Animal Dreams: A Novel

  "They're saying I'm a doctor," I said to his back. "That I've come here to save Grace." Hallie and I had already used up all the possible jokes on our town and Doc Homer: Saving Grace, Amazing Grace. Every one left a bitter taste in the mouth.

  "And how do they propose that you're going to do that?"

  "I don't know. However doctors usually perform their miracles."

  "You know very well what doctors do. You finished four years of medical school and you nearly finished your internship. You were only two or three months away from being licensed to practice."

  I touched my fingertip to some vagrant bread crumbs scattered across the table. Because his back was turned I had the courage to ask the question point blank. "How severely do you hold that against me? That I didn't make doctor?"

  "Who is saying you didn't make it?"

  "I'm saying it, right now. I don't have it in me, now or ever. Just the idea of me being a doctor is ridiculous. People depending on me in a life-or-death situation? Remember when I took Red Cross swimming lessons? I tried out the elbow-hold rescue on Ginny Galvez and we had a near-death experience."

  He spoke without turning around. "How did you arrive at the conclusion that you could not be a doctor?"

  For a minute I buried my face in the afghan, which smelled like a familiar animal. When I looked up again he was facing me, drying his hands on a dish towel, one finger at a time. "I would just like to know," he said.

  "I couldn't make it through my rotation on OB-GYN. I was delivering a premature baby, which turned out also to be breach, and there was fetal distress, and the mother's pressure started to shoot up. I just walked away from it. I don't even remember exactly what I did, but I know I left her there. She could have died." I corrected myself. "They both could have died."

  "You were only a first-year resident and it was a high-risk delivery. I'm sure there was someone on hand to back you up. Malpractice laws being what they are."

  "That's not the point."

  "You don't have to deliver babies to be a physician. I no longer deliver babies myself. There are a hundred specialties you could choose that have nothing to do with obstetrics."

  "That isn't the point. People were looking to me for a decision, and I lost my nerve. You can't lose your nerve. You're the one that taught me that."

  He looked me straight in the eye and said, "I lose my nerve a dozen times a day."

  It was the last thing on earth I expected to hear. I felt as if I'd been robbed. I put my face back in the afghan and suddenly I started to cry. I have no idea where the tears came from, they just came from my eyes. I didn't want either one of us to admit helplessness here. I kept my face down for a long time, soaking the wool. When I finally glanced up he was putting something away in the refrigerator. In the dark kitchen, the brightly lit interior of the refrigerator was a whole, bright little foreign land of cheerful white boxes, stacked like condominiums. There must have been fifty tupperware containers in there: pies, cakes, casseroles. I thought of Uda's squash pie, and understood with surprise that all the women of Grace were taking care of Doc Homer. As a caretaker, I was superfluous.

  He saw me looking at him. He stood with the refrigerator door half open, illuminating his face. "Codi, you could be a doctor if you wanted to do that. You learned the skills. Don't try to put the blame on something abstract like your nerve--you have to take responsibility. Is it something you want, or not?"

  "I don't know."

  He didn't move. I kept thinking he ought to close the refrigerator door. He'd always had a million rules about everything. Wasting electricity, for example.

  "It's not," I finally said, for the first time.

  "No?"

  "No. I thought it would be an impressive thing to do. But I don't think it was a plan that really grew out of my life. I can't remember ever thinking it would be all that delightful to look down people's throats and into their nasty infected ears and their gall bladders."

  "You're entitled to that opinion," he said. "That the human body is a temple of nastiness."

  I held him steady in the eye and he smiled, ever so slightly. "You bet," I said. "People are a totally creeped scenario."

