Animal Dreams: A Novel

  I spoke with a dozen secretaries of this and that and finally with the Minister of Agriculture himself. He knew Hallie. He talked for a long time about what an extraordinary person she was; it made me suspicious that she was dead, and I started crying. Viola took the phone and translated until I was fit to talk again. The Minister promised me she wasn't dead. He would call me the minute they knew anything at all. He was fairly sure the contras took her by mistake, not knowing she was an American citizen, and now were probably confused as to how to release her without generating too much bad publicity. He asked, had I called the President of the United States?

  In the meantime, Hallie's letters still came to the Post Office box. I knew she had mailed them before she was kidnapped, but their appearance frightened me. They looked postmarked and cheerful and real, but they were ghosts, mocking what I'd believed was a solid connection between us. I'd staked my heart on that connection. If I could still get letters like this when Hallie was gone or in trouble, what had I ever really had?

  I didn't read them. I saved them. I would open them all once I'd heard her voice on the phone. I wouldn't be fooled again.

  At some point between Christmas and mid-January, Grace became famous. The several hundred pinatas planted in Tucson had grown into great, branching trees of human interest, which bore fruit in the form of articles with names like "This Art's Not for Breaking" and "What Pinatas!" in slick magazines all over the Southwest. The Stitch and Bitch Club's efforts in papier-mache became a hot decorator item in gentrified adobe neighborhoods like the one in Tucson that Hallie used to call Barrio Volvo.

  It was the birds that caused the stir, but because it was there, people were also reading my urgent one-page plea for the life of Grace. Where Mayor Jimmy Soltovedas's repeated calls to the press had failed, Stitch and Bitch succeeded: our story became known. Hardly a day passed without some earnest reporter calling up to get a statement from Norma Galvez. The club designated her the media spokeswoman; Dona Althea was more colorful, but given to unprintable remarks. Ditto for Viola, who was even more unprintable because she spoke English.

  But when a scout crew from CBS News came to town, they wanted the Donn. They sat in on a meeting at the American Legion hall and zeroed in on the Stitch and Bitch figurehead with her authority and charm and all she represented in the way of local color. They got some of the meeting on tape, but made an appointment to come back on Saturday with a crew to interview the Dona in her home. Norma Galvez would be (for safety's sake) her interpreter. By the time Saturday morning came, when CBS rolled into town in their equipment Jeeps like Jesus into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, the whole town was anticipating the visit of what Viola had been calling "the B.S. News."

  There were about fifty of us packed into Dona Althea's living room, just there to watch. The Dona looked as she always looked: tiny, imperious, dressed in black, with her long white braid pinned around her head like a crown. As a concession to the cameras she clutched an embroidered shawl around her shoulders.

  She refused to close the restaurant, though, and it was lunchtime, so there were still comings and goings and much banging of pots. Cecil, the sound man, had to run his equipment off the outlet in the kitchen, since it was the only part of the house that had been wired in the twentieth century. "Ladies, we're just going to have to be cozy in here," he said, turning sideways and scooting between two Althea sisters to reach the plug.

  "Son of a," he said, when one of the sisters tripped over his cord and unplugged it for the third or fourth time. The Althea in question stopped in her tracks and looked for a minute as if she might deck him, but decided to serve her customers instead. She was so burdened with plates it's lucky Cecil didn't get menudo in his amps.

  The director of the crew had the Dona sit in a carved chair that normally stood in her bedroom and held the TV. Two men carried it out, sat her down in it, and arranged vases of peacock feathers at her feet. "Just cross your ankles," the director told her. Norma translated, and the Dona complied, scowling fiercely. She looked like a Frida Kahlo painting. "Okay," he said, wiping sweat off his forehead. He was a heavy man, dressed in Italian shoes and a Mexican wedding shirt, though his mood was not remotely festive. "Okay," he repeated. "Let's go."

