And maybe it could have happened
anywhere, any time. But I don't believe that for a
second.
I expect I wouldn't have taken too
much notice of Sara Gutierrez if my pop hadn't. I was a senior at
Hollier High School, varsity football first string, debating team,
science club. Sara was the eighth-grade sister of Alfred Gutierrez,
who I knew from football. But the Gutierrezes lived in South
Hollier, down the slope from the Dimas shaft, on the other side of
Guadalupe Hill, and we lived on Collar Hill above downtown with the
lawyers and store owners and bankers. Alfred and I didn't see much
of each other outside of football practice. The only time my father
saw Alfred's father was when Enrique Gutierrez had his annual
physical at the company hospital, or if he got hurt on the job and
Pop had to stitch him up.
But one night I was up studying and
heard Pop in the kitchen say, "I don't know if that youngest
Gutierrez girl is simple or plain brilliant."
Pop didn't talk about patients at
home as a rule, so that was interesting enough to make me prick up
my ears.
"Probably somewhere in between,
like most," Mom said. Mom didn't impress easily.
"She came into the infirmary today
with her chest sounding like a teakettle on the boil. If I can keep
that child from dying of pneumonia or TB, I'll change my name to
Albert Schweitzer." He paused, and I knew Mom was waiting for him
to come back from wherever that thought had led him. She and I were
used to Pop's parentheses. "Anyway, while I'm writing up her
prescription, she says, 'Doctor Ryan, what makes a
finch?'"
"I don't suppose you told her,
'God,'" Mom said with a sigh.
"I didn't know what to say. But
when she saw I didn't get her drift, she asked why are house
finches and those little African finches that Binnie Schwartz keeps
in her parlor both finches? So I started to tell her about
zoological taxonomy—"
"I just bet you did," Mom said. I
could hear her smiling.
"Now, Jule—"
"Go on, go on. I won't get any
peace 'til you do."
"Well, then she said, 'But the
finches don't think so. We're human beings because we say we are.
But the finches don't think they're all finches. Shouldn't that
make a difference?'"
A pause, and the sound of dishes
clattering in the wash water. "Sara Gutierrez spends too much time
on her own," Mom said. "Invalids always think too much."
I don't remember what Pop replied
to that. Probably he argued; Pop argued with any sentence that
contained the word "always."
By the time I came home for the
summer after my first year of college, the matter was settled: Sara
Gutierrez was bright. She'd missed nearly half her freshman year in
high school what with being out sick, but was still top of her
class. Pop bragged about her as if he'd made her
himself.
She was thin and small and kind of
yellowish, and you'd hardly notice if she was in the same room with
you. The other girls in town got permanent waves to look like Bette
Davis. Sara still looked like Louise Brooks, her hair short, no
curl at all. But that summer I saw her at the ballpark during one
of the baseball games. She looked straight at me in the stands.
There was something in her eyes so big, so heavy, so hard to hang
onto that it seemed like her body would break from trying to carry
it.
Nobody ever
suggested that Sara was bright at anything likely to be of use to
her. A long while later I looked her up in the
Hollier Hoist
, the
high school yearbook, to see what her classmates must have made of
her. She'd been a library monitor. That was all. No drama society,
no debating team, no booster club, no decorating committee for the
Homecoming dance.
I guess she saved her debating for
me. And she danced, all right, but you won't find that in the
yearbooks.
Hollier was a mining town—founded
in the 1880s by miners and speculators. The whole point of life
here was to dig copper out of the ground as cheap as possible, and
hope that when you got it to the surface you could sell it for a
price that made the work worthwhile. The town balanced on a knife
edge, with the price of copper on one side, and the cost of mining
it on the other.
And that didn't apply only to the
miners and foremen and company management. If copper did poorly, so
did the grocers, mechanics, lawyers, and schoolteachers. What came
up out of those shafts fed and clothed us all. Pop was a company
doctor. Without copper, there was no company, no one to doctor, no
dinner on the table, no money for movies on Saturday, no college
tuition. He used to say that Hollier was a lifeboat, with all of us
rowing for a shore we couldn't see. The company was the captain,
and we trusted that the captain had a working compass and knew how
to read it.