  The news from Hallie was brief and moderately alarming. There had been contra activity in her district, nobody hurt but four John Deere tractors burnt down to scorched metal hulls. She sounded sick about that. "A Deere is like a hunk of gold here. Because of the U.S. embargo we can't get parts, and the ones still running are Nicaragua's patron saints." She sounded completely, happily settled in, though, much more so than I was in Grace. She talked about waking up in the mornings: Roosters hopping up onto the windowsill. An army of little girls in polyester dresses out in the street with huge baskets on their heads, forging out on a hundred urgent missions. She was making good progress with some new cultivation methods; wished she knew more about diesel mechanics. A man named Julio, a literacy teacher from Matagalpa, had asked her out on a date. (She drew stars all around the word "date," making fun of herself.) They had busy schedules, so finally they met after work and rode together to a meeting in a church where Hallie delivered a lecture on pesticide safety. The church was full of gnats and kerosene smoke and little kids crawling around on a big piece of plastic, crying, impatient for their parents to take them home to bed. She and Julio had ridden over together on her horse, Sopa del Dia, and had a nice time going home.

  Sunday night was Halloween and Emelina's children took to the streets. Grace was at an interesting sociological moment: the teenagers inhaled MTV and all wanted to look like convicted felons, but at the same time, nobody here was worried yet about razor blades in apples.

  Emelina volunteered me to go trick-or-treating with the four older boys while she stayed home to dispense bribes to the rest of the town's marauders; she felt a pagan holiday would do me good. I was only chaperone and crossing guard, not expected to go in costume. There was a state law against anyone over twelve wearing a mask or making direct requests at people's doors. The city fathers of Grace were independent to an extent: they ignored state law when they closed school on November 2 for the town's biggest holiday, the Day of All Souls. But to be on the safe side they were going along with the Halloween mask law. John Tucker was disappointed but tried not to show it. Emelina encouraged him to go with us anyway, more or less as a second chaperone. She was wonderful to watch. I guess I'd never really seen good mothering up close.

  He agreed to go, dressed in J.T.'s black raincoat, with a quarter-inch of talcum powder on his face. Emelina ran deep eyeliner shadows under his eyes. It was convincing--he looked either sick or dead, depending on his position. Mason went as a bug, with grocerybag wings and radio antennae strapped to his head with a yellow sweatband. He instructed Emelina to draw on bug fangs with her eyebrow pencil. I don't think Emelina ever actually wore makeup, she just kept it on hand for emergencies. The twins both were going as teenagers (i.e., convicted felons), but decided they needed fangs also.

  We made a pretty good haul; in this fruit basket of a valley, I'd never seen such an orgy of sucrose. Jawbreakers and Gummi Bears multiplied in the kids' bags like the loaves and fishes. The twins pulled me along by both hands, and Mason gripped my leg when we crossed the street. We hit every house on the road that circled the canyon to the south--the longest possible route to the courthouse. John Tucker hung back in the shadows at the edges of yards, but I escorted the boys right up to the doorsteps, secretly enjoying these little peeks into people's bright living rooms. Our last stop was at the lemon-yellow home of Mrs. Nunez, whom I knew to be an important figure in the Stitch and Bitch Club. I was beginning to learn my way around the matriarchy of Grace, a force unknown to me in childhood.

  Old Mrs. Nunez recognized the kids immediately, but for some reason mistook me for Emelina. I think she just didn't really look. She chattered at the boys as she dropped Hershey's kisses and bubble gum into their heavy grocery bags: "Oh, what an awful-looking bug you are. You get away from my house, you old cucaracha. And you u
gly old twins, too. You're too scary." She kissed them all on the tops of their heads.

  She stopped suddenly, holding her glasses and peering out at the pale apparition of John Tucker, who was hanging back around her shrubs as required by law. "Cielo santo!" she said, with real concern. "What's the matter with your brother?"

  "He's thirteen," said Glen.

  All Souls' Day dawned cool, and the people of Grace put on their sweatshirts and gave thanks. The heat wave was broken. By half past eight the sun was well up and sweatshirts peeled off again, but it was still a perfect day. Every able-bodied person in Grace climbed the canyon roads to converge on the cemetery.

