Best Friends by Samantha Glen Read Free Book Online Page A

inhaled deeply.
    â€œSmell,” he said, sharing the burst of fragrance with the others. “Isn’t it wonderful?”
    Francis was scanning the distance to the plateau Kelvert had shown them the day before. The land on this mesa rolled and undulated in mounds and hollows to the cliff’s edge, every yard as far as they could see thickly carpeted with scrub, piñon, and juniper. “We need to clear a road,” he stated.
    â€œI’ve been thinking about that,” Gregory Castle said. He spoke softly, as befitted the quietest member of the group. Gentle of demeanor, Gregory was their English philosopher, a calm pillar of strength in the often rambunctious world of his colleagues.
    â€œIt might work just to run the trucks back and forth to the site a few times. The tires can lay down tracks, flatten the smaller plants, and we can cut out the bigger obstructions.”
    â€œLet’s get to it,” Francis said.
    They macheted brush all day. By noon they’d worked up enough of a sweat to take off their shirts, exulting in the bite of chilled air against their skin. They didn’t stop until it was too dark to see.
    They slept in town that night. Before leaving Arizona they’d rented, sight unseen, the cheapest house they could find in Kanab. As Steven had sagely pointed out, “Seven guys in one trailer can get a little too close for comfort.”
    Cyrus cooked, finding the energy from somewhere to whip up a tofu quiche and green salad while his companions struggled to keep their eyes open. The crew was asleep by eight o’clock.
    Â 
    It was a routine that became habit as the months passed: awake at sunup; bang nails until dark; then back to the house with the leaking roof, or to one of the three local restaurants if Steven or Cyrus, the designated chefs, were too beat to cook.
    The men grew to cherish the simplicity of laboring with their hands and the satisfaction of exhaustion at day’s end. They found that, in spite of their inexperience, they could do this work.
    Sometimes their lack of knowledge was even in their favor, as when they desperately needed power and a phone. Frozen ground made the hand-digging of trenches for cables an impossibility. Gregory came up with a simple but perfectly adequate solution: “We’ll just drape the lines on top of the ground until it gets warmer.”
    Their faces became familiar at the hardware store. The bakery knew of Virgil’s love of pastries, and their vegetarian preferences were discussed at great length at the grocery.
    They were regulars at Nedra’s, Chef’s Palace, and the local Italian restaurant run by a former boxer from New Jersey—until one night there was a “CLOSED” sign on the door.
    The guys thought they were making some small progress in being accepted when it was revealed to them in Duke’s Sporting Goods that the former boxer had left his wife that morning to run off with a very young girl from the nearby polygamous community of Colorado City.
    But they couldn’t seem to make much headway with their only neighbor at the mouth of the canyon. They would wave or shout “hello” when they spied him, but Norm Cram would either watch them go by or turn around and stomp back into his house.
    Grant Robinson was another matter. Cyrus was puzzled by the buzz of a chainsaw one afternoon and went to investigate. About a mile away he found an old man, easily in his late eighties and bent like a gnome with arthritis, cutting limbs off a tree.
    â€œMe and my Effie homesteaded this place,” he said. “I sold it fifteen years ago, but . . .” He winced and carefully shifted his saw from a clawlike hand to his equally disfigured other. “Can’t seem to leave the place alone.”
    The old man nodded to the sapling, stripped of limbs and growing straight as a plumber’s line to the sky. “You might find a use for these one day. They make the best barn