“My husband used to be a crane operator when the mine was running,” shouted a woman in the back row. “He would know how to fix up them bulldozers from hell to breakfast.”
“My husband was a dynamite man,” volunteered another woman. “That would be quicker.”
“Excuse me, but your husbands won’t put Chinese arithmetic past no bulldozers,” said Viola. Mrs. Crane Operator and Mrs. Dynamite seemed unperturbed, but Viola added thoughtfully, “No offense. Mine would be just as lazy, except he’s dead.”
Mrs. Galvez nodded. “Well, that’s the truth. My husband says the same thing, ‘The lawyers will fix it up, honey.’ If the men were any use they’d be here tonight instead of home watching the football game.”
“What are you talking about, football?” asked Mrs. Dynamite. “Muchacha, didn’t you hear? The Miss America Pageant is on tonight.” She stood up. “Whose husbands was watching the Broncos game when you walked out of the house?”
There was a show of hands.
“Okay, ten seconds and…” she leaned forward, dropped her jaw, and bugged her eyes wide like a pair of fried eggs…“if you got remote control, three seconds.”
“Sure, why do you think they hurried us all out of the house tonight?” a woman added from the front row. “‘Why, yes, honey, go on to your club. I’ll be okay. I’ll just eat me a TV dinner here and watch football.’ Like hell. Football in a bathing suit.”
“Okay, girls,” said Mrs. Galvez, adjusting her hair and rapping the table with her high-heeled pump. “Like Doña Althea says, we got some darn good thinking to do tonight.”
“I say we were on the right track with the dynamite,” said Viola. There was general nodding.
The woman in the red dress stood again. “We don’t know how to use the dynamite, though. And the men, they might be good men but they wouldn’t do it. They’d be scared to, I think. Or they don’t see no need. These men don’t see how we got to do something right now. They think the trees can die and we can just go somewhere else, and as long as we fry up the bacon for them in the same old pan, they think it would be…” she faltered, hugging her elbows in earnest…“that it would be home.”
On the way back Viola was quiet. She walked quickly, stopping only to pick up the feathers that littered the leafy orchard floor. The sudden cold snap that heralded the certainty of winter had caused the male peacocks to molt in unison. There being no hope of mating for months to come, they had shed their burdensome tails.
The meeting had ended in compromise: the Stitch and Bitch Club would officially sanction mass demonstrations against Black Mountain’s leaching operation, to be held daily on the dam construction site, starting at 6 A.M. the following morning. Unofficially, the Stitch and Bitch Club would have no objection if a bulldozer met with premature demise.
Hallie wrote:
This morning I saw three children die. Pretty thirteen-year-old girls wearing dresses over their jeans. They were out in a woods near here, picking fruit, and a helicopter came over the trees and strafed them. We heard the shots. Fifteen minutes later an alert defense patrol shot the helicopter down, twenty miles north, and the pilot and another man in the helicopter were killed but one is alive. Codi, they’re American citizens, active-duty National Guards. It’s a helicopter from the U.S., guns, everything from Washington. Please watch the newspapers and tell me what they say about this. The girls were picking fruit. When they brought them into town, oh God. Do you know what it does to a human body to be cut apart from above, from the sky? We’re defenseless from that direction, we aren’t meant to have enemies attack us from above. The girls were alive, barely, and one of the mothers came running out and then turned away saying, “Thank you, Holy Mother, it’s not my Alba.” But it was Alba. Later when the families took the bodies into the church to wash them, I stayed with Alba’s two younger sisters. They kept saying, “Alba braided our hair this morning. She can’t be dead. See, she fixed our hair.”
Codi, please tell me what you hear about this. I can’t stand to think it could be the same amnesiac thing, big news for one day and then forgotten. Nobody here can eat or talk. There are dark stains all over the cement floor of the church. It’s not a thing you forget.
She signed it, perversely, “The luckiest person alive.”
I heard nothing. I listened to the radio, but there wasn’t a word. Two days, nothing. Then, finally, there was one brief report about the American in the helicopter who was taken prisoner by the Nicaraguan government. He was an ex-mercenary running drugs, the radio said, no connection to us. He was shot down and taken prisoner, and that is all. No children had died in an orchard, no sisters, no mothers, no split skulls. And I’m sorry to say this, I knew it was a lie, but I was comforted.
“Who came up with the idea that Indians are red?” I asked Loyd one morning. If I wasn’t careful I could lose myself in this man. His color was like some wholesome form of bread, perfectly done. His forearm, which my head rested on, was sparsely covered with silky black hair.
He turned his head. His hair was perfectly straight, and touched his shoulders. “Old movies,” he said. “Westerns.”
We were in my bed very late on a Sunday morning. Loyd was a wonderful insomnia cure, good enough to bottle. That’s what I’d written Hallie, whom I told everything now, even if my daily letters were comparatively trivial. “He’s a cockfighter,” I’d confessed, “but he’s better than Sominex.” When Loyd lay next to me I slept deep as a lake, untroubled by dreams. First I’d felt funny about his being here-exposing Emelina’s children, and all that. But he didn’t invite me to his place, saying mine was better. He liked to pull books down off my slim shelf and read parts aloud in bed, equally pleased with poetry or descriptions of dark-phase photosynthesis. It occurred to me that Emelina would have a good laugh over my delicacy concerning her children. She probably was daring them to look in the windows and bring back reports.
But the shades were drawn. “Old westerns were in black and white,” I reminded him. “No red men.”
“Well, there you go. If John Wayne had lived in the time of color TV, everybody would know what Indians look like.”
“Right,” I said, gently picking up Loyd’s forearm and taking a taste. “Like that white guy in pancake makeup that played Tonto.”
“Tonto who?”
“Tonto Schwarzenegger. Who do you think? Tonto. The Lone Ranger’s secretary.”
“I didn’t grow up with a TV in the house.” He withdrew his arm and rolled over on his stomach, forearms crossed under his chin. It looked like a defensive posture. “After we got plumbing in Santa Rosalia we all sat around and watched the toilet flush. Sounds like a joke, right? How many Indians does it take to flush a toilet.”
“It’s no big deal. Sorry. Forget it.”
“No, it is a big deal.” He stared at the painted headboard of my bed, rather than at me. “You think I’m a TV Indian. Tonto Schwarzenegger, dumb but cute.”
I pulled up the covers. For a bedspread I’d been using the black-and-red crocheted afghan, Hallie’s and my old comfort blanket. “And what is that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“Nothing. Forget it.”
“If you said it, Loyd, you meant it.”
“Okay, I did.” He got up and began to put his clothes on. I reached over and caught his T-shirt when it was halfway over his head, and pulled him to me like a spider’s breakfast. I kissed him through the T-shirt. He didn’t kiss back. He pulled his head free of the shirt and looked at me, waiting.
“I don’t know what you want from me,” I said.
“I want more than I’m getting. More than sex.”
“Well, maybe that’s all I have to offer.”