What Used to Be Good Still Is
Emma Bull
Emma Bull
Porphyry is a volcanic rock. Maybe that's why it happened. Maybe it was because the hill that became a pit was named Guadalupe, for the Virgin of Guadalupe, who appeared in a vision to a Mexican peasant a long time ago. Maybe it's because walls change whatever they enclose, and whatever they leave out.
And maybe it could have happened anywhere, any time. But I don't believe that for a second.
I expect I wouldn't have taken too much notice of Sara Gutierrez if my pop hadn't. I was a senior at Hollier High School, varsity football first string, debating team, science club. Sara was the eighth-grade sister of Alfred Gutierrez, who I knew from football. But the Gutierrezes lived in South Hollier, down the slope from the Dimas shaft, on the other side of Guadalupe Hill, and we lived on Collar Hill above downtown with the lawyers and store owners and bankers. Alfred and I didn't see much of each other outside of football practice. The only time my father saw Alfred's father was when Enrique Gutierrez had his annual physical at the company hospital, or if he got hurt on the job and Pop had to stitch him up.
But one night I was up studying and heard Pop in the kitchen say, "I don't know if that youngest Gutierrez girl is simple or plain brilliant."
Pop didn't talk about patients at home as a rule, so that was interesting enough to make me prick up my ears.
"Probably somewhere in between, like most," Mom said. Mom didn't impress easily.
"She came into the infirmary today with her chest sounding like a teakettle on the boil. If I can keep that child from dying of pneumonia or TB, I'll change my name to Albert Schweitzer." He paused, and I knew Mom was waiting for him to come back from wherever that thought had led him. She and I were used to Pop's parentheses. "Anyway, while I'm writing up her prescription, she says, 'Doctor Ryan, what makes a finch?'"
"I don't suppose you told her, 'God,'" Mom said with a sigh.
"I didn't know what to say. But when she saw I didn't get her drift, she asked why are house finches and those little African finches that Binnie Schwartz keeps in her parlor both finches? So I started to tell her about zoological taxonomy--"
"I just bet you did," Mom said. I could hear her smiling.
"Now, Jule--"
"Go on, go on. I won't get any peace 'til you do."
"Well, then she said, 'But the finches don't think so. We're human beings because we say we are. But the finches don't think they're all finches. Shouldn't that make a difference?'"
A pause, and the sound of dishes clattering in the wash water. "Sara Gutierrez spends too much time on her own," Mom said. "Invalids always think too much."
I don't remember what Pop replied to that. Probably he argued; Pop argued with any sentence that contained the word "always."
By the time I came home for the summer after my first year of college, the matter was settled: Sara Gutierrez was bright. She'd missed nearly half her freshman year in high school what with being out sick, but was still top of her class. Pop bragged about her as if he'd made her himself.
She was thin and small and kind of yellowish, and you'd hardly notice if she was in the same room with you. The other girls in town got permanent waves to look like Bette Davis. Sara still looked like Louise Brooks, her hair short, no curl at all. But that summer I saw her at the ballpark during one of the baseball games. She looked straight at me in the stands. There was something in her eyes so big, so heavy, so hard to hang onto that it seemed like her body would break from trying to carry it.
Nobody ever suggested that Sara was bright at anything likely to be of use to her. A long while later I looked her up in the Hollier Hoist, the high school yearbook, to see what her classmates must have made of her. She'd been a library monitor. That was all. No drama society, no debating team, no booster club, no decorating committee for the Homecoming dance.
I guess she saved her debating for me. And she danced, all right, but you won't find that in the yearbooks.
Hollier was a mining town--founded in the 1880s by miners and speculators. The whole point of life here was to dig copper out of the ground as cheap as possible, and hope that when you got it to the surface you could sell it for a price that made the work worthwhile. The town balanced on a knife edge, with the price of copper on one side, and the cost of mining it on the other.
And that didn't apply only to the miners and foremen and company management. If copper did poorly, so did the grocers, mechanics, lawyers, and schoolteachers. What came up out of those shafts fed and clothed us all. Pop was a company doctor. Without copper, there was no company, no one to doctor, no dinner on the table, no money for movies on Saturday, no college tuition. He used to say that Hollier was a lifeboat, with all of us rowing for a shore we couldn't see. The company was the captain, and we trusted that the captain had a working compass and knew how to read it.
