Animal Dreams: A Novel

  "Oh, J.T.? He put sixteen cars on the ground outside El Paso. A derailment. Nobody got hurt. Oh shoot--John Tucker, honey, will you take the baby in the living room and watch him a minute? I can't hear myself think."

  John Tucker took the baby from Emelina's lap and carried him under one arm into the next room. The baby waggled his arms and legs like a swimmer in green stretch pajamas.

  "Okay. Mason, sweetie, put your feet up here on my lap and I'll tie your sneakers for you." Emelina took a gulp of coffee. "So they all had to give a urine sample--J.T., the fireman, the brakeman, and some other person, I can't remember who. Maybe another engineer. It all had to happen within a half hour of the accident; the company made a very big deal out of that. J.T. says, here they were out in some cow pasture with sixteen boxcars of frozen mixed vegetables scattered from hell to breakfast, and all the damn supervisor cared about was making sure which person pissed in what jar."

  The boys seemed unmoved by this off-color narrative. Having Emelina for a mother would neutralize the thrill of swear words.

  "You know what, though," she said, looking startled. "Damn. We were just joking about drug tests, the day before yesterday. Grammy made a poppyseed cake for Curty's and Glen's birthday and J.T. said..."

  "Mo-om."

  "I'm sorry, Curtis, I forgot. He doesn't want us to call him Curty. Their actual birthday was yesterday."

  I wanted to hear the rest of the derailment story, but this conversational flow was akin to freeway driving in L.A.; you don't back up. "Well, happy birthday," I said. "You boys get handsomer every time I see you, you know that?"

  Curtis's ears turned red.

  "You can say 'Thank you, ma'am,' can't you? Codi, they've all been asking me when you were going to get here till I thought they'd turn blue in the face, and now they're acting like they were raised outside in a pen with the dogs."

  "That's okay." I felt a little intimidated myself. Even though I'd kept up with the family, it was inconceivable that in my absence from Grace Emelina could have produced this whole blue-eyed tribe of human beings.

  "Mom, can I sleep put in the pen with Buster tonight?" Mason asked.

  "No sir, you can't. So when we were eating that cake, J.T. was saying how he'd better not have an accident on the railroad, because poppyseeds show up some way on the drug test."

  "That's true, they would." I reconsidered this. "He'd register positive for opiates. Poppyseeds are related to heroin. Is he going to be in trouble?"

  "No, they know it wasn't his fault. It was a sun-kink or some darn thing with the rails. The drug test is just to cover their ass. You know who else was on the train? The other engineer and the brakeman were both guys we went to school with, you might remember them. Roger Bristol and Loyd Peregrina. Loyd lived up at Whiteriver for a while but he's moved back."

  I paid attention to my heart rate, to see if it would react in any way to this information. It didn't seem to.

  "Aunt Codi, say something in Greece," Glen said.

  "In Greek," Emelina corrected, giving me an apologetic look. "I already told them you looked like a fashion model and had lived overseas. They think you know David Bowie."

  "Your mother exaggerates," I said.

  Glen didn't seem too disappointed.

  "So, Em, if I'm going to live here do I have to buy a pair of those silver loafers from the Hollywood Shop?"

  She nodded seriously. "I'm pretty sure they won't let you teach down at the high school without them."

  The school bus honked outside. "Okay, scoot," Emelina said. "Mason, give me a kiss."

  The boys stampeded out the kitchen door, all legs, leaving the baby beached on Emelina's lap. His eyes roamed anxiously around the quiet kitchen, taking in the emptiness.

  Emelina and I took each other in. All morning I'd felt the strange disjuncture that comes from reconnecting with your past. There's such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answers; it's like having a stranger as a house guest in your skin.

  "So what's new?" she asked.

  "I don't know, everything. I don't think Grace has changed, but it feels different. There's a lot I don't remember."

  Emelina smiled. "I know what you mean. Senility strikes." It was an odd thing to say; Doc Homer's exact problem was that his mind had begun to roam in alarming new pastures.

  "I guess so," I said.

  "Well, some things never change." She leaned forward and said in a low voice, "Grammy still collects figurines of Elvis."

  I had to laugh. We'd known J.T.'s mother as children, of course--people here spent their childhoods tearing through the homes of their future in-laws--and I remembered her living room, which we used to call the Elvis Museum. She denied that the ones that were whiskey bottles were whiskey bottles. She'd always told us aftershave.

