Cinderella in Overalls (10 page)

Why that made her sad she couldn’t say. She’d lived twenty-eight years without ever venturing into such a restaurant and had no need to ever set foot in one again. She was happy with her simple life. Especially now that she was getting the truck. If she weren’t so sleepy, she’d be jumping with joy. But her eyelids were drooping. She was determined not to doze through another trip between La Luz and Palomar.

The next thing she knew she was sleeping on Josh’s shoulder for the second time that day. She forced her eyes open and looked up at the sky. The stars glowed faintly. She turned to tell him she understood why he couldn’t see the constellations in town, but his eyes were closed. His breathing was even and his legs angled off to one side.

She studied his face. Were those worry lines there the last time she looked? Maybe this loan was causing him more concern than he let on. Was he going out on a limb for her and the villagers just to humor her? She wondered what kind of a name he would make for himself if they didn’t pay it back. What would happen to his future in the bank if the program failed?

The taxi hit a bump in the road and his briefcase slipped out from under his arm. She set it on the floor, then folded his suit coat and laid it over the front seat. Finally she leaned back and closed her eyes. But at the next steep turn his body swayed across the seat and his head landed on her shoulder. Her eyes flew open. His stayed shut.

She took his shoulders in her hands and firmly edged him back on his side. He groaned. She wedged herself in the corner and resolutely closed her eyes once more. But the next turn saw him careening toward her again.

She sighed. She couldn’t wake him and ask him to move when he only had five hours of sleep in the past two days. She couldn’t wake him when he felt so right where he was. She liked the way he smelled of American soap. And the way his chin rubbed against her cheek, slightly scratchy and smelling of after-shave, American after-shave.

Familiar, comfortable smells, and yet like nothing she’d ever known before. Like no one she’d ever known before. Was America full of men like this and she just hadn’t noticed? Was Josh Bentley an ordinary man who seemed extraordinary because she’d been buried on the farm? That must be it. Her shaking hands, the banging of her heart, these were the reactions of someone who’d been out of touch.

She told Jacinda she hadn’t known any men in America, only boys. And it was true. She had to come all this way to meet a man. Josh Bentley was all man. She was achingly aware of that fact for the next hundred miles as the taxi bounced along the narrow highway.

Josh felt himself sinking into the soft wool of her sweater. It wasn’t day and it wasn’t night. He wasn’t asleep and he wasn’t awake. He was somewhere in between, and Catherine was there with him, riding through the darkness. Her hair tumbled over her shoulder and caressed his cheek. He inhaled the fragrance of sunshine and flowers, ordinary homegrown flowers, but like nothing he’d ever smelled before.

He didn’t want the ride to end, but the taxi jolted to a stop in front of Catherine’s house. He sat up straight and paid the driver. With his briefcase in his hand and his suit jacket over his arm he stood in the road, wishing he could put his arms around her and feel her body melt into his. But she was looking around at her house, at her garden, everywhere but at him.

He felt strange, empty, disoriented. He managed a half smile in the darkness. “Good night. I’ll be off just as soon as I fix the car.” He opened his briefcase on his knee and took the new hose out.

“I see.” She hesitated. He imagined her inviting him in for a cup of coffee or an early breakfast or a nap in the hammock. He could almost smell the coffee, taste the food and feel the hammock sway.

She spoke. “Do you know what to do?”

“Of course. It’s just a matter of replacing the hose. They explained it to me at the garage. How hard can it be? I’ll be out of here in ten minutes.”

She turned toward her house. “Well, thanks for the dinner. .. and the ride... and the loan.”

He watched her go. “You’re welcome.” It wasn’t the way he’d hoped the evening would end, standing there watching her disappear into her house. He stayed for a moment in the warm night air, waiting to see if the gas light he’d seen last night would go on in her bedroom, but the house was dark and quiet.

Maybe she’d taken her nightgown from the hook on the wall and undressed in the kitchen. He pictured the pink sweater coming off over her head. And then her bra.

He looked down, and the ground seemed to rise up to meet him. He was losing it. He had to get out of there. The sooner the better. His car was just where he’d left it. Removing the old hose was easy. He tossed it onto the ground. Fastening the new one in its place was no problem with the screwdriver from the glove compartment. His eyes were getting used to the dark.

He tightened the clamp and cinched it down. One final twist and he’d be heading back down the road to civilization. But the clamp sprang up and snapped in two. He bent over and picked up the useless pieces. Then, very carefully, he closed the hood of the car. He wanted to laugh, he wanted to cry. Most of all he wanted to sleep.

He didn’t look back at her house. He didn’t think about the hammock. Even if she came out and begged him to come in, he wouldn’t go. He had his pride. And he had his car. It didn’t run, but he had it. He climbed into the back seat. Out of his jacket he made a pillow. He folded his legs like a jackknife and closed his eyes. What he would do in the morning he didn’t know. Right now he didn’t care.

When Catherine woke, the sun was streaming through the window, making a rectangular pattern on her bed. She sat up with a guilty start. She’d fallen asleep so fast she hadn’t heard Josh’s car start up. She imagined him driving through the night, stopping at his apartment and going to the office, while she slept through the raucous rooster’s crowing.