  It was the bittersweet Mexican holiday, the Day of the Dead, democratic follow-up to the Catholic celebration of All Hallows. Some people had business with the saints on November 1, and so went to mass, but on November 2 everybody had business at the graveyard. The families traipsing slowly uphill resembled harvester ants, carrying every imaginable species of real and artificial flower: bulging grocery sacks of chrysanthemums and gladioli; tulips made from blue and pink Styrofoam egg cartons; long-stemmed silk roses bouncing in children's hands like magic wands; and unclassifiable creations out of fabric and colored paper and even the plastic rings from six-packs. The Stitch and Bitch Club had had four special meetings in a row.

  When Hallie and I were very small we used to be allowed to participate in this celebration, with J.T.'s family. I wondered if Viola remembered having us in tow. In my own mind it was all vague; what I remembered best was the marigolds. Cempazuchiles, the flowers of the dead. I asked Viola about them.

  "They come on the truck," she answered cryptically.

  "Do you remember when Hallie and I used to come up here with you?"

  "Sure I do. You always ran all over the graves and messed up everything." Viola didn't pull her punches.

  "Well, we were little," I said defensively. "Doc Homer made us quit coming after a while. I remember that. I remember him saying, 'Those great-grandmothers aren't any of your business.'"

  "Well, he was the boss."

  "Right. He was the boss."

  Emelina and the four older boys were marching ahead, but I was pushing the stroller over gravel and Viola was over sixty, so we both had an excuse to lag. We were a harvester-ant clan ourselves, burdened not only with flowers but with food and beer and soft drinks and sundry paraphernalia. John Tucker was carrying a new, largish St. Joseph for Viola's husband's grave. J.T. was still in El Paso, and Loyd was on a switch engine in Yuma, but we didn't seem to need them all that much. It looked like a female holiday, what with the egg-carton flowers. A festival of women and children and old people and dead ancestors.

  Viola stopped for breath, holding the bosom of her shiny black dress and looking down at the canyon. I waited with her, adjusting the red handkerchief Emelina had tied over Nicholas's bald head to shield it from sun. As he vibrated over the corduroy road the kerchief kept slipping down over his eyes, and he looked like a drunken pirate. I bent over and looked into his face, upside-down. He enlightened me with a wicked pirate smile.

  It was a spectacular day. The roadside was lined with bright yellow plumes of rabbitbrush, apparently too common a flower for anyone to take to a grave, but I liked them. I would try to remember to pick some on my way back down, to stick into the clay ollas around my house; I was determined to prove to Emelina that I wasn't completely bereft of domestic instincts.

  From where we stood we could look down on the whole of Grace plus the many small settlements that lay a little apart from the town, strung out along the length of Gracela Canyon and its tributaries, often inhabited by just a few families, some with their own tiny graveyards. These settlements were mostly abandoned now. A lot of them had been torn right up when Black Mountain chased a vein of copper under their floors; others had been buried; the company had an old habit of digging and dumping where it pleased. Grace's huge main cemetery was located on the opposite side of the canyon, as far as possible from the mine, for exactly that reason. Not even the graveyards were sacred.

  At the upstream end of the canyon we could also see the beginnings of the dam that would divert the river out Tortoise Canyon. There had been a ridiculous photo in the local paper: the company president and a couple of managers at a ground-breaking ceremony, wearing ties, stepping delicately on shovels with their wing-tip shoes. These men had driven down from Phoenix for the morning, and would drive right back. They all had broad salesmen's smiles. They pretended the dam was some kind of community-improvement project, but from where Viola and I stood it looked like exactly what it was--a huge grave. Marigold-orange earth movers hunched guiltily on one corner of the scarred plot of ground.

  "So what's going to happen?" I asked Viola.

  "The Lord in heaven knows," she said.

  I prodded. "Well, there was a meeting last night. Have you talked to anybody?"

  "Oh, sure. The men on the council had another one of their big meetings about it and decided to have a lawsuit. A lawyer came up from Tucson to meet with Jimmy Soltovedas."

  Jimmy was the mayor. The town council had nothing to do with Black Mountain anymore; Grace wasn't a company town in the classical sense, except for the fact that the company owned everything we walked on.

  "What did the lawyer say?" In a moment of vanity I wondered if anyone had mentioned my affidavit. My line about "the approximate pH of battery acid" seemed like something a lawyer could gleefully quote.

