Shovelbums
Shovelbums
Mike grew up in Florida, worked at a meat packing plant in Chicago for two years, quit that job, moved west, and started shovelbumming when he was twenty-two. At fifty-six he was terrified of the apocalypse and training his body to survive without electricity. He bought a rotisserie chicken each week, stored it in a dresser drawer in his motel, and ate a little from it each night. He believed whoever could survive the apocalypse would get to repopulate the earth.
Brooke laughed because she thought Mike was joking, but then he unwrapped a plastic bag and showed her his chicken carcass. She thought that was disgusting but she didn’t say so because this was her first summer as a shovelbum and she’d only just met Mike three hours before. Instead she talked about the success of her master’s thesis and the new Platypus hydration system that she was looking forward to carrying on their first job.
Calvin had a PhD that Mike distrusted and that Brooke envied. He specialized in Iron Age African archaeology, spoke three languages, could read six. But he still couldn’t find a full-time job. Even in the desert, even in June, he never carried water or food. Just a two-liter bottle of orange Fanta. He didn’t mind that it got hot or flat.
Trina, the crew chief, picked them up at the Salt Lake City airport. She was thirty minutes early and told them this was something they should get used to. She said breaks were never a second longer than fifteen minutes and lunches were exactly half an hour.
Together they moved from one job to another—never staying in a place longer than ten days, always sleeping in motels along the way—recording and updating sites for the National Register of Historic Places.
Cliff Dwellings
Deep in the Wasatch Range, three miles down a two-track road, past an old ranch, beyond an airway beacon station, and through a dried out ravine, they surveyed a string of wide-mouthed caves in the steep limestone cliffs. They found one unnatural rock alignment and a heap of dead bats. Trina filled out the inspection papers. They moved south.
They updated site records at Butler Wash—new pictures, new coordinates. They noted ground disturbances caused by erosion, graffiti on the east wall, and evidence of a party. Wine coolers, cigarette butts, Doritos.
Next, they surveyed Mule Canyon, Fry Canyon, Mesa Verde.
Chacoan Great House
The site inspection of Una Vida was delayed first on account of a monsoon and second on account of the stomach flu. When they finally reached the site four days late—all a few pounds lighter and a little gray—the inspection was delayed for a third time on account of ants. Enormous, pissed-off ants with black bodies and red asses that swarmed up their trowels, over their hands, under their shirts, into their pant legs.
Home-cooked meals
Brooke bought a toaster oven for her motel room. On Sundays she baked a week’s worth of sunrise muffins from scratch and warmed one each morning for breakfast. At night she baked casseroles and wandered the motel hallways looking for someone to share her food with because she hated to eat alone.
Shit-list
“Catclaw acacia,” Trina said.
“Locusts,” Mike said.
“Scrub oak,” said Calvin.
“No, wait,” said Mike. “Barrel cactus.”
“Oh,” said Trina. “I second that.”
“What about the prickly pear?” Brooke asked. “The ocotillo? The jumping cholla?”
“Those fuckers,” Mike said.
Joshua Tree National Park
A hundred and fifty miles east of Los Angeles, deep in the desert, they parked at the beginning of a washed-out road, walked seven miles, stopped for lunch in the shade of a creosote bush, walked for another three to a dried-out dam, and found nothing more than trash: fence staples, lightbulb fragments, crushed aluminum cans, nails, hinges, a single metal spoon, a tobacco tin, a clear glass bottle, balancing weights for a car wheel. The only item that could be dated was a single bullet casing from 1867. But even that was misleading. It was a left over from a film shoot. Disney, circa 1950. The movie: Chico, the Misunderstood Coyote.
They were supposed to be looking for petroglyphs, but what they really wanted to see was an oasis, a mirage, a conspiracy of the eyes, an optic error—something to call home about. They stared hard at the heat rising in waves off the desert floor. They wanted skeletons to appear amid dust storms, the distant mountain range to disappear. They tried hard to hallucinate something interesting, and when nothing appeared they made it up.
Mike said the rock mounds looked like the pregnant bellies of giant women, all of them out there on their backs, waiting for him to return to them.
Brooke thought the Joshua trees looked like angry men with spiky fingers pointing down at them, scolding them for coming out this far. Calvin disagreed. He thought they looked more like cheerleaders. Arms out wide, pom-poms in hand—an entire desert of trees cheering for them, all the way back to the Jeep.