  "So it's all over with Carlo? Or just a vacation?"

  "I don't know. Over, I think. It's taken me all this time to figure out he's not going to tell me the secret to a meaningful life." I was serious. I'd loved Carlo best when he provided me with guidance.

  "I used to think the ideal husband would be Doctor Kildare."

  "Carlo's an emergency-room surgeon. A man that decides which way to sew a thumb back on would have a good hold on life, wouldn't you think? I just assumed it would rub off."

  "Gross," Emelina remarked.

  "I think it was his eyebrows. You know how he has those kind of arched, Italian eyebrows?"

  "No, I never got to meet him. He was always at the hospital."

  That was true. He was shy. He could face new flesh wounds each day at work, but he avoided actual people. "Well, he had this look," I said. "He always seemed right on the verge of saying something that would change your life. Even when he was asleep he looked like that."

  "But he never did?"

  "Nope. It was just his eyebrows."

  I did miss him, or at least I missed being attached to someone in theory. Carlo had beautiful hands and a legendary sense of direction. Even when we were in Venice, where the tourist books advise you that "part of the Venice experience is wandering the narrow strade until you find yourself lost," We wandered but never got lost. The man had a compass needle in his cerebral cortex. And for all that, he'd still in the long run declined to be the guiding star I needed. Just as my father did. My father was dying on me.

  Emelina collected the plates and cups. She stood up and tied on an apron over her bathrobe, miraculously keeping the baby situated on her hip throughout the operation.

  "Well, you're no worse for the wear of five children in fourteen years," I said, and she laughed, probably not believing it. Emelina was noticeably pretty. That combination particular to Grace, the pale blue eyes and black hair, never failed to be arresting, no matter how many versions of it you saw. The eyes were a genetic anomaly--in the first hours after birth, the really pure specimens of Grace's gene pool were supposed to have whitish, marblelike irises. I'd seen pictures. Doc Homer had written it up for the American Journal of Genetics, years ago.

  "And John Tucker's a teenager," I said. "Are we that old?"

  "I am. You're not." She started to clear the table with one hand. "Every minute in the presence of a child takes seven minutes off your life." I took the baby from her and she said, "Don't say I didn't warn you."

  "They're your treasures, Em. You've got something to show for yourself."

  "Oh, yeah. I know," she said.

  The baby's name was Nicholas, but nobody called him anything but "the baby." I'd read somewhere that the brain organizes information in sets no larger than four--that's why Social Security and phone numbers are subdivided; possibly four children's names were the limit on parental memory. I sat in the rocker and settled nameless Nicholas on my lap, his head at my knees. My long thigh bones exactly accommodated his length.

  Emelina scraped toast corners into a blue enamel pail and ran a sinkful of hot water. "I don't think I could stand to let Mason go off to kindergarten next year
if it wasn't for the baby. It kills you to see them grow up. But I guess it would kill you quicker if they didn't."

  "I remember you saying you were calling it quits after four."

  "Famous last words."

  While I watched her move around the kitchen, my fingers tingled with the pleasure of stroking the baby's fine black hair. It was longer by several inches than his big brother John Tucker's; someone had taken shears to that boy with a vengeance. Probably Emelina. A woman who beheaded her own chickens would cut her kids' hair herself.

  Emelina washed and rinsed the plates and set them into the wire rack to drain. I sat feeling useless, though Nicholas seemed comfortable and was falling asleep on my lap. When that happens you feel them grow heavier, as if relaxation allowed them to be flooded with extra substance. A constriction ran across my lungs. I'd come close to having a baby of my own once, but I thought of it now so rarely that the notion of myself as a mother always caught me off guard.

