Animal Dreams

16 Bleeding Hearts

At the first sign of winter the trees began to die. Leaves and aborted fruits fell in thick, brittle handfuls like the hair of a cancer patient. The abundance of sun and warmth, which we thought would never end, had led the trees on too, promising the impossible. But now the daylight grew thin and they showed no will to live. A dead sea of leaves drifted deep and undisturbed on the orchard floors. No children played there.

I spent a lot of time considering the mystery of my family tree. I didn’t push the subject of the Nolinas, but I did ask people about my mother, whose leavings were scant. I’d grown up with only one sentence, repeated like a mantra: “It wasn’t childbirth she died of, it was organ failure.” I know this was meant to protect Hallie and me from guilt, but “organ failure,” in its way, was equally unhelpful: a pronouncement that reminded me of those doubtfully groomed children in school whose report cards bore failing marks through every season, perennial as grass. “Organ failure” sounded like something our mother ought to be ashamed of, and us after her, for her, in death.

Viola dispensed with the organ-failure myth as easily as snapping a wishbone: “No, it was childbirth,” she told me.

“But Hallie was born in June,” I said. “She didn’t die till later in the summer.”

“It was a few weeks,” Viola conceded. “Hallie gave her a real good round. She lost a lot of blood and after the birth she never got up again.”

I was stunned by this news, and we walked in silence for a while. We were on our way to a special meeting of the Stitch and Bitch Club. To my surprise, I’d been invited as a guest scientist to talk about the pH of the river; needlework was not on the agenda.

Viola had on a brown cloth coat and what must have been her dead husband’s hunting cap, earflaps down, the whole thing cocked forward to accommodate her thick, coiled bun. She stopped to pick up two stray peacock feathers, which she tucked into her coat pocket. One was perfect, with an iridescent blue eye bobbing at its tip. The other one had no eye.

“What did she look like?” I asked.

“Like you. Exactly like you, only smaller. She had real little hands and feet.”

I looked down at my size 9’s, defensively. “Not like Hallie?”

“Hallie always favored Doc more,” Viola said.

I pondered this but couldn’t see it-Hallie was so vital and Doc Homer looked drawn. But then what I saw really was their interiors, not their façades. Your own family resemblances are a frustrating code, most easily read by those who know you least.

“Well, I know she was pretty,” I said. “Everybody says that. With a name like Alice how could you not be pretty?”

Viola made an odd sound, like unconsummated laughter.

“What?”

“He was the only one that ever called her Alice. Everybody else called her Althea. It means ‘the truth.’”

“Althea? What, she was an honorary member of the Doña Althea family?”

Viola said nothing. I never knew what to make of her dark hints, but this one was wildly improbable. My impression was that she’d stayed an outsider, like the rest of us. Doc Homer had married my mother and come out here from Illinois after World War II, after he’d served in the army and finished his internship. Her maiden name was something like Carlisle. We never pressed him for more; when it came to our mother, Doc Homer seemed to be in an extended mourning period that lasted for our whole lives to date.

It made me curious, though. I had visions of trying again, of pinning his fragile shoulder blades against the wall of his basement office and forcing him to tell the whole truth about our family. As if Doc Homer’s tongue could be forced.

Abruptly, Viola and I reached the American Legion hall. We walked into a noisy room bright with artificial light and I felt disoriented as to the decade. Women wearing cable-knit cardigans over thin housedresses crowded the hall with their talk, their large purses and imposing bosoms. When they saw Viola and me they began to come to some kind of order. Chairs were dragged, with much metallic howling, from conversational circles back into crooked rows. Many faces were familiar to me now from some encounter, such as old Mrs. Nuñez, who’d been so chatty when I took the boys to her house trick-or-treating, and others like Uda Dell I knew specifically. Doña Althea presided from an overstuffed chair at the front of the hall, but did not speak. Her face was as finely lined as the grain in maple wood, and about the same color. Her pale blue eyes blazed in the direction of the air over our heads. You could have taken her for a blind woman if you didn’t know the truth, which was that Doña Althea’s vision was sharp as a hawk’s.

Norma Galvez, whose shellacked white hair was crowned with a navy bow that coordinated with her Steelworkers T-shirt, brought the meeting to order. It was a packed house. It took a while to achieve perfect quiet. Viola ushered me to a chair at the front table, hurried over to say hello to Doña Althea, and deposited the two feathers in a grocery bag of kindred feathers at the Doña’s feet. Then she scurried back and took her seat by me.

“Viola brought a guest,” announced Mrs. Galvez, accompanied by vigorous nodding from Viola. She’d removed her hunter’s cap. “You all know Doc Homer’s daughter Cosima. She’s going to tell us about the contamination.”

That was my introduction. I was expecting to hear all about myself and the situation, as is always done at meetings that go on too long. But she was through, and I was on. I stood a little shakily, thinking of Hallie, who felt at home giving a lecture in a church full of mosquitoes and kerosene smoke and squalling babies.

“I’m not an expert,” I began. “Here’s the chemistry of it. Black Mountain Mining has been running sulfuric acid, which is a clear, corrosive, water-miscible acid, through their tailing piles to recover extra copper. It combines to make copper sulfate, which is also known as ‘blue vitriol.’ People used to use it to kill rats and pond algae and about everything else you can name. There’s a ton of it in your river. And there’s straight sulfuric acid in there too. The EPA finally sent a report saying that kind of pollution is very dangerous, and they can’t put it near people and orchards, so Black Mountain is building a dam to run the river out Tortoise Canyon. You know that part of the story. And the men on the town council are pushing for a lawsuit that will get some action in the twenty-first century.” There was some snickering. I remembered my talk with Viola on the hill overlooking the dam construction site-her disgust. The Stitch and Bitch Club wasn’t banking on the good old boys.

“I really don’t know any way of helping out with your problem. All I can tell you is that you have a problem, and why, which I guess is what scientists are mainly good for.” I paused to swallow. The room was a silent garden of blinking faces, expecting something from me.

“My students and I looked at the river water under microscopes, and the usual things that live in a river aren’t there. Then we tested the pH of the river and found out it’s very acidic. The EPA has tested it too, and they agree. But your trees knew all this way before we did. Watering them from the river is just like acid rain falling on them, if you’ve heard of that. The acid-rain problem here in the West comes mostly from mine smelters. It’s the same acid, one way or the other. Sulfuric acid.” I feared I was losing my grasp of the subject, but they were still listening.

“I don’t think I can tell you anything helpful. But Viola said I should come anyway. If you have questions I’ll try to answer them.” I sat down.

A thin woman in cat’s-eye glasses and a red dress stood up and demanded, “You mean the fish and stuff is all killed? My husband claims they was catching croppies out of there a month or two ago.”

“Well, no, the fish…”

“Stand up, honey, we can’t hear you,” said Miss Lorraine Colder, my fourth-grade teacher. She and Miss Elva Dann, who sat next to her, had lived together forever and resembled each other although they were no relation.

“Not the fish,” I said. “They’re still alive, but the smaller things that live in the water…” I considered how to phrase this, and started again. “Usually there’s a whole world of microscopic things living in a river, and in the dirt, and the air. If you were in an airplane and flew over a city and looked down and saw nothing was moving, you’d know something was up. That’s how you can tell if a river is healthy or not. You can’t see them, but they’re supposed to be there.”

The woman in the red dress hugged her sweater around her. “Like bugs?”

“Kind of,” I said.

Another woman said in Spanish that if the river water killed bugs, she’d better take some and sprinkle it around her son’s house. There was a good bit of laughter.

“It won’t kill cockroaches,” I said. “Too bad. You could sell it for a fundraiser.” They laughed again, though there were some surprised looks, and I was secretly satisfied. All my life here, people had spoken Spanish around me the way grownups spell around children.

The woman in the red dress was still standing. “What we want to know is, is the river poisoned for good? Would we be better off to let them run it out Tortoise Canyon?”

Every person in the room was looking at me. It dawned on me that they weren’t conceiving of their situation as hopeless. What they wanted was not sympathy or advice, but information. “Well, no,” I said. “The river could recover. It doesn’t start here, it starts up on the Apache reservation, in the mountains where the snow melts. As long as that’s pure, the water coming down here will be okay.”

“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 Doña 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 Doña Althea’s more idiomatic swear words were new ones on me. Also, she referred to me as la huérfana, 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 Doña 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.”

Codi, please tell me what you hear about this. I can’t stand to think it could be the same amnesiac thing, big news for one day and then forgotten. Nobody here can eat or talk. There are dark stains all over the cement floor of the church. It’s not a thing you forget.

She signed it, perversely, “The luckiest person alive.”

I heard nothing. I listened to the radio, but there wasn’t a word. Two days, nothing. Then, finally, there was one brief report about the American in the helicopter who was taken prisoner by the Nicaraguan government. He was an ex-mercenary running drugs, the radio said, no connection to us. He was shot down and taken prisoner, and that is all. No children had died in an orchard, no sisters, no mothers, no split skulls. And I’m sorry to say this, I knew it was a lie, but I was comforted.

“Who came up with the idea that Indians are red?” I asked Loyd one morning. If I wasn’t careful I could lose myself in this man. His color was like some wholesome form of bread, perfectly done. His forearm, which my head rested on, was sparsely covered with silky black hair.

He turned his head. His hair was perfectly straight, and touched his shoulders. “Old movies,” he said. “Westerns.”

We were in my bed very late on a Sunday morning. Loyd was a wonderful insomnia cure, good enough to bottle. That’s what I’d written Hallie, whom I told everything now, even if my daily letters were comparatively trivial. “He’s a cockfighter,” I’d confessed, “but he’s better than Sominex.” When Loyd lay next to me I slept deep as a lake, untroubled by dreams. First I’d felt funny about his being here-exposing Emelina’s children, and all that. But he didn’t invite me to his place, saying mine was better. He liked to pull books down off my slim shelf and read parts aloud in bed, equally pleased with poetry or descriptions of dark-phase photosynthesis. It occurred to me that Emelina would have a good laugh over my delicacy concerning her children. She probably was daring them to look in the windows and bring back reports.

But the shades were drawn. “Old westerns were in black and white,” I reminded him. “No red men.”

“Well, there you go. If John Wayne had lived in the time of color TV, everybody would know what Indians look like.”

“Right,” I said, gently picking up Loyd’s forearm and taking a taste. “Like that white guy in pancake makeup that played Tonto.”

“Tonto who?”

“Tonto Schwarzenegger. Who do you think? Tonto. The Lone Ranger’s secretary.”

“I didn’t grow up with a TV in the house.” He withdrew his arm and rolled over on his stomach, forearms crossed under his chin. It looked like a defensive posture. “After we got plumbing in Santa Rosalia we all sat around and watched the toilet flush. Sounds like a joke, right? How many Indians does it take to flush a toilet.”

“It’s no big deal. Sorry. Forget it.”

“No, it is a big deal.” He stared at the painted headboard of my bed, rather than at me. “You think I’m a TV Indian. Tonto Schwarzenegger, dumb but cute.”

I pulled up the covers. For a bedspread I’d been using the black-and-red crocheted afghan, Hallie’s and my old comfort blanket. “And what is that supposed to mean?” I asked.

“Nothing. Forget it.”

“If you said it, Loyd, you meant it.”

“Okay, I did.” He got up and began to put his clothes on. I reached over and caught his T-shirt when it was halfway over his head, and pulled him to me like a spider’s breakfast. I kissed him through the T-shirt. He didn’t kiss back. He pulled his head free of the shirt and looked at me, waiting.

“I don’t know what you want from me,” I said.

“I want more than I’m getting. More than sex.”

“Well, maybe that’s all I have to offer.”

He still waited.

“Loyd, I’m just here till next June. You know that. I’ve never led you on.”

“And where do you go after next June?”

“I don’t know.” I poked my fingers through the holes in the black-and-red afghan, a decades-old nervous habit. He held eye contact until I was uncomfortable.

“Who do you see yourself marrying, Codi?”

I could feel my pulse in my neck. It was a very odd question. “I don’t.”

“Yes, you do. But he’d have to be taller than you, smarter than you, more everything. A better job and more damn college degrees. You’re like every other woman alive.”

“Thanks very much,” I said.

“Your height alone kind of limits the field.”

“If that’s supposed to be an insult, you’re way off. I always wanted to be even taller than I am, taller than Hallie.”

We sat not looking at each other for a minute. I took his hand and laid it, limp, against mine. It felt like a pancake or something. “This isn’t about your deficiencies, Loyd. It’s just me. I can’t stay here. There’s a poem by Robert Frost about this pitiful old hired hand who comes back home when he’s run out of luck because he knows they won’t kick him out. The poem says, ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.’” I stroked the tendons on the back of Loyd’s hand. “I don’t want to be seen as pitiful. I came here with a job to do, but I have places to go after this. I wish…” I turned my face toward the window so he wouldn’t see tears. “I’d like to find a place that feels like it wants to take me in. But this isn’t it. At the end of the school year my time’s up. If we get attached, you and me, then it’s hard.”

“That’s your game, not mine, Codi.” He got up and walked into the living room to make his hourly call to the depot; he was expecting to be sent to El Paso soon. I was stunned that he would walk away from me when I needed to be taken in. Though I guess that’s just what I’d asked him to do, walk away. His T-shirt was inside out, and he took it off and switched it around, still managing to keep the receiver cradled against his ear. He’d been put on hold. I watched him through the doorway and realized that the muscles in his back were taut with anger. I’d never seen Loyd mad, and was surprised he was capable of it.

I felt lost. I got up, throwing back the afghan and draping the flannel sheet around me like a sari, and went into the living room. The floor was cold. I shifted from one foot to the other, feeling vaguely like the Statue of Liberty. Jack on the front doorstep was scratching his neck vigorously, jingling his tags. That dog had the patience of Job.

“What’s going on?” I asked, when Loyd hung up the phone.

“I’m five times out. Plenty of time for a fuck.”

“That’s not what I meant. Loyd, I don’t think you’re dumb.”

“Just not anything worth changing your plans for.”

I laughed. “As if I had plans.”

He looked at me, his eyes searching back and forth between my two pupils as if he were trying to decide which door concealed the prize. “What would happen if you stayed here, Codi?”

