And Other Stories (20 page)

"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 drug store 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 back yard in a light-colored dress, her head tipped back to see
the stars, or the ridge top. 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 her 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.

The shock pushed the words out of
my mouth. "I love you, Sara."

She shook her head, wide-eyed.
"Oh..."

"Marry me. I'm going to Colorado
next month, you can go with me. You can finish school
there—"

Sara was still shaking her head,
and now her eyes were full of tears and reflected stars. She
reached out a hand, stretching it out as if we were far, far apart.
"Oh, Jimmy. I want—Oh, don't you see?"

"Don't you care for me,
Sara?"

She gave a terrible wordless cry,
as if she were being twisted in invisible hands. "I can't
leave!"

"But for you and me—"

"There are more people than just
us. They need me."

"Your folks? They've got your
brothers. They don't need you the way I do."

"Jimmy, you're
not listening. I
can't
leave. I'm the mountain."

Her face wasn't crazy. It was
streaked with tears and a deep, adult sorrow, like the saints'
statues in St. Patrick's Church. Sara reached out to me the way
Mary's statue reached down from her niche over the altar, pity and
yearning in the very finger-joints. I saw the waving heat around
her, and the stars in her eyes and her hair.

I stepped back a pace. I couldn't
help it.

I saw her heart break. That's the
only way I can describe what I watched in her face. But when it was
done, what was left in her eyes and her mouth and the way she held
her head was strong and certain and brave.

"Goodbye, Jimmy," she said. She
turned, sure-footed, and ran like a deer along the tailings ridge
into the night.

I think I shouted her name. I know
that something set the dogs barking all over South Hollier, and
eventually Enrique Gutierrez was shaking me by the
shoulders.

When Sara hadn't come home by
morning, we called the police. Mr. and Mrs. Gutierrez were afraid
she'd broken her leg, or fallen and been knocked out. I couldn't
talk about what I was afraid of, so I agreed with them, that that
could have happened.

Every able-bodied person in South
Hollier joined the search. Everyone thought it would be over in an
hour or so. By afternoon the police had brought dogs in, and were
looking for fresh slides. They didn't say they were looking for
places where the rocks might have engulfed a body.

If she was out there, the dogs
would have found her. Still, I had to go down to the station,
because I was the last one to see her, because the girl at the
lunch counter had heard our fight. And God knows, I must have
seemed a little crazy. I told them what I'd seen and what we'd
said. I just didn't tell them what I thought had
happened.

I didn't transfer to the Colorado
School of Mines. Leveling mountains didn't appeal to me anymore. I
went back to pre-med, and started on medical school at the
University of Arizona. When Pearl Harbor was bombed, I enlisted,
and went to the Pacific as a medic.

After the war, I finished medical
school and hired on as a company doctor at the hospital in Hollier.
Pop had passed, and Mom was glad to have me nearby. I couldn't live
in the house on Collar Hill, though, that looked down the canyon to
where Guadalupe Hill had been. I found a little house in South
Hollier, small enough for a bachelor to handle.

The Gutierrez house was gone. As
the dump grew, it needed a bigger base, and the company bought the
house and knocked it down to make room for more rock. Mr. and Mrs.
Gutierrez bought a place down at the south end of Wilson, and while
they were alive, I used to visit and tell them how their old
neighbors were getting on.

I'd lived in South Hollier for a
couple of months before I climbed the slope of the tailings one
December night and sat in the starlight. I sat for maybe an hour
before I felt her beside me. I didn't turn to look.

"The mountain's happy now," I said.
My voice cracked a little.

"I'm happy," she said. "Be happy
for me, Jimmy."

"Who's going to be happy for
me?"

"I'll do that. Maybe someday you
will, too."

I shook my head, but it seemed
silly to argue with her.

"What used to be good still is,"
she said. "Remember that." And after a minute, "I take care of
everybody, but you most of all."

"I'll die after a while and save
you the trouble."

"Not for a long time." There was
motion at the corner of my eye, and I felt warm lips against my
cheek. "I love you, Jimmy."

Then there was nothing beside me
but a gust of cold wind.

I'd watched the mining of Guadalupe
Hill, and thought men could do anything, be anything, conquer
anything. I'd thought we'd cure cancer any day.

Now Guadalupe Pit is as deep as
Guadalupe Hill once was high, and next to it there's a second pit
that would hold three Guadalupes. Both pits are shut down, played
out. There's no cure for cancer, the AIDS quilt is so big that
there's no place large enough to roll the whole thing out at once,
and diabetes has gone from a rarity to an epidemic.

But in South Hollier there's a
ridge that could have been nothing more than a heap of barren,
cast-off rock; and a cluster of buildings that could have slowly
emptied and died inside their wall. Instead there's a mountain with
a goddess, and a neighborhood that rests safe and happy, as if in
her warm cupped hands.