March of Time and Skin (novel excerpt.)

An old Indian walked out of the station eating an orange. I nodded to him and smiled. He said nothing. He stood next to me under the hood.
"What is it?" His voice was angered, aggravated and aggravating.
"I don't know."
"What happened?"
I told him. He walked away slowly and came back with another. He got behind the wheel and cranked it. His buddy stayed under the hood. I walked inside the station and bought a drink.

They were standing over the engine, laughing. His buddy had one tooth in his head. I asked the first one what was wrong with it. He wiped his hands down his shirt and shook his head, smiling.
"Is very bad."
I stared at his friend. He nodded and smiled. I looked at his tooth.
"How bad?"
The other one answered. He was the boss.
"Head gasket blown. Much money."
"How much money?"
"We do it for nine hundred."
I only had six hundred on me. I told him.
"No. Fix here or we tow to junkyard."
I had the extra key in my wallet.
"All right. Fix it. Nine hundred."
I asked them him long it would take. He said, from what I could make out, one solid day. I took my bike out and rode into town, into that place.

The car lots there were useless. They either had nothing I could afford or anything I would trust. I rode back. They had the van on the lift in the garage. I found the boss again.
"Listen. I really only have six hundred dollars. Can't we do something here, I mean, we are both people."
He scowled.
"You not my people. Nine hundred dollars. That good deal. Somewhere else maybe you pay twice as much."
"Well, I don't have it."
He looked me up and down.
"Where you live?"
I shook my head. He smiled.
"Maybe you work here for money for van."
I asked him where around here that was possible.He laughed.
"I make call. Job very hard. Very hard. Maybe you quit."
I asked him what it was. He uttered one word: digging. He told me I could sleep in the van until I paid it off, but that he would charge me a little extra for rent. I thought quickly about catching a bus, but there was nowhere I wanted to go. I couldn't hitch a ride out with my bike and my things. Arizona was not an option. I told him to make the call.

I slept in the van that night in the garage. It was still dark when one of the Indians banged on the door. "Git up! Time for work!"
I had the sheet of paper with directions and set out on my bike. It was a four mile ride through the dusty roads and paths. I saw the site. A long, long line of Indians on their knees with narrow shovels trenching into the ground, a truck going slowly in reverse with a giant spool of cable they laid carefully into the trench. They were shirtless and moving quickly, the foremen screaming at them. That endless line ripping a tear in the desert, that line of dark red backs and elbows moving like a long machine. I was my soul after death and I was standing at the gates of hell.
I found the lead foreman and told him who I was.He yelled.
"YOU LATE!"
I tried to explain. He threw a shovel in my hands.
"Three feet deep and two wide. NOW!"
I squeezed in between two big Indians. The foreman ran up and nudged me with his boot.
"NO! You bring up FRONT!"
He walked me up to the front of the line. It was a long walk. The Navajos peered at me with my shovel. They were jeering me. At the front of the line the foreman pushed me to the lead. I'd had it with him. I turned and held my shovel as to swing at him. He jumped back and pulled out a long blade. I yelled at him:"FUCK YOU!"
The line burst into laughter. The foreman laughed with them.
"Just dig, white boy. You quit before a hour."
He put the knife back in his boot and walked away. I dropped to one knee and saw the ditch. I would work the day then sneak out with the van before the Indians came back to the shop. I began digging. The other boys laughed. Their laughter made me angry. I dug furiously for an hour. I was always at least eight feet in front of them. One of the boys yelled at me to slow down. I heard his friend.
"Don't worry. He get tired."
I thought of all the things that sickened me. I found this reservoir of hatred inside my arms. I dug on. Three or so hours passed. It was time for everyone to drink.
It was a long wait for the water ladle. There was a huge steel trough and we all lined up to drink from that ladle. When my turn came I took two or three gulps then another foreman grabbed it.
"That too much, white boy."
Everybody laughed. They still had ten minutes. They found corners of shade by the trailer and sat. I walked back to the ditch and kept at it. They were all screaming at me to take a break. The foremen told them to keep quiet, that they were disgusted that a white boy was making them look so bad. I kept digging. I was yards out from them.
They had to cut their break short. They were moving as quickly as they could, but I had plenty of hatred in me. At one point a foreman blew his whistle and we stopped. He ran over with his tape measure and stuck it in their part of the ditch.
"Too damn shallow!"
A big worker stood up and looked at me. He ran his finger under his throat. I asked him if he was tired. The line howled. I kept going, faster and faster, delirious from the heat. My skin was burnt.

