Barbara Kingsolver - Animal Dreams

I suspect “chlorofluorocarbons” was the largest word ever spoken within the walls of Grace High, and I’m fairly sure also that nobody forgot it for at least the rest of the day.

After the bell rang, Connie Muñoz eyed me and said, “Miss, I seen you wear stone-washed jeans to school sometimes.” The other kids were already out of there like bats out of hell.

“You’re right,” I said. “I didn’t know about the mountains when I bought them. Just like Hector didn’t, and you didn’t.”

“Yeah?” She chewed her gum and held me under a neutral, military sort of gaze. I’d publicly humiliated her new boyfriend; this would require some diplomacy.

“I’ve been learning a lot of this stuff just lately,” I told her. “I’m not saying I’m not part of the problem.”

“So how come you’re so mad at us, Miss?”

I felt conscious of my height, and embarrassed. “Connie, I don’t really know. Because I’m guilty too, I guess. And now I’m trying to fix it all at once.”

A hint of life came into her eyes. “Don’t sweat it,” she said. “I think it’s cool that you cuss and stuff when you’re mad. Everybody was paying attention. What you said was right, these guys just think when they use something up there’s always going to be more.”

“I shouldn’t have cussed,” I said. “I’m supposed to be setting an example. And I shouldn’t have picked on Hector the way I did.”

She laughed and cracked her gum. “Hector Jones is a dickhead.”

I had dinner at Doc Homer’s house. I’d done so every night since I got back from Santa Rosalia and found out Hallie had been kidnapped. If I badgered him enough, I kept thinking, he would have something more to tell me. But he couldn’t remember anything. If I’d ever doubted Hallie was his favorite, there was no question about it now-I’d never seen him so affected by any event in our lives. He still functioned, cooked for himself and went to work, but it was only an obstinate ritual; he was a mess. I’d found some of his medication bottles in a cache in the living room, inside an old iron coal bucket. There was no way to know whether he was taking them. Half the time he talked to me as if I were six years old.

“Who was the person you spoke with on the phone?” I asked again. “Was she somebody in the government? There’s got to be somebody we can call.” I cautiously eyed the plate he set down in front of me. Doc Homer had prepared liver with steamed apples and yellow squash. In certain restaurants things like this passed for haute cuisine, I knew, but here it passed for weird. It was getting to where he’d combine anything he found in his refrigerator. I’d started shopping for him, lest he get down to refried beans and ice cream.

“She suggested that we call the President of the United States,” he said.

I set my fork down on the table. He’d said this quite a number of times before. “I think I will call the President.” I moved my chair back from the table. It was an idle threat; I’d probably just get a polite recording. But I knew Doc Homer wouldn’t want what he would consider an absurd long-distance call on his bill.

“I understand you have a boyfriend,” he said, cutting his liver and apples into small pieces.

“What do they think will happen? Did this person you talked to sound real worried? Or did she say this was a routine kind of thing? Sometimes they’ll just take a foreign hostage to get attention and then they’ll let them go the next day. She’s probably back at her house already.” I knew this was unlikely. The contras, as I understood it, didn’t need attention. They were fully supported by the richest sugar daddy in the modern world.

“He drinks, Codi. He will take advantage of you.”

I stared at Doc Homer for a long time. “Not anymore,” I said. “He doesn’t drink anymore. And he couldn’t take advantage of me if he wanted to. I’m as sweet and innocent as the Berlin Wall. Your concern is approximately two decades too late.”

“My concern is for your welfare.”

“Your concern.” I picked up slices of apple and ate them with my fingers, to annoy him. “I’m going to have to go down there. I can get a bus to Tucson tonight and a plane to Managua and be there tomorrow.” I doubted it was this easy.

The teakettle boiled and he jumped up. He seemed edgy. He got out the filter paper and slowly set up the drip machine for coffee, carefully positioning each part of the apparatus as if it were some important experiment in organic chemistry.

“I told you it wasn’t a good idea,” he said, pouring boiling water into the funnel. I waited for some further clue. He could he evaluating any mistake I’d made since age three.

“What idea is that?” I prompted, since he didn’t go on.

“Loyd Peregrina.”

We both watched the water pass through the dark grounds, absorbing their color and substance. He’d never mentioned Loyd’s name before; I was surprised he knew it. I wondered whether Doc Homer had a whole other life in his head, in which he dispensed kind, fatherly advice. This gulf-between what Doc Homer believed himself to be and what he was-brought out the worst in me, or the most blunt. “Don’t worry about Loyd Peregrina,” I said. “I can’t get hurt now. I’m leaving him this time. It’s just a short-term thing.”

“He won’t elevate your life.”

“Damn it, you don’t know the first thing about my life. What’s to elevate? I’m a medical-school dropout who works graveyard shifts in quick-marts.”

“You left the profession by choice. We’ve established that.”

“Okay, so I walked out the door with my eyes open. What did I choose instead? What am I good at? Name one thing.”

He balked. I knew he would. Doc Homer wasn’t fluent in the language of compliments.

“I have no career, no kids, not even a place I consider home. Basically I’m a bag lady with an education.”

“That’s a preposterous assessment.”

“How would you know? You don’t really see me, you just see what you want. You take pictures of people and turn them into rock walls.”

“That is not what I do. I begin with a picture in my head, from the past. I try to duplicate it from the images I have at hand.”

This was a new one. “I don’t believe I give a damn about the images you have at hand.” I lowered my voice. The quickest way to lose points with Doc Homer was to lose control. I said, “You always just wanted Hallie and me to be above everybody in Grace.”

“You were above your peers.”

I snorted at that. “I was as trashy as Connie Muñoz and Rita Cardenal, without half their guts or one-tenth of their sex appeal. I was ugly and embarrassed to be alive.”

Doc Homer had a strange way of actually getting quieter when he raised his voice. “My daughters were not trash,” he said.

I looked him square in the eye. “I got pregnant when I was fifteen.”

“I know. I watched you bury the baby in the riverbed.”

I felt an odd flush in my neck and face. For about a minute we both listened to the dripping of the coffeepot. Then I said, “Why do you lie about everything?”

“I’ve never told you anything but the truth.”

“You’ve never told me anything, period. You said you and mother came from Illinois. But you came from here. You’ve got a whole family lying up there in the damn graveyard.”

“We did come here from Illinois. I was stationed there, and went to medical school there. We moved back here after the war.”

“What kind of war had people stationed in Illinois?” I asked absurdly, close to tears. “I’m sorry, but in history class they never told us about the Midwestern Front.”

“Alice’s family despised me.”