Animal Dreams

4 Killing Chickens

Emelina’s was a pleasant, ramshackle place with animals, an old plum orchard and five boys. When I walked up the drive with my suitcases they were preparing to kill roosters. Emelina’s eyes and mouth drew wide and she looked briefly like a surprised fish. “Codi, this is Sunday, I thought you said tomorrow.”

“No, it was today, I’m here,” I said apologetically. I was glad I hadn’t waited any longer at the courthouse.

“Shoot, you look like a fifty-dollar bill. Where’d you get that haircut, Paris, France?” She gave me a hug and waved her hand at the driveway. “I’m sorry about this mess. We’ve just got the water boiled for the birds. Shoot.”

I’d just witnessed what I’d thought was going to be the slaughter of a peacock, so I laughed, but this time it was real murder and mayhem. The drive was lined with pails, paper bags, and a tragically stained wooden block that had been used before. Emelina’s twins, who were about ten, each held a fat white rooster by the feet. A younger brother was riding a tricycle precariously over the rocky ground. I put down my suitcases.

“Curty and Glen, look at you,” I said. “And Mason. You guys are getting too big.”

“Aunt Codi, look. If you hold them upside down they go to sleep,” Glen said.

Curty said, “No, they get hypnotized.”

“Well, either way it’s a handy trick,” I said. “You don’t want them to see what’s coming.”

Emelina looked dismayed. “Codi, we don’t have to do this now. What a god-awful thing to do in front of company.”

“I’m not company. You’re all set up, so do it. You can’t go out of your way for me if I’m going to live here.”

She rolled her eyes. “Go on back to the granny house then. John Tucker was supposed to sweep it out this morning before he went to his baseball practice but I’ll fall over dead if he did it right now, instead of feeding the baby. I’ll bet you fifteen dollars he’s laying in the house watching the MTV.”

John Tucker was Emelina’s oldest, but I couldn’t picture him old enough to feed the baby. I hadn’t yet seen the baby, since he’d only arrived six months ago. But over the years Emelina and I had kept up. I’d taped her kids’ school pictures to the woodwork of Carlo’s and my many ill-furnished apartments. Sometimes repairmen would ask if they were my boys.

I went around to the side yard and pushed open a wire gate that wouldn’t have kept out a determined hen. The guesthouse in the back faced the big ranch house across a huge brick courtyard that was wild and overrun with flowering vines. Every inch of space was taken up with fruit trees, painted flowerpots, and lawn chairs that looked like they’d been there since the last war. I could hear chickens clucking softly somewhere out of sight, and at the back of the courtyard a goat stretched its neck to get at a fig tree.

The guesthouse had a pink door flanked by pots of geraniums, whose crimson flowers stood out against the white walls like wine stains blooming on a tablecloth. Inside, the little house was whitewashed and immaculate. There were two brick-floored rooms: a living room and bedroom. The light pouring in the windows was stirred up by the motion of fig branches outside. The bed had a carved headboard, painted with red enamel, and a soft-looking woven spread. It was a fairytale bed. I wished I could fall down and sleep a hundred years in this little house with pale crisscrossing shadows on the walls.

I heard the goat moving around outside, munching loudly and bumping against the wall. I opened cupboards. Everything was spotless. The east window in the living room looked straight out onto the granite wall of the canyon a few yards away, a startling lack of view. Emelina’s place was the last and highest on her street, backed up against the canyon. The floorboards of her front porch were on a level with her neighbors’ roofs.

I took my time exploring. I savored the first minutes in a new home. Carlo would always go straight to unpacking boxes, looking for the sheets and coffeepot and swearing that we were going to get better organized, while I stepped stealthily over the bare floors, peeking around corners and into alluring doors, which generally turned out to be the broom closet. But there was that thrilling sense that, like a new lover, the place held attributes I had yet to discover. My favorite book as a child was The Secret Garden. It’s embarrassing to think I’d merrily relocated again and again, accompanying Carlo to the ends of the earth, because of the lure of a possible garret or secret closet. But it might be true.

I tried out the two very old chairs in the living room. They had rose slipcovers and were comfortable. In a corner near the window was a beehive fireplace, and next to it, a clay vase of peacock feathers. Every home in Grace had one of those; it was a local feature. You could pick up half a dozen peacock feathers on any given day, in the orchards, as you went about your business. When the vase was full, you took them to one of the old women who made real-feather pinãtas, and then you started your collection over. The practice had not been allowed in our house because Doc Homer said the feathers were crawling with bird mites; he dreaded to think what those old women’s houses were harboring in the way of microorganisms. It became Hallie’s and my joke. Whenever he unreasonably forbade us to do something, we’d look at each other and mouth the words “bird mites.”

The bathroom and kitchen must have been added on about mid-century. The refrigerator looked prehistoric, but worked. It contained a loaf of fresh bread in a paper bag, some tomatoes and figs, a block of goat cheese, and a six-pack of Miller Lite. Emelina’s estimation of the bare essentials. I popped open a beer and went back around the house in time to witness the demise of the second rooster.

“Is it okay that there’s a goat loose in the courtyard?” I asked Emelina.

“Shit! I’m going to tan John Tucker’s hide. John Tucker!” she yelled. “Get your damn goat out of the garden, please, or we’ll have him for dinner!”

There was a noise from inside and the back door slammed.

“You don’t really want to watch this, Codi,” she said. “But I guess you see a lot worse in your line of work.”

I sat on the porch rail. I was no longer in the doctoring line of work. It’s true I’d been educated to within an inch of my life, and had done well in medical school. My mistake was assuming medicine was a science like any other. If it’s carburetors you know, you can fix cars, I reasoned; if it’s arteries and tendons you fix people. For reasons that were unclear to me, I’d learned the science but couldn’t work the miracle: I’d had a crisis while trying to deliver a baby. My problem turned out to be irreversible. Emelina knew all this. I was here, after all, with no more mission in life than I’d been born with years ago. The only real difference between then and now was wardrobe.

“Tell me if I can help,” I said.

She ignored me. “Okay, watch your hands, Curty. Keep them way back.” Emelina was small, but didn’t give that impression. Her jeans had “Little Cowboy” stitched on the label, and undoubtedly belonged to one of her sons. Emelina and I graduated from high school the same year, 1972. Under my picture in the yearbook it said, “Will Go Far,” and under Emelina’s it said, “Lucky in Love.” You could accept this as either prophecy or a bad joke. I’d gone halfway around the world, and now lived three-quarters of a mile from the high school. Emelina had married Juan Teobaldo Domingos the same June we graduated. Now J.T. worked for the railroad and, as I understood it, was out of town most of the time. She said it didn’t bother her. Maybe that’s as lucky as love gets.

Curty laid his hypnotized rooster on the block and held its feet, keeping the rest of his body as far away as possible. It never regained consciousness. Emelina swung the axe over her shoulder and brought it down on the mark. The pink, muscular neck slipped out of the collar of feathers as if the two parts had been separately made. The boys hooted and chased after the body as it thrashed across the dirt. But I was fascinated by the head: the mouth opened and closed, silently, because the vocal cords were in the part that had been disconnected.

“That’s the way, Curty,” Emelina directed. “Don’t get blood on your brother. Dip him all the way in. Now pluck him quick or he’ll go stiff on you. Start with the wings, see how Glen’s doing?” She wiped perspiration out of her eyes.

I was amazed by the muscle definition in her upper arms and her easy command of the axe. Her hands stayed surprisingly clean through the whole operation. She reminded me of Hallie, the way she could do things. Though of course Hallie would never decapitate anything.

“I can’t believe you’re watching this,” she said when both boys were settled down to plucking feathers. She went inside and came out with a beer. She sat down next to me on the wide wooden rail, knocking the heels of her sneakers against the crossbar like a child. I was very conscious of my height. Sometimes I had an acute feeling that small women were better put together somehow, more in control of their bodies.

“You used to have a hissy fit when we’d go over to Abuelita’s and she’d be killing chickens,” Emelina said. “Remember? Even when we were big, twelve or thirteen.”

“No, that was Hallie. She’s the one that had such a soft heart. We’ve always been real different that way. She’d cry if she stepped on a bug.” I drained my beer. “She’s still like that, except now she cries about bag ladies. I swear. She gives them quarters and then she wishes she’d given them a dollar.”

I stared out at the treetops and the leaf-green gables of the roof on a house below us. The shingles were an odd, elaborate shape like the spade in a deck of cards. I wondered in what decade they’d stopped making shingles like that, and how this neighbor might repair the roof after a bad storm.

“You really do look great,” Emelina said. “That’s a terrific haircut, I mean it. You’ll stand out in a crowd here till you get your first cut down at Beth’s Butcher Shop.”

I ran my fingers over my weedy scalp, feeling despair. I’d spent my whole childhood as an outsider to Grace. I was willing to march downtown and submit myself to butchery this minute if that would admit me to the club. I’d led such an adventurous life, geographically speaking, that people mistook me for an adventurer. They had no idea. I’d sell my soul and all my traveling shoes to belong some place.

“I always forget you have so much auburn. Doc Homer had the same coloring, didn’t he? Sort of reddish before he went gray?” She fingered her own shoulder-length hair. “Speaking of him…”

“Speaking of him,” I said.

“Have you talked to him?” She looked apprehensive. Emelina was my informant. When he started getting lost on his way home from the drugstore, she was the one person in Grace who thought to call me, rather than just draw him a map.

“I’ll go up and see him tomorrow.”

“And where’s Hallie gone? You told me, but I forgot.”

“Nicaragua,” I said. “To save the crops. Cross between Johnny Appleseed and a freedom fighter.”

Emelina laughed and I felt disloyal. I hadn’t meant to sound glib. It was just hard to put Hallie into the context of regular life. “I guess it’s really dangerous,” I said. “But she’s excited about it. She’ll be happy.” I was sure of this. Hallie didn’t have my problem. She belonged wherever she was.

Emelina nodded. She watched the boys, who sat cross-legged on the driveway, transfixed by the importance of their task. They were dappled with blood and looked like they’d been through a strange war themselves-a children’s war.

A scarlet bougainvillaea covered the front porch. In fact, it was so overgrown that the wood of the vine seemed to be supporting the structure over our heads. The breeze coming up the valley felt like a warm liquid against my arms and face. I held the sweaty beer can against my temple and watched the bougainvillaea arms swaying around us like seaweed under the ocean.

“No,” Emelina said after a while. “I’m sure it was you that had a fit over the chickens. You’d start, and then Hallie would do it too. She always followed whatever you did.”

“No. Hallie? We’re chalk and cheese. Somebody ought to do a study on us, if they want to know how kids in the same family can turn out totally different. She was born with her own mind.”

“Maybe she was, but she copied you like a picture,” Emelina said. “She used to get so pissed off at me because I wouldn’t go along with your boycott of Abuelita’s chicken and rice.”

I didn’t remember organizing boycotts. “Well, you’re the witness here. Blood all over the driveway and I didn’t faint.”

“People change,” she said. “Not everything stays with you all your life.”

I sat watching my suitcases for a good fifteen minutes, as if they might become inspired to unpack themselves, and then I went into the bedroom and lay down for just a minute, letting my shoes drop one at a time onto the brick floor. I tried to think how far Hallie might have gotten by now. Guatemala. Maybe farther. It was frightening to speculate on specifics; I’d been rationing my thoughts about her, but now I was exhausted and my mind ran its own course. I thought of Hallie at border crossings. Men in uniforms decorated with the macho jewelry of ammunition. No, not that far. I pulled her back to Tucson, where I’d seen her last and she was still safe.

She’d come by the 7-Eleven, all packed up, at the end of my graveyard shift. She knocked her knuckles on the plate glass to get my attention. I locked the cash drawer and took off. Sparrows were ruffling themselves in the sheets of fresh rain on the asphalt. As I walked her across the parking lot to her truck I could see just how we’d look to somebody, hanging on to each other by the elbows: like two swimmers in trouble, both of us equally likely to drown.

Or maybe only one of us was holding on for dear life. It was hard to believe I’d once been the one to strike out bravely for college, leaving Hallie crying in front of the Baptist Grocery. Now it seemed like I was the baby of the family, the one with no firm plans who’s allowed to fiddle around forever keeping everyone young.

Hallie was headed for a war zone. She walked straight through the puddles, dragging me along, and I had to stretch out my legs and drench my shoes to keep up with her. When Hallie was intensely excited she had a wild-animal look to her that could stop people in their tracks. A vibration came from her skin, like a bell that has just been struck. Her hair was long and reckless, curling wildly in the humidity. Every part of my sister could stir rebellion. I was thinking that if anything happened to her I wouldn’t survive. I couldn’t see that there would be any method, or any point.

As long as I held Hallie’s arm she would still be here, she wouldn’t be climbing into the truck, turning the key, driving south through Arizona and Mexico and the perilous places farther on, wouldn’t be stopped at a roadblock by men who might blandly shoot her in the head for being twenty-nine years old and alone and female, wearing blue jeans, carrying antihistamine pills in her glove compartment. It seemed like a chain of events I could hold back, there in the parking lot, with the bones of her elbow securely gripped in my hand.

Her little beat-up pickup looked impossibly loaded, like the tiny burros you see in postcards carrying elephant-sized burdens without complaint. I wasn’t worried about the truck. I asked where she’d put her antihistamines. We knew of a photographer who’d been shot, ostensibly for running drugs, because he had a baby-food jar of aspirin and vitamin tablets in his camera bag.

Hallie said her pills were no place easy to find.

I put my head on her shoulder. “What if our houseplants die?”

“They won’t,” she said. Hallie knew I wanted easy answers.

I lifted my head again and she stared at me, thoughtfully. The sky had cleared. The early-morning light behind her head was orange, making her hair glow, and she looked like an angel. She never had any idea how she looked to other people; she thought she was plain.

“If the flea beetles start getting at the ones on the porch,” she said slowly, “dust them with Celite.” Hallie worked for the Extension Service and answered the Garden Hotline, 626-BUGS. For a period of years ending on that day, garden pests were her life.

I hugged her with all the strength in my arms. “Hallie,” I said, “could you please just change your mind now and not go?”

“You really love me, so you want me to stay here and keep the suburbs safe for geraniums.”

“I know how I ought to feel,” I said. “I just don’t.”

