Barbara Kingsolver (12 page)

“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.

O
n 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 dis
pensed 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.:

And a P.P.S.:

“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 ques
tion 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.