Filling buckets with sand. Me and Freddy and Jonesey. Freddy is very ugly. He walks all leaned over to one side, like one of his hands is pulling its arm further to the ground than the other. When he’s walking and I watch him from behind, I wonder, why doesn’t it look like one of his shoulders wants to be further away from the ground than the other? But the overwhelming impression I get is one of greater weight in the left hand, rather than one of greater levity in the right. Freddy’s face is also very asymmetrical, his nose is big and bulbous and has enormous pores and a few big black hairs sticking defiantly out. It’s all pushed over to one side. The eye that it’s pushed towards is squinty, surrounded by deep folds in white, puffy flesh. It looks like that eye, the left, is the real center of the face, and everything else is oriented towards it. The lines and wrinkles lead into it and the nose points vaguely towards it. It’s like it’s the center of a big, obscene pucker. Freddy’s mouth is usually bunched up over on one side, and when he smiles it’s a quick, sudden movement, like one photograph being instantly replaced by another. His mouth is instantly all over his face. It’s a big mouth, and when he smiles, he smiles with all of it. There’s no in between; it’s either the neutral, bunched up mouth, or the huge grin. Freddy doesn’t smile at what you might expect him to. He doesn’t smile at jokes--I think he doesn’t usually understand a joke is being made. He smiles the first time he sees you in the morning, like he had forgot who you were but you just made his day by showing up. And he smiles when accidents happen. Somebody trips, or drops something. Little harmless accidents make his face light up like nothing else. After a while, the smile goes away, but all of a sudden, it’ll come back and you can tell that the image flashed in front of his mind’s eye again. Freddy always wears a button-up shirt, while me and Jonesey just wear T-shirts. It’s like he comes from a time when you dress for work, no matter what you’re doing. The few button-up shirts I have, I strive to keep as clean as possible. Dirt stains from around where we work never come out. They don’t come out of Freddy’s shirts, either, but he wears them again anyway. They’re the kind of color that you know was once white and is still supposed to be white. He always wears pants of a kind of light brown, which are the same color as his boots and the dirt we work in. The colors in his clothes and skin all seem like shades of the same hue, a kind of tan that brings to mind images of bare earth, static, solid, and grave.

Jonesey is young, though not as young as me. He’s mean, and dumb, and his hair is black and shiny. It’s a little long: when it hangs in his face it reaches to the tip of his nose. Jonesey’s face is tan--all our faces are--and he has big, white teeth that contrast sharply with his dark skin, more so when he’s dirty, which is most of the time. When he smiles, pulls his upper lip up past the gumline--the lower lip is too big to move much--his teeth glare out at you so you can’t help but look down from his eyes. The whiteness of his teeth dominates his whole face when they’re visible. They look so out of place, so unnaturally bright. Sometimes it’s all I can see of him, those big teeth that might look healthy and pleasant in somebody else’s face but seem threatening in Jonesey’s. His ears look a little pointed; there’s too many folds and bends in them. He jokes around, mean, and guffaws afterwards, more like a short, sharp yell than a laugh. When I first started working with him, I would pretend to laugh, too, to be polite. After not too long I realized he didn’t need it. It doesn’t bother him if other people don’t laugh with him. I have a suspicion he likes it better that way.

