Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [166]
“They sure do. But Walkenhorst and Gutierrez want it to be rich right now, unmistakably, so the Syndicate will take up its option and start paying royalties. The Syndicate wants it to look rich, whether it’s really rich or not, so it can sell its option for a pile to Simpson’s people. If it’s really rich, Ferd will take up the option and work the mine himself. Simpson’s crowd would prefer if Simpson could detect riches that aren’t apparent to Walkenhorst, Gutierrez, or me, so they can buy cheap and get rich later.”
“What are you going to report?”
“I haven’t even seen the mine yet.”
“What does Simpson think?”
“I don’t suppose he’d tell me, would he?”
“Would you tell him what you think?”
“I don’t suppose.”
She got up and went to the window. Through the shutters she looked down on the Plaza of the Martyrs. The beggars who sat all day in the niches of the Morelos monument were already there. Women were hurrying toward the cathedral, and now its bell began to boom again across the sunny square. A girl with a wide flat basket of flowers on her head crossed the street, herself a flower, a nodding sunflower on a graceful stem, and stopped, swaying and topheavy, while a customer selected a blossom from her tray.
When Susan turned, she found Oliver watching her with his amused, relaxed, speculative expression. His hands were locked behind his head, his chest was hairy through the neck of his undershirt. He had gained back the flesh that Leadville had taken off him: he looked rested and confident. Here in Mexico she kept being surprised at how blond he was. Much more than Don Gustavo, who was dark and thin, he looked the part of the invading Nordic capitalist.
“Are we in for more litigation and fighting?” she said.
“Why?” he said, surprised. “My only job is to inspect and report.”
“It sounds as if there might be disputes, and testifying in court, and all that.”
“Then I misled you. It’s all very agreeable.”
“I’m glad. I hate all that. It scares me.” She listened to Ascención’s broom scratch down the corredor and past their door. “All that greedy fighting for rights and boundaries and ownership. I want this trip to go on being perfect.”
“To go on being.”
“Yes. Don’t you think it has been, up to now?”
I guess.
“You guess! You know.”
“I guess I know.”
His hand caught the hem of her chemise as she went past, and he pulled her close to kiss her bare back above the corset laces. “In case the mine does turn out all right, how’d it be if we came back here to run it?”
With her hands in her hair she turned. “Is that a possibility?”
“Simpson suggested it last night.”
“Our mortal enemy?”
“He’s no enemy. We think pretty much the same way. He’d recommend me, he said.”
“Would you take it if it was offered?”
“Would you?”
“Oh my goodness, that’s something I never even thought of.”
“You could keep house in a palace like the Casa Walkenhorst.”
“I’d have to think. What about Ollie?”
“He’d grow up a charro. I suppose he’d have to have a tutor like Enriqueta. My guess is he’d like it here.”
“You want to do it.”
“I don’t know. It may not work out that way at all. But if it did, it would be a way out of the Leadville box. It’s also a long way out of the world, almost as far out as Potosí.”
“But the railroad’s coming.”
“Two years away, at least. Meantime your only company would be Don Gustavo reciting his Spanish poems entitled ‘Yo,’ and a few families like the Gutierrez’, and maybe an American or Scotch or Swedish engineer now and then. Remember New Almaden?”
“But here you’d be in charge. There wouldn’t be any Kendall. You could run a humane mine. And it’s civilized, it isn’t crude at all. There was nobody at New Almaden like Emelita, either.”
Again she went to the window. This time she saw the carriage with the white mules, driven by Ysabel, come out the gate and head down toward the cathedral. Through the closed windows she could make out two crow-like forms that had to be Emelita and Enriqueta. She thought, washed by a shiver of strangeness, What if I too . . . ?
“It’s