I took my paper bags and headed across the street. A red pickup truck beeped its horn and startled me--I'd charged right across without looking. I froze up, like one of those ridiculous squirrels that dart one way and then the other and are doomed to end up a road kill. Except my life was in no danger here; he'd stopped. It was Loyd Peregrina, looking exactly like himself. If anything he looked younger than fifteen years ago. His arm was out the window and I hurried out of his way thinking it was a turn signal, that he was trying to turn right. It didn't occur to me till he'd gone on down the street that he was waving at me.
I stayed in the shower forever trying to rinse the salt out of my scalp and skin. I had fantasies of not going to this thing, but Emelina would be hurt, and also my house sat in the middle of the party like a floral centerpiece. It would be hard to pretend not to be home. I put on the most minimal thing I owned, a white cotton dress, and sneaked out my front door.
It was like a high-school reunion. Everyone was boisterously friendly and dying to be filled in on the last decade and a half, which in my case was not that pretty a picture, and of course they asked about Hallie. Children ran underfoot like rebel cockroaches. Emelina, my guardian angel, kept setting me up in conversations before running off to clean up some mess the kids had gotten into or check on the goat.
J.T. came over and gave me a hug that lifted me off the ground--but that's J.T., plus a few beers. It really was nice to see him. "I hear you wrecked a train," I said.
"Wrecked her good," he said. J.T. was broad-shouldered and dark, with the kind of face that's made more handsome, not less, by the scars of teenage acne. We'd known each other since we were babies. His older sister Pocha was at the party, and his brothers Cristobal, Gus, and Arturo, all of whom had been our neighbors when Hallie and I were small. I remembered playing Dutchman's tag with them at the graveyard on All Souls' Days--it was always a huge family picnic up there--until Doc Homer decided the graveyard was off limits. (Bird mites no doubt.)
People were jammed into the courtyard belly to elbow and it soon got too noisy to talk. I stood near the edge of things, in the shade of an olive that was probably planted when the house was built, middle-aged as olives go. A band called the Sting Rays, featuring one of J.T.'s formerly pigeon-toed cousins, was belting out "Rosa Lee." I spotted Loyd across the way, but would have had to step on a hundred toes to get to him. He was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, paying attention to a small woman in a strapless dress. Loyd looked like someone in a cigarette ad, except he wasn't smoking: white T-shirt, white smile, those models are always the picture of health. His hair was mink black, in a ponytail. And he had terrific arms. I hate to admit things like this, but in a certain frame of mind I am a sucker for good muscle definition.
A woman approached me suddenly from behind and shouted, "Codi Noline! God, honey, you look like a rock 'n' roll star."
In my sundress and dimestore thongs I looked no more like a rock 'n' roll star than Mother Teresa. "I'll take that as a compliment," I said. "I take them where I can get them nowadays."
"Lord, I know what you mean," she said. It was Trish Garcia, who was a cheerleader and clandestine smoker when I'd last known her. Now she smoked openly, had a raspy cough, and looked like a cartwheel was out of the question. "I heard Hallie's in South Africa."
I laughed. "Nicaragua."
"Well, what in the world's she doing there?"
In high school, Hallie and I were beneath Trish's stratum of normal conversation. I remembered every day of those years, no lapses there. Once in the bathroom I'd heard her call us the bean-pole sisters, and speculate that we wore hand-me-down underwear. I wondered how the rules had changed. Had I come up in the world, or Trish down? Or perhaps growing up meant we put our knives away and feigned ignorance of the damage. "She's teaching people how to grow crops without wrecking the soil," I said. "She has her master's in integrated pest management."
Trish looked indifferent, but she was working hard at being unimpressed, whereas before it came naturally. I took this as a good sign. "Well, I guess it pays good," she said.
"No, they're not really paying her, just living expenses is about all, I think. She's doing it just to do it. She wants to be part of a new society."
