“Acheson, ma’am.” That surprised her.
“Willie, who is the secretary of agriculture?”
“Topeka and Santa Fe?”
I think we both were drunk with sleepiness. Every time she’d whack us on the head with the civics book we’d laugh harder. She sent him to the hall and me to the cloakroom, found us both curled up fast asleep after class.
A few times Sextus climbed up to Dot’s room. I’d hear him whisper, “The kid asleep?”
“Out like a light.” And it was true. No matter how hard I tried to stay awake to watch what they did, I’d fall asleep.
* * *
A weird thing happened to me this week. I could see these small quick crows flying just past my left eye. I’d turn but they would be gone. And when I closed my eyes, lights would flash past like motorcycles on the highway zooming by. I thought I was hallucinating or had cancer of the eye, but the doctor said they were floaters, that lots of people get them.
“How can there be lights in the dark?” I asked, as confused as I used to be about the refrigerator. He said that my eye told the brain there was light so my brain believed it. Please don’t laugh. This merely exacerbated the crow situation. It brought up the tree falling in the forest all over again too. Maybe my eyes just told my brain about crows in the maple tree.
One Sunday morning I woke up and Sextus was sleeping on the other side of Dot. I might have been more interested if they had been a more attractive couple. He had a buzz cut and pimples, white eyebrows and a huge Adam’s apple. He was a champion roper and barrel rider though, and his hog had won three years in a row at 4-H. Dot was homely, just plain homely. All the paint she put on didn’t even make her look cheap, it only accentuated her little brown eyes and big mouth that prominent eyeteeth kept open in a permanent semi-snarl. I shook her gently and pointed to Sextus. “Oh Jesus wept,” she said and woke him up. He was out the window, down the cottonwood and gone in seconds. Dot pinned me against the hay, made me swear not to say a word. “Hey, Dot, I haven’t so far, have I?”
“You do, I’ll tell on you and the Mexkin.” I was shaken, she sounded like my mother.
It was nice not worrying about my mother. I was a nicer person now. Not surly or sullen. Polite and helpful. I didn’t spill or break or drop things like at home. I never wanted to leave. Mr. and Mrs. Wilson kept saying I was a sweet girl, a good worker, and how they felt I was one of the family. We had family dinners on Sundays. Dot and I worked until noon while they went to church, then we closed up, went home, and helped make dinner. Mr. Wilson said grace. The boys poked each other and laughed, talked about basketball, and we all talked about, well, I don’t remember. Maybe we didn’t actually talk much, but it was friendly. We said, “Please pass the butter.” “Gravy?” My favorite part was that I had my own napkin and napkin ring that went on the sideboard with everyone else’s.
On Saturdays I got a ride to Nogales and then a bus to Tucson. The doctors put me in a medieval painful traction for hours, until I couldn’t take it anymore. They measured me, checked for nerve damage by sticking pins in me, hitting my legs and feet with hammers. They adjusted the brace and the lift on my shoe. It looked like they were coming to a decision. Different doctors squinted at my X-rays. The famous one they had been waiting for said my vertebrae were too close to my spinal cord. Surgery could cause paralysis, shock to all the organs that had compensated for the curvature. It would be expensive, not just the surgery, but during recovery I would have to lie immobile on my stomach for five months. I was glad they didn’t seem to want surgery. I was sure that if they straightened my spine I would be eight feet tall. But I didn’t want them to stop checking me; I didn’t want to go to Chile. They let me have one of the X-rays that showed a silver heart Willie gave me. My S-shaped spine, my heart in the wrong place and his heart right in the center. Willie put it up in a little window in the back of the Assay Office.
Some Saturday nights there were barn dances, way out in Elgin or Sonoita. In barns. Everybody from miles and miles would go, old people, young people, babies, dogs. Guests from dude ranches. All of the women brought things to eat. Fried chicken and potato salad, cakes and pies and punch. The men would go out in bunches and hang around their pickups, drinking. Some women too, my mother always did. High school kids got drunk and threw up, got caught necking. Old ladies danced with each other and children. Everybody danced. Two-step mostly, but some slow dances and jitterbug. Some square dances and Mexican dances like La Varsoviana. In English it’s “Put your little foot, put your little foot right there,” and you skip skip and whirl around. They played everything from “Night and Day” to “Detour, There’s a Muddy Road Ahead,” “Jalisco no te Rajes” to “Do the Hucklebuck.” Different bands every time but with the same kind of mix. Where did those ragtag wonderful musicians come from? Pachuco horn and guiro players, big-hatted country guitarists, bebop drummers, piano players that looked like Fred Astaire. The closest I ever heard anything come to those little bands was at the Five Spot in the late fifties. Ornette Coleman’s “Ramblin’.” Everybody raving how new and far-out he was. Sounded Tex-Mex to me, like a good Sonoita hoedown.
The staid pioneer-type housewives got all dressed up for the dances. Toni permanents and rouge, high heels. The men were leathery hardworking ranchers or miners, brought up in the Depression. Serious God-fearing workers. I loved to see the faces of the miners. The men I’d see coming off a shift dirty and drawn now red-faced and carefree, belting out an “Ah-hah, San Antone!” or an “Aí, Aí, Aí,” because not only did everybody dance, everybody sang and hollered too. At intervals Mr. and Mrs. Wilson would slow down to pant, “Have you seen Dot?”
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 hightailing 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.”