  There was a camera on the interviewer and two cameras were on Dona Althea: bright, hot lights everywhere. A crew member dabbed the interviewer's nose and forehead with a powder puff, eyed the Dona once, and backed off. The interviewer introduced himself as Malcolm Hunt. He seemed young and wore an outfit that suggested designer-label big-game hunting or possibly Central American revolutions. He probably meant well. He carefully explained to Dona Althea that they would edit the tape later, using only the best parts. If she wanted to go back and repeat anything, she could do that. He suggested that she ignore the cameras and just speak naturally to him. Norma Galvez translated all this. The Dona squinted at the lights, fixed her scornful gaze on a point just above the kitchen door, and shouted all her answers in that direction. Cecil took it personally and slinked around behind the steam table.

  Mr. Hunt began. "Dona Althea, how long have you lived in this canyon?"

  "Desde antes que tu cagabas en tus panales!"

  Norma Galvez shifted a little in her chair and said, "Ah, since before your mother was changing your diapers." The Dona scowled at Norma briefly, and one of the Altheas laughed from the kitchen.

  Mr. Hunt smiled and looked concerned. "When did your family come to this country?"

  The Dona said something to the effect that her family had been on this land before the Gringos took over and started calling it America. The prospectors came and mined out the damn gold, and the Black Mountain company mined out the damn copper, and then they fired all the men and sent them home to plant trees, and now, naturally, they were pissing in the river and poisoning the orchards.

  Mrs. Galvez paused. "A long time ago," she said.

  Mr. Hunt lost his composure for the first time. He made an odd, guttural noise and looked at Mrs. Galvez, who spread her hands.

  "You want an exact translation?"

  "Please."

  She gave it to him.

  It wasn't the afternoon anybody had expected. Malcolm Hunt kept adjusting his posture and his eyebrows and appearing to start the whole interview over, framing new questions that sounded like opening lines.

  "The Black Mountain Mining Company is polluting--and now actually diverting--the river that has been the lifeblood of this town for centuries. Why is this happening?"

  "Because they're a greedy bunch of goat fuckers" (Mrs. Galvez said "so-and-sos") "and they got what they wanted from this canyon and now they have to squeeze it by the balls before they let go."

  "They're actually damming the river to avoid paying fines to the Environmental Protection Agency, isn't that right? Because the river is so polluted with acid?"

  The Dona waited for Norma's translation, then nodded sharply.

  "What do you think could stop the dam from being built, at this point?"

  "Dinamita."

  Mr. Hunt appeared reluctant to follow this line of questioning to its conclusion. "In a desperate attempt to save your town," he said, trying another new tack, "you and the other ladies of Grace have made hundreds of pinatas. Do you really think a pinata can stop a multinational corporation?"

  "Probably not."

  "Then why go to all the trouble?"

  "What do you think we should do?"

  She had him there; Malcolm Hunt looked stumped. He looked from Norma to the Dona and back to Norma. "Well," he said, "most people write their congressmen."

  "No se. We don't write such good letters. I don't think we have any congressman out here anyway, do we? We have a mayor, Jimmy Soltovedas. But I don't think we have any congressman." She pronounced the word in English, making it stand out from the rest of her speech like a curse or a totally new concept. "Si hay," she went on, "If we do, I haven't seen him. Probably he doesn't give a shit. And also we don't know how to use dynamite. What we kn
ow how to do is make nice things out of paper. Flowers, pinatas, cascarones. And we sew things. That's what we ladies here do."

  I smiled, thinking of Jack following old habits, turning around three times on the kitchen floor and lying down to dream of a nest in the grass.

  "But why peacocks, what's the history?" Malcolm persisted, after hearing the fully translated explanation. "Tell me about the peacocks."

  "What do you want to know about peacocks?" the Dona asked, giving him a blank look. The full Spanish name for peacock is pavo real, "royal turkey," but Mrs. Galvez let that one slip by.

  "How did they get here?"

  Dona Althea lifted her head, adjusted her shawl, leaned back and put her hands on her knees, which were spread wide apart under her black skirt. "Hace cien anos," she began. "More than one hundred years ago, my mother and her eight sisters came to this valley from Spain to bring light and happiness to the poor miners, who had no wives. They were the nine Gracela sisters: Althea, Renata, Hilaria, Carina, Julietta, Ursolina, Violetta, Camila, and Estrella."