Trish stared. I pretended Hallie was there at the party somewhere, about to walk up behind me. "Six or seven years ago they threw out the dictator and gave all his land to the poor people," I said. "But they need a lot of help in the farming department now, because these soldiers keep attacking the poor farmers from across the border and burning up their crops."
Hallie would laugh at "farming department." She'd laugh at the whole scene, the education of Trish the Cheerleader. She would love me.
"The Communists," Trish said knowingly. "I heard about that. I heard they're thinking about sending the Marines down there to stop them from doing that."
"No, it's the other way around," I said patiently. "The Marines aren't rooting for the new society. The U.S. is paying the contras, the guys that attack the farmers." Hallie would not laugh now, she would be inflamed. She said we were a nation in love with forgetting the facts. She saved clippings that proved it. When Castro released those prisoners from Mariel: One day the headlines said we'd gotten him to free all these wonderful political prisoners. A month later when they were burning down halfway houses in Miami the papers castigated Fidel for exporting his hooligans and junkies.
Trish fiddled with her bra strap. "Hallie always would just up and do anything under the blue sky," she said.
"You're right," I told Trish. "I wish I were that brave. I'd be scared to death to be where she is."
"Well, you know, we can't all be the hero," she said, jutting her lower jaw to blow smoke up toward the olive branches. If I could have drawn blood, if I'd known how to do that with words instead of a needle, I would have. I wasn't sure what Hallie craved but I knew it wasn't glory.
"How's Doc Homer?" she asked.
I hadn't yet found the valor to go see him. I feared seeing him in failing condition. And still disapproving of me, on top of it. "Hard to say," I said.
I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to see Loyd, grinning broadly. "Too good to speak to an Indian boy on Main Street?"
The tingle of a blush started behind my ears, and I ignored it. I'd learned since high school that in an emergency shyness can be disguised with a completely fake bravado. "You tried to run me down, Loyd! I ought to turn you in for reckless driving." I ran my fingers through my hair. "Actually, I didn't think you'd know who I was."
"Are you kidding? How many beautiful six-foot-tall women you think we've got in this town?"
"Five eleven," I corrected. "I'm the shorter of the bean-pole sisters." I felt suddenly drunk, though I wasn't, chemically speaking. Trish drifted off toward the barbecue pit.
He looked at me for a long time, just looked. Grinning. His left hand was fingering the tip of an olive branch and I expected him to snap it off but he didn't, he only took in its texture as someone might eat chocolate or inhale a cigarette.
"You want another beer?" he asked.
So that was going to be it, no filling in the last fifteen years. No constructing ourselves for each other--otherwise known as falling in love. "Think you can get over to that ice chest and back before this party is over?" I knew he wouldn't.
"In case I don't, I've got your phone number." He winked.
"Don't you worry. You'll be hearing from my lawyer."
I felt adrift and disappointed, though I hadn't held any conscious expectations of Loyd. I looked around at other faces, wondering if they all held secret disappointments for me. Dona Althea, the ancient woman we used to call the "Peacock Lady," was holding court in a lawn chair under the fig tree. She was the one who used to collect the feathers for pinatas. She looked today like she always had, dressed in black, fierce and miniature like a frightening breed of small dog. Even with her braided crown of silver hair she wasn't five feet tall. J.T.'s mother, Viola Domingos, and se
veral other women sat in a group with her, fanning themselves in time to the music and drinking beer. J.T. and Loyd had apparently been commandeered into serving them food; the goat had been pronounced done. People were beginning to move toward the makeshift table, which I'd helped Emelina improvise from the doors to Mason's and the twins' rooms, covered with embroidered tablecloths compliments of the Stitch and Bitch Club. There was enough food to save an African nation. Potato salad, deviled eggs, menudo, tortillas and refried beans and a thousand kinds of dessert. I heard somebody say in a highpitched voice, "Tomato soup in that cake? I wouldn't have guessed that for love nor money."
