“Hope it don’t rain . . .”
“It’ll be fine. I’ll probably see you up to the shack . . . nights . . . late. I gotta get . . . Midland and . . . some of the boys up there.”
“See you then,” Crain said. “Find out about Max.”
* * *
Hawkes was standing on the side of a mountain where the only trail was cut out of the dirt by off-road four-wheelers. She could get a pickup from I-10 southeast to what they called “the hole,” and she could get the same pickup from the town of Pershing northwest to the hole, but the hole was a problem.
The hole was actually an arroyo slicing down the mountain right into the Rio Grande, created by storm runoff. The solution to the problem was to knock the edges off the hole with a Bobcat, using the loose dirt to fill in the rocky bottom, covering stones the size of footballs. Getting a trailer up to the hole with the Bobcat was a trial, and the Bobcat itself was the smallest one made, which didn’t help. They’d spent ten days working on the road, trailering the machine as far as they could, then using it to smooth entry and exit lines and knock down center mounds on the two-tracks until they got to the hole.
Not everybody would have a four-wheeler, they thought, so after knocking the edges off the hole and partially filling it, they widened the bottom, building a parking platform. If some couldn’t make it up the slope, they’d pull the truck off until everybody else was through, then they’d use a winch to pull the truck up the far side.
Once across the hole, they’d be fine, even in the dark.
* * *
“What do you think?” Hawkes asked Rand Low, looking down the hole.
“We gotta pack it better if we’re gonna put sixty or seventy or eighty pickups across it. But I could take the truck down there now and get it out. Those rocks down there actually make a decent foundation.”
“If you can’t get out, we’d have a long walk,” Hawkes said, hands on her hips.
“Ah, we’re good,” Low said. “Let’s give it a shot. If it doesn’t work, we’ll pull it out with the Bobcat.”
They were all soaked with sweat and brown with dust. Terrill Duran was wearing a bandanna around his face as he worked the Bobcat. He killed the engine and walked over and asked, “You wanna try?”
“We’re talking about it,” Hawkes said doubtfully. “If you guys think so . . . Take it easy.”
Low got in the pickup, eased it up to the hole, then let it roll down over the edge, slowly, to the bottom, fifteen feet below, across the built-up pad, then up the other side.
At the top, on the far side, Low got out and called, “It’s soft, we need to pack it some more, but it’ll work fine. I think we’re done with it.”
“C’mon over,” Duran called back to him. “I’ll push some more dirt down and we can pack it, and then we can run the truck up and down it for a while.”
They gave it another hour, rolling the pickup and the tiny Bobcat up and down the arroyo wall, until the dirt was solid. When they were finished packing, they took a heavy-bristled push broom out of the truck and pushed white surface dirt back over the raw earth of the refashioned arroyo. When they were done, Low stuck a couple of rod-mounted red reflectors into the dirt on both sides of the track into the hole.
“How about we go into Pershing and check in to the motel, like we talked about?”
“Waste of money, if we leave tonight,” Crain said. “And it’s a risk.”
“We got the money,” Low said. “Not much risk. And I stink. We all stink. Instead of stinking all the way back to El Paso, I’d like to get cleaned up and maybe spend an hour in the pool. We all brought our swimsuits.”