Animal Dreams - Barbara Kingsolver [73]
The woman in the red dress was still standing. “What we want to know is, is the river poisoned for good? Would we be better off to let them run it out Tortoise Canyon?”
Every person in the room was looking at me. It dawned on me that they weren’t conceiving of their situation as hopeless. What they wanted was not sympathy or advice, but information. “Well, no,” I said. “The river could recover. It doesn’t start here, it starts up on the Apache reservation, in the mountains where the snow melts. As long as that’s pure, the water coming down here will be okay.”
“So if you could stop Black Mountain from running the acid through the tailing piles, then after a while the junk would get washed out?” inquired Mrs. Galvez. “Like flushing the John?”
“Exactly like that,” I said.
Fifty women started talking at once. You’d think I’d commuted a death sentence. After a minute Doña Althea carefully pushed herself up from the arms of her chair and stood, waiting for quiet. In her black dress she rustled like an old crow. She gave a short speech in Spanish, the gist of which was that I’d told them what they needed to know, and now they had to figure out how to get the company to stop building the dam and stop polluting the river and go to hell.
I sat down, a bit stunned. My Spanish was passably good, thanks to the years of Hallie’s refugees sleeping on my couch, but some of Doña Althea’s more idiomatic swear words were new ones on me. Also, she referred to me as la huérfana, the orphan. They always called Hallie and me that. It seemed unkind.
“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