Animal Dreams

11 A River on the Moon

Loyd and I didn’t go to Whiteriver. He was called out on Friday for a seven-day stand on a switch engine in Lordsburg. He seemed disappointed and promised we’d go another time. Loyd didn’t have much seniority on the railroad; he’d only moved back to Grace a few years earlier, and at Southern Pacific he was still getting what he called “bumped” a lot. It was hard to plan his time off.

I was somewhat relieved. I’d been unsure of what I was getting into, and had my doubts. Once I found out, I had more.

I’d asked J.T. what “game birds” were. He and I were out working in the old plum orchard one evening, pruning dead branches out of the trees. My job was mainly to stay out of the way of falling timber. It was a fair distance from the house, and Emelina had asked if I could go along to keep an eye on him. She wasn’t the type to worry, but a man hanging from the treetops wielding a chainsaw is a nerve-racking sight, believe me. Even if he isn’t your husband.

J.T. informed me that game birds were fighting cocks. He was taking a break just then, leaning on one hand against a tree trunk and drinking what seemed like gallons of water.

I was stunned. “You mean like cockfights.”

J.T. smiled. “You been talking to Loyd?”

“He invited me to go with him up to Whiteriver. He said something about game birds, and…” I laughed at myself. “I don’t know, I was thinking of something you’d eat. Cornish hens.”

He laughed too. He offered me the jar of water and I drank from it before handing it back. I was surprised at the easy intimacy I felt with J.T. We hadn’t been friends in high school-he was, after all, captain of the football team. Through no meanness on his part, but simply because of the natural laws of adolescent segregation, we might as well have gone to high school on different planets. Being neighbors again now brought back what we’d forgotten then: we had a relationship that dated back even before Emelina. We were next-door neighbors in toddlerhood. We’d played together before male and female had meaning.

He turned up the glass jar and drank it to the bottom, tensing the muscles in his jaw when he swallowed. J.T.’s whole body shone with sweat. I briefly imagined him naked, which disturbed me. I’d slept with someone’s husband before-an Asian history professor in college-mistaking his marital status for something comforting and fatherly. But I was devoted to Emelina. No, that wouldn’t happen.

It was early October, and still hot. Grace was supposed to have the perfect climate, like Camelot or Hawaii, and it’s true that growing up here I could hardly remember an uncomfortable day, temperature-wise. Most of the homes had neither air-conditioning nor central heating, and didn’t need them, but this fall had turned into hell warmed over. Down in the desert, in Tucson, every day was in the hundred-and-teens and the TV weathermen were reporting the string of broken records almost proudly, like scores in a new sport. In Grace no one kept track especially, but we suffered just the same.

J.T. knelt down to start the chainsaw again, but I spoke up before he could yank the cord. “I thought cockfighting was illegal.”

“Most everywhere it is, but not in the state of Arizona. And up on the reservation they’ve got their own laws. Loyd’s not a criminal, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I guess I don’t know what I’m asking. I just can’t see Loyd and cockfighting.”

“His daddy was real big in the sport. He was kind of a legend up there in Apache country.”

“So Loyd’s got to keep up the tradition,” I said, without sympathy. I knew Loyd’s father was also a renowned drunk.

J.T. asked, “You an animal lover?”

“Not to extremes,” I said. “I eat them.” I thought of how unmoved I’d been watching Emelina chop off heads for our Sunday dinner, that first day in Grace. “But watching animals kill each other for sport,” I said tentatively, “that’s kind of an unsavory business, isn’t it?” I looked toward the edge of the orchard. It was getting dark fast. Already I could see moonlight reflected in the irrigation ditches.

J.T. sat on his heels and looked straight up into the branches over our heads. “I don’t know why I mess with these trees,” he said. “They’re sixty years old. They don’t produce worth a damn anymore. I could cut them down and get a lot better out of this ground, not to mention the firewood. But my daddy gave me this orchard.” He picked up the stone of a plum, weathered shiny white like a tooth, and rubbed it with his thumb. After a minute he raised his arm with a quick overhand snap and threw it toward the river. “Loyd’s old man didn’t have one damn thing to give him but cockfighting.” J.T. looked at me. “I’m not crazy about it either. Codi. But you’ve got to know Loyd before you decide.”

I dropped the subject of cockfighting. Loyd had begun to come by fairly regularly in the evenings, which is to say regular for a railroad man: I’d see him three days in a row, and then not at all for a week. It reinforced the feeling that we were only casual acquaintances, meeting nearly by accident, and I tried to limit my expectations to the point where I paid no attention to how I looked in the evenings. Sometimes as I walked around the brick floors of my living room and bedroom I’d realize I was listening for the jingle of Jack’s tags, and then I’d click on the radio.

When Loyd did show up we would drag our lawn chairs out for a view of the sun’s parting shot at the canyon wall, and we’d talk about nothing in particular. For instance, he told me the story of Jack’s life. Jack’s mother was a coyote that Loyd took in when he was living up on the Apache reservation. She’d been crippled with buckshot in her shoulder, and had gone into heat. Loyd saw her one night skirting the arroyo behind his house, trying to get away from a pack of males. He got her attention with a low whistle, and then he left his front door open and went to bed; next morning, she was curled up under his cot.

I didn’t question this. For one thing, he seemed to hold a power over females of all types. But truly Loyd had the most unself-conscious way of telling a story I’d ever heard, as if it didn’t matter whether I was impressed or not, he was just going to give me the facts. It seemed as if he didn’t care enough, one way or the other, to lie.

“I kept her shut up in the house for a week with my dad’s old dog, Gunner. Gunner lost one of his back legs when he was a pup and he could get around real good, but he’d never in his life mounted a female. I thought she’d be safe with him.”

This matter-of-fact talk about heat and mounting made me slightly edgy, or rather, edgy once-removed. I felt like I ought to be uneasy with Loyd, but I wasn’t. To him it was life and death and dogs. Sometimes Loyd seemed about twelve.

“Well, Jack is here to tell the tale,” I said. “So I guess she wasn’t safe.”

Loyd smiled. “Nope. Old Gunner had his one chance at love. He got into some poisoned coyote bait right after that. He died before the pups were born.”

“How do you know they were his? She could have been pregnant already.”

Loyd asked Jack, as politely as you’d ask a favor from a friend, to roll over. “See that?” Over Jack’s heart was a white patch with a black crescent moon in its center. “That’s Gunner’s. There were seven pups, two black and five brown, and every one of them had that badge.”

“How did you know which one to keep?”

He hesitated. “Dad decided,” he said finally. “And Jack. Really I guess Jack’s the one that decided.”

They were nothing electrifying, these chats with Loyd in the dark, but they were a relief from my days at the high school, which were spent in a standoff just shy of open war. Occasionally Loyd took the tips of my fingers and rubbed them absentmindedly between his own, the way he would surely stroke Jack, if Jack had fingers. The night of the story of Jack, he also kissed me before he left, and I was surprised by how I responded. Kissing Loyd was delicious, like some drug I wanted more of in spite of the Surgeon General’s warning. Later on, when I slept, I had dreams of coyotes in heat.

