The Monday after I graduate high school, on Monday Morning, Pops tells me I’m going to Osgood. “Got a real important job. Need someone with a head on their shoulders.”

“What?” Osgood? More like Osbad.

“That dirt we put on out there—the lava rock’s coming through. Spread out and pick up as many rocks as you can. We don’t want to ruin a swather.”

“Why not Brandon? He’s new.”

“Because the Mexicans like you.”

We stand in silence. Brandon would quit after a day at Osgood.

“I just need someone with a brain on their shoulders to run this crew.”

“Don’t we have some plowing to do? Isn’t there a tractor job?”

He sighs. “Look, you gonna, or do I need to?”

I shut up. A rotten taste mills in the back of my throat. “What truck am I taking?”

“All we got is the van. Get going—it’s supposed to rain.”

“Who’s coming with me?”

“Sergio and some new guys. They’re in the house.”

I drive across the gravel yard to the cinder-block shack. The ceiling and wall are stained black from the stove. The guys are lounging on mattresses thrown out on the floor.

“Get your lunches,” I say to Sergio, the only one that understands, and look over the new guys—two young kids, and a decrepit, tired man. In the van, Sergio takes front, the old one in the middle bench seat, the kids sit on overturned oil buckets in the back.

I gas it when we leave the shop, and the kids pretend to be riding bulls when I swerve. Sergio, in the front, dramatically shoots his hands down, clamping them onto the seat. He swears in Spanish—I know, he’s taught me the words. The old one doesn’t budge.

“This is the best I can do, drive you around.” I’m not surprised when Sergio doesn’t answer. The old one gapes a toothless grin, his cheeks and forehead all long, brown wrinkles. I stare at him in the mirror, and swear in Spanish.

The old man shuts up quick; the jack-o-lantern grin disappears.

The van handles poorly, floating from one edge of the road to the other. We ride in silence.

“Why he treat like that?” Sergio breaks in. He squints a little, concentrates, and asks again, “Why treat you bad tú papá?”

“Trying to make me a man or something.”

“Be man? What mean?”

“Responsibility, I guess. Make me run a crew.”

“Run over crew?”

“No. Run crew. Be boss.”

“Oh, new boss you?”

“Just today.”

He nods. “Make pretty good boss,” he says. “Good boss son.”

We pass Roberts—twenty bleached singlewides on the south side of the road—and leave the blacktop for good. The van handles worse on the pot-holed gravel; knuckles of half-drowning lava rock jar the old machine and make the doors rattle.

The van revs and rumbles up a rocky incline. “I ought to be running a farm by now, not playing chauffeur.”

Sergio just stares straight out the windshield, toward the western horizon. In the rear-view, the two bobble-head boys laugh and push each other off of their buckets. The old man stares at me, smiling. Our eyes connect.

“Ask him what his deal is,” I say to Sergio. He turns halfway around and rattles off some tin-can jargon. The old man cracks his knuckles and replies low and deep.

“He say he happy today. Been five years since left Michoacán.”

“Michigan?”

“Michoacán, México.”

“Tell him he’ll be even happier when we get to the fields.”

Sergio says nothing to the old man.

I wonder where Michoacán is, and if it’s as strange as the high Idaho desert. Cinderblock houses pepper the bare, rolling hills. The only things moving are quarter-mile lines of corrugated steel pivots, crawling across the fields, watering the thin ground. Snaky gravel roads criss-cross at lonely intersections.

From above, I’ve been told it looks flat as Nebraska, but it’s different driving through it. Left, right, up, down—Pops says never faster than thirty, especially in the van.

The thought makes me push the accelerator up to thirty-five. That’s when the old man starts singing.

Who knows really, really what he was singing? I look over at Sergio. He’s glossy eyed; the two in the back, hands resting in their laps, stare at the oil-stained, tool-cluttered floor.

The sound comes out low, guttural, and then smooth and high and floating. He doesn’t change the tune, holds the notes like a bear trap. Forceful. Unforgiving. He sings, sings like an old man should, I guess.

