Animal Dreams

by Barbara Kingsolver

  At some later point, I noticed, Koshari had acquired a new-looking straw cowboy hat, which he cocked ridiculously on one of his horns. I had a feeling it wasn’t the Navajo he was aping here. He walked duck-footed with a John Wayne swagger and was using a length of two-by-four as a gun. He knelt and fired repeatedly at the dancing deer, grandly falling over backward each time. Later he stalked them, trailing his gun in the snow and tripping over it with admirably practiced body comedy.

  The deer eventually retreated to the cliff, and the plaza filled with two lines of new dancers—a row of black-clad women and a row of men in white kilts—whose bodies beat a loud rhythm as they walked. Their chests were crisscrossed with lines of seashell bells. The two rows of dancers faced one another and stamped their feet, shaking the bells, crowding the air above the plaza with a loud, hollow clicking like summer insects. The men wore crowns of eagle feathers and the women wore spectacular wooden headdresses painted with stylized clouds and slanting blue lines of rain and green blades of corn. This was the corn dance, officially a summer prayer but danced at every important occasion, Loyd said, because you couldn’t pray it often enough.

  “Most of the dances have to do with rain,” he said. “Here, that’s what everything hangs on.”

  Santa Claus kachinas and the beauty of the spectacle notwithstanding, I still felt outside of it. “So you make this deal with the gods. You do these dances and they’ll send rain and good crops and the whole works? And nothing bad will ever happen. Right.” Prayer had always struck me as more or less a glorified attempt at a business transaction. A rain dance even more so.

  I thought I might finally have offended Loyd past the point of no return, like stealing the lobster from frozen foods that time, to get myself fired. But Loyd was just thinking. After a minute he said, “No, it’s not like that. It’s not making a deal, bad things can still happen, but you want to try not to cause them to happen. It has to do with keeping things in balance.”

  “In balance.”

  “Really, it’s like the spirits have made a deal with us.”

  “And what is the deal?” I asked.

  “We’re on our own. The spirits have been good enough to let us live here and use the utilities, and we’re saying: We know how nice you’re being. We appreciate the rain, we appreciate the sun, we appreciate the deer we took. Sorry if we messed up anything. You’ve gone to a lot of trouble, and we’ll try to be good guests.”

  “Like a note you’d send somebody after you stayed in their house?”

  “Exactly like that. ‘Thanks for letting me sleep on your couch. I took some beer out of the refrigerator, and I broke a coffee cup. Sorry, I hope it wasn’t your favorite one.’”

  I laughed because I understood “in balance.” I would have called it “keeping the peace,” or maybe “remembering your place,” but I liked it. “It’s a good idea,” I said. “Especially since we’re still here sleeping on God’s couch. We’re permanent houseguests.”

  “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.

  HOMERO

  20

  The Scream

  The 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.

  COSIMA

  21

  The Tissue of Hearts

  Hallie 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-was
hed 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.