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Wind Chimes
Kent Nelson
I left four men on the drilling rig with instructions to keep it moving until the dawn shift. The rest of us went down. I picked my way along the path in the half-darkness, while some of the others drove their trucks. The high beams bounced over the gray sage and grama grass and sprayed into the distance.
Ahead of me Mitch stopped and turned his back to the wind to light a cigarette. Illuminated by the match, his face broke into rough patterns of orange and shadow. He had come in three weeks before, and I liked his willingness. When the rig foreman, Olshansky, tested him with the worst jobs like cleaning casing or climbing the tower to shake something loose, Mitch didn't argue. He did the work.
The evening light slid now along the hills to the west, and what color remained to the day dissipated into the familiar silhouettes of Cathedral Wash. Along the river the dusty cottonwoods tattered in the wind, but the trees did little to change a land that appeared as lifeless as the surface of the moon.
