And it did, smashing me down, forcing me into flesh, binding me leadenly to the earth, squeezing out the delight, cramping my soul back into finiteness, snapping bars across my sky and stranding me in the thin watery glow of morning so alone again that the effort of opening my eyes was almost too much to be borne.
Lying rigidly under the press of the covers I gathered up all the tatters of my dream and packed them tightly into a hard little knot way back of my consciousness. “Stay there. Stay there,” I pleaded. “Oh, stay there!”
Forcing myself to breakfast I came warily into the dining room at the hotel. As the only female-type woman guest in the hotel I was somewhat disconcerted to walk into the place when it was full and to have every hand pause and every jaw still itself until I found my way to the only empty seat, and then to hear the concerted return to eating, as though on cue. But I was later this morning, and the place was nearly empty.
“How was the old stack?” Half of Marie’s mouth grinned as she pushed a plate of hotcakes under my nose and let go of it six inches above the table. I controlled my wince as it crashed to the table, but I couldn’t completely ignore the sooty thumbprint etched in the grease on the rim. Marie took the stiffly filthy rag she had hanging as usual from her apron pocket, and smeared the print around until I at least couldn’t see the whorls and ridges any more.
“It was interesting,” I said, not bothering to wonder how she knew I’d been there. “Kruper must have been quite a town when the smelter was going full blast.”
“Long’s I’ve been here it’s been dyin’,” Marie said. “Been here thirty-five years next February and I ain’t never been up to the stack. I ain’t lost nothing up there!”
She laughed soundlessly but gustily. I held my breath until the garlic went by. “But I hear there’s some girls that’s gone up there and lost-“
“Marie!” Old Charlie bellowed from across the table. “Cut out the chatter and bring me some grub. If teacher wants to climb up that da-dang stack leave her be. Maybe she likes it!’”
“Crazy way to waste time,” Marie muttered, teetering out to the kitchen, balancing her gross body on impossibly spindly legs.
“Don’t mind her,” Old Charlie bellowed. “Only thing she thinks is fun is beer. Why, lots of people like to go look at worthless stuff like that. Take-well-take Lowmanigh here. He was up there only yesterday-“
“Yesterday?” My lifted brows underlined my question as I looked across the table. It was one of the fellows I hadn’t noticed before. His name had probably been thrown at me with the rest of them by Old Charlie on my first night there, but I had lost all the names except Old Charlie and Severeid Swanson, which was the name attached to a wavery fragile-looking Mexicano, with no English at all, who seemed to subsist mostly on garlic and vino and who always blinked four times when I smiled at him.
“Yes.” Lowmanigh looked across the table at me, no smile softening his single word. My heart caught as I saw across his cheek the familiar pale quietness of chill-of-soul. I knew the look well. It had been on my own face that morning before I had made my truce with the day.
He must have read something in my eyes, because his face shuttered itself quickly into a noncommittal expression and, with a visible effort, he added, “I watched the sunset from there.”
“Oh?” My hand went thoughtfully to my nose.
“Sunsets!” Marie was back with the semiliquid she called coffee. “More crazy stuff. Why waste good time?”
“What do you spend your time on?” Lowmanigh’s voice was very soft.
Marie’s mind leaped like a startled bird. “Waiting to die!” it cried.
“Beer,” she said aloud, half of her face smiling. “Four beers equal one sunset.” She dropped the coffeepot on the table and went back to the kitchen, leaving a clean sharp, almost visible pain behind her as she went.
“You two oughta get together,” Old Charlie boomed. “Liking the same things like you do. Low here knows more junk heaps and rubbish dumps than anybody else in the county. He collects ghost towns.”
“I like ghost towns,” I said to Charlie, trying to fill a vast conversational vacancy. “I have quite a collection of them myself.”
“See, Low!” he boomed. “Here’s your chance to squire a pretty schoolmarm around. Together you two oughta he able to collect up a storm!” He choked on his pleasantry and his last gulp of coffee and left the room, whooping loudly into a blue bandanna.
We were all alone in the big dining room. The early-morning sun skidded across the polished hardwood floor, stumbled against the battered kitchen chairs, careened into the huge ornate mirror above the buffet and sprayed brightly from it over the cracked oilcloth table covering on the enormous oak table.
The silence grew and grew until I put my fork down, afraid to click it against my plate any more. I sat for half a minute, suspended in astonishment, feeling the deep throbbing of a pulse that slowly welled up into almost audibility, questioning, “Together? Together? Together?” The beat broke on the sharp edge of a wave of desolation, and I stumbled blindly out of the room.
“No!” I breathed as I leaned against the newel post at the bottom of the stairs. “Not involuntarily! Not so early in the day!”
With an effort I pulled myself together. “Cut out this cotton-pickin’ nonsense!” I told myself. “You’re enough to drive anybody crazy!”
Resolutely I started up the steps, only to pause, foot suspended, halfway up. “That wasn’t my desolation,” I cried silently. “It was his!”
“How odd,” I thought when I wakened at two o’clock in the morning, remembering the desolation.
“How odd!” I thought when I wakened at three, remembering the pulsing “Together?”
“How very odd,” I thought when I wakened at seven and did heavy-eyed out of bed-having forgotten completely what Lowmanigh looked like, but holding wonderingly in my consciousness a better-than-three-dimensional memory of him.
School kept me busy all the next week, busy enough that the old familiar ache was buried almost deep enough to be forgotten. The smoothness of the week was unruffled until Friday, when the week’s restlessness erupted on the playground twice. The first time I had to go out and peel Esperanza off Joseph and pry her fingers out of his hair so he could get his snub nose up out of the gravel. Esperanza had none of her Uncle Severeid’s fragility and waveriness as she defiantly slapped the dust from her heavy dark braid.
“‘He calls me Mexican!” she cried. “So what? I’m Mexican. I’m proud to be Mexican. I hit him some more if he calls me Mexican like a bad word again. I’m proud to be-“
“Of course you’re proud,” I said, helping her dust herself off.
“God made us all. What do different names matter?”
“Joseph!” I startled him by swinging around to him suddenly. “Are you a girl?”
“Huh?” He blinked blankly with dusty lashes, then, indignantly: “Course not! I’m a boy!”
“Joseph’s a boy! Joseph’s a boy!” I taunted. Then I laughed.
“See how silly that sounds? We are what we are. How silly to tease about something like that. Both of you go wash the dirt off.” I spatted both of them off toward the schoolhouse and sighed as I watched them go.
The second time the calm was interrupted when the ancient malicious chanting sound of teasing pulled me out on the playground again.
“Lu-cine is crazy! Lu-cine is crazy! Lu-cine is crazy!”
The dancing taunting group circled twelve-year-old Lucine where she stood backed against the one drooping tree that still survived on our playground. Her eyes were flat and shallow above her gaping mouth, but smoky flames were beginning to flicker in the shallowness and her muscles were tightening.
“Lucine!” I cried, fear winging my feet. “Lucine!”