His father, Danny Rivers, worked for a small contracting outfit. Not one of the fancy ones with logos and big projects. One of the other kind. The dirty, cheap, permanently half-indebted kind. Jobs where a man is also the operator, the loader, half an accountant, and, if necessary, his own mechanic. Danny drove anything that had wheels, oil, and a bad attitude. Bulldozer, loader, old excavator, dump truck, whatever. He used to say that machines were like people.

“If they make too much noise,” he would say, “something hurts.”