“I would have the wrong haircut. Everybody would remind me that I don’t quite belong. ‘Oh, honey,’ they’d say, ‘you’re still here? I heard you were on your way to Rio de Janeiro to have tea with Princess Grace.’ And I’d say, ‘No, I’ve grown up to be the new Doc Homer. I’ve moved into his house and I’m taking over his practice so I can save the town.’”

“Save us from what, Great White Mother?”

“Oh, shit, you guys can all just go to hell.” I laughed, since the other choice was to cry. He took me in his arms and I crumpled against his chest like an armful of laundry. “This town was never kind to me,” I said into his shirt. “I never even got asked out on dates. Except by you, and you were so drunk you didn’t know better.”

“You know what we used to call you in high school? Empress of the Universe.”

“That’s just what I mean! And you didn’t care that the Empress of the Universe had to go home every night to a cold castle where the king stomped around saying hugs are for puppy dogs and we are housebroken.”

Loyd seemed interested in this. “And then what?”

“Oh, nothing much. I’d hide in my room and cry because I had to wear orthopedic shoes and was unfit to live.”

He turned my chin to face him. I hadn’t noticed before that without shoes we were the same height. Proportioned differently-my legs were longer-but our chins punched in at the same altitude. “So, where you headed now, Empress?”

“God, Loyd, I don’t know. I get lost a lot. I keep hoping some guy with ‘Ron’ or ‘Andy’ stitched on his pocket and a gas pump in his hand will step up and tell me where I’m headed.”

His face developed slowly toward a grin. “I’ll tell you. You’re going with me to do something I’m real good at. The best.”

I tried to figure this out. Behind his smile there was a look in his eyes that was profoundly earnest. It dawned on me. “Cockfights?”

There was no way I could say no.

A fighting cock is an animal bred for strength and streamlined for combat. His wings are small, his legs strong, and when he’s affronted his neck feathers puff into a fierce mane like a lion’s. Individuality has been lost in the breeding lines; function is everything. To me each bird looked like any other. I couldn’t tell them apart until they began dying differently.

The deaths are protracted. That was one thing I learned when I went to see Loyd excel in the profession to which he was born.

I’d had in mind that a cockfight would be an after-dark, furtive thing: men betting and drinking and sweating out the animal suspense under cover of night. But it was broad daylight. Loyd cut the wheel sharply, taking us off the road and up a gravel arroyo. He seemed to navigate the reservation by the same mysterious instincts that lead birds to Costa Rica and back home again unfailingly each year. We reached a thicket where a motley herd of pickup trucks were parked at odd angles, close together, like nervous horses ready to bolt. Loyd pulled his red truck into the herd. Beyond the trees was a dirt arena where roosters strutted around clearing their throats, barnyard-innocent.

Loyd steered me through the arena, his arm around my shoulders, greeting everybody. I saw no other women, but Loyd would have been welcome here if he’d shown up with a shewolf. “Lot of people going to lose their shirts today,” a man told him. “You got some damn good-looking birds.” The man was handsome and thin, with a long ponytail tied up Navajo style. His name was Collie Bluestone. Loyd introduced us, seeming proud of me.

“Glad to meet you,” I said. Collie’s hand felt taut with energy. A chunk of turquoise on a leather thong rested on his collarbone, below the scar of an old tracheotomy.

“Collie’s a cock mechanic,” Loyd said. “We go back a ways.”

I laughed. “You give them tune-ups before the fight?”

“No, after,” Collie said. “I sew them up. So they live to fight another day.”

“Oh. I thought it was to the death.” I dragged a finger across my throat.

Collie smiled. “Out of every fight, one of them dies and one lives.” He turned to Loyd. “How come the girls always forget about the one that lives?”

“Everybody loves a hero, I guess.” Loyd winked at me.

“Nothing heroic about a dead bird,” I pointed out.

The arena centered on a raked floor of reddish-brown dirt. Loyd maneuvered me through the men squatting and arguing at its perimeter to a dilapidated flank of wooden chairs where he deposited me. I felt nervous about being left alone, though the atmosphere was as innocuous as a picnic, minus women and food.

“I’ll be back,” he said, and vanished.

The place was thick with roosters but didn’t smell like poultry, only of clean, sharp dust. I suppose the birds didn’t stay around long enough to establish that kind of presence. Some men took seats near me, jarring me slightly; the chairs were all nailed together in long rows, the type used for parades. I spotted Loyd through the crowd. Everybody wanted to talk to him, cutting in like suitors at a dance. He was quite at home here, and relaxed: an important man who’s beyond self-importance.

He returned to me just as a short, dark man in deeply worn plaid pants was marking out a chalk square in the dirt of the center pit. Betting flared around the fringes. An old man stabbed the stump of a missing forefinger at the crowd and shouted, angrily, “Seventy! Somebody call seventy!”

Loyd took my hand. “This is a gaff tournament,” he explained quietly. “That means the birds have a little steel spur on the back of each leg. In the knife fights they get blades.”

“So you have gaff birds and knife birds,” I said. I’d been turning over this question since our trip to Kinishba.

“Right. They fight different. A knife fight is a cutting fight and it goes a lot faster. You never really get to see what a bird could do. The really game birds are gaff birds.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I said.

The first two fighters, men named Gustavo and Scratch, spoke to the man in plaid pants, who seemed in charge. Scratch appeared to have only one functional eye. Loyd said they were two of the best cockfighters on the reservation. The first position was an honor.

“The roosters don’t look honored,” I said. Actually they looked neither pleased nor displeased, but stalked in circles, accustomed to life on one square yard of turf. Their tail feathers ticked like weeds and one of them crowed nonstop, as if impatient. But impatience implies consciousness of time and a chicken is existential. I know that much about birds.

“How come you’re not down there playing with your friends?” I asked Loyd.

“I’ve got people to train the birds, bring the birds, weigh in, all that. I handle. You’ll see.”

“Train the birds? How do you teach a bird to fight?”

“You don’t, it’s all instinct and breeding. You just train them not to freak out when they get in a crowd.”

“I see. So you don’t train, you handle,” I said. “A handling man.”

He pinched my thigh gently along the inside seam of my jeans. I’d been handled by Loyd quite a few times since Kinishba. The crowd quieted. Scratch and Gustavo squared off in the center of the pit, their charges cradled at thigh level, and they thrust their birds toward each other three times in a rhythm that was frankly sexual. Each time the men’s hips rocked forward, the cocks dutifully bit each other’s faces. Apparently the point was to contrive a fighting mood. Two minutes ago these birds were strutting around their own closed circuits, and if they looked away from each other even now they’d probably lose their train of thought and start scratching the dust for cracked corn.

But now they were primed, like cocked pistols. Their handlers set them down on opposite chalk lines and they shook themselves and inflated their pale ruffs. When the plaid-pants referee gave the word, the men let go. The birds ran at each other and jumped up, spurs aimed for the other bird’s breast. They hopped over one another, fluttering their short wings, pecking each other’s heads and drawing blood. After about thirty seconds the birds’ spurs tangled and they lay helpless, literally locked in combat.

“Handle that!” the referee shouted.

The handlers moved in to pull them apart. They faced the birds off, waited for the count, and let them go at each other once more. Within another minute Scratch and Gustavo had to intervene again, this time because one bird had his spurs irretrievably embedded in the breast meat of his opponent. The handlers gently pulled them apart and started them again.

It takes a very long time for one bird or the other to die. Presumably they were dying of internal wounds and hemorrhage. Punctured lungs, for example, and literally bleeding hearts. Eventually they began to bleed from the mouths. At that point I could finally tell Scratch’s bird from Gustavo’s because it lay down in the dirt and wouldn’t get up. Scratch had to place it on its feet and push it back in the direction of combat.

“Why don’t they just declare the winner?” I whispered.

“There’s rules.”

It was a ridiculous answer, but correct. A death was required. It took thirty or forty minutes, and I guess the birds were showing their mettle, but it was hard to watch. The cocks were both exhausted and near death, no longer even faintly beautiful. Their blond breasts and ruffs were spotted with blood, stringy as unwashed hair. Collie Bluestone would have his work cut out for him here.

There seemed to be elaborate rules about how to keep things going after this point, when both birds really just wanted to sit with their beaks in the dirt. If one lay still, the other had no incentive to fight. I’ve studied a lot of biology; I quickly figured out that this industry was built around a bird’s natural impulse for territorial defense, and that’s where it broke down. No animal has reason to fight its own kind to the death. A rooster will defend his ground, but once that’s established, he’s done. After that he tends to walk around ignoring the bizarre surroundings and all the people who have next month’s rent riding on him and he’ll just act like a chicken-the animal that he is. The handlers had to keep taking the birds firmly in hand, squaring them off and trying to force the fight.

“This is making me sick,” I told Loyd.

He looked at me with such surprise it angered me. Nobody could look at this picture and fail to see cruelty.

“I’ve seen little boys do this same exact thing,” I said. “Take some pitiful animal and tease it and drag it back by the legs over and over again, trying to make it fight.”

“The knife fights go a lot faster,” he said.

“But you don’t like knife fights. You like this. That’s what you said.”

He didn’t answer. To avoid the birds I looked at the crowd, whose faces betrayed neither pain nor blood thirst but passive interest. It could have been any show at all, not two animals obliged to kill each other; it could have been TV. They were mostly old men in feed caps, or black felt cowboy hats if they were Apaches. I spotted a few families now, but knew if you asked these women about cockfighting they’d use the word we. “Oh, we love it,” they’d say in cigarette-husky voices, meaning he does. A teenager in a black tank top, a greenish tattoo flowering across her broad back, hoisted a toddler onto her shoulder. She lit a cigarette and paid scant attention to the action in the pit, but her child took it in like a sponge.

Several people yelled loudly for Gustavo’s bird. Then finally, without much warning, its opponent passed over from barely alive to dead. Without ceremony Scratch carried his limp loser out by its feet and tossed it into the back of a truck. Loyd Peregrina was called up next. A rooster was delivered into his arms, smooth as a loaf of bread, as he made his way down to the pit. This time I watched. I owed him that.

In the first fight I’d watched birds, but this time I watched Loyd, and soon understood that in this unapologetically brutal sport there was a vast tenderness between the handler and his bird. Loyd cradled his rooster in his arms, stroking and talking to it in a low, steady voice. At each handling call he caressed the bird’s wings back into place, stroked its back, and licked the blood from its eyes. At the end, he blew his own breath into its mouth to inflate a punctured lung. He did this when the bird was nigh unto death and clearly unable to win. The physical relationship between Loyd and his rooster transcended winning or losing.

It lasted up to the moment of death, and not one second longer. I shivered as he tossed the feathered corpse, limp as cloth, into the back of the truck. The thought of Loyd’s hands on me made the skin of my forearms recoil from my own touch.

“What do they do with the dead birds?” I wanted to know.

“What?”

“What do they do with them? Does somebody eat them? Arroz con pollo?”

He laughed. “Not here. In Mexico I’ve heard they do.”

I thought of Hallie and wondered if they had cockfights in Nicaragua. In the new, humane society that had already abolished capital punishment, I’d bet money they still had cockfights.

Loyd watched the road and executed a tricky turn. He was driving a little fast for gravel road and dusk, but driving well. I tried to picture Loyd driving a train, and came up with nothing. No picture. No more than I could picture Fenton Lee in his head-on wreck.

“What do they do with them here?”

“Why, you hungry?”

“I’m asking a question.”

“There’s a dump, down that arroyo a ways. A big pit. They bury them in a mass grave. Tomb of the unknown chicken.”

I ignored his joke. “I think I’d feel better about the whole thing if the chickens were getting eaten.”

“The meat’d be tough,” Loyd said, amused. He was in a good mood. He’d lost his first fight but had won four more after that-more than anyone else that day.

“It just seems like such a pathetic waste. All the time and effort that go into those chicken lives, from the hatched egg to the grave of the unknown chicken. Pretty pointless.” I needed to make myself clear. “No, it’s not pointless. It’s pointed in a direction that makes me uncomfortable.”

“Those roosters don’t know what’s happening to them. You think a fighting cock understands its life is pointless?”

“No, I think a fighting cock is stupider than a head of lettuce.” I glanced at Loyd, hoping he’d be hurt by my assessment, but apparently he agreed. I wanted him to defend his roosters. It frightened me that he could connect so intensely with a bird and then, in a breath, disengage.

“It’s a clean sport,” he said. “It might be hard to understand, for an outsider, but it’s something I grew up with. You don’t see drunks, and the betting is just a very small part of it. The crowd is nicer than at a football game.”

“I don’t disagree with any of that.”

“It’s a skill you have in your hands. You can go anywhere, pick up any bird, even one that’s not your own, a bird you’ve never seen before, and you can do this thing with it.”

“Like playing the piano,” I said.

“Like that,” he said, without irony.

“I could see that you’re good at it. Very good.” I struggled to find my point, but could come up only with disturbing, disjointed images: A woman in the emergency room on my first night of residency, stabbed eighteen times by her lover. Curty and Glen sitting in the driveway dappled with rooster blood. Hallie in a jeep, hitting a land mine. Those three girls.

“Everything dies, Codi.”

“Oh, great. Tell me something I don’t know. My mother died when I was a three-year-old baby!” I had no idea where that came from. I looked out the window and wiped my eyes carefully with my sleeve. But the tears kept coming. For a long time I cried for those three teenage girls who were split apart from above while they picked fruit. For the first time I really believed in my heart it had happened. That someone could look down, aim a sight, pull a trigger. Feel nothing. Forget.

Loyd seemed at a loss. Finally he said gently, “I mean, animals die. They suffer in nature and they suffer in the barnyard. It’s not like people. They weren’t meant to live a good life and then go to heaven, or wherever we go.”

As plainly as anything then, I remembered trying to save the coyotes from the flood. My ears filled with the roar of the flooded river and my nose with the strong stench of mud. I gripped the armrest of Loyd’s truck to keep the memory from drowning my senses. I heard my own high voice commanding Hallie to stay with me. And then, later, asking Doc Homer, “Will they go to heaven?” I couldn’t hear his answer, probably because he didn’t have one. I hadn’t wanted facts, I’d wanted salvation.

Carefully, so as not to lose anything, I brought myself back to the present and sat still, paying attention. “I’m not talking about chicken souls. I don’t believe roosters have souls,” I said slowly. “What I believe is that humans should have more heart than that. I can’t feel good about people making a spectator sport out of puncture wounds and internal hemorrhage.”

