Animal Dreams

by Barbara Kingsolver

  He laughed. Amazingly, he wasn’t embarrassed at all. I’d forgotten how the downtown scene could be—people cultivating weird-ness like it was a disease or a career. He had a neatly trimmed beard and was extremely handsome. “How Emma Bovary,” he said.

  I smiled. “You seem to have lost your syntax. Perhaps you’re in the wrong place. The Café Gertrude Stein is down the street.”

  “Well,” he said. “Well well well. Perhaps you could provide me with some context. Do you have a name?”

  “Cosima. It means Order in the Cosmos.”

  “Cosima, my love, I’m in desperate need of order. If you have the New York Times in your bag there, I’d be willing to marry you.” I had the New York Times.

  “I’m not in the habit of marrying strangers,” I said. I was suddenly disgusted with what I was doing. I’d go anywhere Carlo wanted, I’d be a sport for my students in Grace, I’d even tried to be a doctor for Doc Homer, just as I’d humiliated myself in the old days to get invited to birthday parties. If I kept trying to be what everybody wanted, I’d soon be insipid enough to fit in everywhere. I grabbed my bag and stood up to go. I told the man, “You don’t have the slightest idea who I am.”

  The second night in Tucson I slept like a child, so drenched in sleep that when I woke up I didn’t know where I was. For a minute I lay lost in the bed, trying slowly to attach the physical fact of myself to a name, a life, a room in a house within a larger place. It was a frightening moment, but nothing new to me, either. So rarely in my life did I truly surrender to sleep that it took an extra effort for me to pull myself out. It felt like slogging on my elbows up a riverbank.

  Carlo wasn’t in bed with me, of course; he’d skirted the awkward issue by saying he had a weird shift and might as well sleep on the sofa and not disturb anybody. But he’d had plenty of opportunities in the past to see me wake up confused. He always claimed there was something wrong with the electrical current in the temporal lobes of my brain. He said that explained why I couldn’t remember parts of what I’d lived through, and remembered other parts that I hadn’t. I was attracted to easy answers but mistrusted them too. Carlo’s specialty was the nervous system; he tended to think all human difficulties were traceable to neural synapses gone haywire. And I feared—no, I knew—what was wrong with me was more complicated than what’s wrong with a badly wired house.

  Carlo was already gone but left a note, saying to think very seriously about Aspen. It sounded like a joke, put that way, but I folded the note and stuck it in my suitcase. Emelina was cheerful at breakfast. She’d sensed the previous day that my mood had turned black and blue, but she was intent on our having a vacation even if neither of our hearts was really in it. We’d gone to the movies and eaten at McDonald’s, which by Grace standards is the high life. We ordered Happy Meals; she was collecting small plastic replicas of impossible-looking vehicles for her boys. We had enough now to go home.

  On our way out of town she insisted that we stop at an obvious tourist trap called Colossal Cave. It was colossal by no means, but a cave. We stood a long time in the dim entry while the guide in a Smokey Bear hat made small talk, hoping for a bigger crowd. There were only seven or eight of us. It must be hard to give your whole spiel to a group that wouldn’t even make a baseball team or a jury.

  “So when’s Loyd get home?”

  “Friday,” I said.

  “That switch-engine deal gets long, doesn’t it?”

  “It never seems to bother you,” I said, although I had an acute memory of the night I’d glimpsed them making love in the courtyard.

  “Mm,” she said.

  “Then again, Loyd might be making the whole thing up. He’s probably got a sweetie in Lordsburg.” Emelina looked startled. “I’m kidding,” I said.

  “Don’t say stuff like that. Knock on wood.” She thumped the side of her head.

  “Well, it’s occurred to me to wonder why Loyd wasn’t married or anything when I came along. If he’s such a hot item.”

  “He was.”

  “Married?”

  “No. Seeing somebody, but not that serious. Definitely not married. He was once, awhile back, for a year or two, I think. No kids. He didn’t tell you?”

  “I never asked.”

  “Her name was Cissie. She didn’t deserve him.” Emelina peeled off her Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt (actually John Tucker’s). It was cave temperature down there, only 55 degrees but much warmer than outside, where it was predicted to drop below freezing that night. A woman near us was wearing a mink coat.

