I slept with the television some nights, the best nights. It was no larger than a basketball, so it fit above my shoulder in the crick of the mattress where somebody must have sat a lot. It was a used mattress. I wedged the television in the crick with a spare pillow and watched late shows. But sometimes I fell asleep cradling the spare pillow and the TV’s face fell forward and sparkled warm static on my shoulder.

If not awakened by the screen’s heat at 4 a.m., I awakened anyway to its glow. And I would have to crawl out of bed and unhook its tin foil antenna, which sprawled behind all the posters above my bed like a river and its tributaries, and I’d move the box back to its stand across the room, which I’d inevitably knock over. If it’s true that watching TV too close makes you go blind, then I know the root cause of my thick glasses.

Falling back to sleep then came easy. My growing body felt always as if it had run five miles and in the hours before dusk felt especially numb and clumsy.

In the cold dusk an hour later I awakened for good. Prayer came as usual by rote and with a little benign resentment. I’d mutter a few pleas for safety and forgiveness every day over breakfast cereal, wondering couldn’t you just say it once and count on the all-knowing God to remember your preferred settings. You just didn’t feel anxious about sin or hell at that ungodly hour.

I sipped hazelnut instant coffee from a travel mug that mom just got me. It never came with me to Hoffman’s because I feared forgetting it in the field or losing it off Bob’s truck. He had a reputation. Two kids already fell off.

Something burning? Dad asked. No, I said. It’s those crystals, he said, and said no more about them. Then he said a few words about if I had enough clothes and a long sleeve shirt and sunscreen. The paradox of farm work is you’re all the time cold or hot, and always burning.

We’re very close to the sun in Manhattan.

I asked if we should warm up the truck, but you didn’t have to this time of year, he said. But it seemed cold enough for that extra step and we pretty much did warm it up before heading out, the both of us in the cab, saying nothing.

Dust swirled when we climbed in. The morning gloaming was deep gray and pink and we sat still and dumb as mannequins, our visible breath the only indicator we were alive. Dad toed the accelerator like a piano pedal for five minutes till the truck idled without his foot on the gas.

The Bridger mountains still had snow.

***

You’re OK walking home after? Dad said.

Yeah, I said.

If it’s bad out ask Carol if she’ll take you home all the way, he said.

There she is, I said.

All right, he said. See you later. Tell me if Bob drives too fast.

It was our longest conversation of the day.

Sorry, Carol said, leaning over and opening the car door. She was a few minutes late.

Carol drove fast but not like Bob Hoffman, and she wore tight pants and sat with her legs wide and flat as paper and I thought she was a strange shape. Like a boneless chicken breast. Women in my family were not built like that. She was probably pretty, but I was not old enough to judge, and she smelled like shampoo. I couldn’t talk to her very well. Her daughter Jaimee had fine skin and soft arm fuzz in the sunshine but I didn’t think of her as much in the car. She didn’t laugh or make any noises there. But in the field she was my favorite, despite her making no sound there either. The glowing wheat beards made me think of her arms. She was stronger, hairier, and more graceful than I was. The way she sliced through rows and stooped like a heron to pull the rogues made me think of her naked. Or of the dream I had of her once: I held her in my arms and her butt was cold. Were butts cold? I had not felt one other than my own, and it was cold sometimes.

I only ever thought deliberately of sinning while in the field. Out there it was always too damp or cold or muggy or blazing to think of anything else. So, I thought of the flesh, both cold and warm flesh. That paradox! But in the car I thought of no one and nothing, since we all know each thought’s destiny is hell or the road to it.

Jaimee, you bring sunscreen? Carol said.

No answer because she probably did.

Jay? Carol said.

I put it on already, I said, and I had. It was cold and oily and I put it only on my neck and nose because I was not old enough to take my shirt off in the field. Besides, we quit at noon or 2 depending on Bob’s mood, or if he was in trouble with a kid’s parents.

Supposed to get warm, Carol said. Use Jaimee’s if she didn’t forget it.

Jaimee made no sound.

We were the last to arrive at Cole’s yard, where Bob and seven kids I did not like waited.

Tell me if he drives too fast, Carol said, and Jaimee said she would. And when Jaimee opened her door I said I would too and we stepped out together and I looked at her but she did not look at me. Carol hit her elbow on the door handle and said shit! but continued cranking down her window. Then she yelled sorry! to Bob, who didn’t say anything, just nodded his head and waved back with two fingers at his eyebrow.

