THE WIND WAS UP, and I was the new guy, so I expected to be assigned the nasty job. Being from the East, that wide open horizon behind Gary as he returned stunned me again, the way it still does. It was early morning, and the sun was doing that crazy thing with optics; before sunrise rays refracts off cloud layers so that just above the horizon, you see the bottom parts of the solar disc coming down out of nothing. Mirage-like. It would do that until the real sun rose. We would feel the dry heat with it. He came back with three small sticks in his hand. Not really sticks, not out here in this New Mexico scrubland. Bits of bramble was the best he could do. Leyland was staring straight at the sun, again.

​

"Hey, grab one." Gary nudged Leyland. Leyland selected one, then I did too. It didn't seem unfair that I got the short one.

​

"Give me a one, a one-fifty, and a two. Three will do it," Gary said to me, thumbing through his paperwork.

​

That's how I came to trudge a hundred feet, one-fifty, and two hundred feet through ten-inch-deep cow shit just so the pipeline company would know if the surface level dropped a quarter inch or not. These desolate acres contain a feedlot. The cattle are penned in with all the water and salty food they can dream of before they are weighed and sold by the pound. They eat; they shit; I'm not certain they ever sleep. Most days we pulled chains — dragged five-hundred-foot tape measures along the ground to measure pipeline distances. We didn't survey many feedlots, thank God.

​

 

Rifle guns, that night

​

"WE BOUGHT GUNS. It's the only way they'd cash our paychecks." Arlen, the X-ray ferret called out to us when he and the rest of the x-ray crew walked out of the Walmart, seven of them with seven new rifles.

​

One of the others called out to Arlen, "They're rifles. You don't call them guns, fucktard."

​

The city of Roswell fell on hard times when the meat packing plant was shut down, and alien tourism was iffy, so the residents were happy to see pipeline workers roll into town, suspicious but pleased we had money. And except for weekend, we weren't even in town during daylight hours.

​

For weeks we'd be miles away sighting in corners, and we'd hear the x-ray crew shooting at rocks or anything else they could think of as targets. Pop, pop, pop.

​

"We oughta buy rifles too," I said to Gary. "We could go duck hunting."

​

"Ducks?" Leyland looked at us like we were crazy.

​

"You wouldn't think they'd have ducks out here," I said, "but there's a line of faults and artesian water holes strung from Canada all the way down, and ducks and geese migrate along it."

​

"Out at Bottomless Lake they do a lot of that," Gary said. "They drink so much beer not many ducks get hurt."

​

Leyland dragged his feet as we walked and said to himself, "I feel like I am this permeable rock under our feet; it's good at preserving limited precipitation."

​

We both looked at him.

​

"You need to piss?" Gary said.

​

"Reminds me, we need beer," I said to Gary.

​

The water from shallow wells around sucks up soluble minerals from the immediate limestone substrate and tastes like vile chalk soup with metal shavings. That's what New Mexico is. That and the deep wells reaching down into the Ogallala Aquifier. Ogallala water is delightful, filtered through hundreds of miles of sand and gravel, with interlayered beds of silt and clay. So, this bleak land can be more. I want it to be more. I want everything to be Ogallala water.

​

​

Wednesday

​

GARY LAID IN, and me and Leyland went out alone and worked a point of intersect. That's where the pipeline changes direction. This change was a break over a small hill down into an arroyo, a dry steambed. Lots of them had to be crossed, but we were surprised by something in the bottom of this one. I blame myself for letting Leyland drive out there in central nowhere. He yanked hard on the steering wheel. "Hey!" I yelled uselessly as our jeep twisted into a rock outcrop and hung precariously.

​

"I had to. Look," he said, pointing out of the window. A pronghorn antelope had wedged itself between rocks, tangled up with a cayote it had somehow killed. The pronghorn was in pain, half gutted, dying silently. In its eyes we must have appeared like some noisy, new torment, but we were as trapped as it was. The Jeep was canted sideways and hanging at almost forty-five degrees.

​

We had to climb out of the passenger window. Me, then Leyland. After looking first at each other for damage, Leyland stared dumbfounded at the antelope like he wasn't sure yet if it was real. "Forget that," I said, looking away from the antelope. "We got our own shit to fix."

​

"If we pull the Jeep backwards, it'll flip 'cause the weight will shift," Leyland said, but the look in his eye — something was bothering him, maybe the heat, maybe the situation, maybe something weird. The wind hummed in the rocks, from a low pitch into a higher tremolo.

​

"We'll turn the wheel hard and push," I said. "If we get it straightened out, we can get it back on the track somehow."

​

But we weren't physicists. The Jeep shuddered in the dust and when we pushed, it slipped, slid, and then slowly rolled over and went belly up.

