Apology

transient the foreman had picked out of a lineup at the local shopping center parking lot. The foreman called the man Shoe. He had come unprepared, with no steel-toed boots to his name.
Rather than sending him away altogether, the foreman ordered the man to the store with a loaned fifty-dollar bill. Shoe walked away from the site, trying not to drag his right foot behind him. When he came back, he could hear the others as he approached. Howling, though they were running their machinery full-on.
The foreman yelled, “Shoe, get in there,” and threw him a shovel as an afterthought. Earlier, the crew had ripped through a power cable the utility locator missed marking. They were fortunate it wasn’t live. The prints indicated hints of buried structure. The foreman didn’t want to take any more chances. They would have to hand-dig this section.
It hadn’t occurred to the foreman to ask Shoe if he understood. They just needed someone to find the top of the conduit, or, if it was another direct buried cable, then its black plenum sheath. They were already so deep, it couldn’t be down much farther, if it was even there at all.
How unnecessary it had been for this young man to slide down the gray clay wall, breaking in the new boots with slick smearing. The foreman pointed at the deepest spot and nudged the air downward, which meant dig, and Shoe slipped the shovel head into the already broken muck and began, though there was nowhere to go with it. He didn’t know if he could sling it above him and not hit anyone.
They were behind schedule.
It was taking too long.
“Oh, just get the hell out of there,” the foreman said to the stooped figure.
Shoe had been this person most of his life. The intended recipient of a cussword, a dredger of malcontent. And now Shoe did not hesitate. He thrust the shovel head in at an angle, prepared to dig more if the man suddenly changed his mind.
The man did not change his mind. Nor did he reach down to help pull Shoe up. It was too slippery, too much sludge for his tasseled loafers. The tool was left there, abandoned in place, and Shoe crawled out, sliding, pulling himself up with all of his might as the few standing around offered him only their ridicule.
That evening, with the sounds of her brother and his friends taunting each other in the nearby field, Teagan walked among the machinery at the construction site. At each vehicle she stopped to inspect the sinuous, exposed hoses connected to what seemed more an open brain than an engine.
There was the unfamiliar smell of diesel. It grafted to her excitement, of having wandered here alone. Cautiously, she stepped between tracks in the matted clay. The tracks now resembled stamped sections of gray Play-Doh, as if the earth had first been rolled out smooth by the workers and then tamped down with metal templates, industrial-sized cookie cutters. The spaced teeth of a backhoe. The track belt fit snug around a bulldozer’s wheels. Some fragments of dirt and clay had dried and crumbled at the edges of each one.
Then the machines were a herd of huge animals sleeping.
Near the farthest end of the site, Teagan found a deep hole. At first, it looked like a well. Something from one of the children’s books she liked to read. Except there were no walled stones encircling the opening. No small shingled roof with a bucket hanging from coiled rope.
It was already getting late, she knew, but with the vehicles quietly sleeping she could at least peer down into the pit. It would be something to boast about to her twin brother. She was sure neither he nor any of his friends had been brave enough to explore the site alone.
Tommy wasn’t the boss of her, she thought, even though she could hear his voice plain as day now, telling her she needed to get out of there—not just his life, as he had said it so rudely in front of the others, but here as well.
This entire place that was growing darker by the second.
She gulped the cool air and leaned over to take another look.
Her foot began to slip on the edge.
She recovered. She didn’t hear bits of falling dirt. No sound of splashing water. She laughed to herself. She was fast, faster than her brother. Yes. It didn’t matter that she had almost slipped down into it. She would take precaution and back way up this time, as far back as possible. She would brace her foot against the bulldozer’s track as if it were a starting block.
As she readied herself, she felt it, a blow to the head.
“Owww,” she yelled and looked around, but saw only a shadow darting out of view. She found the football and held it up. Etched on the side was the name Mario, her brother’s stupid friend she couldn’t stand.
“I have this. It’s mine now,” she said.
“You wish,” came a voice from the other side of the bulldozer.
“You wish.”
“No, you wish.”
The voice went back and forth with her this way.
She held the ball with both hands, like she had watched Tommy do countless times as he tore through a bundle of boys on the field, but instead of grunting and making noise in the fray, she stepped slowly, as if replaying a memory of her brother, except that she was her brother now and could turn easily to gain yardage, galloping in slow motion toward the others, who weren’t there. She went around one side of the bulldozer and saw him from behind, crouched and hiding. She lifted the ball and threw it at his head.
“Shit,” Mario said, throwing a hand up and rubbing behind his ear.
She laughed and ran away as he scrambled for the ball and then took off after her. They wove around the machinery. When they rounded the excavator, Teagan frantically grabbed onto one of