"So did you get to drive the big machines?"
"Nope. Mostly I got to pick rocks and dirt clods off the conveyor. I think that was the best job I ever had. The hardest, but the best, because I grew up on it. Stopped thinking about myself all the time and started thinking about something else, even if it was just damn pecans."
I took it from Loyd's use of the singular pronoun that Leander was dead by this time. Slowly I was patching together Loyd's life, and it was not the poor little gypsy story I'd imagined. I suppose I'd wanted to see him as a fellow orphan. But everywhere he'd been, he'd been with family.
"How long will Grace last without the river?" I asked.
"Two or three years, maybe. The old orchards will go longer because their roots are deeper." He glanced at me. "You know I have an orchard?"
"No. In Grace?"
"Yep. Not the pecans, those belong to my cousins, but Tia Sonia's leaving me the peach orchard. The fruit trees were always my job, keeping the birds and squirrels off the fruit."
"How do you do that?"
"Well, the main way is by killing them."
I laughed.
"What's funny?"
"I don't know." I stared out the windshield. In the distance, Ship Rock floated like a ghost vessel on the snowy plain. "So you now have a dying orchard to call your own. Your Aunt Sonia's moved back to Santa Rosalia, right?"
"Right. But the orchard's not mine till I have kids."
"That doesn't seem fair."
"No, it makes sense. When you have a family, you need trees." He paused, carefully, it seemed to me, and redirected the conversation. "What job did you grow up on?"
I thought this over. "Maybe I haven't had it yet."
He smiled. "You went to medical school, right? And almost finished. That can't be too easy."
"When it stopped being easy, I quit."
"What were you doing in Tucson, then, before you came to Grace?"
"You don't want to know. Cashier in a 7-Eleven."
"Shoot. And I thought you were too good to go out with a locomotive engineer. What about before that?"
"You don't want to know."
"Yes, I do."
"Well, I did medical research at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota."
"Damn! Really?"
"Yep. I was living up there two years ago when I first found out Doc Homer was sick."
"And before that?"
I rolled my head back and looked at the roof of the car. "You really don't want to know."
"You were President of the United States."
"Guess again."
"You hotwired Porsches."
I laughed. "The biggest thing I ever stole was a frozen lobster, for my boyfriend's birthday. I was working in frozen foods and I think I actually wanted to get fired. Doesn't that sound stupid?"
"Yes, it sounds stupid. So that came before Mayo Clinic?"
"That, and a bunch of different odd little things. A few piddly research jobs in between. Believe me, I never put everything on the same resume."
"And what's the one you never mention? The one you're trying not to tell me about."
"For a few years in there I lived overseas."
"No kidding. Did you fly? Shoot, I'd love to go someplace in an airplane."
"Flying's okay," I said. In truth, flying terrified me. It's the one thing I knew I had in common with my mother, who'd flat-out refused, there at the end. In my own life I handled it by means of steadfast denial. I'd flown over the Atlantic Ocean twice without even checking to see if there really was a flotation device under my seat; flotation seemed beside the point. Oh, I flew like a bird.
"So, okay, what were you doing overseas?"
I glanced at him. "I was my boyfriend Carlo's girlfriend. On the island of Crete."
He seemed amused. "What, you mean you cleaned house and made cookies?"
"Kind of. Sometimes I'd help out in the clinic. One time I set the broken leg of a sheep. But mostly I was a housewife."
"So you'd, what, go shopping in a bikini?"
I laughed. "It really was not that kind of island. You know where it is, right? In between Greece and Egypt. The women wear black wool dresses and crucifixes the size of a hood ornament. Getting the picture?"
He nodded.
"The main baby present for a boy is a silver knife, which they present in this ceremony where the godparents list all the enemies of the family going back to around Adam and Eve."
"You liked it that much, huh?"
I took my coat off. It was finally warming up. "Well, it was interesting. It was someplace to go. It was like going to another century, actually. But I felt like a complete outsider." I closed my eyes, fighting an old ache.
"How do you mean?"
