Until then, they’ll have to wait. They sit on the dropped tailgate, watching their work boots sway. Fingers drum an aluminum din against the truck to muffle their language barrier. He’s not quite sure what time it was when the dump truck rolled away, but it sure feels like it’s been a good forty-five minutes by now. He turns the ignition one click for the dashboard clock—11:42. He has to get going soon. Anxiety starts crunching dollars and minutes in his head, and among the frantic calculations emerges a voice, his own, bumbling through a goulash of digits and cusses and snippets from his note cards. He jogs over to Jorge.

“Think we’ll actually get out of here by noon?”

Jorge shrugs, unfazed by his lack of comprehension. Henry begins mentally counting in Spanish, hoping the momentum of the sequence might swing him past ocho, nueve, diez, once—

“Doce,” Henry shouts, tapping his watchless wrist.

“¿Ya?” Jorge says. “¿El tiempo se va volando, no?”

“No, I mean,” Henry starts. “I mean, tú y yo … nosotros, uh, vámonos at noon, twelve, doce, right?”

Jorge squints. “Pues, yo me quedo hasta que me pague, güey.”

Henry smiles, nods, because this is going fucking nowhere. He has to get cleaned up and out of here quick, and so grabs the nub of motel soap then sprints to a garden hose. The first splashes are tepid, stale, but after the coils of resting water clear, it’s freezing. He scrubs at his shoulders and back frantically, then reaches into his jeans to flush the bayou out of his crotch. The soap disintegrates once he gets to his face and armpits, the vital parts of him he would have prioritized and lathered down first if he wasn’t starving, if his brain wasn’t in a blender. He finger-combs his hair back in a sopping sweep, remembering that—along with everything else that has gone straight to shit—he never got a chance to give his or Junior’s mops much-needed trims.

After toweling off with the sweaty T-shirt and sniffing his pits—still tart, musky—he hurries back to the truck. He scrambles for the stick of deodorant, which at some point had abandoned its home in the glove compartment for the floor and damn near launched him into a delirious fury. And then, when he uncaps it, the last chalky crumbs of it fall to the street.

Henry screams.

“¿Estás bien, güey?”

Henry dabs into the plastic plunger of the deodorant stick and rubs the scant residue under his arms, but it’s no use. He cannot go to the interview reeking of decay and diesel fumes.