Loyd kept his eyes on the dark air above the road. Bugs swirled in the headlights like planets cut loose from their orbits, doomed to chaos. After a full half hour he said, “My brother Leander got killed by a drunk, about fifteen miles from here.”

In another half hour he said, “I’ll quit, Codi. I’m quitting right now.”

17 Peacock Ladies at the Café Gertrude Stein

“He’s giving up cockfighting for you?” Emelina’s eyes were so wide I could only think of Mrs. Dynamite’s husband watching Miss America.

“I guess. We’ll see if he stays on the wagon.”

“Codi, that’s so romantic. I don’t think J.T. ever gave up a thing for me except cracking his knuckles.”

“Well, that’s something,” I said.

“No, it doesn’t even count, because I terrorized him out of it. I told him it would give him arthritis or something.”

Emelina and I were eating chili dogs at a roadside diner on 1-10. Loyd’s pickup, which we’d borrowed for the trip, was parked where we could keep an eye on it. Piled high in the back, individually wrapped in dry-cleaner bags, were fifty peacock piñatas with genuine peacock tail feathers. We were headed for Tucson, prepared to hit the streets with the biggest fund-raising enterprise in the history of the Stitch and Bitch Club.

The project was Viola’s brainchild, although she shared credit with Doña Althea, who had opened up her storehouse of feathers. They’d held two all-night assembly lines to turn out these masterpieces, and really outdid themselves. These were not the likes of the ordinary piñata, destined to meet its maker at the end of a blindfolded ten-year-old’s baseball bat. They had glass-button eyes and feather crests and carefully curled indigo crepe-paper wings. These birds were headed for the city, and so was the Stitch and Bitch Club, en masse, by Greyhound. Our plan was to meet at the bus station and take it from there.

I was surprised when Viola asked if I’d come. She said they needed me, I knew the city; you’d think it was a jail break. But Loyd was doing switch-engine time in Lordsburg and it was Christmas break, so I had time on my hands. I begged Emelina to come too, and spend a few days in Tucson. I needed to walk on flat sidewalks, risk my neck in traffic, go see a movie, that kind of thing. J.T. could stay with the kids. He was home on thirty days’ probation from the railroad, for the derailment that was officially not his fault. The railroad moves in mysterious ways.

Emelina hadn’t gone anywhere without a child in thirteen years. Out of habit she packed a roll of paper towels in her purse. As we drove out of Grace she gasped for air, wide-eyed, like a hooked fish. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she kept saying. “Turn the truck around. I can’t go.”

I drove westward, ignoring my hostage. “What, you think J.T. doesn’t know how to take care of his own sons?”

“No,” she said, staring at the center line. “I’m afraid I’ll come back and find him dead on the kitchen floor with a Conquerers of the Castle arrow stuck on his head and a fistful of Hostess Ding Dongs.”

By the time we hit the interstate she’d decided it would work out. The boys could go to college on J.T.’s life insurance.

“Oh, they won’t pay if it’s murder,” I said gravely.

She brightened a little. “I always forget. He’s the one that wanted so many kids.”

It was mid-December, fourteen shopping days till Christmas, and by afternoon it was clear and cold. Twenty-two women in winter coats and support hose took the streets of downtown Tucson by storm, in pairs, each cradling a papier-mâché piñata in her arms. No one who witnessed the event would soon forget it.

Emelina and I and the truck were more or less set up as headquarters. We parked in front of a chichi restaurant called the Café Gertrude Stein, for the sole reason that it sported an enormous green plastic torso out front and the women felt they could find their way back to this landmark. As soon as they sold their birds, they were to head back for more. Emelina and I held the fort, perched carefully in the midst of our pyramid of paper birds.

A man in a black fedora and glen plaid scarf came out of the café and gave us a startled look. We’d not been there when he went in. “How much?” he asked.

This had been a much-debated question; apparently the Greyhound driver had threatened to stop the bus if the Stitch-and-Bitchers didn’t quit yelling about it. Ultimately we’d been instructed to try and get what we could.

“How bad do you want it?” asked Emelina, saucily crossing her legs. Monogamous as a goose, and a natural-born flirt.

A small crowd of homeless people had gathered on the other side of the street from where our truck was parked. It seems we were by a good margin the best entertainment of their day.

“Fifty dollars?” the man in the scarf asked.

Emelina and I looked at each other, cool as cukes. “They’re made by hand,” I said.

“Sixty?”

“Okay.”

He handed us three twenties and Emelina forked over a plastic-wrapped bird. Its tail bobbed gently behind him as he made his way down the street. I mouthed the words, “Sixty dollars!” and we collapsed against each other.

“They’re made by hand,” Emelina said, eyebrows arched, in perfect imitation of an Empress of the Universe.

Miss Lorraine Colder and Miss Elva Dann came back to the truck almost immediately. They’d enlisted a bag lady named Jessie, who owned her own shopping cart. When Miss Lorraine explained the threat to the homes of Grace, Jessie cried for a little while and then rallied her wits. They were able to pack half a dozen piñatas into her cart, and the trio of women set out to sell them all in a single foray.

Norma Galvez, in the meantime, lost her partner at a crosswalk and had to be escorted back to the big green naked lady by a bicycle policeman named Officer Metz. In a conversation that lasted only five blocks she’d acquired an amazing number of facts about this man: for example, he had twin daughters born on Christmas Day, and wore a hernia belt. She told Emelina and me these things when she introduced him. Officer Metz was sympathetic, but did ask if the ladies had a vendor’s permit. Mrs. Galvez, a quick thinker, explained that we weren’t selling anything. We were soliciting donations to save our town. Each and every donor got a free peacock piñata. In the interest of public relations she gave him one to take home to his twins.

By five o’clock we were out of birds. As it turned out, Emelina and I didn’t make the best sale of the day. While too many peacocks went for only ten or fifteen, Doña Althea haggled one elderly gentleman up to seventy-five dollars. When the transaction was completed, the Doña allowed him to kiss her hand.

By the time they were back in Grace on the last evening bus, I was later informed, the Stitch and Bitch Club had already laid plans to come back in ten days with five hundred peacock piñatas. There would be only two deviations from the original plan. First, each piñata would be accompanied by a written history of Grace and its heroic struggle against the Black Mountain Mining Company. To my shock I was elected, in absentia, to write this epic broadside and get it mimeographed at the school. (Miss Lorraine and Miss Elva had retired.) Second, the price would be fixed at sixty dollars. Some argued for seventy-five but the Doña overruled, pointing out that she couldn’t be expected to kiss every damn cowboy in Tucson.

Emelina and I let ourselves into my old house. Carlo was expecting us and had left the key under the usual brick. The neighborhood seemed even seedier than when I left. There was some demolition going on, with cheerfully nasty graffiti decorating the plywood construction barriers. Our old house with its bolted-down flowerpots stood eerily untouched, inside and out. Carlo had let all the plants finish dying, as expected, but beyond that he’d made no effort to make the place his own. He seemed to be living like a man in mourning, not wishing to disturb the traces of a deceased wife. Or wives.

“This is creepy, Carlo,” I told him when he got home late that night from his ER shift. “Why haven’t you moved things around? It looks like Hallie and I just walked out yesterday.”

He shrugged. “What’s to move around?”

Emelina had gone to bed, trying, I believe, to stay out of our way. She’d kept asking me if it wouldn’t be awkward for us to stay with my “ex.” It was hard for her to understand that Carlo and I were really “exes” right from the start. Having no claim on each other was the basis of our relationship.

I’d stayed up watching the news so I could see him when he got home. He slumped down next to me on the couch with a bag of potato chips.

“That your dinner?”

“You my mother?”

“I should hope not.” On the news they were talking about an ordinance that banned charity Santas from collecting donations in shopping malls. The owner of a sporting-goods store was explaining that it took away business. Rows of hunting bows were lined up behind him like the delicately curved bones of a ribcage.

“You look exhausted,” I told Carlo. He really did.

“I sewed a nose back on tonight. Cartilage and all.”

“That’ll take it out of you.”

“So what’s creepy about the way I’m living?” In his light-green hospital scrubs, Carlo looked paler and smaller than I remembered him. No visible muscles.

“It looks like you’re living in limbo,” I said. “Waiting for somebody else to move in here and cook a real meal for you and hang up pictures.”

“You never did either of those things.”

“I know. But it’s different when there’s two people living in a house with no pictures. It looks like you’re just too busy having fun with each other to pay attention to the walls.”

“I miss you. We did have fun.”

“Not that much. You miss Hallie.” Being here made me miss her too, more tangibly than in Grace. On these scarred wooden floors, Hallie had rolled up the rugs and attempted to teach us to moonwalk.

“How is she? Does she ever write you? I got one postcard, from Nogales.”

“Yeah, we write. She’s real busy.” I didn’t tell him we wrote a lot. We’d revived an intensity of correspondence we hadn’t had since 1972, the year I escaped from Grace and Hallie came into a late puberty, both of us entirely on our own. This time she was over her head with joy and I with something like love or dread, but we still needed each other to make sure it was real. We had to live with an odd, two-week lag to our conversations. I’d be writing her about some small, thrilling victory at school, and she’d be addressing the blue funk I was in two weeks ago when I was getting my period. It didn’t matter; we kept writing, knowing it would someday even out.

“How’s your father?”

“Oh,” I said, “deteriorating. Forgetting who I am. Maybe it’s a blessing.”

“Are you sleeping these days?”

“Yeah, I am, as a matter of fact,” I said, evasively.

“You haven’t had that eyeball dream?”

I’d never been able to explain this to Carlo’s satisfaction. “It’s not really an eyeball dream.”

“What is it, then?”

“Just a sound, like popping glass, and then I’m blind. It’s a very short dream. I’d rather not talk about it if you don’t mind. I’m afraid I’ll jinx myself.”

“So you haven’t been having it?”

“No, not for a while.”

It was kind of him to be interested. He gently squeezed my shoulder in the palm of his hand, releasing the tightness in my deltoid muscle. Not that it applied to us anymore, but people who know a lot about anatomy make great lovers. “So you’re getting along okay there?”

“As well as I get along anywhere,” I said, and he laughed, probably believing I meant “As poorly as I get along anywhere.”

“I’ve been giving some thought to Denver,” he said. “Or Aspen.”

“That would be a challenge. You could sew the faces back onto people who ski into trees.”

“You want to come? We could ski into trees together.”

“I don’t know. I’m not really thinking too far ahead right now.”

He took my feet into his lap and massaged my arches. He had the famous hands of a surgeon, there was no denying it, but I had no sexual interest in Carlo. I still had a slight hope he’d come up with the perfect plan for the two of us that would make me happy and fulfilled, but even that was fading.

“What else could a modern couple like ourselves do in Aspen?” I asked him. “Besides ski into trees, and try to spot movie stars snorting coke in hotel lounges? Aspen sounds kind of fast-lane.”

“After Grace, it would be, yes.”

“Don’t make fun of my country of origin.”

Carlo looked surprised. “I’ve never heard you defend it before.”

“It was a joke.”

“Well, what about Denver, then. Not so fast-lane.”

“Denver’s nice.” I felt the familiar tug of a brand-new place that might, this time, turn out to be wonderful. And the familiar tug of Carlo wanting me to go with him. I’d seen Denver once. It had endless neighborhoods of sweet old brick houses with peaked roofs and lawns shaded by huge maples. It would be a heavenly place to walk a dog.

“Would you ever consider getting a dog, Carlo?”

“A dog?”

“They have four legs and say ‘woof woof.’”

“Oh, right.”

“I’ve met this wonderful dog, in Grace. He’s half coyote and he’ll sit for five hours in the back of a pickup truck waiting for you, just because he trusts you to come back.”

“This sounds serious.”

“He’s a good dog.” I realized I hadn’t thought about Loyd all day, which I viewed as an accomplishment. This must be how it is to be alcoholic: setting little goals for yourself, proving you can live without it. When really, giving it all that thought only proves that you can’t. My mood suddenly began to plummet; I’d felt elated all afternoon, but now I recognized the signs of a depression coming. If I timed it right, Hallie’s letter addressing my last depression would arrive on target.

“Shoot, look at that!” Carlo dropped my feet and jumped to turn up the volume on the TV. “That’s you!”

It was. I yelled for Emelina but the spot was over by the time she showed up in the doorway wearing one of J.T.’s shirts, looking stunned.

“You were on the news,” Carlo explained excitedly. “They said something about the Peacock Ladies and then they said something about Southwestern folk art, and they showed you two standing up in the truck, and this old lady in a black dress…”

“Doña Althea,” I said.

“…holding up the piñata, and another lady and a cop…”

“Officer Metz.”

“…and I didn’t hear anything else because we were yelling.” He stopped suddenly, looking embarrassed by his enthusiasm. He and Emelina hadn’t officially met.

“Oh. Carlo, Emelina. Emelina, Carlo. An old friend from a previous life.”

I didn’t say which one was the previous life, and which was the present. I didn’t know.

Hallie, what I can never put a finger on is the why of you and me. Why did you turn out the way you did? You’re my sister. We were baked in the same oven, with the same ingredients. Why does one cake rise and the other fall? I think about you on your horse, riding out to the fields in your gray wool socks and boots and your hair looking like the Breck Girl gone wild, setting off to make a new world. Life must be so easy when you have dreams.

I read in the paper that we’ll be sending another 40 or 50 million to the contras, so they can strafe little girls and blow you up with your cotton crop. It hurts to know this; I could be a happier American if I didn’t have a loved one sending me truth from the trenches. You’re right, we’re a nation of amnesiacs. I’m embarrassed. It’s an inappropriately weak emotion. You risk everything, while I pay my taxes like everybody else and try not to recall the unpleasant odor of death.

My life is a pitiful, mechanical thing without a past, like a little wind-up car, ready to run in any direction somebody points me. Today I thought I was a hero. We sold fifty peacock piñatas to raise money for the Stitch and Bitch Club, which will somehow save the town of Grace. But it’s not my cause, I’m leaving. I have no idea how to save a town. I only came along today because it looked like a party and I was invited. Remember how we used to pray to get invited to birthday parties? And they only asked us because we were so grateful we’d do anything, stay late and help the mothers wash the cake pans. I’m still that girl, flattered to death if somebody wants me around.