"I'm pretty good at languages but I never could get the hang of fitting in. Not anywhere, but especially not there."
"Why do you think you don't fit in? Give me an example."
It was plain that I'd always been an oddity in Grace, so he must have meant how was I an oddity in Crete. "Well, my first day there I marched into the bakery and asked for a psoli. The word for a loaf of bread is psomi. A psoli is a penis."
Loyd laughed. "Anybody could make a mistake like that."
"Not more than once, I promise you."
"Well, you were foreign. People expect you to say a few dumb things."
"Oh, every day I did something wrong. They had complicated rules about who could talk to who and what you could say and who said it first. Like, there were all these things you were supposed to do to avoid the Evil Eye."
"How do you do that?" he asked. Loyd was full of curiosity.
"You wear this little amulet that looks like a blue eyeball. But the main thing is, you never ever mention anything you're proud of. It's this horrible social error to give somebody a compliment, because you're attracting the attention of the Evil Eye. So you say everything backward. When two mothers pass each other on the road carrying their babies, one says to the other, 'Ugly baby!' And the other one says, 'Yours also!'"
Loyd laughed a wonderful, loud laugh that made me think of Fenton Lee, in high school. Who'd died in the train wreck.
"I swear to God it's true."
"I believe you. It's just funny how people are. People in Grace do that too, in a way. You give them a compliment and they'll say, 'Oh, no, that's just something I've had a long time.' We're all scared to be too happy about what we've got, for fear somebody'll notice and take it away." He reached over and stroked the underside of my arm, from the elbow up. "Like you, Codi. You're exactly like that. Scared to claim anything you love."
"Am I?" I was willing to believe whatever he said. Talking with Loyd was like talking to myself, only more honest. Emelina was always asking me what it was like to live overseas, and I knew she would love the penis story, but I'd never told her much about Crete. I was afraid of her seeing me as more of an outsider in Grace than I already was. But Loyd didn't make those judgments. I could have told Loyd I'd lived on Neptune, and he'd say, "Uh-huh? What was it like, was it cold?"
In the Jemez Mountains we drove up the slope of what looked like a huge old volcano. A fluted core of granite jutted from its mouth, and twisted black ridges of old lava flows ran like varicose veins down its sides. The snow was deep and the road icy. We crept along, then stopped. Loyd got out of the truck and started down the bank toward a frozen creek that cut between the road and the steep mountainside.
"Are you nuts?" I inquired.
"Come on." He waved energetically.
"Why should I follow you down there?" I demanded, following as fast as I could.
"It's a surprise."
It was near sunset, near or below freezing, and Loyd wasn't even wearing his jacket. I slipped several times behind him and then we both slid flat-out down the hill on our backs. We were sledding, not on snow but on an exposed hillside of bizarre, rounded gravel. I picked up a handful in my mitten and tossed it in the air. It was porous and weightless like Styrofoam popcorn. "What i
s this stuff?" I asked, but Loyd was already crossing a log over the frozen creek. I scrambled behind him up the forested slope on the other side. I picked my way between rocks, grabbing roots and tree trunks to pull myself up. Halfway up I had to stop, hugging a pine trunk and panting. The cold air cut my lungs, and I blinked hard against the sensation that the water in my eyes might freeze over.
"It's the altitude," I whined. Loyd grabbed my hand and pulled me gently uphill. Suddenly we were following the course of an odd unfrozen stream with lush plants thriving alongside it, their leaves glossy green against the snow. I'd never seen anything like this in nature, only in the sort of paintings that show improbable and dreamlike things. Loyd, who had gotten ahead of me again, was now taking off his shirt. I wondered if perhaps I was, after all, in one of my strange dreams, and whether I would soon be looking under the foliage beside the stream for my lost baby.
I climbed over the top of a boulder and there stood Loyd, naked, smiling, an apparition bathed in steam. He slid into the blue pool at the base of the boulder. I touched the steaming water and it blessedly scalded my fingertips. I undressed more quickly than I probably have in my life, before or since, and immersed myself up to my eyes.