I also saw Hallie. Her hair moved around her like something alive. “I’ve kissed a man who kills birds,” I confessed, but she looked past me as if she didn’t have a sister. Her eyes were pale as marbles. I woke up confused, too shaken to get up and turn on a light.

I’d dreamt of Carlo, too, on several occasions, for no good reason I could see. He’d written me a letter that was fairly medical and devoid of passion. He did miss me, though, and that sentiment brought comfort as I lay in my empty bed. It meant I was lonely by choice, or by difficult circumstances such as an ailing father; these things are supposed to feel better than being lonely because nobody wants you. Lately I’d started thinking about Carlo with a kind of romantic wistfulness, which I knew was bogus. The truth is, we’d essentially promised each other from the beginning that we wouldn’t stay together. “No strings,” we said, proving that we were mature medical students without spare time. The odd thing is that we did stay together, physically, and so I suppose falling out of love was our hearts’ way of keeping the bargain. The end was always curled up there between us, like a sleeping cat, present even in our love-making.

Especially there. Carlo and I had gone to bed together for the first time one early dawn during our rotation in pediatric intensive care, after we’d worked all night trying to save a Papago baby brought in too late from the reservation. We’d gone straight from the dead baby to my apartment, my bed. There was hardly any talk that I remembered, we just held on to each other, joined, for as long as our bodies could stand it. I wanted anything that would stop that pain, and Carlo was strong medicine. Not happiness, nothing joyful, only medicine.

There was one other time of desperate, feverish connection that I particularly remembered. This was much later, when Carlo and I were living abroad. Carlo had been granted the opportunity to spend a year in an unbelievably remote clinic, halfway up the tallest mountain in central Crete.

The work was rugged, but in December we took a trip away from the village, to Venice. The clinic closed for some combination of clan ritual and Greek Orthodox holiday that practically evacuated the village. We set off for Italy feeling like truant school kids, drinking wine in tin cups on the train and reeling with the heady sense of getting away with something. Before that he’d scarcely managed an afternoon off, much less a week. Then Carlo came down with a cold on the overnight ferry to Brindisi, and by the time we reached Venice we were both burning up, our skin hot to the touch, like furnaces. Our bodies’ internal combustion gave rise to an unquenchable craving for carbohydrates, and for each other, so we checked into the Penzione Meraviglioso and for a week ate plates of pasta and made a kind of sweaty, delirious love previously unknown to either of us, in a bed that was memorably soft and huge.

The Penzione looked out onto the cold, damp Grand Canal and a dim little plaza ominously named the Piazza of the Distraught Widows. (Distraught or Inconvenienced, it could translate either way.) The origin of this name was unknown to the elderly matron, who was born and raised in the building. She brought food up to us and was alternately scandalized by our appetites and worried for our well-being. She was of the opinion that in damp weather any illness at all would find its way to the lungs. She ventured to tell us we ought to see a doctor.

Carlo spoke Italian. His father had come to America on a steamer carrying cured leather and Chianti. He explained in grammatically imperfect but polite terms that we were both doctors. We could not be in better hands, he said. For my benefit, later, he’d translated the double entendre. By the end of the week, Carlo and the matron were bosom friends. In spite of his notorious shyness, whenever she brought us hot tea he would sit up in bed with a shirt on and give opinions on the infertility of her eldest daughter and the lung ailment of her son-in-law who worked in the glassblowing trade. I lay beside him, meanwhile, with the sheets pulled around my neck, feeling sinful and out of place, like a whore taken home to meet Mother. The matron didn’t ask for my opinions, probably because she didn’t believe I was actually a doctor. Which I wasn’t, technically. I did some work at the clinic-rural Crete was not overly concerned about licensure-but to be completely honest, I was Carlo’s paramour. I did the shopping. I learned the Greek words for oil and soap and bread.

I know that a woman’s ambitions aren’t supposed to fall and rise and veer off course this way, like some poor bird caught in a storm. All I can say is, at one of the many junctures in my life when I had to sink or swim, Crete was an island, a place to head for, new and far away. I had just dropped out of medicine in my first year of residency, a few months shy of becoming a licensed M.D. I’d discovered there was something serious, mainly a matter of nerve and perhaps empathy, that stood in my way. I learned all this while a baby was trying to be born feet first. I couldn’t think how I was going to tell Doc Homer, and I’ll admit I was attracted just then to the idea of putting an ocean between myself and that obelisk of disapproval. It also helped that Carlo really wanted me to go with him. But I had no mission beyond personal survival; it was nothing like Hallie’s going to Nicaragua. Our village had its own kind of bleakness, the bones and stones of poverty, but the landscape was breathtaking. Our classmates were treating intestinal parasites in Niger and Haiti, black lung in Appalachia, while Carlo and I set broken legs on the steep slope of Mount Ida, mythical birthplace of Zeus. Poverty in a beautiful place seemed not so much oppressive as sublime. Basically it’s the stuff of the world’s great religions, I told myself, although I knew better.

It was 100 degrees in the shade, and the burgeoning minds of Biology I and II took a field trip to the river; our putative goal was to get some samples of water to examine under the microscope. We were learning about the plant and animal kingdoms, starting right down at the bottom of the ladder with the protozoans and the blue-green algae. I could easily have collected a gallon of river water myself and brought it in, but the school had no air conditioning and I’m not completely without a heart. I’d played it tough with the kids long enough to prove my point, if there was one, and I was tired of it. We all were.

I knew the trip to the river would turn into a party. I didn’t try too hard to go against nature. The tall kid with the skinhead haircut, whose name was Raymo, was the first one to get wet up to his T-shirt. It took about ninety seconds. I only drew the line when boys started throwing in girls against their will.

“Okay, knock it off, scientists, Marta says she doesn’t want to get wet,” I said. Marta shot me a lipstick-red pout when they put her down, but she’d shrieked “No” and I felt there was a lesson to be learned here, all the way around.

“I’ve got a ton of sample bottles here, so let’s get going.” I sat a safe distance up the riverbank under an ash tree, labeling full bottles as they were brought to me. I’d suggested that they collect shallow and deep water, moving and stagnant, but they went far beyond this, collecting anything that moved. It was enough to make you believe in the hunting instinct. There was a low, grassy island in the middle of the riffle, and several kids were out there on their knees catching bugs and frogs. Raymo actually caught a six-inch perch with a net fashioned from his T-shirt. “Sooner or later I figure we’ll get around to fish,” he said. “A fish is an animal, right?”

“Right,” I said, and let him dump it, along with the frogs, into a mop bucket we’d cajoled from the janitor. I don’t know what teaching in a big-city school is like, but at Grace High we were flexible about interdepartmental appropriations.

