“Althea? What, she was an honorary member of the Doña Althea family?”
Viola said nothing. I never knew what to make of her dark hints, but this one was wildly improbable. My impression was that she’d stayed an outsider, like the rest of us. Doc Homer had married my mother and come out here from Illinois after World War II, after he’d served in the army and finished his internship. Her maiden name was something like Carlisle. We never pressed him for more; when it came to our mother, Doc Homer seemed to be in an extended mourning period that lasted for our whole lives to date.
It made me curious, though. I had visions of trying again, of pinning his fragile shoulder blades against the wall of his basement office and forcing him to tell the whole truth about our family. As if Doc Homer’s tongue could be forced.
Abruptly, Viola and I reached the American Legion hall. We walked into a noisy room bright with artificial light and I felt disoriented as to the decade. Women wearing cable-knit cardigans over thin housedresses crowded the hall with their talk, their large purses and imposing bosoms. When they saw Viola and me they began to come to some kind of order. Chairs were dragged, with much metallic howling, from conversational circles back into crooked rows. Many faces were familiar to me now from some encounter, such as old Mrs. Nuñez, who’d been so chatty when I took the boys to her house trick-or-treating, and others like Uda Dell I knew specifically. Doña Althea presided from an overstuffed chair at the front of the hall, but did not speak. Her face was as finely lined as the grain in maple wood, and about the same color. Her pale blue eyes blazed in the direction of the air over our heads. You could have taken her for a blind woman if you didn’t know the truth, which was that Doña Althea’s vision was sharp as a hawk’s.
Norma Galvez, whose shellacked white hair was crowned with a navy bow that coordinated with her Steelworkers T-shirt, brought the meeting to order. It was a packed house. It took a while to achieve perfect quiet. Viola ushered me to a chair at the front table, hurried over to say hello to Doña Althea, and deposited the two feathers in a grocery bag of kindred feathers at the Doña’s feet. Then she scurried back and took her seat by me.
“Viola brought a guest,” announced Mrs. Galvez, accompanied by vigorous nodding from Viola. She’d removed her hunter’s cap. “You all know Doc Homer’s daughter Cosima. She’s going to tell us about the contamination.”
That was my introduction. I was expecting to hear all about myself and the situation, as is always done at meetings that go on too long. But she was through, and I was on. I stood a little shakily, thinking of Hallie, who felt at home giving a lecture in a church full of mosquitoes and kerosene smoke and squalling babies.
“I’m not an expert,” I began. “Here’s the chemistry of it. Black Mountain Mining has been running sulfuric acid, which is a clear, corrosive, water-miscible acid, through their tailing piles to recover extra copper. It combines to make copper sulfate, which is also known as ‘blue vitriol.’ People used to use it to kill rats and pond algae and about everything else you can name. There’s a ton of it in your river. And there’s straight sulfuric acid in there too. The EPA finally sent a report saying that kind of pollution is very dangerous, and they can’t put it near people and orchards, so Black Mountain is building a dam to run the river out Tortoise Canyon. You know that part of the story. And the men on the town council are pushing for a lawsuit that will get some action in the twenty-first century.” There was some snickering. I remembered my talk with Viola on the hill overlooking the dam construction site—her disgust. The Stitch and Bitch Club wasn’t banking on the good old boys.
“I really don’t know any way of helping out with your problem. All I can tell you is that you have a problem, and why, which I guess is what scientists are mainly good for.” I paused to swallow. The room was a silent garden of blinking faces, expecting something from me.
“My students and I looked at the river water under microscopes, and the usual things that live in a river aren’t there. Then we tested the pH of the river and found out it’s very acidic. The EPA has tested it too, and they agree. But your trees knew all this way before we did. Watering them from the river is just like acid rain falling on them, if you’ve heard of that. The acid-rain problem here in the West comes mostly from mine smelters. It’s the same acid, one way or the other. Sulfuric acid.” I feared I was losing my grasp of the subject, but they were still listening.
