When Mom and I got back from
Tucson, I rang up Sam Koslowsky, who I knew from high school, and
proposed a little camping and fishing in the Chiricahuas. He had a
week's vacation coming at the garage, so he liked the
notion.
For a week, I didn't see Sara, or
mention her name, or even think about her, particularly. I hoped
she'd gotten used to not seeing me, so when I came back, she
wouldn't mind that I stopped asking her out or meeting her for
lunch.
It would have been a fine plan, if
Mom hadn't wanted me to go down to the library and pick up the Edna
Ferber novel she had on reserve. When I saw that the girl at the
desk wasn't Sara, I let my breath out in a whoosh, I was so
relieved. Maybe relief made me cocky. Whatever it was, I thought it
was safe to go upstairs and find a book for myself.
Sara was sitting cross-legged on
the floor in front of the geography section, her skirt pulled tight
down over her knees to make a hammock for the big book in her lap.
She looked up just as I spotted her. "Jimmy, come look at
this."
It was as if she hadn't noticed I'd
been gone—as if she hadn't noticed I wasn't there five minutes
earlier. She had a wired-up look to her, as if she had things on
her mind that didn't leave room for much else, including me. Wasn't
that what I'd wanted? Then why was I feeling peeved?
I looked over her shoulder at the
book. At the top of the page was a smudgy photograph of Mount Fuji,
in Japan. Sara jabbed at the paragraphs below the photo as if she
wanted to poke them into some other shape. "Mount Fuji," I said, as
if I saw it every day.
"But that's not
just the name of the mountain. The mountain's a goddess, or
has
a
goddess, I'm not sure which. And her name is Fuji. And look—" Sara
flipped pages wildly until she got to one with a turned-down corner
(I was shocked—a library assistant folding corners) and another
photo. The mountain in this one was sending up blurry dark smoke.
"Here, Itza—Itzaccihuatl in Mexico. Itza is sort of a goddess, too.
Or anyway, she's a woman who killed herself when she heard her
lover died in battle, and became a volcano. And there's a volcano
goddess in Hawaii, Pele."
"Sure. All right," I said, since
she seemed to want me to say something.
"And there's more than that.
Volcanoes seem extra-likely to have goddesses, all over the
world."
I laughed. "I guess men all over
the world have seen women blow their tops."
Instead of laughing, or pretending
to be offended, she frowned and shook her head. "There's so much I
need to know. Did you want to go to lunch? Because I'm awfully
sorry, I just don't have time."
That reminded me
that I was annoyed. "I just came to get a book. People do that in
libraries." I pulled one down from the shelf above her head and
walked off with it. The girl at the desk giggled when she checked
it out, and it wasn't until I was outside that I found I was about
to read
A Lady's Travels in
Burma
. Between that and Mom's Edna
Ferber, I figured I was punished enough for being short with
Sara.
I waited a week before I stopped by
the library again. Again she was too busy for lunch, but as I moved
to turn from the desk, she said, "I really am sorry, Jimmy." She
didn't look like a girl giving a fellow the brush-off. In fact,
something about her eyebrows, the tightness of her lips, made her
look a little desperate.
I could be busy, too, I decided,
and with better reason. I wrote to the Colorado School of Mines to
ask what a transfer required in the way of credits, courses, and
tuition. I wrote to some of the company's managers, in town and at
the central office, inquiring about scholarship programs for
children of employees who wanted to study mining and engineering. I
gathered letters of recommendation from teachers, professors, any
Pillar of the Community who knew me. Pop helped, and bragged, and
monitored my progress as if he'd never had visions of a son
following him into medicine.
In mid-August, I got a letter from
the School of Mines, conditionally accepting me for the engineering
program. All I had to do was complete a couple of courses in the
fall term, and I could transfer in January. I took it down to Pop's
office as soon as it came, because he was almost as eager as I
was.
He was with a patient. I sat in the
waiting room for a few minutes, but I felt silly; waiting rooms are
for patients. I ducked into the little room that held Pop's desk
and books and smelled like pipe tobacco. The transom over the door
between it and the examining room was open, and the first words I
heard were from Sara. I should have left, but I didn't think of
it.
"See, Margarita? Just a sprain. But
don't you go near the tailings again."
"
You
do," said a little voice with a hint of a
whine.
"I'm grown up."
"When I'm grown up, can
I?"
"Maybe," said Sara, something
distant in her voice. "Maybe by then."
"Tailings dumps
shift and settle for a while," Pop agreed on the other side of the
door. "They're not safe at first for anybody.
Including
grown-ups."
"Have...have many people been hurt,
in South Hollier?" Sara sounded as if she wanted Pop to think it
was a casual question. But I knew her better.
"Some sprains and bruises. Probably
some scrapes that I never see, but only minor things. Folks just
can't seem to stay off a hill or a high building, whatever you tell
'em. Especially the little ones," Pop added in a new, dopey voice.
Margie squealed, as if maybe Pop had tweaked her ear.
I was mostly packed and ready to
head back to college when Lucas Petterboro, three years old,
wandered away from his yard in South Hollier and out to the new
tailings dump. From what could be told after the fact, it seemed
he'd caused a little slide clambering up the slope, which had
dislodged a much larger rock, which had produced a still larger
slide. Searchers found his shoe at the bottom of the raw place in
the dump, which gave them an idea where to start
digging.