Back in the lab, we rounded up all the creatures visible to the naked eye and made a home for them in an aquarium that had once held blue and orange Ping-Pong balls used for some mystical experiment in physics. Marta and two other cheerleaders disposed of the Ping-Pong balls and took over the terrarium project. They made a pond on one side for the fish, and an admirable mossy island on the other side, complete with a beach, and a cave they called the Motel Frog. They refused to deal directly with the clients, though. Raymo transferred the fish and frogs (with his bare hands) from the mop bucket.

The next day we got out the microscopes. The kids groaned, preferring to do experiments on the frogs. It’s hard to get people interested in animals that have no discernible heads, tails, fins, or the like-and plants, forget it. There’s no drama. You just don’t have the skulking and stalking and gobbling up of innocent prey in the plant world. They don’t even eat, except in the most passive sense. In college I knew a botany professor who always went around saying, “It takes a superior mind to appreciate a plant.” Hallie and I were a case in point, I guess. We divided the world in half, right from childhood. I was the one who went in for the instant gratification, catching bright, quick butterflies, chloroforming them in a Mason jar and pinning them onto typewritten tags with their Latin names. Hallie’s tastes were quieter; she had time to watch things grow. She transplanted wildflowers and showed an aptitude for gardening. At age ten she took over the responsibility of the Burpee’s catalogue.

But now I was on my own in the Garden of Eden. I was expected to teach the entire living world to these kids. I would write Hallie and ask her advice on how to turn adolescents on to organisms that have no appreciable sex life. In the meantime we were doing protozoans, which I could handle. I drew huge, fantastic pictures in colored chalk of what we could expect to see in this river water: strands of Nostoc like strings of blue pearls; multi-tentacled hydras; rotifers barreling into each other like hyperactive kids. I demonstrated the correct way to put a drop of water on a glass slide, coverslip it, and focus the scope. The lab grew quiet with concentration.

They couldn’t see anything. At first I was irritated but bit my tongue and focused a scope myself, prepared to see the teeming microscopic world of a dirty river. I found they were right, there was nothing. It gave me a strange panic to see that stillness under powerful magnification. Our water was dead. It might as well have come from a river on the moon.

For homework I assigned my classes the task of being spies. They were to find out from their parents what the hell was going on with this river. The pH, which we tested, from some areas came in just a hair higher than battery acid. I couldn’t believe the poisoning from the mine had gone this far. Protozoans are the early-warning system in the life of a river, like a canary in a mine. And this canary was dead. We took a closer look at Raymo’s perch (named Mr. Bad Fish) and the frogs in the terrarium, which seemed in reasonably good health. But then, they’d been awfully easy to catch.

“It can’t be legal,” I lamented to Viola as we sat on the front porch with three of the boys and four grocery bags of snap beans. Emelina and John Tucker were in the kitchen canning as fast as we could snap. When it came to childbearing and gardening, Emelina seemed unable to walk the path of moderation.

“It’s not legal,” Viola said grumpily. “What difference does it make?”

We worked in silence for a while. The aluminum bowl between us rang like a bell when we threw our hard green beans against its sides. Mason hadn’t managed to master the art of snap beans and had fallen asleep in the glider. The twins elbowed each other like irritable birds on a wire. Viola had been overseeing the boys in the garden most of the morning, and for once seemed tired. She was wearing lavender stretch pants, an embroidered blouse, and a baseball cap with the insignia of the Steelworkers’ Union. J.T.’s father had worked in the smelter for forty years, from age eighteen until he died of lung cancer. The cap sat forward on Viola’s head because her long hair was pinned in a thick circle at the back. According to Emelina, Viola felt the boys were losing touch with their past, but looking at her now I couldn’t get a fix on what that past might be. I thought of the Elvis whiskey bottle collection up in her room. I didn’t really know Viola the way I knew Emelina and J.T. and the kids. She was always skirting around the edges of rooms with her hands full, just ready to go somewhere, too busy to sit down and talk.

“They’ll have to pay a fine if they don’t stop polluting the river,” I said cheerfully. “The EPA will shut them down if they don’t clean it up.” At Emelina’s urging, I’d gone down to the courthouse and filed an affidavit with local authorities on the pH and biotic death of the river. I used the most scientific language I could muster, such as “biotic death” and “oxygen load.” I’d written Hallie about it.

Viola said without looking up, “They’re just going to divert the river.”

“What?”

She bent over with a soft groan and took another double handful of beans out of the grocery bag between her legs, and set them into her apron. Curtis and Glen had stopped hitting each other for the moment and were having a race. It took them forever to snap any beans because they had to stop every two minutes to count who had done the most.

“Dam up the river,” Viola said. “That’s all they have to do to meet with the EPA laws. Dam it up and send it out Tortoise Canyon instead of down through here. The EPA just says they can’t put it down here where people live.”

“But then there would be no water for the orchards. That would be worse than the way it is now.”

“That’s right. But it’s okey-dokey with the EPA. The men all had a town meeting about it yesterday, with this hot-shot guy from Phoenix. They sat and talked for about nine or ten hours and finally what he told them is if Black Mountain dams up the river, it’s out of the jurisdiction of the Environmental Protection Agency.” Viola reeled out the long words scornfully, as if she were glad to get them out of her mouth.

“That’s impossible,” I said. “There are water rights.”

“Nobody around here’s got water rights. All these families sold the water rights to the company in 1939, for twenty-five cents an acre. We all thought we were getting money for nothing. We had us a fiesta.”

I stared at her. “So do you know for sure that’s what they’re going to do? Divert the river?”

She shrugged. “Who knows what anybody is going to do for sure? We could all die tomorrow. Only the Lord knows.”

I wanted to shake her. I wished she would look me in the eye. “But this is what you’ve heard is going to happen?”

She nodded once, never taking her eyes off the snap beans that flew through her hands and rang freshly broken into the aluminum bowl.

I still couldn’t believe it. “How could they do that?”

“With bulldozers,” Viola said.

Loyd and I made another date for Whiteriver, this time on a Sunday in October. The evening before, I went with Emelina to hear Chicken Scratch music at the outdoor restaurant run by Doña Althea’s four daughters. The same traveling Waila bands had been coming over from the Papago reservation for decades, substituting sons for fathers so gradually that the music never changed. Emelina’s normal taste ran to Country-Merle Haggard and Dolly Parton; but Waila was something special, she said, she was crazy about it. Her boys, enlightened by MTV, rolled their eyes. She took Mason and the baby with us because, as Emelina put it, they were too little to have a choice.

The restaurant was outdoors, in a walled courtyard that was a larger, more baroque version of Emelina’s. Flowers bloomed everywhere out of pots shaped like pigs and squatty roosters, some of which had lost body parts, and two enormous old olive trees sparkled with tiny Christmas lights that evidently knew no season. Carved out here and there in the thick adobe wall were rounded niches that were home to weather-worn saints the size of a G.I. Joe; some, in fact, looked suspiciously like dolls in saints’ clothing. In a corner, near where the band was setting up, stood a four-foot-tall, almost comically thin St. Francis of Assisi. He looked venerable and tired (also hungry), and was surrounded by a postmodern assortment of glazed ceramic and plastic birds.