After the next hour everybody hated me. I didn't care. I would never see them again. We worked until dusk. At the trailer where I had my bike chained the tires were knifed. They were watching me. I paid them no mind. I picked up my bike and carried it on my shoulder up over the hill where they could not see me. Then I set it down and collapsed. I watched the hot and dead sky turn circles over my body, and I remembered the pier in California, meeting Greg, my genius painter buddy from Vegas, and Billy, his young protégé, and they were in town for a week, and we rode our bikes all day, practicing new tricks in front of the ocean. I remembered jumping on a Greyhound bus from Phoenix to Venice Beach, with three hundred dollars in my pocket. I remembered my first girlfriend. She lived by the beach, and I escaped her one morning while she was sleeping. On that hot dirt, I thought back to the beach house where I had been a renter, living with an after-hours alcoholic and her lazy eye and her husband, Cliff, who was a psychologist and latently homosexual, which occurred to me on that hot dirt was the reason he always had a pipe in his mouth. I remembered my laundry getting stolen from the dryers in San Diego, and I remembered going to jail in Tijuana and being beaten over and over. But mostly I remembered nothing, and it was supposed to be dusk but the sky wouldn’t budge. I heard the rumbling of tires coming behind me. I picked up my bike and kept going. They blew by, yelling, hooting, flipping me the bird, leaving me in a cloud of dust. I set it down and walked it.

A mile before the station the two mechanics pulled up in an old car. The boss nodded at me,
"We fix van."
I nodded.
"See you in morning."
I nodded again. They wouldn't see me in the morning. They wouldn't see me again.

The van wasn't in the garage windows. I walked around back and dug the key from my wallet. I threw my bike in the side door and sat behind the wheel. I could see the last traces of Sunlight crashing into the desert. Then it was dark. I turned the key. It purred. They had done a good job. I crawled in back and laid on the couch. The van had no wheels, they had it set upon jacks.

That night I slept on my stomach. I passed out right away, woke up about five hours later. I was stiff and sore. The flesh on my knees was raw. I didn't know when the Sun would appear. I found the road and walked. Every step I took my pants would hit the exposed skin on my knees and stick to them. I walked, thinking if this were the way it would have to be then I would show them. I would show them all. I found a strange vigor within that thought. I moved on, trying like hell to ignore my body.

An old truck coasted past me then slowed to the shoulder. I approached it cautiously. An old Indian with a white ponytail and a cowboy hat. He asked me if I wanted a ride. He lived right near the site. I asked him what time it was. He didn't know. He asked me what I was doing here. I told him.
He shook his head.
"Good luck."
There was a pleasant calm to his voice, deep and casual. He lit a smoke and shook one loose for me.
"Don't smoke."
"Good for you. Don't start."
We drove by a billboard advertising the new Jeep Cherokee. He chuckled:
"They totally obliterate the Indian Nation then name a fuckin' automobile after it."
I laughed. He peered at the road.
"You got any native in you?"
"I don't know."
"Just a mutt, huh?"
"Yes."
He dropped me off.

