Then one morning toward the end of April, Cameron swung the boom of the excavator down and glanced Marie in the head with the corner of the bucket, a ton if it was a pound. If it had hit her square on, it would have killed her. As it was, it split her hard hat in two pieces, easy as opening a grapefruit. Marie was knocked out cold.

When I burst out of my trailer, Cameron stood up in the machine to meet me. “You want to fucking talk to me, dyke, I’ll kill you, too,” he said. I grabbed him by the leg and hauled him out of the excavator, went for him with whatever was on hand, which happened to be a pipe wrench. Backhanded him across the face with it while Marie lay out next to us. Now there were two of them on the ground. I turned nurse, considered triage, went to check on Marie first. Lawrence was already there, holding her head on his lap. There wasn’t any blood, the hard hat had done that much, at least. She opened her eyes, focused them. I unlaced her boots. She could wiggle all her toes. She could say her name when I asked.

“That motherfucker is going to pay,” I said.

“You sure are ignorant,” Lawrence said. “No one ever pays for anything. The people that should pay don’t pay. And the more people like you interfere, the more we’re the ones paying.”

I thought of Helen, how eager she’d been to tell me and Lily we should take our case to the Supreme Court. The rage I’d felt at her I hadn’t bothered to explain, not even to myself. Still, I said, “He won’t get away with this.”

“You’re the reason he’s here at all,” Marie said.

Lawrence said, “It only gets worse from here. We’re going home. We can pick this up again somewhere else.”

Behind us, Cameron was laughing. He pushed his hand against the blood on his face, one of his eyes wouldn’t open, but he had climbed back up into the excavator to watch us. “You clocking out, Tiger Lily?” he asked.

“We can fight this bastard,” I told them. “There’s a camera in the trailer. It caught everything on tape.”

“Makes more sense to fight the zombies,” Marie said.

I called Shane, and he showed up quick, looking stressed out.

“What happened?” he asked. Not me or Marie, not Lawrence. He asked Cameron.

“She’s such a fucking slut,” Cameron said, thumbing toward Marie. “Hardly walks away to pee. I could tell you the color of her panties. She’s probably fucking Big Chief over here, and the fucking dyke, too.” He raised his voice to me again. “You think I don’t know, just ’cause you have long hair? I can tell. I have amazing gaydar. And I’m very accepting.”