Underground mining's expensive. The shafts went deeper and deeper under the mountains following the veins of high-grade ore, the pumps ran night and day to pump out the water that tried to fill those shafts, and the men who dug and drilled and blasted had to be paid. But near the surface, under what farmers call dirt and miners call overburden, around where the rich veins used to run, there was plenty of low-grade ore. Though it didn't have as much copper in it, it could be scraped right off the surface. No tunnels, no pumps, and a hell of a lot fewer men to pay.
Guadalupe Hill was a fine cone-shaped repository of low-grade ore.
The summer after my sophomore year at college, I came home to find the steam shovels scooping the top off Guadalupe Hill. You could see the work from the parlor windows on Collar Hill, hear the roar and crash of it funneled up the canyon from the other side of downtown. Almost the first thing I heard when I got off the train at the depot was the warning siren for a blast, and the dynamite going off like a giant bass drum. From the platform I could see the dust go up in a thundercloud; then the machinery moved in like retrievers after a shot bird.
As Pop helped me stow my suitcase in the trunk of the Hudson, I said, "I'd sure like to watch that," and jerked my head at Guadalupe Hill.
"I'd take you over now, but your mother would fry me for supper."
"Oh, I didn't mean before I went home." I would have meant it, but I knew he'd be disappointed in me if I couldn't put Mom before mining.
Once I'd dropped my suitcase in my room and given Mom a kiss and let her say I looked too thin and didn't they feed me in that frat house dining room, Pop took me down to watch the dig.
It was the biggest work I'd ever seen human beings do. Oh, there'd been millions of dollars of copper ore taken out of the shafts in Hollier. Everyone in town knew there were a thousand miles of shafts, and could recite how many men the company employed; but you couldn't see it. Now here was Guadalupe Hill crawling with steam shovels and dump trucks, men shouting, steam screeching, whistles, bells. It went as smooth and precise as a ballet troupe, even when it looked and sounded like the mouth of Hell.
And the crazy ambition of the thing! Some set of madmen had wanted to turn what most folks would have called a mountain inside out, turn it into a hole as deep and as wide as the mountain was tall. And another set of madmen had said, "Sure, we can do that."
Later I wasn't surprised when people said, "Let's go to the moon," because I'd seen the digging of Guadalupe Pit. It was like watching the building of the pyramids.
Pop stopped to talk to the shift boss. Next to that big man, brown with sun and streaked with dust, confident and booming and pointing with his square, hard hands, Pop looked small and white and helpless. He was a good doctor, maybe even a great one. His example had me pointed toward pre-med, and medical school at Harvard or Stanford if I could get in. But looking from him to the shift boss to the roaring steam shovels, I felt something in me slip. I wanted to do something big, something that people would see and marvel at. I wanted people to look on my work and see progress and prosperity and stand in awe of the power of Man.
Over dinner, I said, "It makes you feel as if you can do anything, watching that."
"You can, if you have enough dynamite and a steam shovel," Pop agreed as he reached for a pork chop.
"No, really! We're not just living on the planet like fleas on a dog anymore. We're changing it to suit us. Like sculptors. Like--"
"God?" Mom said, even though I'd stopped myself.
"Of course not, Mom." But I'd thought it, and she knew it. She also knew I was a college boy and consequently thought myself wiser than Solomon.
Conversation touched on the basketball team and the repainting of the Women's Club before I said carefully, "I've been wondering if I'm cut out for med school."
Guess I wasn't careful enough; Pop gave me a look over his plate that suggested he was onto me. "Not everyone is."
"I don't want to let you down."
"You know we'll be proud of you no matter what," Mom replied, sounding offended that she had to tell me such a thing.
"I'm thinking of transfering to the Colorado School of Mines."
"Might need some scholarship money--being out of state," said Pop. "But your grades are good. The company might help out, too." He passed me the mashed potatoes. "You don't have to be a doctor just because I am."