Her breath expanded her chest against my arms, and I thought of the way a tree will keep on growing after a fence is wired around its trunk. The unbelievable force of that expansion. And I let her go.

She started up her truck and waved from the corner, not a mournful gone-forever wave but a chin-up wave like you see in the World War II movies, where everybody is brave because they all believe in the same thing. I told myself because I had no other choice that Hallie would do all right. That we were both going to live.

I walked the six blocks home under dripping trees and a sun that was already too hot. Across the street I heard a woman say to her companion in an odd accent, “It’s the Desert Museum. I had understood him to say the ‘dessert museum,’ and obviously I was expecting something quite different.” I thought: this is how life is, ridiculous beyond comprehension. What I felt wasn’t pain but a hollowness, like a drum with the skin stretched tight. It took me five minutes to get our front door open, because everything in Tucson with moving parts gets cantankerous in the rainy season. Hallie had meant to put graphite in the lock before she left.

A white balloon left over from her going-away party followed me from the living room into the kitchen. It was the size of a head, and had lost some helium so it hung at eye level, trailing its string along the floor like a tired old ghost. Static electricity drew it along behind me. I swatted it away from my head while I plundered the refrigerator. I found some red bell peppers that had been absurdly expensive at the health-food market, and washed one and ate it standing up in the kitchen. After that I found a paring knife and went to work on a cucumber. I didn’t feel like cooking breakfast just for myself. Carlo was at the hospital and I had no idea when he was due back.

The phone rang and I jumped, I suppose because I felt guilty for standing in the kitchen eating costly vegetables. I was afraid it was going to be somebody with garden pests, but they’d already turned off the Garden Hotline. It was Hallie calling from a pay phone this side of the border to tell me she’d forgotten to graphite the lock.

“I knew you’d call about that.” I was filled with a strange joy because she felt the same way I did: that we couldn’t survive apart. I just stood still for a minute, giving Hallie’s and my thoughts their last chance to run quietly over the wires, touching each other in secret signal as they passed, like a column of ants. You couldn’t do that kind of thing at international rates.

“There’s a library book, too,” she said. “Those Baron Münchhausen stories. I found it in with my books when I was cleaning out my room.”

“I know. I saw it. I’ll take it back today.”

“That book’s got to be overdue, Codi. You were reading it in the car a month ago when we drove to Bisbee.”

I took a bite out of the cucumber and chewed before answering. I wanted this phone call to last forever. I wanted to recall every book we’d ever read aloud together while driving. “You’re right. It’s overdue.”

“Take it back and pay the fine, okay? Libraries are the one American institution you shouldn’t rip off.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Miss Patty Hearst the Second.” I heard her trying not to laugh. Hallie was intellectually subversive and actually owned a copy of Abbie Hoffman’s Steal This Book, but by nature she was perversely honest. I’d seen her tape dimes to a broken parking meter.

“Apart from moral reasons, they’ll cancel your card.”

“I don’t know why you think I’m such a library outlaw. I’m all paid up over there.” I munched on the cucumber. It wasn’t that different from eating an outsize apple, say, or a peeled peach, and yet anyone looking in the window would judge me insane. “Don’t worry about me, Hallie,” I said finally. “Just worry about yourself.”

“I’m not worried about myself. I’m the luckiest person alive.”

It was an old joke, or an old truth, grown out of all the close shaves she’d walked away from. Bike wrecks, car wrecks, that kind of thing. I’d always been more or less a tragedy magnet, but Hallie was the opposite. One time she started out the door of the old science library at the university, and then turned around and went back in because she’d left her sunglasses by the microfiche machine, and two seconds later the marble façade fell off the front of the building. Just slid straight down and smashed, it looked like Beirut.

Hallie didn’t believe she was invulnerable. She was never one of those daredevil types; she knew she could get hurt. What I think she meant was that she was lucky to be on her way to Nicaragua. It was the slowest thing to sink into my head, how happy she was. Happy to be leaving.

We’d had one time of perfect togetherness in our adult lives, the year when we were both in college in Tucson-her first year, my last-and living together for the first time away from Doc Homer. That winter I’d wanted to fail a subject just so I could hang back, stay there with her, the two of us walking around the drafty house in sweatshirts and wool socks and understanding each other precisely. Bringing each other cups of tea without having to ask. So I stayed on in Tucson for medical school, instead of going to Boston as I’d planned, and met Carlo in Parasitology. Hallie, around the same time, befriended some people who ran a safehouse for Central American refugees. After that we’d have strangers in our kitchen every time of night, kids scared senseless, people with all kinds of damage. Our life was never again idyllic.

I should have seen it coming. Once she and I had gone to see a documentary on the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which was these Americans who volunteered without our government’s blessing to fight against Franco and Hitler in the Spanish Civil War. At that point in U.S. history fascism was only maybe wrong, whereas communism was definitely. When we came home from the movie Hallie cried. Not because of the people who gave up life and limb only to lose Spain to Franco, and not for the ones who came back and were harassed for the rest of their lives for being Reds. The tragedy for Hallie was that there might never be a cause worth risking everything for in our lifetime. She was nineteen years old then, and as she lay blowing her nose and sobbing on my bed she told me this. That there were no real causes left.

Now she had one-she was off to Nicaragua, a revolution of co-op farms and literacy crusades-and so I guess she was lucky. Few people know so clearly what they want. Most people can’t even think what to hope for when they throw a penny in a fountain. Almost no one really gets the chance to alter the course of human events on purpose, in the exact way they wish for it to be altered.

I loved her for feeling so strongly about things. But I’d watched Doc Homer spend a lifetime ministering his solemn charity to the people of Grace and I’m not sure whose course was altered by that, other than Hallie’s and mine, in a direction we grew to resent. It’s true that I tried myself to go into medicine, which is considered a helping profession, but I did it for the lowest of motives. I did it to win love, and to prove myself capable. Not to move mountains. In my opinion, mountains don’t move. They only look changed when you look down on them from a great height.

5 The Semilla Besada

I’d agreed to move into the guesthouse on the condition that I wasn’t going to impose on Emelina’s family life, but apparently her life was beyond imposition. She sent John Tucker over in the morning to fetch me for breakfast.

He stood tentatively outside my screen door, unsure of what to do with all his limbs. “Mom says she’ll break your face if you don’t come over for breakfast.”

“Okay, sure,” I said, following him back to the house. John Tucker was the most appealing kind of adolescent. I couldn’t begin to picture the man he would soon become-armpits and arrogance, scratching the back of his neck, throwing a baseball. Out of the question. He was wearing a cap to cover what looked like an overly enthusiastic summer haircut.

“I know you don’t have anything to eat over there yet,” Emelina said. “Everything was closed, yesterday was Sunday. Today you can get on your feet. J.T. called from El Paso and said to be sure and give you a kiss.” Emelina buttered a piece of toast and handed it to Mason, who was four going on five. “Glen, don’t put jam on your brother. If you want to wear plum preserves today that’s your nickel, but not Curtis’s. Curty, honey, don’t hit. John Tucker, help him with that, will you?”

“He called from El Paso?” I prompted. Conversations with a mother of five are an education in patience.

“Yeah, he’s in Texas. He’s got to stay for an investigation. So are you going to be able to stand living in that shack?”

“It’s not a shack, Em. It’s nice out there. I like it.”

“Codi, honey, there was goats living in there at one time. And Grammy lived there too, before the goats. But she said she got the ague in her bones and she decided she had to move in upstairs.” Grammy was J.T.’s mother, Viola Domingos.

“Mom, make Glen stop,” Curtis said.

“Glen, for heaven’s sakes, just eat that toast and put it out of its misery. The bus is going to be here in a minute and you don’t even have your shoes on.”

“No, but I know where they are,” Glen declared.

“Well, go get them.”

“School doesn’t start till next week,” I said, alarmed that I might be wrong. I was always having dreams like that.

“No, but they’ve got this summer thing for kids. They go up there to the river park and shoot each other with bows and arrows or something. Tomorrow’s the last day. So you think you’ll like it out there? We make enough noise over here to raise up the quick and the dead.”

“It’s fine. I used to live three blocks from a hospital ambulance entrance.” I didn’t add: with a man who reattached severed body parts for a living. I buttered my toast, holding my elbows in close and keeping an eye out for wayward jam knives. “So what kind of an investigation?”

“Oh, J.T.? He put sixteen cars on the ground outside El Paso. A derailment. Nobody got hurt. Oh shoot-John Tucker, honey, will you take the baby in the living room and watch him a minute? I can’t hear myself think.”

John Tucker took the baby from Emelina’s lap and carried him under one arm into the next room. The baby waggled his arms and legs like a swimmer in green stretch pajamas.

“Okay. Mason, sweetie, put your feet up here on my lap and I’ll tie your sneakers for you.” Emelina took a gulp of coffee. “So they all had to give a urine sample-J.T., the fireman, the brakeman, and some other person, I can’t remember who. Maybe another engineer. It all had to happen within a half hour of the accident; the company made a very big deal out of that. J.T. says, here they were out in some cow pasture with sixteen boxcars of frozen mixed vegetables scattered from hell to breakfast, and all the damn supervisor cared about was making sure which person pissed in what jar.”

The boys seemed unmoved by this off-color narrative. Having Emelina for a mother would neutralize the thrill of swear words.

“You know what, though,” she said, looking startled. “Damn. We were just joking about drug tests, the day before yesterday. Grammy made a poppyseed cake for Curty’s and Glen’s birthday and J.T. said…”

“Mo-om.”

“I’m sorry, Curtis, I forgot. He doesn’t want us to call him Curty. Their actual birthday was yesterday.”

I wanted to hear the rest of the derailment story, but this conversational flow was akin to freeway driving in L.A.; you don’t back up. “Well, happy birthday,” I said. “You boys get handsomer every time I see you, you know that?”

Curtis’s ears turned red.

“You can say ‘Thank you, ma’am,’ can’t you? Codi, they’ve all been asking me when you were going to get here till I thought they’d turn blue in the face, and now they’re acting like they were raised outside in a pen with the dogs.”

“That’s okay.” I felt a little intimidated myself. Even though I’d kept up with the family, it was inconceivable that in my absence from Grace Emelina could have produced this whole blue-eyed tribe of human beings.

“Mom, can I sleep put in the pen with Buster tonight?” Mason asked.

“No sir, you can’t. So when we were eating that cake, J.T. was saying how he’d better not have an accident on the railroad, because poppyseeds show up some way on the drug test.”

“That’s true, they would.” I reconsidered this. “He’d register positive for opiates. Poppyseeds are related to heroin. Is he going to be in trouble?”

“No, they know it wasn’t his fault. It was a sun-kink or some darn thing with the rails. The drug test is just to cover their ass. You know who else was on the train? The other engineer and the brakeman were both guys we went to school with, you might remember them. Roger Bristol and Loyd Peregrina. Loyd lived up at Whiteriver for a while but he’s moved back.”

I paid attention to my heart rate, to see if it would react in any way to this information. It didn’t seem to.

“Aunt Codi, say something in Greece,” Glen said.

“In Greek,” Emelina corrected, giving me an apologetic look. “I already told them you looked like a fashion model and had lived overseas. They think you know David Bowie.”

“Your mother exaggerates,” I said.

Glen didn’t seem too disappointed.

“So, Em, if I’m going to live here do I have to buy a pair of those silver loafers from the Hollywood Shop?”

She nodded seriously. “I’m pretty sure they won’t let you teach down at the high school without them.”

The school bus honked outside. “Okay, scoot,” Emelina said. “Mason, give me a kiss.”

The boys stampeded out the kitchen door, all legs, leaving the baby beached on Emelina’s lap. His eyes roamed anxiously around the quiet kitchen, taking in the emptiness.

Emelina and I took each other in. All morning I’d felt the strange disjuncture that comes from reconnecting with your past. There’s such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it’s like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin.

“So what’s new?” she asked.

“I don’t know, everything. I don’t think Grace has changed, but it feels different. There’s a lot I don’t remember.”

Emelina smiled. “I know what you mean. Senility strikes.” It was an odd thing to say; Doc Homer’s exact problem was that his mind had begun to roam in alarming new pastures.

“I guess so,” I said.

“Well, some things never change.” She leaned forward and said in a low voice, “Grammy still collects figurines of Elvis.”

I had to laugh. We’d known J.T.’s mother as children, of course-people here spent their childhoods tearing through the homes of their future in-laws-and I remembered her living room, which we used to call the Elvis Museum. She denied that the ones that were whiskey bottles were whiskey bottles. She’d always told us aftershave.

“So it’s all over with Carlo? Or just a vacation?”

“I don’t know. Over, I think. It’s taken me all this time to figure out he’s not going to tell me the secret to a meaningful life.” I was serious. I’d loved Carlo best when he provided me with guidance.

“I used to think the ideal husband would be Doctor Kildare.”

“Carlo’s an emergency-room surgeon. A man that decides which way to sew a thumb back on would have a good hold on life, wouldn’t you think? I just assumed it would rub off.”

“Gross,” Emelina remarked.

“I think it was his eyebrows. You know how he has those kind of arched, Italian eyebrows?”

“No, I never got to meet him. He was always at the hospital.”

That was true. He was shy. He could face new flesh wounds each day at work, but he avoided actual people. “Well, he had this look,” I said. “He always seemed right on the verge of saying something that would change your life. Even when he was asleep he looked like that.”

“But he never did?”

“Nope. It was just his eyebrows.”

I did miss him, or at least I missed being attached to someone in theory. Carlo had beautiful hands and a legendary sense of direction. Even when we were in Venice, where the tourist books advise you that “part of the Venice experience is wandering the narrow strade until you find yourself lost,” We wandered but never got lost. The man had a compass needle in his cerebral cortex. And for all that, he’d still in the long run declined to be the guiding star I needed. Just as my father did. My father was dying on me.

Emelina collected the plates and cups. She stood up and tied on an apron over her bathrobe, miraculously keeping the baby situated on her hip throughout the operation.

“Well, you’re no worse for the wear of five children in fourteen years,” I said, and she laughed, probably not believing it. Emelina was noticeably pretty. That combination particular to Grace, the pale blue eyes and black hair, never failed to be arresting, no matter how many versions of it you saw. The eyes were a genetic anomaly-in the first hours after birth, the really pure specimens of Grace’s gene pool were supposed to have whitish, marblelike irises. I’d seen pictures. Doc Homer had written it up for the American Journal of Genetics, years ago.