As he sings, the morning darkens; the bright clear windows of the van change with the sky around it. The old man stops, and Sergio asks him a question. He answers quickly.

“He say he learn that song as boy. On way to farm in Michoacán, he sing it then too.”

Sergio translates more: “Next time, he say I drive and you play guitar.”

I look back. He smiles. I don’t know how to play the guitar, so I don’t smile back. Sergio and the old man talk again. It sounds like a typewriter.

“He say song make him happy be alive. He feel neck muscles move, wind move, sound. Alive.”

“Tell him he might not be alive after picking up rocks today,” I say.

Sergio tells him. “He sing, he tell me. He sing forever.” The old man’s wavering voice starts again.

All of us listen for a while before I realize we’re lost. Pops gruffly relays the directions over the cell phone. West. Blue Shop. Lone Pine Cellar. Five miles. Two rusty pivots. Dead coyote.

“Dead coyote?”

“Damn thing ran right out in front of me, couldn’t stop fast enough,” he says. Its carcass is easy to find—green patchy sprouts of hay bending in the breeze.

We empty out of the van. I explain to Sergio the plan, and he explains it to the pack. “We’ll stretch out along the bottom here, halfway across the pivot, and we’ll all walk to the north.” He translates. “Whenever we come across a patch of rocks, come together and pile them up. We’re not going to be able to pack them all the way from the middle, so Pops can bring a pickup out if he wants them moved.”

I ask Sergio to tell me their names. He does. Pedro, something else. We space out across the field, the old man follows me. He tugs at my sleeve. He points to himself.

“On-sail-moe,” he says, and thumps his chest with a withered finger. “On-sail-moe.”

“Huh?”

“On-sail-moe.” Thump, thump.

I must look confused because he squats in the dirt, right by the road, and scrawls ANSELMO in shaky letters. He points to himself again.

“Oh, your name?”

His head shakes vigorously. “Sí, sí, sí.”

“Anselmo,” I say, and point to the field. “Go pick up rocks.”

<>

By ten we’re at the northern edge of the field. We’ve made about eight waist-high piles of the chalky black rock. My back hurts, but I only rub it when I’m away from the guys. They don’t need to see me hurting, I’m the new boss.

Anselmo ends up close to me and smiles as he carries a small boulder, hunched over. It hangs down between his legs like a prison-ball shackle.

I tell Sergio that we can be back to the van by noon if we hurry. We move quickly to the other side and start back towards the gravel road.

When we get close, the scrawniest boy runs to the corner and pulls the van up closer to us. We make it back by noon—the second side not half as bad with the rocks, only three piles. We carry out a load of beer cans and candy wrappers from the hay.

We pile into the van for lunch. I only have a soda. The rest pull out tightly rolled packages of tin foil from plastic grocery bags.

“They want heat them up,” says Sergio.

“Tell them to go to town,” I say. My stomach growls.

“I show you,” he says. He reaches over and turns the key, then walks around and pops the hood. He sticks the food on the van’s manifold. “They heat up now.”

We nap for twenty-minutes while lunch warms up. I turn the cell phone off just in case Pops calls—he doesn’t need to know.

It’s one by the time we unload, stretch, and start off on our third swipe. As we walk out into the hay, Anselmo tugs at my sleeve.

He holds an open tinfoil package out to me, looking like a priest. The tinfoil’s still warm. I nod to Anselmo and then bite down into the taco. The beans are cold, chewy, but I smile. He looks at the ground and puts his hands together, nods and walks backwards, mumbling to himself as if he’s saved a soul.

The weather is worse. To the west, black clouds form, so I tell them to pick up the pace. Given the circumstances, there’s a wetback joke in there somewhere, which I almost tell Sergio. For some reason I don’t. I bend down and pick up a rock, moving through the field, parallel with the rest.

I end up next to Anselmo on our second pass to the north. This pivot is covered with hills. My legs feel like anchors. The young ones take advantage, and, once I’m out of sight, lie down in the bottom of the swells to rest.