"Of course not." I needed to hear him say so, though.
We sat in the parlor after dinner. Pop got his pipe going before he said, "The Gutierrez family isn't doing so well. Tool nippers got laid off at the Dimas shaft, and Enrique with 'em. I think it hit Sara hard."
At first I thought he was talking about Mrs. Gutierrez; I don't know that I'd ever heard her first name. Then I remembered Sara.
"You might take the time for a chat if you see her." He took his pipe out of his mouth and peered at it as if it were a mystery. "She asks about you."
If there's a young fellow who can remain unmoved by the knowledge that a girl asks about him, I haven't met him.
Sara was working in the Hollier Library for the summer. I found an excuse to drop in first thing next day. I came up to the desk and called to the girl on the other side who was shelving reserved books, "Is Sara Gutierrez working today?"
Of course it was her. When I look back on it, it seems like the most natural thing in the world that the girl would straighten up and turn 'round, and there she'd be. Her hair still wasn't waved, and she wasn't pink and white like a girl in a soap ad. But she wasn't thin anymore, either. Her eyes were big and dark under straight black brows, and she looked at me as if she were taking me apart to see what I was made of. Then she said, without a hint of a smile, "She'd better be, or this whole place'll go to the dickens."
I'd planned to say hello, pass the time of day for a few minutes. But a little fizz went up my backbone, and I heard myself say, "Must be awful hard for her to get time off for lunch."
"She'd probably sneak out if someone made her a decent offer."
"Will the lunch counter at the drug store do?"
Sara looked at me through her eyelashes. "Golly, Mr. Ryan, you sweet-talked me into it."
"I'll come by for you at the noon whistle."
She had grilled cheese and a chocolate phosphate. Funny the things you remember. And she said the damnedest things without once cracking a smile, until I told her about my fraternity initiation and made her laugh so hard she skidded off her stool. By the time I asked for the check I'd gotten a good notion of how to tell when she was joking. And I'd asked her to go to the movies the next night, and she'd said yes.
I picked her up for the movie outside the library, and when it was over, I proceeded to drive her home. But at the turnoff for the road to South Hollier, she said, "I can walk from here."
I turned onto the road. "Not in the dark. What if you tripped in a hole, or met up with a javelina--"
"I'd rather walk," she said, her voice tight and small.
I didn't think I'd said or done anything to make her mad. "Now, don't be silly." I remembered Pop saying that Sara seemed to take her father's layoff hard. Was that what this was about?
"Really--" she began.
In the headlights and the moonlight I could see two tall ridges of dirt and rock crossways to the road on either side, as if threatening to pinch it between them. Two corrugated iron culvert pipes, each as big around as a truck, loomed in the scrub at the roadside.
"Where'd that come from?"
She didn't answer. The Hudson passed between the ridges of dirt, and I could see the lights of the houses of South Hollier in front of me. I pulled over.
"Are they building something here?" I asked.
Sara sat in the passenger seat with her hands clenched in her lap and her face set, looking out the windshield. "It's Guadalupe Hill," she said at last.
"What?"
"They have to put it someplace. The tailings will make a new line of hills around South Hollier on the east and south."
I tried to imagine it. North and west, the neighborhood ran right up to the mountain slopes. This would turn South Hollier into the bottom of a bowl with an old mountain range on two sides and a new one on the others.
"What about the road?"
"That's what the pipes are for."
"You mean you'll drive through the pipe, like a tunnel?"
"One for each direction," she answered.
"Well, I'll be darned." The more I thought about it, the cleverer it was. Wasn't it just like mining engineers to figure out a way to put a tailings dump where it had to go without interfering with the neighborhood traffic?
Sara shook her head and pleated her skirt between her fingers. I put the Hudson into gear and drove down the road into South Hollier.
At her door, I asked, "Can I see you again?"
She looked up into my face, with that taking-me-apart expression. At last she said, "'May I.' College man."
"May I?"
"Oh, all right." Her eyes narrowed when she was teasing. Before I knew what had happened, she was on the other side of her screen door. Based on her technique, I was not the first young man to bring her home. "Good night, Jimmy."
I drove back to Collar Hill with vague but pleasant plans for the summer.