  In spite of the heat outside, Emelina's dishwater was fogging the window. A little collection of potted plants stood in a row on the windowsill. Prayer plants. I was struck with a sudden, forceful memory of Emelina's grandmother's house. Hallie and I called her Abuelita too, though of course she was no relation, and the old woman called us "the orphan girls," huerfanas. Nobody ever thought we could understand Spanish. The house had a stale, old-lady smell, but we loved her boxes of "pretties": cast-metal carts with broken wheels, lead soldiers, huge washers and carriage bolts, every species of unidentifiable metal part. Her dead husband was a blacksmith. There were also boxes of ancient dress-up clothes in satiny fabrics as brittle as paper. Our best playroom was the sunny alcove crammed with plants where we stalked lions through the parlor palms, dressed in our finery, more glamorous than Beryl Markham and the Baroness von Blixen could have managed to be in their dreams. We confronted real dangers in the form of rickety iron stands holding heavy, breakable pots and fragile plants. The African violets were furred like pets, and the prayer plants had leaves like an old woman's hands, red-veined on the back, that opened wide in the sun and folded primly together in the shade. Abuelita instructed us to sit and watch them, to try and catch them in the act of closing their leaves. Hallie always waited the longest, patient for enlightenment long after Emelina and I had returned to our rowdy diversions.

  "You know, I'm so used to J.T. being gone," Emelina said, bringing me back. "I think he'd be underfoot if he were here. I'd give us about ten days, then I'd probably shoot him. Husband murder in Grace, oh boy." She seemed to be answering a question, however circumspectly, that I wasn't sure I'd asked.

  "How long has he been on the railroad?"

  "Just since the mine shut down, which was..." She frowned at the glass she was drying, decorated with white pigs in red bow ties. "Ten years, about."

  "They used to always say they'd hire again up there when the price of copper went up."

  "Well, you know, that's talk. Nobody's waiting around anymore, Now it's pecans and plums. And the railroad, thank God for that. I think we could live off the orchards if the boys didn't eat like horses and outgrow their shoes every ten days. Get this, now they're too fashion conscious to wear each other's hand-me-downs. Remember when boys didn't give a shit what they wore? We never should have got satellite TV." She turned around, drying her hands on her apron. "Is that rascal gone to sleep? Thanks. Codi. I'll take him upstairs and put him down for his nap." She lifted the baby onto her shoulder like a sack of valuable flour. "You got big plans for today?"

  "I thought I'd make an excursion into the city," I said. "Check out the dry goods at the Baptist Grocery."

  She laughed. "If you can wait awhile I'll go with you. Grammy can listen for the baby. She ought to be home pretty soon from her meeting." Emelina rolled her eyes as she left the kitchen. "Stitch and Bitch Club on Mondays, bright and early."

  I stood at the window looking out at the grove of trees that ran the length of the canyon. Plum, pear, apple. And quince, I believe, though I couldn't identify a quince tree to save my life. I only remembered the word because of the way people here pronounced it--"queens"--with their Spanish-influenced vowels. In the distance I could make out white satellite dishes perched among the cacti on the red cliff--one to each house, like dogs. Well, that was something new. The sky was overcast. In the orchards on the other side of the river I could see men working among the trees. I remembered them beating the branches with long poles, bringing down scattered showers of pecans. Frailing, that was called. In the older orchards sometimes they had to climb up into the tallest trees to reach the upper branches with their poles. But it was too early in the year for that. Pecans didn't ripen till late fall.

  Hallie and I had played in this house once or twice as children, when a pair of pigeon-toed girl cousins of J.T.'s had lived here. Now it belonged so securely to Emelina. It was hard to realize how fully life had gone on. Of course, it would. I could have stayed here, or gone away as I did, it made no difference to Grace.

  I washed the baby's cup, running my finger around the inside rim. While the sun left the windowsill and moved on to other things, I noticed, the prayer plants had closed up when I wasn't watching. They stood in a self-satisfied row, keeping their thoughts to themselves.

  "You keep some of the dirt on them, and you just stuff them down in paper bags and keep them somewhere dark," said Lydia Galvez. "Do you have a root cellar?"

  "No, uh-uh. We did, but the boys got into it and figured out how to cave it in some way," Emelina said.

  "Well, you could put them anyplace dark. The bottom of a closet would do."

  Lydia Galvez was the wife of John Tucker's little league coach. I'd been introduced. We'd discussed John Tucker, baseball, and Emelina's talent for producing boys. The whole town had been betting this last one would be a girl, Lydia Galvez told me. Now they were talking about dividing gladiolus bulbs.

  "I've got some black," Lydia was saying. "Do you have any black? I could spare you some. They're not a true black, I'd really call it purple, but they're supposed to be important."

  Emelina gave me a glance, so I knew she was trying to wind things up. Our whole afternoon had gone pretty much this way. Lydia, like everyone else, had no earthly notion of what to say to me, or I to them; I rarely even remembered who they were. But we were all polite, as if I were Emelina's lunatic maiden aunt.

