Construction
The base was mud, but by noon had
baked hard across the housings, clotting
in sprays on chainboxes, everywhere
but on the sheathed chrome of the
hydraulics. Only the ditch lay clean,
an inch of black topsoil giving way
to red clay, moist and trenched sheer
like a steak’s edge. The hodcarrier in it
panting & the only one working,
everyone else in trucks, or back
in the shade of a cottonwood.
Nothing there could be done until
mix was set at the ditch’s end & the
mixer’s trough didn’t reach. So they had him
working it—an apprentice out of
Laramie, blurred runes tattooed on
his fingers, head shaved, with white
eyebrows, and a gold KKK stud
in his ear. He was running cement
from the trough on down to the end
by wheelbarrow. The mixer rotated
like a planet, its driver climbing out of
his cab, taking a rag and rubbing
talc off the door where the words Hecho
Valencia/Concrete-Gravel were.
Like us he looked the hoddie over because
the guy was an animal, pushing the
barrow under the trough from behind and
squatting down between the handles as the
mud poured, the trough bucking low, driving
his hardhat’s brow sling down across his
nose hard. When he had a load he shouted,
pushed it out from under and descended
along planks set in the ditch which
pitched and splintered as he ran them. When
he’d hit the end it went on its toe
and the mud slid off like pudding
going in the trash. Then he saw
Valencia watching and began
right there to lift the empty barrow
by the tongs, like a chair lifted by its
legs, and to bring it down on his own
head, the hat taking the weight and the
cold slip thick with lime covering and
sliding off the brim, onto his shirt-
less torso, which was burnt red, his arm
pits blond and white, the skin shuddering
as olive remainder ran in streams
down to his waist, into his pants. And
each run he grinned up at Valencia
from the shadow under his wheeled
carapace, dripping like with shit, the
gold on his ear glinting.
