Animal Dreams: A Novel

  If she couldn't scream, I did. I was in every way unreasonable, especially with the kids at school. Even at the time, I was lucid enough to be thankful that Rita had dropped out. One member of my family had already yelled at her; she didn't have to know that neither one of us had all our tires on the road.

  The students had tried to be cooperative. They went to Tucson to assist the Stitch and Bitch Club, as I'd requested, and found the city to be a superb adventure. They discovered a video arcade; Raymo sweet-talked more than ten young women into buying pinatas; there were rumors that Connie Munoz gave Hector Jones a hand job in the back seat of the bus on the way home. What did I expect? They were teenagers. I knew that, but still I screamed at them because Black Mountain was poisoning their mother's milk and all they cared about was sex and a passing grade.

  I had rational intentions. I talked about evapotranspiration and rain forests and oxygen in the biosphere, how everything was connected. The last virgin timber cleared and milled to make way for a continent of landfills choking on old newspapers. It was a poetic lecture. Marta made the mistake of asking me how much of this poetry was going to be on the test.

  I glowered. "Your life is the test. If you flunk this one, you die."

  The whole front row looked stunned. Their pens stopped moving.

  "What you people learn for a test you forget the next day. That's bullshit. That's a waste of your brains and my time. If I can't teach you something you'll remember, then I haven't even been here this year." I crossed my arms and glared at them. "You kids think this pollution shit is not your problem, right? Somebody will clean up the mess. It's not your fault. Well, your attitude stinks. You're as guilty as anybody. Do you, or do you not, think the world was put here for you to use?"

  Nobody was fool enough to answer. I observed during the long silence that half the kids in the room were wearing stone-washed jeans. I yanked up Hector Jones by the arm and made an example of him. I have to admit I disliked Hector partially for unfair reasons: his father was a former hoodlum named Simon Bolivar Jones who'd been noticeably unkind to me in school.

  "Stand up here," I said. "Show everybody your jeans. Nice, right? Turn around. Nice ass, Hector. Wonderful jeans. They were half worn out before you bought them, right?" I smacked Hector lightly on the butt and let him sit down.

  "You know how they make those? They wash them in a big machine with this special kind of gravel they get out of volcanic mountains. The prettiest mountains you ever saw in your life. But they're fragile, like a big pile of sugar. Levi Strauss or whoever goes in there with bulldozers and chainsaws and cuts down the trees and rips the mountainside to hell, so that all us lucky Americans can wear jeans that look like somebody threw them in the garbage before we got them."

  "Trees grow back," Raymo said. Raymo was a brave young man.

  "Excuse me?"

  He cupped his hands around his mouth and spoke as if I were his deaf grandmother: "Trees...grow...back."

  I cupped my hands around my mouth and said, just as loudly, "Not if the whole...damn...mountain is gone, they don't."

  "Well, there's other mountains."

  "Sure, there's some other mountains," I said, feeling that I might explode if I weren't careful. "If you got hit by a truck, Raymo, I guess your ma would say, 'Well, I have some other kids.'"

  About half the class thought that was funny. The other half was probably trying to figure out how to get out of my classroom alive.

  I stared them down, ticking like a bomb. "Sure. Trees grow back. Even a whole rain forest could grow back, in a couple hundred years, maybe. But who's going to make it happen? If you had to pay the real price for those jeans--the cost and the time and the work of bringing that mountain back to life instead of leaving it dead--those pretty jeans would have cost you a hundred dollars."

  I felt strangely high. Furious and articulate. "Think about the gas you put in a car," I said. "The real cost. Not just pumping it out of the ground and refining it and shipping it, but also cleaning up the oil spills and all the junk that goes into the air when it gets burned. That's part of what it costs, but you're not paying it. Gas ought to be twenty dollars a gallon so you're getting a real good deal. But soon the bill comes due, and we pay it, or we eat dirt. The ultimate MasterCharge."

  I can't swear they were listening, but they were watching me carefully. Thirty-six blue eyes ticked back and forth as I paced the floor in front of my desk.

  "If Grace gets poisoned, if all these trees die and this land goes to hell, you'll just go somewhere else, right? Like the great pioneers, Lewis and Clark. Well, guess what, kiddos, the wilderness is used up." I walked around my little square of floor like a trapped cat. "People can forget, and forget, and forget, but the land has a memory. The lakes and the rivers are still hanging on to the DDT and every other insult we ever gave them. Lake Superior is a superior cesspool. The fish have cancer. The ocean is getting used up. The damn air is getting used up." I pointed at the ceiling, meaning to indicate the sky. "You know what's up there? Ozone. It's this stuff in the atmosphere that acts like an umbrella."

  I stopped and reconsidered this effete analogy. Teenagers who won't use condoms aren't impressed by the need for an umbrella. I surveyed the class thoughtfully and demanded, "Whose Dad or Mom ever worked in the smelter?"

  About half the hands went up, reluctantly.

  "You know what they did up there, right? One way or another they were around thousand-degree hot metal. You ever see them dressed for work? They wore coveralls like Mr. Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, and a big shield over their faces, right?"