The sun set. Venus opened her eye on the horizon. From where we sat we could see the Jemez range and the valley floor fifty miles to the south, its buttes and mesas still lit by a distant sun. When our bodies turned red we stood up briefly among the snow-covered boulders, shouting, and the steam rose off our uplifted arms like smokestacks.
Loyd asked, "So, am I nuts?"
I stretched my legs along the sandy bottom of the pool until my toes found his. The heat relaxed every muscle and sinew and reflex in my body, and most of the ones in my head. This kind of happiness was sure to attract the attention of the Evil Eye. "Have you got any more surprises?" I asked. "Or is this the last one?"
"I've got some more."
He scooted over and lifted me off the sand, supporting my floating body with both hands under the small of my back. "I don't give them away all at once, though," he said. "Only a half dozen a year."
I counted on my fingers: Kinishba. Spider Rock, the Cliff house, and Maxine Shorty's farm. And this, volcanic hot springs. I didn't know whether to count the cockfights or not. That he could give up cockfights, I'd have to count that. "So I've used up my half-dozen already," I said.
He lifted me slightly out of the water and kissed my ribs, one at a time. "If you're only staying around for a year. That's the rules."
"That's bribery."
"Whatever it takes." He kissed my navel and the damp hill over my pubic bone.
The front of my body was very cold and the back was very hot. Somewhere in the middle, near my heart, I was just right. I opened my eyes and saw constellations whose names were their own business. "Were you ever in love with my sister?" I asked.
He looked at me oddly.
"It's just a joke. Every man I've ever been with, it seems like, was really in love with Hallie."
"I can't picture your sister. She's shorter than you, right?"
I ducked my chin a little, immersing my smile. Right then I could have signed on for life.
The day we left Grace, there had been four airmail letters in the P.O. box. Lately Hallie's letters sometimes came in bunches, owing to the accumulated pauses in postal service between Chinandega and Grace. But I saved them and read only one per day. It supported the pleasant, false notion that she was available to me all the time and would always be there tomorrow.
The fourth day of our trip was Christmas Eve. In the morning as we drove down from Jemez, before we arrived in Santa Rosalia, I laid out all four letters on the dash in order of postmark and spent one last hour with my sister.
I reread the old ones before opening the fourth one. Hallie's week had gone wildly up and down. On Tuesday she was nigh unto manic because the government had had a successful national meeting on the pesticide problem. Central America was becoming a toilet bowl of agricultural chemicals, she said, because of war-strained farming economies and dumping from the First World. In the seventies, when Nicaragua was run by the U.S. Marines and Somoza, it was the world's number-one consumer of DDT. But it seemed the new Nicaragua (our government, she called it) planned to take responsibility for its poisons. She also mentioned that her friend Julio was back in Chinandega after a stint of literacy work near the Atlantic coast. I couldn't read anything between the lines.
On Wednesday, a child was rushed in from the village of San Manuel to the Chinandega clinic in critical condition because someone had stored paraquat in a Coke bottle.
On Thursday she was grimly happy. Five contras were making a secret sabotage raid on a hydroelectric plant, somewhere to the east, and were surprised by some armed farmers who took them captive. The culprits had passed through town in the back of an open Jeep, slit-eyed with dishonor, on their way to trial in Managua. Wouldn't it be something, she mused, if that Jeep hit one of the contra road mines? But there was the driver to consider, and even if there hadn't been, it wasn't something she could wish for. She said, "You can't let your heart go bad like that, like sour milk. There's always the chance you'll want to use it later."
I wondered at what point I'd given up on later and let mine go sour. I didn't know, although Hallie might. I reread each of the three letters with fascination but also the same dissatisfaction I'd had on the morning I'd opened it. It was all just things happening, and selfishly, I wanted Hallie. Even if she didn't speak to me directly, I wanted her to speak.
I tore open the last envelope and was hit full in the face with what I wanted. It was four pages long, in a cursive enlarged by rage. When God wants to punish you, as Isak Dinesen declared, He answers your prayers.
