And Other Stories (18 page)

"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."