  She pronounced the names musically and slowly, drawing out the syllables and rolling the r's. They were the names of fairy princesses, but the story, in her high, sustained voice, was Biblical. It was the Genesis of Grace. And of Hallie and me. Our father's own grandmother--mother of Homero Nolina up in the graveyard--was one of those princesses: the red-haired, feisty one. I could picture her barefoot, her hair curly like Hallie's and coming loose from its knot. I saw her standing in the open front door of her house, shaking a soup spoon at her sisters' arrogant children who came to tease her own. Perhaps she was Ursolina, the little bear.

  When Hallie and I were little I used to make up endless stories of where we came from, to lull her to sleep. She would steal into my bed after Doc Homer was asleep, and I would hold her, trying to protect her from the wind that blows on the heads of orphans and isolates them from the living, shouting children who have inherited the earth. "We came from Zanzibar," I would whisper with my mouth against her hair. "We came from Ireland. Our mother was a queen. The Queen of Potatoes."

  I could never know the truth of my mother, but there was another story now. Another side. I closed my eyes and listened to Dona Althea with the joy of a child. I don't know what they heard on the CBS news. I heard a bedtime story thirty years late.

  22

  Endangered Places

  It rained and rained in Gracela Canyon. February passed behind a mask of clouds. It seemed like either the end of the world or the beginning.

  The orchards, whose black branch tips had been inspected throughout the winter for latent signs of life, suddenly bloomed, all at once: pears, plums, apples, quince, their normal staggered cycle compressed by the odd weather into a single nuptial burst. Through my classroom window I watched drenched blossoms falling like wet snow.

  Water, in Grace, is an all-or-nothing proposition, like happiness. When you have rain you have more than enough, just as when you're happy and in love and content with your life you can't remember how you ever could have felt cheated by fate. And vice versa. I knew, abstractly, that I'd been happy, but now that I was in pain again, that happiness was untouchable. It was a garish color picture of a place I had not been. Memory runs along deep, fixed channels in the brain, like electricity along its conduits; only a cataclysm can make the electrons rear up in shock and slide over into another channel. The human mind seems doomed to believe, as simply as a rooster believes, that where we are now is the only possibility.

  But it isn't. In spite of the promise of plenty that dripped from the rooftops and gushed down Gracela Canyon's ravines throughout February, the winter rains would soon dry up. Then there would not be another drop until July. During those brittle months the taste and smell of rain would be lost to us, beyond the recollection even of children and the deepest root tips of trees. That is the way of the seasons in a desert place. Only the river ran continuously. The river was Grace's memory of water.

  We heard nothing from Hallie. First I tried to tell myself she was already out of danger. In the past, the two-week delay of her letters had caused me to keep a distrustful eye on Hallie, like a star so many light years away it could have exploded long ago while we still watched its false shine. Now I tried the reverse psychology: we would hear, soon, that she'd been safe while we worried.

  But we didn't, and I gave over to panic. I began to call Managua every week. The Minister of Agriculture, whose secretary now knew me by voice, said there wasn't any reason for me to fly down to Nicaragua; there was nothing I could do there but wait, which--he implied--I was doing badly enough where I was. He really was not unkind, just frustrated, like any of us. He pointed out that Hallie was an exceptional person, to those of us who loved her, but not an exceptional case--the contras made daily forays across the border to attack workers in their fields, sometimes even schoolchildren. Thousands of civilians had died. "If you came here," he said, "you would see." Every home had a framed photograph on a table that stood for a fresh empty space in the family, he said. Teachers and community workers were particularly at risk.

  He said I might try making Hallie's status known to the general public in the United States. It could pressure her captors to show restraint; or, he warned me frankly, it could do the opposite.