“And John Tucker’s a teenager,” I said. “Are we that old?”

“I am. You’re not.” She started to clear the table with one hand. “Every minute in the presence of a child takes seven minutes off your life.” I took the baby from her and she said, “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“They’re your treasures, Em. You’ve got something to show for yourself.”

“Oh, yeah. I know,” she said.

The baby’s name was Nicholas, but nobody called him anything but “the baby.” I’d read somewhere that the brain organizes information in sets no larger than four-that’s why Social Security and phone numbers are subdivided; possibly four children’s names were the limit on parental memory. I sat in the rocker and settled nameless Nicholas on my lap, his head at my knees. My long thigh bones exactly accommodated his length.

Emelina scraped toast corners into a blue enamel pail and ran a sinkful of hot water. “I don’t think I could stand to let Mason go off to kindergarten next year if it wasn’t for the baby. It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn’t.”

“I remember you saying you were calling it quits after four.”

“Famous last words.”

While I watched her move around the kitchen, my fingers tingled with the pleasure of stroking the baby’s fine black hair. It was longer by several inches than his big brother John Tucker’s; someone had taken shears to that boy with a vengeance. Probably Emelina. A woman who beheaded her own chickens would cut her kids’ hair herself.

Emelina washed and rinsed the plates and set them into the wire rack to drain. I sat feeling useless, though Nicholas seemed comfortable and was falling asleep on my lap. When that happens you feel them grow heavier, as if relaxation allowed them to be flooded with extra substance. A constriction ran across my lungs. I’d come close to having a baby of my own once, but I thought of it now so rarely that the notion of myself as a mother always caught me off guard.

In spite of the heat outside, Emelina’s dishwater was fogging the window. A little collection of potted plants stood in a row on the windowsill. Prayer plants. I was struck with a sudden, forceful memory of Emelina’s grandmother’s house. Hallie and I called her Abuelita too, though of course she was no relation, and the old woman called us “the orphan girls,” huérfanas. Nobody ever thought we could understand Spanish. The house had a stale, old-lady smell, but we loved her boxes of “pretties”: cast-metal carts with broken wheels, lead soldiers, huge washers and carriage bolts, every species of unidentifiable metal part. Her dead husband was a blacksmith. There were also boxes of ancient dress-up clothes in satiny fabrics as brittle as paper. Our best playroom was the sunny alcove crammed with plants where we stalked lions through the parlor palms, dressed in our finery, more glamorous than Beryl Markham and the Baroness von Blixen could have managed to be in their dreams. We confronted real dangers in the form of rickety iron stands holding heavy, breakable pots and fragile plants. The African violets were furred like pets, and the prayer plants had leaves like an old woman’s hands, red-veined on the back, that opened wide in the sun and folded primly together in the shade. Abuelita instructed us to sit and watch them, to try and catch them in the act of closing their leaves. Hallie always waited the longest, patient for enlightenment long after Emelina and I had returned to our rowdy diversions.

“You know, I’m so used to J.T. being gone,” Emelina said, bringing me back. “I think he’d be underfoot if he were here. I’d give us about ten days, then I’d probably shoot him. Husband murder in Grace, oh boy.” She seemed to be answering a question, however circumspectly, that I wasn’t sure I’d asked.

“How long has he been on the railroad?”

“Just since the mine shut down, which was…” She frowned at the glass she was drying, decorated with white pigs in red bow ties. “Ten years, about.”

“They used to always say they’d hire again up there when the price of copper went up.”

“Well, you know, that’s talk. Nobody’s waiting around anymore, Now it’s pecans and plums. And the railroad, thank God for that. I think we could live off the orchards if the boys didn’t eat like horses and outgrow their shoes every ten days. Get this, now they’re too fashion conscious to wear each other’s hand-me-downs. Remember when boys didn’t give a shit what they wore? We never should have got satellite TV.” She turned around, drying her hands on her apron. “Is that rascal gone to sleep? Thanks. Codi. I’ll take him upstairs and put him down for his nap.” She lifted the baby onto her shoulder like a sack of valuable flour. “You got big plans for today?”

“I thought I’d make an excursion into the city,” I said. “Check out the dry goods at the Baptist Grocery.”

She laughed. “If you can wait awhile I’ll go with you. Grammy can listen for the baby. She ought to be home pretty soon from her meeting.” Emelina rolled her eyes as she left the kitchen. “Stitch and Bitch Club on Mondays, bright and early.”

I stood at the window looking out at the grove of trees that ran the length of the canyon. Plum, pear, apple. And quince, I believe, though I couldn’t identify a quince tree to save my life. I only remembered the word because of the way people here pronounced it-“queens”-with their Spanish-influenced vowels. In the distance I could make out white satellite dishes perched among the cacti on the red cliff-one to each house, like dogs. Well, that was something new. The sky was overcast. In the orchards on the other side of the river I could see men working among the trees. I remembered them beating the branches with long poles, bringing down scattered showers of pecans. Frailing, that was called. In the older orchards sometimes they had to climb up into the tallest trees to reach the upper branches with their poles. But it was too early in the year for that. Pecans didn’t ripen till late fall.

Hallie and I had played in this house once or twice as children, when a pair of pigeon-toed girl cousins of J.T.’s had lived here. Now it belonged so securely to Emelina. It was hard to realize how fully life had gone on. Of course, it would. I could have stayed here, or gone away as I did, it made no difference to Grace.

I washed the baby’s cup, running my finger around the inside rim. While the sun left the windowsill and moved on to other things, I noticed, the prayer plants had closed up when I wasn’t watching. They stood in a self-satisfied row, keeping their thoughts to themselves.

“You keep some of the dirt on them, and you just stuff them down in paper bags and keep them somewhere dark,” said Lydia Galvez. “Do you have a root cellar?”

“No, uh-uh. We did, but the boys got into it and figured out how to cave it in some way,” Emelina said.

“Well, you could put them anyplace dark. The bottom of a closet would do.”

Lydia Galvez was the wife of John Tucker’s little league coach. I’d been introduced. We’d discussed John Tucker, baseball, and Emelina’s talent for producing boys. The whole town had been betting this last one would be a girl, Lydia Galvez told me. Now they were talking about dividing gladiolus bulbs.

“I’ve got some black,” Lydia was saying. “Do you have any black? I could spare you some. They’re not a true black, I’d really call it purple, but they’re supposed to be important.”

Emelina gave me a glance, so I knew she was trying to wind things up. Our whole afternoon had gone pretty much this way. Lydia, like everyone else, had no earthly notion of what to say to me, or I to them; I rarely even remembered who they were. But we were all polite, as if I were Emelina’s lunatic maiden aunt.

I sat down on the wall in front of the courthouse and watched myself in the plate-glass window of Jonny’s Breakfast, which was empty at this hour. My reflection stared back, looking more alone than anything I’d seen in my life. It occurred to me that I’d never drawn a breath here without Hallie. Not one I could be sure of. I was three when she was born. Before that I wasn’t conscious of my place in the world, so it didn’t matter.

Later, it mattered more than anything. Doc Homer drilled us relentlessly on how we differed from our peers: in ambition, native ability, even physical constitution. The nearest thing to praise, from him, was “No one else in Grace knows that!” Or, “You are Nolines.” We stood out like a pair of silos on a midwestern prairie. As far as I could see, being Nolines meant that we were impossibly long-limbed like our father and all the Noline relatives we never got to meet. He and mother came from a part of Illinois (this is a quote) where people were reasonable and tall.

The height, at least, wasn’t lost on Hallie and me. We turned out to be six feet on average-Hallie one inch over, and I, one under. In high school they used to call us forty percent of a basketball team. We didn’t play sports, but they still said that. Height isn’t something you can have and just let be, like nice teeth or naturally curly hair. People have this idea you have to put it to use, playing basketball, for example, or observing the weather up there. If you are a girl, they feel a particular need to point your height out to you, as if you might not have noticed.

In fact, Hallie and I weren’t forty percent of anything-we were all there was. The image in the mirror that proves you are still here. We had exactly one sister apiece. We grew up knowing the simple arithmetic of scarcity: A sister is more precious than an eye.

“You tell that daddy of yours I need a pill to get rid of my wrinkles,” Lydia said loudly.

I made an effort to collect myself. “Okay.”

I should have said, “You don’t need any such thing,” or something like that, but I didn’t think fast enough. I wasn’t managing this first day all that well. I had a lump in my throat and longed to get back to my cottage and draw the blinds. Grace was a memory minefield; just going into the Baptist Grocery with Emelina had charged me with emotions and a hopelessness I couldn’t name. I’d finished my shopping in a few minutes, and while I waited for Emelina to provision her troops for the week I stood looking helplessly at the cans of vegetables and soup that all carried some secret mission. The grocery shelves seemed to have been stocked for the people of Grace with the care of a family fallout shelter. I was an outsider to this nurturing. When the cashier asked, “Do you need anything else?” I almost cried. I wanted to say, “I need everything you have.”

It was past midnight but a cold moon blazed in the window and I couldn’t sleep. I lay on my back in the little painted bed in Emelina’s cottage. I hated sleeping alone. As little as there was between Carlo and me, I’d adjusted to his breathing. All my life I’d shared a bed with somebody: first Hallie. Then in my first years at college I discovered an army of lovers who offered degrees of temporary insanity and short-term salvation. Then Carlo, who’d turned out to be more of the same. But companionable, still. Sleeping alone seemed unnatural to me, and pitiful, something done in hospitals or when you’re contagious.

I’d finally reached that point of electric sleeplessness where I had to get up. I tucked my nightgown into my jeans and found my shoes out in the kitchen. I closed the door quietly and took a path that led away from the house, not down past other houses but straight out to the north, through Emelina’s plum orchard and a grove of twisted, dead-looking apples. Every so often, peacocks called to each other across the valley. They had different cries: the shrill laugh, a guttural clucking-a whole animal language. Like roosters and children, on a full-moon night they would never settle down completely.

I wanted to find the road that led up the canyon to Doc Homer’s. I wasn’t ready to go there yet, but I had to make sure I knew the way. I couldn’t ask Emelina for directions to my own childhood home; I didn’t want her to know how badly dislocated I was. I’d always had trouble recalling certain specifics of childhood, but didn’t realize until now that I couldn’t even recognize them at point-blank range. The things I’d done with Hallie were clear, because we remembered so much for each other, I suppose, but why did I not know Mrs. Campbell in the grocery? Or Lydia Galvez, who rode our school bus and claimed to have loaned me her handkerchief after Simon Bolivar Jones chucked me on the head with his Etch-a-Sketch, on a dare. In fact, I felt like the victim of a head injury. I hoped that if I struck out now on faith I would feel my way to Doc Homer’s, the way a water witcher closes her eyes and follows her dowsing rod to find a spring. But I didn’t know. I could have lost the homing instinct completely.

I was on a road that looked promising, anyway. I could hear the river. (Why does sound travel farther at night?) I had my mother’s death on my mind. One of my few plain childhood memories was of that day. I was not quite three, Hallie was newborn, and I’m told I couldn’t possibly remember it because I wasn’t there. The picture I have in my mind is nonetheless clear: two men in white pants handling the stretcher like a fragile, important package. The helicopter blade beating, sending out currents of air across the alfalfa field behind the hospital. This was up above the canyon, in the days when they grew crops up there. The flattened-down alfalfa plants showed their silvery undersides in patterns that looked like waves. The field became the ocean I’d seen in storybooks, here in the middle of the desert, like some miracle.

Then the rotor slowed and stopped, setting the people in the crowd to murmuring: What? Why? And then the door opened and the long white bundle of my mother came out again, carried differently now, no longer an urgent matter.

According to generally agreed-upon history, Hallie and I were home with a babysitter. This is my problem-I clearly remember things I haven’t seen, sometimes things that never happened. And draw a blank on the things I’ve lived through. I told Doc Homer many times that I’d seen the helicopter, and I also once insisted, to the point of tears, that I remembered being on the ship with the nine Gracela sisters and their peacocks. For that one he forced me to sit in my room and read the Encyclopædia Britannica. Novels were banned for a month; he said I needed to clear my mind of fictions. I made it to Volume 19, driven mostly by spite, but I still remembered that trip with the Gracelas. They were worried about whether the peacocks were getting enough air down in the hold of the ship.

I would concede now that all these things were fabrications based on stories I’d heard. Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth but not its twin. It was a fact that our mother had been terrified of flying. This part of our family history was well known in Grace. In her entire life she never left the ground. When her health deteriorated because of a failed kidney and a National Guard helicopter bore down from the sky to take her to Tucson, she’d explained to the men that she wasn’t going to fly. When they ignored her, she just died before the helicopter could lift itself up out of the alfalfa. The big bird hovered for a minute, and went away hungry.

It wasn’t her aversion to flight that was impressive; people in Grace didn’t travel much by car, let alone by air. I think the moral of the tale, based on the way people told it, was the unsuspected force of my mother’s will. “Who else would have married Doc Homer?” they seemed to be saying. And also, I suppose, “Who could have borne those unconforming girls?” People never said this directly, but when we were willful they would tell us, without fail: “You didn’t suck that out of your thumb.”

It made sense to me. I had no visual memory of a mother, and could not recall any events that included her, outside of the helicopter trip she declined to take. But I could remember a sense of her that was strong and ferociously loving. Almost a violence of love. It was the one thing I’d had, I suppose, that Hallie never knew. As the two of us grew up quietly in the dispassionate shadow of Doc Homer’s care and feeding, I tried to preserve that motherly love as best I could, and pass it on. But I couldn’t get it right. I was so young.

And somehow Hallie thrived anyway-the blossom of our family, like one of those miraculous fruit trees that tap into an invisible vein of nurture and bear radiant bushels of plums while the trees around it merely go on living. In Grace, in the old days, when people found one of those in their orchard they called it the semilla besada-the seed that got kissed. Sometimes you’d run across one that people had come to, and returned to, in hopes of a blessing. The branches would be festooned like a Christmas tree of family tokens: a baby sock, a pair of broken reading glasses, the window envelope of a pension check.