Trina didn’t know about the rock mounds or the trees but she thought the tarantulas only looked like tarantulas, especially at sundown when they crossed the road looking for mates. She ran over them whenever she could even though the road signs said not to.
Attire
Only once, on their first day in Yuma, did Brooke wear her hair in pigtails under her wide-brimmed hat. When they gathered at the Jeep in the dark of the morning, Trina told her to take them out. Pigtails, she said, were Mike’s favorite.
Mike’s other favorite was his Bob Dylan t-shirt, the one with the hole across the back that measured 10.5 inches in diameter. When he bent over to inspect a surface deposit, fibers split, and the hole opened wider. By lunch he had a sunburn the shape of a circle. He asked Brooke to help him moisturize it with his lotion. She said no.
Brooke also said no when Trina asked her if she had duct tape in her pack. When Brooke asked why she needed it, Trina lifted her left foot and a thin stream of yellow sand fell to the desert floor. She had a hole the size of a nickel in the sole of her boot. With a little tape she thought they might last through the season.
To everyone’s surprise it was Calvin who had remembered the tape and he helped Trina with her boot, even though she told him he was doing it all wrong.
Yuma, Arizona
In the far corner of the desert, south of the Barry Goldwater Air Force Base, deep in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, eleven miles from the border, they found a Bible, a tube of lip balm, and a set of footprints. This wasn’t what they were looking for.
They followed the footprints ten meters east and found a purple sweatshirt and an empty water bottle. Thirty meters north, under a creosote bush, stuck on a low branch, Brooke found a piece of paper. It was a drawing, in crayon. A yellow sun in the top corner. Three stick figures hovering near the bottom of the page, standing on nothing. A man in a hat and sunglasses. A little girl in a purple dress. A woman in a matching tank top and shorts. Their legs were too short and their arms were too long, but they were all holding hands.
Brooke stood up. “We have to find them.”
“There’s more,” Calvin said. “Look.”
He had a woman’s shoe, a pair of dirty socks, and a child’s headband with three lace flowers covered in dust.
“They must be headed to Yuma,” Brooke said.
“Or Dateland,” Calvin said.
“Gila Bend, maybe,” said Mike.
“We’ll never find them,” said Trina.
“But we have to try,” Brooke said.
They all looked at Trina.
“Twenty minutes. And stay in the site bounds,” she said.
Brooke walked west, Calvin east, Trina north, and Mike south. They met twenty minutes later, and no one found anything worth mentioning.
They left what they could, for others. Brooke left her trail mix, her hat, and the water pouch of her hydration system. Calvin left his half-finished bottle of Fanta. Trina left her jar of peanut butter, the rest of her bread. Mike left messages of encouragement in the sand. Good luck. Be safe. Keep west.
Yuma, Part II
Mike said he checked the papers. Nothing on the front page about a missing family, so he read the whole goddamn thing.
Brooke said she hadn’t been able to sleep. She watched the news all night. Nothing there either.
“Really?” Calvin said. “You’re surprised?” Trina got in the Jeep. The others followed.
Artifact Scatter
“Trina, I think I found something over here,” Calvin said.
“I think it’s a tool.”
“I think it’s made from jasper.”
“I think it’s ancient.”
Calvin was always right, which made his uncertainty all the more irritating, and on most days Trina told him to shut up, to let them all just work in silence. But today she didn’t say anything and neither did Brooke or Mike. Today, they hoped Calvin wouldn’t stop because they didn’t want to hear the wind or birds or coyotes. They didn’t want to think about how thoroughly the sun was burning the skin on their necks. Or how the heat left their throats dry. Today they were happy to hear a human voice.
“I think there are more,” he said. “Yes. Here. Look.”
Yuma, Part III
Brooke said she was going back.
Calvin said he was going with her.
Mike said he wouldn’t let them go alone.
Trina said it was their day off—they could do whatever they liked.
They drove down the two-track road as far as they could and walked the rest of the way. Brooke’s hat was gone. As were Mike’s messages, Calvin’s Fanta, the bread, and the peanut butter. They stood together looking out across the creosote flats, and Brooke sensed movement was happening all around them. Mike kneeled down and picked up a small stone. He rubbed it between his fingers, put it back down. He found another and placed it beside the first. He found more and balanced one on top of another.
Calvin and Brooke joined him. They worked quietly, stacking the rocks, listening to the distant thunder of the military planes. It took them nearly an hour to get it right. Three pyramids.