  I knew nothing else to do, so I wrote letters. Emelina helped. We papered her kitchen table with letters in progress. I drafted mine on stationery from the Grace High School principal's office, but the letterhead intimidated Emelina, who preferred lined paper from her kids' loose-leaf notebooks. Viola put a request to the Stitch and Bitch Club, and after that we had volunteers in Emelina's kitchen for nightly letter-writing sessions. I dictated the main ideas and then they all got the hang of it. I looked up who had voted for sending the guns, and who had voted against, and either way we tried to work it in. I expect we sent out more than a thousand letters. When we lost track of which congressmen we'd written, we wrote them again. We wrote radio stations and any other public entity we believed might be reading its mail. Sometimes I stopped and laid my head on my arms. Emelina would massage the back of my neck and say nothing, because we both suspected words were beside the point.

  There may have been publicity we never knew about. We didn't get the New York Times in Grace. I do know there was a short piece in the Tucson morning paper, in the "Money" section, of all things, right next to an article about how to reduce your mortgage with twice-monthly payments. There was a small, smiling photo of Hallie, who was identified as a former employee of the University Extension Service. The reporter had called up the Minister of Agriculture as I'd suggested, and said that he "alleged" she had been kidnapped by agitators based in Honduras. This was followed by a much longer quote from a state senator who said the Nicaraguan civil war was a tragedy, and that the United States was doing its best to bring democracy to the region, and that no U.S. citizen could go there without expecting to be caught in crossfire.

  The reporter, believing I would be pleased, sent me the clipping along with a note wishing my family all the best. The breadth of his ignorance made me feel hopeless, as I've sometimes felt in dreams, when the muscles dissolve and escape is impossible. I wept uncontrollably all day. At school I asked my students to read Silent Spring for an hour while I put my head down on my desk and cried. They were subdued. I suspected people in Grace of walking around me on tiptoe now, the way a town might avert its eyes when its resident crazy lady hikes up her skirt and scratches an itch and swears at the blackbirds watching from a telephone wire.

  I stopped going to Doc Homer's for dinner. We were in the worst position to comfort one another. I guessed he could go on about his routine--that had always been the core of his resilience--but I don't think I'd slept a single night since she'd been taken, and I was reaching an abnormal state of exhaustion. I fought off hallucinations. Late one night Hallie appeared in my bedroom doorway, very small, looking up at me. With those same eyes she used to ask without words to crawl into my bed.

&nbsp
; "Hallie, I'm trying so hard. But I don't know how to save you."

  She turned on stocking feet and walked back into the dark.

  I got up and rifled my desk drawers till I found the newspaper clipping with her picture. I looked at it hard, trying to convince myself that Hallie wasn't a child. I had the black-and-red afghan bundled around me but I felt chilled and hard as a frozen branch. My hands shook. I tucked the clipping into an envelope and wrote a note to the President of the United States, begging him please just to look at her. "This is my only sister," I told him. "I'm coming to understand responsibility. You gave those men a righteous flag to wave and you gave them guns. If she dies, what will you tell me?" I licked the envelope and sealed it. I knew the address by heart.

  We began to get letters back, to the effect that the matter would certainly bear investigation. They weren't form letters, each one was typed by a different secretary, but they all said the same thing. It surprised me to see how a meaningless phrase repeated again and again begins to resemble truth.

  In the middle of that gray month Emelina's youngest son learned to walk. I was alone with him when it happened. The sun had come out briefly as I walked home from school, and the baby and I were both anxious to be outdoors. Emelina asked if I could just not let him eat any real big bugs, and I promised to keep an eye out. I settled with a book in the courtyard, which was radiant with sudden sunlight. The flowers were beaten down, their bent-over heads bejeweled with diamond droplets like earrings on sad, rich widows.

  For quite a while now Nicholas had been cruising the perimeters of his world, walking confidently from house to tree to lawn chair to wall, so long as he had something to hold on to. Sometimes what he touched was nothing more than apparent security. Today I watched the back of his red overalls with interest as he cruised along a patch of damp, tall four-o'clocks, lightly touching their leaves. He had no idea how little support they offered.