by Lucia Berlin
Willie’s mom went to the dances with a group of friends. She danced every dance, always in a pretty dress, her hair up, her crucifix flying. She was beautiful and young. Ladylike too. She didn’t dance close on slow dances or go out to the pickups. No, I didn’t notice that. But all the Patagonia women did and mentioned it in her favor. They also said she wouldn’t be a widow for long. When I asked Willie why he never came, he said he didn’t know how to dance and besides he had to watch the kids. But other children go, why couldn’t they come. No, he said. His mother needed to have fun, get away from them sometimes.
“Well, how ’bout you?”
“I don’t care that much. I’m not being unselfish. I want my ma to find another husband as much as she does,” he said.
If diamond drillers were in town the dances really livened up. I don’t know if there still are diamond drillers, but in those mining days they were a special breed. Always two of them roaring into the camp ninety miles an hour in a cloud of dust. Their cars were not pickups or regular sedans but sleek two-seaters with glossy paint that shined through the dust. The men didn’t wear denim or khakis like the ranchers or miners. Maybe they did when they went down in the mines, but traveling or at dances they wore dark suits and silky shirts and ties. Their hair was long, combed in a pompadour, with long sideburns, a mustache sometimes. Even though I saw them only at western mines, their license plates usually were from Tennessee or Alabama or West Virginia. They never stayed long, a week at the most. They got paid more than brain surgeons, my father said. They were the ones who opened a good vein or found one, I think. I do know they were important and their jobs were dangerous. They looked dangerous and, I know now, sexy. Cool and arrogant, they had the aura of matadors, bank robbers, relief pitchers. Every woman, old ones, young ones, at the barn dances wanted to dance with a diamond driller. I did. The drillers always wanted to dance with Willie’s mother. Somebody’s wife or sister who had had too much to drink invariably ended up outside with one of them and then there was a bloody fight, with all the men streaming out of the barn. The fights always ended with somebody shooting a gun off in the air and the drillers high-tailing off into the night, the wounded gallants returning to the dance with a swollen jaw or a blackening eye. The band would play something like, “You Two-Timed Me One Time Too Often.”
One Sunday afternoon Mr. Wise drove me and Willie up to the mine, to see our old house. I got homesick then, smelling my daddy’s Mr. Lincoln roses, walking around under the old oaks. Rocky crags all around and views out into the valleys and to Mount Baldy. The hawks and jays were there and the ticky-tick drum cymbal sound of the pulleys in the mill. I missed my family and tried not to cry, but I cried anyway. Mr. Wise gave me a hug, said not to worry, I’d probably be going to join them once school was out. I looked at Willie. He jerked his head at me to look at the doe and fawns that gazed at us, only a few feet away. “They don’t want you to go,” he said.
So I probably would have gone to South America. But then there was a terrible earthquake in Chile, a national disaster, and my family was killed. I went on living in Patagonia, Arizona with the Wilsons. After high school I got a scholarship to the University of Arizona where I studied journalism. Willie got a scholarship too, and had a double major in geology and art. We were married after graduation. Willie got a job at the Trench and I worked for the Nogales Star until our first son, Silver, was born. We lived in Mrs. Boosinger’s beautiful old adobe house (she had died by then) up in the mountains, in an apple orchard near Harshaw.
I know it sounds pretty corny, but Willie and I lived happily ever after.
What if that had happened, the earthquake? I know what. This is the problem with “What ifs.” Sooner or later you hit a snag. I wouldn’t have been able to stay in Patagonia. I’d have ended up in Amarillo, Texas. Flat space and silos and sky and tumbleweeds, not a mountain in sight. Living with Uncle David and Aunt Harriet and my great-grandmother Grey. They would have thought of me as a problem. A cross to bear. There would be a lot of what they would call “acting out,” and the counselor would refer to as cries for help. After my release from the juvenile detention center it would not be long before I would elope with a diamond driller who was passing through town, headed for Montana, and, can you believe it? my life would have ended up exactly as it has now, under the limestone rocks of Dakota Ridge, with crows.