  “I wasn’t about to leave it in the car,” she said to us, without provocation.

  Loyd had never mentioned even a large personal fact like a previous marriage, whereas this woman in mink felt compelled to explain herself to strangers. That’s how it is: some people are content to wait till you ask, while others jump right in with the whole story. It must have to do with discomfort. Once while I was waiting to file off an airplane, a grandmother came down the aisle carrying a doll in one arm and a little boy in the other, and she actually took the time to explain to us all as she passed, “The doll is his sister’s, she’s up ahead.” I could relate to the urge. I remembered all my tall tales to strangers on buses. I was explaining in my own way; making things up so there would be no discussion of what I was really.

  At last our guide spoke some encouraging words and the little crowd followed him down into the cave. As he walked he told us about an outlaw who’d ducked in her to hide his loot, back in the days of Jesse James, and apparently had never come out. This was meant to give us a thrill of fear, but it seemed more likely that there was a back door somewhere and the bad guy got away with the money. That’s how things go. I still believe Adolf Hitler is living in the South Pacific somewhere with sanded-off fingerprints and a new face, lying on a beach drinking mai-tais.

  Emelina hadn’t seen a cave before and was very impressed. There were delicate stalactites shaped like soda straws, and heavy, hooded stalagmites looming up from the cave floor. She kept pointing out formations that reminded her of a penis.

  “You’ve only been away from home three days,” I whispered.

  “I didn’t say it looked like J.T.’s,” she whispered back.

  The sound of trickling water was everywhere, even over our heads. I shivered to think how many tons of rock and dirt were up there above us. I’d forgotten that caves were not my favorite thing.

  The highlight of the tour was the Drapery Room, which was admittedly impressive in size. The guide pointed with his flashlight to various formations, which had names like Chief Cochise and The Drapes. The walls and ceiling glittered with crystallized moisture.

  Then, for just a minute—they always have to do this—he turned off the lights. The darkness was absolute. I grabbed for Emelina’s arm as the ceilings and walls came rushing up to my face. I felt choked by my own tongue. As I held on to Emelina and waited for the lights to come back on, I breathed slowly and tried to visualize the size of the room, the distance between myself and the roof that I knew was there. Instead I saw random images that didn’t help: Emelina collecting the little fast-food cars for her boys; the man in the café who’d suggested I marry him. And then while we all still waited I understood that the terror of my recurring dream was not about losing just vision, but the whole of myself, whatever that was. What you lose in blindness is the space around you, the place where you are, and without that you might not exist. You could be nowhere at all.

  18

  Ground Orientation

  Loyd and I were going to spend Christmas at Santa Rosalia Pueblo. Snow fell steadily as we drove north through the Apache reservation. It enclosed translucent desert trees in spherical white envelopes, giving them form and substance. It was surprising to look out over a landscape that normally seemed empty, and see a forest.

  When I closed my eyes I saw papier-mâché peacocks. I’d been helping out on the piñata assembly lines. I’d had nightmares again and wasn’t sleeping well; I figured I
could be useful. We didn’t turn out five hundred piñatas in ten days—that was a little ambitious—but we passed the halfway mark. The last fifty or so were the best by folk-art standards. By then we’d already used up every scrap of blue crepe paper from the attics and bureau drawers of Grace, and so had to be enterprising. Some women cut up denim jeans. Mrs. Nuñez made peacock wings out of the indigo-colored flyleaves of all twelve volumes of the Compton’s Children’s Encyclopedia. To be sure, there were no two alike.

  I also sweat blood over my mimeographed broadside. I wasn’t a writer except by default. Viola refused to help, saying I was the one that went to college so quit whining. I tried to include all the things that made Grace what it was: the sisters coming over with their peacocks; their blue-eyed descendants planting an Eden of orchards in the idyllic days before Black Mountain; the confetti-colored houses and stairstep streets—everything that would be lost to a poisoned river. All in one page. Viola wouldn’t let me go longer, claiming nobody would read it. There was some argument over whether to put the note inside the piñata, like a message in a bottle. I said city people didn’t buy art just to crack it open; I was respected as an expert on city people. So my modest History of Grace was rolled, bound in ribbon like a diploma, and inserted into each peacock’s beak.

