"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 Dona 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 Dona Althea's more idiomatic swear words were new ones on me. Also, she referred to me as la huerfana, 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 Dona 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 would officially sanction mass demonstrations against Black Mountain's leaching operation, to be held daily on the dam construction site, starting at 6 A.M. the following morning. Unofficially, the Stitch and Bitch Club would have no objection if a bulldozer met with premature demise.
Hallie wrote:
This morning I saw three children die. Pretty thirteen-year-old girls wearing dresses over their jeans. They were out in a woods near here, picking fruit, and a helicopter came over the trees and strafed them. We heard the shots. Fifteen minutes later an alert defense patrol shot the helicopter down, twenty miles north, and the pilot and another man in the helicopter were killed but one is alive. Codi, they're American citizens, active-duty National Guards. It's a helicopter from the U.S., guns, everything from Washington. Please watch the newspapers and tell me what they say about this. The girls were picking fruit. When they brought them into town, oh God. Do you know what it does to a human body to be cut apart from above, from the sky? We're defenseless from that direction, we aren't meant to have enemies attack us from above. The girls were alive, barely, and one of the mothers came running out and then turned away saying, "Thank you, Holy Mother, it's not my Alba." But it was Alba. Later when the families took the bodies into the church to wash them, I stayed with Alba's two younger sisters. They kept saying, "Alba braided our hair this morning. She can't be dead. See, she fixed our hair."