Hallie and I had a favorite besada in the old Domingos orchard, and one cold day on the way home from school we tucked wisps of our hair into its bark. Secretly. We’d hidden in the schoolyard to snip the ends off our braids and tie them up together with a pink thread unraveled from my coat button. If Doc Homer found out, he would construct some punishment to cure us of superstition. We agreed with him in principle-we were little scientists, born and bred. But children robbed of love will dwell on magic.

I stopped suddenly in the center of the road, in the moon’s bright light, with shadow trickling downhill from my heels like the water witcher’s wellspring finally struck open. I’d found the right path. The road angled up out of the orchards toward the top of the canyon. The steepness of the climb felt right. I would come back in daylight and go the rest of the way to Doc Homer’s, past the old helicopter landing pad up in the alfalfa field. Those fields would surely be abandoned now, like half the cropland in Arizona, salted to death by years of bad irrigation. I didn’t want to go up there now and see it all under moonlight, the white soil gleaming like a boneyard. It was too much.

I turned back down the road feeling the familiar, blunt pressure of old grief. Even the people who knew me well didn’t know my years in Grace were peculiarly bracketed by death: I’d lost a mother and I’d lost a child.

6 The Miracle

I was fifteen years old, two years younger than my own child would be now. I didn’t think of it in those terms: losing a baby. At first it was nothing like a baby I held inside me, only a small impossible secret. Slowly it grew to a force as strong and untouchable as thunder. I would be loved absolutely. But even in the last months I never quite pictured the whole infant I might have someday held in my arms; that picture came later. The human fact of it was gone before I knew it. But evidently that word “lost” was somewhere in my mind because I’ve had thousands of dreams of losing-of literally misplacing-a baby.

In one of the dreams I run along the creek bank looking among the boulders. They are large and white, and the creek is flooded, just roaring, and I know I’ve left a baby out there. I thrash my way through mesquite thickets, stopping often to listen, hearing nothing but the roar of the water. I feel frantic until finally I see her in the middle of the water bobbing like a Cortland apple, little and red and bright. I wade in and pull her out and she lies naked there on the bank without so much as a surname, her umbilicus tied with a man’s black shoelace such as my father might wear. I see her and think, “It’s a miracle she’s survived.”

That thought is the truest part of the dream. Really there would be nothing new or surprising about a baby being born in secret and put into a creek. But to pull one out, that would be a surprise. A newborn has no fat yet; it wouldn’t float. It would sink like a stone.

Loyd Peregrina was an Apache. He took me out four times. Our football team was called the Apaches, but Loyd was also a real Apache, and the kind of handsome you could see coming down the road like bad news. When he first asked me, I thought he’d made a mistake, or a joke, and I looked to see who was watching. Nobody was. Four Saturdays in a row, for exactly one lunar month: the odds of getting pregnant out of that were predictable, but I was unfathomably naïve. I was a motherless girl. I’d learned the words puberty and menarche from the Encyclopædia Britannica. The rest I learned from girls in the schoolyard who weren’t even talking to me when they said what they did.

Loyd wouldn’t remember. For me it was the isolated remarkable event of a tenuous life but for Loyd-with his misspelled name and devil eyes-it was one in a hundred, he was a senior and ran around with everybody. Also he was such a drinker in those days that I was frankly surprised to hear he was still alive. He never knew what he’d spawned, much less when it died. Even Hallie didn’t. It’s the first time I understood that even with a sister I could be alone. At night I lay feeling my limbs, seeing what Hallie still saw, which was nothing near the truth, and I felt myself growing distant and stolid. I was the woman downtown buttoning her child’s jacket, her teeth like a third hand clamped on a folded grocery list, as preoccupied as God. Someone important and similar to others. I was lured and terrified. I couldn’t help but think sometimes of escape: the thing inside me turning to blood of its own accord, its bones liquefying, leaking out. And then one evening my savage wish was granted.

I never did tell Hallie. I kept quiet, first to protect her from the knowledge of terrible things, and later to protect myself from that rock-solid element she came to own. That moral advantage.

It divided me from the people I knew, then and later, but in broader human terms I don’t pretend that it sets me apart in any great way. A miscarriage is a natural and common event. All told, probably more women have lost a child from this world than haven’t. Most don’t mention it, and they go on from day to day as if it hadn’t happened, and so people imagine that a woman in this situation never really knew or loved what she had.

But ask her sometime: how old would your child be now? And she’ll know.

7 Poison Ground

Emelina was up with the chickens. I heard her out in the courtyard pulling honeysuckle vines away from the old brick barbecue pit. They came out with a peculiar zipping sound, like threads from a seam in rotten cloth. “You can see we haven’t been festive for a while,” she said. She was organizing what she called a “little fiesta” for the Saturday of Labor Day weekend. It was a family tradition; they roasted a whole goat. (Not John Tucker’s.)

I found a broom and pitched in, sweeping up the pieces of a broken flowerpot I’d come to think of as part of the décor. Emelina asked, in the carefully offhand way a good mother would ask, if I’d been up to the school yet. I’d received numerous calls about a teachers’ meeting.

“I know about the meeting, but I haven’t gone up there yet,” I confessed. School would begin the following Tuesday. I needed to get organized and see what kind of shape the labs were in, but I kept putting it off, on grounds of terror. I hadn’t actually taught school before. When Emelina wrote me about the opening at Grace High School it had seemed sensible to apply. While Carlo slept I’d sat up in bed with my legal pad and a small reading light, feigning competence, attempting to organize the problem areas of my life into manageable categories: I had no real attachment to selling lottery tickets at 7-Eleven; Doc Homer was going off the deep end; Carlo was Carlo; Hallie would be leaving at summer’s end, and without a destination for myself I’d be marooned. Grace was something. If I got this job I could spend ten months in Grace seeing about Doc Homer, possibly without his noticing. I reasoned that I wasn’t qualified and didn’t have a chance of being hired, and so I felt bold enough to apply.

They hired me. The state had some kind of emergency clause that in a pinch allowed people to teach without certification. And of course I did have a world of education in the life sciences. Also, I believe my last name had something to do with it. Nothing else I put down in my wobbly writing on that application could have impressed anyone too much.

I dumped the shards of the flowerpot into a plastic trash bag, making the satisfactory sound of demolition. I started in with Emelina on the honeysuckle vines. As we dragged them out she looped the long strands around her arm like strings of Christmas tree lights. “You excited about starting?” she asked.

“Nervous.”

“Well hell, Codi, you’re bound to be better than the last one. John Tucker says she was scared of her shadow. Some senior boys chased her into the teachers’ lounge with a fetal pig.”

Emelina’s faith in me was heartening.

“Did I tell you J.T. called this morning?” she asked. “They’re going to make it home for the fiesta. Him and Loyd. Do you remember Loyd?”

I yanked at a vine that was rooted right into the crumbling adobe. “Sure,” I said.

“I didn’t know if you would. I think you were the only girl in the whole high school that never fell for him.”

It was humid and hot. I’d tied a bandana around my forehead and already it was soaking wet. The salt stung my eyes.

“I went out with Loyd a few times,” I said.

“Did you? Him and J.T. are real good buddies. He’s straightened out a lot. He’s real sweet.” She unburdened herself of the loops of vines, laying them in a pile, and stood up with her hands on her waist, arching her back. “Loyd, I mean.” She laughed. “Not J.T. He’s just the same as he always was.”

I took off my bandana and wrung it out. The dark drops on the hot brick dried up instantly, leaving behind a white lace of salt. Just like the irrigation water on the alfalfa. In just this way the fields get ruined, I thought to myself.

Emelina kicked tentatively at the brick barbecue pit. “You think this thing will stand up after we get the vines out of it?”

“I think they’re what’s holding it together,” I said.

She cocked her head and looked at it thoughtfully. “Well, if it falls down we’ll just have us a roasted-goat disaster. We’ll just have to get extra beer.”

On the morning of the fiesta she sent John Tucker and me to town for last-minute supplies, including extra beer, although the barbecue pit showed every sign of standing through another Labor Day fiesta. I followed John Tucker down a path I didn’t know, a short cut through a different orchard. “What kind of trees are those?” I asked John Tucker. The branches were heavy with what looked like small yellow-green pomegranates.

“Quince,” he said, with a perfect short “i,” not “queens.” The Spanish-flavored accent of Old Grace was dying out, thanks to satellite TV, I suppose. I watched the back of his shorn head; the path was narrow and we walked single file. At thirteen he was my height, a head taller than Emelina. It must shift your liaison with a child when you have to look up to him.

I caught a glimpse of bright car windshield through the trees, and knew where we were. You could picture Grace as a house, with orchards for rooms. To map it of course you’d have to be a botanist. We left quince and entered pecan, where the ground was covered with tiny, immature nuts. “So what’s happening with these orchards?” I asked, kicking at a slew of green pecans the size of peach pits. “I’ve been seeing this all over.”

“Fruit drop.”

John Tucker was already a man of few words.

The Baptist Grocery was nondenominational, but harked back to a time when everything in Grace, including grocery stores, was still segregated. This wasn’t recent, but maybe a century ago. Here the Hispanic and Anglo bloodlines got very mixed up early on, starting with the arrival of the Gracela sisters. By the time people elsewhere were waking up to such ideas as busing, everyone in Grace had pretty much given up on claiming a superior pedigree. Nowadays the Baptist Grocery peddled frozen fish sticks to Protestant and Catholic alike.

John Tucker shopped like an automaton, counting out bags of chips and jars of salsa. Since he seemed interested in efficiency, not congeniality, I suggested we split up. I would go to the liquor store and meet him in front of the courthouse.

Drinking establishments had proliferated in Grace since my day. The mine had closed in the interim, of course; bars and economic duress are common fellow travelers. I passed the Horny Toad Saloon and the Little Dipper plus the one I remembered, the State Line, which was no more situated on the state line than the grocery was Baptist. New Mexico lay thirty miles to the east. I think the name referred to the days when Gracela County was dry and people had to drive to the border for beer.

Emelina had advised that I’d find the best price on beer at the Watering Hole, a package store. I located it on the corner of Main Street and the depot alley, which led down past the old movie theater to the railroad station. The theater had been remodeled into an exercise salon and video rental store called the Video Rodeo, with a huge hand-lettered sign in the window announcing “NINTENDOS NOWHERE.” I stared for a good half minute before I made out that it meant “NOW HERE,” not “NOWHERE.” The calligrapher got cramped.

The Watering Hole was closed, with a sign on the door saying “BACK IN TEN,” so I waited. The placard was lettered in the same hand as the “NINTENDOS” sign. Maybe one person actually ran all the stores in Grace from behind the scenes, like the Wizard of Oz, powerfully manipulating people through hand-lettered signs. It was hot and my mind was fraying at the edges. I wiped the sweat out of my eyes and massaged my prickly scalp, thinking I must look like a drowned hen, but maybe nobody would recognize me today. Living without a lover was beginning to produce in me the odd sense that I was invisible.

A pretty, old carob tree stood near the door of the liquor store, throwing dappled shade on the sidewalk. I knew that its twisted, woody-looking pods could be crunched between the teeth and tasted like cocoa. I sat on a concrete block and leaned my back against the trunk. Apparently this was a frequent waiting spot. Fallen carob pods lay all around my feet. I picked one up, polished it on my T-shirt and bit down: the first sensation was sawdust, but then the splinters turned strongly bittersweet on my tongue, a nostalgic tang. I looked up into the leathery leaves. Hallie had told me carobs were dioecious, which means that male and female parts are possessed by separate individuals. In plain English, they’re like us; it takes two to tango. This one was loaded with fruit, but there wasn’t another carob tree in sight. I looked all the way down the main street and down toward the depot. No male carobs. I patted the trunk sympathetically.

The door of the Watering Hole was opened by a proprietor who looked as if she might not be legal drinking age herself. In fact this must have been the case because after she bagged and rang up my purchase she asked if I’d mind waiting while she went next door to the Video Rodeo and got her dad. He arrived shortly to accept my money and put it in the register. I suppose they switched off, since she probably wasn’t old enough to rent out porno movies either. I recognized neither father nor daughter, and they didn’t make a point of knowing or not knowing me: a relief. The daily work of remeeting people was overwhelming, and Emelina’s party was going to be a whole lot more of the same.

I took my paper bags and headed across the street. A red pickup truck beeped its horn and startled me-I’d charged right across without looking. I froze up, like one of those ridiculous squirrels that dart one way and then the other and are doomed to end up a road kill. Except my life was in no danger here; he’d stopped. It was Loyd Peregrina, looking exactly like himself. If anything he looked younger than fifteen years ago. His arm was out the window and I hurried out of his way thinking it was a turn signal, that he was trying to turn right. It didn’t occur to me till he’d gone on down the street that he was waving at me.

I stayed in the shower forever trying to rinse the salt out of my scalp and skin. I had fantasies of not going to this thing, but Emelina would be hurt, and also my house sat in the middle of the party like a floral centerpiece. It would be hard to pretend not to be home. I put on the most minimal thing I owned, a white cotton dress, and sneaked out my front door.

It was like a high-school reunion. Everyone was boisterously friendly and dying to be filled in on the last decade and a half, which in my case was not that pretty a picture, and of course they asked about Hallie. Children ran underfoot like rebel cockroaches. Emelina, my guardian angel, kept setting me up in conversations before running off to clean up some mess the kids had gotten into or check on the goat.

J.T. came over and gave me a hug that lifted me off the ground-but that’s J.T., plus a few beers. It really was nice to see him. “I hear you wrecked a train,” I said.

“Wrecked her good,” he said. J.T. was broad-shouldered and dark, with the kind of face that’s made more handsome, not less, by the scars of teenage acne. We’d known each other since we were babies. His older sister Pocha was at the party, and his brothers Cristobal, Gus, and Arturo, all of whom had been our neighbors when Hallie and I were small. I remembered playing Dutchman’s tag with them at the graveyard on All Souls’ Days-it was always a huge family picnic up there-until Doc Homer decided the graveyard was off limits. (Bird mites no doubt.)

People were jammed into the courtyard belly to elbow and it soon got too noisy to talk. I stood near the edge of things, in the shade of an olive that was probably planted when the house was built, middle-aged as olives go. A band called the Sting Rays, featuring one of J.T.’s formerly pigeon-toed cousins, was belting out “Rosa Lee.” I spotted Loyd across the way, but would have had to step on a hundred toes to get to him. He was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, paying attention to a small woman in a strapless dress. Loyd looked like someone in a cigarette ad, except he wasn’t smoking: white T-shirt, white smile, those models are always the picture of health. His hair was mink black, in a ponytail. And he had terrific arms. I hate to admit things like this, but in a certain frame of mind I am a sucker for good muscle definition.