The tables and chairs were of every imaginable type, following the same theme, and the flatware too-like snowflakes, no two alike. The effect was completely festive, in spite of Doña Althea’s daughters. All four of them (who each had Althea lodged somewhere in her name) were over sixty, as thin as St. Francis but without his animal magnetism. They moved through the crowd with efficient scowls, taking orders and bringing out heavenly food from the little kitchen, all the while acting as though they couldn’t quite understand why they’d agreed to go to all this trouble. You would think they’d have figured it out by now. It had been the most popular restaurant in town for half a century.

With tender, paternal attention the Alvaro Brothers unwrapped their musical instruments, which traveled in comfort, nestled in bright-blocked quilts. The men appeared to be three generations, rather than actual brothers. The elder Alvaro, dressed in cowboy boots and a formal Western shirt, cradled a gunmetal saxophone that reminded me of World War II planes. A middle-aged Alvaro with shoulder-length hair played accordion, and two boys in T-shirts played bass guitar and drums. The old sax player stepped up to the microphone. “We are the Alvaro Brothers,” he said. “If we make too much noise, let us know.”

It was the last time any of them smiled. From the instant they began to play, they stood motionless with their mouths turned down in concentration. Everybody else was dancing in their seats. Chicken Scratch music is Mexican-spiced Native American polka. It sounds like a wild, very happy, and slightly drunken wedding party, and it moves you up and down; you can’t keep still. A line of older women in dark skirts and blouses, possibly Alvaro Sisters or Alvaro Wives, stood near the kitchen, swaying a little and tapping their feet. Several couples began to dance, and I could tell Emelina was itching to join them, but she held herself back. Mason showed no such restraint. He was out of his seat in no time, front and center, jumping in circles and running into people’s legs. The younger people moved aside when the Papago women moved out from the wall and began to do the traditional six-step dance. They moved in a loose line, slightly bent over, shuffling over the gravel and sounding-if not looking-exactly like the scratching hens that give the music its name.

The place was packed. It took forever to get served and there were some mixed-up orders, and nobody cared. The music was so buoyant. One of the Althea sisters actually cracked a smile. After forty-five minutes the bass player plucked his lit cigarette from the bridge of his guitar and the Alvaros took a break.

Emelina told me she and J.T. had come here on their first date. They were fourteen. Viola had come too, but fortunately she spent the whole time in the kitchen advising Doña Althea on the menudo, Viola’s specialty. J.T. was thus able to eat his whole meal with one hand on Emelina’s knee, under the table.

“Just think,” I said. “If you’d come on another night, the soup of the day would have been something else and you and J.T. might never have gotten married.”

She smiled an odd little smile. “I don’t think there’s anybody else in this town I could have married but J.T. It was like we had each other’s names printed on us when we were born.”

“Seems like there’s a lot of that in this town.”

“Oh, yeah. And people do what their parents did. The father’s a hoghead, the son’s a hoghead.”

I smiled. “What’s a hoghead?”

“Locomotive engineer. I don’t know why they call them that.” She pecked her fingertips on the tabletop, watching the Papago women talking to the musicians.

For a while I’d believed that Emelina and J.T., with their congenial partnership and all those miles between them, were like Carlo and me, parallel lines that never quite touched. I was wrong. Two nights before when J.T. came home at 3 A.M. they made love in the moonlit courtyard, urgently, with some of their clothes on. My house was dark but I was awake, invisible in my kitchen. I felt abandoned. Emelina was nothing like me.

“It’s dangerous,” she said suddenly. “Shit, you can’t think about it but it’s hell, the railroad. Did you know Fenton Lee, in high school?”

“Sure.”

“He was in a head-on wreck two years ago. Bringing his train out of the yard in El Paso, at night, and somebody else was coming in, lined for the same track. Nobody knows why. Maybe a signal failed. Southern Pacific says no. But J.T. says it happens.”

“So Fenton was killed?” I remembered him plainly, in horn-rim glasses. He had blond bangs and a loud laugh.

“Yeah, it was real bad. They heard the crash all over the yard. The one engine climbed up the other one and sheared off the top. There wasn’t a whole lot left.”

I felt numb. A train wreck and Fenton dead in it were beyond what I was willing to imagine.

“You can jump off, when you see that coming,” Emelina told me. “Fenton’s brakeman and conductor jumped off, and the other crew did, but Fenton stayed on. I guess he didn’t really believe it. I told J.T., ‘If you ever see a headlight coming at you, don’t you dare save the train. You get your butt out of there.’”

The band started up again and Emelina’s mood quickly lifted. Our food arrived and Mason snapped back to the table. Emelina resettled the baby in the rickety high chair. “So you’re going up to the rez with Loyd tomorrow,” she said, her eyes twinkling. “This is getting serious. If I was your mother I’d tell you to wear garlic around your neck.” She dipped the tip of her spoon into her refried beans and fed it to the baby. He took the spicy brown mush like manna from heaven. “But since I’m not your mother,” she said soberly, “I’d advise you to wear nice-looking underwear.”

She embarrassed me. “It’s nothing serious,” I said. “We’re not exactly couple material, are we? Me and Loyd-with-one-L.”

She looked up, surprised. “He can’t help how his name’s spelled.” She paused a minute, studying me. “What, you think Loyd’s dumb?”

Now I had embarrassed myself. “No, I don’t think that. I just can’t see myself with a guy that’s into cockfighting.”

I’m sure Emelina suspected this was nowhere near the whole truth. She was thinking I did hold Loyd’s misspelled name against him, and a lot of other things. That I couldn’t see myself with a roughneck Apache hoghead who was her husband’s best friend. I felt myself blush. I was just like Doc Homer, raising himself and Hallie and me up to be untouched by Grace.

“I’ll tell you something, honey,” Emelina said, pausing her spoon midway enroute to the baby’s open mouth. “Half the women in this town, and not just the single ones, would give up Sunday breakfast to go to Whiteriver in that little red truck.”

“I know that,” I said, paying attention to my enchiladas. I didn’t know how to apologize to Emelina without owning up to something I wasn’t sure I felt. Strictly speaking, I didn’t think I was better than Loyd and half the women in Grace. I was amazed, in fact, by Loyd’s interest in me. I also didn’t think it would last very long.

Emelina directed her energies back to mothering. “Mason, honey, don’t pull all that stuff out with your fingers,” she shouted affectionately above the music, which had risen in pitch. “I know it’s stringy. I’ll cut it up for you.” She reached across the table, expertly dissecting Mason’s chicken burro.

For some reason I glanced up at the baby, whose eyes and mouth were wide. Something was severely wrong. He wasn’t breathing. I knocked over my chair getting to him. I reached my finger into his throat and felt something, but couldn’t dislodge it. He made a voiceless gag. I stood behind his chair and pulled him up by the armpits, folded him over my left arm, and gave him four quick whacks between the shoulder blades. Then I rolled him over so he was face up and wide-eyed but still head down; supporting his head with my right hand, I tucked two fingertips under his breastbone and poked hard. A small, hard, whole pinto bean shot out of his mouth like a bullet.