She met me for lunch a couple times a week, and sometimes she'd let me go with her and carry her packages when she had errands to the Mercantile or the Fair Store. Once she wanted sheet music from the Music Box, and she let me talk her into a piano arrangement of a boogie woogie song I'd heard at a college party.
"Should I hide it from my mama?" she asked, with her eyes narrowed.
"I'll bet she snuck out to the ragtime dances."
"Oh, not a good Catholic girl like my mama."
"Mine's a good Catholic girl, too, and she did it."
Sara smiled, just the tiniest little smile, looking down at the music. For some reason, that smile made my face hot as a griddle.
Sara wouldn't go to a movie again, though, or the town chorus concert or the Knights of Columbus dance. I asked her to the Fourth of July fireworks, but she said she was going with her family.
"I'll look for you," I said, and she shrugged and hurried away.
The fireworks were set off at the far end of Panorama Park, down in the newer neighborhood of Wilson where the company managers lived. Folks tended to spread their picnic blankets in the same spot every year. The park divided into nations, too, like much of Hollier. A lot of the Czech and Serbian families picnicked together, and the Italians, and the Cornishmen; the Mexicans set up down by the rose garden, at the edge of the sycamores. The Gutierrez family would be there.
I got to the park at twilight, and after saying hello to a few old friends from high school, and friends of Mom and Pop's, I pressed through the crowd and the smells from all those picnic dinners. When I got to the rose garden it was almost dark, but I found Alfred Gutierrez without too much trouble.
"You looking for Sara?" he said, with a little grin.
"I told her I'd come 'round and say hi." I was above responding to that grin.
"She's around here someplace. Hola, Mamá," he called over his shoulder, "where'd Sara go?"
Mrs. Gutierrez was putting the remains of their picnic away. She looked up and smiled when she saw me. "Hello, Jimmy. How's your mama and papa?"
"They're fine. I just wanted to say hello..."
Mrs. Gutierrez nodded over her picnic basket. "Sara said she had to talk to someone."
Was it me? Was she looking for me, out there in the night, while I looked for her? There was a bang--the first of the fireworks. "Will you tell her I was here?"
Alfred grinned again, and Mrs. Gutierrez looked patient in the blue light of the starburst.
I watched the fireworks, but I didn't get much out of them. Was Sara avoiding me? Why wouldn't she see me except when she was downtown; in the daytime, but never the evenings? Could it be she was ashamed of her family, so she wouldn't let me pick her up at home? The Gutierrez family wasn't rich, but neither were we. No, it had to be something about me.
It wasn't as if we were sweethearts; we were just friends. I'd go back to college in September, she'd stay here, and we'd probably forget all about each other. We were just having fun, passing the time. She was too young for me to be serious about, anyway. So why was she giving me the runaround?
By the time the finale erupted in fountains and pinwheels, I'd decided two could play that game. I'd find myself some other way to pass the time for the next couple months, and it wouldn't be hard to do, either.
That was when I saw her, carried along with the slow movement of people out of the park, her white summer dress reflecting the moon and the street lights. She was holding someone's little girl by the hand and trying to get her to walk, but the kid had reached that stage of tired in which nothing sounded good to her.
"Hi, Sara."
"Jimmy! I didn't see you there."
I wanted to say something sophisticated and bitter like, "I'm sure you didn't," but I remembered that I'd resolved to be cool and distant. That's when the little girl burst into noisy, angry tears.
"Margie, Margarita, I can't carry you. You're a big girl. Won't you please--"
I scooped the kid up so quickly that it shocked the tears out of her. "A big girl needs a bigger horse than Sara," I told her, and settled her on my shoulders, piggyback-fashion.
We squeezed through the crowd without speaking until we got to Margie's family's pickup truck. The Gutierrez family was riding with them, and I had to see Alfred smirk at me again. Folks started to settle into the back of the truck on their picnic blankets. Something about Sara's straight back and closed-up face, and the fact that she still wasn't talking, made me say, "Looks kind of crowded. I've got my pop's car here..."
