He had the top bunk

It rained on the ninth and then again on the eleventh. So I had about four days of good dirt before it all went back to powder.

You can't grade a dry road. All you're doing is moving dust from one side to the other and building a windrow that blows back into the lane by Thursday. So when the ground's damp I'm in the seat by five. That week Rowena had my kids in the mornings too, which isn't the arrangement. The arrangement is after school until Charlene gets off at six. Rowena didn't say anything about the mornings. She doesn't ever say anything.

I run a 140 out of the Chinle yard. It was the BIA yard before it was ours. My uncle Harrison ran a blade out of there and he's the one who got me on, the summer after I graduated, 2000. Bus routes first, every time, because a bus bottoms out and I end up standing in somebody's office. So it's the Nazlini road, then the one past the windmill that goes up toward the sheep camps and quits being a road about four miles in. You put a crown on it so the water runs off the sides instead of sitting in the wheel tracks. Most of the job is the ditch, not the blade.

Weather comes over the rim from the west in the afternoon and you get about forty minutes of watching it before it's on you. In August that's most days. Some days you're in full sun the whole time with a wall of rain standing over Black Mesa.

A 140 has a cutting edge bolted along the bottom of the moldboard and you wear it down to nothing over a season. You can hear when it's gone. The machine starts sounding like it's pushing the dirt instead of cutting it. I changed mine out in the shop on a Friday with Emerson holding the light.

People wave when you're on the machine. Some of them stop and roll the window down to tell you where the bad spot is, and it's almost always a bad spot I already know about, and I let them tell me. There's an old lady out past the windmill brings coffee out to the cab if she sees me.

Emerson's on my crew. Twenty-two, from Many Farms, related to me on his mother's side. He got picked up in Window Rock in July coming back from the rodeo at Tsaile. Point one-nine. It's his second one, so he's looking at real time and not weekend time.

They put him in the cab with me because he can't drive anything now, county or otherwise, so he rides along and gets out and sets the cones. His grandma's been calling Rowena about it. Everybody calls Rowena about everything. She's on the register at Bashas' four days a week and then she's got my three the rest of it.

I rolled a truck on 191 in 2009, south of the junction, at night. Nobody else in it. There's a rod in that leg now and the ankle doesn't hinge, so I go up the grader steps sideways. Then in 2010 they gave me five months in Gallup on the DUI. They held my job for me. I never asked why and nobody ever told me.

Rowena drove down twice. She brought our mom the second time, and our mom sat there the whole hour and hardly said anything, and Rowena talked about a washing machine she was trying to get somebody to haul off.

It's a building, is all it is. You're in a pod with a dayroom in the middle and the TV up on a bracket where nobody can reach it, running all day whether anyone's watching or not. Bologna on white bread. The phone eats money. There's a window in that dayroom set up high and the only thing it shows you is sky, and after a couple months I could read the weather off it.

There were two of us in the cell and he had the top bunk. Jason. Zuni, or his mother was. It went on most of the five months and neither of us ever said one word about it. Then my time was up and I got my truck back from my cousin Verna's off Boardman and drove home on 491.

There's a guy on the maintenance crew at the chapter house now, Leander, came up from Gallup three or four years back. He was in that pod. His wife works the deli at Bashas' with Rowena. He said hey to me in the parking lot in March and I said hey. The windmill road washed out about a week after that and I was up there most of April.

Winters I'm on the plow. Same yard, and I take 191 north and then the canyon road. We don't use salt out here. It's cinders out of the pit past Many Farms, and the wing will throw them nice if you've got your speed right. Two in the morning, nothing out there but a dog. Charlene sleeps through most of it. One night she was up when I came in and she said you want eggs. I said no. She made them anyway. My youngest doesn't sleep through it either and she'll be at the window when I pull in.

I go to the clinic every three months because Rowena makes the appointment and then texts me the day before and again that morning. They caught the sugar in 2017. The gal there takes my shoes off and looks at my feet. She tells me I need better ones. The good ones in Gallup run a hundred and sixty dollars.

We were parked at the cattle guard on 4 waiting on the belly dump when Emerson asked me what it's like in there. He'd been working up to it a couple of weeks. He'd bring up Gallup and then start talking about something else.

So I told him some of it. The mat's thinner than you're picturing. Have somebody put money on your books before you go in, because that first week is the long one, and his grandma will do it, I told him to just ask her. Don't take anything off anybody, not a soup, not a stamp, because then you owe him. He asked how you get a bottom bunk. I told him you ask for one, and if that doesn't work you get a limp. He laughed.

Then he asked was it scary and I said no, it's boring. Five months is a long time to be bored.

The belly dump showed around three and we got base course down on the last quarter mile before the light started to go.

I dropped Emerson at his grandma's in Many Farms. Then I took the machine back to the yard and hosed the dust out of the radiator.