“You got to be kidding, my friend. I mean, you have got to be. We talkin desert sun and desert heat here – none of that yuppie tanning-salon shit. What are you in real life, bubba? An accountant?”

“A teacher,” I said. “Third grade.”

“Oh, honey,” he said, and laughed again. “Get out my face, okay?”

I had a pocket watch – handed down from my great-grandfather, who worked on the last stretch of the great transcontinental railroad. He was there, according to family legend, when they hammered home the golden spike. I took the watch out and dangled it in Blocker’s face on its chain.

“See this?” I said. “Worth six, maybe seven hundred dollars.”

“This a bribe?” Blocker laughed again. A great old laugher was he. “Man, I’ve heard of people making deals with the devil, but you’re the first one I ever met who wanted to bribe himself into hell.” Now he looked at me with something like compassion. “You may think you understand what you’re tryin to get yourself into, but I’m here to tell you you don’t have the slightest idea. In July I’ve seen it go a hundred and seventeen degrees out there west of Indian Springs. It makes strong men cry. And you ain’t strong, bubba. I don’t have to see you with your shirt off to know you ain’t got nothin on your rack but a few yuppie health-club muscles, and they won’t cut it out in the Big Empty.”

I said, “The day you decide I can’t cut it, I’ll walk off the job. You keep the watch. No argument.”

“You’re a fucking liar.”

I looked at him. He looked back for some time.

“You’re not a fucking liar.” He said this in tones of amazement.

“No.”

“You’d give the watch to Tinker to hold?” He cocked his thumb at a humongous black man in a tie-dyed shirt who was sitting nearby in the cab of a bulldozer, eating a fruit-pie from McDonald’s and listening.

“Is he trustworthy?”

“You’re damned tooting.”

“Then he can hold it until you tell me to take a hike or until I have to go back to school in September.”