Animal Dreams

by Barbara Kingsolver

  “Miss Goody Orthopedic-Shoes,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Mail order.”

  “No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Codi dear,

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Love from your faithful adoring slave-for-life,

  Hallie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “So is that your dog?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

  “He looks like a coyote,” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “No,” I said.

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

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

  “Twin,” Loyd said. “He’s dead.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Well, that sounds mysterious,” I said.

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

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

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

  HOMERO