Firebirds Rising

by Sharyn November

  “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 afterno
on, 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 drugstore 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 backyard in a light-colored dress, her head tipped back to see the stars, or the ridgetop. 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 h
er 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.