forms up. Rock crushers, slurry mixers, water trucks, sprayers, asphalt cookers, and all the support vehicles—cooks’ RV, first aid RV, Roy’s office RV, and the bunk RVs needed for construction far from civilization—organize to the side. The project is underway. Roy whistles over a dump truck and swings into the cab beside the driver. He has a project, a budget, a deadline. A most inflexible deadline.
The first two days they bust rock, tons and tons of it. The demolition crews rove ahead of the ’dozers, blowing the largest boulders and rock ledges apart. The bulldozers blade the beginnings of a roadway through the rubble while front-end loaders shovel the debris into dump trucks, which take it to the crushers. More trucks bring the crushed product back to the route, where spreaders and graders form it into road base. The work proceeds with practiced smoothness.
Roy employs the best demo expert in the business. It is widely acknowledged that Kath can trim dynamite sticks to the millimeter by eye, and juggle a dozen blasting caps at once, stone sober (which everyone knows is much harder than juggling them drunk). She brings the mountains low and levels valleys, makes the rough places smooth and plain as they follow the ruler-straight line of survey flags westward.
On the morning of the third day, out past Kingdom Come, Kath brings Roy the bad news. “Survey flags disappeared last night, boss.” Roy has been expecting trouble since the moment they started the project; he is almost relieved that something definite has finally happened so his stomach can stop winding itself in knots. This problem will be easy to solve; he expects more serious attempts at delay to follow.
“Get Jorge and his crew out there with the transit. And Kath—set guards tonight.” She nods and goes off to rouse the surveyors and to unlock the armory.
The heat mounts by the hour, and by noon it is unbelievable. Roy makes sure his people have plenty to drink, but most shrug off the temperature. No es nada, they say, and work on stoically. Felipe pushes back his Stetson and spits into the dust. “This is nothin’, Jefe. El Paso in July—now that’s muy caliente.”
The afternoon brings a spot of good news. Roy’s nephew, Ramón Benitez, brings him a sample of a new slurry. Ramón is Roy’s sister’s son, the first in the extended Sandoval familia to get a college degree. At Texas A&M University he studied chemical engineering and agronomy, and he is fond of saying “El Dios never made a better chemical engineering factory than the brown Jersey cow.” His great ambition is to own a small dairy herd of his own; for now he makes Roy’s job easier by constant tinkering with the many surfacing, binding, and weather-proofing chemicals used in paving operations.
He shows Roy a capped jar of thick, gray sludge, and a chunk of sulfurous, flaking rock. “It’s this local brimstone, Tío Roy, from Hell’s Half Acre. We can crush it and use it instead of fly ash. It saves us a lot of money, the slurry spreads easier, and sets up faster and harder.” Roy examines the test plot. The reformulated slurry has set up into a smooth, hard surface full of tiny glittering flakes. “¿Qué es?” he asks.
“Iron pyrite, Tío. Fool’s gold,” Ramón answers. Roy okays the change. It will save them more than money; it will save time they would have had to spend trucking in the fly ash from power plants back in East Texas. They start spreading the new slurry that afternoon. The first section will be ready to tar by the next morning.
That night only a few survey flags disappear. Guards with rifles patrol the route, setting off road flares every few hundred feet. They report vague shapes skulking in the darkness just outside the circles of light, but only one sharpshooter connects with a target, and a skull-jangling howl greets his success. Morning reveals the corpse of a wolf-like creature four times the size of a Great Dane. “Hellhound,” Kath says, pushing the animal’s lip back with the barrel of her rifle to show a fang as long as her hand.
Kath brings the news to Roy, who is watching his tar boss roll on the first layer of asphalt sealer. Roy is an asphaltenophile, a connoisseur of heavy hydrocarbons. He knows his tars, from Athabascan bitumen to Trinidadian pitch. “I love the smell of asphalt in the morning,” he tells Kath. “It smells like… progress.” He is in too