Barbara Kingsolver (24 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What’s he saying?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you in a minute.”

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

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

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

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

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

“You’re not…”

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

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

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

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

“How would they know that?”

“Word gets around.”

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

“Do you like her?”

“Yeah. I do.”

“How do you know?”

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

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

It was hard to stay mad at Loyd.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

T
he kettle is about to boil, and the telephone
rings. He dries his hands slowly and goes to answer it, expecting Mandy Navarrete’s fourth child. Christmas Day, a long silent day, will end now with a long unpleasant night. There was a time when deliveries excited him; during the gene-pool study he looked forward to those infant eyes, and setting up his camera and lights. But there is nothing to study now. Mandy Navarrete is all muscles and resistance, a woman who delivers in her own time. Her grandmother Concepcion Navarrete was his first-grade teacher. She was similarly muscular, and disapproved of his family.

He lifts the receiver slowly on the fourth or fifth ring. The voice speaks in hurried Spanish but he answers in English because he knows they can understand. He hasn’t spoken Spanish since the day he married Alice. “There is plenty of time,” he says. “I know this process. We don’t need to be in a panic.”

He hears silence, static, several different voices and questions and then the same voice again, emphatically repeating its word:
Secuestrada
. Kidnapped.

“Who is this?”

He listens. The voice is very distant and often breaks. It is a woman, a friend of his daughter. He tries to understand which daughter they mean.
Secuestrada
. Codi has been away for several days but this voice is saying “Hollie.” Someone is keeping her. She was in the field alone, with her horse, when they came to blow up the building where she has chemicals for the crop. He understands none of this and lets it sift past him like pollen, like his life. There are many more words in his life than he would like, most of the time.

Hollie
, the woman insists, as if she is trying to wake him from sleep. Are you the father?
El padre de Hollie Nolina?
We are very much afraid.

We are very much afraid.

In the first grade she hit a boy and they kept her after school. The boy’s name was Simon Bolivar Jones. He was angry at her and had called her vicious names because she climbed to the top of the tall slide the wrong way, up the slide and not the steps, and stood up there and danced, shouting, her hands outstretched. No boy could do it.

“You should let her come home. She hasn’t done anything wrong. She’s being punished for an act of bravery.” He isn’t sure whether he has just spoken in Spanish or English.

Sí
, the voice answers after a moment.
Claro que sí
.

“Where is she?”

No estamos seguros
. We think they must have taken her into Honduras, where they’re camped. A large patrol has gone to look for her. Thirty people, more than half of them from the village where she lives. There were more who wanted to go. Even an eight-year-old boy. Hallie has many friends.

Even an eight-year-old boy. Thirty people.

The words are so much fine dust suspended in the air before him, in the long, trapezoidal block of sunlight from the window. He examines the dust. He sees the word “Hallie.” It was Codi who stood up and danced on the slide.

“You should let her come home,” he says again. He can remember precisely the muscular line of Mrs. Navarrete’s disapproving jaw. “Let my daughter come home now.”

The voice rejects this statement, says nothing.

He touches the corner of his eye and is surprised to find moisture on his fingertips. He stares at an iron coal bucket beside the fireplace, trying to recall its history, how it came to him. He thinks, for no reason, that this iron coal bucket could save his life, if only he could remember. He remembers instead that he no longer delivers babies, the telephone call could not possibly be Mandy Navarrete. It is a woman from another country, who knows his daughter. He is trying hard not to look at the dust in the air but the sun has illuminated each particle so that it glows. Each word burns.

“Is there something I can do?” he asks finally. “I know she has friends in the Ministry of Agriculture. Do they know?”

“Everyone knows. Our Ministry of Agriculture, your Ministry of Agriculture.” There is a pause. “You understand that this occurs every day. We’re a nation of bereaved families. The only difference this time is that it happens to be an American. It happens to be Hallie.” The voice weakens again, and he waits, and it goes on. “We sent a telegram to your President and the NBC. We think if they are embarrassed enough by their contras, they could do something.”

If they are embarrassed enough.

“Wait. Let me take down the number where you are. So I can call you tomorrow.”

“I’m in the office of a church in Managua. Nobody here knows anything. You can call the Ministry of Agriculture if you want. Or your President. He is the responsible party.”

