a distracted way as he was getting a voice call, faintly and tinnily audible to them on the flip-up earplugs cantilevered out from the bows of his safety glasses. He indexed those down into his ears and answered the call, excusing himself with a nod and donning his hard hat as he stepped out into the sun and ambled over toward the livestock pen. His duties as Son of Aaron apparently encompassed not just construction management but inspection of sacrificial lambs.
A junior crew member bustled in to accommodate the visitors. He pulled a couple of folding chairs off of a stack and set them up at a folding table. This was strewn with printed documents kept from blowing away by rocks and ammunition magazines. He rearranged those to make a bit of space. “Y’all can help yourselves to water and iced tea,” he said, nodding toward a pair of insulated coolers on a smaller table nearby. Until he spoke Sophia had guessed he was in his late twenties, but now she thought eighteen. “I’d fetch it myself but my hands is filthy.” He held them up as proof and flashed a grin that would have been brilliant had his teeth been all present and not brown.
“Thank you so much, we will definitely help ourselves!” Sophia said loudly and distinctly, since the young man had his earplugs in.
“The reference to Iowa City?” Anne-Solenne asked. That was where they had stayed last night, in a boutique hotel next to a tapas bar.
“Where the big hospital is. So, another country to them. But they have to go there when they get sick. Like, to get a melanoma whacked off or whatever. They can’t afford Blue State hotel rooms or food, so they have to camp out on the periphery and cook over propane burners under tarps. Not a fun time.”
Anne-Solenne nodded. “Dentistry,” she said.
“Ted has normal-people teeth because he is old and grew up before this part of the world got Facebooked. After that, the people with education fled to places like Ames, Des Moines, Iowa City. Which includes dentists. A few mainline churches used to run charity dental clinics where you could get a bad tooth pulled, or whatever, but those are being chased away by these people.” Not wanting to be obvious, she glanced over at the gigantic cross. She took a sip of iced tea and grimaced.
“That bad?” Anne-Solenne asked.
“Sweet. Another cultural signifier. When we get to my aunt and uncle’s place they’ll serve it unsweetened, Northern style.”
The two women walked slowly back to the table, taking in the scene. Over by the livestock pen, Ted was explaining something to Julian, who looked dismayed. Most of the space around the site was given over to parking for workers’ pickup trucks. Not a single one had a license plate, but they were decked out with a range of stickers: a mix-and-match of Stars and Bars, Don’t Tread on Me, and what Phil had designated the Full Moab: in the center, REMEMBER or REMEMBER MOAB or simply MOAB, bracketed between a mushroom cloud and a profile silhouette of a man with a bowed head. The latter was a direct cut-and-paste job from the black “Remember POW/MIA” flag, which was also ubiquitous around here even though no American POWs or MIAs had existed for decades.
“Now, let me take the bull by the horns as far as the KKK Libel.” Ted had returned from inspecting the lambs. He set his weary bones down into a folding chair and indicated that the visitors should do likewise. Phil preferred to stand; he unzipped his paper coverall down to his navel, parted it to expose his chest, and stood sideways to them trying to catch the breeze. Sophia cataloged it as a microaggression, the hundredth today, not even worth noticing next to the twenty-story macroaggression that Ted and his crew were building. You couldn’t wear underwear beneath the bunny suit because that would miss the whole point unless your underwear was made of Levitican-certified unmingled fiber, and hers wasn’t, so her bra was down in a locker at the checkpoint and she couldn’t unzip as Phil was doing. She sat down next to Anne-Solenne. Ted’s nervous hands sorted and stacked documents—contracts, by the looks of them—as he calmly dismantled the KKK Libel. “Obviously you are not a white person, at least not one hundred percent,” he said, evaluating Sophia, “and I don’t know about him.” He cast a glance over at Julian, who was down on one