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"So if you could stop Black Mountain fro piles, then after a while the junk would get washed out?" inquired Mrs Galvez "Like flushing the John?"

"Exactly like that," I said

Fifty wo at once You’d think I’d commuted a death sentence After a minute Dona Althea carefully pushed herself up fro 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 theure out how to get the co 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 sords 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 ," shouted a woman in the back row "He would kno 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 Dynahtfully, "No offense Mine would be just as lazy, except he’s dead"

Mrs Galvez nodded "Well, that’s the truth My husband says the sa, ’The lawyers will fix it up, honey’ If the ht instead of ho about, football?" asked Mrs Dynaeant is on tonight" She stood up "Whose husbands atching 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 woo 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 pu to do tonight"

"I say ere on the right track with the dyna

The woain "We don’t kno to use the dynaood men but they wouldn’t do it They’d be scared to, I think Or they don’t see no need These ht now They think the trees can die and we can just go so as we fry up the bacon for them in the sa 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 thefor months to co had ended in compromise: the Stitch and Bitch Club would officially sanctionoperation, to be held daily on the da Unofficially, the Stitch and Bitch Club would have no objection if a bulldozerI 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 doenty 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 froton Please watch the newspapers and tellfruit When they brought them into town, oh God Do you knohat it does to a human body to be cut apart from above, from the sky? We’re defenseless from that direction, we aren’t irls were alive, barely, and one of the , "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 theer sisters They kept saying, "Alba braided our hair thisShe can’t be dead See, she fixed our hair"