, when silence becomes palpable and weaves into the space of what is unsaid and thereby gives shape to it. As it passed, tears began lacing patterns over Mike’s dust-covered cheeks.

Little Mikey came around to the passenger side of the truck and opened the door. He and Wayne came up behind Mike and reached down to take hold of him. “Got it, chief?” Wayne asked, gripping Mike under the arm. Together they helped him, wincing and cursing, to his feet. He hopped toward the pickup with one arm around Wayne's shoulder while his free hand held tight to Thom’s blood-spoiled kerchief.