It’s late one morning, with Duval up in Phoenix, when I come across the worker I’ve christened ‘Red Baseball Cap’ kneeling on the ground by the cottonwood, trying to clean his hand in the murky water of the wash. He’s cut himself badly; a deep incision running from the base of his thumb right through to the centre of his palm, and from the way his thumb is hanging backwards, it looks to me like he’s severed the nerve. He’s terrified to see me and scrambles to his feet as I approach.

‘Escuse, please, sorry,’ he stutters, backing away, all but brandishing the silver cross he’s wearing in front of my face. Undaunted, I take hold of his arm, and in reciprocal stumbling Spanish, compel him to accompany me back up to the cabin where I hold his hand under the kitchen tap then find him one of Emmy’s Blue Parrot plasters and a bandage to go on top. Throughout my Florence Nightingale routine, the boy refuses to look at me, instead staring intently at his hand as if willing a map of escape to materialize in its creases and curves. He’s really young, no more than seventeen or eighteen, with baby-soft skin which looks like it has yet to meet the blade of a razor. The plasters and bandage are barely adequate and almost immediately the blood begins seeping through. I suggest driving him to the medical centre in Ague. ‘Te llevaré al médico,’ I say, pleased to have an unexpected chance to practise the future tense of llevar.

He shakes his head violently.

‘No, really, I’ll take you.’

‘¡No! ¡No al médico!’ he says so vehemently that I let him go, whereupon he hotfoots it from the cabin like a teenager released early from school detention.

I think no more of it until a couple of days later when I’m walking through the town with Duval. The men are working on the roof, bending lengths of pale new wood like whale ribs across the top of the cabin’s structure. Bank of Texas T-shirt is perched vertiginously on top, legs astride a cross beam, a nail gun in his hand. Duval’s gesturing some instruction at him and he is nodding and pantomiming something back when Red Baseball Cap walks out of the door carrying the front end of a piece of plywood.

‘Hola,’ I call at him. A drill is reverberating in the background and the boy doesn’t turn.