Underground
mining's expensive. The shafts went deeper and deeper under the
mountains following the veins of high-grade ore, the pumps ran
night and day to pump out the water that tried to fill those
shafts, and the men who dug and drilled and blasted had to be paid.
But near the surface, under what farmers call dirt and miners
call
overburden
, around where the rich
veins used to run, there was plenty of low-grade ore. Though it
didn't have as much copper in it, it could be scraped right off the
surface. No tunnels, no pumps, and a hell of a lot fewer men to
pay.
Guadalupe Hill was a fine
cone-shaped repository of low-grade ore.
The summer after my sophomore year
at college, I came home to find the steam shovels scooping the top
off Guadalupe Hill. You could see the work from the parlor windows
on Collar Hill, hear the roar and crash of it funneled up the
canyon from the other side of downtown. Almost the first thing I
heard when I got off the train at the depot was the warning siren
for a blast, and the dynamite going off like a giant bass drum.
From the platform I could see the dust go up in a thundercloud;
then the machinery moved in like retrievers after a shot
bird.
As Pop helped me stow my suitcase
in the trunk of the Hudson, I said, "I'd sure like to watch that,"
and jerked my head at Guadalupe Hill.
"I'd take you over now, but your
mother would fry me for supper."
"Oh, I didn't mean before I went
home." I would have meant it, but I knew he'd be disappointed in me
if I couldn't put Mom before mining.
Once I'd dropped my suitcase in my
room and given Mom a kiss and let her say I looked too thin and
didn't they feed me in that frat house dining room, Pop took me
down to watch the dig.
It was the
biggest work I'd ever seen human beings do. Oh, there'd been
millions of dollars of copper ore taken out of the shafts in
Hollier. Everyone in town knew there were a thousand miles of
shafts, and could recite how many men the company employed; but you
couldn't
see
it. Now here was Guadalupe Hill crawling with
steam shovels and dump trucks, men shouting, steam screeching,
whistles, bells. It went as smooth and precise as a ballet troupe,
even when it looked and sounded like the mouth of
Hell.
And the crazy ambition of the
thing! Some set of madmen had wanted to turn what most folks would
have called a mountain inside out, turn it into a hole as deep and
as wide as the mountain was tall. And another set of madmen had
said, "Sure, we can do that."
Later I wasn't surprised when
people said, "Let's go to the moon," because I'd seen the digging
of Guadalupe Pit. It was like watching the building of the
pyramids.
Pop stopped to talk to the shift
boss. Next to that big man, brown with sun and streaked with dust,
confident and booming and pointing with his square, hard hands, Pop
looked small and white and helpless. He was a good doctor, maybe
even a great one. His example had me pointed toward pre-med, and
medical school at Harvard or Stanford if I could get in. But
looking from him to the shift boss to the roaring steam shovels, I
felt something in me slip. I wanted to do something big, something
that people would see and marvel at. I wanted people to look on my
work and see progress and prosperity and stand in awe of the power
of Man.
Over dinner, I said, "It makes you
feel as if you can do anything, watching that."
"You can, if you have enough
dynamite and a steam shovel," Pop agreed as he reached for a pork
chop.
"No, really! We're not just living
on the planet like fleas on a dog anymore. We're changing it to
suit us. Like sculptors. Like—"
"God?" Mom said, even though I'd
stopped myself.
"Of course not, Mom." But I'd
thought it, and she knew it. She also knew I was a college boy and
consequently thought myself wiser than Solomon.
Conversation touched on the
basketball team and the repainting of the Women's Club before I
said carefully, "I've been wondering if I'm cut out for med
school."
Guess I wasn't careful enough; Pop
gave me a look over his plate that suggested he was onto me. "Not
everyone is."
"I don't want to let you
down."
"You know we'll be proud of you no
matter what," Mom replied, sounding offended that she had to tell
me such a thing.
"I'm thinking of transfering to the
Colorado School of Mines."
"Might need some scholarship
money—being out of state," said Pop. "But your grades are good. The
company might help out, too." He passed me the mashed potatoes.
"You don't have to be a doctor just because I am."
"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 drug
store 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.