Animal Dreams: A Novel

  On the way back Viola was quiet. She walked quickly, stopping only to pick up the feathers that littered the leafy orchard floor. The sudden cold snap that heralded the certainty of winter had caused the male peacocks to molt in unison. There being no hope of mating for months to come, they had shed their burdensome tails.

  The meeting had ended in compromise: the Stitch and Bitch Club would officially sanction mass demonstrations against Black Mountain's leaching operation, to be held daily on the dam construction site, starting at 6 A.M. the following morning. Unofficially, the Stitch and Bitch Club would have no objection if a bulldozer met with premature demise.

  Hallie wrote:

  This morning I saw three children die. Pretty thirteen-year-old girls wearing dresses over their jeans. They were out in a woods near here, picking fruit, and a helicopter came over the trees and strafed them. We heard the shots. Fifteen minutes later an alert defense patrol shot the helicopter down, twenty miles north, and the pilot and another man in the helicopter were killed but one is alive. Codi, they're American citizens, active-duty National Guards. It's a helicopter from the U.S., guns, everything from Washington. Please watch the newspapers and tell me what they say about this. The girls were picking fruit. When they brought them into town, oh God. Do you know what it does to a human body to be cut apart from above, from the sky? We're defenseless from that direction, we aren't meant to have enemies attack us from above. The girls were alive, barely, and one of the mothers came running out and then turned away saying, "Thank you, Holy Mother, it's not my Alba." But it was Alba. Later when the families took the bodies into the church to wash them, I stayed with Alba's two younger sisters. They kept saying, "Alba braided our hair this morning. She can't be dead. See, she fixed our hair."

  Codi, please tell me what you hear about this. I can't stand to think it could be the same amnesiac thing, big news for one day and then forgotten. Nobody here can eat or talk. There are dark stains all over the cement floor of the church. It's not a thing you forget.

  She signed it, perversely, "The luckiest person alive."

  I heard nothing. I listened to the radio, but there wasn't a word. Two days, nothing. Then, finally, there was one brief report about the American in the helicopter who was taken prisoner by the Nicaraguan government. He was an ex-mercenary running drugs, the radio said, no connection to us. He was shot down and taken prisoner, and that is all. No children had died in an orchard, no sisters, no mothers, no split skulls. And I'm sorry to say this, I knew it was a lie, but I was comforted.

  "Who came up with the idea that Indians are red?" I asked Loyd one morning. If I wasn't careful I could lose myself in this man. His color was like some wholesome form of bread, perfectly done. His forearm, which my head rested on, was sparsely covered with silky black hair.

  He turned his head. His hair was perfectly straight, and touched his shoulders. "Old movies," he said. "Westerns."

  We were in my bed very late on a Sunday morning. Loyd was a wonderful insomnia cure, good enough to bottle. That's what I'd written Hallie, whom I told everything now, even if my daily letters were comparatively trivial. "He's a cockfighter," I'd confessed, "but he's better than Sominex." When Loyd lay next to me I slept deep as a lake, untroubled by dreams. First I'd felt funny about his being here--exposing Emelina's children, and all that. But he didn't invite me to his place, saying mine was better. He liked to pull books down off my slim shelf and read parts aloud in bed, equally pleased with poetry or descriptions of dark-phase photosynthesis. It occurred to me that Emelina would have a good laugh over my delicacy concerning her children. She probably was daring them to look in the windows and bring back reports.

  But the shades were drawn. "Old westerns were in black and white," I reminded him. "No red men."

  "Well, there you go. If John Wayne had lived in the time of color TV, everybody would know what Indians look like."

  "Right," I said, gently picking up Loyd's forearm and taking a taste. "Like that white guy in pancake makeup that played Tonto."

  "Tonto who?"

  "Tonto Schwarzenegger. Who do you think? Tonto. The Lone Ranger's secretary."

  "I didn't grow up with a TV in the house." He withdrew his arm and rolled over on his stomach, forearms crossed under his chin. It looked like a defensive posture. "After we got plumbing in Santa Rosalia we all sat around and watched the toilet flush. Sounds like a joke, right? How many Indians does it take to flush a toilet."

  "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.

  "Collie's a cock mechanic," Loyd said. "We go back a ways."

  I laughed. "You give them tune-ups before the fight?"

  "No, after," Collie said. "I sew them up. So they live to fight another day."

  "Oh. I thought it was to the death." I dragged a finger across my throat.

  Collie smiled. "Out of every fight, one of them dies and one lives." He turned to Loyd. "How come the girls always forget about the one that lives?"

  "Everybody loves a hero, I guess." Loyd winked at me.

  "Nothing heroic about a dead bird," I pointed out.

  The arena centered on a raked floor of reddish-brown dirt. Loyd maneuvered me through the men squatting and arguing at its perimeter to a dilapidated flank of wooden chairs where he deposited me. I felt nervous about being left alone, though the atmosphere was as innocuous as a picnic, minus women and food.