Pop and Mom and I went to the
funeral. Pop had delivered Luke. Everyone in South Hollier was
there, and so were a lot of other people, mining families, since
the Petterboros had been hard-rock miners down the Princess Shaft
for thirty years. Mom sat beside Mrs. Petterboro at the cemetery
and held her hand; Pop talked to Joe Petterboro, and now and then
touched him lightly on the shoulder. The pallbearers were South
Hollier men: Mr. Dubnik, who'd won the hard-rock drilling contest
three years running; Mr. Slater, who ran a little grocery out of
the front of his house; Fred Koch, who'd been in my class and who
was clerking in a lawyer's office downtown: and Luis Sandoval, the
cage operator for the Dimas Shaft. It was a small coffin; there was
only room for the four of them. The children of South Hollier stood
close to their parents, in their Sunday clothes, confused and
frightened. Their mothers and fathers held their hands and wore the
expression folks get when something that only happens to other
people happens to one of their own.
And me? There wasn't a damned thing
for me to do.
So when Sara came up to me, her
eyes red in a white face, and slipped her hand into mine, I wanted
to turn and bawl like a baby on her shoulder. If she'd spoken right
away, I would have.
"So," I said at last, harsher than
I'd meant to. "Guess that mountain's still unhappy,
huh?"
She let go of my hand. "Yes. It
is." She pulled her sweater close around her, though the sun was
warm. "It keeps me awake at night. The engineers say the ridge
ought to be stable, but there was a slide last week that came
within three feet of the Schuellers' back door."
"Too much rain this summer." That
made her shrug, which made me look closer at her. "What do you
mean, it keeps you awake? Worrying won't help."
Her eyes were big and haunted and
shadowed underneath. "I can hear the mountain, Jimmy."
Her mom called Sara's name. Sara
shot me a last frightened look and went to her.
I went back to college the day
after the funeral. I sat on the train still seeing that look, still
hearing Sara say, "I can hear the mountain." I told myself it was
poetry again, and banished her voice. But it always came
back.
I shut it out with work. By the
time the term ended and I packed all my worldly goods on the train
for home, I'd gotten top grades in my classes, a scholarship from
the company, and an invitation to visit my fraternity's house on
the School of Mines campus at my earliest convenience.
I walked in the back door of the
house on Collar Hill and smelled pipe tobacco, ginger snaps, and
baking potatoes. I saw the kitchen linoleum with the pattern
wearing away in the trafficked spots, saw Mom's faded flowered
apron and felt her kiss on my cheek. Suddenly I felt safe. That was
the first I knew that I hadn't felt safe for a long time, and that
the feeling building in me as the train approached Hollier wasn't
anticipation, but dread.
"You'll have to go find us a
Christmas tree," Mom said to me over dinner. "Your father's been so
busy lately that it's full dark before he gets home."
"And your mom won't let me buy a
Christmas tree in the dark anymore," Pop added.
"Oh, the poor spavined thing you
brought home that year! You remember, Jimmy?"
It was as if I'd been away for
years. I shivered. "Why so busy, Pop?" If it was the tailings, if
it was South Hollier...
"Mostly a bumper crop of
babies—"
"Stephen!" Mom scolded.
"—along with winter colds and
pneumonia and the usual accidents. Price of copper is up, the
company's taken more men on for all the shifts, and that just
naturally increases the number of damned fools who let ore cars run
over their feet."
"Right before I left, the
Petterboro baby—"
"Lord, yes. Nothing that bad since,
thank God."
"Then the tailings are
safe?"
Pop cocked his head and frowned.
"Unless you run up to the top and jump off. It's true, though, that
the South Hollier dump made more trouble in the beginning and less
now than any others. I guess they know what they're doing, after
all."
The tightness went out of my back.
It was all right. Of course Sara hadn't meant it literally, what
she'd suggested at the funeral. And now everything was
fine.
When I saw Sara on Main Street the
next afternoon, on her way to catch the trolley home, I knew that
something wasn't fine at all. Her cheeks were hollow, her clothes
hung loose on her, and the shadows around her eyes were darker than
when I left.
"You've been sick again," I said,
before I realized how rude it would sound.
"No. Ask your dad." She thumped her
knuckles against her chest. "Lungs all clear."
"But—" I couldn't tell her she
looked awful; what kind of thing was that to say? "Pop's car's down
the block. Can I drive you someplace?"
"I'm just headed home."
"Why, I know right where that is!"
I sounded too hearty, but she smiled.
"There's still room, with all that
chemistry and geometry in there?"
"The brain swells as it fills up.
My hat size gets bigger every year."
"Oh, so it's learning that does
that."
When we got to the tailings, I saw
that the culvert pipes were in place on the roadway, and the fill
crested over them about six feet high. I steered the car into the
right-hand pipe. I felt like a bug washed down a drain as the
corrugated metal swallowed the car and the light. The engine noise
rang back at us from the walls, higher and shrill. I wanted to
crouch down, to put the Hudson in reverse, to floor it.
"Looks like they've moved a lot of
stone since summer." I watched her out of the corner of my eye as I
said it.
She nodded. It wasn't the old
nervous silence she used to fall into near the tailings. She wasn't
stiff or tense; but there was a settled quality to her silence, a
firmness.
"Pop says the dump's quit
shifting."
Sara looked at me as we came out of
the pipe and into South Hollier. "That's right." She made it sound
like a question.
I didn't know what to answer, so
instead I asked, "Is your dad back at work?"
"They brought him on as a mechanic
at the pit. He likes it. And it means he'll get his full pension
after all."
South Hollier was now enclosed in
its bowl, a Medieval walled town in the Arizona mountains. It
looked constrained, like a fat woman in a girdle. But kids played
in front yards, women took wash off their clotheslines, smoke rose
from chimneys. Everything was all right.
Except it wasn't. Something was out
of whack.
When I pulled up to Sara's front
door, I said, "We're still friends?"
She thought about it. I realized I
liked that better than if she'd been quick to answer. "We
are."