“Not much of a gravestone,” Mike said.
Brooke snapped her head around.
“I thought they were cairns,” she said. “To show them the way.”
Per Diem
The company gave them each sixty-three dollars a day for food and lodging.
A night at the Frontier Motel in Yuma cost forty-five dollars and included a free continental breakfast. For dinner, they went to Low Country Restaurant and Saloon beside their motel. By the time Brooke, Mike, and Calvin showed up, Trina was already there, flipping through the local newspaper in front of her, pretending she wasn’t waiting for them.
“Anything?” Brooke said, pointing to the paper.
“No.”
Brooke didn’t feel like baking anything that night, so she bought a salad she shared with Calvin, a burger she shared with Trina, a plate of fries she shared with Mike, and a piece of chocolate cake she shared with all of them. Mike spent the rest of his per diem on beer. Calvin and Trina didn’t buy anything because Calvin was saving his money for a ticket back to South Carolina, where he’d be living with his parents unless he could find a job in the fall. Trina was saving her money to send to her daughter in Pittsburgh, for rent.
“You never told us you had a daughter,” Calvin said. “You never asked,” she said.
Family
Trina had a son, too. And although both children were grown, neither had a full-time job, and so they shared Trina’s apartment while she worked out west in the summers. In the winters they all lived in the apartment together, even though it only had one bedroom and the toilet was unreliable.
Mike had a brother in upstate New York and a sister in New York City. He hadn’t seen them in fifteen years because he once read an article that said the East Coast would be drowned in a tsunami event, and that prediction had kept him west of the Mississippi ever since.
Brooke was an only child and had recently started to resent her parents for not giving her a sibling because they were aging quickly, and she would have to take care of them.
Calvin was also an only child but never resented his parents because they’d lost two children before he was born.
Dreams
“I find them,” Brooke said. “In my sleep. That family. I’m walking out there alone. At the base of the mountains. And he’s right there. The man. He’s wearing gray pants, one sock, no shirt. His eyelids are burned red by the sun. His mouth is open, mid-gasp. Three cholla spines lodged in his palm, one in the back of his right hand, one in his cheek, another in his left shoulder. And his wife is there, too. Farther away, in a thin ribbon of shade, under the creosote bush. Her breasts are bare and shriveled, her mouth is open, coated with sand. And I’m down on my knees trying to clear her mouth of the sand. But the more I dig out, the worse it gets. The more sand there is.”
Mike drove the Jeep faster, said that was really sad. Calvin and Trina didn’t say anything. Brooke wished she had different stories to tell.
Yuma, Part IV
Mike ordered ten hamburgers from the dollar menu, ate one, and put the rest in the glove compartment. They walked four miles and stopped only once to inspect an old railroad track.
Trina cut lunch short by five minutes because Mike was late getting to the Jeep that morning, and she walked nearly half a mile in front of the group for the rest of the day. When they caught up to Trina she was sitting on a rock, boots off.
“Blisters,” she said.
“Heels or toes?” Brooke asked.
“Inside of my thighs. They popped when I sat down.”
She emptied her boots of sand, laced them up tight, a puff of yellow pollen springing from her laces. She walked alongside the group for the last two miles, never once complaining about the seams that were scraping the inside of her legs raw.
That night there was news of bodies on page twenty-three of the newspaper. Not out by the military base but farther south. And not a family of three, but five teenage boys.
“It’s like they want them to do it,” Mike said. “To cross here. Let the desert do the dirty work.”
Yuma, Part V
They met at the Jeep before the sun came up. No one said Good morning or How are you? or How’d you sleep? or How long will we be out? or How many miles today? Brooke didn’t have muffins for any of them, and she didn’t tell them about any of her dreams. They all just stared at each other in the dim light of the neon pink motel sign. Trina took out the inspection papers. She tipped them toward the light. She said she would take care of it, and they all knew she’d falsify the report. They went back to their rooms. They shut their doors. They slept.
Leftovers
Mike woke up at noon, hungry, and remembered the burgers he’d bought the day before. He went to the Jeep, checked the glove compartment. His burgers were gone. He knocked on the door to Trina’s room and told her they’d been robbed. Trina said it was unsanitary. He said he wanted his burgers back. She said they were in the trash bin behind the motel. He only found eight.
He knocked on Brooke’s door to see if she was hungry, but she didn’t answer.