The whole operation took maybe thirty seconds. Emelina picked the bean up off the table and looked at me. Her face was ashen as the baby’s.

“He was choking,” I said dumbly, laying him carefully on the table. “That’s the only way you can get something out of the windpipe when it’s in that far.”

He lay still for about half a minute, breathing but still looking gray, and then he coughed twice and began to scream. His face turned rosy purple. Several women from nearby tables had whipped the napkins off their laps and were crowding in close around us. The music stopped. Emelina stared at her son like he was something she hadn’t ordered, set down on the table.

“It’s okay to pick him up,” I said. “He’ll be sore in the ribs, but he’s okay.”

She held him against her shoulder. He was still shrieking, and I don’t think there was a person in the restaurant now who wasn’t staring at us. At me, actually. Emelina looked up with enormous eyes, as if I were one of the saints in the wall: Our Lady of Blocked Windpipes. She wiped tears off her chin with the back of her hand.

“It’s no big deal,” I said.

It really wasn’t. I’d just done what I knew how to do.

Emelina begged me to sleep in the house with them that night, in case he stopped breathing again. There was no reason in the world for that to happen, and I told her so. But she was quietly beside herself. J.T. had left for El Paso that morning, for two weeks this time because of some mess about the derailment. Viola was out late at another so-called “emergency meeting” of her women’s club. I think Emelina felt lonely, or vulnerable-afraid of the simple fact that life held possibilities she couldn’t handle alone. It must have been a rare experience for Emelina, and I felt for her. While we were making up a bed for me in the baby’s room, I stopped and hugged her. She held on to me like a child.

I knew better than to expect sleep. I lay curled on my side, listening in spite of myself to the baby’s soft exhaled breaths, and I kept turning my mind away from the one thought that kept coming back to me, persistent as an unwanted lover’s hand, that I’d saved a life.

I thought about Loyd instead. I knew nothing about where we were going tomorrow; I hadn’t seen that country. My mind turned over various expectations, none of which I recognized as my own. Who did I think I was, and what did I want from an Apache cockfighter with a misspelled name? His body, yes. But I couldn’t take that risk, and end up needing more.

At some time in my life I’d honestly hoped love would rescue me from the cold, drafty castle I lived in. But at another point, much earlier I think, I’d quietly begun to hope for nothing at all in the way of love, so as not to be disappointed. It works. It gets to be a habit.

A pack of coyotes set up a sudden racket near the house, yipping and howling, so close by they sounded like they had us surrounded. When a hunting pack corners a rabbit they go into a blood frenzy, making human-sounding screams. The baby sighed and stirred in his crib. At seven months, he was just the size of a big jackrabbit-the same amount of meat. The back of my scalp and neck prickled. It’s an involuntary muscle contraction that causes that, setting the hair follicles on edge; if we had manes they would bristle exactly like a growling dog’s. We’re animals. We’re born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts. There’s no sense pretending. Tomorrow, I thought, or the next day, or the day after that, I would have sex with Loyd Peregrina.

12 Animal Dreams

On Sunday morning I put on jeans, changed into a denim dress, then back into jeans again, feeling stupid. I can get into a mood where I annoy myself no end. At the moment when I got completely fed up and stopped caring, I had on jeans and a white cotton shirt and silver earrings, so that’s what I wore. And yes, I’ll admit it, nice underwear.

I waited on the porch and was relieved when Loyd pulled up before Emelina’s household had roused. It was a little odd, living with a family that paid attention to my social life.

Jack stood up to greet me from the back of the pickup and I rubbed his ears. “I brought lunch,” I told Loyd, sliding into the cab with a basket Emelina had helped pack the night before.

He smiled wonderfully. “That’s mighty white of you.”

I didn’t know what to make of that. It was something people said, but usually when they said it both people were white.

I asked him to detour past the Post Office so I could check for mail. There was no regular mail delivery in Grace, probably on humanitarian grounds. A daily route up these stairstep streets would have put some postal employee into a cardiac high-risk category. Every family had a box at the P.O., which they could check daily or annually, as they pleased. Emelina leaned toward annual. I persuaded her to turn over the key to me; I was the only member of the household expecting mail.

The mailboxes were built right into the outside wall of the Post Office. I peeked through the little window of the Domingos family drawer and saw the striped margin of an airmail envelope.

“Hallie!” I called to Loyd, waving the envelope as I bounced back to the truck. He didn’t seem to register. “My sister Hallie. In Nicaragua.” I checked the postmark to make sure this was true, and it was. Mailed nearly three weeks ago. The stamps, two alike, were bright and beautiful, carrying across oceans and continents a child-like revolutionary hopefulness: a painting of a woman picking red coffee beans, and her baby strapped on her back. Hallie was in the fields of her dreams.

I ripped it open and read quickly. She’d arrived mid-September, was fine, got my letters, she spent a few days in Managua and then backtracked straight to the rural area near Chinandega. She’d expected (or feared) a little formality but they put her to work the day she arrived, wearing her one and only dress. “I’m in seventh heaven,” she wrote, and I could see her hiking up that dress and striding across the plowed rows, leading a battery of stunned men. “This cotton’s been getting sprayed to death and still eaten up with weevils. Cultivation practices are pitiful. I know exactly what to do. I think we’ll get productivity up about 100 percent from last year. Can you imagine? You’d think it was Christmas, everybody’s already talking about how the collective could use this prosperity: they could get a secondary-school teacher in here full time, or a good adult-ed program.”

I got a vivid picture of Hallie’s face and could hear her voice as I read. Her hair would be restrained in a red bandana, her face tense with concentration and her eyebrows knit at angles like accent marks. I could also recall her exact expression as she lay on our living-room sofa in Tucson with her long legs propped up, one hand pushing the hair up from her high forehead, while she calmly dispensed information over the Garden Hotline. I understood the full extent to which she’d been wasting her life on house plants.

The letter was short. She was living in a two-room house with a widowed mother of four young children, who insisted that Hallie have one of the rooms to herself-a luxury that made Hallie uncomfortable. There was nothing to spare. The day she moved in, a request went out to the neighbors and somebody brought over a plate and a tin cup for her, and somebody else brought a fork. Both women had recently lost sons.

The territory she would have to cover, giving crop advice, was huge. She was issued a horse. There were problems with the roads, she said, that made Jeeps a less desirable mode of transport for short trips: horses usually weren’t heavy enough to trigger the land mines the contras buried in the roads. The horse’s name was Sopa del Dia; she was white with gray spots.

She signed it, “Your insane-with-love sister Hallie,” with a P.S.:

Re your question about botany: tell your students plants do everything animals do-give birth, grow, travel around (how do you think palm trees got to Hawaii?), have sex, etc. They just do it a lot slower. Bear this in mind: flowers are the sex organs of plants. Tell the boys to consider that when they’re buying their dates corsages for the prom.