“I don’t think I can tell you anything helpful. But Viola said I should come anyway. If you have questions I’ll try to answer them.” I sat down.
A thin woman in cat’s-eye glasses and a red dress stood up and demanded, “You mean the fish and stuff is all killed? My husband claims they was catching croppies out of there a month or two ago.”
“Well, no, the fish…”
“Stand up, honey, we can’t hear you,” said Miss Lorraine Colder, my fourth-grade teacher. She and Miss Elva Dann, who sat next to her, had lived together forever and resembled each other although they were no relation.
“Not the fish,” I said. “They’re still alive, but the smaller things that live in the water…” I considered how to phrase this, and started again. “Usually there’s a whole world of microscopic things living in a river, and in the dirt, and the air. If you were in an airplane and flew over a city and looked down and saw nothing was moving, you’d know something was up. That’s how you can tell if a river is healthy or not. You can’t see them, but they’re supposed to be there.”
The woman in the red dress hugged her sweater around her. “Like bugs?”
“Kind of,” I said.
Another woman said in Spanish that if the river water killed bugs, she’d better take some and sprinkle it around her son’s house. There was a good bit of laughter.
“It won’t kill cockroaches,” I said. “Too bad. You could sell it for a fundraiser.” They laughed again, though there were some surprised looks, and I was secretly satisfied. All my life here, people had spoken Spanish around me the way grownups spell around children.
The woman in the red dress was still standing. “What we want to know is, is the river poisoned for good? Would we be better off to let them run it out Tortoise Canyon?”
Every person in the room was looking at me. It dawned on me that they weren’t conceiving of their situation as hopeless. What they wanted was not sympathy or advice, but information. “Well, no,” I said. “The river could recover. It doesn’t start here, it starts up on the Apache reservation, in the mountains where the snow melts. As long as that’s pure, the water coming down here will be okay.”
“So if you could stop Black Mountain from running the acid through the tailing piles, then after a while the junk would get washed out?” inquired Mrs. Galvez. “Like flushing the John?”
“Exactly like that,” I said.
Fifty women started talking at once. You’d think I’d commuted a death sentence. After a minute Doña Althea carefully pushed herself up from the arms of her chair and stood, waiting for quiet. In her black dress she rustled like an old crow. She gave a short speech in Spanish, the gist of which was that I’d told them what they needed to know, and now they had to figure out how to get the company to stop building the dam and stop polluting the river and go to hell.
I sat down, a bit stunned. My Spanish was passably good, thanks to the years of Hallie’s refugees sleeping on my couch, but some of Doña Althea’s more idiomatic swear words were new ones on me. Also, she referred to me as la huérfana, the orphan. They always called Hallie and me that. It seemed unkind.
“My husband used to be a crane operator when the mine was running,” shouted a woman in the back row. “He would know how to fix up them bulldozers from hell to breakfast.”
“My husband was a dynamite man,” volunteered another woman. “That would be quicker.”
“Excuse me, but your husbands won’t put Chinese arithmetic past no bulldozers,” said Viola. Mrs. Crane Operator and Mrs. Dynamite seemed unperturbed, but Viola added tho
ughtfully, “No offense. Mine would be just as lazy, except he’s dead.”
Mrs. Galvez nodded. “Well, that’s the truth. My husband says the same thing, ‘The lawyers will fix it up, honey.’ If the men were any use they’d be here tonight instead of home watching the football game.”
“What are you talking about, football?” asked Mrs. Dynamite. “Muchacha, didn’t you hear? The Miss America Pageant is on tonight.” She stood up. “Whose husbands was watching the Broncos game when you walked out of the house?”
There was a show of hands.
“Okay, ten seconds and…” she leaned forward, dropped her jaw, and bugged her eyes wide like a pair of fried eggs…“if you got remote control, three seconds.”
“Sure, why do you think they hurried us all out of the house tonight?” a woman added from the front row. “‘Why, yes, honey, go on to your club. I’ll be okay. I’ll just eat me a TV dinner here and watch football.’ Like hell. Football in a bathing suit.”