I wasn't in any hurry. I moved out of the way of the principal rush and stood near the gate to the side yard, near my little house. I noticed a dog lying very still and alert, just on the other side of the gate. It looked like an oversized coyote but it was definitely a domestic creature. It had a green bandana tied around its neck. This dog didn't belong to Emelina's household--I was pretty sure I knew all the family animals. It sat with its mouth slightly open and its ears cocked, staring steadily through the wire gate at the people inside.
"You thinking about crashing this party?" I asked the dog.
It glanced up at me for a second, with a patient look, then fixed its gaze back on the crowd. Or maybe on the roast goat.
"I'll bring you some of that, if you're willing to wait awhile," I said. "Nobody's going to miss one little bite."
The dog didn't respond to this promise.
All the old men had served themselves first and were settling down into a huddle of folding chairs near the front door of my cottage, holding their plates carefully horizontal above their knees. I started to move away, out of deference, but I noticed they were talking about fruit drop. I plainly heard one of them say the words, "poison ground." I stood four feet away and invisible, I suppose because they were men, and women talked to women. They asked questions of each other, to which they apparently already knew the answers.
"Do you know how much sulfuric they put in the river? He said the EPA give Black Mountain thirty days to shut down that leaching operation."
"Damn, man, that's veneno. How long you think we been putting that on our trees?"
"When did anybody ever tell the Mountain what to do?" The man who said this had a remarkably wrinkled brown face, like an Indian mummy I'd once seen in a roadside museum. "They'll pull some kind of strings," he said.
A man who sat with his back to me spoke up. "They won't fight the EPA. It's not worth it. They been saying for ten years that mine is dead. They're not hardly getting anything from that leaching operation."
Another man nodded at this, pointing his fork toward the head of the canyon. "Just enough to pay the taxes. That's all. They'll shut her down."
"You think so?" asked the one who reminded me of a mummy. "They're getting gold and moly out of them tailing piles. If they wasn't, they wouldn't keep running the acid through them. You boys know that damn company. They're not going to stop no leaching operation on account of our pecan trees." His voice trailed off and he was quiet for a minute, his callused fingers fooling with an unlit cigarette. I heard women's voices rising randomly over the din of the party, calling out instructions, reining in their kids. The party seemed like something underwater, a lost continent, and I felt profoundly sad though it wasn't my continent. I would go get a bite to eat, say something grateful to Emelina, and slip back into my house.
The man with his back to me said, "It's in Ray Pilar's apples and quince." He pronounced it "queens."
Another man, younger than the others, said, "It's going to kill every damn tree in this canyon. If I'm wrong, my friend, you can shoot me."
The man with the wrinkled face said, "If you're right, my friend, you might as well shoot yourself."
8
Pictures
The dead mountain range of tailings on the lip of the mine had sat for decades, washed by rain, and still was barren as the Sahara. From a distance you might guess these piles of dirt to be fragile, like a sandcastle, but up close you'd see the pinkish soil corrugated with vertical ridges and eroded to a sheen, like rock. It would take a pickaxe to dent it.
It was high noon and I knew where I was. I bypassed the old mine road at the top of the canyon and stayed on the unmarked lane that people called, for reasons unknown to me, the Old Pony Road. All Grace's streets went by odd names that had mostly to do with picturesque forms of transportation: the Old and New Pony roads, the Goatleg, Dog-Cart Road, and the inexplicable Tortoise Road. Amazingly, most or all of these also had official, normal-sounding names like West Street and San Francisco Lane, which were plainly marked on painted aluminum street signs and totally ignored. Maybe somebody had just recently dreamed up these normal names and hammered up signs to improve the town's image.
From the canyon's crest I could see down into the isolated settlements at the north end of the valley, some abandoned, some buried in deep graves of mine tailings, through which, presumably, Black Mountain now ran quantities of sulfuric acid. Far to the south lay open desert. The road I was on would pass through one more flock of little houses, all settled like hens into their gardens, before reaching Doc Homer's drafty two-story gray edifice.