And a P.P.S.:

Sure I remember when we almost drowned in a flood. Plain as day. God, Codi, don’t you? We found those abandoned coyote pups, and the river was flooding, and you wanted to save them. You said we had to. I was chicken because Doc Homer would spank the shit out of us and I wanted to run for it, but you wouldn’t let me.

“My sister’s saving people’s lives in Nicaragua,” I told Loyd.

“She’s a doctor? I thought she was a farmer.”

“People can’t live without crops. There’s more than one way to skin a revolution.”

He nodded.

I wanted him to know more than this about Hallie. That she was also a human being who did normal things. That she’d tried once, just as an example, to teach Carlo and me to break-dance. She’d thrown her hair around like a prissy rock star and we died laughing. In wool socks on the hardwood floor she could moonwalk like Michael Jackson.

I kept folding and unfolding the letter. “She has to ride a horse, because there’s land mines in the roads.”

The cab of the truck shuddered every time we hit a pothole, but Loyd drove calmly, his mind far away, the way I imagined he might look riding a horse. I’d never seen him so relaxed. I looked back a few times to check on Jack, who seemed equally content. I presumed he’d walked around in circles a few times back there before curling up in his nest of imaginary tall grass.

“Is there anything you know of that you’d die for?” I asked Loyd.

He nodded without hesitation.

“What?”

He didn’t answer right away. Then he said, “The land.”

“What land?”

“Never mind. I can’t explain it.”

“The reservation? Like, defending your country?”

“No.” He sounded disgusted. “Not property. I didn’t say property.”

“Oh.”

We passed by another of Black Mountain’s mines, abandoned for years, the buildings standing quiet as a shipwreck. The huge windows of the smelter were made of chicken-wire glass, but a lot of them were broken out anyway; inside loomed the dinosaur skeletons of old machinery. Next to the smelter were the concentrator and a hovel of shacks under rusting tin roofs. Beyond them lay more fallow alfalfa fields, their soil crusted white from all the years of slightly salty irrigation water. Hallie could have stayed right in Grace and done some good, but of course there was the question of relative desperation of need. Nobody was dying for lack of this alfalfa.

The edge of these fields was the southern border of the Apache reservation, just fifteen minutes north of Grace. I hadn’t been there before, and was surprised it was that close.

“Are you kidding?” he asked. “Gracela Canyon used to be in the reservation. The whites took that little section back after some guys hit gold down there.”

“Is that true?”

“Look it up, Einstein. It’s in the town records. They only gave the Apache this land in the first place because it looked like a piece of shit.”

To some extent that must have been true: it was dead-looking country, though not as dead as the used-up cropland. It didn’t look murdered. Here the gentle hills were pale brown grading to pink, sparsely covered with sage and fall-blooming wildflowers. Along the creekbeds were tall stands of cottonwoods. Their yellow leaves rained down. Every now and then we’d pass through clusters of homes that you couldn’t exactly call towns, with long horse corrals strung between the houses. Red horses raised their heads and galloped along beside us for the short distance they’d been allotted, expertly turning aside just before they reached the ends of their corrals. Loyd waved at the people we passed, and they waved back.

“Do all those people know you?” I asked, incredulous.

“Nah. Just my truck.”

Eventually we stopped in one of the settlements that was distinguished from the others by its size and the presence of a store. Rusting soft-drink signs nailed across the front porch marked it as a commercial establishment. Through the screen door I could see shadows of men in cowboy hats. Loyd pulled his parking brake, squeezed my hand, and held on to it for a second. “You want to come in?” he asked doubtfully. “It’s only going to take me ten minutes.”

“I know what this is about,” I said. “J.T. told me you’re into fighting cocks.”

He nodded slightly.

“Well, is it okay for me to go in with you? Are women allowed?”

He laughed, then dropped my hand and flipped his index finger against my cheek. “Big old roosterfighting Indian boogeyman might get you.”

“I’m a big girl,” I said. I got out and followed him up the wooden steps, but regretted it once we were inside. A short man leaning on the counter looked at Loyd and resettled his hat on his head, ignoring me completely. This wasn’t going to be any of my business. I bought a lukewarm soft drink from the old guy behind the counter. He grasped it through his apron and screwed off the cap, leaving a broad asterisk of dust on the white cloth. The other men watched this gesture in silence.

“I’ll be outside,” I told Loyd.

I sat in a wooden rocker on the porch. Jack had lifted his head and cocked his ears but hadn’t moved from the truckbed.

Almost immediately I could hear Loyd raising his voice. “I told you I want Apodaca’s line and not any of the others. I want gaffers. I’m not interested in knife birds.”

The short man said, “Loyd, I’m telling you, you got to go up to Phoenix. They’re getting goddamn tourists at those knife tourneys. It’s a circus. You can get two hundred birds through there in a day.”

“Don’t tell me what I want. Do you have gaffers out there, or did I just waste a tank of gas?”

Their voices dropped lower again. I felt uncomfortable listening in, though I was fascinated and slightly appalled by the notion of “knife birds.” It was encouraging that Loyd didn’t want them, whatever they were. The words the men used were as mysterious as Loyd’s railroad talk. He evidently spoke a lot of languages, not even counting Apache and Pueblo and Navajo.

Across the street from the store stood a substantial-looking whitewashed church-the only white building in an adobe town. It was shaped like the Alamo with a bell tower. The ground in front was planted with petunias, phlox, and marigolds: pink, purple, orange, in that order. One thing Hallie always said she loved about Indian reservations and Mexico was that there were no rules about color. She was right. It was really a splendid combination, now that I looked at it, but in some orderly country like Germany they’d probably arrest you for planting this in front of your house; in suburban Tucson they’d just avoid you. Keep their kids inside when you went out to weed.

People trailed out of the church in twos and threes, mostly women, carrying out the same color scheme in their blouses and skirts. They all looked at me as they passed, not with hostility, but with the kind of curiosity you’d have if you noticed an odd plant had popped up in your garden: you wouldn’t yank it out right away. You’d give it a few days to see what developed.

I could hear roosters cock-a-doodling somewhere, and I was curious. As I went down the steps an adobe-colored dog scooted out of my way and ran under the porch. The store, I discovered, had a deep backyard. The chain-link fence was overgrown with weedy vines, but I could still see in: it was a rooster garden in there. Roosters in small cubicles laid out in neat rows, one bird per cage. They strutted and turned in circles, eying each other as if each moment were new, as if they hadn’t for all their natural lives been surrounded by these other birds. They had red faces and glossy black feathers that threw off iridescent flashes of color, like a hummingbird’s throat. Beautiful. But the claustrophobic energy was tiring to watch.

I heard a door slam and I quickly went back around front. Loyd was ready to go, but not in the bad mood I expected. By the time we got to the edge of town he was smiling.

I offered him the last of my soda. “So, did you waste a tank of gas?”

He put his arm across the back of the seat, his thumb touching the nape of my neck, and shot me a sideways look. “No way.”

We weren’t headed back toward Grace, we drove north. There were no more towns, just reddish hills and a badly rutted road. “Was that Whiteriver?” I asked.