Mrs. Gutierrez looked distracted and waved her hands over picnic basket, blankets, sleeping kids, and folded-up adults. "Would you--? Sara, you go with Jimmy. I don't know how..." With that, she went back to, I think, trying to figure out how they'd all come in the truck in the first place.
Sara turned to me, her eyes big and sort of wounded. "If you don't mind," she mumbled.
We were in the front seat of the Hudson before I remembered my grudge. "Now, look, Sara, you've been dodging me--"
She was startled. "Oh, no--"
"I just want to say you don't have to. We've had some fun, but if you think I'm going to go too far or make a pest of myself or hang on you like a stray dog--"
The force of her head-shaking stopped me. "No, really, I don't."
"What's up with you, then? We're just friends, aren't we?"
Sara looked at her knees for a long time, and I wondered if I'd said something wrong. "That's so," she said finally. "We are."
She sounded as if she were deciding on something, planting her feet and refusing to be swayed. I'd only started on my list of grievances, but her tone made me lose my place in the list. "I guess I'll take you home, then."
We talked about fireworks as I drove: which we liked best, how we'd loved the lights and colors but hated the bang when we were kids, things we remembered from past July Fourths in the park. But as I turned down her road and headed toward South Hollier, Sara's voice trailed off. At the tailings ridge, I stopped the car.
"Darn it, Sara, why should I care where you live? Is that what this is about, why you go all stiff and funny?"
She stared at me, baffled-looking. "No. No, it's that..." She reached for the door handle. "Come with me, will you, Jimmy?"
In the glare of the headlights, she picked her way up to the foot of the tailings. I was ready to grab her elbow if she stepped wrong; the ground was covered with debris rolled down from the ridge top, rocks of all sizes that seemed to want to shift away under my feet or turn just enough to twist my ankle. But she went slow but steady over the mess as if she'd found a path to follow.
She stopped and tipped her head back. The stars showed over the black edge of the tailings, and I thought that was what she was looking at. "Can you tell?" she asked.
"Tell what?"
Sara looked down at her feet for the first time since she got out of the car, then at the ridge, and finally at me. "It doesn't want to be here."
"What doesn't?"
"The mountain. Look, it's lying all broken and upside down--overburden on the bottom instead of the top, then the stone that's never been in sunlight before. It's unhappy, and now it'll be a whole unhappy ring around South Hollier." She turned, and I saw two tears spill out her eyes. "We've always been happy here before."
For an instant I thought she was crazy; I was a little afraid of her. Then I realized she was being poetic. Pop had said her dad's layoff had hit her hard. She was just using the tailings as a symbol for what had changed.
"You'll be happy again," I told her. "This won't last, you'll see."
She looked blank. Then she reached out toward the slope as if she wanted to pat it. "This will last. I want to fix it, and there's nothing..." She swallowed loudly and turned her face away.
I couldn't think of a way to fix things for her, and I didn't want to say anything about her crying. So I turned back to the tailings ridge, textured like some wild fabric in the headlights. "That gray rock is porphyry, did you know?"
"Of course I do." The ghost of her old pepper was in that. I suppose it was a silly question to ask a miner's daughter.
"Well, do you know it's the insides of a volcano?"
She looked over her shoulder and frowned.
"The insides of a want-to-be volcano, anyway," I went on. "The granite liquifies in the heat and pushes up, but it never makes it out the top. So nobody knows it's a volcano, because it never erupted."
Sara had stopped frowning as I spoke. Now she turned back to the tailings with an expression I couldn't figure out. "It wanted to be a volcano," she murmured.
I didn't know what else to say, and she didn't seem to need to say anything more. "I ought to get you home," I said finally. "Your mom will be wondering."
When we stopped in front of her house, Sara turned to me. "I only told you that, about the...about the mountain, because we're friends. You said so yourself. I wouldn't talk about it to just anybody."
"Guess I won't talk about it at all."
She smiled. "Thank you, Jimmy. For the ride, and everything." She slid out of the passenger side door and ran up to her porch. She ran like a little kid, as if she ran because she could and not because she had to. When she got to the porch she waved.
I waved back even though I knew she couldn't see me.