Carlo asked me to go with him to Denver or possibly Aspen. Carlo’s still Carlo. He wants to know why you haven’t written. (I told him you’re busy saving the world.) I almost think I could go to Denver. Carlo is safe because I don’t really love him that much. If he stopped wanting me around one day, it wouldn’t be so terrible. I wouldn’t die.

Hallie, I realize how that sounds. I feel small and ridiculous and hemmed in on every side by the need to be safe. All I want is to be like you, to be brave, to walk into a country of chickens and land mines and call that home, and have it be home. How do you just charge ahead, always doing the right thing, even if you have to do it alone with people staring? I would have so many doubts-what if you lose that war? What then? If I had an ounce of your bravery I’d be set for life. You get up and look the world in the eye, shoo the livestock away from the windowsill, and decide what portion of the world needs to be saved today. You are like God. I get tired. Carlo says “Let’s go to Denver,” and what the heck, I’m ready to throw down the banner of the Stitch and Bitch Club and the republic for which it stands. Ready to go live in Denver and walk my dog.

I went out at dawn, alone, to mail my letter and prowl my old neighborhood. I kept trying to believe I felt good in this familiar haunt. I’d brought my city clothes: a short skirt and black tights and stiletto-heeled boots (the sight would have laid Doc Homer flat), and I walked downtown among strangers, smiling, anonymous as a goldfish. There was a newsstand four blocks down where I used to go for the Times or the Washington Post, which Hallie and Carlo would spread all over the living-room floor on Sunday mornings. Hallie would constantly ask us if she could interrupt for a second. “Listen to this,” she’d say. She needed to read it all aloud, both the tragedies and the funnies.

I ducked into a coffee shop that had decent coffee and wonderful croissants. As I sat blowing into my cup I realized I was looking around to see who was there-a habit I must have picked up in Grace, where you looked at people because they were all identifiable.

A man at a table very close to my elbow kept looking at my legs. That’s another thing you put up with when you’re tall-men act like you’ve ordered those legs out of a catalogue. I crossed them finally and said, “See, look, I’ve got another one just like it.”

He laughed. Amazingly, he wasn’t embarrassed at all. I’d forgotten how the downtown scene could be-people cultivating weird-ness like it was a disease or a career. He had a neatly trimmed beard and was extremely handsome. “How Emma Bovary,” he said.

I smiled. “You seem to have lost your syntax. Perhaps you’re in the wrong place. The Café Gertrude Stein is down the street.”

“Well,” he said. “Well well well. Perhaps you could provide me with some context. Do you have a name?”

“Cosima. It means Order in the Cosmos.”

“Cosima, my love, I’m in desperate need of order. If you have the New York Times in your bag there, I’d be willing to marry you.” I had the New York Times.

“I’m not in the habit of marrying strangers,” I said. I was suddenly disgusted with what I was doing. I’d go anywhere Carlo wanted, I’d be a sport for my students in Grace, I’d even tried to be a doctor for Doc Homer, just as I’d humiliated myself in the old days to get invited to birthday parties. If I kept trying to be what everybody wanted, I’d soon be insipid enough to fit in everywhere. I grabbed my bag and stood up to go. I told the man, “You don’t have the slightest idea who I am.”

The second night in Tucson I slept like a child, so drenched in sleep that when I woke up I didn’t know where I was. For a minute I lay lost in the bed, trying slowly to attach the physical fact of myself to a name, a life, a room in a house within a larger place. It was a frightening moment, but nothing new to me, either. So rarely in my life did I truly surrender to sleep that it took an extra effort for me to pull myself out. It felt like slogging on my elbows up a riverbank.

Carlo wasn’t in bed with me, of course; he’d skirted the awkward issue by saying he had a weird shift and might as well sleep on the sofa and not disturb anybody. But he’d had plenty of opportunities in the past to see me wake up confused. He always claimed there was something wrong with the electrical current in the temporal lobes of my brain. He said that explained why I couldn’t remember parts of what I’d lived through, and remembered other parts that I hadn’t. I was attracted to easy answers but mistrusted them too. Carlo’s specialty was the nervous system; he tended to think all human difficulties were traceable to neural synapses gone haywire. And I feared-no, I knew-what was wrong with me was more complicated than what’s wrong with a badly wired house.

Carlo was already gone but left a note, saying to think very seriously about Aspen. It sounded like a joke, put that way, but I folded the note and stuck it in my suitcase. Emelina was cheerful at breakfast. She’d sensed the previous day that my mood had turned black and blue, but she was intent on our having a vacation even if neither of our hearts was really in it. We’d gone to the movies and eaten at McDonald’s, which by Grace standards is the high life. We ordered Happy Meals; she was collecting small plastic replicas of impossible-looking vehicles for her boys. We had enough now to go home.

On our way out of town she insisted that we stop at an obvious tourist trap called Colossal Cave. It was colossal by no means, but a cave. We stood a long time in the dim entry while the guide in a Smokey Bear hat made small talk, hoping for a bigger crowd. There were only seven or eight of us. It must be hard to give your whole spiel to a group that wouldn’t even make a baseball team or a jury.

“So when’s Loyd get home?”

“Friday,” I said.

“That switch-engine deal gets long, doesn’t it?”

“It never seems to bother you,” I said, although I had an acute memory of the night I’d glimpsed them making love in the courtyard.

“Mm,” she said.

“Then again, Loyd might be making the whole thing up. He’s probably got a sweetie in Lordsburg.” Emelina looked startled. “I’m kidding,” I said.

“Don’t say stuff like that. Knock on wood.” She thumped the side of her head.

“Well, it’s occurred to me to wonder why Loyd wasn’t married or anything when I came along. If he’s such a hot item.”

“He was.”

“Married?”

“No. Seeing somebody, but not that serious. Definitely not married. He was once, awhile back, for a year or two, I think. No kids. He didn’t tell you?”

“I never asked.”

“Her name was Cissie. She didn’t deserve him.” Emelina peeled off her Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt (actually John Tucker’s). It was cave temperature down there, only 55 degrees but much warmer than outside, where it was predicted to drop below freezing that night. A woman near us was wearing a mink coat.

“I wasn’t about to leave it in the car,” she said to us, without provocation.

Loyd had never mentioned even a large personal fact like a previous marriage, whereas this woman in mink felt compelled to explain herself to strangers. That’s how it is: some people are content to wait till you ask, while others jump right in with the whole story. It must have to do with discomfort. Once while I was waiting to file off an airplane, a grandmother came down the aisle carrying a doll in one arm and a little boy in the other, and she actually took the time to explain to us all as she passed, “The doll is his sister’s, she’s up ahead.” I could relate to the urge. I remembered all my tall tales to strangers on buses. I was explaining in my own way; making things up so there would be no discussion of what I was really.

At last our guide spoke some encouraging words and the little crowd followed him down into the cave. As he walked he told us about an outlaw who’d ducked in her to hide his loot, back in the days of Jesse James, and apparently had never come out. This was meant to give us a thrill of fear, but it seemed more likely that there was a back door somewhere and the bad guy got away with the money. That’s how things go. I still believe Adolf Hitler is living in the South Pacific somewhere with sanded-off fingerprints and a new face, lying on a beach drinking mai-tais.

Emelina hadn’t seen a cave before and was very impressed. There were delicate stalactites shaped like soda straws, and heavy, hooded stalagmites looming up from the cave floor. She kept pointing out formations that reminded her of a penis.

“You’ve only been away from home three days,” I whispered.

“I didn’t say it looked like J.T.’s,” she whispered back.

The sound of trickling water was everywhere, even over our heads. I shivered to think how many tons of rock and dirt were up there above us. I’d forgotten that caves were not my favorite thing.

The highlight of the tour was the Drapery Room, which was admittedly impressive in size. The guide pointed with his flashlight to various formations, which had names like Chief Cochise and The Drapes. The walls and ceiling glittered with crystallized moisture.

Then, for just a minute-they always have to do this-he turned off the lights. The darkness was absolute. I grabbed for Emelina’s arm as the ceilings and walls came rushing up to my face. I felt choked by my own tongue. As I held on to Emelina and waited for the lights to come back on, I breathed slowly and tried to visualize the size of the room, the distance between myself and the roof that I knew was there. Instead I saw random images that didn’t help: Emelina collecting the little fast-food cars for her boys; the man in the café who’d suggested I marry him. And then while we all still waited I understood that the terror of my recurring dream was not about losing just vision, but the whole of myself, whatever that was. What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.

18 Ground Orientation

Loyd and I were going to spend Christmas at Santa Rosalia Pueblo. Snow fell steadily as we drove north through the Apache reservation. It enclosed translucent desert trees in spherical white envelopes, giving them form and substance. It was surprising to look out over a landscape that normally seemed empty, and see a forest.

When I closed my eyes I saw papier-mâché peacocks. I’d been helping out on the piñata assembly lines. I’d had nightmares again and wasn’t sleeping well; I figured I could be useful. We didn’t turn out five hundred piñatas in ten days-that was a little ambitious-but we passed the halfway mark. The last fifty or so were the best by folk-art standards. By then we’d already used up every scrap of blue crepe paper from the attics and bureau drawers of Grace, and so had to be enterprising. Some women cut up denim jeans. Mrs. Nuñez made peacock wings out of the indigo-colored flyleaves of all twelve volumes of the Compton’s Children’s Encyclopedia. To be sure, there were no two alike.

I also sweat blood over my mimeographed broadside. I wasn’t a writer except by default. Viola refused to help, saying I was the one that went to college so quit whining. I tried to include all the things that made Grace what it was: the sisters coming over with their peacocks; their blue-eyed descendants planting an Eden of orchards in the idyllic days before Black Mountain; the confetti-colored houses and stairstep streets-everything that would be lost to a poisoned river. All in one page. Viola wouldn’t let me go longer, claiming nobody would read it. There was some argument over whether to put the note inside the piñata, like a message in a bottle. I said city people didn’t buy art just to crack it open; I was respected as an expert on city people. So my modest History of Grace was rolled, bound in ribbon like a diploma, and inserted into each peacock’s beak.

The second Tucson excursion filled two chartered buses. Some husbands and kids got into the act, and also my students. I declared it a class project. I told Raymo if he sold ten peacocks I’d give him a C +. But I didn’t go. Loyd had asked for a week’s layoff and we set out on the trip he’d been planning forever.

“Don’t you have to stop somewhere and check on your roosters?” I asked. We were near Whiteriver.

“I don’t have any roosters.”

“You don’t?” I was incredulous. I thought he’d just stop going to fights himself. “What, you sold them?”

“Collie Bluestone kind of took over the business.”

“So you could get back into it if you wanted to.”

“Nope. He’s moved over to the Colorado River reservation. He’s fighting them over at Ehrenberg.”

This was a good bit more frightening than if Loyd had presented me with a diamond ring. “But I’m not…What if you and I don’t work out, Loyd?”

He downshifted for a rutted stretch in the road. “No offense, Codi, but I didn’t give up cockfighting to impress you. I did it because you were right.”

“I was right?”

“About what you said.”

“What did I say?”

He didn’t answer. I vaguely remembered saying something about puncture wounds and internal hemorrhage. Making that a spectator sport. “I can’t believe you’d do this thing all your life and then just quit one day after something I said. Maybe you were ready to give it up anyway.”

“Maybe I was.” We were both quiet for a while, passing through winter-killed fields of grass and sage. Two black horses grazed on bristly shrubs in a field with no apparent fences.

“You and your brother were twins, right?” I asked, apropos of nothing.

He nodded. “Identical. Twins are bad luck.”

I laughed. “For the mother.”

“No, in the pueblo. When twins are born people say there’ll be a poor rainy season or grasshoppers or some darn thing. In the old days you had to let twins die.”

“Both? You couldn’t pick one and let the other one go?”

“Nope.”

“I can’t imagine the mother who’d do it,” I said, though of course I could. I had probably starved my own child to death in utero, rather than risk known disaster.

“There’s a Tewa story about a mother sneaking her twins out of the pueblo and leaving them with Spider Grandmother to raise.”

“Yeah? See, if there was a story like that, people knew it was wrong to let them die.”

“Knew it was hard. Not wrong, necessarily. When Leander and I were bad, our mother said she was like poor old Spider Grandmother, got stuck with the War Twins.”

“Were you bad a lot?”

“Just twice as bad as a regular boy.” He laughed. “People called us ‘Twice as Bad.’ Our sisters talked about us like we were just one boy. They’d say ‘he went out riding,’ or whatever. I think we thought we were one person. One boy in two skins.”

“Hallie and I feel that way sometimes.”

I could see clear crescents of water collecting on Loyd’s lower eyelids. “You don’t have to talk about this,” I said.

“I don’t ever talk about him. Sometimes I’ll go a day or two without even thinking about him, and then I get scared I might forget he ever was.”

I laid a hand on his gearshift arm. “You want me to drive?”

He stopped and turned off the engine. We sat watching snowflakes hit the windshield and turn into identical dots of water. Then he got out. I pulled on my mittens and followed him.

Outside the cab it was impossibly quiet. We’d climbed a little now, and were in forest. Snowflakes hissed against pine needles. Jack sat in the truckbed watching Loyd carefully, exhaling voiceless clouds of steam.

“I ever tell you how I came to keep Jack?” Loyd asked.

I thought about it. “No. You told me how you took in his mother and she had pups. You didn’t say how you picked Jack.”

“He picked us.” Loyd was leaning against the truck with his arms crossed over his chest. He looked cold. “Dad meant to drown the whole litter. He put them in an empty cement bag and tied the top real good and drove down to the river and pitched them in. He didn’t know what he was doing; he was drunk as seven thousand dollars, I imagine. On the way back he picked me up from work and I said, ‘Dad, here’s one of the pups in the back of the truck.’ He was hiding down in a box of pipe T-joints. Dad’s old truck was a junkyard on wheels; you could find anything in the world back there. So I says to Dad, ‘Where’s the rest of them?’” Loyd’s voice caught, and he waited a second, wiping his eyes. “I don’t know what I’m getting all broke up for. God knows what I would have done with seven mongrel coyote pups.”

God knows what I’d have done with a baby at sixteen, I thought. It’s not the practical side of things that breaks us up. I leaned on the truck beside him and took his left hand between my mittened palms. It felt like a cold bottle. “So what happened? Why did you lose Leander?”