He understands that she is being as helpful as she can. She is a kind, tired voice. He doesn’t want her to hang up, because then his life will begin. There is a pause while she talks to someone else who is there with her, and then she returns to him and says, “I’m sorry.”

“Is there anything more? Besides waiting?”

“I’m sorry. There is nothing.”

Carefully he puts down the receiver and looks at the air in front of the window in this empty room. The dust. He listens inside himself for a long time before he understands that it’s the teakettle that is screaming.

H
allie was somebody’s prisoner. Whether my eyes
were open or closed, I saw her with a white cloth tied tightly over her mouth. That’s the only image that would ever come.

If she couldn’t scream, I did. I was in every way unreasonable, especially with the kids at school. Even at the time, I was lucid enough to be thankful that Rita had dropped out. One member of my family had already yelled at her; she didn’t have to know that neither one of us had all our tires on the road.

The students had tried to be cooperative. They went to Tucson to assist the Stitch and Bitch Club, as I’d requested, and found the city to be a superb adventure. They discovered a video arcade; Raymo sweet-talked more than ten young women into buying piñatas; there were rumors that Connie Muñoz gave Hector Jones a hand job in the back seat of the bus on the way home. What did I expect? They were teenagers. I knew that, but still I screamed at
them because Black Mountain was poisoning their mother’s milk and all they cared about was sex and a passing grade.

I had rational intentions. I talked about evapotranspiration and rain forests and oxygen in the biosphere, how everything was connected. The last virgin timber cleared and milled to make way for a continent of landfills choking on old newspapers. It was a poetic lecture. Marta made the mistake of asking me how much of this poetry was going to be on the test.

I glowered. “Your life is the test. If you flunk this one, you die.”

The whole front row looked stunned. Their pens stopped moving.

“What you people learn for a test you forget the next day. That’s bullshit. That’s a waste of your brains and my time. If I can’t teach you something you’ll remember, then I haven’t even been here this year.” I crossed my arms and glared at them. “You kids think this pollution shit is not your problem, right? Somebody will clean up the mess. It’s not your fault. Well, your attitude stinks. You’re as guilty as anybody. Do you, or do you not, think the world was put here for you to use?”

Nobody was fool enough to answer. I observed during the long silence that half the kids in the room were wearing stone-washed jeans. I yanked up Hector Jones by the arm and made an example of him. I have to admit I disliked Hector partially for unfair reasons: his father was a former hoodlum named Simon Bolivar Jones who’d been noticeably unkind to me in school.

“Stand up here,” I said. “Show everybody your jeans. Nice, right? Turn around. Nice ass, Hector. Wonderful jeans. They were half worn out before you bought them, right?” I smacked Hector lightly on the butt and let him sit down.

“You know how they make those? They wash them in a big machine with this special kind of gravel they get out of volcanic mountains. The prettiest mountains you ever saw in your life. But they’re fragile, like a big pile of sugar. Levi Strauss or whoever goes in there with bulldozers and chainsaws and cuts down the trees and rips the mountainside to hell, so that all us lucky Americans can wear jeans that look like somebody threw them in the garbage before we got them.”

“Trees grow back,” Raymo said. Raymo was a brave young man.

“Excuse me?”

He cupped his hands around his mouth and spoke as if I were his deaf grandmother: “Trees…grow…back.”

I cupped my hands around my mouth and said, just as loudly, “Not if the whole…damn…mountain is gone, they don’t.”

“Well, there’s other mountains.”

“Sure, there’s some other mountains,” I said, feeling that I might explode if I weren’t careful. “If you got hit by a truck, Raymo, I guess your ma would say, ‘Well, I have some other kids.’”

About half the class thought that was funny. The other half was probably trying to figure out how to get out of my classroom alive.

I stared them down, ticking like a bomb. “Sure. Trees grow back. Even a whole rain forest could grow back, in a couple hundred years, maybe. But who’s going to make it happen? If you had to pay the real price for those jeans—the cost and the time and the work of bringing that mountain back to life instead of leaving it dead—those pretty jeans would have cost you a hundred dollars.”

I felt strangely high. Furious and articulate. “Think about the gas you put in a car,” I said. “The real cost. Not just pumping it out of the ground and refining it and shipping it, but also cleaning up the oil spills and all the junk that goes into the air when it gets burned. That’s part of what it costs, but you’re not paying it. Gas ought to be twenty dollars a gallon so you’re getting a real good deal. But soon the bill comes due, and we pay it, or we eat dirt. The ultimate MasterCharge.”