He knocked on Calvin’s door who did answer. Brooke was sitting on the bed, her shoes still on, her hands tucked in the sleeves of her shirt. She had been crying. Mike left them two hamburgers and then went to his room where he ate alone.
Low Country Restaurant and Saloon
No one was hungry for dinner but they went anyway, and Trina told them they were already six days behind schedule and they should be ready to move on in the morning. She didn’t mention the missing family, but she did buy three rounds of margaritas and that felt to Brooke like some kind of apology.
Checkout
At 5:30 in the morning, Brooke went to the front desk. She showed the woman behind the counter the forty-three bites on the back of her right leg. She counted them twice, pointing at each red bump. The woman said her beds were clean. Brooke demanded a refund. The woman said there was no such thing. Brooke said she wanted to talk to the manager. The woman said she was it. The employee. The employer. The manager. The owner. Everything. And they didn’t do refunds.
At the truck, Brooke showed the crew. She said they itched like hell. Calvin said not to scratch them, it would only make them worse. Mike said he would rub some cream on her leg if she wanted.
“Get in the Jeep,” said Trina. “We’re already late.”
Flagstaff
They spent the first half of the day in the forest near Flagstaff, recording trees that had once been used as lookout towers, and the second half back at the Econo Lodge, searching their bodies for ticks. Brooke found two on her right ankle and one on her hip. Calvin offered to check her scalp, and Brooke said okay. She flipped her head forward and Calvin ran his fingers through her hair, behind her ears, across the back of her neck. He found one tick and a small twig. He crushed the tick between his fingernails. She offered to return the favor, but Calvin said Mike had already looked.
“You trust him?” she asked.
He bent his head. Brooke ran her hands around his neck and behind his ears. She took her time. She didn’t find any ticks.
“I made cookies,” she said. “They’re from a box. But they’re okay.”
It was Brooke’s grandmother who taught her how to bake, but Brooke lied and said she learned from watching cooking shows because she didn’t want to talk about dead people. They ate four cookies each on the curb in front of the motel, and then Brooke took out the drawing. She unfolded it slowly. Stared at it for a long time.
“I think about her,” Brooke said, pointing to the little girl. “I think about them,” Calvin said, pointing to the parents.
Keepsake
The thirteen compartments in Brooke’s backpack were intended to keep things organized. When they pulled out of Salt Lake City airport three months before, she had two tubes of ChapStick in the top pouch; her emergency sunscreen in the left side pouch; and her tampons, pads, and ibuprofen in the second smallest pouch on the front of the pack. She had two pencils and two pens secured in the slots intended for pencils and pens. Her map and compass were safely stored in the right pocket, which she could access without removing her backpack. Three months later, everything was thrown into the bottom of the pack. Everything except the crayon drawing, which she kept secure in the innermost pocket, the one with the zipper and the Velcro flap.
White Stallion Inn
There was no continental breakfast, but the owner did provide a brown-bag lunch for $3.95—a turkey sandwich, an apple, peanut butter crackers, and a brownie. Lunch wasn’t as advertised. They each got two slices of ham on white bread and a banana.
Some desert
They walked a sixteen-mile loop and didn’t record a single historic site.
Shit-list, continued
“Rattlesnakes,” Mike said.
“I think desert centipedes are worse,” Calvin said. “Bark scorpions,” said Brooke.
“The goddamn sun,” Trina said.
Some other desert
It was a creosote bush that punctured their two left tires, and it was only thanks to Trina that they carried two spares instead of one. Mike, Brooke, and Calvin were so grateful that they offered to change them, but when they couldn’t figure out how to release the second spare tire from the hold under the Jeep, Trina told them all to get out of the fucking way so she could fucking do it her fucking self. They all looked at each other. They laughed, Trina too, and then she said she was sorry but explained that it would be easier for her to do alone since the three of them were completely incompetent. She didn’t apologize for that.
“I think we’re all pretty tired of your insults,” Calvin said.
“Well I think we’re all tired of the way you start every sentence with ‘I think,’” she said.
Trina disappeared under the Jeep. Calvin looked hurt and then pissed, and he got down on his hands and knees and told Trina he thought she must be a terrible mother, treating people the way that she did. Brooke and Mike escaped into a patch of shade at the front of the Jeep. Mike pulled a small black notebook out of his pack. He flipped to the back, wrote something. Brooke asked what he was doing. He showed her how he recorded every job he worked on and every person he worked with. He said it would serve as evidence when the entire world went to shit. Evidence of jobs he’d done, of women he’d known, and of miles he’d walked.
