Barbara Kingsolver (9 page)

Emelina found this hilarious. I know she thought I was exaggerating, but I wasn’t. In a way we were grateful for the attention, but the shoes were so appalling. They affected our lives, the two of us differently. Hallie just gave up trying for image, while I went the route of caring too much. It was harder for me, being the first to break into junior high, then high school, in these shoes. I suffered first and therefore more.

“I’m positive that was the whole reason I hardly ever had any dates in high school,” I told Emelina.

“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “The only reason boys didn’t ask you out was because they thought you were too good for them. You were so smart, why would you want to run with a Grace boy? That’s what they thought.”

The meeting in the living room was beginning to break up. We lowered our voices automatically.

“No,” I said solemnly. “It was the shoes. It’s a known fact. The
day I left Grace I bought a pair of gladiator sandals and my sex life picked right up.”

Emelina eventually remembered
a letter for me she’d been carrying around a while. She’d stuck it in the diaper bag when she picked up the mail, and then forgotten it, so it suffered more in its last hundred yards of delivery than it had in its previous fifteen hundred miles. Of course, it was from Hallie.

I went home to read it, like a rat scurrying back to its hole with some edible prize. I settled into the living-room chair, polished my glasses, and scowled at the postmark: Chiapas, near Mexico’s southern border, only days after she left. That was a disappointment, anything could have happened since then. I slit it open.

The ending was an old joke: in our letters we used to try to outdo each other with ingratiating closures. The rest of the letter was pure Hallie. Even in a lethargic mood she noticed every vanilla orchid, every agony and ecstasy. Especially agony. She might as well not have had skin, where emotions were concerned. Other people’s hurt
ran right over into her flesh. For example: I’ll flip through a newspaper and take note of the various disasters, and then Hallie will read the same paper and cry her eyes out. She’ll feel like she has to
do
something about it. And me, if I want to do anything, it’s to run hell for leather in the other direction. Maybe it’s true what they say, that as long as you’re nursing your own pain, whatever it is, you’ll turn your back on others in the same boat. You’ll want to believe the fix they’re in is their own damn fault.

The strangest thing is that where pain seemed to have anesthetized me, it gave Hallie extra nerve endings. This haunts me. What we suffered in our lives we went through together, but somehow we came out different doors, on different ground levels.

Friday night after
the first week of school, the dog with the green bandana showed up again at the gate. I saw it when I came outside after my solitary supper to water the morning glories and potted geraniums on my front step. The heat seemed to wilt them right down to death’s door, but water always brought them back. I could only wish for such resilience.

“Hi, buddy,” I said to the dog. “No barbecues today. You’re out of luck.”

Thirty seconds later Loyd was standing at the door with a bottle of beer. “I told you I’d get back to you with this,” he said, grinning. “I’m a man of my word.”

“Well, okay,” I said. “I guess you are.” I wasn’t sure how I felt about seeing him in my doorway, other than surprised. I pulled a couple of folding chairs onto the patio, where we could see the sunset. The sky was a bright, artificial-looking orange, a color you might expect to see in the Hollywood Shop. “Are you going to have one too, or do I drink this alone?” I asked him.

Loyd said he’d just take a soda because he was marked up and five times out. I was mystified by this information.

“I’m marked up on the call board at the depot,” he explained. “To
take a train out. Five times out means I’m fifth in line. I’ll probably get called late tonight or early tomorrow morning.”

“Oh,” I said. “It sounded like baseball scores. The count is three and two and it’s the bottom of the seventh.”

Loyd laughed. “I guess it would sound like that. You get used to talking railroad talk like it was plain English. Around here that’s about all everybody does, is railroad.”

“That, and watch the fruit fall off their trees.”

Loyd looked at me, surprised. “You know about that, do you?”

“Not very much,” I said. I went into my house to get him a soda, picking my way over the rough bricks of the patio because I was barefoot. I will say this much for Doc Homer’s career as a father: my arches are faultless.

When I came back out I sat down and handed over a Coke, letting Loyd fight with the easy-off twist cap himself. I had to use pliers on those things. It didn’t give Loyd two seconds of trouble. He palmed it, then tipped his head back and drank about half the bottle. The things that aggravate me most in the world are the things men do without even knowing it.

“So is that your dog?” I asked.

“That’s jack. You met? Jack, this lady here is Codi Noline.”

