Barbara Kingsolver - Animal Dreams

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.

On 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.