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Tierwater wouldn’t want to preach. He’d just want to explain what happened that night, how it stuck in him like a barbed hook, like a bullet lodged too close to the bone to remove, and how it was the beginning, the real beginning, of everything to come.
    All right.
    It’s still dark when they arrive, four–fifteen by his watch, and the concrete – all thirty bags of it – is there waiting for them, not ten feet off the road. Andrea is the one who locates it, with the aid of the softly glowing red cap of her flashlight – watchman or no, it would be crazy to go shining lights out here, and the red, she explains, doesn’t kill your night vision like the full glare of the white. Silently, they haul theconcrete up the road – all of them, even Sierra, though sixty pounds of dead weight is a real load for her. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Dad,’ she says when he asks if she’s okay – or whispers, actually, whispers didactically – ’because if Burmese peasants or coolies or whatever that hardly weigh more than I do can carry hundred–and–twenty–pound sacks of rice from dawn to dusk for something like thirty–two cents a day, then I can lift this.’
    He wants to say something to relieve the tension no one but him seems to be feeling, something about the Burmese, but they’re as alien to him as the headhunters of the Rajang Valley – don’t some of them make thirty–six cents a day, the lucky ones? – and the best he can do is mutter ‘Be my guest’ into the sleeve of his black sweatshirt. Then he’s bending for the next bag, snatching it to his chest and rising out of his crouch like a weightlifter. The odd grunt comes to him out of the dark, and the thin whine of the first appreciative mosquitoes.
    In addition to the concrete, there are two shovels and a pickax secreted in the bushes. Without a word, he takes up the pick, and once he gets his hands wrapped round that length of tempered oak, once he begins raising it above his head and slamming it down into the yielding flesh of the road, he feels better. The fact that the concrete and the tools were here in the first place is something to cheer about – they have allies in this, confederates, grunts and foot soldiers – and he lets the knowledge of that soothe him, his shoulders working, breath coming in ragged gasps. The night compresses. The pick lifts and drops. He could be anywhere, digging a petunia bed, a root cellar, a grave, and he’s beginning to think he’s having an out–of–body experience when Andrea takes hold of his rising arm. ‘That’s enough, Ty,’ she whispers.
    Then it’s the shovels. He and Teo take turns clearing the loose dirt from the trench and heaving it into the bushes, and before long they have an excavation eighteen inches deep, two feet wide and twelve feet across, a neat black line spanning the narrowest stretch of the road in the roseate glow of Andrea’s flashlight. It may not be much of a road by most standards, but still it’s been surveyed, dozed, cleared and tamped flat, and it brings the machines to the trees. There’s no question about it – the trucks have to be stopped, the line has to be drawn. Here. Right here.
Our local friends have chosen well,
he thinks, leaning on the shovel and gazing up into the night, where two dark fortresses of rock, discernible now only as the absence of stars, crowd in over the road: block it here and there’s no way around.
    They’re tired, all of them. Beat, exhausted, zombified. Though they dozed away the afternoon at the Rest Ye May Motel and fueled themselves with sugar–dipped doughnuts and reheated diner coffee, the hike, the unaccustomed labor and the lateness of the hour are beginning to take their toll. Andrea and Teo are off in the bushes, bickering over something in short, sharp explosions of breath that hit the air