A woman approached me suddenly from behind and shouted, “Codi Noline! God, honey, you look like a rock ‘n’ roll star.”

In my sundress and dimestore thongs I looked no more like a rock ‘n’ roll star than Mother Teresa. “I’ll take that as a compliment,” I said. “I take them where I can get them nowadays.”

“Lord, I know what you mean,” she said. It was Trish Garcia, who was a cheerleader and clandestine smoker when I’d last known her. Now she smoked openly, had a raspy cough, and looked like a cartwheel was out of the question. “I heard Hallie’s in South Africa.”

I laughed. “Nicaragua.”

“Well, what in the world’s she doing there?”

In high school, Hallie and I were beneath Trish’s stratum of normal conversation. I remembered every day of those years, no lapses there. Once in the bathroom I’d heard her call us the bean-pole sisters, and speculate that we wore hand-me-down underwear. I wondered how the rules had changed. Had I come up in the world, or Trish down? Or perhaps growing up meant we put our knives away and feigned ignorance of the damage. “She’s teaching people how to grow crops without wrecking the soil,” I said. “She has her master’s in integrated pest management.”

Trish looked indifferent, but she was working hard at being unimpressed, whereas before it came naturally. I took this as a good sign. “Well, I guess it pays good,” she said.

“No, they’re not really paying her, just living expenses is about all, I think. She’s doing it just to do it. She wants to be part of a new society.”

Trish stared. I pretended Hallie was there at the party somewhere, about to walk up behind me. “Six or seven years ago they threw out the dictator and gave all his land to the poor people,” I said. “But they need a lot of help in the farming department now, because these soldiers keep attacking the poor farmers from across the border and burning up their crops.”

Hallie would laugh at “farming department.” She’d laugh at the whole scene, the education of Trish the Cheerleader. She would love me.

“The Communists,” Trish said knowingly. “I heard about that. I heard they’re thinking about sending the Marines down there to stop them from doing that.”

“No, it’s the other way around,” I said patiently. “The Marines aren’t rooting for the new society. The U.S. is paying the contras, the guys that attack the farmers.” Hallie would not laugh now, she would be inflamed. She said we were a nation in love with forgetting the facts. She saved clippings that proved it. When Castro released those prisoners from Mariel: One day the headlines said we’d gotten him to free all these wonderful political prisoners. A month later when they were burning down halfway houses in Miami the papers castigated Fidel for exporting his hooligans and junkies.

Trish fiddled with her bra strap. “Hallie always would just up and do anything under the blue sky,” she said.

“You’re right,” I told Trish. “I wish I were that brave. I’d be scared to death to be where she is.”

“Well, you know, we can’t all be the hero,” she said, jutting her lower jaw to blow smoke up toward the olive branches. If I could have drawn blood, if I’d known how to do that with words instead of a needle, I would have. I wasn’t sure what Hallie craved but I knew it wasn’t glory.

“How’s Doc Homer?” she asked.

I hadn’t yet found the valor to go see him. I feared seeing him in failing condition. And still disapproving of me, on top of it. “Hard to say,” I said.

I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to see Loyd, grinning broadly. “Too good to speak to an Indian boy on Main Street?”

The tingle of a blush started behind my ears, and I ignored it. I’d learned since high school that in an emergency shyness can be disguised with a completely fake bravado. “You tried to run me down, Loyd! I ought to turn you in for reckless driving.” I ran my fingers through my hair. “Actually, I didn’t think you’d know who I was.”

“Are you kidding? How many beautiful six-foot-tall women you think we’ve got in this town?”

“Five eleven,” I corrected. “I’m the shorter of the bean-pole sisters.” I felt suddenly drunk, though I wasn’t, chemically speaking. Trish drifted off toward the barbecue pit.

He looked at me for a long time, just looked. Grinning. His left hand was fingering the tip of an olive branch and I expected him to snap it off but he didn’t, he only took in its texture as someone might eat chocolate or inhale a cigarette.

“You want another beer?” he asked.

So that was going to be it, no filling in the last fifteen years. No constructing ourselves for each other-otherwise known as falling in love. “Think you can get over to that ice chest and back before this party is over?” I knew he wouldn’t.

“In case I don’t, I’ve got your phone number.” He winked.

“Don’t you worry. You’ll be hearing from my lawyer.”

I felt adrift and disappointed, though I hadn’t held any conscious expectations of Loyd. I looked around at other faces, wondering if they all held secret disappointments for me. Doña Althea, the ancient woman we used to call the “Peacock Lady,” was holding court in a lawn chair under the fig tree. She was the one who used to collect the feathers for piñatas. She looked today like she always had, dressed in black, fierce and miniature like a frightening breed of small dog. Even with her braided crown of silver hair she wasn’t five feet tall. J.T.’s mother, Viola Domingos, and several other women sat in a group with her, fanning themselves in time to the music and drinking beer. J.T. and Loyd had apparently been commandeered into serving them food; the goat had been pronounced done. People were beginning to move toward the makeshift table, which I’d helped Emelina improvise from the doors to Mason’s and the twins’ rooms, covered with embroidered tablecloths compliments of the Stitch and Bitch Club. There was enough food to save an African nation. Potato salad, deviled eggs, menudo, tortillas and refried beans and a thousand kinds of dessert. I heard somebody say in a highpitched voice, “Tomato soup in that cake? I wouldn’t have guessed that for love nor money.”

I wasn’t in any hurry. I moved out of the way of the principal rush and stood near the gate to the side yard, near my little house. I noticed a dog lying very still and alert, just on the other side of the gate. It looked like an oversized coyote but it was definitely a domestic creature. It had a green bandana tied around its neck. This dog didn’t belong to Emelina’s household-I was pretty sure I knew all the family animals. It sat with its mouth slightly open and its ears cocked, staring steadily through the wire gate at the people inside.

“You thinking about crashing this party?” I asked the dog.

It glanced up at me for a second, with a patient look, then fixed its gaze back on the crowd. Or maybe on the roast goat.

“I’ll bring you some of that, if you’re willing to wait awhile,” I said. “Nobody’s going to miss one little bite.”

The dog didn’t respond to this promise.

All the old men had served themselves first and were settling down into a huddle of folding chairs near the front door of my cottage, holding their plates carefully horizontal above their knees. I started to move away, out of deference, but I noticed they were talking about fruit drop. I plainly heard one of them say the words, “poison ground.” I stood four feet away and invisible, I suppose because they were men, and women talked to women. They asked questions of each other, to which they apparently already knew the answers.

“Do you know how much sulfuric they put in the river? He said the EPA give Black Mountain thirty days to shut down that leaching operation.”

“Damn, man, that’s veneno. How long you think we been putting that on our trees?”

“When did anybody ever tell the Mountain what to do?” The man who said this had a remarkably wrinkled brown face, like an Indian mummy I’d once seen in a roadside museum. “They’ll pull some kind of strings,” he said.

A man who sat with his back to me spoke up. “They won’t fight the EPA. It’s not worth it. They been saying for ten years that mine is dead. They’re not hardly getting anything from that leaching operation.”

Another man nodded at this, pointing his fork toward the head of the canyon. “Just enough to pay the taxes. That’s all. They’ll shut her down.”

“You think so?” asked the one who reminded me of a mummy. “They’re getting gold and moly out of them tailing piles. If they wasn’t, they wouldn’t keep running the acid through them. You boys know that damn company. They’re not going to stop no leaching operation on account of our pecan trees.” His voice trailed off and he was quiet for a minute, his callused fingers fooling with an unlit cigarette. I heard women’s voices rising randomly over the din of the party, calling out instructions, reining in their kids. The party seemed like something underwater, a lost continent, and I felt profoundly sad though it wasn’t my continent. I would go get a bite to eat, say something grateful to Emelina, and slip back into my house.

The man with his back to me said, “It’s in Ray Pilar’s apples and quince.” He pronounced it “queens.”

Another man, younger than the others, said, “It’s going to kill every damn tree in this canyon. If I’m wrong, my friend, you can shoot me.”

The man with the wrinkled face said, “If you’re right, my friend, you might as well shoot yourself.”

8 Pictures

The dead mountain range of tailings on the lip of the mine had sat for decades, washed by rain, and still was barren as the Sahara. From a distance you might guess these piles of dirt to be fragile, like a sandcastle, but up close you’d see the pinkish soil corrugated with vertical ridges and eroded to a sheen, like rock. It would take a pickaxe to dent it.

It was high noon and I knew where I was. I bypassed the old mine road at the top of the canyon and stayed on the unmarked lane that people called, for reasons unknown to me, the Old Pony Road. All Grace’s streets went by odd names that had mostly to do with picturesque forms of transportation: the Old and New Pony roads, the Goatleg, Dog-Cart Road, and the inexplicable Tortoise Road. Amazingly, most or all of these also had official, normal-sounding names like West Street and San Francisco Lane, which were plainly marked on painted aluminum street signs and totally ignored. Maybe somebody had just recently dreamed up these normal names and hammered up signs to improve the town’s image.

From the canyon’s crest I could see down into the isolated settlements at the north end of the valley, some abandoned, some buried in deep graves of mine tailings, through which, presumably, Black Mountain now ran quantities of sulfuric acid. Far to the south lay open desert. The road I was on would pass through one more flock of little houses, all settled like hens into their gardens, before reaching Doc Homer’s drafty two-story gray edifice.

I bypassed the main entrance of the hospital, the only one of the ghost town of Black Mountain buildings that was still in use. The hospital itself had finally closed-people had to leave Grace for a more equipped town if their problems were major-but Doc Homer’s office in the basement could handle anything up to and including broken limbs. He wasn’t working there today. I’d called him at home; I was expected.

“Cosima? Cosima Noline! I want you to look.” A heavyset woman in a housedress and running shoes was standing at her mailbox, shouting at me. “Child, will you look. If you aren’t the picture of your mother.”

My mother was dead at my age. The woman put her arms around me. She was nobody I recognized.

“We’ve been so anxious to see you!” she said at a convincing decibel level. “Viola told us at sewing club you’d got in, and was staying down with her and J.T. and Emelina till you can help Doc get his place straightened out and move in up here with him. Oh, I know Doc’s glad to have you back. He’s been poorly, I don’t expect he’d tell you but he is. They said when you was overseas you learned the cure they used on that actress in Paris, France. Bless your heart, you’re a dear child.” She paused, finally, taking in my face. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

I waited, expecting help. It had been fourteen years, after all. But she offered no hints. “No, I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t.”

“Uda!” The woman said.

“Oh. Uda. I’m sorry.” I still didn’t have the foggiest idea who she was.

“I won’t keep you, hon, but I want you to come for dinner soon as you can. I’ve baked Doc a squash pie I’ve been aiming to take up there. Hang on, I’ll just run get it.”

I waited while she hurried on her small feet up the path to the house and disappeared into the cave of honeysuckle that had swallowed her front porch. Uda returned directly with a covered pie tin that I accepted along with a bewildering kiss on both cheeks. I wondered how many people in Grace believed I’d flown in fresh from Paris with a cure for Alzheimer’s.

He’d told me two years ago. I had no idea if it was the confirmed truth or just his opinion, since Doc Homer made no distinction between the two. And if it was true, I still didn’t know what to think. What we are talking about, basically, is self-diagnosed insanity and that gets complicated.

Carlo and I in fact weren’t living in Paris (we never had), but in Minnesota; we’d already come back from Crete. Hallie had kept decently in touch with Doc Homer but I hadn’t, and felt guilty, so I engineered a visit in Las Cruces. God knows how long he would have waited to tell me, otherwise. This meeting was not a plan he’d cooked up to give me the news, but my idea, sprung at the last minute. An accident of science, actually. Someone had recently spliced the glow gene from a glowworm into a tobacco plant, and the scientific world was buzzing over this useless but remarkable fact. All the top geneticists were meeting in New Mexico and my boss wanted me down there to take notes. I was working at a high-powered research lab; this was prior to my moving back to Tucson and falling into convenience-mart clerking. If I ever wrote down on paper my full employment history, I assure you it would look like the résumé of a schizophrenic.

And in my professional upswings I had more of what passes for confidence; it dawned on me that it’s an easy bus ride over the state line from Grace to Las Cruces. I’d phone Doc Homer.

I was astonished when he agreed to come. “Barring unforeseen difficulties at the hospital,” he’d said over the phone. I didn’t know yet that the hospital had closed; that he sometimes forgot.

“You always say that.” It was true, that was his standard disclaimer on every promise to Hallie or me, but it was uncharacteristic for me to tease him. Truthfully, after such an ice age, there was no such thing as characteristic. I tried out joking, more or less to see if it would work. “You’ll say that at your own funeral, Pop,” I’d said boldly into the receiver. Later, after he told me, I could have bitten my tongue off for that.

We met in the lobby of the Holiday Inn, just for a couple of drinks since he said he had to get back to Grace that night. The bar was done up in this madly cheerful south-of-the-border décor, with a blue tile fountain and silk bougainvillaeas climbing out of clay pots shaped like pigs. It was somebody’s idea of what Old Mexico would look like if you didn’t have to take poverty into account. The waitresses wore swishy miniskirts with ruffles in contrasting primary colors. In this setting my father told me he had a terminal disorder of the brain.

All I kept thinking was that he must be wrong. I doubted he’d had a CAT scan. The thing to do would be to check into the University Hospital in Tucson and get a neurological workup, to rule out other things, but I didn’t try to talk him into it. The nature of my relationship with Doc Homer, which had eluded me over the phone, came back instantly when I saw him. There are all the small things you love and despise about a parent: the disappointed eyes, the mannerisms, the sound of the voice as much as the meaning of the words, that add up to that singular thing-the way you are both going to respond, whether you like it or not. It had settled heavily over our table and I could hardly breathe. I knew this man. He wouldn’t seek out a second opinion to stack up against his own. He’d suffer his own doubts but never anyone else’s. The waitress swished over and brought us fresh margaritas. The trickle of the fountain put me on edge, the way a running toilet will, or any sound of water going to waste. “What are you going to do?” I asked Doc Homer.

