As things had turned out, Grace was not going to dry up. The women of the Stitch and Bitch had won back the river. A vice-president of the Black Mountain Mining Company called a press conference in Phoenix to announce that after seventy years of productive and congenial relations with the people of Gracela Canyon, the mine operation there was closing up shop. It was a matter of the leaching operation's being no longer profitable, he said. The dam would be deconstructed. Naturally, if any harm had been incurred, all necessary reparations would be made to the people of Grace. He made no mention of the historic registry petition that had been filed one week earlier. So mountains could be moved. Now I knew.
When my bus paused in Willcox a woman climbed aboard and chose to sit by me, rather than take her chances on something worse that might come along, I guess. She wore an ample white jogging suit and had an odd, metallic hair color. I spent the next fifty miles in fear of a conversation I wasn't in the mood for, but she just kept scowling at a gardening magazine.
Then suddenly she held out her magazine as if it had offended her. "That kills me, how people can grow four o'clocks like that," she said, whacking the page with the back of her plump hand.
I glanced over at the unbelievable floral displays in her magazine. I could relate to her frustration. You just knew they trucked in those flowers from a climate-controlled greenhouse somewhere and arranged them on the lawn, right before snapping the photo.
"I'm Alice Kimball," the woman explained. "I get the worst slugs."
Alice. Would my mother be wearing tepid jogging suits now, if her organs had not failed her? I tried to smile. "Where do you get them?"
"In my four o'clocks. That's what I'm trying to tell you, I can't grow a four o'clock to save my life. The leaves get so full of holes they just look pitiful. And they get in the lawn, too. My husband says he hears them out there eating up his grass. What can you do?"
"I'm not the right person to ask," I said. "My sister could sure tell you, though. She got a degree in Integrated Pest Management. She used to answer the Garden Hotline in Tucson, 626-BUGS."
Mrs. Kimball brightened as if I'd offered her a peppermint. "I've called that before. They have the nicest little girl on that line, she'll tell you anything you want to know."
"That was my sister you talked to. Hallie Noline." I was amazed by the coincidence, but then again probably half of Tucson had turned to Hallie for advice. And half of Nicaragua. "That was part of her job," I said. "She did that for six years."
Mrs. Kimball looked around at the neighboring seats as if Hallie might turn up for consultation. "Well, do you mean she's quit? I just thought the world of her."
"Yep, she quit. She left the country."
"Left the country?"
"She went to Nicaragua." Everybody in this country should know her name, I thought. During the Iran hostage crisis they had a special symbol on the newscasts: a blindfolded man, and the number of days. A schoolchild glancing up from a comic book would know that this story was about them. But a nation gloats on the hostility of its enemies, whereas Hallie had proved the malevolence of some men we supplied with machine guns. Hallie was a skeleton in the civic closet.
Some people knew. I'd gotten a card from a nun in Minneapolis who had known Hallie. She was one of several thousand people who had gone down to Nicaragua for just a week or two, she said. They helped pick coffee, or if they had training they did other helpful things. The idea was just to be there in the danger zone, so that if the U.S. should attack, it would have to attack some of its own citizens. This nun, Sister Sabina Martin, had helped give vaccinations. She met Hallie at the clinic in Chinandega the day Hallie brought in a child who'd drunk paraquat from a Coke bottle. Sister Martin and Hallie sat with the child the whole day, and she said that although I might not think it possible, she felt she'd come to know Hallie well during that time. In some circumstances, she said, an afternoon can be a whole life.
"Oh, well," Mrs. Kimball said, after quite a while. "You must miss her."
"I will, when it really sinks in. She hasn't been gone that long."
"I know what you're going through," said Mrs. Kimball. "I lost my sister in 1965."
I hadn't told her Hallie was dead. Mrs. Kimball had seized the subject of death all on her own. "I'm sorry," I said, not really wanting to be encouraging, but you couldn't just ignore it, either.
"She's been dead all this time of an aneurysm and there are still days when I think, 'Oh, wait till I tell Phoebe about that!' Before I realize. I always think it's harder to believe they're gone when it's sudden."