“No. This is what you’d call the Whiteriver metropolitan area.”

“You used to live here? After you left your mother’s pueblo?”

“Around here. We lived up at Ghost River. It’s a little higher ground up there. It’s nice, there’s trees.”

“You and your dad and…” I wanted to ask about his dead twin brother, but then again I didn’t. Not today.

“And Jack,” he said.

“Whatever happened to Jack’s coyote mother?”

“After she had her litter, she left us. She went back to live in God’s backyard.”

I was quiet for a minute, taking in the hills. “And where are we headed now?”

He smiled. “Who wants to know?”

“A hometown girl, looking for some adventure.”

“Well, then, we’re headed for some adventure.”

Loyd kept both hands on the wheel in the washed-out stretches, driving like a race-car driver-I don’t mean fast, but skillfully, with that generous kind of concentration that seems easy as a reflex. We were gaining ground, getting higher, passing through intermittent stands of evergreens. In between were meadows, solidly carpeted in yellow flowers, punctuated by tall white poppies with silver leaves and tissue-paper petals. In the distance, the southern slopes of the mountainsides were dappled with yellow. We passed through another tiny enclave of houses and horse corrals. The people there would have been born into that life; I couldn’t imagine it. For some reason I thought of Hallie’s first letter-the babies playing around the cook fire, in the refugee camps. But this wasn’t like that; it didn’t look desperate, just lonely. It was hard to understand why a person would stay. Loyd hadn’t. But then again, he wasn’t born here. And yet he seemed drawn back, for reasons beyond fighting cocks.

The road smoothed out a bit and Loyd took his right hand off the wheel and laid it on my leg. For a little while he and I both pretended it wasn’t there. Then I asked him, “What would these people around here say if they knew you had your hand on a white girl’s thigh?”

He smiled. “They’d say I was a lucky son of a bitch.”

He lifted the hand and ran his palm up the length of my arm, from my wrist to my shoulder, lightly, just stroking the hairs and not the skin. My nipples stood up and my scalp tingled and my whole body wanted that hand on it, everywhere at once. But he took it back and put it on the steering wheel, and I pitied myself for envying a steering wheel.

“You still haven’t told me where we’re going,” I said.

He nodded at the road. “That’s where we’re going. We’re almost there.” After a minute he geared down into four-wheel drive and turned off the dirt road onto a side path, not really a road but a pair of tracks in the gravelly ground. If you hadn’t known it was there, you’d never have seen it.

If we are going to see some more people about gaffers and knife birds, I thought, I’m going to have to sit and be still, be a white girl. No matter what, I’m going to have to stop thinking about kissing Loyd. I looked away from his face, out the window. There was nothing out there now but fields of yellow flowers, rocky red hills in the near distance, and off to the east very high mountains softly blackened around their tops by a pelt of pine forests. It would be cool up there now, even today. I pictured myself lying under the pines on a floor of brown needles. It was hard to keep Loyd out of the picture.

“What is this?” I was out of the truck, entranced, before he’d even set the brake.

“Kinishba,” Loyd said. “Prehistoric condos.”

That’s just about what it looked like. Out there in the middle of God’s backyard, without a fence in sight, sat a long rectangular building made entirely of carefully set stone, no mortar. Dozens of small doors opened into it across the front.

“Can we go inside? Is it allowed?”

He hooked his elbow around my neck, like a friendly wrestler, as we walked toward the site. “It’s allowed. I allow it.”

“What, are you the landlord here?”

“Till somebody tells me I’m not.”

He let me go and turned toward the truck, whistling once. Jack leaped in a high arc over the tailgate and streaked through the field of foot-tall grass, looking like the soul of happiness. He headed downhill toward what must have been a river; I could see cotton-woods. We were in higher country here, with more vegetation.

“That’s a good dog,” I said.

“Yep. That’s a good dog.”

The doors were no more than four feet high. I ducked through one into a small, rectangular room with a dust floor. It was cool as a cave, and quiet. The door was a square of bright light with the silhouette of Loyd coming through. Even inside the room, the ceiling was low, just inches above my head. I touched it. “People were short back then. Didn’t eat their Wonder bread.”

“They would’ve had to build a special room for you. You would have been their queen.”

I laughed, though it struck me I’d been complimented. Was that how Loyd saw me? Not as a grain elevator on the prairie, but a queen? At the back of the room a door led into another room, which was darker, having no openings to the outside. Two more doors led out of that room-one to the side, and one up through the ceiling, which was made of thick, curved trunks of small trees. There was another whole set of rooms on top of this one.

“Can we go upstairs?”

He shook his head. “I wouldn’t trust those beams. They’re kind of old.”

“How old?”

“Eight hundred years.”

I looked at him. “Are you kidding?”

“Nope.”

We went from room to room, changing directions in the dark until the compass points were entirely lost to me. It was a maze. Loyd said there were more than two hundred rooms-a village under one roof. The air smelled cold. I tried to imagine the place populated: stepping from room to room over sleeping couples, listening through all the noises of cooking and scolding and washing up for the sound of your own kids, who would know secret short cuts to their friends’ apartments.

“The walls are thick,” I observed.

“The walls are graveyards. When a baby died, they’d mortar its bones right into the wall. Or under the floor.”

I shuddered. “Why?”

“So it would still be near the family,” he said, seeming surprised I hadn’t thought of this myself.

Without warning we came out into a bright courtyard in the center, surrounded by walls and doorways on all four sides. It was completely hidden from the outside-a little haven with a carpet of fine grass and an ancient ash tree. A treasure island. I was drawn to the shade. “We should’ve brought the picnic basket,” I said, settling under the ash. The ground was cool. My brief vision of a living city was gone; it seemed ghostly again. For eight hundred years, those bones in the walls had been listening to nothing more than the dry skittering of lizards.

“We’ve got all day,” Loyd said. He sat about two feet away from me, clasping his hands around his knees and looking at the toes of his boots.

“So who built this place, eight hundred years ago?”

“My mama’s folks. The Pueblo. They had their act together back then, didn’t they?”

They did. I couldn’t stop running my eyes over the walls and the low, even roofline. The stones were mostly the same shape, rectangular, but all different sizes; there would be a row of large stones, and then two or three thinner rows, then a couple of middle-sized rows. There was something familiar about the way they fit together. In a minute it came to me. They looked just like cells under a microscope.

“It doesn’t even look like it was built,” I said. “It’s too beautiful. It looks like something alive that just grew here.”

“That’s the idea.” Loyd seemed as pleased as if he’d built it himself.

“Of what? The idea of Pueblo architecture?”

“Yep. Don’t be some kind of a big hero. No Washington Monuments. Just build something nice that Mother Earth will want to hold in her arms.”

It was a pleasant thought. I also didn’t mind the thought of being held in Loyd’s arms, but he was making no moves in that direction. He was explaining the water system-they evidently had some sort of running water-and how they’d grown squash and corn on the hillside facing the river.

I reached over and ran a finger from his knee to his ankle. He looked up. “I’m talking too much, right?”

