The Kerr Construction Company by Larry Farmer Page A

minimum wage.”
    “I know that. I can live on three bucks an hour. I used to work at a cotton gin for below minimum wage.”
    “And now you got a college degree and are ready for the big bucks. You ain’t running from the law?”
    “I know it doesn’t make sense.” I smiled.
    “If you ain’t running from the law, it’s none of my business what you’re doing here. Go get your supplies and come on back. The crew’s already in the field. I’ll take you out there and introduce you. We’re doing landscape maintenance on a Navajo reservation. Moriah Energy is strip mining for uranium, and by law they’re obliged to replenish the earth. We’re contracted by them to make the reservation look normal again. Whatever that means. Environmentalists came in handy for a change. Thank you, President Carter, I guess, for once.”
    ****
    The ride to the reservation passed through desolate countryside. I’d heard how sheep and goats can live on the sparsest terrain, and that probably explained why they were about the only living creatures I saw.
    The highway was narrow but at least paved. I don’t know if everything got suddenly uglier or if it was my attitude, now that I was in the middle of nowhere trying to work for nothing at some menial task. But I remembered, from history class, how time after time the conquered native Indian population was forced on to the worst of the livable and least productive environments.
    Our family farm near Harlingen, where I grew up in the southern tip of Texas, an area called the Rio Grande Valley, was irrigated, with good black, fertile soil. We even had citrus orchards. We hired help for below minimum wage, and illegal aliens were even cheaper. Now it was my turn to be one of the hands like we used to hire. I liked the idea. I’d always admired our helpers. Another reason I’m doing this. I think.
    “Doug.” The man who’d just hired me called to a young, husky, medium-height guy with a short cropped beard, after we pulled up to a double-cab pickup. “I hired this guy for your dad. He’ll work as a laborer. He just finished college and needs some extra bucks. He grew up on a farm in Texas and is an ex-Marine.”
    Nothing fazed Doug until that last description of me—ex-Marine. His eyes narrowed, and I wasn’t sure if it was a cynical grin or a sneer on his face. He spit tobacco onto the ground right in front of my new steel-toed boots. I made a point of showing no expression.
    “Did you go to Vietnam?” he asked.
    I was used to being judged when people asked this. He just seemed curious.
    “No,” I replied. “Nixon pulled the Marines out by then.”
    “I thought about joining the Marines, just to go through boot camp,” he said. “To see how I’d do. I didn’t care about the rest of it, though.” He spit more tobacco. “Follow me,” he motioned. “We’re drilling. For uranium. This ain’t Texas. I’ll start you off mixing mud. You ever mixed mud before?”
    “No.”
    “You got college. You’ll figure it out.”
    I hated hearing how I would figure things out. I didn’t on our farm. It drove my daddy crazy. I’m not very mechanically inclined.
    Mixing mud was easy to do. You dumped a fifty-pound sack of some mixture they called mud into a trough with water, and stirred. Almost like mixing cement except the result was a soupy plastic. We did this into the night. It was ten before they finally let us go home. A lanky guy who came up to my shoulders, with dark hair cropped at his earlobes and an Abraham Lincoln beard, walked up to me.
    “You the new guy?” he asked, in a strong Mexican accent. His accent surprised me because he had white skin. Another one not friendly. Nobody on the crew so far had been. “I’m Jose,” he said without offering his hand. “I work for Kerr Construction too. Everybody else on the crew already left. We come in two double-cabin pickups, but everyone else left at six.” He pointed. “We have that old Chevy pickup to get home. You