After dressing quickly, she walked out through the kitchen to the back of the house. She inhaled deeply the clean air fragrant with sage and rosemary that grew along the fence. It was good to be home. She felt unsettled and anxious in the city. Especially this last time.

There were goats to milk, eggs to collect and melons to pick, but first she had to find Jacinda and tell her the good news.

She walked around the front of her house and stopped dead in her tracks. Josh’s car was exactly where he’d left it. She dropped her wicker basket and ran to peer in the back window. He was folded in the back seat, sleeping soundly. She rapped on the window. He raised his head and blinked at her. Her mouth curved into a reluctant smile at the sight of his rumpled, sleepy appearance.

She heard herself asking the obvious question. “What are you doing here?”

He sat up and rubbed his head. She opened the door and stared down at him. “The clamp broke,” he said, holding up the two metal pieces.

She took them out of his hand to examine them. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

He got out of the car and ran his hand through his hair, feeling like an idiot, his last words still ringing in his ears, and probably in hers, too. “How hard can it be?” And “Out of here in ten minutes.” She must be wondering if he was creating these problems as an excuse to hang around.

“What would you have done?” he asked irritably. “Made a new one out of bailing wire?” He paused, regaining control. “Sorry, but it’s just a damn inconvenience being so far from... from...”

“Civilization? Go ahead and say it. We’re in the sticks, the boonies. Away from tall buildings and polluted air.”

He put his hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry if I sounded critical. I’m not angry with you. I’m angry with myself. I want to get out of here, and I’m sure you want me out of here as soon as possible so you can go back to your prize potatoes and I can go back to reducing the national debt.” He raised the hood of the car. “That’s the new hose. But it’s no good without the clamp.”

She rubbed the broken pieces together thoughtfully in the palm of her hand. “We could try Old Pedro,” she said after a moment.

“Old Pedro? Who’s Old Pedro? You said all the men were working the tin mines.’’

“He’s too old and crippled. He hurt his leg in a mining accident years ago. Now he makes drain gutters and fixes things.”

“What kind of things? Metal things?” he asked. She nodded and he grabbed her arm. “Let’s go see him.”

With the new hose under his arm and the broken clamp in his pocket, Josh followed Catherine over the same rutted road the taxi had taken last night, past fields of tiny green onion shoots and brilliant tomatoes. He wanted to apologize for being irritable, but the silence had gone on for too long and stretched between them like the road to Old Pedro’s shed across the footbridge. He wanted to talk to her about the loan program, but his throat was dry and the walls of his stomach were knocking together.

Yesterday he was on a high. Anything seemed possible. The loan. The truck. Catherine. His career. Today he was racked with doubts. The program was too big, too ambitious. He wanted to absorb some of her confidence. He wanted to run his hands over her cool skin and bury his face in her dark hair. But she had work to do and so did he.

At the end of the path was a small shed with a misshapen figure of a man bent over a piece of corrugated metal with a pair of tin snips. He looked up from his work. A lantern hung from the ceiling and illuminated his lined face. Catherine introduced Old Pedro to Josh, and Pedro peered into his face for a long moment.

Josh brought out the hose and the clamp and Catherine explained what had happened. Old Pedro merely nodded. While they watched he cut and hammered and bent the scrap metal until he had fashioned a rough copy of the broken clamp. Josh breathed a sigh of relief and reached into his wallet, but the old man shook his head with a rush of words in Spanish.

“He says he has done it for a favor,” Catherine said. “It is too small a job to accept money.’’

“But I have nothing else to offer,” Josh protested.

“He says not to worry. The gringos have always treated him well. Back in the old days when he worked the mines.”

Josh studied the man’s wrinkled face and watched him hobble across the dirt floor to see them to the door. “You mean the tin mines,” he said.

Catherine translated and Pedro shook his head. “Plata,” he said. “Silver.”

“Where?” Josh asked.

Old Pedro waved his hand in the general direction of the mountains to the south. “Out there.”

“If I wanted to go there, if I wanted to see them, could he show me?”

The eagerness in Josh’s voice, the intensity of his gaze, startled her. “I don’t think so. He’s old as you see, and lame.”

“Maybe he could show me on a map. Or tell me how to get there.” Josh felt a surge of excitement rush through his veins.

Catherine asked, but the old man shook his head. “He says he couldn’t tell you. And he couldn’t take you because the God of Thunder closed the entrance and put a curse on the mine before even one piece of silver could be extracted.”

Josh stared at the old man. It was just as he had heard. His father and the Tochabamba silver mine. His hopes to strike it rich, to find his fortune. But as usual it slipped away. This time it was an avalanche. It was always something—a natural disaster or unscrupulous partners, but all his life the Tochabamba stood as a symbol of hope and riches and loss.

For a moment Josh felt what his father must have felt on the brink of a discovery, the excitement and the anticipation. And then, just as surely, the disappointment. Outside the entrance in the bright sunshine, Josh hesitated. He had to know, whether he ever got there or not.

“The mine, was it the Tochabamba?”

Without waiting for the translation the old man’s eyes widened in surprise. He spoke rapidly in Spanish, gesturing with his short, muscular arms while Josh watched and strained to understand. ,

“What’s he saying?” he demanded.

Catherine’s eyebrows drew together. “He says he’s surprised you know that name. He’s the only one left who remembers around here. The others were killed when the God of Thunder shook the earth.”