Brody handed me the check through the window of his pickup without shutting off the engine. It was the last Friday in August, a little past noon, and the dam behind me was finished.
The check was for $4,500. The first half had been the same amount, three weeks earlier. Nine thousand dollars for a month of my life, my machine, and every gallon of diesel I had poured into it.
“That squares us,” he said.
I did not take it right away. I stood in the caliche dust of Ellis Vance’s ranch road with my cap pushed back, and I looked at the man I had been married to for twenty-three years.
“Ellis told me what you billed him,” I said. “Thirty-eight thousand dollars.”
Brody did not blink. He had always been better at that than me. He looked past me at the dam, at the yellow dozer parked on top of it, and nodded once, the way a man agrees with the weather.
Ellis hired Kuehn Dirt Work,” he said. “You’re not Kuehn Dirt Work anymore, Darla. You’re the dozer.”
Then he held the check a little farther out the window, the way you hold a biscuit out to a dog you are not sure about.
I took it. I want to be honest about that part. I took it because the note on the D6 was due on the tenth, and the bank does not care whose name is painted on a truck door.
He pulled off. The dust hung over the road a long time after him. I stood there until it settled, then walked back down the face of the dam I had built alone and climbed up into the cab.
I did not cry. I want to be honest about that too. I sat with both hands on the levers and the engine off, and I looked at that dam for most of an hour.
It was a good dam. That was the worst of it. It was the best one I had ever built.
My name is Darla Kuehn. I was forty-nine that summer, and I had been running a bulldozer in the Texas Hill Country for twenty-five years.
My uncle taught me on an old D4 when I was twenty-four, on his place outside of town, because nobody else in the county would let a girl near the levers. He said I had soft hands on a blade, which from him was the highest praise there was.
Brody and I married two years after that. He had a dump truck, a good telephone voice, and a way of shaking a rancher’s hand that made the man feel he had known him since grade school.
I had the touch on a blade. Together we started Kuehn Dirt Work, and for most of twenty-three years it worked about as well as anything works.
He bid the jobs, ran the phone and hauled road base. I built the ponds, cut the terraces, cleared the cedar and set the grade. Our name went on two pickup doors and on a little sign we stuck by the gate at every job.