With a quick glance in Bede’s direction, and a fierce desire to shield Bede from anyone’s ire, Galen grabbed a tray and plate and cutlery and began helping himself to the lasagna and salad.
Clearing his voice to draw attention to himself, he said, “Damn shovel popped back and whacked me good.” He even pointed to his face with aWhat the fuck gesture, making themoment a comical one and not one where he was out and out lying. “I lost my grip, I think.”
“I see,” said Gabe, with a lift to his chin and a sidelong glance in Bede’s direction. “Did you ice it?” he asked. “Do you need time off?”
“No, I’m good.” Galen nodded to show how good he was, though it made his head throb. His face hurt from his hairline to his mouth, but he’d be damned if he was going to complain about it. “I’ll be fine.”
He was planning to eat lunch with Gabe and Blaze, because it seemed the better way to distract him from his accident with Bede’s elbow. But then he sat across from Bede, just the same.
“Thanks,” said Bede, almost muttering it as he concentrated on the contents of his plate. Then he looked up, as if he knew Galen was on the verge of asking him why he would say thanks. “For not saying anything.”
“It was an accident,” Galen said. He wasn’t a tattletale, never had been.
Bede’s response was a slight flush on his cheeks, like it mattered to him that Galen had lied to Gabe. That it mattered to him that Galen understood that, yes, it had been an accident.
After lunch, they picked up another small chest of bottles of water and iced tea, and grabbed picks and shovels from the tool shed.
As they worked in the shade along the path in the woods, things seemed to calm down, with the members of his team following his lead and simply getting down to work.
He made sure the team took breaks every hour, kept the pace steady but not too fast, and privately he longed for the days when he took instructions rather than having to be responsible for what everyone else was doing.
“Hey,” said Toby, just as Galen dug his shovel quite deep beneath a narrow patch of knapweed.
Galen lifted his head, expecting some kind of shenanigans.
“What do you need, Toby?” asked Galen, pausing.
Owen and Bede paused as well, leaning on their shovels. The pair of them, Galen had to admit, looked a little cute in their matching poses, elbows on shovels, one hip cocked, and their matching shirts and straw cowboy hats.
“What’re we going to do with all this knapweed we dug up, boss?” asked Toby.
After a moment, Galen said, “That’s a good question, Toby.”
He already knew the answer. After Gabe assigned him and his team the task of getting rid of all the knapweed, he’d done some research. He’d already ordered plastic jugs of vinegar and Castile soap, and knew exactly how many sprayers were waiting for them in the ranch’s supply shed on the other side of the hill.
And while it might be just as easy to explain this to his team, in a flash ofWhat would Gabe do?and encouraged by Toby’s curiosity, he decided to turn the question back to Toby. Back to all of his team.
“We can stop work early today and use my laptop to look it up. How does that sound?”
Toby straightened up as though Galen had pinned a merit badge on his chest for asking good questions. Owen gave him an elbow, like he was trying to keep Toby from getting uppity, but seemed pleased for Toby just the same. As for Bede, he cast a long gaze at Galen, before picking up his pickaxe and digging the point at the dry dirt, focused on his task.
Around late afternoon, Galen announced that it was quitting time, led the way storing tools in the shed, and after only a little apprehension, led his team to his own tent, where his laptop was.
As Galen went into his tent to get it, Toby and Owen scrambled onto the wooden platform to peer inside of his tent, jostling for a good view of how the boss man lived.
But not Bede. He merely waited at the bottom of the step as if getting to use a computer with pretty good Wi-Fi didn’t impress him at all.
Except it did. That was plain to see for anyone who was looking. Bede’s eyes went to the laptop that Galen carried beneath his arm, fingers curled at his sides as if to keep himself from reaching out for it. Which only made sense, as Galen had seen the inside of Wyoming Correctional’s computer lab, with its five wheezing on-their-last-legs desktops and one battered Chromebook, and knew, or felt he knew, how much Bede had been missing technology.
Once in the mess tent, with pre-dinner soda and pretzels and nuts arrayed before them, it was Bede who reached out, volunteering to be lead man on research.
They all stood behind him as he sat at one of the long tables and opened the laptop. He opened up a web browser, Google Chrome, Galen was pleased to see, and entered the search terms:knapweed, destroy, dispose.
They could all read, of course, but Bede gravely gave the summary.
“We should dig it up, like we’re already doing. Dispose of like regular trash, in trash bags to be taken to the dump. Spray the ground with vinegar and soap solution.” Bede looked up at Galen, in a way that somehow got to him, though he couldn’t explain why. “What kind of sprayer? Like a hand-held spray bottle? That’d take forever.”
“Yeah,” said Toby. “Forever.”