Mom asked me the next day if I'd drive her up to see her aunt in Tucson. We were halfway there before she said, "Are you still seeing Sara Gutierrez?"
I was about to tell her that I'd seen her the night before, when I realized that wasn't how she meant "seeing." "We're just friends, Mom. She's too young for me to think of that way."
"Does she think so, too?"
I thought about last night's conversation. "Sure, she does."
"I know you wouldn't lead her on on purpose, but it would be a terrible thing to do to her, to make her think you were serious when you aren't."
"Well, she doesn't think so." Mom was just being Mom; no reason to get angry. But I was.
"And it would break your father's heart if you got her in trouble."
"I'm not up to any hanky-panky with Sara Gutierrez, and I'm not going to be. Are you satisfied?"
"Watch your tone, young man. You may be grown up, but I'm still your mother."
I apologized, and did my best to be the perfect son for the rest of the trip. But the suggestion that anyone might think Sara and I would be doing things we'd be ashamed to let other people know about--it hung around like a bad smell, and made me queasy whenever I remembered it.
Did people see me with Sara and think I was sneaking off with her to-- My God, even the words, ones I'd used about friends and classmates and strangers, were revolting. Somewhere in Hollier, someone could be saying, "Jimmy Ryan with the youngest Gutierrez girl! Why, he probably dazzled her into letting him do whatever he wanted. And you know he won't think about her for five minutes after he goes back to college."
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, Izta-- Iztaccihuatl in Mexico. Izta 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."
"Then I'll say this, one friend to another. Something's eating you, and it's not good. Tell me. I'll help."
Sara smiled, a slow one that opened up like flower petals. We heard her screen door bang, and looked to see her mom on the front porch.
"Jimmy!" Mrs. Gutierrez called. "Jimmy Ryan, when did you get home? Come in for coffee!"
Sara gave a little laugh. "Don't argue with my mama."
I went in, and got coffee Mexican style, with a little cinnamon, and powdered-sugar-dusted cookies. Mrs. Gutierrez skimmed around her scoured red-and-yellow kitchen like a hummingbird. But here, too, something wasn't right.
Mrs. Gutierrez gave Sara a pile of magazines to take to a neighbor's house. When we heard the screen bang behind her, Mrs. Gutierrez turned to me. "You see how she is?"
"Has she been sick?"
Mrs. Gutierrez twisted the dishrag between her hands, and I was reminded of Sara twisting at her skirt, the first night I'd driven her home. "When... At night, late, she goes to bed. She says she's going to bed. But I lie awake in the dark and hear her go out again. It's hours before she comes back."
I felt so light-headed I almost couldn't see. "Is it some boy?" I was scared at how angry I sounded. "Is she--" Everything else stuck in my throat. I had no business being angry. I was furious.
But Mrs. Gutierrez shook her head. "Do you think I would let that go on? Almost I wish it were. Then we'd have shame or a wedding, but not this--this fading away."
It was true. Sara was fading away.
"What can I do?"
"Find out what's happening. Make her stop."
So I began to meet her for lunch. She wasn't too busy anymore, but she was always tired. Still, she smiled at me, the kind of weary, gentle smile that women who work too hard wear, and let me take her to the drug store lunch counter. I made her eat, which she didn't mind doing, but didn't seem to care much about, either.
"Are you going to tell me what's wrong?" I asked every time. And every time, she'd say "Nothing," and make a joke or turn the subject.
One day--I know the date exactly, December 12--I badgered her again.
"There's nothing wrong, Jimmy. Everything's fine now."
"That sounds like things used to be wrong. What's changed?"
Sara gave a little frustrated shrug that made her collarbone show through her blouse. "You remember I told you we used to be happy? Well, we're happy again. That's all."
"Your mom's not happy."
"Yes, she is--she's just looking for something to be unhappy about. Is that why you're always nagging me? Because she told you to?"
"Well, why shouldn't she? You're skin and bones, she says you don't sleep, you sneak out of the house--"
Sara's face stopped me. It was like stone, except for her eyes, which seemed to scorch my face as she looked at me. "You know what you are, Jimmy Ryan? You're a busybody old woman. Keep your nose out of my business from now on!"
