Barbara Kingsolver - Animal Dreams

Several people yelled loudly for Gustavo’s bird. Then finally, without much warning, its opponent passed over from barely alive to dead. Without ceremony Scratch carried his limp loser out by its feet and tossed it into the back of a truck. Loyd Peregrina was called up next. A rooster was delivered into his arms, smooth as a loaf of bread, as he made his way down to the pit. This time I watched. I owed him that.

In the first fight I’d watched birds, but this time I watched Loyd, and soon understood that in this unapologetically brutal sport there was a vast tenderness between the handler and his bird. Loyd cradled his rooster in his arms, stroking and talking to it in a low, steady voice. At each handling call he caressed the bird’s wings back into place, stroked its back, and licked the blood from its eyes. At the end, he blew his own breath into its mouth to inflate a punctured lung. He did this when the bird was nigh unto death and clearly unable to win. The physical relationship between Loyd and his rooster transcended winning or losing.

It lasted up to the moment of death, and not one second longer. I shivered as he tossed the feathered corpse, limp as cloth, into the back of the truck. The thought of Loyd’s hands on me made the skin of my forearms recoil from my own touch.

“What do they do with the dead birds?” I wanted to know.

“What?”

“What do they do with them? Does somebody eat them? Arroz con pollo?”

He laughed. “Not here. In Mexico I’ve heard they do.”

I thought of Hallie and wondered if they had cockfights in Nicaragua. In the new, humane society that had already abolished capital punishment, I’d bet money they still had cockfights.

Loyd watched the road and executed a tricky turn. He was driving a little fast for gravel road and dusk, but driving well. I tried to picture Loyd driving a train, and came up with nothing. No picture. No more than I could picture Fenton Lee in his head-on wreck.

“What do they do with them here?”

“Why, you hungry?”

“I’m asking a question.”

“There’s a dump, down that arroyo a ways. A big pit. They bury them in a mass grave. Tomb of the unknown chicken.”

I ignored his joke. “I think I’d feel better about the whole thing if the chickens were getting eaten.”

“The meat’d be tough,” Loyd said, amused. He was in a good mood. He’d lost his first fight but had won four more after that-more than anyone else that day.

“It just seems like such a pathetic waste. All the time and effort that go into those chicken lives, from the hatched egg to the grave of the unknown chicken. Pretty pointless.” I needed to make myself clear. “No, it’s not pointless. It’s pointed in a direction that makes me uncomfortable.”

“Those roosters don’t know what’s happening to them. You think a fighting cock understands its life is pointless?”

“No, I think a fighting cock is stupider than a head of lettuce.” I glanced at Loyd, hoping he’d be hurt by my assessment, but apparently he agreed. I wanted him to defend his roosters. It frightened me that he could connect so intensely with a bird and then, in a breath, disengage.

“It’s a clean sport,” he said. “It might be hard to understand, for an outsider, but it’s something I grew up with. You don’t see drunks, and the betting is just a very small part of it. The crowd is nicer than at a football game.”

“I don’t disagree with any of that.”

“It’s a skill you have in your hands. You can go anywhere, pick up any bird, even one that’s not your own, a bird you’ve never seen before, and you can do this thing with it.”

“Like playing the piano,” I said.

“Like that,” he said, without irony.

“I could see that you’re good at it. Very good.” I struggled to find my point, but could come up only with disturbing, disjointed images: A woman in the emergency room on my first night of residency, stabbed eighteen times by her lover. Curty and Glen sitting in the driveway dappled with rooster blood. Hallie in a jeep, hitting a land mine. Those three girls.

“Everything dies, Codi.”

“Oh, great. Tell me something I don’t know. My mother died when I was a three-year-old baby!” I had no idea where that came from. I looked out the window and wiped my eyes carefully with my sleeve. But the tears kept coming. For a long time I cried for those three teenage girls who were split apart from above while they picked fruit. For the first time I really believed in my heart it had happened. That someone could look down, aim a sight, pull a trigger. Feel nothing. Forget.

Loyd seemed at a loss. Finally he said gently, “I mean, animals die. They suffer in nature and they suffer in the barnyard. It’s not like people. They weren’t meant to live a good life and then go to heaven, or wherever we go.”

As plainly as anything then, I remembered trying to save the coyotes from the flood. My ears filled with the roar of the flooded river and my nose with the strong stench of mud. I gripped the armrest of Loyd’s truck to keep the memory from drowning my senses. I heard my own high voice commanding Hallie to stay with me. And then, later, asking Doc Homer, “Will they go to heaven?” I couldn’t hear his answer, probably because he didn’t have one. I hadn’t wanted facts, I’d wanted salvation.

Carefully, so as not to lose anything, I brought myself back to the present and sat still, paying attention. “I’m not talking about chicken souls. I don’t believe roosters have souls,” I said slowly. “What I believe is that humans should have more heart than that. I can’t feel good about people making a spectator sport out of puncture wounds and internal hemorrhage.”

Loyd kept his eyes on the dark air above the road. Bugs swirled in the headlights like planets cut loose from their orbits, doomed to chaos. After a full half hour he said, “My brother Leander got killed by a drunk, about fifteen miles from here.”

In another half hour he said, “I’ll quit, Codi. I’m quitting right now.”

“He’s giving up cockfighting for you?” Emelina’s eyes were so wide I could only think of Mrs. Dynamite’s husband watching Miss America.

“I guess. We’ll see if he stays on the wagon.”

“Codi, that’s so romantic. I don’t think J.T. ever gave up a thing for me except cracking his knuckles.”

“Well, that’s something,” I said.

“No, it doesn’t even count, because I terrorized him out of it. I told him it would give him arthritis or something.”

Emelina and I were eating chili dogs at a roadside diner on 1-10. Loyd’s pickup, which we’d borrowed for the trip, was parked where we could keep an eye on it. Piled high in the back, individually wrapped in dry-cleaner bags, were fifty peacock piñatas with genuine peacock tail feathers. We were headed for Tucson, prepared to hit the streets with the biggest fund-raising enterprise in the history of the Stitch and Bitch Club.

The project was Viola’s brainchild, although she shared credit with Doña Althea, who had opened up her storehouse of feathers. They’d held two all-night assembly lines to turn out these masterpieces, and really outdid themselves. These were not the likes of the ordinary piñata, destined to meet its maker at the end of a blindfolded ten-year-old’s baseball bat. They had glass-button eyes and feather crests and carefully curled indigo crepe-paper wings. These birds were headed for the city, and so was the Stitch and Bitch Club, en masse, by Greyhound. Our plan was to meet at the bus station and take it from there.

I was surprised when Viola asked if I’d come. She said they needed me, I knew the city; you’d think it was a jail break. But Loyd was doing switch-engine time in Lordsburg and it was Christmas break, so I had time on my hands. I begged Emelina to come too, and spend a few days in Tucson. I needed to walk on flat sidewalks, risk my neck in traffic, go see a movie, that kind of thing. J.T. could stay with the kids. He was home on thirty days’ probation from the railroad, for the derailment that was officially not his fault. The railroad moves in mysterious ways.