  The second Tucson excursion filled two chartered buses. Some husbands and kids got into the act, and also my students. I declared it a class project. I told Raymo if he sold ten peacocks I’d give him a C +. But I didn’t go. Loyd had asked for a week’s layoff and we set out on the trip he’d been planning forever.

  “Don’t you have to stop somewhere and check on your roosters?” I asked. We were near Whiteriver.

  “I don’t have any roosters.”

  “You don’t?” I was incredulous. I thought he’d just stop going to fights himself. “What, you sold them?”

  “Collie Bluestone kind of took over the business.”

  “So you could get back into it if you wanted to.”

  “Nope. He’s moved over to the Colorado River reservation. He’s fighting them over at Ehrenberg.”

  This was a good bit more frightening than if Loyd had presented me with a diamond ring. “But I’m not…What if you and I don’t work out, Loyd?”

  He downshifted for a rutted stretch in the road. “No offense, Codi, but I didn’t give up cockfighting to impress you. I did it because you were right.”

  “I was right?”

  “About what you said.”

  “What did I say?”

  He didn’t answer. I vaguely remembered saying something about puncture wounds and internal hemorrhage. Making that a spectator sport. “I can’t believe you’d do this thing all your life and then just quit one day after something I said. Maybe you were ready to give it up anyway.”

  “Maybe I was.” We were both quiet for a while, passing through winter-killed fields of grass and sage. Two black horses grazed on bristly shrubs in a field with no apparent fences.

  “You and your brother were twins, right?” I asked, apropos of nothing.

  He nodded. “Identical. Twins are bad luck.”

  I laughed. “For the mother.”

  “No, in the pueblo. When twins are born people say there’ll be a poor rainy season or grasshoppers or some darn thing. In the old days you had to let twins die.”

  “Both? You couldn’t pick one and let the other one go?”

  “Nope.”

  “I can’t imagine the mother who’d do it,” I said, though of course I could. I had probably starved my own child to death in utero, rather than risk known disaster.

  “There’s a Tewa story about a mother sneaking her twins out of the pueblo and leaving them with Spider Grandmother to raise.”

  “Yeah? See, if there was a story like that, people knew it was wrong to let them die.”

  “Knew it was hard. Not wrong, necessarily. When Leander and I were bad, our mother said she was like poor old Spider Grandmother, got stuck with the War Twins.”

  “Were you bad a lot?”

  “Just twice as bad as a regular boy.” He laughed. “People called us ‘Twice as Bad.’ Our sisters talked about us like we were just one boy. They’d say ‘he went out riding,’ or whatever. I think we thought we were one person. One boy in two skins.”

  “Hallie and I feel that way sometimes.”

  I could see clear crescents of water collecting on Loyd’s lower eyelids. “You don’t have to talk about this,” I said.

  “I don’t ever talk about him. Sometimes I’ll go a day or two without even thinking about him, and then I get scared I might forget he ever was.”

  I laid a hand on his gearshift arm. “You want me to drive?”

  He stopped and turned off the engine. We sat watching snowflakes hit the windshield and turn into identical dots of water. Then he got out. I pulled on my mittens and followed him.

  Outside the cab it was impossibly quiet. We’d climbed a little now, and were in forest. Snowflakes hissed against pine needles. Jack sat in the truckbed watching Loyd carefully, exhaling voiceless clouds of steam.

  “I ever tell you how I came to keep Jack?” Loyd asked.

  I thought about it. “No. You told me how you took in his mother and she had pups. You didn’t say how you picked Jack.”

