“Dude. Put the crystal ball away already,” he said, his mouth full of Froot Loops from the self-serve cereal hopper. “You don't know and it don't matter. We work until the work runs out. Then we can fear the reaper.”

Joe pictured Will Ferrell and a cowbell, wondered if this was a reference he and Dustin shared. Dustin was barely twenty-one, fresh out of his parents' house, the biggest disappointment of his life so far an unsuccessful search for a steady girlfriend. Every break he got, Dustin went home to his mother's chili and cinnamon rolls, to beers with his high school buddies.

“You mean face the reaper. At the end, you face him.”

In the cafeteria, Dustin flashed a smile, revealing the benefits of teenage orthodontics. “What I mean, Joe, is YOLO.”

“Yoyo?” Joe was messing with him now. He knew what YOLO meant, felt the oppressive truth of YOLO like spiders crawling on his skin.

Dustin's hair stuck up at odd angles, and Joe fought an urge to pat the kid on the head, make him look more presentable. Through the thin plastic wall that separated their bedrooms, the kid sounded like a sixty-year-old man. Dustin's smoker's hack, exacerbated by a nasty bronchitis he'd picked up somewhere, had woken Joe multiple times. Joe found himself stealing the kid's cigarettes, tossing them into trash cans at random gas stations. It was how he would have handled it with his own son, if his own son had grown up to be a smoker, but DJ hadn't gotten the chance to grow up at all. Joe felt his hands burn and tingle, then, and before the feeling could spread to his chest, to the raw mess of his heart, he closed his eyes, willed himself to stop thinking about it. It was like closing a set of blinds to hide a wildfire blazing outside the window. Temporary relief, false, but relief all the same.

Joe had been in the man camp for about a year, and he had to admit it lived up to the promises of the recruiter he had spoken to back in Colorado, who had sold a comfortable life (Amenities like you wouldn't believe! Better than home! Hassle-free!) and the chance to make his fortune driving water trucks for the rigs. It was Joe's nature to doubt all salesmen, but in spite of his low expectations about this part of his compensation package, it was an improvement over his first gig back in Colorado. Room and board had been free there, too, a giant double-wide provided by the company stuffed with eleven other guys, bunk beds lined up like army barracks, slopped Stagg chili and Dorito powder in the shared kitchen, the smell of burnt coffee and weed and the never-ending trash can overflow, their sense of decency dropping off the same cliff as their privacy.