Barbara Kingsolver - Animal Dreams

“It’s no big deal. Sorry. Forget it.”

“No, it is a big deal.” He stared at the painted headboard of my bed, rather than at me. “You think I’m a TV Indian. Tonto Schwarzenegger, dumb but cute.”

I pulled up the covers. For a bedspread I’d been using the black-and-red crocheted afghan, Hallie’s and my old comfort blanket. “And what is that supposed to mean?” I asked.

“Nothing. Forget it.”

“If you said it, Loyd, you meant it.”

“Okay, I did.” He got up and began to put his clothes on. I reached over and caught his T-shirt when it was halfway over his head, and pulled him to me like a spider’s breakfast. I kissed him through the T-shirt. He didn’t kiss back. He pulled his head free of the shirt and looked at me, waiting.

“I don’t know what you want from me,” I said.

“I want more than I’m getting. More than sex.”

“Well, maybe that’s all I have to offer.”

He still waited.

“Loyd, I’m just here till next June. You know that. I’ve never led you on.”

“And where do you go after next June?”

“I don’t know.” I poked my fingers through the holes in the black-and-red afghan, a decades-old nervous habit. He held eye contact until I was uncomfortable.

“Who do you see yourself marrying, Codi?”

I could feel my pulse in my neck. It was a very odd question. “I don’t.”

“Yes, you do. But he’d have to be taller than you, smarter than you, more everything. A better job and more damn college degrees. You’re like every other woman alive.”

“Thanks very much,” I said.

“Your height alone kind of limits the field.”

“If that’s supposed to be an insult, you’re way off. I always wanted to be even taller than I am, taller than Hallie.”

We sat not looking at each other for a minute. I took his hand and laid it, limp, against mine. It felt like a pancake or something. “This isn’t about your deficiencies, Loyd. It’s just me. I can’t stay here. There’s a poem by Robert Frost about this pitiful old hired hand who comes back home when he’s run out of luck because he knows they won’t kick him out. The poem says, ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.’” I stroked the tendons on the back of Loyd’s hand. “I don’t want to be seen as pitiful. I came here with a job to do, but I have places to go after this. I wish…” I turned my face toward the window so he wouldn’t see tears. “I’d like to find a place that feels like it wants to take me in. But this isn’t it. At the end of the school year my time’s up. If we get attached, you and me, then it’s hard.”

“That’s your game, not mine, Codi.” He got up and walked into the living room to make his hourly call to the depot; he was expecting to be sent to El Paso soon. I was stunned that he would walk away from me when I needed to be taken in. Though I guess that’s just what I’d asked him to do, walk away. His T-shirt was inside out, and he took it off and switched it around, still managing to keep the receiver cradled against his ear. He’d been put on hold. I watched him through the doorway and realized that the muscles in his back were taut with anger. I’d never seen Loyd mad, and was surprised he was capable of it.

I felt lost. I got up, throwing back the afghan and draping the flannel sheet around me like a sari, and went into the living room. The floor was cold. I shifted from one foot to the other, feeling vaguely like the Statue of Liberty. Jack on the front doorstep was scratching his neck vigorously, jingling his tags. That dog had the patience of Job.

“What’s going on?” I asked, when Loyd hung up the phone.

“I’m five times out. Plenty of time for a fuck.”

“That’s not what I meant. Loyd, I don’t think you’re dumb.”

“Just not anything worth changing your plans for.”

I laughed. “As if I had plans.”

He looked at me, his eyes searching back and forth between my two pupils as if he were trying to decide which door concealed the prize. “What would happen if you stayed here, Codi?”

“I would have the wrong haircut. Everybody would remind me that I don’t quite belong. ‘Oh, honey,’ they’d say, ‘you’re still here? I heard you were on your way to Rio de Janeiro to have tea with Princess Grace.’ And I’d say, ‘No, I’ve grown up to be the new Doc Homer. I’ve moved into his house and I’m taking over his practice so I can save the town.’”

“Save us from what, Great White Mother?”

“Oh, shit, you guys can all just go to hell.” I laughed, since the other choice was to cry. He took me in his arms and I crumpled against his chest like an armful of laundry. “This town was never kind to me,” I said into his shirt. “I never even got asked out on dates. Except by you, and you were so drunk you didn’t know better.”

“You know what we used to call you in high school? Empress of the Universe.”

“That’s just what I mean! And you didn’t care that the Empress of the Universe had to go home every night to a cold castle where the king stomped around saying hugs are for puppy dogs and we are housebroken.”

Loyd seemed interested in this. “And then what?”

“Oh, nothing much. I’d hide in my room and cry because I had to wear orthopedic shoes and was unfit to live.”

He turned my chin to face him. I hadn’t noticed before that without shoes we were the same height. Proportioned differently-my legs were longer-but our chins punched in at the same altitude. “So, where you headed now, Empress?”

“God, Loyd, I don’t know. I get lost a lot. I keep hoping some guy with ‘Ron’ or ‘Andy’ stitched on his pocket and a gas pump in his hand will step up and tell me where I’m headed.”

His face developed slowly toward a grin. “I’ll tell you. You’re going with me to do something I’m real good at. The best.”

I tried to figure this out. Behind his smile there was a look in his eyes that was profoundly earnest. It dawned on me. “Cockfights?”

There was no way I could say no.

A fighting cock is an animal bred for strength and streamlined for combat. His wings are small, his legs strong, and when he’s affronted his neck feathers puff into a fierce mane like a lion’s. Individuality has been lost in the breeding lines; function is everything. To me each bird looked like any other. I couldn’t tell them apart until they began dying differently.

The deaths are protracted. That was one thing I learned when I went to see Loyd excel in the profession to which he was born.

I’d had in mind that a cockfight would be an after-dark, furtive thing: men betting and drinking and sweating out the animal suspense under cover of night. But it was broad daylight. Loyd cut the wheel sharply, taking us off the road and up a gravel arroyo. He seemed to navigate the reservation by the same mysterious instincts that lead birds to Costa Rica and back home again unfailingly each year. We reached a thicket where a motley herd of pickup trucks were parked at odd angles, close together, like nervous horses ready to bolt. Loyd pulled his red truck into the herd. Beyond the trees was a dirt arena where roosters strutted around clearing their throats, barnyard-innocent.

Loyd steered me through the arena, his arm around my shoulders, greeting everybody. I saw no other women, but Loyd would have been welcome here if he’d shown up with a shewolf. “Lot of people going to lose their shirts today,” a man told him. “You got some damn good-looking birds.” The man was handsome and thin, with a long ponytail tied up Navajo style. His name was Collie Bluestone. Loyd introduced us, seeming proud of me.

“Glad to meet you,” I said. Collie’s hand felt taut with energy. A chunk of turquoise on a leather thong rested on his collarbone, below the scar of an old tracheotomy.