  “He picked us.” Loyd was leaning against the truck with his arms crossed over his chest. He looked cold. “Dad meant to drown the whole litter. He put them in an empty cement bag and tied the top real good and drove down to the river and pitched them in. He didn’t know what he was doing; he was drunk as seven thousand dollars, I imagine. On the way back he picked me up from work and I said, ‘Dad, here’s one of the pups in the back of the truck.’ He was hiding down in a box of pipe T-joints. Dad’s old truck was a junkyard on wheels; you could find anything in the world back there. So I says to Dad, ‘Where’s the rest of them?’” Loyd’s voice caught, and he waited a second, wiping his eyes. “I don’t know what I’m getting all broke up for. God knows what I would have done with seven mongrel coyote pups.”

  God knows what I’d have done with a baby at sixteen, I thought. It’s not the practical side of things that breaks us up. I leaned on the truck beside him and took his left hand between my mittened palms. It felt like a cold bottle. “So what happened? Why did you lose Leander?”

  “Why?” He looked up at the sky. “Because we left the Pueblo. We were like the War Twins, I guess. A lot for our mother to handle. Our sisters were all older and having their own babies by that time. And people thought boys should go out in the world some. Be with our dad. He’d been down at Whiteriver more or less as long as we could remember. If we’d stayed up there in Santa Rosalia it would have worked out, but we came down here and Leander just ran into trouble. We didn’t have anybody looking after us. Dad couldn’t look after himself.”

  “Doesn’t sound like it,” I said.

  “Everybody always talked like Leander died of drinking, but he wasn’t but fifteen. Not old enough to sit down and order a beer. Everybody forgets that, that he was just a kid. We drank some, but I don’t think he was drinking the night he died. There was a fight in a bar.”

  “What did he die of, then?”

  “Puncture wounds. Internal hemorrhage.”

  I drove through the pine forest, thinking off and on of Hallie, mindful of the slick road. Loyd was quiet, but took the wheel again when we descended into the Navajo reservation. He pointed out areas that were overgrazed. “It seems as big as the whole world, but it’s still a reservation,” he said. “There’s fences, and a sheep can’t cross them.”

  As dusk took us the landscape changed to an eerie, flat desert overseen by godheads of red sandstone. We were out of the snow now. The hills were striped with pinks and reds that deepened as we drove north and the sun drove west. It was dark when we left the highway and made our way down a bumpy road into the mouth of Canyon de Chelly. We passed several signs proclaiming the canyon bottom to be Navajo tribal land, where only autho
rized persons were admitted. The third sign, sternly luminous in the headlights, said, “Third and Final Warning.”

  “Are we allowed in here?” I asked.

  “Stick with me. I can get you into all the best places.”

  Down in the canyon we bumped over rough road for an hour, following the course of a shallow river. There was no moon that I could see, and I lost any sense of direction I might have had while we still had sun. I was exhausted but also for the first time in weeks I felt sleepiness, that rare, delicious liqueur, soaking into my body like blotter paper. I almost fell asleep sitting up. My head bobbed as we crossed and recrossed the frozen river and climbed its uneven banks. Finally we stopped, and slept in the truckbed, cuddled like twin mummies inside a thick wrapping of blankets. We turned our bodies carefully and held each other to keep warm. Outside the blankets, our lips and noses were like chipped flint striking sparks in the frozen air.

  “No fair, you’ve got Jack on your side,” I murmured.

  “Jack, other side, boy,” Loyd commanded. Jack stood up and walked over the cocoon that contained us, stepping carefully on our chests. He turned around a few times in the wedge of space behind me, then dropped down with a groan and snuggled against my back. Within minutes I could feel the extra heat and I fell into heavensent unconsciousness.

  In the morning, a sugar coating of snow had fallen, lightly covering the rocks. Ahead of us the canyon forked into two; from the riverbed a red rock spire rose a thousand feet into the air. Low clouds, or high fog, brushed its top. I held my breath. Looking up at a rock like that gave me the heady sensation of heights. He’d parked so this would be the first thing I saw: Spider Rock.

  The canyon walls rose straight up on either side of us, ranging from sunset orange to deep rust, mottled with purple. The sandstone had been carved by ice ages and polished by desert eons of sandpaper winds. The place did not so much inspire religion as it seemed to be religion itself.

  I was dressed in an instant and walking around awestruck like a kid, my head bent all the way back. “It doesn’t look like a spider,” I said, of the rock. “It looks like a steeple.”