“Why?” He looked up at the sky. “Because we left the Pueblo. We were like the War Twins, I guess. A lot for our mother to handle. Our sisters were all older and having their own babies by that time. And people thought boys should go out in the world some. Be with our dad. He’d been down at Whiteriver more or less as long as we could remember. If we’d stayed up there in Santa Rosalia it would have worked out, but we came down here and Leander just ran into trouble. We didn’t have anybody looking after us. Dad couldn’t look after himself.”

“Doesn’t sound like it,” I said.

“Everybody always talked like Leander died of drinking, but he wasn’t but fifteen. Not old enough to sit down and order a beer. Everybody forgets that, that he was just a kid. We drank some, but I don’t think he was drinking the night he died. There was a fight in a bar.”

“What did he die of, then?”

“Puncture wounds. Internal hemorrhage.”

I drove through the pine forest, thinking off and on of Hallie, mindful of the slick road. Loyd was quiet, but took the wheel again when we descended into the Navajo reservation. He pointed out areas that were overgrazed. “It seems as big as the whole world, but it’s still a reservation,” he said. “There’s fences, and a sheep can’t cross them.”

As dusk took us the landscape changed to an eerie, flat desert overseen by godheads of red sandstone. We were out of the snow now. The hills were striped with pinks and reds that deepened as we drove north and the sun drove west. It was dark when we left the highway and made our way down a bumpy road into the mouth of Canyon de Chelly. We passed several signs proclaiming the canyon bottom to be Navajo tribal land, where only authorized persons were admitted. The third sign, sternly luminous in the headlights, said, “Third and Final Warning.”

“Are we allowed in here?” I asked.

“Stick with me. I can get you into all the best places.”

Down in the canyon we bumped over rough road for an hour, following the course of a shallow river. There was no moon that I could see, and I lost any sense of direction I might have had while we still had sun. I was exhausted but also for the first time in weeks I felt sleepiness, that rare, delicious liqueur, soaking into my body like blotter paper. I almost fell asleep sitting up. My head bobbed as we crossed and recrossed the frozen river and climbed its uneven banks. Finally we stopped, and slept in the truckbed, cuddled like twin mummies inside a thick wrapping of blankets. We turned our bodies carefully and held each other to keep warm. Outside the blankets, our lips and noses were like chipped flint striking sparks in the frozen air.

“No fair, you’ve got Jack on your side,” I murmured.

“Jack, other side, boy,” Loyd commanded. Jack stood up and walked over the cocoon that contained us, stepping carefully on our chests. He turned around a few times in the wedge of space behind me, then dropped down with a groan and snuggled against my back. Within minutes I could feel the extra heat and I fell into heavensent unconsciousness.

In the morning, a sugar coating of snow had fallen, lightly covering the rocks. Ahead of us the canyon forked into two; from the riverbed a red rock spire rose a thousand feet into the air. Low clouds, or high fog, brushed its top. I held my breath. Looking up at a rock like that gave me the heady sensation of heights. He’d parked so this would be the first thing I saw: Spider Rock.

The canyon walls rose straight up on either side of us, ranging from sunset orange to deep rust, mottled with purple. The sandstone had been carved by ice ages and polished by desert eons of sandpaper winds. The place did not so much inspire religion as it seemed to be religion itself.

I was dressed in an instant and walking around awestruck like a kid, my head bent all the way back. “It doesn’t look like a spider,” I said, of the rock. “It looks like a steeple.”

“It’s named for Spider Woman. She lived up there a long time ago. One day she lassoed two Navajo ladies with her web and pulled them up there and taught them how to weave rugs.”

The thought of standing on top of that rock, let alone trying to learn anything up there, made me shiver. “Is that the same Spider Grandmother who raised the twins?”

I expected Loyd to be impressed by my memory, but he just nodded. “That’s a Pueblo story and this is a Navajo story, but it’s the same Spider Woman. Everybody kind of agrees on the important stuff.”

I shaded my eyes and looked up the canyon. Its narrows gave window views into its wider places. Giant buttresses of rock extended from the canyon walls, like ships, complete with knobbly figureheads standing on their prows. Some of the figureheads had been stranded, eroded away from the mother rock, and stood alone as sculptured spires. Where the canyon grew narrower the rock buttresses alternated like baffles, so the river had to run a slalom course around them. So did we. The truck crunched over icy shoals and passed through crystal tunnels of icy cottonwood branches. We passed a round hogan with a shingled roof and a line of smoke rising from its chimney pipe. A horse wandered nearby, nosing among the frozen leaves.

Several times Loyd stopped to point out ancient pictures cut in the rock. They tended to be in clusters, as if seeking refuge from loneliness in that great mineral expanse. There were antelope, snakes, and ducks in a line like a carnival shooting gallery. And humans: oddly turtle-shaped, with their arms out and fingers splayed as if in surrender or utter surprise. The petroglyphs added in recent centuries showed more svelte, self-assured men riding horses. The march of human progress seemed mainly a matter of getting over that initial shock of being here.

Eventually we stopped in a protected alcove of rock, where no snow had fallen. The walls sloped inward over our heads, and long dark marks like rust stains ran parallel down the cliff face at crazy angles. When I looked straight up I lost my sense of gravity. The ground under my boots was dry red sand, soft and fine, weathered down from the stone. If the river rose to here, the mud would be red. Loyd held my shoulders and directed my eyes to the opposite wall, a third of the way up. Facing the morning sun was a village built into the cliff. It was like Kinishba, the same multistory apartments and unbelievably careful masonry. The walls were shaped to fit the curved hole in the cliff, and the building blocks were cut from the same red rock that served as their foundation. I thought of what Loyd had told me about Pueblo architecture, whose object was to build a structure the earth could embrace. This looked more than embraced. It reminded me of cliff-swallow nests, or mud-dauber nests, or crystal gardens sprung from their own matrix: the perfect constructions of nature.

“Prehistoric condos,” I said.

Loyd nodded. “Same people, but a lot older. They were here when Columbus’s folks were still rubbing two sticks together.”

“How in the world did they get up there?”

Loyd pointed out a crack that zigzagged up from the talus slope to the ledge where the village perched. In places the crevice wasn’t more than two inches deep. “They were pretty good rock climbers,” he said. Loyd’s forte was understatement.

There wasn’t a sound except for the occasional, echoing pop of a small falling rock. “What were they scared of?” I asked quietly.

“I don’t know. Maybe they weren’t scared. Maybe they liked the view.”

The doors were built so you’d have to step high to get out. Obviously, for the sake of the children. “Gives you the willies, doesn’t it? The thought of raising kids in a place where the front yard ends in a two-hundred-foot drop?”

“No worse than raising up kids where the frontyard ends in a freeway.”

“You’re right,” I said. “No worse than that. And quieter. Less carbon monoxide.”

“So you do think about that sometimes,” Loyd said.

“About what?”

“Being a mother.”

I glanced at him and considered several possible answers. “All the time,” and “never” seemed equally true. Sometimes I wanted to say, “You had your chance, Loyd, we had our baby and it’s dead.” But I didn’t. That was my past, not his.

“Sure, I think about it,” I said, needing to relieve the pressure in my chest. “I think about hotwiring a Porsche and driving to Mexico, too.”

He laughed. “Only one of the two is legal, I’m told.”

I wanted to try and climb up into the cliff village, but Loyd explained that we’d crack our skulls, plus you weren’t supposed to mess with the antiquities.

“I thought you broke all the rules,” I said, as we climbed back into the truck and headed farther up the canyon.

He looked surprised. “What rules have I broken?”

“Authorized Navajo personnel only, for starters. We’re not even supposed to be down here.”

“We’re authorized guests of Maxine Shorty of the Streams Come Together clan.”

“Does she live here?”

“Not now. Almost everybody drives their sheep out and spends the winter up top, but the farms are down here. Leander and I spent almost every summer here till we were thirteen.”

“You did? Doing what?”

“Working. I’ll show you.”

“Who’s Maxine Shorty?”

“My aunt. I’d like you to meet her but she’s down visiting at Window Rock for the holiday.”

Loyd was full of surprises. “I’ll never get your family straight. How’d you get a Navajo aunt? Are Navajos and Pueblos all one big tribe or something?”

Loyd laughed rather hysterically. It occurred to me that this redneck Apache former cockfighter must find me, at times, an outstanding bonehead. “The Pueblo people were always here,” he explained patiently. “They’re still building houses just like this-the Rio Grande Pueblos, Zuñi, Hopi Mesa. Not in the cliffs anymore, but otherwise just the same. They’re about the only Indians that haven’t been moved off their own place into somebody else’s.”

“And the Navajo?”

“Navajos and Apaches are a bunch that came down from Canada, not that long ago. A few hundred years, maybe. Looking for someplace warmer.”

“And this is now Navajo tribal land, because?”

“Because the U.S. Government officially gave it to them. Wasn’t that nice? Too bad they didn’t give them the Golden Gate Bridge, too.”

The truck crunched over frozen sand. “So the Pueblo are homebodies, and the Navajo and Apache are wanderers.”

“You could look at it that way, I guess.”

“What are you?”

“Pueblo.” There was no hesitation. “What are you?”

“I have no idea. My mother came from someplace in Illinois, and Doc Homer won’t own up to being from anywhere. I can’t remember half of what happened to me before I was fifteen. I guess I’m nothing. The nothing Tribe.”

“Homebody tribe or wanderer tribe?”

I laughed. “Emelina called me a ‘homewrecker’ one time. Or no, what did she say? A ‘home ignorer.’”

He didn’t respond to that.

“So how’d you get a Navajo aunt?” I asked again.

“The usual way. My mother’s brother married her. Pueblo men have to marry out of the clan, and sometimes they go off the pueblo. The land down here stays with the women. So my uncle came here.”

Maxine Shorty’s farm, which she inherited from her mother and would pass on to her daughters, was a triangle bordered by the river and the walls of a short side canyon. We parked by the line of cottonwoods near the river and walked over the icy stubble of a cornfield. A sad scarecrow stood guard. It occurred to me that the barrenness of a winter farm was deceptive; everything was there, it was still fertile, just as surely as trees held their identity in the shape and swell of their bare winter twigs.

“Has it changed much?”

I meant it as a joke, I saw nothing that could have changed, but Loyd looked around carefully. “Those little weedy cottonwoods have grown up along the stream. And there’s a big boulder on that slope, you see the one with dark stripes? That used to be up there.” He pointed to a place in the canyon wall, visible only to himself, from which the boulder had fallen. Most men, I thought, aren’t this familiar with the furniture in their homes.

“So what did you do here?”

“Worked our butts off. Weeded, picked corn, grew beans and watermelons. And had to carry a lot of water in the bad years.”

“Were those peach trees here?” I asked. A weathered orchard occupied the steep upper section of land.

“They’re older than my aunt. The peach trees go way back. They were planting orchards down here three hundred years ago.”

“A canyon of fruit. Like Grace.”

He inspected the trees carefully, one at a time: the bases of the branches, the trunks, the ends of twigs. I didn’t know what he was looking for, and didn’t ask. It seemed like family business. On this land Loyd seemed like a family man.

“And did the people that lived up in the cliffs grow corn and beans too?”

“That’s right.”

“So how come this canyon’s stayed productive for a thousand and some-odd years, and we can’t even live in Grace for one century without screwing it up?”

It was mostly a rhetorical question but Loyd considered it for a long time as he led me along a path up the talus slope to the back of the box canyon.

“I know the answer to that,” he said finally. “But I can’t put it in words. I’ll have to show you. Not here. Later on.”

I felt sadly let down, though it was closer to an actual promise of revelation than I’d gotten in nine years of watching Carlo’s eyebrows. I could wait for “later on.”

At the top of the slope was another ancient dwelling, this one mainly just ruined walls. The floor plan was clear. It interested me that the doors all lined up, I suppose to admit light to the interior.

“I found a whole clay pot in here one time,” Loyd said. “It’s in my mother’s house.” He lowered his voice. “Don’t tell any Navajos, they’ll throw Mama in jail.”

“You brought it back to her at the end of one summer, right? As a present. And she still treasures it.”

He smiled a little shyly. The image of a ten-year-old Loyd brought the threat of tears to my eyes. I’d spent my life watching mother-child rituals from outside the window.

“So you played in here when you were little?”

“Oh, yeah. This used to be me and Leander’s fort.”

“Cowboys and Indians?”

He laughed. “Good Indians and bad Indians.”

“Which were you?”

“Nobody can be good all the time. Or bad all the time. We took turns.”

He led me over a couple of tumbledown walls to the base of the cliff, and knelt down. I looked where he pointed. Set carefully among an assortment of old petroglyphs were two modern ones: the outlined left hands of two small boys, just touching, perfectly matched.

We crossed the high desert from Chinle to Ship Rock, New Mexico, and on to the Jemez Mountains. Wind battered the windows and we warmed our hands at the heater vents and talked about everything under the sun. Loyd talked about his marriage to Cissie Ramon, which he said was noisy and short. Cissie was crazy about rooster fighting, men, and unusual colors of nail polish, like green. He’d thought she was exotic, but she was just wild; there was a difference. She ran out on him.

He was a good deal more interested in talking about working in his aunt’s pecan orchards, in Grace. This aunt was his mother’s sister, Sonia. She married a Pueblo man from her village but moved with him to Grace when Black Mountain drafted Native American men into the mines during World War II. Sonia and her husband planted fruit trees there, thinking the war would last at least twenty years, and when it didn’t they felt they ought to stay on in Grace anyway, for the sake of the orchards.

It was a different story from farming in Canyon de Chelly, Loyd said. Sonia had started out as a tenant picker, before buying her own pecan orchard, and she learned harvesting the modern way. Usually the harvest started in October and ran till Thanksgiving. To get the nuts off the trees, they used a machine called a tree shaker.

“I remember guys hitting the branches with sticks, when I was a kid,” I said.

“Nah, we were high-tech. After the tree shaker comes the harvester, which is this big thing with a vacuum-scooper that you drive along between the rows. It scoops up everything and blows the sticks and leaves out the back, and the pecans and rocks fall down into this cage at the bottom. More junk falls out the slots as it rolls around, and the hulls fall off, and the idea is you end up with mostly pecans. But really you end up with pecans and pecan-sized dirt clods and pecan-sized rocks.”