  They nodded, relieved, I suppose, that I wasn't going to single them out for humiliation. I sat on the desk and crossed my arms. "Imagine that's you, working up there with that hot metal in your face. Now, somebody rips that mask off you while you're working. Goodbye face. Goodbye nose and eyelids, beauty queens. You're dead."

  They might well have been dead, for all the sound they made.

  "That's what the ozone layer does for us, boys and girls, it's a big face shield in the sky." I was skipping a few steps here, but not really exaggerating the consequences. Not at all. I attempted to lower my voice and sound faintly reasonable. "And it's slipping away from us. There's a big hole in it over the South Pole. When you use a spray can you make that hole bigger. There's something in most aerosol cans and refrigerators and air conditioners, called chlorofluorocarbons, that neutralizes the ozone. Factories are still making tons of it, right now."

  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 Munoz 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 an
d 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 Munoz 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."

  I stopped, remembering how Viola had averted her eyes and said, "that family went downhill," the day. I discovered Homero Nolina up in the cemetery. The red-haired Gracela sister with the temper, who married Conrado Nolina and produced a legacy of trash--that was my father's family. What he believed he came from, and what we still were. Auburn-haired and angry, living in exile in our own town. There wasn't enough air in the kitchen for me to breathe, and get all this in.

  "So you, what, ran off to the army. Got yourself educated on the G.I. Bill, and then came back here as the mighty prodigal doctor with his beautiful new wife, and acted like nobody could touch you."

  I watched him closely, but could read nothing. I couldn't even see him, really; I had no idea how he'd look to a stranger. Old? Sick? Mean-spirited? He poured coffee into two mugs and gave the larger one to me.

  "Thank you," I said.

  "You're welcome."

  "Why did you come back here? If it was so important to you to start over, you could have gone anywhere. You could have stayed back there in Illinois."

  Doc Homer sat down opposite me. He clenched and unclenched his left hand, then spread it flat on the table and examined it abstractly, as if it were a patient. I looked at the framed photograph on the wall over his head: his portrait of a hand that wasn't a hand, but five cacti with invisible spines.

  "Why do you suppose the poets talk about hearts?" he asked me suddenly. "When they discuss emotional damage? The tissue of hearts is tough as a shoe. Did you ever sew up a heart?"

  I shook my head. "No, but I've watched. I know what you mean." The walls of a heart are thick and strong, and the surgeons use heavy needles. It takes a good bit of strength, but it pulls together neatly. As much as anything it's like binding a book.

  "The seat of human emotion should be the liver," Doc Homer said. "That would be an appropriate metaphor: we don't hold love in our hearts, we hold it in our livers."

  I understand exactly. Once in ER I saw a woman who'd been stabbed everywhere, most severely in the liver. It's an organ with the consistency of layer upon layer of wet Kleenex. Every attempt at repair just opens new holes that tear and bleed. You try to close the
wound with fresh wounds, and you try and you try and you don't give up until there's nothing left.

  For Christmas, Loyd had given me an Apache burden basket. It was exquisitely woven, striped with the colors of dried grass, and around its open mouth hung tin bells on leather thongs that made whispery, tinkling sounds. It wasn't much bigger than a teacup. The night he gave it to me in Santa Rosalia I felt it would easily hold all my burdens, forever. Now it hung on the wall over my bed, and at night I looked at it and wept for my own stupidity in trusting that life could be kind.

  I apologized to my classes. I couldn't see trying to maintain the recommended authoritative distance; I told them my sister had been kidnapped and that I was scared to death. I told them everything seemed very serious to me now, including things like the ozone layer. The kids were extremely quiet. I don't think any adult had ever apologized to them before. From the storeroom we got down a pre-World War II map that showed all the world's climatic zones, and we found Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, El Salvador. The shapes and names of many nations had changed during the lifetime of that map, but not the climatic zones. We talked more calmly about the rain forest and the manner in which fast-food chains were cutting it down to make hamburger farms. We talked about poor countries and rich countries and DDT in the food chain, and the various ways our garbage comes home to us. The memory of the land. My students understood these things perfectly well. There is nothing boring about the prospect of extinction.

  On Friday I took the day off to make phone calls. Hallie had left me a list of emergency telephone numbers, mostly speculative, and I called them all. It took the whole morning. I got nowhere with the State Department and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and ended up with the Nicaraguan Ministry of Agriculture. Viola helped me contend with the impenetrable Spanish of international operators. Emelina sat on my other side holding my hand, wringing the fingers, apparently forgetting that it wasn't hers. Mason and the baby sat on the floor in front of us, silent, wondering as children always must wonder in a crisis what terrible thing they had done to wreck the world.

  We learned nothing useful. They were sure now that Hallie had been taken across the border into Honduras, probably to a camp where many other prisoners were held. It was a well-outfitted camp; they had Sony radios and high-quality Crations. It made me smile, a little, to think Hallie might be eating Crations I'd dutifully paid for with my taxes. Dinner was on me. So were the land mines.