  "I'll be back," he said, and vanished.

  The place was thick with roosters but didn't smell like poultry, only of clean, sharp dust. I suppose the birds didn't stay around long enough to establish that kind of presence. Some men took seats near me, jarring me slightly; the chairs were all nailed together in long rows, the type used for parades. I spotted Loyd through the crowd. Everybody wanted to talk to him, cutting in like suitors at a dance. He was quite at home here, and relaxed: an important man who's beyond self-importance.

  He returned to me just as a short, dark man in deeply worn plaid pants was marking out a chalk square in the dirt of the center pit. Betting flared around the fringes. An old man stabbed the stump of a missing forefinger at the crowd and shouted, angrily, "Seventy! Somebody call seventy!"

  Loyd took my hand. "This is a gaff tournament," he explained quietly. "That means the birds have a little steel spur on the back of each leg. In the knife fights they get blades."

  "So you have gaff birds and knife birds," I said. I'd been turning over this question since our trip to Kinishba.

  "Right. They fight different. A knife fight is a cutting fight and it goes a lot faster. You never really get to see what a bird could do. The really game birds are gaff birds."

  "I'll take your word for it," I said.

  The first two fighters, men named Gustavo and Scratch, spoke to the man in plaid pants, who seemed in charge. Scratch appeared to have only one functional eye. Loyd said they were two of the best cockfighters on the reservation. The first position was an honor.

  "The roosters don't look honored," I said. Actually they looked neither pleased nor displeased, but stalked in circles, accustomed to life on one square yard of turf. Their tail feathers ticked like weeds and one of them crowed nonstop, as if impatient. But impatience implies consciousness of time and a chicken is existential. I know that much about birds.

  "How come you're not down there playing with your friends?" I asked Loyd.

  "I've got people to train the birds, bring the birds, weigh in, all that. I handle. You'll see."

  "Train the birds? How do you teach a bird to fight?"

  "You don't, it's all instinct and breeding. You just train them not to freak out when they get in a crowd."

  "I see. So you don't train, you handle," I said. "A handling man."

  He pinched my thigh gently along the inside seam of my jeans. I'd been handled by Loyd quite a few times since Kinishba. The crowd quieted. Scratch and Gustavo squared off in the center of the pit, their charges cradled at thigh level, and they thrust their birds toward each other three times in a rhythm that was frankly sexual. Each time the men's hips rocked forward, the cocks dutifully bit each other's faces. Apparently the point was to contrive a fighting mood. Two minutes ago these birds were strutting around their own closed circuits, and if they looked away from each other even now they'd probably lose their train of thought and start scratching the dust for cracked corn.

  But now they were primed, like cocked pistols. Their handlers set them down on opposite chalk lines and they shook themselves and inflated their pale ruffs. When the plaid-pants referee gave the word, the men let go. The birds ran at each other and jumped up, spur
s aimed for the other bird's breast. They hopped over one another, fluttering their short wings, pecking each other's heads and drawing blood. After about thirty seconds the birds' spurs tangled and they lay helpless, literally locked in combat.

  "Handle that!" the referee shouted.

  The handlers moved in to pull them apart. They faced the birds off, waited for the count, and let them go at each other once more. Within another minute Scratch and Gustavo had to intervene again, this time because one bird had his spurs irretrievably embedded in the breast meat of his opponent. The handlers gently pulled them apart and started them again.

  It takes a very long time for one bird or the other to die. Presumably they were dying of internal wounds and hemorrhage. Punctured lungs, for example, and literally bleeding hearts. Eventually they began to bleed from the mouths. At that point I could finally tell Scratch's bird from Gustavo's because it lay down in the dirt and wouldn't get up. Scratch had to place it on its feet and push it back in the direction of combat.

  "Why don't they just declare the winner?" I whispered.

  "There's rules."

  It was a ridiculous answer, but correct. A death was required. It took thirty or forty minutes, and I guess the birds were showing their mettle, but it was hard to watch. The cocks were both exhausted and near death, no longer even faintly beautiful. Their blond breasts and ruffs were spotted with blood, stringy as unwashed hair. Collie Bluestone would have his work cut out for him here.

  There seemed to be elaborate rules about how to keep things going after this point, when both birds really just wanted to sit with their beaks in the dirt. If one lay still, the other had no incentive to fight. I've studied a lot of biology; I quickly figured out that this industry was built around a bird's natural impulse for territorial defense, and that's where it broke down. No animal has reason to fight its own kind to the death. A rooster will defend his ground, but once that's established, he's done. After that he tends to walk around ignoring the bizarre surroundings and all the people who have next month's rent riding on him and he'll just act like a chicken--the animal that he is. The handlers had to keep taking the birds firmly in hand, squaring them off and trying to force the fight.