“So did you get to drive the big machines?”

“Nope. Mostly I got to pick rocks and dirt clods off the conveyor. I think that was the best job I ever had. The hardest, but the best, because I grew up on it. Stopped thinking about myself all the time and started thinking about something else, even if it was just damn pecans.”

I took it from Loyd’s use of the singular pronoun that Leander was dead by this time. Slowly I was patching together Loyd’s life, and it was not the poor little gypsy story I’d imagined. I suppose I’d wanted to see him as a fellow orphan. But everywhere he’d been, he’d been with family.

“How long will Grace last without the river?” I asked.

“Two or three years, maybe. The old orchards will go longer because their roots are deeper.” He glanced at me. “You know I have an orchard?”

“No. In Grace?”

“Yep. Not the pecans, those belong to my cousins, but Tía Sonia’s leaving me the peach orchard. The fruit trees were always my job, keeping the birds and squirrels off the fruit.”

“How do you do that?”

“Well, the main way is by killing them.”

I laughed.

“What’s funny?”

“I don’t know.” I stared out the windshield. In the distance, Ship Rock floated like a ghost vessel on the snowy plain. “So you now have a dying orchard to call your own. Your Aunt Sonia’s moved back to Santa Rosalia, right?”

“Right. But the orchard’s not mine till I have kids.”

“That doesn’t seem fair.”

“No, it makes sense. When you have a family, you need trees.” He paused, carefully, it seemed to me, and redirected the conversation. “What job did you grow up on?”

I thought this over. “Maybe I haven’t had it yet.”

He smiled. “You went to medical school, right? And almost finished. That can’t be too easy.”

“When it stopped being easy, I quit.”

“What were you doing in Tucson, then, before you came to Grace?”

“You don’t want to know. Cashier in a 7-Eleven.”

“Shoot. And I thought you were too good to go out with a locomotive engineer. What about before that?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Well, I did medical research at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.”

“Damn! Really?”

“Yep. I was living up there two years ago when I first found out Doc Homer was sick.”

“And before that?”

I rolled my head back and looked at the roof of the car. “You really don’t want to know.”

“You were President of the United States.”

“Guess again.”

“You hotwired Porsches.”

I laughed. “The biggest thing I ever stole was a frozen lobster, for my boyfriend’s birthday. I was working in frozen foods and I think I actually wanted to get fired. Doesn’t that sound stupid?”

“Yes, it sounds stupid. So that came before Mayo Clinic?”

“That, and a bunch of different odd little things. A few piddly research jobs in between. Believe me, I never put everything on the same résumé.”

“And what’s the one you never mention? The one you’re trying not to tell me about.”

“For a few years in there I lived overseas.”

“No kidding. Did you fly? Shoot, I’d love to go someplace in an airplane.”

“Flying’s okay,” I said. In truth, flying terrified me. It’s the one thing I knew I had in common with my mother, who’d flat-out refused, there at the end. In my own life I handled it by means of steadfast denial. I’d flown over the Atlantic Ocean twice without even checking to see if there really was a flotation device under my seat; flotation seemed beside the point. Oh, I flew like a bird.

“So, okay, what were you doing overseas?”

I glanced at him. “I was my boyfriend Carlo’s girlfriend. On the island of Crete.”

He seemed amused. “What, you mean you cleaned house and made cookies?”

“Kind of. Sometimes I’d help out in the clinic. One time I set the broken leg of a sheep. But mostly I was a housewife.”

“So you’d, what, go shopping in a bikini?”

I laughed. “It really was not that kind of island. You know where it is, right? In between Greece and Egypt. The women wear black wool dresses and crucifixes the size of a hood ornament. Getting the picture?”

He nodded.

“The main baby present for a boy is a silver knife, which they present in this ceremony where the godparents list all the enemies of the family going back to around Adam and Eve.”

“You liked it that much, huh?”

I took my coat off. It was finally warming up. “Well, it was interesting. It was someplace to go. It was like going to another century, actually. But I felt like a complete outsider.” I closed my eyes, fighting an old ache.

“How do you mean?”

“I’m pretty good at languages but I never could get the hang of fitting in. Not anywhere, but especially not there.”

“Why do you think you don’t fit in? Give me an example.”

It was plain that I’d always been an oddity in Grace, so he must have meant how was I an oddity in Crete. “Well, my first day there I marched into the bakery and asked for a psoli. The word for a loaf of bread is psomi. A psoli is a penis.”

Loyd laughed. “Anybody could make a mistake like that.”

“Not more than once, I promise you.”

“Well, you were foreign. People expect you to say a few dumb things.”

“Oh, every day I did something wrong. They had complicated rules about who could talk to who and what you could say and who said it first. Like, there were all these things you were supposed to do to avoid the Evil Eye.”

“How do you do that?” he asked. Loyd was full of curiosity.

“You wear this little amulet that looks like a blue eyeball. But the main thing is, you never ever mention anything you’re proud of. It’s this horrible social error to give somebody a compliment, because you’re attracting the attention of the Evil Eye. So you say everything backward. When two mothers pass each other on the road carrying their babies, one says to the other, ‘Ugly baby!’ And the other one says, ‘Yours also!’”

Loyd laughed a wonderful, loud laugh that made me think of Fenton Lee, in high school. Who’d died in the train wreck.

“I swear to God it’s true.”

“I believe you. It’s just funny how people are. People in Grace do that too, in a way. You give them a compliment and they’ll say, ‘Oh, no, that’s just something I’ve had a long time.’ We’re all scared to be too happy about what we’ve got, for fear somebody’ll notice and take it away.” He reached over and stroked the underside of my arm, from the elbow up. “Like you, Codi. You’re exactly like that. Scared to claim anything you love.”

“Am I?” I was willing to believe whatever he said. Talking with Loyd was like talking to myself, only more honest. Emelina was always asking me what it was like to live overseas, and I knew she would love the penis story, but I’d never told her much about Crete. I was afraid of her seeing me as more of an outsider in Grace than I already was. But Loyd didn’t make those judgments. I could have told Loyd I’d lived on Neptune, and he’d say, “Uh-huh? What was it like, was it cold?”

In the Jemez Mountains we drove up the slope of what looked like a huge old volcano. A fluted core of granite jutted from its mouth, and twisted black ridges of old lava flows ran like varicose veins down its sides. The snow was deep and the road icy. We crept along, then stopped. Loyd got out of the truck and started down the bank toward a frozen creek that cut between the road and the steep mountainside.

“Are you nuts?” I inquired.

“Come on.” He waved energetically.

“Why should I follow you down there?” I demanded, following as fast as I could.

“It’s a surprise.”

It was near sunset, near or below freezing, and Loyd wasn’t even wearing his jacket. I slipped several times behind him and then we both slid flat-out down the hill on our backs. We were sledding, not on snow but on an exposed hillside of bizarre, rounded gravel. I picked up a handful in my mitten and tossed it in the air. It was porous and weightless like Styrofoam popcorn. “What is this stuff?” I asked, but Loyd was already crossing a log over the frozen creek. I scrambled behind him up the forested slope on the other side. I picked my way between rocks, grabbing roots and tree trunks to pull myself up. Halfway up I had to stop, hugging a pine trunk and panting. The cold air cut my lungs, and I blinked hard against the sensation that the water in my eyes might freeze over.

“It’s the altitude,” I whined. Loyd grabbed my hand and pulled me gently uphill. Suddenly we were following the course of an odd unfrozen stream with lush plants thriving alongside it, their leaves glossy green against the snow. I’d never seen anything like this in nature, only in the sort of paintings that show improbable and dreamlike things. Loyd, who had gotten ahead of me again, was now taking off his shirt. I wondered if perhaps I was, after all, in one of my strange dreams, and whether I would soon be looking under the foliage beside the stream for my lost baby.

I climbed over the top of a boulder and there stood Loyd, naked, smiling, an apparition bathed in steam. He slid into the blue pool at the base of the boulder. I touched the steaming water and it blessedly scalded my fingertips. I undressed more quickly than I probably have in my life, before or since, and immersed myself up to my eyes.

The sun set. Venus opened her eye on the horizon. From where we sat we could see the Jemez range and the valley floor fifty miles to the south, its buttes and mesas still lit by a distant sun. When our bodies turned red we stood up briefly among the snow-covered boulders, shouting, and the steam rose off our uplifted arms like smokestacks.

Loyd asked, “So, am I nuts?”

I stretched my legs along the sandy bottom of the pool until my toes found his. The heat relaxed every muscle and sinew and reflex in my body, and most of the ones in my head. This kind of happiness was sure to attract the attention of the Evil Eye. “Have you got any more surprises?” I asked. “Or is this the last one?”

“I’ve got some more.”

He scooted over and lifted me off the sand, supporting my floating body with both hands under the small of my back. “I don’t give them away all at once, though,” he said. “Only a half dozen a year.”

I counted on my fingers: Kinishba. Spider Rock, the Cliff house, and Maxine Shorty’s farm. And this, volcanic hot springs. I didn’t know whether to count the cockfights or not. That he could give up cockfights, I’d have to count that. “So I’ve used up my half-dozen already,” I said.

He lifted me slightly out of the water and kissed my ribs, one at a time. “If you’re only staying around for a year. That’s the rules.”

“That’s bribery.”

“Whatever it takes.” He kissed my navel and the damp hill over my pubic bone.

The front of my body was very cold and the back was very hot. Somewhere in the middle, near my heart, I was just right. I opened my eyes and saw constellations whose names were their own business. “Were you ever in love with my sister?” I asked.

He looked at me oddly.

“It’s just a joke. Every man I’ve ever been with, it seems like, was really in love with Hallie.”

“I can’t picture your sister. She’s shorter than you, right?”

I ducked my chin a little, immersing my smile. Right then I could have signed on for life.

The day we left Grace, there had been four airmail letters in the P.O. box. Lately Hallie’s letters sometimes came in bunches, owing to the accumulated pauses in postal service between Chinandega and Grace. But I saved them and read only one per day. It supported the pleasant, false notion that she was available to me all the time and would always be there tomorrow.

The fourth day of our trip was Christmas Eve. In the morning as we drove down from Jemez, before we arrived in Santa Rosalia, I laid out all four letters on the dash in order of postmark and spent one last hour with my sister.

I reread the old ones before opening the fourth one. Hallie’s week had gone wildly up and down. On Tuesday she was nigh unto manic because the government had had a successful national meeting on the pesticide problem. Central America was becoming a toilet bowl of agricultural chemicals, she said, because of war-strained farming economies and dumping from the First World. In the seventies, when Nicaragua was run by the U.S. Marines and Somoza, it was the world’s number-one consumer of DDT. But it seemed the new Nicaragua (our government, she called it) planned to take responsibility for its poisons. She also mentioned that her friend Julio was back in Chinandega after a stint of literacy work near the Atlantic coast. I couldn’t read anything between the lines.

On Wednesday, a child was rushed in from the village of San Manuel to the Chinandega clinic in critical condition because someone had stored paraquat in a Coke bottle.

On Thursday she was grimly happy. Five contras were making a secret sabotage raid on a hydroelectric plant, somewhere to the east, and were surprised by some armed farmers who took them captive. The culprits had passed through town in the back of an open Jeep, slit-eyed with dishonor, on their way to trial in Managua. Wouldn’t it be something, she mused, if that Jeep hit one of the contra road mines? But there was the driver to consider, and even if there hadn’t been, it wasn’t something she could wish for. She said, “You can’t let your heart go bad like that, like sour milk. There’s always the chance you’ll want to use it later.”

I wondered at what point I’d given up on later and let mine go sour. I didn’t know, although Hallie might. I reread each of the three letters with fascination but also the same dissatisfaction I’d had on the morning I’d opened it. It was all just things happening, and selfishly, I wanted Hallie. Even if she didn’t speak to me directly, I wanted her to speak.

I tore open the last envelope and was hit full in the face with what I wanted. It was four pages long, in a cursive enlarged by rage. When God wants to punish you, as Isak Dinesen declared, He answers your prayers.

I am like God, Codi? Like GOD? Give me a break. If I get another letter that mentions SAVING THE WORLD, I am sending you, by return mail, a letter bomb. Codi, please. I’ve got things to do.

You say you’re not a moral person. What a copout. Sometime, when I wasn’t looking, something happened to make you think you were bad. What, did Miss Colder give you a bad mark on your report card? You think you’re no good, so you can’t do good things. Jesus, Codi, how long are you going to keep limping around on that crutch? It’s the other way around, it’s what you do that makes you who you are.

I’m sorry to be blunt. I’ve had a bad week. I am trying to explain, and I wish you were here so I could tell you this right now, I am trying to explain to you that I’m not here to save anybody or any thing. It’s not some perfect ideal we’re working toward that keeps us going. You ask, what if we lose this war? Well, we could. By invasion, or even in the next election. People are very tired. I don’t expect to see perfection before I die. Lord, if I did I would have stuck my head in the oven back in Tucson, after hearing the stories of some of those refugees. What keeps you going isn’t some fine destination but just the road you’re on, and the fact that you know how to drive. You keep your eyes open, you see this damned-to-hell world you got born into, and you ask yourself, “What life can I live that will let me breathe in & out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?” I didn’t look down from some high rock and choose cotton fields in Nicaragua. These cotton fields chose me.

The contras that were through here yesterday got sent to a prison farm where they’ll plant vegetables, learn to read and write if they don’t know how, learn to repair CB radios, and get a week-long vacation with their families every year. They’ll probably get amnesty in five. There’s hardly ever a repeat offender.

That kid from San Manuel died.

Your sister, Hallie

“What’s new with Hallie?” Loyd asked.

“Nothing.”

I folded the pages back into the envelope as neatly as I could, trying to leave its creases undisturbed, but my fingers had gone numb and blind. With tears in my eyes I watched whatever lay to the south of us, the land we were driving down into, but I have no memory of it. I was getting a dim comprehension of the difference between Hallie and me. It wasn’t a matter of courage or dreams, but something a whole lot simpler. A pilot would call it ground orientation. I’d spent a long time circling above the clouds, looking for life, while Hallie was living it.

19 The Bread Girl

Five miles outside of Santa Rosalia Pueblo, Loyd stopped the truck, pulled off his cowboy boots, and put on moccasins. Shortly we were going to have to get out and walk through snow.

