Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [152]
“Oh, I know. You were being thoughtful. How did . . . When Frank left him in Denver, how was it? What did Pricey say?”
“He cried,” Oliver said.
He would not look at her, he stared stubbornly out the window. She let her own wet glance go the same way. Out there the dry hillside shimmered with tears and summer, the aspens flashed light off their incessant leaves, the grasshoppers whirred and arched. A mourning dove was who-whoing off in the timber. In the blinking of a tear it would be fall. She had missed the spring and half the summer, the home that they had bragged they would make at the edge of timberline was a disaster.
The dove’s long mournful throaty cooing was a dirge for the failed and disappointed, for the innocent and incompetent, themselves not excepted, who wandered out to this harsh place and were destroyed.
As if he had read her mind, Oliver said, “He never did belong. He never could have made it even if he hadn’t been hurt.”
“Just the same,” she said. “Just the same! If that Syndicate had any heart it would have done something for him. It didn’t, did it? Who paid his fare?”
“I did.”
“And will never get it back.”
“Do you care?”
“No. But I hate that heartless mine, all those people so many safe miles away who let people get hurt or killed and never care, so long as they get their dividends.”
“Which they’re not getting.”
“They’re too callous to deserve anything. Too timid and too callous. Why don’t we quit?”
A little laugh was jolted out of him. He looked first out the window and then into his hands, as if in search of something that would catch his eye. “Frank would feel terrible, for one thing. He’d stay here ten years without pay, and trade buckshot with those people every afternoon, just to beat them.”
“Are you talking about Frank or yourself?”
“All right,” he said. “I’m not exactly friendly with them. And I don’t like to lose.”
“You need a vacation, that’s what you need.”
“So do you.”
“So does Ollie. We all do. It hasn’t been good here, Oliver. Helen was right. Grass won’t grow, cats can’t live, chickens won’t lay. We were mistaken to think we could make a home on this mountain. We ought to get out ”
He had out his knife again, digging at his horny palm. She saw the V between thumb and forefinger thick and yellow with callus. In the absence of money to hire a crew, he and Frank and Jack Hill had been mucking in the mine like common laborers, hoping to turn up something that would persuade the New York office to commit itself and its money. Carefully, without looking up, he said, “Would you consider Mexico?”
“Consider it?” she said suspiciously. “Why? Have you had an offer?”
“Not exactly. But I could, I think.”
“Where is it? Off on some mountaintop, like Leadville or Potosí?”
She saw his forehead pucker. His eyes returned from outdoors and met hers steadily. His head was up so that the pupils sat in the middle, riot up against the upper lids, and there was not that sinister half-moon of white below them. “Sue,” he said, “it’s my profession.”
She was contrite. She hadn’t meant to sneer. “I know. Tell me.”
“Letter came a week or so ago–ten days, two weeks, I don’t know. The Syndicate’s given up on the Adelaide until the suit’s settled. We’re just sitting here. They’ve got an option on a mine in Michoacán. There was this sort of question, if it worked out that way would I be interested in inspecting it.”
“And then what?”
“Then we’d come back here, assuming the Adelaide wins its suit.”
“What about Ollie?”
“He couldn’t go, not on this inspection trip.”
“Back to Milton?”
“Milton or Guilford. Milton’s more his home than anywhere else.”
“How long?”
“How long?”
“You say you’d have to inspect it. How long would that take?”
“I don’t know. Two months, maybe more.”
“Could I go along?”
“I wouldn’t go otherwise.”
Absently her hand came out and settled on top of his. He was being scrupulous not to influence her, he simply laid out possibilities. “I hate to think of Ollie,” she said. “Just barely well, if he is.”
He said nothing. He watched her.
“I wonder if I could get Thomas to commission an article,