Cinderella in Overalls - By Carol Grace Page 0,28

can go back to your prize potatoes and I can go back to reducing the national debt.” He raised the hood of the car. “That’s the new hose. But it’s no good without the clamp.”

She rubbed the broken pieces together thoughtfully in the palm of her hand. “We could try Old Pedro,” she said after a moment.

“Old Pedro? Who’s Old Pedro? You said all the men were working the tin mines.’’

“He’s too old and crippled. He hurt his leg in a mining accident years ago. Now he makes drain gutters and fixes things.”

“What kind of things? Metal things?” he asked. She nodded and he grabbed her arm. “Let’s go see him.”

With the new hose under his arm and the broken clamp in his pocket, Josh followed Catherine over the same rutted road the taxi had taken last night, past fields of tiny green onion shoots and brilliant tomatoes. He wanted to apologize for being irritable, but the silence had gone on for too long and stretched between them like the road to Old Pedro’s shed across the footbridge. He wanted to talk to her about the loan program, but his throat was dry and the walls of his stomach were knocking together.

Yesterday he was on a high. Anything seemed possible. The loan. The truck. Catherine. His career. Today he was racked with doubts. The program was too big, too ambitious. He wanted to absorb some of her confidence. He wanted to run his hands over her cool skin and bury his face in her dark hair. But she had work to do and so did he.

At the end of the path was a small shed with a misshapen figure of a man bent over a piece of corrugated metal with a pair of tin snips. He looked up from his work. A lantern hung from the ceiling and illuminated his lined face. Catherine introduced Old Pedro to Josh, and Pedro peered into his face for a long moment.

Josh brought out the hose and the clamp and Catherine explained what had happened. Old Pedro merely nodded. While they watched he cut and hammered and bent the scrap metal until he had fashioned a rough copy of the broken clamp. Josh breathed a sigh of relief and reached into his wallet, but the old man shook his head with a rush of words in Spanish.

“He says he has done it for a favor,” Catherine said. “It is too small a job to accept money.’’

“But I have nothing else to offer,” Josh protested.

“He says not to worry. The gringos have always treated him well. Back in the old days when he worked the mines.”

Josh studied the man’s wrinkled face and watched him hobble across the dirt floor to see them to the door. “You mean the tin mines,” he said.

Catherine translated and Pedro shook his head. “Plata,” he said. “Silver.”

“Where?” Josh asked.

Old Pedro waved his hand in the general direction of the mountains to the south. “Out there.”

“If I wanted to go there, if I wanted to see them, could he show me?”

The eagerness in Josh’s voice, the intensity of his gaze, startled her. “I don’t think so. He’s old as you see, and lame.”

“Maybe he could show me on a map. Or tell me how to get there.” Josh felt a surge of excitement rush through his veins.

Catherine asked, but the old man shook his head. “He says he couldn’t tell you. And he couldn’t take you because the God of Thunder closed the entrance and put a curse on the mine before even one piece of silver could be extracted.”

Josh stared at the old man. It was just as he had heard. His father and the Tochabamba silver mine. His hopes to strike it rich, to find his fortune. But as usual it slipped away. This time it was an avalanche. It was always something—a natural disaster or unscrupulous partners, but all his life the Tochabamba stood as a symbol of hope and riches and loss.

For a moment Josh felt what his father must have felt on the brink of a discovery, the excitement and the anticipation. And then, just as surely, the disappointment. Outside the entrance in the bright sunshine, Josh hesitated. He had to know, whether he ever got there or not.

“The mine, was it the Tochabamba?”

Without waiting for the translation the old man’s eyes widened in surprise. He spoke rapidly in Spanish, gesturing with his short, muscular arms while Josh watched and strained to understand. ,

“What’s he saying?”