  "The lawyer said we might have grandfather rights to the water, and so we could have a class-action lawsuit to make the company give us back our river."

  "How long will that take?"

  She shrugged. "Maybe ten years."

  "Ten years?"

  "Right. In ten years we can all come back and water our dead trees."

  "Did anybody go to the newspapers to get some publicity about this? It's ridiculous."

  "Jimmy called the newspapers half a dozen times. I talked to Jimmy's wife. Nobody's interested in a dipshit little town like Grace. They could drop an atom bomb down on us here and it wouldn't make no news in the city. Unless it stirred up the weather over there and rained out a ball game or something."

  "So it's a ten-year lawsuit." I didn't want to believe she was right, though her sources were always irreproachable. "Is that the only thing those guys can come up with against the Mountain?"

  "Don't call that company the Mountain," she said curtly. "It makes it sound like something natural you can't ever move."

  "I've heard the men call it that," I said.

  Viola snorted like an old horse and started up the hill.

  When we arrived, half a dozen elderly men were putting a fresh coat of white paint on the wrought-iron fence around the huge cemetery. Wrought iron was a theme here; there were iron crosses and wreaths, and over some of the graves there were actual little iron houses, with roofs. Through the ups and downs of Black Mountain's smelting plant, Grace had been home to a lot of out-of-work metalworkers.

  Most families divided their time between the maternal and paternal lines, spending mornings on one set of graves and afternoons on the other. Emelina and the boys staked out the Domingos plot and set to work sweeping and straightening. One of the graves, a great-uncle of J.T.'s named Vigilancio Domingos, was completely bordered with ancient-looking tequila bottles, buried nose down. Mason and I spent half the morning gathering up the strays and resetting them all in the dirt, as straight as teeth. It was a remarkable aesthetic--I don't mean just Uncle Vigilancio, but the whole. Some graves had shrines with niches peopled by saints; some looked like botanical gardens of paper and silk; others had the initials of loved ones spelled out on the mound in white stones. The unifying principle was that the simplest thing was done with the greatest care. It was a comfort to see this attention lavished on the dead. In these families you would never stop being loved.

  The marigold truck arrived at ten o'clock. Women swarmed down on it like bees, coming away with armloads of floral gold. The
re were many theories on the best way to put them to use, or to make them go farthest. Viola, who directed the Domingos family operations, was of the deconstructionist school. She had the boys tear the flowers up and lay the petals down over a grave, blanketing it like a monochrome mosaic.

  John Tucker stayed at his work but the twins wandered and Mason disappeared altogether. Emelina, wasn't worried. "He's refining his begging skills he learned on Halloween," she said, and was probably right. Grandmothers everywhere, who at lunch had set out extra plates for the dead, were now indiscriminately passing out the sweet remains of their picnics.

  By mid-afternoon Emelina felt we should send out a search party, "before he eats so many cookies he busts." Viola volunteered, and I went with her, more or less as a tourist. I wanted to see what else there was in the line of beautified graves. We skirted Gonzalez and Castiliano and Jones, each family with its own style. Some were devotees of color or form, while others went for bulk. One grave, a boy who'd died young, was decorated with the better part of a Chevrolet. There were hundreds of holes drilled into the fishtail fenders, to hold flowers. It was beautiful, like a float in a parade.

  The cemetery covered acres. To the west of us were collections of small neglected mounds whose stones bore the names of families that had died out. "Trubee," I read aloud, wandering toward the desert of the forgotten. "Alice, Anna, Marcus. Lomas: Hector, Esperanza, Jose, Angel, Carmela."

  "Honey, we better get back to where people are," Viola cautioned, but I wandered on, as distracted in my way as Mason must have been, wherever he was.

  "Nolina," I shouted. "Look, here's my long-lost relatives."

  Viola looked at me oddly from her distance across the graves.

  "I'm kidding," I said. We came from Illinois, as she well knew. "Here's my Aunt Raquel, my aunt...something Maria." Most of the graves were illegible, or so crudely marked there was nothing to read. Then I found one that stopped me dead.