“Saving your boots?” I asked.

He ignored me. Those particular boots looked as though they’d hitchhiked to hell and back without getting a single ride.

“Me and Leander used to come home at the end of the summer wearing cowboy boots and Mama would have a fit. And cowboy hats. She’d grab off our hats and swat us with them and say, ‘Ahh! You look like Navajos!’”

I’d never seen Loyd wear a hat of any kind, now that I thought about it. His story brought back a memory, vague and incomplete, of cowboy boots and a hat I’d had myself, as a child. I could just recall the sheen of lacquered straw, and a terrible sadness.

“You see it yet?”

I squinted toward the south, but saw only snow-covered hills dotted with dark, spherical juniper bushes. The horizon was punctuated with bleak mesas whose rock shoulders stood exposed to the cold. “See what?”

“Where we’re going to sleep tonight.”

“I hope not.”

A few minutes later he asked again. I saw mesas and scalped hills with rocky outcroppings on their tops. I saw juniper trees, and snow. “Is this an eye test?” I asked.

We were practically inside Santa Rosalia Pueblo before I saw it. The village was built on a mesa and blended perfectly with the landscape, constructed of the same stones as the outcroppings that topped all the other, empty mesas. Horses and broadfaced cattle looked up at us from their pens as Loyd’s red truck, the newest-looking thing within a hundred miles, rolled up the dirt track into town.

It was a village of weathered rectangles, some stacked stepwise in twos and threes, the houses all blending into one another around a central plaza. The stone walls were covered with adobe plaster, smooth and appealing as mud pies: a beautiful brown town. The color brown, I realized, is anything but nondescript. It comes in as many hues as there are colors of earth, which is commonly presumed infinite.

We left the truck in the company of other pickups and station wagons at the edge of town, and walked up into the narrow streets. In his moccasins Loyd walked with a softer, less aggressive gait. Jack stayed close to his left knee. There wasn’t a soul out, but lines of smoke drifted from chimneys and the big adobe beehive ovens that squatted in every third or fourth backyard. A black dog pawed at the edge of a frozen puddle. The ladders that connected one rooftop to the next were drifted lightly with snow. One house had a basketball hoop nailed to the end beams. Front curtains everywhere glowed with warm interior light, though it was still early afternoon, and strings of bright red chilies hung by the front doors.

Loyd’s mother’s house had a green door. The front window was crowded with artificial flowers and ceramic animals. Loyd’s oldest sister, Birdie, met us at the door. The two of them spoke rapidly in a language that sounded like song, as if the pitch might be as important as the syllable. Birdie had a perm, and wore a large turquoise necklace over her flowered blouse. She stopped talking to Loyd just long enough to touch my arm and say, “He still has that dog, don’t he?” and “Come get warm.” We followed her into the kitchen, where Loyd’s mother enveloped him with a hug, then tugged his ponytail and lightly boxed his ears.

“What’s she saying?” I asked Birdie.

“She’s saying he looks like a Navajo.”

The kitchen smelled of cedar smoke. Inez Peregrina was cooking a goose, among other things. She wore a large dress composed of about six different cotton fabrics, florals and plaids, somehow colorfully harmonic. The frames of her glasses were large and owlish. Her gray hair was trimmed in bangs and a pageboy over her ears, but long in back, twisted into a heavy, complicated coil and tied with red cloth. Her hands were noticeably large. I wanted her to hug me too, but she only smiled and touched my cheek when Loyd introduced us. She continued talking to him in a steady, musical downpour, to which he was attentive.

Birdie disappeared and soon returned at the head of a flock of women, and I was introduced, but the conversation between Inez and Loyd went on, uninterrupted. One at a time, each of the other women held out both hands to me, which I took, trying to appear gracious while I struggled to get their positions straight. They were Loyd’s sisters; a niece; his Aunt Sonia, who had lived in Grace during the war and after; and someone Loyd called his “navel mother.” I couldn’t discern the generations. Aunt Sonia spoke to me in Spanish and poured cups of coffee for Loyd and me from a huge tin pot on the wood-fired stove. There were also a propane stove and the adobe oven in the backyard, and all three were in use.

I felt spectacularly out of place. For one thing, I stood a foot taller than any other woman in the room; we don’t even have to get into matters of wardrobe. But I was also fascinated to watch Loyd being his mother’s son. His sisters’ brother, the apple of the family eye. The only remaining boy. The sisters asked him in calm, uninflected English about the drive and the length of our stay and whether he’d seen Aunt Maxine, who evidently had a heart condition. Aunt Sonia asked several specific questions about people in Grace, some of whom I knew better than Loyd because of my Stitch and Bitch association, but I was reluctant to speak. She and the sisters drifted away to other tasks, and Inez still hadn’t stopped talking.

“Is it okay if I look around?” I asked Loyd.

“You can dance on the table if you want to, you’re the guest,” he said, grabbing me around the waist.

“I don’t want to dance on the table.”

He held on to me for just a minute, asking Inez in English what she thought of me. I passed a hand through my hair, thankful that it had had time to grow out from Billy Idol to a more or less regulation Mary Martin.

Inez smiled and said something, running the ladle in her right hand up and down an imaginary line. I looked at Loyd for translation.

“She says I’m lucky to have gotten such a big, strong girl. She thinks I’m lazy.”

“Tell her I don’t put up with lazy men. I make them pull their weight.”

He told her and she laughed, giving me the hug I’d coveted.

The frosted windowpanes looked out onto the cold plain and dish-shaped, empty cornfields that lay to the south, but the kitchen was smoky and warm. The open pantry behind Inez was stocked with jars of dry yellow corn, cans of Spam, and fruit cocktail. (No orchards here, evidently.) And hominy. In Grace it was golden jars of home-canned peach halves that sat smug on kitchen shelves. Here it was puffy white hominy, jar after jar of it, hominy enough for an army.

The kitchen was at the end of a big room that contained a long wooden table, a sofa, numerous small chests, and many, many photos. A radio in another room played Hank Williams. I moved around the living room, idly looking out the windows and examining photographs. There was one of Inez and a man I presumed to be Loyd’s father standing together in formal dress: he in silver-buttoned moccasins and a royal blue velvet shirt, Inez in turquoise bracelets and a silver squash-blossom necklace over her dark ceremonial dress. Her legs looked like white birch stumps in their buckskin leggings, and the woven blanket folded across her shoulders seemed to weigh her down. She looked much older than she must have actually been.

Most of the available tabletops were populated by little ceramic animals of the pastel, cute variety. Loyd had told me Inez made the best pottery in the Pueblo, but evidently it was made for Anglo collectors, not for home use. I did find in a china cabinet a display of extraordinary black-and-white pots, their glazed surfaces covered with microscopically fine geometric designs. Some of the pots were slightly less well made, maybe some of the proud early efforts of Inez’s daughters. A crude, dark bowl with a chipped rim sat in the cabinet’s central place of honor, and I stared at it, puzzled, until I realized this was Loyd’s pot, the one he’d found in the ruins. Loyd’s offering from Canyon de Chelly.

I peeked into the next room. Charlie Rich was singing from the radio now, and Birdie hummed “Behind Closed Doors” while she bent over an electric sewing machine. Its small light glowed on her face. A baby slept on a flat, fur-lined cradle board that hung like a swing on ropes from the ceiling. On every fifth arc of the swing, Birdie reached up without looking and gave it a push. She noticed me standing in the doorway and inclined her head toward the end of the room, where an iron bed stood behind a drawn-open curtain of blankets. “You can put things there. That’s for you and Loyd.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Who’s the little one?”

“My daughter’s girl. Hester.”

“How old?”

“Three weeks.”

“Does your daughter live here too?”

Birdie pulled her cloth from the machine and shook her head slightly while she broke the thread with her teeth. “She goes to boarding school in Albuquerque.”

I returned to exploring the living room. I was stunned to run across a small framed photo of two little Loyds, identical, sitting astride very different horses. Behind them was a backdrop of dry hills and a brown water tank. Loyd and Leander, nine years old, looking as if they owned the world. Until I saw that picture I hadn’t really heard a word he’d told me about losing his brother. You can’t know somebody, I thought, till you’ve followed him home.

That evening Inez’s house filled with relatives for the feast. Cousins and uncles and aunts showed up, stamping the snow off their moccasins, bringing covered dishes and their own chairs. All the older women had their hair cut in the same style as Inez’s, with short flaps over the ears and the heavy chignon in the back, and they wore silver necklaces and elaborate turquoise rings that shielded their knuckles. The teenage girls wore jeans and about everything else you’d expect on a teenage girl, except makeup. One of them nursed a baby at the table, under her T-shirt.

Loyd and I shared one chair; apparently we were the official lovebirds of this fiesta. He spent a lot of time telling me what I was eating. There were, just to begin with, five different kinds of posole, a hominy soup with duck or pork and chilies and coriander. Of the twenty or so different dishes I recognized only lime Jell-O, cut into cubes. I gave up trying to classify things by species and just ate. To everyone’s polite amusement, my favorite was the bread, which was cooked in enormous, nearly spherical loaves, two dozen at a time, in the adobe ovens outside. It had a hard brown crust and a heavenly, steaming interior, and tasted like love. I ate half a loaf by myself, believing no one would notice. Later, in bed, Loyd told me they were all calling me the Bread Girl.

Our bed was small, but after three nights in the truck it felt deliciously soft. I cuddled against Loyd. “What’s a navel mother?” I asked, drowsy with warmth and a half loaf of bread.

“She’s like a special aunt. She’s the one that cuts the cord when you’re born, and helps your mother get up out of bed when she’s ready. They count that as your birthday-the day your mother gets up.”

“Not the day you were born?”

“Not the day you came out. They count the mother getting better as all part of the birth.”

“Hallie doesn’t have a birthday, then,” I said. “After she was born, our mother never got up. She got real sick, and then a helicopter tried to come get her and she died. All without ever putting her slippers on.”

“Then Hallie never finished getting born,” Loyd said. He kissed the top of my head.

I was aware of the sleeping sounds of Inez and Hester on the other side of the makeshift curtain. I asked, “Is it okay that we’re sleeping together?”

Loyd quietly laughed at me. “It’s okay with me. Is it okay with you?”

“I mean with your family.”

“They’re not hung up about it. Mama wanted to know if you’re my woman.”

“Meaning what?”

“As opposed to woman of the week, I guess.”

“Woman of the year,” I said.

In the morning snow had fallen, as deep as five or six quilts. The windows were round blue tunnels to the light, like the mouths of caves. Loyd got up and went outside, where, at dawn, Inez and Birdie were already involved with the day’s industry. He was sent back to bed with a whole fresh loaf of bread.

“How did your dad meet her?” I asked. Loyd and I were sitting on the roof of Inez’s house now, facing south, waiting for ceremonies to begin in the plaza.

“At a dance over in Laguna. In the summertime. It was a corn dance. Everybody says she was a knockout when she was young. A real good dancer.”

“I think she’s a knockout now.”

“He grew up over at Jicarilla.”

“Where’s that?”

“Not too far from here. It’s another Apache reservation. Everybody goes to everybody’s dances. We used to go over to the Navajo powwows in the fall.”

Today, on Christmas Day in Santa Rosalia, there were supposed to be dances from morning till night. Half the town seemed to be preparing to dance, while the other half were busy getting good seats. I had no idea what to expect. Anxious-looking little boys clutching feather crowns and fox pelts ran across the corners of the plaza bent low, as if this would make them invisible. Earlier in the day these same little boys had run in boisterous gangs from house to house banging on doors and begging for warm crusts torn from the morning loaves. A wholesome version of trick-or-treat. Give these kids one Halloween in Grace, I thought, and they’d never be content with complex carbohydrates.

“So he married your mother,” I said. “And came here.”

“The women are kind of the center of things up here. The man goes to the wife’s place.”

“But he didn’t stay.”

“I never really knew Dad that well. He was already gone when he was still here, if you know what I mean. I don’t know what it was that hurt him. I know he grew up at a boarding school and never had much family and he couldn’t keep to the old ways. Or didn’t know them. I don’t know. It was real hard for him here.”

I let the subject go. As the twig is bent, so grows the tree, Doc Homer used to say, referring mostly to the bone structure of the feet but it applied to moral life as well. And who knew how the kinks happened; they just did. I ought to know. As Hallie had bluntly pointed out in her letter, I’d marked myself early on as a bad risk, undeserving of love and incapable of benevolence. It wasn’t because of a bad grade on a report card, as she’d supposed. It ran deeper than that. I’d lost what there was to lose: first my mother and then my baby. Nothing you love will stay. Hallie could call that attitude a crutch, but she didn’t know, she hadn’t loved and lost so deeply. As Loyd said, she’d never been born-not into life as I knew it. Hallie could still risk everything.

Loyd and I dangled our feet over the side of the roof, looking out over the plaza and beyond, to where the plaza ended suddenly, perforce, by the drop of a sheer cliff. I could only see this precipice as a threat, and wonder how toddlers lived to the age of reason without toddling over it, but many little feather-bedecked children were running along its edge as if it were nothing more than the end of a yard.

I heard a drum and a brief burst of what sounded like sleigh bells. Then nothing. If anything ever did happen, we’d have a good view. We’d climbed a ladder to get where we were. Jack had given a long, dejected look up the rungs as if he might consider the climb, if he weren’t so dignified. Now he lay curled at the bottom keeping watch. Old wooden ladders and aluminum extension ladders were propped everywhere; second-and third-story roofs served as patios. All around the plaza, legs hung like fringe over the sides of buildings. I spotted Inez and some other relatives across the way. Inez’s owlish glasses were the type that turn dark outdoors; two huge black disks hid her round face as she sat, hands folded, inscrutable as a lifeguard.

Not far from us in a sheltered corner of the roof was a wire pen full of geese and turkeys muttering the subdued prayers of the doomed. “Does your mama know you were a cockfighter?” I asked Loyd.

“No.” He hesitated. “She knew Dad did it, and that he took Leander and me to the fights when we were little, but she didn’t care for him doing that. She never knew I went on with it. And you better not tell her.”

“I’m gonna tell,” I said, poking him in the ribs. “I’m going to look up in my Keres-English dictionary, ‘Your son is a dirty low-down rooster fighter.’”