“I don’t see a need to do anything special, for the time being. I’ll make arrangements when the time comes.”

My stomach was tight. I felt perversely annoyed with the smiling clay pigs. I touched my lips to the coarse salt on the rim of the margarita glass, and the crystals felt like sand in my mouth, or broken glass. I thought of walls I’d seen in Mexico-high brick hacienda walls topped with a crest of broken bottles imbedded in cement, to keep people on their correct sides of the fence. If they want to provide an authentic Mexican flavor they should have something like that in here, I thought.

“Nobody else knows,” he said. “And I’d like for you not to mention it to your sister.”

I stared at him. I knew it wouldn’t matter what came next, whether I said “Okay,” or “Why?” or “That’s not fair,” which is what I mainly felt. Dr. Homer Noline had stopped talking, there being nothing more to say, in his opinion. I imagined him going back to Grace on the bus and lying that night in his bed, tired but wide awake, recalling the events of his day and wondering what pathways of thought in his brain might be slipping off track. Trying to remember what vegetable he’d cooked for dinner or what tie he’d worn. He might be confronting these thoughts with fear, or only clinical interest. I really didn’t know.

For the first time in my life then, and just for a few seconds, I was able to see Doc Homer as someone I felt sorry for. It was a turning point for me, one of those instants of freakishly clear sight when you understand that your parent might have taken entirely the wrong road in life, even if that road includes your own existence. I pitied Doc Homer for his slavish self-sufficiency. For standing Hallie and me in the kitchen and inspecting us like a general, not for crooked hems so much as for signs of the weakness of our age: the lipstick hidden in a book satchel, the smoldering wish to be like everyone else. Being like no one else, being alone, was the central ethic of his life. Mine too, to some extent, not by choice but by default. My father, the only real candidate for center of my universe, was content to sail his private sea and leave me on my own. I still held that against him. I hadn’t thought before about how self-sufficiency could turn on you in old age or sickness. The captain was going down with his ship. He was just a man, becoming a child. It became possible for me to go back to Grace.

I arrived at the house, nervous, ludicrously armed with Uda’s squash pie. But he was in his darkroom. Not waiting. He called it his workroom, I think to try to legitimize his hobby to himself. Doc Homer made pictures. Specifically, he made photographs of things that didn’t look like what they actually were. He had hundreds: clouds that looked like animals, landscapes that looked like clouds. They were pressed between slabs of cardboard, in closets. Only one was framed. The matting and framing were my present to him one Christmas when I was in high school, after I’d started making my own money. It had cost me a lot, and was a mistake. His hobby was a private thing, too frivolous in his opinion to be put on public display. I should have foreseen this, but didn’t.

Nevertheless, he’d hung it in the kitchen, God only knows why because the man was far from sentimental, and there it still hung. It was the first thing I noticed when I knocked on the screen door and walked in. The photo was my favorite, a hand on a white table. And of course it wasn’t a hand, but a clump of five saguaro cacti, oddly curved and bumpy, shot against a clear sky. All turned sideways. Odd as it seemed, this thing he did, there was a great deal of art to it.

I put the pie in the refrigerator and nosed around a little, telling myself it’s what a good daughter would do. I pictured these good daughters-wifely and practical, wearing perms and loafers and Peter Pan collars. I didn’t remotely look the part. As I crept around the house it felt to me like a great, sad, recently disclosed secret. The kitchen seemed smaller than when I was a girl, standing on a bucket to reach the sink, but that’s natural. It was also crowded with odds and ends you wouldn’t expect in a kitchen: a pair of Piper forceps, for example, washed with the day’s dishes and sitting amongst them on the drainboard. This didn’t signify any new eccentricity on his part. He’d always had a bizarre sense of utility. I could picture him using the forceps to deliver a head of cabbage from a pot of boiling water. Holding it up. Not in a show-off way, but proud he’d thought of it, as if he were part of a very small club of people who had the brains to put obstetrical instruments to use in the kitchen.

The rooms were cool and stale although it was hot outside. I stepped through the living room, over the old Turkish carpet, which looked malnourished, its bare white threads exposed like ribs. Doc Homer could afford better, I heard somebody say in my mind, a voice I couldn’t identify. “All the money he’s got up there.” Which of course wasn’t true, we never had much, that was just what people thought because we were standoffish. Beyond the living room was the parlor where he used to see patients who’d come to the house, embarrassed, it seems to me now, at night when the office was closed. At present the parlor was shockingly cramped. The door to the outside porch was blocked by furniture I didn’t remember: two sofas and something that looked like a cobbler’s bench. Folded on a sofa was one thing I remembered well, a black crocheted afghan with red flowers. Hallie and I used to drag that thing around everywhere, our totem against disaster. It looked cleaner now than I’d ever seen it.

Magazines and journals were everywhere. His American Journal of Genetics was still organized chronologically on the shelf. That was his pet interest; they’d once published his article on the greatly inbred gene pool of Grace, with its marble-eyed babies. (He’d even rigged up a system for photographing the newborns’ eyes, for documentation.) The trait first began showing up in the fifties, when third-cousin descendants of the Gracela sisters started marrying each other. Emelina would have been one of his subjects. You needed to get the gene from both sides; it was recessive. That’s about what I knew. For me it was enough to understand that everyone in Grace was somehow related except us Nolines, the fish out of water. Our gene pool was back in Illinois.

Other magazines, many in number, were piled on the floor. I picked up a Lancet: 1977, my first year of med school. There was an important article on diabetes I remembered. Underneath, a recent National Geographic. There was no order at all. Though if I mentioned it he’d come up with some elaborate rationale before he’d admit to disorganization. South Sea Islands and Islets of Langerhans, I could see him saying, and not meaning it as a joke. The smell of mold was making my eyes water. I was inclined toward the stairs, to go up and see what kind of shape the bedrooms were in, but I didn’t have the heart. It wasn’t my house. I forced my hand to knock on the darkroom door.

“Open. I’m about to start printing.”

I closed the door behind me. There was only a dim red light bulb. “Hi, Pop,” I said.

He looked at me, unsurprised and not very much changed, I could see as my eyes adjusted. I was prepared for frailty and incoherence but he was lucid and familiar. The same substantial hands and wrist bones, the straight nose and low, broad mouth-things I also have, without noticing much. He motioned for me to sit.

“So how are you these days?” I asked.

He ignored the question. We hadn’t been together since the Holiday Inn lounge, two years ago, but from Doc Homer you didn’t expect hugs and kisses. He was legendary in this regard. Hallie and I used to play a game we called “orphans” when we were with him in a crowd: “Who in this room is our true father or mother? Which is the one grownup here that loves us?” We’d watch for a sign-a solicitous glance, a compliment, someone who might even kneel down and straighten Hallie’s hair ribbon, which we’d tugged out of alignment as bait. That person would never be Doc Homer. Proving to us, of course, that he wasn’t the one grownup there who loved us.

I sat carefully on a cool file cabinet. He was adjusting black knobs on the enlarger, preparing to make a print. When he switched on the bulb an image appeared against the wall, in reverse: white trees, black sky, mottled foreground. I’d learned how to look at negatives many years before I read my first X-ray. He shrank the frame into focus, shut it off while he slid a rectangle of paper into place and set the timer, and then projected the picture again, burning it into the paper. In the center were two old men hunched on a stone wall, backs to the camera.

“They look like rocks,” I said. “It’s hard to see where the wall ends and the men start.”

“Men who look like stones,” said Doc Homer. His speech was more formal than most people’s writing. Who else would really say “stones”?

“Except for the hat,” I said. “That hat’s a giveaway.”

“I’m taking it out.” He held a small steel spatula into the beam of light and waved little circles over the area of the man’s hat, as if he were rubbing it out, which is exactly what he was doing. Photographers call this “dodging,” and the spatula was a “dodging tool,” though in all probability this one was something used in gallbladder surgery. When I was little I called it the Magic Wand.

The timer rang and he shut the projector off. I looked at his face in profile in the faint red light. Deep lines ran from his nose to the corners of his mouth. He didn’t look well, but maybe he never had. He picked up the print by its edges.

“You haven’t heard anything from Hallie, have you?”

He shook his head.

“You’re sure you don’t want me to tell her you’ve got, that you’re sick? I’m sorry to bring this up, but it’s hard to be the only one. I think she’d want to know.”

He appeared not to have heard me. I knew he had. Doc Homer never argued, he just didn’t participate in conversation that didn’t please him.

“So did the man’s hat go away?” I asked.

He slipped the paper into a dishpan of clear liquid. “We’ll see.” He seemed suddenly happy now, almost friendly, as he often did in here. The darkroom was the nearest I’d ever come to feeling like I had a dad. We stood without talking and watched a gray image grow on the paper like some fungus with a mind of its own. I thought about the complex chemistry of vision, remembering from medical school the textbook diagrams of an image projected through the eyeball, temporarily inscribed on the retina.

“I never thought about how printing a photograph duplicates eyesight,” I said. “It’s the same exact process in slow motion.”

He nodded appreciatively and my heart warmed. I’d pleased him. “Probably there is no real invention in the modern world,” he said. “Just a good deal of elaboration on nature.” He lifted out the slick print and slipped it into a second tray, the fixer.

“The stone has no head,” he pronounced, correctly; it looked like a rock wall with two extra rocks balanced on top. You’d think it was just a simple snapshot of what it looked like. His finest art defeated itself. God only knows what was the point, but it made him smile. When the timer rang again he took the photograph out and slid it into its final bath. He fished out several other prints and attached them with small clothespins to a wire. Then he dried his hands on a towel, one finger at a time. These gestures made me think of all the years he’d spent alone, doing his own dishes, his laundry.

I felt our visit drawing to a close, like a scientifically predicted death. We would go out into the light, find a little more to say, and then I’d go.

“There’s a pie for you in the kitchen,” I said. “From Uda. Who is she?”

“Uda Ruth Dell,” he said, as though that explained it.

“I mean, what is she to me? Did I use to know her?”

“Not especially,” said Doc Homer, still studying the photographs. “No better than you knew anyone else.”

“She knows all about me, and then some,” I said. “She probably knows what I had for lunch.”

“You’re in Grace,” he said.

“Well, I was embarrassed because I couldn’t remember her. She wasn’t very helpful. She just stood there waiting for me to rack my brain and come up with her name. She sure knew me right off the bat.”

Doc Homer didn’t care for expressions like “right off the bat.” He switched off the red light before opening the darkroom door, passing us through a moment of absolute darkness. He knew, but refused to accept, that I was afraid of the dark. The click and blackness plunged me into panic and I grabbed his upper arm. Surprisingly, he touched my knuckles lightly with his fingertips.

“You’re in Grace,” he said again, as if nothing had happened. “There is only one of you for all these people to be watching for. And so many of them for you.”

I’d lived all my life with a recurring nightmare. It would come to me in that drowsy twilight where sleep pulls on your mind with tempting music but is still preventable. When I let down my guard the dream would spring again, sending me back into weeks of insomnia. It had to do with losing my eyesight. It wasn’t a complicated dream, like a movie, but a single, paralyzing freeze frame: there’s a shattering pop, like glass breaking, and then I am blind.

Once, years ago on Crete, Carlo and I were driving on a badly rutted gravel road to get to a beach on the south of the island. A truck loaded with blood oranges kicked up a rock that broke the windshield in front of my face. I wasn’t hurt, the rock only pocked the glass and spun out a spiderweb of cracks, but I spent the rest of the day in mute hysteria. Carlo never did know what was wrong. Any explanation I could think of sounded like superstition. My dream was very much more than a dream. It had so much living weight to it, such prescience, it felt like something that was someday bound to happen.

The insomnia, on the other hand, wasn’t such a big problem as you might imagine. I worked around it. I read a lot. In med school I did my best studying while my classmates were in the throes of rapid eye movement. I still considered my night-prowling habits to be a kind of secret advantage I had over other people. I had the extra hours in my day that they were always wishing for.

Emelina would not understand this. The night before school started, she brought me warm milk.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. She’d also brought out a blue embroidered tablecloth, which she shook out like a little sail and spread efficiently over my table. She felt the place needed more honey touches.

“You’ve got to have your sleep. They had a special on Nova about it. This man in Italy died from not sleeping for around eight months. Before he died he went crazy. He’d salute the doctors like he was in the army.”

“Em, I’ll live. That’s too pretty, that tablecloth. Don’t you need that?”

“Are you kidding? Since Grammy joined Stitch and Bitch she’s been embroidering borders on the dish rags. What happens if you just lie in bed and count backward from ninety-nine? That’s what I tell the boys to do when they can’t settle down.”

“Insomnia’s different,” I said. It was hard to explain this to people. “You know the light that comes on when you open the refrigerator door? Just imagine it stays on all the time, even after you close the door. That’s what it’s like in my head. The light stays on.”

Emelina made herself comfortable in my other living-room chair. “You’re like that Thoreau guy that lived at Walden Pond. Remember when we read that in Senior English? He only had two chairs. We need to get you some more stuff in here.”

I was surprised that Henry Thoreau entered into Emelina’s world view. “If I want company I can always go over to your house,” I pointed out.

“That’s the God’s truth. I’m about ready to move out. Tonight Glen and Grammy got into it, oh boy, she says he’s impudent. That’s her all-time favorite word. Whenever Mason gets mad at somebody he yells ‘You’re impotent!’ And people laugh, so we’ll never get him to stop now.”

I drank the milk. I could stand some mothering. I wondered if I’d had this in the back of my mind when I moved in here.

Emelina scrutinized my clean, white walls. “Codi, I hope you’ll take this the right way, but I don’t see how you can live in a place and have it feel like nobody lives there.”

“I have things in here. My clothes, look in the closet. And books. Some of those books are very personal.” This was true. Besides my Field Guide to the Invertebrates there were things Hallie had sent me over the years, and an old volume of American poetry-incomprehensibly, a graduation gift from Doc Homer.

“Your room was like this when we were in high school. I had posters of Paul Revere and the Raiders and dead corsages stuck in the mirror, every kind of junk. And when we’d go over to your house it was like a room somebody’s just moved out of.”

“I’m neat,” I said.

“It’s not neat. It’s hyper neat.”

“Can you imagine what Doc Homer would have said if Paul Revere and the Raiders turned up in his home? Without an appointment?”

