Barbara Kingsolver - Animal Dreams

“They would’ve had to build a special room for you. You would have been their queen.”

I laughed, though it struck me I’d been complimented. Was that how Loyd saw me? Not as a grain elevator on the prairie, but a queen? At the back of the room a door led into another room, which was darker, having no openings to the outside. Two more doors led out of that room-one to the side, and one up through the ceiling, which was made of thick, curved trunks of small trees. There was another whole set of rooms on top of this one.

“Can we go upstairs?”

He shook his head. “I wouldn’t trust those beams. They’re kind of old.”

“How old?”

“Eight hundred years.”

I looked at him. “Are you kidding?”

“Nope.”

We went from room to room, changing directions in the dark until the compass points were entirely lost to me. It was a maze. Loyd said there were more than two hundred rooms-a village under one roof. The air smelled cold. I tried to imagine the place populated: stepping from room to room over sleeping couples, listening through all the noises of cooking and scolding and washing up for the sound of your own kids, who would know secret short cuts to their friends’ apartments.

“The walls are thick,” I observed.

“The walls are graveyards. When a baby died, they’d mortar its bones right into the wall. Or under the floor.”

I shuddered. “Why?”

“So it would still be near the family,” he said, seeming surprised I hadn’t thought of this myself.

Without warning we came out into a bright courtyard in the center, surrounded by walls and doorways on all four sides. It was completely hidden from the outside-a little haven with a carpet of fine grass and an ancient ash tree. A treasure island. I was drawn to the shade. “We should’ve brought the picnic basket,” I said, settling under the ash. The ground was cool. My brief vision of a living city was gone; it seemed ghostly again. For eight hundred years, those bones in the walls had been listening to nothing more than the dry skittering of lizards.

“We’ve got all day,” Loyd said. He sat about two feet away from me, clasping his hands around his knees and looking at the toes of his boots.

“So who built this place, eight hundred years ago?”

“My mama’s folks. The Pueblo. They had their act together back then, didn’t they?”

They did. I couldn’t stop running my eyes over the walls and the low, even roofline. The stones were mostly the same shape, rectangular, but all different sizes; there would be a row of large stones, and then two or three thinner rows, then a couple of middle-sized rows. There was something familiar about the way they fit together. In a minute it came to me. They looked just like cells under a microscope.

“It doesn’t even look like it was built,” I said. “It’s too beautiful. It looks like something alive that just grew here.”

“That’s the idea.” Loyd seemed as pleased as if he’d built it himself.

“Of what? The idea of Pueblo architecture?”

“Yep. Don’t be some kind of a big hero. No Washington Monuments. Just build something nice that Mother Earth will want to hold in her arms.”

It was a pleasant thought. I also didn’t mind the thought of being held in Loyd’s arms, but he was making no moves in that direction. He was explaining the water system-they evidently had some sort of running water-and how they’d grown squash and corn on the hillside facing the river.

I reached over and ran a finger from his knee to his ankle. He looked up. “I’m talking too much, right?”

I shook my head. “No, keep talking.”

“You sure?”

I hesitated. I hadn’t expected to have to make the suggestion, and my stomach felt tight. “Yeah. Just, could you move over here and talk?”

His eyes brightened. I’d taken him by surprise. He leaned over and I took his head in my hands and gave him the kiss I’d been thinking about for the last two hours. It lasted a good long while. He twisted his fingers gently through the hair at the base of my skull and held on tight, and my breath stopped while he laid down a track of small kisses from my earlobe to my collarbone. We lay back on the grass and I rolled against him, looking down into his eyes. They were dark brown, a color with depth to it, like stained glass. It was a little surprising to look at brown eyes after all the pale blues of Grace.

Just being held felt unbelievably good, the long drink I’d been dying for. For a second I hugged back as tightly as I could. Something inside his buttoned shirt pocket made a crackling, cellophane sound. I raised up a little and poked it with my finger. “If you’ve got a condom in your pocket, Loyd Peregrina, this is my lucky day.”

He did. It was.

By late afternoon the shade had moved, and we also had rolled over a few times in the grass, I suppose, traveling from our original spot. Anyway we were in the sun. We disconnected and I lay on my back, feeling the forbidden touch of sun on my nipples and eyelids.

Loyd lay with his head propped on his elbow, just looking at me again, the way he had on the day of Emelina’s party. With a finger he traced concentric circles around my breasts, and triangles on my abdomen, as if warpainting me for some ceremonial mission. Whatever it might be, I felt up to the job. I knew when reason returned I’d be scared to death of feeling that good with another person, but my body was renewed. I felt like a patch of dry ground that had been rained on.

Jack had come into the courtyard and was sleeping in the shade, a little distance away. “He found his way in here without any trouble,” I said. “You boys must come here a lot.”

Loyd kissed my check and sat up and pulled on his jeans. “Yep, kind of a lot. Not as much as I’d like to.”

I thought of the condom in his pocket, the presumption, and felt irritated. “Well it’s a good seduction spot. It worked on me.” I found the rest of my clothes and concentrated on getting my shirt buttoned up. I’d lost an earring somewhere.

Loyd stared at me for a full half minute, and then lay back down, his hands clasped behind his head, looking straight up. “I don’t mean that I bring people here. Nobody but me and Jack’s ever been here before.” He glanced at me, and then away again. “But I guess that’s just what you expect me to say.” He didn’t say anything more for another minute, and then he said, “Shit.”

“I’m sorry. I guess I believe you. I do believe you.”

He was wounded. I suppose some sharp thing in me wanted to sting him, for making me need him now. After he’d once cut me to the edge of what a soul will bear. But that was senseless. Anybody would say that baby was my own fault, and he didn’t even know about it. I looked at this grown-up Loyd and tried to make sense of him, seeing clearly that he was too sweet to survive around me. I would go to my grave expecting the weapon in the empty hand.

“Codi, I couldn’t believe it when you said you’d come up here with me. I couldn’t even believe I asked.”

I sat forward, letting the point of my chin dig into my knee. “I can see what it means to you. I’m sorry for thinking what I did.”

He spoke slowly. “I’ve been looking forward to this ever since Labor Day. Not because I thought we’d…Not for any one reason. I just wanted to come here with you.”

I looked at him. It was the truth. I could think of nothing at all to say.

“I don’t blame you if you’re still pissed off at me for when we were in high school.”

My heart lost its rhythm for a second. “What for?”

“For being a jerk.”

“You remember that?”

I suppose it was an insulting question. He said, “I have a lot of reasons in my mind for the way I was, but they don’t make much difference. I hurt a lot of people.”