The Son of Every Man

Chapter 6.3

Another half-hour down the highway, having crossed the border into Arizona, they reached what felt to Miguel like the farthest he had ever been from anywhere. The highway cut a remarkably straight line through a strange landscape of stunted, jagged peaks, rising from a sea of sagebrush and cactus.

Just after four, Eddie hit the brakes suddenly, scanning the road ahead. He made a right turn onto a dirt road so well-disguised that Miguel (figuring Eddie had lost his mind) braced himself for impact with the dense pocket of brush. But an opening emerged at the last second, and after about ten minutes minutes of bumping slowly along, the ragged lane dipped left, down around a low, rocky hill. The Headwaters camp lay cleverly tucked at its base.

It wasn't that different from what Miguel had pictured. A patched-up old single-wide played centerpiece to a pitiful cluster of canvas tents, flaps opening and closing in the slow, hot breeze. The largest structure, a metal-clad building similar in both scale and design to the warehouse, stood just past the tents. The ruins of an ancient wooden corral scooped up the far side of the camp in a crumbling half-circle.

The hill enshrouding the camp was capped with a massive, emerging boulder, rounded off like a bald man's head. It took on more of a monolithic quality the longer Miguel stared it.

"Each of you grab a jug of the water," ordered Eddie. "We'll bring them to the barracks."

Miguel and Gabe met at the trunk of the car. They both lifted out a swollen plastic gallon container, along with their bedding.

"Follow me," said Eddie.

Heavily-laden, they made their way into camp. Eddie had, of course, already made inroads with the workers here. A very slim white man, sweating and cursing as he walked a large black metal drum across the dusty yard, immediately stopped and straightened up, greeting Eddie with a "Sir." Eddie merely nodded at the man and kept moving. When they arrived at an upright tan canvas tent near the single-wide, Eddie lifted the flap and motioned for Miguel and Gabe to enter first. "These are the guest barracks," he said.

Miguel looked around the cramped, dim interior. There were four cots lined up against the back wall with very little space between them.

"I snore," Eddie announced, "so I'll take the one on the left. We'll skip one, and I'll let you two fight over who gets the other wall." Eddie placed his belongings on the unused cot. "Let's head over to the main house. I'll call the others in so you can meet them."

They approached the battered single-wide. An air-conditioning unit struggled in one of the windows, a wart on the tin exterior. Stepping inside, Miguel was reminded somewhat of the main house back at the Delta Encampment. But while theirs had been kept pristine through the years, no such effort had been made here. The walls were scuffed, scraped and even punctured here and there. An especially peculiar indentation near the edge of the small junky kitchen caught his eye. The fake wood panel was notably concave and cracked vertically. The area surrounding the crack hosted a vague maroon discoloration. He dropped his gaze to the carpet below, where the dark stain continued.

All-knowing Eddie guessed where Miguel's gaze was fixed. "Cleaned it up the best they could," he said. "It was six years ago now. Worker got with the boss's girl one night. Boss killed the worker right then and there. Of course, we had to clear everyone out for good. The camp was vacant for months while we assembled a new team. You can imagine how badly it hurt production," Eddie went on. "We were only pushing about eighty percent there for a while."

Miguel nodded compliantly, as if production were not the furthest fucking thing from his mind at the moment. Could this possibly be some sort of tasteless joke? He looked over to Gabe, but the kid just stared blankly at the floor.