I worked the day through. By the end of the week I was adjusted to the labor, and the workers gave up on hazing me. Once or twice my friend would see me walking and give me a lift in. We had weekends off if we chose them. I worked. I found out that I was making minimum wage, which at the time was $3.35 an hour. Weekends were overtime. If I worked the maximum I would pull down around $240 a week after taxes. The Indians charged me twenty dollars a week for rent. I survived on food from the station, mostly orange juice and fruit and candy bars. I bought a battery powered clock with an alarm at a drug store. In bed by 9, up at 3. Walking to work took an hour.

Into my second week I was allowed to ride to and from the site with the boys in the pick ups. This peeled me off an extra 2 hours a day. My sister in Illinois offered to bail me out, but I could not take her money. I hated the work more and more, but I felt a bond with the desert, with the deadliness of it. At night I would write in my journal and fall to sleep with no trace of sound around me. I tried to take a weekend off but I fell bored with everything and went back to the ditch.

Payday was once every month, paid to the day the checks were issued. I had started the job on the third day of the new pay period. I came to stand at peace with the Navajos, though we hated each other. I was a symbol of war and death and dominance to them. To me they were just more assholes I had to see every day in order to make money. They were no different to me than anyone else. I was not responsible for their holocaust. I wasn't even alive. They dealt with me the way someone deals with a fly they cannot kill. I found a nice mindset out in the desert; with the job, the boys, the heat, the nothingness. It would do me no good to bitch about it or take pity on myself. There was no time for it. I was a vessel for that cable, for the phone company. I took it. I had no choice.

One day on the job, one of the Indians dug too carelessly and broke open one of the cables. They were fiber-optic lines from the phone company. I learned through an Indian’s broken English and hand movements that if you shined a flashlight through one end of a five thousand foot section the light would come out of the other end. He said it was expensive to repair, something like $400,000 a minute or an hour or whatever he’d meant, for a specialist to come out. We were laying a different type of line next to the fiber-optic that was already in the ground. The guy hit it and cut it open with the shovel. Work was halted for a few hours. He was called off the line and I never saw him again. I remember it because he tried to point the finger at me. I was working in front of him. He was scared. He called the foreman over and nodded at me.
"White boy cut wire!"
I looked at the foreman and shook my head, kept digging. The worker tried to come at me but I stopped him with my shovel, laid it hard across his shins. Another Indian stepped in and defended me to the boss, an Indian whom I had never talked to. I didn't know why he did it. I guess I had earned a shred of respect out there. I was out of myself there, in a certain zone, a haze. Even nailing that Indian with my shovel was in careless slow motion. Everything that happened out there only drifted by with little or no importance; everything that happened was secondary to the ditch.

Payday came. I had not showered in just a few days under a month, saving washing off with the hose at the station. My check was pathetic compared to the work I had done. My rent was $80 dollars -that with the money I owed on the van would leave me with $60 extra. I would leave with a little under what I’d rolled in with. After every one got their checks they had to go back to work. I walked off the site and into town to cash in.Back at the station I showed the Indians my money. The boss opened the register. I told him to get the wheels on before I paid him.
"What? You no trust us?"
"No."
"Half money first."
"No."
"He put wheels on. I watch you."
"Just put the fucking wheels on."
He whistled to his worker. That's how they called each other. That whistle. I was utterly sick of that whistle. Out back he removed the jacks one by one after the wheels were bolted down. They surrounded me. I dug into my pocket and pulled the money out. They eyed the roll. I held my hand out.
"The keys. Now."
The boss dropped the keys into my hand. I peeled off $980 and handed it to him. He looked at me squarely and walked away, his worker following him, watching the money over his shoulder. I fired up the Dodge and pulled out, feeling more indifferent than anything. I headed down the same back roads.


I stopped in Tucson. Downtown there was some sort of carnival. I was rugged and dark. I fit right in. For the first time in my life I wanted a beer. I had never had a drink; saving the few times I had wine with my first girlfriend. The compulsion came from nowhere, hit me from above. The first barmaid asked for ID, so I went next door. The place was dark and seedy. I sat in the back. It was a dismal bar. The barmaid didn't sweat me about my age. I ordered my first beer.