The wind picks up. The nearest tree—the lone pine by the cellar—is five miles off, so it hits us like a snowplow. That’s all I hear, the wind, like I’m swimming in it. I tell Sergio to stay back and move a pile that’s close to the edge. The rest of us bend into the wind, forming a line across the thin hay.

We make it halfway down the field. I walk on the backbone of a long-running ridge that meets the gravel road where the van is parked. The ridge’s crest forms an upside-down u in the road. The kids trudge along in the bottom of a swell, and Anselmo in another. From the ridge, I can see everyone clearly for the first time.

Anselmo ties his yellow windbreaker around his neck with the sleeves, like I used to do with my pajamas after Saturday morning cartoons. He is tired. I saw that at lunch, while he napped. His chest had moved slowly then, shallowly up and down, barely moving the thin jacket.

Now the jacket flies out behind him, flapping and snapping. He extends his arms, like he’s going to pull up in the headwind and take off, and his coal-colored hair stands on end. His mouth—open, open wide and gaping, singing, yelling, screaming, singing, praising—is silent. The wind whips his words away. He begins to jog into the wind, arms out, hair blowing, mouth wide open. Nothing comes out. He gazes up the hill at me and smiles.

I smile back. Then I trip.

Lying in the hay, a jagged bunch of lava protrudes behind me. Only fifty feet from the gravel road, I have to dig it out or Pops will see. Scratching at the edges of the biggest piece, digging into the cold earth, the wind moans in my ears and flips my collar. I dig a six-inch deep trench around it before I can rock it loose.

Standing, both arms wrapped around the big rock, I see the van. One of the kids brings it up the hill quickly. The window is rolled down, the other chases after him. He laughs in the driver’s seat and swerves from left to right on the gravel road.

Then I see Anselmo, on the other side. He’s walking up the road on the hill’s backside towards the van. He can’t see it.

I drop the rock and run—run with my mouth open—yelling, screaming, waving, screaming. The wind sweeps my words away. Ten feet from the crest, the boy sees me and turns his head. Anselmo does the same.

The kid locks up the brakes—at least he tries. The four tires leave dark, deep trails on the down side of the hill, before the van hits the old man. It stops hard.

Anselmo is folded underneath.

I fumble with the cell phone as I run, turn it on. I fall to my knees and skid into the van, stopping myself with my elbows, denting the door. The three boys stand in the hay, staring.

I dial 911. Then I crane my neck, see Anselmo, and vomit.

“Emergency Services, how may I help you?” a lady says.

“I’m in the desert—in Osgood. Anselmo just got run over.”

“Okay. Remain calm. Stay on the phone. What happened?”

“Anselmo was walking and a kid brought the van. He couldn’t stop, ran right over him. He’s under the van.”

“Is he alive?”

The thought makes me sick.

“Is he alive? Can you hear him breathing?”

I can’t hear anything because of the three, crying, wailing, screeching.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“You have to check his pulse.”

My stomach knots, my mouth dries.

“Sir, you have to check his pulse. You can save his life.”

“I can’t.”

“You have to.”

I lie flat on my stomach and look back under the van. Anselmo is there. One arm points at me, the hand contracts, relaxes, contracts, relaxes, picking up rocks and scratching five furrows in the gravel. I crawl under the van, away from the arm, towards his neck.

“His hand is moving,” I whisper into the phone.

“You have to check his pulse,” the voice says.

His hand works at an unpredictable rate—fast, slow, slow, slow, faster, fast.

I drop the phone and crawl deeper. Her voice, incomprehensible, crackles steadily.

It’s difficult to free my arm enough to reach. Wedging into position, extending an arm, touching his neck—it’s warm. I feel his pulse.

It beats to the song he had sung—his song—guttural, soft, floating, shameless.

The phone crackles again.

I reach for it to answer but when I open my mouth, the song begins to fade, fade. The wind stops—the song stops—and it’s silent for a moment under the van until the sky splits open and the heavy drops fall straight down.