I can’t swear they were listening, but they were watching me carefully. Thirty-six blue eyes ticked back and forth as I paced the floor in front of my desk.

“If Grace gets poisoned, if all these trees die and this land goes to hell, you’ll just go somewhere else, right? Like the great pioneers, Lewis and Clark. Well, guess what, kiddos, the wilderness is used up.” I walked around my little square of floor like a trapped cat. “People can forget, and forget, and forget, but the land has a memory. The lakes and the rivers are still hanging on to the DDT and
every other insult we ever gave them. Lake Superior is a superior cesspool. The fish have cancer. The ocean is getting used up. The damn
air
is getting used up.” I pointed at the ceiling, meaning to indicate the sky. “You know what’s up there? Ozone. It’s this stuff in the atmosphere that acts like an umbrella.”

I stopped and reconsidered this effete analogy. Teenagers who won’t use condoms aren’t impressed by the need for an umbrella. I surveyed the class thoughtfully and demanded, “Whose Dad or Mom ever worked in the smelter?”

About half the hands went up, reluctantly.

“You know what they did up there, right? One way or another they were around thousand-degree hot metal. You ever see them dressed for work? They wore coveralls like Mr. Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, and a big shield over their faces, right?”

They nodded, relieved, I suppose, that I wasn’t going to single them out for humiliation. I sat on the desk and crossed my arms. “Imagine that’s you, working up there with that hot metal in your face. Now, somebody rips that mask off you while you’re working. Goodbye face. Goodbye nose and eyelids, beauty queens. You’re dead.”

They might well have been dead, for all the sound they made.

“That’s what the ozone layer does for us, boys and girls, it’s a big face shield in the sky.” I was skipping a few steps here, but not really exaggerating the consequences. Not at all. I attempted to lower my voice and sound faintly reasonable. “And it’s slipping away from us. There’s a big hole in it over the South Pole. When you use a spray can you make that hole bigger. There’s something in most aerosol cans and refrigerators and air conditioners, called chlorofluorocarbons, that neutralizes the ozone. Factories are still making tons of it, right now.”

I suspect “chlorofluorocarbons” was the largest word ever spoken within the walls of Grace High, and I’m fairly sure also that nobody forgot it for at least the rest of the day.

After the bell rang, Connie Muñoz eyed me and said, “Miss, I seen you wear stone-washed jeans to school sometimes.” The other kids were already out of there like bats out of hell.

“You’re right,” I said. “I didn’t know about the mountains when I bought them. Just like Hector didn’t, and you didn’t.”

“Yeah?” She chewed her gum and held me under a neutral, military sort of gaze. I’d publicly humiliated her new boyfriend; this would require some diplomacy.

“I’ve been learning a lot of this stuff just lately,” I told her. “I’m not saying I’m not part of the problem.”

“So how come you’re so mad at us, Miss?”

I felt conscious of my height, and embarrassed. “Connie, I don’t really know. Because I’m guilty too, I guess. And now I’m trying to fix it all at once.”

A hint of life came into her eyes. “Don’t sweat it,” she said. “I think it’s cool that you cuss and stuff when you’re mad. Everybody was paying attention. What you said was right, these guys just think when they use something up there’s always going to be more.”

“I shouldn’t have cussed,” I said. “I’m supposed to be setting an example. And I shouldn’t have picked on Hector the way I did.”

She laughed and cracked her gum. “Hector Jones is a dickhead.”

I had dinner at
Doc Homer’s house. I’d done so every night since I got back from Santa Rosalia and found out Hallie had been kidnapped. If I badgered him enough, I kept thinking, he would have something more to tell me. But he couldn’t remember anything. If I’d ever doubted Hallie was his favorite, there was no question about it now—I’d never seen him so affected by any event in our lives. He still functioned, cooked for himself and went to work, but it was only an obstinate ritual; he was a mess. I’d found some of his medication bottles in a cache in the living room, inside an old iron coal bucket. There was no way to know whether he was taking them. Half the time he talked to me as if I were six years old.