“We’ve met,” I said. “I sneaked him some goat spare ribs the other day at the fiesta. I hope he’s not on a special diet or anything.”

“He’s in love, is what he is, if you gave him a piece of that goat. That was one of Angel Pilar’s yearling billy goats. Jack’s had his eye on those spare ribs ever since last summer.”

Jack looked at me, panting seriously. His tongue was purplish, and his eyes were very dark brown and lively. Sometimes when you look into an animal’s eyes you see nothing, no sign of connection, just the flat stare of a wild creature. But Jack’s eyes spoke worlds. I liked him.

“He looks like a coyote,” I said.

“He is. Half. I’ll tell you the story of his life sometime.”

“I can’t wait,” I said, really meaning it, though it came out sounding a little sarcastic. Our chairs were close enough together so that I
could have reached over and squeezed Loyd’s hand, but I didn’t do that.

“It was nice of you to come by,” I said.

“So this was your first week of school, right? How’s life with the juvenile delinquents of Grace?”

I was a little bit flattered that he knew about my job. But then everybody would. “I don’t know,” I said. “Pretty scary, I think. I’ll keep you posted.”

The sky had faded from orange to pale pink, and the courtyard was dusky under the fig trees. Every night as it got dark the vegetation around the house seemed to draw itself in closer, hugging the whitewashed walls, growing dense as a jungle.

Loyd touched my forearm lightly and pointed. On the cliff above the courtyard wall, a pair of coyotes trotted along a narrow animal path. Jack’s ears stood up and rotated like tracking dishes as we watched them pass.

“You know what the Navajos call coyotes? God’s dogs,” Loyd said. His fingers were still resting on my forearm.

“Why’s that?” I asked.

He took his hand back and cracked his knuckles behind his head. He leaned back in his chair, stretching out his legs. “I don’t know. I guess because they run around burying bones in God’s backyard.”

Jack got up and went to the courtyard wall. He stood as still as a rock fence except for one back leg, which trembled, betraying all the contained force of whatever it was he wanted to do just then, but couldn’t. After a minute he came back to Loyd’s feet, turned his body in a tight circle two or three times, and lay down with a soft moan.

“Why do they do that? Turn in circles like that?” I asked. I’d never lived with a dog and was slightly infatuated with Jack.

“Beating down the tall grass to make a nice little nest,” Loyd said. “Even if there’s no tall grass.”

“Well, I guess that make sense, from a dog’s point of view.”

“Sure it does.” He bent forward to scratch Jack between the ears.
“We take these good, smart animals and put them in a house and then wonder why they keep on doing the stuff that made them happy for a million years. A dog can’t think that much about what he’s doing, he just does what feels right.”

We were both quiet for a while. “How do you know what the Navajos call coyotes? I thought you were Apache.” I felt vaguely that it might be racist to discuss Loyd’s breeding, but he didn’t seem offended.

“I’m a lot of stuff,” he said. “I’m a mongrel, like Jack. I was born up in Santa Rosalia Pueblo. My mama still lives up there. You ever been up there to Pueblo country?”

“No,” I said.

“It’s pretty country. You ought to go sometime. I lived up there when I was a little kid, me and my brother Leander, God, we ran wild all over that place.”

“You have a brother? I never knew that.”

“Twin,” Loyd said. “He’s dead.”

Everybody’s got a secret, I thought, and for the first time that evening I remembered the child of Loyd’s that was unknown to him. It felt furtive and strange to hold it in mind in his presence, as if I were truly holding it, and he might see it.

A dust-colored peafowl hopped onto the courtyard wall and then into the fig, rustling the leaves and warning us off with a throaty, chirruping sound. She was awkward and heavy-bodied, no more flight-worthy than a helicopter.

“So you’re Pueblo, and Apache, and Navajo,” I said.

“My dad’s Apache. We boys left Mama and came down to White Mountain to live with him, but it didn’t work out. I ended up in Grace with my mama’s sister. You knew my
tía
Sonia, right?”

“I don’t think so. Is she still around?”

“No. She’s gone back to Santa Rosalia. I need to go up there and see her and Mama one of these days.”

It sounded like a strangely scattered family. I still wasn’t clear on the Navajo connection.

“Can I use your phone?” he asked suddenly.

“Sure. It might be in use, it’s Emelina’s and J.T.’s phone. They just ran an extension out for me.”