She spun around on her counter stool and plunged out of the drugstore.
By the time I got out to the sidewalk she was gone. She wasn't at the library, or the high school.
That night I picked at my dinner, until Mom said, "Jimmy, are you sick?"
"I had a big lunch, I guess. Pop, can I borrow the car tonight?"
"Sure. What you got planned?"
I felt terrible as I said, "Supposed to be a meteor shower tonight. I thought I'd drive out past Don Emilio and watch."
This time he didn't give me a look across the table. I almost wished he had.
I drove out the road toward South Hollier at about 9 p.m. I didn't know when the Gutierrez family went to bed, but I didn't want to arrive much past that time, whatever it was. I parked the car off the road just before the culvert-pipe tunnels and walked the rest of the way.
The night was so clear that the starlight was enough to see by. I circled South Hollier, only waking up one dog in the process, until I found a perch where I could see the front and back doors of the Gutierrez house. That put me partway up the lower slopes of the tailings dump. I'd thought there was another house or two between theirs and the dump; had they been torn down to make room?
It got cold, and colder, as I waited. I wished I had a watch with a radium dial. Finally I saw movement; I had to blink and look away to make sure it wasn't just from staring for so long at one spot.
Sara was a pale smudge, standing in her back yard in a light-colored dress, her head tipped back to see the stars, or the ridge top. She set out to climb the slope.
She wasn't looking for me, and I was wearing a dark wool coat. So I could follow her as she climbed, up and up until she reached the top of the ridge. I had the sense to stay down where I wouldn't show up against the sky.
Sara stood still for a moment, her head down. Then she lifted her face and her arms. She began a shuffling step, rhythmic, sure, as if the loose stones she danced over were a polished wood floor. About every five steps she gave a spring. Sometimes she'd turn in place, or sweep her arms over her head in a wide arc. I followed her as she moved along the ridge, until in one of her turns the starlight fell on her face. It was blank, entranced. Her eyes were open, but not seeing.
I couldn't stand it. "Sara!"
She came back to her own face; I don't know any other way to say it. She came back, stumbled, and stopped. I scrambled up the slope to her, and grabbed her shoulders as she swayed. They were thin as bird bones under my hands.
"Sara, what is this? What the hell are you doing out here?" My voice sounded hollow and thin, carried away by the air over the ridge.
"Jimmy? What are you doing here?"
I felt my face burn. The only true answer was "Spying." I felt guilty enough to be angry again. "Trying to find out what you wouldn't tell me. Friends don't lie to each other."
"I haven't...I haven't lied to you."
"You said everything was fine!"
She nodded slowly. "It is, now."
"You're sleepwalking on the tailings!"
Her face took on a new sharpness. "You think I'm sleepwalking?"
"What else?"
"Oh, God." She scrubbed at her face with both hands. "Don't you remember, when I told you about Fuji and the others?"
I let go of her shoulders. For the first time I felt, in my palms, the heat of her skin, that radiated through the material of her dress. "This isn't some bunk about the mountain?"
"I had to fix it. There wasn't anybody else who could."
"You're not fixing anything! This is just a pile of rocks that used to be a hill!"
"Jimmy. I am the mountain."
She stood so still before me, so straight and solid. And I was cold all the way through, watching the light of the stars waver through the halo of heat around her.
"Sara. Please, this is-- Come down from here. Pop will help you--"
Her eyes narrowed, and her head cocked. "Can he dance?"
She was still there, still present in her crazy head. The rush of relief almost knocked me over. What would I have done if she'd been lost--if I'd lost her?
If I'd lost her. Before my eyes I saw two futures stretching out before me. One of them had Sara in it, every day, for every minute. The other... The other looked like bare, broken rock that nothing would grow on.
The shock pushed the words out of my mouth. "I love you, Sara."
She shook her head, wide-eyed. "Oh..."
"Marry me. I'm going to Colorado next month, you can go with me. You can finish school there--"
Sara was still shaking her head, and now her eyes were full of tears and reflected stars. She reached out a hand, stretching it out as if we were far, far apart. "Oh, Jimmy. I want-- Oh, don't you see?"