The petroglyphs in Danger Cave.
The lime kilns in Eureka.
The lighthouse in Tacoma.
“Got trench foot on that job. Slept in a tent instead of the motel because sleeping under a roof felt like cheating.”
He started to take off his shoe to show her the scars. Brooke insisted he stop. “How long will you do this?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I like it most days. Even days like this.” He gestured to the back of the Jeep, where Calvin was still crouched, watching Trina work. I think you dropped a wheel nut, Trina. I think you can get it yourself. I think you’re the asshole.
Mike didn’t ask Brooke how long she would do this, because he knew it would be a small miracle if she finished out the season. She wasn’t cut out for this kind of work. Most people weren’t. He had a book full of names to prove it.
“Do you really think they’re dead?” Brooke asked. “That family?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “It didn’t look good.”
“Have you ever seen them before? Bodies, I mean. In the desert?”
“Never, no.” He opened his book. Flipped to the middle, pointed to a name. “But Jebediah did. Or at least he said he did. He was high when he told me. And he was probably high when he thought he saw it. So I didn’t really believe him.”
Mike was quiet, and then he looked away for a long time. Eventually he dropped his head and wrote something else in his book. Brooke asked if she could see.
“What are all the stars for?” she asked.
“My girlfriends,” he said.
There was a star next to her name. There wasn’t one next to Trina’s.
Regrets
Mike should have known it was Calvin who wouldn’t make it to the end of the season, and Brooke should have known better than to cry about it, especially in front of Trina.
But Brooke thought she had a right to be mad. Because he left in the middle of the night without saying goodbye, for one. Because he told Mike about his new job but not her, and Mike couldn’t even remember the name of the college, or what classes he’d be teaching, or whether it was a full-time position or part-time. Because Trina was the one he asked to bring him to the bus station. Because he hadn’t left an address. Or email. Or phone number. Not even a note. Not even a goodbye.
On this last point Brooke was wrong, but she wouldn’t realize it until almost two days later, when she undid the Velcro flap in her backpack, unzipped the inner-most pouch, and found not just the picture that she kept there but also a child’s headband, the flowers still coated with a thin layer of dust.
The Woman in White
Mike wasn’t sure what precisely was to blame for his food poisoning, but Brooke and Trina had a few guesses. All he wanted was to sit in the bathroom with his head against the cold wall while they inspected the Stage Station. Trina said she’d adjust his pay accordingly, and Mike said that seemed fair. Just one day. He’d be fine in the morning. He closed the door to his motel room and Brooke followed Trina to the Jeep.
“He’s faking,” Trina said.
“I don’t know. He looked a little yellow.”
“He’s scared of ghosts,” she said. “This place is supposed to be haunted.” When they reached the site, they checked the structural integrity of the building and all of the doors. Trina made notes of deterioration on the south- facing wall. They skipped inspection of the small graveyard at the back so they had enough time to check the trails around the building before the sun set. They made it all the way back to the motel without Trina once mentioning Calvin, or how Brooke cried when she found out he’d left, and this made Brooke think that maybe Calvin was wrong, that maybe Trina wouldn’t be such a bad mother.
Anza Borrego
On the first day of their final job, it snowed half an inch. They drove out to Gamble Ranch, where the only structural feature still standing was the outhouse. Mike took measurements. Trina recorded them. Brooke made the to-scale drawing. They stopped at the SoCo Gas Station for dinner. Mike got three sausage biscuits left over from breakfast. He talked the cashier into giving them to him for half- price. Trina got a piece of pizza. Brooke settled for a mini box of Frosted Flakes and a half pint of milk.
They drove through Galleta Meadows on their way back to the motel because Mike had heard rumors of a sculpture park. The rumors, it turned out, were true. Giant, rust-red metal statues scattered throughout the valley—dinosaurs, sea serpents, wild horses, mammoths, saber-toothed cats. Mike thought they’d return after the apocalypse. Trina thought that was an alarming thing for a scientist to believe. Brooke didn’t say anything because everywhere she looked she saw the little girl. Behind the yucca. Under the sagebrush. In the shadow of T-Rex. A flash of purple. A bit of brown hair. But it was a trick of the light only. Nothing there at all.
First published in the Winter/Spring 2019 issue of The Southampton Review.