I headed away from the flyer. I was sticking to the same side of the street, passing a vacant lot to get to the next trailer. My legs, defying the demand for pep from my brain, moved slowly, shuffling almost. I looked again at my watch, which hadn’t much budged since just before I rang the bell. At least four hours to go, and I needed to rest. I needed to be able to sit still for a while, but that wasn’t really it. What I needed was relief from thinking about the job, even a good night’s sleep, as if such a thing were possible, but I could give up all hope of sleep. It wouldn’t happen on the road, when I worked all day and half the night. Not at home, on my one day off, when there were errands to run and friends and family to see before the cycle began again. I’d been operating on less than four hours a night for three months now. How long could I do it? Bobby, my crew boss, said he’d been doing it for years, and he seemed okay.

I had no plans of doing it for years. Just one year, that was all, and that was plenty. I was pretty good at the job- more than pretty good- and I made money, but there I was, seventeen years old, and I could feel myself aging, feel soreness accumulating in my joints, feel a beleaguered rounding in my shoulders. My eyes didn’t seem to work as well, my memory had begun to frazzle, my bathroom habits were irregular. It was the lifestyle. I’d gone to sleep at home, just outside Ft. Lauderdale, the night before. The alarm had jerked me out of bed at six so I could get to the local office by eight, where I’d sat in pep meetings until we all hopped in the car and headed out to the Jacksonville area, checked into a motel, and got to work. Another standard weekend gets under way.

Tires rumbled behind me, and I instinctively veered over toward the empty lot, careful to avoid the nests of fire ants and the prickly weeds that would find their way to my dark gray gym socks, which only a seventeen-year-old could convince himself passed for respectable as long as no one saw the sporty stripes.