The other morning I had my shovel turned around in a funny way, trying to empty it into a bucket to my left, which doesn’t work out right if you’re holding the shovel left-handed. My shovel caught the lip of the bucket and the sand spilled out. Quickly, I looked up to see if Freddy or Jonesey had seen. I don’t know why I bothered to check, they both seem to see everything I do, as if they’re watching me all the time, or they’re so in tune with this place that they just know what happens without having to look. My eyes fell on Freddy’s big face first, which was already stretched into the enormous grin. At the same time, I heard Jonesey’s yelp of a laugh. I couldn’t help looking over at him, and the sight of those big teeth, in two separate rows in his open mouth struck me all at once. I’m a little afraid of Jonesey. He seems to hate everybody so much, you wonder what’s stopping him from doing something really crazy. When I think of my own dark side, the images that pop into my head, and what holds them at bay, I wonder what could possibly be the analog in Jonesey’s mind. Sometimes I think about making a big pile of sand, like a day’s worth of work, just ten feet away from the bin we’re supposed to be filling. Sometimes I think about just eating the sand, as fast and as much as I can, even though I know it would hurt me. Sometimes I can’t help thinking about driving the shovel through my boot and cutting all my toes off. I’ll picture that for hours at a time. And sometimes, when the idea pops in my head and I can’t do a thing to chase it out, I’ll think about swinging the end of my shovel, hard, into Freddy’s bald head, feeling it break the skull and stick there, and feeling it slide out of my hands as it falls with, but perpendicular to, Freddy’s body. I hate myself for thinking about that, but I do. Sometimes I’ll think about how much I hate thinking about that, and that’ll make the image come, but a lot of the time it’ll catch me off guard. I feel sick when it comes, just like watching it happen and wanting to stop it and then wanting to cry. Sometimes I’ll look up at Freddy and it’s like I’ve done it, he’s not there, he’s dead because I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I just have to give up and keep going and try not to feel so bad about it. Is that what would happen? I would have to tell myself, don’t feel so bad, and keep going like before. These are all things I can’t stop thinking about, but I never do any of them. The reason I don’t is because I worry so much about what other people think of me. It’s stupid, but I won’t do those things because Jonesey would think I was dumb. Or the boss would be disappointed in me. That’s why I’m afraid of Jonesey. As much as he hates everybody, I can’t imagine the same thing holding him back from his bad thoughts. And he’s got to have bad thoughts. Wouldn’t somebody who hates Freddy think about killing him ten times more than I do? Sometimes I think maybe he has some big plan, like he’s been saving up all his bad deeds this whole time, and then one day he’s going to do the most horrible thing imaginable. I really think that sometimes, but then I don’t really think Jonesey’s that smart. Or that he would be interested in thinking that big. Also, it’s hard to think of something he could do that would really be all that horrible. Aside from hurting us or killing us, the only thing would be destroying our work, the results of our hours of labor in the sun and dirt. And it’s hard to think how Jonesey could do that, because there never seem to be any results of our work. I know we work hard, all three of us, I watch the shovels fill the buckets, I feel the pain in my back all night. But, in the few years that I’ve been working here, we’ve never made any significant progress in moving the sand away. At first I thought it was an illusion; I thought I couldn’t see the change because there was such an incomprehensible amount of sand in the first place that small changes can’t be seen. Like watching someone’s hair grow. It’s growing all the time, and you know it’s longer than it was, but you can’t see the progress it’s made from one day to the next. Then I thought maybe we really don’t do any good, maybe there’s just too much sand. For a while, I tried to measure by eye how much sand was there from day to day. I would say to myself, alright, there’s a mound over there that’s about up to the middle of my thigh, and it’s up to the third knot down on that old post, and on and on like that. But the next day, the mound’s a totally different shape, and I can’t tell what’s a knot and what’s a spot of dirt on the post. Some days it even looked like there was more sand. At first I really cared, I really wanted to get the sand in the bins, and it upset me that we never seemed to get anywhere. Then I realized I didn’t even know why we were moving the sand, and I thought, well, how can it matter to me if we get it done or not if I don’t even know why I’m doing it? I have almost asked Freddy why we’re doing it a million times. It always seems like a really stupid question, and I just can’t bring myself to say it out loud. I’m sure Freddy knows. He’s probably older than most of the sand we shovel, he’s been here forever, he’s got to know. Jonesey probably even knows. It’s probably so obvious that I know it without even knowing that I know it. Sometimes Freddy and Jonesey talk quietly and sadly about the possibility of a machine doing the work we do. “They got machines doing everything these days, I don’t see why a machine couldn’t get this sand from here to over there just as good as we can. Better.” Freddy’s right. A machine could do it better. I wonder sometimes about whether a machine could finish the job. Maybe the machine would be able to do it so much better that you would actually be able to see how much sand it moved from day to day. To watch the level drop would be a strange and exciting feeling. But the machine wouldn’t have that feeling. It wouldn’t know one way or the other. The machine would just do what it was built to do, without being able to appreciate the sense of accomplishment at moving all that sand. And what if it did finish the job, what if it did move all the sand? What would the boss do with that machine then? The way I see it, it would become completely useless. In order to make buying a big, expensive machine worth his while, the boss would probably have to go get more sand and set the machine to moving that, too. Maybe if he couldn’t afford more sand, he’d just put the sand back that had already been moved. When I think of that, the boss sneaking in here at night, moving the sand back from the big bins out here, just to give some stupid machine that doesn’t even know any better something to do, I laugh a little. But it’s kind of sad at the same time. I guess I always end up thinking, that’s what the machine was made for, that’s what it ought to do. There’s nothing wrong with that. It kind of seems like you ought to be sad about it, but maybe if there’s something in that machine that’s like being happy is for us, then doing what it was made for makes it happy. Maybe a machine is just a machine and you don’t need to think about it any more than that. But I think that even if the machine did take away our jobs, it wouldn’t be the machine’s fault; a machine can’t help doing what it was built to do.

On the last day I worked there, somebody killed Freddy. I didn’t see it happen, I just remember all of a sudden seeing Freddy lying flat on the sand, blood spilling out of his head and clumping in the sand. I remember seeing that and feeling my knees go weak with a big shiver that went all over my body at once. The sight struck me so hard because it was just like I had always imagined: Freddy hit in the head with a shovel, dead instantly. One minute, Freddy was alive and shoveling, and after one quick, irrevocable act, he was dead--gone forever. I stood there with my mouth open, in shock. Then I remembered to be afraid for my own life and looked around for Jonesey, expecting to see him shuddering with laughter, about to let out one of his laugh-yelps. My eyes found him, but he was farther away than I expected. He was standing, staring at me, and he looked afraid. I thought, isn’t that funny, I was always afraid of Jonesey, and now he’s the one who’s afraid of something. Maybe being afraid is what made him do it. Then it dawned on me that Jonesey was afraid because he didn’t do it; he was afraid of whoever did. I swung around again, looking for the killer. There was no one near. He must have run away. Jonesey ran, too, then. He’s running to get help, I thought. But no one can help Freddy now. I guess somebody has to pay for this. This horrible thing has happened, so someone has to suffer. The killer ran away, and that leaves me standing here. They’ll think I did it anyway, because it’s my shovel. Jonesey came back with the boss, who had his gun. “I didn’t do it,” I told them. “I saw it,” Jonesey said, his voice cracking with fear and excitement. “It wasn’t my fault,” I said. It wasn’t my fault, but something bad had happened. Freddy was dead, and I could see in the boss’ eyes that someone was going to pay for it. I thought, it’s easy like that, someone gets hurt and you make up for it by hurting the person that did it. That’s fair, there’s no other way. I understood then that I was the one who was going to suffer for Freddy’s death. I wondered where the guilt lay, what it was that I had gained from Freddy’s death that I would give up with my own. I decided that I didn’t need to know. The boss, the one with the gun, he must know. He must be able to see it in me, to look at me like that. I looked down at Freddy’s body and felt a wave of sadness and helplessness wash over me. I was sorry, so sorry that he was dead and I thought, whatever I can do to make it better. I thought, what I will do is die. And once that’s done, I won’t be around to know the world in which Freddy’s death has been made up for.