She laughed.

“Emelina, who’s Uda Ruth Dell?”

“Well, you know her, she lives up by Doc Homer. She used to take care of you sometimes, I think. Her and that other woman that’s dead now, I think her name was Naomi.”

“She used to take care of us?” I’d been trying all day to place her. I couldn’t believe I’d draw a complete blank on someone who’d been a fixture of my childhood.

“Sure. Uda’s husband Eddie saved you and Hallie’s life that time when you got stranded in a storm down by the crick.”

“I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

“Yes you do. When you and Hallie almost drowned in that flood. You were just little.”

“Well, how do you remember it, then? I don’t.”

“Everybody knew about that. It was a famous incident. You hid down in a coyote burrow and wouldn’t come out and Eddie Dell found you and drug you out. You all stayed at Uda’s. Doc Homer must have been working at the hospital or something.”

“I don’t remember anything about that.”

Emelina looked at me peculiarly, as if she thought I might be pulling her leg. “It was a real big deal. There was a picture in the paper of you two and Eddie the big hero, and his mule.”

“I guess I do remember,” I said, but I didn’t, and it bothered me that my childhood was everyone’s property but my own.

“You know what you are, Codi? I don’t know if there’s a word for it, but it’s the opposite of ‘homemaker.’”

I laughed. She was still distressed by my blank walls. “There’s a word. Home wrecker. But I’m not one.”

“No I don’t mean in the sense of home wrecker. I mean in the sense of home ignorer.”

“Oh, that way,” I said. I was playing dumb. I knew what she meant. My first boyfriend in college was a Buddhist, and even he had had more pictures on his wall than I did. It wasn’t anything noble; I couldn’t claim a disdain for worldly things. Hallie had once pointed out that I had more shoes than you’d find in a Central American schoolroom with class in session. What I failed at was the activity people call “nesting.” For me, it never seemed like nesting season had arrived yet. Or I wasn’t that kind of bird.

After Emelina left for the night, I wrote Hallie. I had a general-delivery address for her in Managua and I asked, the way we did when we were kids leaving notes for each other in secret hiding places, “Are you there yet? Are you reading this now?” I told her about the dead alfalfa fields around Gracela Canyon, which I thought would interest her professionally, and I told her Doc Homer seemed pretty much the same as ever, which was the truth. And I asked if she remembered the time we almost drowned in a coyote den.

9 The Bones in God’s Backyard

Grace High School, backdrop of the worst four years of my life, was as familiar as one of my bad dreams. Walking toward it up Prosper Street filled me with dread. The building itself had a lot of charm, though, which surprised me. As a child I’d paid no mind to the façade. It was a WPA-era building made of Gracela Canyon’s red granite, with ornate egg-and-dart moldings on the white-painted eaves and woodwork over the doors. The school was actually built by the mining company, in its boom years, and with minerly instincts (or possibly just the proper tools) it was built right into the steep side of the canyon, sunk into rock. It was in an old part of town where the cobbled streets wrapped up and around behind the buildings, occasionally breaking into flights of steps and elsewhere so steep as to make motor vehicles pointless. The principal form of exercise in Grace was just getting from your house to wherever you needed to go.

The school had four floors, and each one had a street-level entrance. I’m pretty sure the building was in some record book on account of this. The main entrance was on the side, halfway up the hill: floor three. Carved into its granite arch was a grammatically suspect motto in Latin, CAUSAM MEAM COGNOSCO, which boys used to quote like pig latin or the inane “Indian” talk we heard in movies.

I checked into the principal’s office, where his secretary, Anita, gave me a set of keys and an armload of official-looking papers and cheered me on. “There’s a million forms there: grade forms, class roster, some new thing from the DES, and your CTA. It all has to be filled out.”

“What, you mean I have to work for a living here? Somebody told me teaching high school was easy money.” I looked through the stack of forms. “What about DOA? I may need one of those.”

Anita looked at me oddly for half a second, then laughed. “We’ll just call the coroner when they bring you in.”

I smiled. Doc Homer was the coroner of Grace, and had been for the entirety of my life and then some. Obviously Anita didn’t know who I was; she looked like a recent graduate herself. Anyone in high school now would have been a toddler when I left Grace. This filled me with hope. Walking those wainscoted halls, still painted the exact same shade of toothpaste green, made me shrink into my skin, and I had to keep reminding myself: None of them knows you as Doc Homer’s misfit child. No one here has seen you in orthopedic shoes.

“The kids’ll just love you,” Anita said, surprising me. “They’re not used to anybody so…” she paused, tapping a complete set of maroon fingernails on her metal desk and presumably fishing for a tactful adjective…“so contemporary.”

I was wearing a dark green blazer, tight jeans, and purple cowboy boots. I ran a hand through my hair and wondered if I should have paid a call to the Hollywood Shop, after all. “Do you think I’m not enough of an authority figure? Will they revolt?” The teachers’ meeting, two days prior, had been devoted primarily to theories of discipline.

Anita laughed. “No way. They know who turns in the grades.”

I found the room where I would be teaching General Biology I and II, and made it through the homeroom period by taking attendance and appearing preoccupied. I’d finally paid my preparatory visit to the school a few days earlier, so I knew what to expect in the way of equipment: desks and chairs; some stonetopped lab benches with sinks and arched chrome faucets; an emergency shower; a long glass case containing butterflies and many other insects in ill repair; and a closet full of dissecting pans and arcane audiovisual aids. The quaint provisions led me to expect I’d be working in something like a museum, or a British movie. When the kids filled the room for first period, though, they gave it a different slant. So far in Grace I hadn’t seen a lot of full-blown teenagers. I wasn’t expecting skateboard haircuts.

The girls seemed to feel a little sorry for me as I stood up there brushing chalk dust off my blazer and explaining what I intended for us to do in the coming year. But the boys sat with their enormous high-top sneakers splayed out into the aisles, their arms crossed, and their bangs in their eyes, looking at me like exactly what I was-one of the last annoying things standing between them and certified adulthood.

“You can call me Codi,” I said, though I’d been warned against this. “Ms. Noline sounds too weird. I went to this high school and had biology in this room, and I don’t really feel that old. I guess to you that sounds like a joke. To you I’m the wicked old witch of Life Science.”

This got a very slight rise out of the boys, not exactly a laugh. The girls looked embarrassed. A tall boy wearing a Motley Crüe T-shirt and what looked like a five-o’clock shadow on his scalp pulled a cigarette out of his pocket and thumped it against his knuckles.

“I was told we’d need an authority figure in the classroom, so I dug one up.” I went to the closet and wheeled out a human skeleton. “This is Mrs. Josephine Nash.”

I’d found her downstairs in a storage room filled with damaged field-hockey equipment and gym uniforms from the fifties. The skeleton was in pretty good shape; I’d only had to reattach one elbow with piano wire and duct tape (provided by the janitor). The name-along with an address in Franklin, Illinois-was written in fine, antique-looking letters on the flange of her pelvis. When I discovered her in the storage room I felt moved to dust her off and hang her up on the heavy cast-iron stand and wheel her up to my lab. I guess I was somewhat desperate for companionship.

“Miss,” one of the boys said. “Miss Codi.”

I tried not to smile. “Yes.”

“That’s Mr. Bad Bones.” He enunciated the name in a way that made everybody laugh. “The seniors use him for the Halloween Dance.”

“Well, not anymore,” I said. Mrs. Nash was my compatriot from the Midwest; a possible relative, even. I could see her as somebody’s mother, out pruning roses. This isn’t a toy,” I said, my voice shaking slightly. “It’s the articulated skeleton of a human being who was at one time, fairly recently, walking around alive. Her name was Josephine Nash and she lived in Illinois. And it’s time she got some respect in her retirement.”

I glared at them; teenagers are so attached to their immortality. “You never know where you’re going to end up in this world, do you?” I asked.

Nineteen pairs of blank, mostly pale-blue eyes looked back at me. You could have heard a cigarette drop.

“Okay,” I said. “Chapter one: Matter, Energy, Organization and Life.”

“I don’t know if I’m going to live through this,” I told Emelina, collapsing in her kitchen. Her kitchen chairs were equipales that took you in like a hug, which I needed. My first day had gone as smoothly as anybody could reasonably hope-no revolts, no crises major or minor. Still, I couldn’t put a finger on what it was, but standing in front of a roomful of high-school students seemed to use up a ferocious amount of energy. It made me think of those dancers in white boots and miniskirts who used to work bars in the sixties, trying desperately to entertain, flailing around like there was no tomorrow.

Emelina, Mason, the baby, and I were all exiled to the kitchen; Viola had taken over the living room with her friends for a special afternoon meeting of the Stitch and Bitch Club. They were preparing for their annual fundraising bazaar, and as a backdrop to our own conversation we could overhear the exchange of presumably vital information:

“Last year the Hospital Equipment Committee didn’t make fifteen cents on them sachet cushions.”

“Well, it’s no wonder. They stunk.”

“Lalo saw in a magazine where you can make airplanes out of cut beer cans. The propellers go around.”

Emelina set a cup of tea in front of me. I picked it up and let the steam touch my eyelids, realizing that what I needed most at that moment was to lie in bed with someone who was fond of every inch of my skin.

“It must be weird, going back to that school,” she said.

“Oh, sure. It is. I didn’t let myself think too much about that part of the job. Till today.”

Mason was on the floor, coloring, and Emelina was moving around the kitchen in an effortless frenzy, closing drawers with her hip, cooking dinner, and feeding the baby at the same time.

“Let me do that,” I said, scooting myself over to the high chair and taking the cereal bowl from Emelina.

“Here, he makes a pretty fair mess, let me give you Grammy’s apron,” she said, tying around me a splendid example of Stitch and Bitch enterprise. The baby snapped up cereal as fast as I could spoon it in, wasting little on mess as far as I could see.

“You’re having dinner with us tonight, right?”

“No, thanks,” I said.

“Honestly, Codi, if you think one more mouth to feed is any trouble you’re out of your mind. If I woke up one day and had six more kids I don’t think I’d notice.”

“No, Em, thanks, but I feel like resting in peace.”

“You’re not dead yet, hon.”

From the living room we heard Viola raising her voice now in Spanish, saying something about peacocks: pavones. The other women answered in Spanish, and I could follow just enough to know that they’d moved rapidly onto the subject of fruit trees. Doña Althea sounded agitated. Her high-pitched voice was easy to recognize, exactly what you’d expect from a very small, strong-willed woman. Emelina raised her eyebrows as she looked under a pot lid. “Do you know the boys won’t even speak Spanish to their Grammy?” she asked in a subdued voice.

I glanced at Mason, who was absorbed in his coloring book, though probably listening. “Is that a problem?”

“Oh, yeah. Viola’s big on all the traditional stuff. She’s real tight with Doña Althea. She wants us to raise the boys puro, speaking Spanish and knowing all the stories. Seems like it might be easier with girls, but these guys…” She shrugged her shoulders. “My parents were always so modern, you remember how Mom is, electric can openers all the way. I always felt like she wanted me to grow up blonde, you know? My dad told me she actually wanted to name me Gidget!”

I laughed. “No. He was pulling your leg.”

“No, he wasn’t. And poor Tucker was named after a car.”

Tucker was a younger brother who’d died in infancy, before I ever knew the family. To tell the truth, I’d forgotten him, in spite of his name passed on to Emelina’s first son.

The baby was sitting with his mouth opened unbelievably wide, waiting for my attention to return to his dinner. I poked in the next bite. A scattering of loud laughter like a rainstorm came from the other room, and all of us in the kitchen were quiet. This gang of old women staked out such a presence, we felt almost crowded out of the house. Mason actually gathered up his papers and started to go outside.

Emelina called him back. “Wait a minute, Mason, before you run off, come show Codi your hand. Codi, could you take a look at his hand? There’s some kind of bump on it. Do you mind?”

“Why would I mind? Let’s have a look.” I felt uncomfortable, not because she’d asked, but with myself, playing doctor. I was a doctor, technically, which is to say I had the training, but it unnerved me to think people saw me in that role. Both Emelina and Mason were quiet while I examined his hand. I bent the wrist back and forth and felt the lump on the tendon. “It’s a ganglion.”

“Is that bad?” Emelina asked.

“No, it’s not serious at all. Just a little bump. Usually they go away on their own. Does it hurt, Mason?”

He shook his head. “Only when he has chores to do,” Emelina offered.

I put a kiss on my fingertips and rubbed it into his wrist. “There you go, Dr. Codi’s special cure.” As he ran off it occurred to me, with a certain self-punitive malice, that this was the extent of special curing I was licensed to dispense.

“So what’s it like up there at the high school?” Emelina asked. “Don’t you keep feeling like Miss Lester’s going to catch you smoking in the bathroom?”

“I never smoked in the bathroom,” I said, scraping the bottom of the cereal bowl and wiping the baby’s mouth with his bib. I’d never seen such efficient eating in my life.

“Oh that’s right, Miss Goody Two-Shoes, I forgot. You didn’t do things like that.” Emelina smiled. She’d been at least as virtuous as I was in high school; the difference was she was popular. Virtue in a cheerleader is admirable, while in a wallflower it’s gratuitous.

“Miss Goody Orthopedic-Shoes,” I said.

She hooted. “Why on God’s green earth did you and Hallie wear those shoes? I never did ask. I figured the polite thing was to just ignore them. Like when somebody has something hanging out of their nose.”

“Thank you. We wore them because Doc Homer was obsessed with the bones of the foot.”

“Kinky old Doc,” she said, stabbing a wooden spoon into a pot of boiled potatoes.

“You have no idea. He used to sit us down and give us lectures on how women destroy their bodies through impractical footwear.” I delivered his lecture, which Hallie and I used to ape behind his back: “Of the two hundred bones in the human body, more than a quarter are in the foot. It is a more complicated instrument than an automobile transmission, and it is treated with far less consideration.”

Emelina was laughing. “Really, you have to give him credit. All my mom ever told me was ‘Sit up straight! Don’t get pregnant! And wear a slip!’”

“Doc Homer wasn’t that great on pregnancy and underwear, but Lord knows the Noline girls were not going to have fallen arches.”

“Where’d you get those god-awful things from? Not the Hollywood Shop, I know that.”

“Mail order.”

“No.”