"Don't you care for me, Sara?"
She gave a terrible wordless cry, as if she were being twisted in invisible hands. "I can't leave!"
"But for you and me--"
"There are more people than just us. They need me."
"Your folks? They've got your brothers. They don't need you the way I do."
"Jimmy, you're not listening. I can't leave. I'm the mountain."
Her face wasn't crazy. It was streaked with tears and a deep, adult sorrow, like the saints' statues in St. Patrick's Church. Sara reached out to me the way Mary's statue reached down from her niche over the altar, pity and yearning in the very finger-joints. I saw the waving heat around her, and the stars in her eyes and her hair.
I stepped back a pace. I couldn't help it.
I saw her heart break. That's the only way I can describe what I watched in her face. But when it was done, what was left in her eyes and her mouth and the way she held her head was strong and certain and brave.
"Goodbye, Jimmy," she said. She turned, sure-footed, and ran like a deer along the tailings ridge into the night.
I think I shouted her name. I know that something set the dogs barking all over South Hollier, and eventually Enrique Gutierrez was shaking me by the shoulders.
When Sara hadn't come home by morning, we called the police. Mr. and Mrs. Gutierrez were afraid she'd broken her leg, or fallen and been knocked out. I couldn't talk about what I was afraid of, so I agreed with them, that that could have happened.
Every able-bodied person in South Hollier joined the search. Everyone thought it would be over in an hour or so. By afternoon the police had brought dogs in, and were looking for fresh slides. They didn't say they were looking for places where the rocks might have engulfed a body.
If she was out there, the dogs would have found her. Still, I had to go down to the station, because I was the last one to see her, because the girl at the lunch counter had heard our fight. And God knows, I must have seemed a little crazy. I told them what I'd seen and what we'd said. I just didn't tell them what I thought had happened.
I didn't transfer to the Colorado School of Mines. Leveling mountains didn't appeal to me anymore. I went back to pre-med, and started on medical school at the University of Arizona. When Pearl Harbor was bombed, I enlisted, and went to the Pacific as a medic.
After the war, I finished medical school and hired on as a company doctor at the hospital in Hollier. Pop had passed, and Mom was glad to have me nearby. I couldn't live in the house on Collar Hill, though, that looked down the canyon to where Guadalupe Hill had been. I found a little house in South Hollier, small enough for a bachelor to handle.
The Gutierrez house was gone. As the dump grew, it needed a bigger base, and the company bought the house and knocked it down to make room for more rock. Mr. and Mrs. Gutierrez bought a place down at the south end of Wilson, and while they were alive, I used to visit and tell them how their old neighbors were getting on.
I'd lived in South Hollier for a couple of months before I climbed the slope of the tailings one December night and sat in the starlight. I sat for maybe an hour before I felt her beside me. I didn't turn to look.
"The mountain's happy now," I said. My voice cracked a little.
"I'm happy," she said. "Be happy for me, Jimmy."
"Who's going to be happy for me?"
"I'll do that. Maybe someday you will, too."
I shook my head, but it seemed silly to argue with her.
"What used to be good still is," she said. "Remember that." And after a minute, "I take care of everybody, but you most of all."
"I'll die after a while and save you the trouble."
"Not for a long time." There was motion at the corner of my eye, and I felt warm lips against my cheek. "I love you, Jimmy."
Then there was nothing beside me but a gust of cold wind.
I'd watched the mining of Guadalupe Hill, and thought men could do anything, be anything, conquer anything. I'd thought we'd cure cancer any day.
Now Guadalupe Pit is as deep as Guadalupe Hill once was high, and next to it there's a second pit that would hold three Guadalupes. Both pits are shut down, played out. There's no cure for cancer, the AIDS quilt is so big that there's no place large enough to roll the whole thing out at once, and diabetes has gone from a rarity to an epidemic.
But in South Hollier there's a ridge that could have been nothing more than a heap of barren, cast-off rock; and a cluster of buildings that could have slowly emptied and died inside their wall. Instead there's a mountain with a goddess, and a neighborhood that rests safe and happy, as if in her warm cupped hands.
For Elise Matthesen, and the necklace of the same title.