Jaimee and I slid our small butts onto the gray, weathered flatbed we’d ride out into the field in. Metal and wood nipped cold against my skin and I wished I had gloves. Jaimee had gloves. They were strawberry and new and their cotton fuzz raised up like a crowd of hands, like suppliants to the sunshine, or like seedlings opening in a moist paper towel you place in a windowsill. I thought of Jaimee’s arms when I looked at her hands. I always thought of them. Even when I thought of her cold butt I thought of them. I’d never known a girl with so much hair there. More than I had. Maybe she wasn’t Carol’s daughter. Carol had bare arms that were strange to look at, like a shaved cat, and she looked nicest in a long sleeve shirt.

Not so the daughter.

I wished she didn’t have long sleeves on now.

I thought ahead to 10 a.m., when the fields would send their steam up into the sizzling air and our roguing pants would be muggy-soggy from the wheat beard dew soaking our crotches. That’s when Jaimee, sweltering from looking over grain and carrying pounds of mud on each shoe, would roll her sweatshirt over her head, shake out her hair, and tie the sweatshirt around her waist to drag like a robe over the grain. Then she’d daub a bead of perspiration from her hairline, and when the hair on her head was straightened she’d flatten that of her arms. She’d curl a hand gently over her bicep and stroke downward, combing toward her wrists and raising her arms and caving her chest in and pushing her bony shoulders forward.

If she caught me staring she would smile but did not talk because we weren’t allowed to. Except once when she did, when we two had gone too far downfield and Bob yelled for us to wait for the group. We stood there in our mud-caked shoes clutching bundles of talls and wild oats and she asked what grade I was going into.

Fifth, I said.

Do you have sports in fifth grade at Christian? she said.

Not yet, I said.

She laughed, but not at me. She laughed because of the unfairness. We should have sports in fifth grade.

We don’t have it yet at Manhattan either, she said. Just gym and stuff. I can’t wait for sports.

Me neither, I said.

She turned and squinted, looked back for the group. Meanwhile, I searched inside myself and found I was incapable of asking a question, any question, to keep our conversation going. I had no idea what she might want to answer. When she turned to look at me, she caught my vacant, dumb eyes, so she didn’t linger there. And we just stood there in the wheat, facing the bottom of the field, fourteen paces apart, and looked over the ditches and fields and acre-plots of the Gallatin Valley, the green and yellow quiltwork of Dutch farmers.

I’d thought since what to ask Jaimee if on a hill alone with her again but still hadn’t come up with anything. It was difficult to think on the back of Bob’s truck, where I usually tried extra hard to think up these things.

It’s hard when you’re hanging on for your life.

The truck now turned sharply off the highway onto a grass path next to a ditch whose name I didn’t know. It was on these paths Bob’s driving was most infamous. He didn’t care for what lurked in the long grass–whether it be mainline, gopher mounds, fence wood–or how the shape of the path might toss his truck bed full of kids.

A square-faced girl named Camilla held her tiny sister Dawn to the bed with both hands like she was pressing a wound. But she finally had to lace the fingers of one hand through the metal grid of the flatbed’s headboard and clutch Dawn’s coat with the other hand to keep her on the truck. Bob’s nephew, safe in the truck’s cab, slid open the rear window like a Catholic confessional and yelled hold on! and Bob said something about burning daylight hours. I felt bad since we were driving fast because we were late and we were late because of me and Jaimee. We were directly responsible, maybe, for a few extra mph this morning.

We lurched and hopped over a sinkhole and the truck shook like a wet dog. My guts jumped and huddled near my lungs and heart. Bob jammed the truck into a lower gear and it screamed like a semi-truck. Our path twisted along the ditch escarpment and I saw dirt turn to mud in the green path’s tire grooves, so I knew the bridge was ahead.

I joined a few small hands clutching the truck bed’s 2×4 sideboard and endured a bump that flung my rear end to the edge of the bed along with some old oil filters. My legs flailed for purchase but flew off the truck’s tail and I flapped there humping the metal edge. My boot-toes flopped to the ground and ruddered in the dirt and mud and I groped along splinters for a knot hole in the bed I could clutch. All the kids were laughing and Bob slowed down some. But it was too late.

I let go.

The truck stopped past the bridge. I lay in the mud before bridge.

Holy shit! Camilla said.

No cursing, Dawn said.

I straightened myself onto my butt and wiped my caked shirtfront. The laughter died to titters and giggles.

We had to quiet down.

There was none of that allowed in the fields, except for grownups.

I scanned smirking faces and saw stolid among them Jaimee, rock-like, glowering into cupped hands. Her gloves had lost their strawberry color. In her palms instead was a paste of old dust and engine oil, black as dried deer shit. She smeared it on her thighs.

Won’t your mom be mad? I asked. It was not my best question but it was of the moment and at least I finally had one.

She’ll be mad about something else, she said, and she jumped off the truck bed.

Then we paced out to our roguing positions and waited for Bob’s command to walk. I stayed on my side of the bridge, near where I’d been dropped. It was where we’d left off yesterday.