“Who was the person you spoke with on the phone?” I asked again. “Was she somebody in the government? There’s got to be somebody we can call.” I cautiously eyed the plate he set down in
front of me. Doc Homer had prepared liver with steamed apples and yellow squash. In certain restaurants things like this passed for
haute cuisine
, I knew, but here it passed for weird. It was getting to where he’d combine anything he found in his refrigerator. I’d started shopping for him, lest he get down to refried beans and ice cream.

“She suggested that we call the President of the United States,” he said.

I set my fork down on the table. He’d said this quite a number of times before. “I think I
will
call the President.” I moved my chair back from the table. It was an idle threat; I’d probably just get a polite recording. But I knew Doc Homer wouldn’t want what he would consider an absurd long-distance call on his bill.

“I understand you have a boyfriend,” he said, cutting his liver and apples into small pieces.

“What do they think will happen? Did this person you talked to sound real worried? Or did she say this was a routine kind of thing? Sometimes they’ll just take a foreign hostage to get attention and then they’ll let them go the next day. She’s probably back at her house already.” I knew this was unlikely. The contras, as I understood it, didn’t need attention. They were fully supported by the richest sugar daddy in the modern world.

“He drinks, Codi. He will take advantage of you.”

I stared at Doc Homer for a long time. “Not anymore,” I said. “He doesn’t drink anymore. And he couldn’t take advantage of me if he wanted to. I’m as sweet and innocent as the Berlin Wall. Your concern is approximately two decades too late.”

“My concern is for your welfare.”

“Your concern.” I picked up slices of apple and ate them with my fingers, to annoy him. “I’m going to have to go down there. I can get a bus to Tucson tonight and a plane to Managua and be there tomorrow.” I doubted it was this easy.

The teakettle boiled and he jumped up. He seemed edgy. He got out the filter paper and slowly set up the drip machine for coffee, carefully positioning each part of the apparatus as if it were some important experiment in organic chemistry.

“I told you it wasn’t a good idea,” he said, pouring boiling water into the funnel. I waited for some further clue. He could he evaluating any mistake I’d made since age three.

“What idea is that?” I prompted, since he didn’t go on.

“Loyd Peregrina.”

We both watched the water pass through the dark grounds, absorbing their color and substance. He’d never mentioned Loyd’s name before; I was surprised he knew it. I wondered whether Doc Homer had a whole other life in his head, in which he dispensed kind, fatherly advice. This gulf—between what Doc Homer believed himself to be and what he was—brought out the worst in me, or the most blunt. “Don’t worry about Loyd Peregrina,” I said. “I can’t get hurt now. I’m leaving him this time. It’s just a short-term thing.”

“He won’t elevate your life.”

“Damn it, you don’t know the first thing about my life. What’s to elevate? I’m a medical-school dropout who works graveyard shifts in quick-marts.”

“You left the profession by choice. We’ve established that.”

“Okay, so I walked out the door with my eyes open. What did I choose instead? What am I good at? Name one thing.”

He balked. I knew he would. Doc Homer wasn’t fluent in the language of compliments.

“I have no career, no kids, not even a place I consider home. Basically I’m a bag lady with an education.”

“That’s a preposterous assessment.”

“How would you know? You don’t really see me, you just see what you want. You take pictures of people and turn them into rock walls.”

“That is not what I do. I begin with a picture in my head, from the past. I try to duplicate it from the images I have at hand.”

This was a new one. “I don’t believe I give a damn about the images you have at hand.” I lowered my voice. The quickest way to lose points with Doc Homer was to lose control. I said, “You always just wanted Hallie and me to be above everybody in Grace.”

“You
were
above your peers.”

I snorted at that. “I was as trashy as Connie Muñoz and Rita Cardenal, without half their guts or one-tenth of their sex appeal. I was ugly and embarrassed to be alive.”

Doc Homer had a strange way of actually getting quieter when he raised his voice. “My daughters were not trash,” he said.

I looked him square in the eye. “I got pregnant when I was fifteen.”

“I know. I watched you bury the baby in the riverbed.”

I felt an odd flush in my neck and face. For about a minute we both listened to the dripping of the coffeepot. Then I said, “Why do you lie about everything?”

“I’ve never told you anything but the truth.”

“You’ve never told me anything, period. You said you and mother came from Illinois. But you came from here. You’ve got a whole family lying up there in the damn graveyard.”