I shook my head. “No, keep talking.”

“You sure?”

I hesitated. I hadn’t expected to have to make the suggestion, and my stomach felt tight. “Yeah. Just, could you move over here and talk?”

His eyes brightened. I’d taken him by surprise. He leaned over and I took his head in my hands and gave him the kiss I’d been thinking about for the last two hours. It lasted a good long while. He twisted his fingers gently through the hair at the base of my skull and held on tight, and my breath stopped while he laid down a track of small kisses from my earlobe to my collarbone. We lay back on the grass and I rolled against him, looking down into his eyes. They were dark brown, a color with depth to it, like stained glass. It was a little surprising to look at brown eyes after all the pale blues of Grace.

Just being held felt unbelievably good, the long drink I’d been dying for. For a second I hugged back as tightly as I could. Something inside his buttoned shirt pocket made a crackling, cellophane sound. I raised up a little and poked it with my finger. “If you’ve got a condom in your pocket, Loyd Peregrina, this is my lucky day.”

He did. It was.

By late afternoon the shade had moved, and we also had rolled over a few times in the grass, I suppose, traveling from our original spot. Anyway we were in the sun. We disconnected and I lay on my back, feeling the forbidden touch of sun on my nipples and eyelids.

Loyd lay with his head propped on his elbow, just looking at me again, the way he had on the day of Emelina’s party. With a finger he traced concentric circles around my breasts, and triangles on my abdomen, as if warpainting me for some ceremonial mission. Whatever it might be, I felt up to the job. I knew when reason returned I’d be scared to death of feeling that good with another person, but my body was renewed. I felt like a patch of dry ground that had been rained on.

Jack had come into the courtyard and was sleeping in the shade, a little distance away. “He found his way in here without any trouble,” I said. “You boys must come here a lot.”

Loyd kissed my check and sat up and pulled on his jeans. “Yep, kind of a lot. Not as much as I’d like to.”

I thought of the condom in his pocket, the presumption, and felt irritated. “Well it’s a good seduction spot. It worked on me.” I found the rest of my clothes and concentrated on getting my shirt buttoned up. I’d lost an earring somewhere.

Loyd stared at me for a full half minute, and then lay back down, his hands clasped behind his head, looking straight up. “I don’t mean that I bring people here. Nobody but me and Jack’s ever been here before.” He glanced at me, and then away again. “But I guess that’s just what you expect me to say.” He didn’t say anything more for another minute, and then he said, “Shit.”

“I’m sorry. I guess I believe you. I do believe you.”

He was wounded. I suppose some sharp thing in me wanted to sting him, for making me need him now. After he’d once cut me to the edge of what a soul will bear. But that was senseless. Anybody would say that baby was my own fault, and he didn’t even know about it. I looked at this grown-up Loyd and tried to make sense of him, seeing clearly that he was too sweet to survive around me. I would go to my grave expecting the weapon in the empty hand.

“Codi, I couldn’t believe it when you said you’d come up here with me. I couldn’t even believe I asked.”

I sat forward, letting the point of my chin dig into my knee. “I can see what it means to you. I’m sorry for thinking what I did.”

He spoke slowly. “I’ve been looking forward to this ever since Labor Day. Not because I thought we’d…Not for any one reason. I just wanted to come here with you.”

I looked at him. It was the truth. I could think of nothing at all to say.

“I don’t blame you if you’re still pissed off at me for when we were in high school.”

My heart lost its rhythm for a second. “What for?”

“For being a jerk.”

“You remember that?”

I suppose it was an insulting question. He said, “I have a lot of reasons in my mind for the way I was, but they don’t make much difference. I hurt a lot of people.”

I looked at him carefully. “In what way exactly do you think you hurt me?”

He shrugged. “Well, maybe I didn’t. Maybe you didn’t care. But still, I could have been a lot nicer. We went out those couple of times, and then so long sucker, that’s it. Loyd’s a good-time boy, he don’t call the same girl twice.”

I breathed out. Nobody knew, so Loyd couldn’t, but for one minute I’d been afraid. I didn’t want him to know how much of a mark his careless love had made on my life. It would oblige him to one of two mean possibilities: compulsory kindness or a vanishing act. I leaned over and kissed him. “You’re forgiven,” I said. “Plain Jane forgives Mr. High School Honcho for being a red-blooded boy.”

“Plain Jane my ass,” he said, rolling me over on top of him and grabbing mine. “I like you a lot. A real, whole lot. You buy that?”

“I’ll buy it. Just don’t try to sell me no knife birds.”

He looked straight into my eyes. “I’m serious, Codi.”

“Okay,” I said. “Sold.” I laid my head on his chest and nearly went to sleep while he gently stroked my spine. I felt like a baby being coaxed, reluctantly, into dreamland. A few yards away, Jack was already there. His legs jerked helplessly, making him look vulnerable.

“I’ve lost an earring. You see it?”

“No. I’ll help you look in a minute.”

“What’s Jack dreaming about?”

“Chasing rabbits,” Loyd said.

“That’s what everybody says, but I don’t think all dogs dream about that. You watch a city dog that’s never even heard of a rabbit-it’ll do that same thing.”

“How do you know they really dream?”

“They do. All mammals that have been tested have REM sleep, except spiny anteaters.” I cringed after I said this. I sounded like Codi Noline, brain of the seventh grade, despised by her peers.

“Spiny anteaters?”

“Well, I’m sorry, but it’s the truth. I read it in the encyclopedia one time.”

“You are an amazing person.”

He meant it, he wasn’t making fun of me. His hand stopped moving and came to rest on the small of my back. He was actually thinking about all this. Carlo wouldn’t have paid the slightest attention to a conversation like this; he’d be thinking about whatever men think about, how much gas is left in the tank. Loyd asked, “What do you think animals dream about?”

“I don’t know. Animal heaven.” I laughed.

“I think they dream about whatever they do when they’re awake. Jack chases rabbits, and city dogs chase, I don’t know what. Meter readers.”

“But that’s kind of sad. Couldn’t a dog have an imagination, like a person?”

“It’s the same with people. There’s nothing sad about it. People dream about what they do when they’re awake. God, when I used to work for Tía sorting the pecans I’d go to bed and dream about pecans, pecans, pecans.”

I studied his face. “Didn’t you ever dream you could fly?”

“Not when I was sorting pecans all day.”

“Really, though. Didn’t you ever fly in your dreams?” Even I had done that, though not often.

“Only when I was real close to flying in real life,” he said. “Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it’s not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it.”

“So you think we all just have animal dreams. We can’t think of anything to dream about except our ordinary lives.”

He gently moved a lock of hair out of my eyes. “Only if you have an ordinary life. If you want sweet dreams, you’ve got to live a sweet life.”

“Okay,” I said, feeling happy. I was sure no other man I’d ever known would have concerned himself with what animals dream about. “I’m going to sleep now, and I’ll give you a report.” I settled my head back down on his chest. His heartbeat moved faintly against my ear as I looked out across the ground. I saw my silver earring gleaming in the grass.