“Okay, girls,” said Mrs. Galvez, adjusting her hair and rapping the table with her high-heeled pump. “Like Doña Althea says, we got some darn good thinking to do tonight.”
“I say we were on the right track with the dynamite,” said Viola. There was general nodding.
The woman in the red dress stood again. “We don’t know how to use the dynamite, though. And the men, they might be good men but they wouldn’t do it. They’d be scared to, I think. Or they don’t see no need. These men don’t see how we got to do something right now. They think the trees can die and we can just go somewhere else, and as long as we fry up the bacon for them in the same old pan, they think it would be…” she faltered, hugging her elbows in earnest…“that it would be home.”
On the way back Viola was quiet. She walked quickly, stopping only to pick up the feathers that littered the leafy orchard floor. The sudden cold snap that heralded the certainty of winter had caused the male peacocks to molt in unison. There being no hope of mating for months to come, they had shed their burdensome tails.
The meeting had ended in compromise: the Stitch and Bitch Club would officially sanction mass demonstrations against Black Mountain’s leaching operation, to be held daily on the dam construction site, starting at 6 A.M. the following morning. Unofficially, the Stitch and Bitch Club would have no objection if a bulldozer met with premature demise.
Hallie wrote:
This morning I saw three children die. Pretty thirteen-year-old girls wearing dresses over their jeans. They were out in a woods near here, picking fruit, and a helicopter came over the trees and strafed them. We heard the shots. Fifteen minutes later an alert defense patrol shot the helicopter down, twenty miles north, and the pilot and another man in the helicopter were killed but one is alive. Codi, they’re American citizens, active-duty National Guards. It’s a helicopter from the U.S., guns, everything from Washington. Please watch the newspapers and tell me what they say about this. The girls were picking fruit. When they brought them into town, oh God. Do you know what it does to a human body to be cut apart from above, from the sky? We’re defenseless from that direction, we aren’t meant to have enemies attack us from above. The girls were alive, barely, and one of the mothers came running out and then turned away saying, “Thank you, Holy Mother, it’s not my Alba.” But it was Alba. Later when the families took the bodies into the church to wash them, I stayed with Alba’s two younger sisters. They kept saying, “Alba braided our hair this morning. She can’t be dead. See, she fixed our hair.”
Codi, please tell me what you hear about this. I can’t stand to think it could be the same amnesiac thing, big news for one day and then forgotten. Nobody here can eat or talk. There are dark stains all over the cement floor of the church. It’s not a thing you forget.
She signed it, perversely, “The luckiest person alive.”
I heard nothing. I listened to the radio, but there wasn’t a word. Two days, nothing. Then, finally, there was one brief report about the American in the helicopter who was taken prisoner by the Nicaraguan government. He was an ex-mercenary running drugs, the radio said, no connection to us. He was shot down and taken prisoner, and that is all. No children had died in an orchard, no sisters, no mothers, no split skulls. And I’m sorry to say this, I knew it was a lie, but I was comforted.
“Who came up with the idea that Indians are red?” I asked Loyd one morning. If I wasn’t careful I could lose myself in this man. His color was like some wholesome form of bread, perfectly done. His forearm, which my head rested on, was sparsely covered with silky black hair.
He turned his head. His hair was perfectly straight, and touched his shoulders. “Old movies,” he said. “Westerns.”
We were in my bed very late on a Sunday morning. Loyd was a wonderful insomnia cure, good enough to bottle. That’s what I’d written Hallie, whom I told everything now, even if my daily letters were comparatively trivial. “He’s a cockfighter,” I’d confessed, “but he’s better than Sominex.” When Loyd lay next to me I slept deep as a lake, untroubled by dreams. First I’d felt funny about his being here—exposing Emelina’s children, and all that. But he didn’t invite me to his place, saying mine was better. He liked to pull books down off my slim shelf and read parts aloud in bed, equally pleased with poetry or descriptions of dark-phase photosynthesis. It occurred to me that Emelina would have a good laugh over my delicacy concerning her children. She probably was daring them to look in the windows and bring back reports.