I am like God, Codi? Like GOD? Give me a break. If I get another letter that mentions SAVING THE WORLD, I am sending you, by return mail, a letter bomb. Codi, please. I've got things to do.
You say you're not a moral person. What a copout. Sometime, when I wasn't looking, something happened to make you think you were bad. What, did Miss Colder give you a bad mark on your report card? You think you're no good, so you can't do good things. Jesus, Codi, how long are you going to keep limping around on that crutch? It's the other way around, it's what you do that makes you who you are.
I'm sorry to be blunt. I've had a bad week. I am trying to explain, and I wish you were here so I could tell you this right now, I am trying to explain to you that I'm not here to save anybody or any thing. It's not some perfect ideal we're working toward that keeps us going. You ask, what if we lose this war? Well, we could. By invasion, or even in the next election. People are very tired. I don't expect to see perfection before I die. Lord, if I did I would have stuck my head in the oven back in Tucson, after hearing the stories of some of those refugees. What keeps you going isn't some fine destination but just the road you're on, and the fact that you know how to drive. You keep your eyes open, you see this damned-to-hell world you got born into, and you ask yourself, "What life can I live that will let me breathe in & out and love somebody or something and not run off screaming into the woods?" I didn't look down from some high rock and choose cotton fields in Nicaragua. These cotton fields chose me.
The contras that were through here yesterday got sent to a prison farm where they'll plant vegetables, learn to read and write if they don't know how, learn to repair CB radios, and get a week-long vacation with their families every year. They'll probably get amnesty in five. There's hardly ever a repeat offender.
That kid from San Manuel died.
Your sister, Hallie
"What's new with Hallie?" Loyd asked.
"Nothing."
I folded the pages back into the envelope as neatly as I could, trying to leave its creases undisturbed, but my fingers had gone numb and blind. With tears in my eyes I watched whatever lay to the south of us, the land we were driving down into, but I have no memory of it. I was getting a dim comprehension of the difference between Hallie and me. It
wasn't a matter of courage or dreams, but something a whole lot simpler. A pilot would call it ground orientation. I'd spent a long time circling above the clouds, looking for life, while Hallie was living it.
19
The Bread Girl
Five miles outside of Santa Rosalia Pueblo, Loyd stopped the truck, pulled off his cowboy boots, and put on moccasins. Shortly we were going to have to get out and walk through snow.
"Saving your boots?" I asked.
He ignored me. Those particular boots looked as though they'd hitchhiked to hell and back without getting a single ride.
"Me and Leander used to come home at the end of the summer wearing cowboy boots and Mama would have a fit. And cowboy hats. She'd grab off our hats and swat us with them and say, 'Ahh! You look like Navajos!'"
I'd never seen Loyd wear a hat of any kind, now that I thought about it. His story brought back a memory, vague and incomplete, of cowboy boots and a hat I'd had myself, as a child. I could just recall the sheen of lacquered straw, and a terrible sadness.
"You see it yet?"
I squinted toward the south, but saw only snow-covered hills dotted with dark, spherical juniper bushes. The horizon was punctuated with bleak mesas whose rock shoulders stood exposed to the cold. "See what?"
"Where we're going to sleep tonight."
"I hope not."
A few minutes later he asked again. I saw mesas and scalped hills with rocky outcroppings on their tops. I saw juniper trees, and snow. "Is this an eye test?" I asked.
We were practically inside Santa Rosalia Pueblo before I saw it. The village was built on a mesa and blended perfectly with the landscape, constructed of the same stones as the outcroppings that topped all the other, empty mesas. Horses and broadfaced cattle looked up at us from their pens as Loyd's red truck, the newest-looking thing within a hundred miles, rolled up the dirt track into town.
It was a village of weathered rectangles, some stacked stepwise in twos and threes, the houses all blending into one another around a central plaza. The stone walls were covered with adobe plaster, smooth and appealing as mud pies: a beautiful brown town. The color brown, I realized, is anything but nondescript. It comes in as many hues as there are colors of earth, which is commonly presumed infinite.