“Swear to God. Hallie and I used to burn the catalogues in the fireplace when they came but he’d still get those damn shoes. For the sizing he’d draw around our feet on a piece of paper and then take all these different measurements. I expect I spent more time with Doc Homer getting my foot measured than any other thing.”

Emelina found this hilarious. I know she thought I was exaggerating, but I wasn’t. In a way we were grateful for the attention, but the shoes were so appalling. They affected our lives, the two of us differently. Hallie just gave up trying for image, while I went the route of caring too much. It was harder for me, being the first to break into junior high, then high school, in these shoes. I suffered first and therefore more.

“I’m positive that was the whole reason I hardly ever had any dates in high school,” I told Emelina.

“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “The only reason boys didn’t ask you out was because they thought you were too good for them. You were so smart, why would you want to run with a Grace boy? That’s what they thought.”

The meeting in the living room was beginning to break up. We lowered our voices automatically.

“No,” I said solemnly. “It was the shoes. It’s a known fact. The day I left Grace I bought a pair of gladiator sandals and my sex life picked right up.”

Emelina eventually remembered a letter for me she’d been carrying around a while. She’d stuck it in the diaper bag when she picked up the mail, and then forgotten it, so it suffered more in its last hundred yards of delivery than it had in its previous fifteen hundred miles. Of course, it was from Hallie.

I went home to read it, like a rat scurrying back to its hole with some edible prize. I settled into the living-room chair, polished my glasses, and scowled at the postmark: Chiapas, near Mexico’s southern border, only days after she left. That was a disappointment, anything could have happened since then. I slit it open.

Codi dear,

I’ve been driving the way you’re supposed to here, like a bat out of hell, the wrong way out of hell whenever that’s possible. I’m getting the hang of outlawry. You’d be proud. I burned up the road till around La Cruz and then slowed down enough to enjoy the banana trees going by in a blur. The tropics are such a gaudy joke: people have to live with every other kind of poverty, but a fortune in flowers, growing out of every nook and cranny of anything. If you could just build an economy on flowers. I stayed in a house that had vanilla orchids growing out of the glutters and a banana tree coming up under the kitchen sink. I swear. There were some kind of little animals too, like mongooses. You would know what they are. I’m happy to be in a jungle again. You know me, I’m always cheered by the sight of houseplants growing wild and fifty feet tall. I keep thinking about 626-BUGS and all those sad ladies trying to grow zebrinas in an arid climate.

I wanted to take the coast highway as far as Nayarit, where it gets rugged, but I paid the price for that little adventure. (Doc Homer would say: I paid a dollar for my shiny dime.) I broke, not bent but flat out busted an axle in Tuxpan and spent two days waiting around while a man with a Fanta delivery truck and time on his hands brought in a new one from Guadalajara. The only hotel was a two-story pension with live band (euphemism) on weekends. I spent the time mostly sitting on my balcony watching pelicans dive-bomb the sea, and remembering our trip to San Blas. Remember those pelicans? If you’d been there, in Tuxpan, it would have been fun. I couldn’t bring myself to do anything productive-there were people I could have talked to about crops and the refugee scene, but instead I spent one whole morning watching a man walk up the beach selling shrimp door to door, He had a pole over his shoulders, with the bucket of shrimp hung on one side and on the other side a plastic jug of water. Every time he sold a kilo of shrimp he’d pour out that much water and drink it, to balance the load. I watched him all the way down the bay and thought, I want to be like that. Not like the man selling shrimp. Like his machine. To give myself over to utility, with no waste.

But I was useless, lying around those two days. Saving my strength for what’s ahead, I guess. I get more jumpy as I move south, like a compass needle or something. Saw an awful lot of dead cropland in the interior, and I know it will be worse in Nicaragua. War brings out the worst in production agriculture.

Tomorrow I cross the border, but it’s hard to say where the border is, because this whole part of Chiapas where I am now is camps of Guatemalans. This whole livelong day I drove horrible mountain roads in the rain and saw refugee camps, one after another like a dream. They say the Guatemalan army is on a new scorched-earth campaign, so people come running across the border with the clothes on their backs and their hearts in their throats and on a good day the Mexican cops don’t bother them. On a bad day, they make them wake up the kids, take down their hammocks, and move into somebody else’s district. It’s a collective death. A whole land-based culture is being relocated out of its land-like a body trying to move out of its skin. Only the portable things survive. The women have their backstrap looms and woven clothes, like you see sometimes in import stores. All those brilliant colors in this hopeless place, it kills you.

Right this minute I’m sitting in the rain, waiting for the mail truck/water delivery (I keep expecting that same guy with his Fanta truck) and watching four barefoot kids around a cook fire. The one in charge is maybe six. She’s sharpening cooking sticks while these damp black chickens strut around shaking themselves and the toddlers pull logs out and roll them to make sparks. I’m just on edge. You live your life in the States and you can’t even picture something like this. It’s easy to get used to the privilege of a safe life.

I know you’re worrying but you don’t have to, since we’ve established that I’m the luckiest person alive. Even though I don’t feel like it. I’ll write from Nica next. I’m sure I’ll be happier once I’m put to some use. I miss you, Codi, write and make me feel better.

Love from your faithful adoring slave-for-life,

Hallie

The ending was an old joke: in our letters we used to try to outdo each other with ingratiating closures. The rest of the letter was pure Hallie. Even in a lethargic mood she noticed every vanilla orchid, every agony and ecstasy. Especially agony. She might as well not have had skin, where emotions were concerned. Other people’s hurt ran right over into her flesh. For example: I’ll flip through a newspaper and take note of the various disasters, and then Hallie will read the same paper and cry her eyes out. She’ll feel like she has to do something about it. And me, if I want to do anything, it’s to run hell for leather in the other direction. Maybe it’s true what they say, that as long as you’re nursing your own pain, whatever it is, you’ll turn your back on others in the same boat. You’ll want to believe the fix they’re in is their own damn fault.

The strangest thing is that where pain seemed to have anesthetized me, it gave Hallie extra nerve endings. This haunts me. What we suffered in our lives we went through together, but somehow we came out different doors, on different ground levels.

Friday night after the first week of school, the dog with the green bandana showed up again at the gate. I saw it when I came outside after my solitary supper to water the morning glories and potted geraniums on my front step. The heat seemed to wilt them right down to death’s door, but water always brought them back. I could only wish for such resilience.

“Hi, buddy,” I said to the dog. “No barbecues today. You’re out of luck.”

Thirty seconds later Loyd was standing at the door with a bottle of beer. “I told you I’d get back to you with this,” he said, grinning. “I’m a man of my word.”

“Well, okay,” I said. “I guess you are.” I wasn’t sure how I felt about seeing him in my doorway, other than surprised. I pulled a couple of folding chairs onto the patio, where we could see the sunset. The sky was a bright, artificial-looking orange, a color you might expect to see in the Hollywood Shop. “Are you going to have one too, or do I drink this alone?” I asked him.

Loyd said he’d just take a soda because he was marked up and five times out. I was mystified by this information.

“I’m marked up on the call board at the depot,” he explained. “To take a train out. Five times out means I’m fifth in line. I’ll probably get called late tonight or early tomorrow morning.”

“Oh,” I said. “It sounded like baseball scores. The count is three and two and it’s the bottom of the seventh.”

Loyd laughed. “I guess it would sound like that. You get used to talking railroad talk like it was plain English. Around here that’s about all everybody does, is railroad.”

“That, and watch the fruit fall off their trees.”

Loyd looked at me, surprised. “You know about that, do you?”

“Not very much,” I said. I went into my house to get him a soda, picking my way over the rough bricks of the patio because I was barefoot. I will say this much for Doc Homer’s career as a father: my arches are faultless.

When I came back out I sat down and handed over a Coke, letting Loyd fight with the easy-off twist cap himself. I had to use pliers on those things. It didn’t give Loyd two seconds of trouble. He palmed it, then tipped his head back and drank about half the bottle. The things that aggravate me most in the world are the things men do without even knowing it.

“So is that your dog?” I asked.

“That’s jack. You met? Jack, this lady here is Codi Noline.”

“We’ve met,” I said. “I sneaked him some goat spare ribs the other day at the fiesta. I hope he’s not on a special diet or anything.”

“He’s in love, is what he is, if you gave him a piece of that goat. That was one of Angel Pilar’s yearling billy goats. Jack’s had his eye on those spare ribs ever since last summer.”

Jack looked at me, panting seriously. His tongue was purplish, and his eyes were very dark brown and lively. Sometimes when you look into an animal’s eyes you see nothing, no sign of connection, just the flat stare of a wild creature. But Jack’s eyes spoke worlds. I liked him.

“He looks like a coyote,” I said.

“He is. Half. I’ll tell you the story of his life sometime.”

“I can’t wait,” I said, really meaning it, though it came out sounding a little sarcastic. Our chairs were close enough together so that I could have reached over and squeezed Loyd’s hand, but I didn’t do that.

“It was nice of you to come by,” I said.

“So this was your first week of school, right? How’s life with the juvenile delinquents of Grace?”

I was a little bit flattered that he knew about my job. But then everybody would. “I don’t know,” I said. “Pretty scary, I think. I’ll keep you posted.”

The sky had faded from orange to pale pink, and the courtyard was dusky under the fig trees. Every night as it got dark the vegetation around the house seemed to draw itself in closer, hugging the whitewashed walls, growing dense as a jungle.

Loyd touched my forearm lightly and pointed. On the cliff above the courtyard wall, a pair of coyotes trotted along a narrow animal path. Jack’s ears stood up and rotated like tracking dishes as we watched them pass.

“You know what the Navajos call coyotes? God’s dogs,” Loyd said. His fingers were still resting on my forearm.

“Why’s that?” I asked.

He took his hand back and cracked his knuckles behind his head. He leaned back in his chair, stretching out his legs. “I don’t know. I guess because they run around burying bones in God’s backyard.”

Jack got up and went to the courtyard wall. He stood as still as a rock fence except for one back leg, which trembled, betraying all the contained force of whatever it was he wanted to do just then, but couldn’t. After a minute he came back to Loyd’s feet, turned his body in a tight circle two or three times, and lay down with a soft moan.

“Why do they do that? Turn in circles like that?” I asked. I’d never lived with a dog and was slightly infatuated with Jack.

“Beating down the tall grass to make a nice little nest,” Loyd said. “Even if there’s no tall grass.”

“Well, I guess that make sense, from a dog’s point of view.”

“Sure it does.” He bent forward to scratch Jack between the ears. “We take these good, smart animals and put them in a house and then wonder why they keep on doing the stuff that made them happy for a million years. A dog can’t think that much about what he’s doing, he just does what feels right.”

We were both quiet for a while. “How do you know what the Navajos call coyotes? I thought you were Apache.” I felt vaguely that it might be racist to discuss Loyd’s breeding, but he didn’t seem offended.

“I’m a lot of stuff,” he said. “I’m a mongrel, like Jack. I was born up in Santa Rosalia Pueblo. My mama still lives up there. You ever been up there to Pueblo country?”

“No,” I said.

“It’s pretty country. You ought to go sometime. I lived up there when I was a little kid, me and my brother Leander, God, we ran wild all over that place.”

“You have a brother? I never knew that.”

“Twin,” Loyd said. “He’s dead.”

Everybody’s got a secret, I thought, and for the first time that evening I remembered the child of Loyd’s that was unknown to him. It felt furtive and strange to hold it in mind in his presence, as if I were truly holding it, and he might see it.

A dust-colored peafowl hopped onto the courtyard wall and then into the fig, rustling the leaves and warning us off with a throaty, chirruping sound. She was awkward and heavy-bodied, no more flight-worthy than a helicopter.

“So you’re Pueblo, and Apache, and Navajo,” I said.

“My dad’s Apache. We boys left Mama and came down to White Mountain to live with him, but it didn’t work out. I ended up in Grace with my mama’s sister. You knew my tía Sonia, right?”

“I don’t think so. Is she still around?”

“No. She’s gone back to Santa Rosalia. I need to go up there and see her and Mama one of these days.”

It sounded like a strangely scattered family. I still wasn’t clear on the Navajo connection.

“Can I use your phone?” he asked suddenly.

“Sure. It might be in use, it’s Emelina’s and J.T.’s phone. They just ran an extension out for me.”

He looked toward the main house as he ducked into my front door. Emelina and J.T. were both home tonight, and Loyd seemed a little guilty about not going over to say hello. It would have been easy for him to come by on the pretense of visiting them, but he hadn’t. I wondered if Loyd still had a reputation as a ladies’ man. Though it was nothing to me, one way or the other. Jack raised his head and peered at me through the darkness, then got up and moved slightly closer to me. I stretched my leg and rubbed his back with my bare foot. His coat was a strange blend of textures: wiry on top and soft, almost downy underneath.

Hallie and I almost had a dog once, back when our Tucson house was on the underground railroad. Hallie had come home one night with a refugee woman and child and a little cinnamon dog. The mother had been tortured and her eyes offered out that flatness, like a zoo animal. But I remember the girl, in a short pink dress and corduroy pants, following that puppy under the bathroom sink and all over the house. I had no reason to believe, now, that any of the three was still living. The woman and her daughter were eventually arrested and sent back to tropical, lethal San Salvador. And we’d decided realistically that we didn’t have room for a dog, so it went to the Humane Society. Terms like that, “Humane Society,” are devised with people like me in mind, who don’t care to dwell on what happens to the innocent.

Loyd came back out, being careful not to slam the decrepit screen door. “I’m next in line,” he said. “Three guys ahead of me laid off to watch the Padres game. I better get home.” Jack got up instantly and went to his side.

“Well, thanks,” I said, still thinking of the cinnamon dog. I held up my bottle. “It’s nice to see you again, Loyd.”

He stood there grinning, the fingers of his right hand playing with Jack’s nape. I didn’t know quite how to finish off the evening. Loyd hesitated and then said, “I’ve got to drive up to Whiteriver, a week from Saturday. To see about something.”

“Well, that sounds mysterious,” I said.

“To see about some game birds. Anyway I thought you might like to get out of here for some fresh air. You want to go?”

I took a deep breath. “Sure,” I said. I wasn’t sure at all, but my mind had apparently made itself up. “Okay. I could use some fresh air.”

Loyd gave a funny little nod, and went out through the gate. Jack disappeared behind him into the cactus jungle.