  I sat down on the wall in front of the courthouse and watched myself in the plate-glass window of Jonny's Breakfast, which was empty at this hour. My reflection stared back, looking more alone than anything I'd seen in my life. It occurred to me that I'd never drawn a breath here without Hallie. Not one I could be sure of. I was three when she was born. Before that I wasn't conscious of my place in the world, so it didn't matter.

  Later, it mattered more than anything. Doc Homer drilled us relentlessly on how we differed from our peers: in ambition, native ability, even physical constitution. The nearest thing to praise, from him, was "No one else in Grace knows that!" Or, "You are Nolines." We stood out like a pair of silos on a midwestern prairie. As far as I could see, being Nolines meant that we were impossibly long-limbed like our father and all the Noline relatives we never got to meet. He and mother came from a part of Illinois (this is a quote) where people were reasonable and tall.

  The height, at least, wasn't lost on Hallie and me. We turned out to be six feet on average--Hallie one inch over, and I, one under. In high school they used to call us forty percent of a basketball team. We didn't play sports, but they still said that. Height isn't something you can have and just let be, like nice teeth or naturally curly hair. People have this idea you have to put it to use, playing basketball, for example, or observing the weather up there. If you are a girl, they feel a particular need to point your height out to you, as if you might not have noticed.

  In fact, Hallie and I weren't forty percent of anything--we were all there was. The image in the mirror that proves you are still here. We had exactly one sister apiece. We grew up knowi
ng the simple arithmetic of scarcity: A sister is more precious than an eye.

  "You tell that daddy of yours I need a pill to get rid of my wrinkles," Lydia said loudly.

  I made an effort to collect myself. "Okay."

  I should have said, "You don't need any such thing," or something like that, but I didn't think fast enough. I wasn't managing this first day all that well. I had a lump in my throat and longed to get back to my cottage and draw the blinds. Grace was a memory minefield; just going into the Baptist Grocery with Emelina had charged me with emotions and a hopelessness I couldn't name. I'd finished my shopping in a few minutes, and while I waited for Emelina to provision her troops for the week I stood looking helplessly at the cans of vegetables and soup that all carried some secret mission. The grocery shelves seemed to have been stocked for the people of Grace with the care of a family fallout shelter. I was an outsider to this nurturing. When the cashier asked, "Do you need anything else?" I almost cried. I wanted to say, "I need everything you have."

  It was past midnight but a cold moon blazed in the window and I couldn't sleep. I lay on my back in the little painted bed in Emelina's cottage. I hated sleeping alone. As little as there was between Carlo and me, I'd adjusted to his breathing. All my life I'd shared a bed with somebody: first Hallie. Then in my first years at college I discovered an army of lovers who offered degrees of temporary insanity and short-term salvation. Then Carlo, who'd turned out to be more of the same. But companionable, still. Sleeping alone seemed unnatural to me, and pitiful, something done in hospitals or when you're contagious.

  I'd finally reached that point of electric sleeplessness where I had to get up. I tucked my nightgown into my jeans and found my shoes out in the kitchen. I closed the door quietly and took a path that led away from the house, not down past other houses but straight out to the north, through Emelina's plum orchard and a grove of twisted, dead-looking apples. Every so often, peacocks called to each other across the valley. They had different cries: the shrill laugh, a guttural clucking--a whole animal language. Like roosters and children, on a full-moon night they would never settle down completely.

  I wanted to find the road that led up the canyon to Doc Homer's. I wasn't ready to go there yet, but I had to make sure I knew the way. I couldn't ask Emelina for directions to my own childhood home; I didn't want her to know how badly dislocated I was. I'd always had trouble recalling certain specifics of childhood, but didn't realize until now that I couldn't even recognize them at point-blank range. The things I'd done with Hallie were clear, because we remembered so much for each other, I suppose, but why did I not know Mrs. Campbell in the grocery? Or Lydia Galvez, who rode our school bus and claimed to have loaned me her handkerchief after Simon Bolivar Jones chucked me on the head with his Etch-a-Sketch, on a dare. In fact, I felt like the victim of a head injury. I hoped that if I struck out now on faith I would feel my way to Doc Homer's, the way a water witcher closes her eyes and follows her dowsing rod to find a spring. But I didn't know. I could have lost the homing instinct completely.