I bypassed the main entrance of the hospital, the only one of the ghost town of Black Mountain buildings that was still in use. The hospital itself had finally closed--people had to leave Grace for a more equipped town if their problems were major--but Doc Homer's office in the basement could handle anything up to and including broken limbs. He wasn't working there today. I'd called him at home; I was expected.
"Cosima? Cosima Noline! I want you to look." A heavyset woman in a housedress and running shoes was standing at her mailbox, shouting at me. "Child, will you look. If you aren't the picture of your mother."
My mother was dead at my age. The woman put her arms around me. She was nobody I recognized.
"We've been so anxious to see you!" she said at a convincing decibel level. "Viola told us at sewing club you'd got in, and was staying down with her and J.T. and Emelina till you can help Doc get his place straightened out and move in up here with him. Oh, I know Doc's glad to have you back. He's been poorly, I don't expect he'd tell you but he is. They said when you was overseas you learned the cure they used on that actress in Paris, France. Bless your heart, you're a dear child." She paused, finally, taking in my face. "You don't remember me, do you?"
I waited, expecting help. It had been fourteen years, after all. But she offered no hints. "No, I'm sorry," I said. "I don't."
"Uda!" The woman said.
"Oh. Uda. I'm sorry." I still didn't have the foggiest idea who she was.
"I won't keep you, hon, but I want you to come for dinner soon as you can. I've baked Doc a squash pie I've been aiming to take up there. Hang on, I'll just run get it."
I waited while she hurried on her small feet up the path to the house and disappeared into the cave of honeysuckle that had swallowed her front porch. Uda returned directly with a covered pie tin that I accepted along with a bewildering kiss on both cheeks. I wondered how many people in Grace believed I'd flown in fresh from Paris with a cure for Alzheimer's.
He'd told me two years ago. I had no idea if it was the confirmed truth or just his opinion, since Doc Homer made no distinction between the two. And if it was true, I still didn't know what to think. What we are talking about, basically, is self-diagnosed insanity and that gets complicated.
Carlo and I in fact weren't living in Paris (we never had), but in Minnesota; we'd already come back from Crete. Hallie had kept decently in touch with Doc Homer but I hadn't, and felt guilty, so I engineered a visit in Las Cruces. God knows how long he would have waited to tell me, otherwise. This meeting was not a plan he'd cooked up to give me the news, but my idea, sprung at the last minute. An accident of science, actually. Someone had recently spliced the glow gene from a glowworm into a tobacco plant, and the scientific world was buzzing over this useless but remarkable fact. All t
he top geneticists were meeting in New Mexico and my boss wanted me down there to take notes. I was working at a high-powered research lab; this was prior to my moving back to Tucson and falling into convenience-mart clerking. If I ever wrote down on paper my full employment history, I assure you it would look like the resume of a schizophrenic.
And in my professional upswings I had more of what passes for confidence; it dawned on me that it's an easy bus ride over the state line from Grace to Las Cruces. I'd phone Doc Homer.
I was astonished when he agreed to come. "Barring unforeseen difficulties at the hospital," he'd said over the phone. I didn't know yet that the hospital had closed; that he sometimes forgot.
"You always say that." It was true, that was his standard disclaimer on every promise to Hallie or me, but it was uncharacteristic for me to tease him. Truthfully, after such an ice age, there was no such thing as characteristic. I tried out joking, more or less to see if it would work. "You'll say that at your own funeral, Pop," I'd said boldly into the receiver. Later, after he told me, I could have bitten my tongue off for that.
We met in the lobby of the Holiday Inn, just for a couple of drinks since he said he had to get back to Grace that night. The bar was done up in this madly cheerful south-of-the-border decor, with a blue tile fountain and silk bougainvillaeas climbing out of clay pots shaped like pigs. It was somebody's idea of what Old Mexico would look like if you didn't have to take poverty into account. The waitresses wore swishy miniskirts with ruffles in contrasting primary colors. In this setting my father told me he had a terminal disorder of the brain.
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