​

It had just been a bad reaction when Leyland drove us into the rocks. I might have done it too. The thing is, he was the one to load the Jeep up with beer but no water. A case of Coors, and in this environment, beer is the opposite of water. That I did blame him for. I wasn't sure when all this would stop being almost comical; I could already feel the dry heat sucking the moisture out of me.

​

The pronghorn panted with a whistling sound, faster now, but it no longer seemed concerned about us. We were too stupid to be a threat, it probably decided, with our upside-down vehicle. It tried to lick its torn abdomen but whimpered with the attempt.

​

The electrical system was busted on the Jeep so we couldn't use the horn. "We're miles the fuck away from everywhere," I said.

​

"When we don't show up tonight, Gary will know where we are. He'll come." The radios we didn't have would be the next thing I brought up in the office. "It's too far to walk."

​

Leyland sat down in the six inches of shade the upturned Jeep afforded, looking at the pronghorn. "We need to know whether things we can't see exist."

​

"What?" I said, straightening up.

​

"You know when we do chain pulls, we go to five hundred feet."

​

"So?"

​

"We don't really know how we're doing that. I mean, first, we're going halfway from five hundred feet to two fifty. The half of that is one twenty-five; then sixty-two and a half, and so on. We always have to go halfway before we can go anywhere."

​

"Are you okay?"

​

"I read this stuff by a guy named Zeno."

​

"Oh shit," I said. "I know who that is."

​

"Zeno would have liked it out here, don't you think? He said we can't get anywhere because we always have to get halfway first, and before we can do that, we have to get halfway to that halfway point first, and half to that before and so on. The thing of it is, we do get places, so there must be something so small there isn't a halfway point. That's two dimensions."

​

The antelope pushed at the coyote. The coyote was dead, but the antelope wanted distance between them, almost with disdain. We watched silently for a while.
 

"Leyland, you never talked to me like that."

​

"I'm not stupid. People think I am." Then he started talking with his eyes closed. "I read a lot. And people think Zeno's a meaningless paradox, ya know. Him trying to prove by logic that we can't move anywhere, but I think it's something different. I think there really is a place so small there isn't a halfway. That's the way I figure it. I mean I know we can move — because we do that, so it's got to be the other thing. I think that's what a two-dimensional world is, a flat world with no left, no right, just a slice so thin we can't understand it. The way I got it figured out, Zeno must have thought everything is stacked up windowpanes."

​

It kinda' made sense to me. "Beer's gonna get hot," I said.

​

The antelope snorted; the sun had moved into its eyes.

​

About three beers in I said, "I had this thing about Einstein and four dimensions that used to worry me."

​

"Do you think that's the same thing?"

​

"I don't know, maybe. It kinda' sounds the same to me," I said.

​

"I mean if you were in two dimensions, you could figure out what three dimensions looks like from there. So, we could sit here and figure out four dimensions just by talking about it," Leyland said.

​

"Well look at you. Who's the fucking philosopher now?"

​

The antelope whimpered when pain stirred it. The eyes were more human than fish or birds, and they looked at me almost with embarrassment. I had come here to make my living and stepped into unforeseen circumstances, and there he was having done the same. We both lived within our predicaments. Little children's eyes when they are dressed up for Easter, not knowing what reaction people will have seeing them, waiting for that reaction from others before deciding how they felt, Leyland looked that way too. All of us waiting for something. What else could we do?

​

Off in the far distances were gun shots, soft like small taps because they were so far away. Pop, pop, pop. The x-ray crew. Too far to yell.

​

"We should have bought those rifles," I said to no one. If we had bought a rifle, we could attract their attention. Sound signals posted on the trilling wind.

​

"It's like windowpanes," Leyland said again, like he had solved something.

​

An hour later I said, "You smell that?" My voice was raspy. All that beer, I had pissed out what little water I had in me.

​

"Sausage?"

​

"Sausages and dust. The x-ray crew is grilling sausages on that big freaking truck they got," I said.

​

"What you figure, a mile?"

​

"Not more than two, for sure." The pipeline is two dimensional — you drive up it or down it. The land around it is so fragile, the ranchers sue if we get off the track. "They'll find us if they are headed in."

​

Leyland looked at the antelope and said slowly, his voice as coarse as mine, "Do you think he'd eat a cantaloupe?"

​

Cantaloupe?

​

"A what?"

​

"A cantaloupe, a nice juicy cantaloupe? Antelope, cantaloupe. You know, antelope, cantaloupe, rifle scope." He mimicked a finger gun, sweaty face taking aim.

​

I leaned back into the minuscule shade without speaking. Why would I?

​

"Cantaloupe," Leyland mumbled and chuckled to himself. He clenched his shoulder and made a pawing motion, oblivious to my observation through slit eyes; it took a moment to realize he was imitating moves to push away an imaginary coyote carcass.

​

Arlen was driving when they arrived. He got his rifle out but only poked at the antelope. It didn't flinch nor move; it was not breathing. It had leaned back farther into the shade than had I.