“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 drugstore 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 streetlights. 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 was still not 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 grievance. “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 of 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 liquefies 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 t
hink 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, Itza—Itzaccihuatl in Mexico. Itza 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.”
Firebirds Rising Page 41