But the shades were drawn. “Old westerns were in black and white,” I reminded him. “No red men.”
“Well, there you go. If John Wayne had lived in the time of color TV, everybody would know what Indians look like.”
“Right,” I said, gently picking up Loyd’s forearm and taking a taste. “Like that white guy in pancake makeup that played Tonto.”
“Tonto who?”
“Tonto Schwarzenegger. Who do you think? Tonto. The Lone Ranger’s secretary.”
“I didn’t grow up with a TV in the house.” He withdrew his arm and rolled over on his stomach, forearms crossed under his chin. It looked like a defensive posture. “After we got plumbing in Santa Rosalia we all sat around and watched the toilet flush. Sounds like a joke, right? How many Indians does it take to flush a toilet.”
“It’s no big deal. Sorry. Forget it.”
“No, it is a big deal.” He stared at the painted headboard of my bed, rather than at me. “You think I’m a TV Indian. Tonto Schwarzenegger, dumb but cute.”
I pulled up the covers. For a bedspread I’d been using the black-and-red crocheted afghan, Hallie’s and my old comfort blanket. “And what is that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“Nothing. Forget it.”
“If you said it, Loyd, you meant it.”
“Okay, I did.” He got up and began to put his clothes on. I reached over and caught his T-shirt when it was halfway over his head, and pulled him to me like a spider’s breakfast. I kissed him through the T-shirt. He didn’t kiss back. He pulled his head free of the shirt and looked at me, waiting.
“I don’t know what you want from me,” I said.
“I want more than I’m getting. More than sex.”
“Well, maybe that’s all I have to offer.”
He still waited.
“Loyd, I’m just here till next June. You know that. I’ve never led you on.”
“And where do you go after next June?”
“I don’t know.” I poked my fingers through the holes in the black-and-red afghan, a decades-old nervous habit. He held eye contact until I was uncomfortable.
“Who do you see yourself marrying, Codi?”
I could feel my pulse in my neck. It was a very odd question. “I don’t.”
“Yes, you do. But he’d have to be taller than you, smarter than you, more everything. A better job and more damn college degrees. You’re like every other woman alive.”
“Thanks very much,” I said.
“Your height alone kind of limits
the field.”
“If that’s supposed to be an insult, you’re way off. I always wanted to be even taller than I am, taller than Hallie.”
We sat not looking at each other for a minute. I took his hand and laid it, limp, against mine. It felt like a pancake or something. “This isn’t about your deficiencies, Loyd. It’s just me. I can’t stay here. There’s a poem by Robert Frost about this pitiful old hired hand who comes back home when he’s run out of luck because he knows they won’t kick him out. The poem says, ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.’” I stroked the tendons on the back of Loyd’s hand. “I don’t want to be seen as pitiful. I came here with a job to do, but I have places to go after this. I wish…” I turned my face toward the window so he wouldn’t see tears. “I’d like to find a place that feels like it wants to take me in. But this isn’t it. At the end of the school year my time’s up. If we get attached, you and me, then it’s hard.”
“That’s your game, not mine, Codi.” He got up and walked into the living room to make his hourly call to the depot; he was expecting to be sent to El Paso soon. I was stunned that he would walk away from me when I needed to be taken in. Though I guess that’s just what I’d asked him to do, walk away. His T-shirt was inside out, and he took it off and switched it around, still managing to keep the receiver cradled against his ear. He’d been put on hold. I watched him through the doorway and realized that the muscles in his back were taut with anger. I’d never seen Loyd mad, and was surprised he was capable of it.
I felt lost. I got up, throwing back the afghan and draping the flannel sheet around me like a sari, and went into the living room. The floor was cold. I shifted from one foot to the other, feeling vaguely like the Statue of Liberty. Jack on the front doorstep was scratching his neck vigorously, jingling his tags. That dog had the patience of Job.
“What’s going on?” I asked, when Loyd hung up the phone.
Animal Dreams Page 17