Loyd looked pained. Pleasing his mother was nothing to joke about. He’d given up cockfighting for Inez, not for me, I now understood. I’d just been the cricket in his ear. But that wasn’t insignificant, I decided. I could settle for that. I looked down at the plaza, whose quilt of fresh snow remained a virginal white, unmarred by tracks. This seemed miraculous, considering the huge number of people crowded around its edges-a good two hundred or more. People must have come from outside the Pueblo. Jicarilla Apaches looking for knockout wives.

“How come those houses over there near the edge of the cliff are falling down?” I asked. Their adobe plaster had cracked off, revealing the same artful masonry as Kinishba, in a state of collapse.

“Because they’re old,” Loyd said.

“Thank you. I mean, why doesn’t somebody fix them up? You guys are the experts, you’ve been building houses for nine hundred years.”

“Not necessarily in the same place. This village was in seven other places before they built it up here.”

“So when something gets old they just let it fall down?”

“Sometimes. Someday you’ll get old and fall down.”

“Thanks for reminding me.” I shaded my eyes, looking to the east. Something was happening near the kiva, which was a building with a ladder poking out through a hatch in its roof. Loyd had suggested I shouldn’t show too much interest in it.

“The greatest honor you can give a house is to let it fall back down into the ground,” he said. “That’s where everything comes from in the first place.”

I looked at him, surprised. “But then you’ve lost your house.”

“Not if you know how to build another one. All those great pueblos like at Kinishba-people lived in them awhile, and then they’d move on. Just leave them standing. Maybe go to a place with better water, or something.”

“I thought they were homebodies.”

Loyd rubbed his hand thoughtfully over my palm. Finally he said, “The important thing isn’t the house. It’s the ability to make it. You carry that in your brain and in your hands, wherever you go. Anglos are like turtles, if they go someplace they have to carry the whole house along in their damn Winnesotas.”

I smiled. “Winnebagos. They’re named after an Indian tribe.” It occurred to me too late that Loyd already knew both these things. For months, I think, I’d been missing his jokes. Empress of the Universe, instructing the heathen.

“We’re like coyotes,” he said. “Get to a good place, turn around three times in the grass, and you’re home. Once you know how, you can always do that, no matter what. You won’t forget.”

I thought of Inez’s copious knickknacks and suspected Loyd was idealizing a bit. But I liked the ideal. The thought of Hallie’s last letter still stung me but I tried to think abstractly about what she wanted to tell me: about keeping on the road because you know how to drive. That morality is not a large, constructed thing you have or have not, but simply a capacity. Something you carry with you in your brain and in your hands.

I’d come on this trip knowing I still had to leave Loyd in June, that Grace wouldn’t keep me, but maybe I was just keeping to the road. I felt guilt slip out of me like a stone. “It’s a nice thought,” I told him. “I guess I’ll probably carry something away with me when I leave Grace.”

He looked at me carefully, started to speak, then stopped. And then did speak. “It’s one thing to carry your life wherever you go. Another thing to always go looking for it somewhere else.”

I didn’t respond to that. I blinked hard and tried to look unconcerned, but the guilt nudged back along with the sharp glass edge of my own rationalization, recognized for what it was. I wasn’t keeping to any road, I was running, forgetting what lay behind and always looking ahead for the perfect home, where trains never wrecked and hearts never broke, where no one you loved ever died. Loyd was a trap I could still walk out of.

I listened to the sad geese in their pen, and realized the crowd was quiet. The snowy plaza was marked with a single line of tracks: in the center of the white square stood a tall young woman in a black dress that hung from one shoulder. Her other shoulder was bare. Her waist, her upper arms and wrists, and her buckskin moccasins were all decorated with garlands of colored yarn, fur, and sleigh bells; at the crest of her head was a tuft of white eagle down. The sun shone purposefully on her hair. It was cut like Inez’s, but hung loose to her waist, swaying as she moved slightly from one leg to the other, her feet barely leaving the ground. She looked graceful and cold.

The sound of drums and then the drummers themselves emerged from the kiva. The four old men took their position at the edge of the plaza and propped their huge drums on their knees without missing a beat. They began a soft chant. A second line of men with blankets draped over their shoulders climbed down from the kiva, also singing, and took their places behind the old drummers.

Then deer arrived, from everywhere. They were men and boys with black shirts and leggings, white kilts, and deer antlers. Their human features disappeared behind a horizontal band of black paint across the eyes. They moved like deer. They held long sticks in front of them, imitating the deer’s cautious, long-legged grace, and they moved their heads anxiously to the side: listening, listening. Sniffing the wind. The woman in black stepped forward shaking her gourd rattle, and they followed her. They became deer. They looked exactly as deer would look if you surprised them in a secret rite in the forest, moving in unison, following the irresistible hiss of a maiden’s gourd rattle.

I was entranced. More people climbed down out of the kiva. Some were dressed and armed as bow hunters who stalked the deer with patience. One man, who didn’t seem to have any realistic function in the drama, was nearly naked and bizarrely painted. His body was ringed with black and white horizontal stripes, he had black rings painted around his eyes and mouth, and his hair was pulled up into a pair of corn-tassel horns. He bounced around like a hysteric, possibly in the interest of keeping warm.

“Who’s the striped guy?” I asked Loyd.

“Koshari,” he said. “A kachina. He has to do with fertility. His home’s in the East.”

This struck me as humorous. “The East, as in New York? Area Code 212?”

“The East as in where the sun rises.”

“That’s all part of his job description?”

“All the kachinas have whole histories and families and live in one of the important places.”

“I thought a kachina was a little doll.”

“That’s right.”

“And also a person dressed up?”

“Yep. And a spirit.”

“A spirit with a family and a mailing address.”

“That’s right. When the person dresses up a certain way, the spirit comes into him. And into the doll, if it’s made right.”

“Okay,” I said.

“What?”

“Nothing, just okay. I understand.”

He smiled at me sideways. “You think it sounds voodoo?”

“All right, I’m narrow-minded. It sounds kind of voodoo.”

We both paid attention to the dancers for a while. I needed to keep a little distance from Loyd.

“Anglos put little dolls of Santa Claus around their houses at Christmas,” Loyd said without looking at me.

“Yeah, but it’s just a little doll.”

“And does it have a wife?”

“Yes,” I conceded. “A wife and elves. And they live at the North Pole.”

“And sometimes one guy will dress up like Santa Claus. And everybody acts a certain way when he comes around. All happy and generous.”

I’d never been put in a position to defend Santa Claus. I’d never even believed in Santa Claus. “That’s just because he stands for the spirit of Christmas,” I said.

“Exactly.” Loyd seemed very pleased with himself.

One of the hunters had drawn his bow and shot an invisible arrow into a deer. It gave an anguished shiver, and then the other hunters lifted its limp carcass onto their shoulders.

“I’ve seen Jesus kachinas too,” Loyd said. “I’ve seen them hanging all over people’s houses in Grace.”

Now there was a thought to ponder.

Koshari must also have been the spirit of nuisance, or a good belly laugh. The other deer dancers still followed the maiden, ignoring the hunters and their own fallen brother, but Koshari clowned and cut between them, getting in their way and generally interfering with their solemnity. But when one of the youngest dancers lost his antlers, Koshari picked up the headdress and carefully reattached it by its buckskin laces. The boy kept dancing, eyes front, paying no attention to the hobgoblin who was putting his costume back together.

At some later point, I noticed, Koshari had acquired a new-looking straw cowboy hat, which he cocked ridiculously on one of his horns. I had a feeling it wasn’t the Navajo he was aping here. He walked duck-footed with a John Wayne swagger and was using a length of two-by-four as a gun. He knelt and fired repeatedly at the dancing deer, grandly falling over backward each time. Later he stalked them, trailing his gun in the snow and tripping over it with admirably practiced body comedy.

The deer eventually retreated to the cliff, and the plaza filled with two lines of new dancers-a row of black-clad women and a row of men in white kilts-whose bodies beat a loud rhythm as they walked. Their chests were crisscrossed with lines of seashell bells. The two rows of dancers faced one another and stamped their feet, shaking the bells, crowding the air above the plaza with a loud, hollow clicking like summer insects. The men wore crowns of eagle feathers and the women wore spectacular wooden headdresses painted with stylized clouds and slanting blue lines of rain and green blades of corn. This was the corn dance, officially a summer prayer but danced at every important occasion, Loyd said, because you couldn’t pray it often enough.

“Most of the dances have to do with rain,” he said. “Here, that’s what everything hangs on.”

Santa Claus kachinas and the beauty of the spectacle notwithstanding, I still felt outside of it. “So you make this deal with the gods. You do these dances and they’ll send rain and good crops and the whole works? And nothing bad will ever happen. Right.” Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction. A rain dance even more so.

I thought I might finally have offended Loyd past the point of no return, like stealing the lobster from frozen foods that time, to get myself fired. But Loyd was just thinking. After a minute he said, “No, it’s not like that. It’s not making a deal, bad things can still happen, but you want to try not to cause them to happen. It has to do with keeping things in balance.”

“In balance.”

“Really, it’s like the spirits have made a deal with us.”

“And what is the deal?” I asked.

“We’re on our own. The spirits have been good enough to let us live here and use the utilities, and we’re saying: We know how nice you’re being. We appreciate the rain, we appreciate the sun, we appreciate the deer we took. Sorry if we messed up anything. You’ve gone to a lot of trouble, and we’ll try to be good guests.”

“Like a note you’d send somebody after you stayed in their house?”

“Exactly like that. ‘Thanks for letting me sleep on your couch. I took some beer out of the refrigerator, and I broke a coffee cup. Sorry, I hope it wasn’t your favorite one.’”

I laughed because I understood “in balance.” I would have called it “keeping the peace,” or maybe “remembering your place,” but I liked it. “It’s a good idea,” I said. “Especially since we’re still here sleeping on God’s couch. We’re permanent houseguests.”

“Yep, we are. Better remember how to put everything back how we found it.”

It was a new angle on religion, for me. I felt a little embarrassed for my blunt interrogation. And the more I thought about it, even more embarrassed for my bluntly utilitarian culture. “The way they tell it to us Anglos, God put the earth here for us to use, westward-ho. Like a special little playground.”

Loyd said, “Well, that explains a lot.”

It explained a hell of a lot. I said quietly, because the dancers’ bells were quieting down, “But where do you go when you’ve pissed in every corner of your playground?” I looked down at Koshari, who had ditched his cowboy hat and gun and seemed to be negotiating with Jack.

I remembered Loyd one time saying he’d die for the land. And I’d thought he meant patriotism. I’d had no idea. I wondered what he saw when he looked at the Black Mountain mine: the pile of dead tailings, a mountain cannibalizing its own guts and soon to destroy the living trees and home lives of Grace. It was such an American story, it was hardly even interesting. After showing me his secret hot springs, Loyd had told me the Jemez Mountains were being mined savagely for pumice, the odd Styrofoam-like gravel I’d thrown into the air in handfuls. Pumice was required for the manufacture of so-called distressed denim jeans.

To people who think of themselves as God’s houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief. Or stupid. A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today. Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it.

Our Koshari friend had somehow bought off Jack and taken away the ladder that was Loyd’s and my only way down. He was standing down there clowning now, pantomiming a smooching couple and talking at great length, playing to the crowd, which was laughing. At one point they all applauded. Loyd was plainly embarrassed.

“What’s he saying?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you in a minute.”

When Koshari had gone to another part of the plaza and people had stopped staring, I pressed Loyd again.

“He said now we’ll have to stay up here together a long time.”

“He talked for five minutes, Loyd. I know he said more than that.”

“Yeah. He said by the time the snow melts, we’ll…Basically he said in the spring there’d have to be a wedding.”

I made a face. “And people liked that idea? Of you marrying me? They were clapping.”

“You’re not…”

He stopped, because a kind man in the crowd had come over to replace our ladder.

“You’re not the Ugly Duck, you know,” Loyd said, once the man had gone.

“They don’t even know me. I’m an outsider.”

“I’m an outsider too,” he said. “They probably know my mother likes you.”

“How would they know that?”

“Word gets around.”

“I mean, how does she know that? I can’t even talk to her.”

“Do you like her?”

“Yeah. I do.”

“How do you know?”

“I like her hugs. She makes good bread.”

“Well, maybe that’s why she likes you. You like her bread.”

It was hard to stay mad at Loyd.

The corn dancers had remarkable stamina. Sometimes they danced in two facing lines, their whole axis rotating around the plaza like a wheel. At other times the women’s line moved into and through the men’s and then they broke into pairs, the men leading, practically prancing, while the women held their eyes on the ground with such concentration as to render it fertile. I would have believed a thunderclap just then, and a summer rainstorm. They danced on and on. The women’s moccasined feet and thickly wrapped legs moved only a fraction of an inch with each step, but the restrained action of that step must have cost more effort than jumping jacks. They did it, and did it, and did it until early afternoon.

The corn dance was followed by an eagle dance, which seemed to involve all the young children in the village and a few older, more skillful dancers. Each one was dressed in a dark shirt and leggings, a white embroidered kilt, and a hood of white eagle down, complete with eyes and a hooked beak. Running from fingertip to fingertip across their backs, they had eagle-feather wings. The youngsters trembled with concentration as they crouched low, then rose in unison, raising their wings and soaring in convincing eaglelike fashion.

It seemed slightly less reverent than the previous dances, more akin to the childhood phenomenon of the dance recital, but Loyd said this was also a prayer. Every dance is a prayer. The eagle carries people’s thoughts to the spirits in the sky. Animal messengers for the small, human hope. As they danced, the children’s lips moved constantly in silent recitation.

“Watch,” Loyd said. “One will go toward the east.” One did. It was one of the older, more reliable dancers. He glided with outstretched wings to the edge of the plaza and past it, down the central street toward the eastern end of the village. Loyd explained that he was carrying the mothers’ concerns for all the boys in the armed service.

Koshari was now solemnly busy among the children, who needed a good deal of prompting and putting-together of costume parts. At several points he left the dancers and made his way around the crowd taking requests for special blessings, special worries. I asked Loyd to get his attention.

“For my sister,” I said, and Loyd translated. “She’s in the south. A long way to the south.”

Near the end of the dance, one small eagle arched his wings and ran all the way to the southern end of the plaza. The wind lifted his feathers as he paused on the edge of the precipice and for just a second I was sure he would have to fall, or fly.