“I wish Dice trusted me more,” I said. We had begun to load our barrels into the trunk, heaving them up, when he finally spoke.

“Trust?” Bay said, and turned his big face toward me, which was fringed with power and light like a crude drawing of the sun. “That’s on you, babe. I’m leaving tomorrow to find us new family,” he said. “Reliable family.” He was provoking me, of course.

“For the next protest?”

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe just for the spring.”

“How long will you be gone?”

He put his hand on my neck and I tilted my head back. He said, “A week or two.” He dropped his hand. I didn’t want to ask him to touch me. I wanted to be wanted.

“Let me tell you a story,” said Bay. “You know how there used to be giant mammals, mastodons and ground sloths, in America?”

“I guess,” I said.

“Humans killed them all off, and they killed off their predators too, saber-tooth tigers and enormous birds. Used to be a bird with a twenty-three-foot wingspan. Too big to get itself in the air by flapping. You know how that kind of bird had to start flying?” He stretched out his long arms.

“How?”

“It had to jump off cliffs and coast,” he said, flapping his arms. Like jumping into the quarry, I thought, or jumping over the bar. I hoped no one was watching. Bay looked like someone you’d call the cops on. “There’s still one kind of those birds left in America, the biggest flying bird in America. The California condor. How did the condors survive into the Anthropocene?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“They eat whales,” he said. “They fucking eat whales, and other sea animals that wash up on the shore. You feel me?”

“I think so,” I said. With Bay words were only one level, the lowest level, and then there was the higher level, the animal level, of gestures and touch, of forgotten and unspoken instincts.

“Don’t think we haven’t noticed you half-assing things.”

I shook my head. I’d been working every waking moment. I slept only a few hours a night. I ate blue heron. My hands were calloused from the shovels and rakes; my big heavy boots had given me hot water-filled blisters. I had to massage my wrists every night because they ached so badly; I had to run cold water into my eyes because of the hay dust.

“Didn’t try to help Pear with the bread. Didn’t try to help Queen milk.”

I was startled to hear Queen’s name. So she’d told on me. And they were right. I had not helped with everything. The work was never finished.