He paid the Wilsons for my room and board, but they all decided it would be good for my character for me to work just like the other kids. We all worked hard, too, especially Dot and me, because we worked so late and then got up at five a.m. We opened up for the three buses of miners going from Nogales to the Trench. The buses arrived within fifteen minutes of one another; the miners had just enough time for one or two coffees and some doughnuts. They’d thank us and wave on their way out, Hasta luego! We’d finish washing up, make ourselves sandwiches for lunch. Mrs. Wilson got there to take over and we’d go to school. I was still in the grade school up on the hill. Dot was a junior.
When we got home at night she’d sneak back out to see her boyfriend, Sextus. He lived on a ranch in Sonoita, had left school to help his dad. I don’t know what time she got back in. I was asleep the minute my head was on my pillow. The minute I hit the hay! I loved the idea of a hay mattress like in Heidi. The hay felt good and smelled good. It always seemed like I had just closed my eyes when Dot was shaking me to wake up. She would already have washed or showered and dressed, and while I did she brushed her hair into a pageboy and made up her face. “What are you staring at? Fix up the bed if you got nothing else to do.” She really didn’t like me, but I didn’t like her back so I didn’t care. On the way to the Sweet Shop, she’d tell me over and over I better keep quiet about her seeing Sextus, her daddy would kill her. Everybody in town knew about her and Sextus already or I would have told somebody, not her folks, but somebody, just because she was so mean. She was just mean on principle. She figured she should hate this kid they put up in her own room. The truth was we got along well otherwise, grinning and laughing, good teamwork, slicing onions, making sodas, flipping burgers. Both of us fast and efficient, both of us enjoyed people, the kind Mexican miners mostly, who joked and teased us in the mornings. After school, kids from school and town people came in, for sodas or sundaes, to play the jukebox and the pinball machine. We served hamburgers, chili dogs, grilled cheese. We had tuna and egg salad and potato salad and coleslaw Mrs. Wilson made. The most popular dish though was the chili Willie Torres’s mother brought over every afternoon. Red chili in the winter, pork and green chilis in summer. Stacks of flour tortillas we’d warm on the grill.
One reason Dot and I worked so hard and so fast was we had an unspoken agreement that after we did all the dishes and cleaned the grill, she’d go out back with Sextus and I’d handle the few pie and coffee orders between nine and ten. Mostly I did homework with Willie Torres.
Willie worked until nine at the assayer’s office next door. We had been in the same grade together at school and I had made friends with him there. On Saturday mornings I’d come down with my dad in the pickup to get groceries and mail for the four or five families that lived on the mountain by the Trench mine. After he did all the buying and loading, Daddy would stop by Mr. Wise’s Assay Office. They’d drink coffee and talk about ore, mines, veins? I’m sorry, I didn’t pay attention. I know it was about minerals. Willie was a different person in the office. He was shy at school, had come from Mexico when he was eight, so even though he was smarter than Mrs. Boosinger, he had trouble reading and writing sometimes. His first valentine to me was “Be my sweat-hart.” Nobody made fun of him though, like they did of me and my back brace, yelling, “Timber!” when I came in because I was so tall. He was tall too, had an Indian face, high cheekbones and dark eyes. His clothes were clean but shabby and too small, his straight black hair long and raggedy, cut by his mother. When I read Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff looked like Willie, wild and brave.
In the Assay Office he seemed to know everything. He was going to be a geologist when he grew up. He showed me how to spot gold and fool’s gold and silver. That first day my father asked what we were talking about. I showed him what I had learned. “This is copper. Quartz. Lead. Zinc.”
“Wonderful!” he said, really pleased. During the drive home I got a geological lecture on the land all the way up to the mine.
On other Saturdays Willie showed me more rocks. “This is mica. This rock is shale, this is limestone.” He explained mining maps to me. We’d paw through boxes filled with fossils. He and Mr. Wise went out looking for them. “Hey, this one! Look at this leaf!” I didn’t realize I loved Willie since our closeness was so quiet, had nothing to do with the love girls talked about all the time, not like romance or crushes or ooh Jeeny loves Marvin.
In the Sweet Shop we’d close the blinds, sit at the counter doing our homework for that last hour, eating hot fudge sundaes. He could trip the jukebox to keep playing “Slow Boat to China,” “Cry,” and “Texarkana Baby” over and over. He was good at arithmetic and algebra and I was good with words so we helped each other. We leaned against each other, our legs hooked around the stools. He even hooked his elbow onto the part of my back brace that stuck out and I didn’t mind. Usually if I saw that anybody even noticed the brace under my clothes I’d feel sick with embarrassment.
More than anything else we shared being sleepy. We never said, “Gee, I’m sleepy. Aren’t you sleepy?” We were just tired together, leaned yawning together at the Sweet Shop. Yawned and smiled across the room at school.
His father was killed in a cave-in at the Flux mine. My father had been trying to get it shut down ever since we got to Arizona. That was his job for years, checking on mines to see if the veins were running out or if they were unsafe. They called him “Shut-’em-down Brown.” I waited in the pickup truck when he went to tell Willie’s mother. This was before I knew Willie. My father cried all the way home from town, which frightened me. It was Willie who later told me my father had fought to get pensions for the miners and their families, how much that helped his mother. She had five other children, did washing and cooking for people.
Willie was up as early as I was, chopping wood, getting his brothers and sisters breakfast. Civics class was the worst, impossible to stay awake, to be interested. It came at three o’clock. One endless hour. In the winter the woodstove steamed up the windows and our cheeks would be blazing red. Mrs. Boosinger blazed under her two purple spots of rouge. In summer with the windows open and flies buzzing around, bees humming and the clock ticking so drowsy so hot, she’d be talking talking about the First Amendment and whap! bang her ruler on the table. “Wake up! Wake up! You two jellyfish have no backbone! Sit up! Open your eyes. Jellyfish!” She once thought I was asleep but I was only resting my eyes. She said, “Lulu, who is the secretary of state?”