But I was useless, lying around those two days. Saving my strength for what's ahead, I guess. I get more jumpy as I move south, like a compass needle or something. Saw an awful lot of dead cropland in the interior, and I know it will be worse in Nicaragua. War brings out the worst in production agriculture.
Tomorrow I cross the border, but it's hard to say where the border is, because this whole part of Chiapas where I am now is camps of Guatemalans. This whole livelong day I drove horrible mountain roads in the rain and saw refugee camps, one after another like a dream. They say the Guatemalan army is on a new scorched-earth campaign, so people come running across the border with the clothes on their backs and their hearts in their throats and on a good day the Mexican cops don't bother them. On a bad day, they make them wake up the kids, take down their hammocks, and move into somebody else's district. It's a collective death. A whole land-based culture is being relocated out of its land--like a body trying to move out of its skin. Only the portable things survive. The women have their backstrap looms and woven clothes, like you see sometimes in import stores. All those brilliant colors in this hopeless place, it kills you.
Right this minute I'm sitting in the rain, waiting for the mail truck/water delivery (I keep expecting that same guy with his Fanta truck) and watching four barefoot kids around a cook fire. The one in charge is maybe six. She's sharpening cooking sticks while these damp black chickens strut around shaking themselves and the toddlers pull logs out and roll them to make sparks. I'm just on edge. You live your life in the States and you can't even picture something like this. It's easy to get used to the privilege of a safe life.
I know you're worrying but you don't have to, since we've established that I'm the luckiest person alive. Even though I don't feel like it. I'll write from Nica next. I'm sure I'll be happier once I'm put to some use. I miss you, Codi, write and make me feel better.
Love from your faithful adoring slave-for-life,
Hallie
The ending was an old joke: in our letters we used to try to outdo each other with ingratiating closures. The rest of the letter was pure Hallie. Even in a lethargic mood she noticed every vanilla orchid, every agony and ecstasy. Especially agony. She might as well not have had skin, where emotions were concerned. Other people's hurt ran right over into her flesh. For example: I'll flip through a newspaper and take note of the various disasters, and then Hallie will read the same paper and cry her eyes out. She'll feel like she has to do something about it. And me, if I want to do anything, it's to run hell for leather in the other direction. Maybe it's true what they say, that as long as you're nursing your own pain, whatever it is, you'll turn your back on others in the same boat. You'll want to believe the fix they're in is their own damn fault.
The strangest thing is that where pain seemed to have anesthetized me, it gave Hallie extra nerve endings. This haunts me. What we suffered in our lives we went through together, but somehow we came out different doors, on different ground levels.
Friday night after the first week of school, the dog with the green bandana showed up again at the gate. I saw it when I came outside after my solitary supper to water the morning glories and potted geraniums on my front step. The heat seemed to wilt them right down to death's door, but water always brought them back. I could only wish for such resilience.
"Hi, buddy," I said to the dog. "No barbecues today. You're out of luck."
Thirty seconds later Loyd was standing at the door with a bottle of beer. "I told you I'd get back to you with this," he said, grinning. "I'm a man of my word."
"Well, okay," I said. "I guess you are." I wasn't sure how I felt about seeing him in my doorway, other than surprised. I pulled a couple of folding chairs onto the patio, where we could see the sunset. The sky was a bright, artificial-looking orange, a color you might expect to see in the Hollywood Shop. "Are you going to have one too, or do I drink this alone?" I asked him.
Loyd said he'd just take a soda because he was marked up and five times out. I was mystified by this information.
"I'm marked up on the call board at the depot," he explained. "To take a train out. Five times out means I'm fifth in line. I'll probably get called late tonight or early tomorrow morning."
"Oh," I said. "It sounded like baseball scores. The count is three and two and it's the bottom of the seventh."
Loyd laughed. "I guess it would sound like that. You get used to talking railroad talk like it was plain English. Around here that's about all everybody does, is railroad."
"That, and watch the fruit fall off their trees."
Loyd looked at me, surprised. "You know about that, do you?"
"Not very much," I said. I went into my house to get him a soda, picking my way over the rough bricks of the patio because I was barefoot. I will say this much for Doc Homer's career as a father: my arches are faultless.
When I came back out I sat down and handed over a Coke, letting Loyd fight with the easy-off twist cap himself. I had to use pliers on those things. It didn't give Loyd two seconds of trouble. He palmed it, then tipped his head back and drank about half the bottle. The things that aggravate me most in the world are the things men do without even knowing it.
"So is that your dog?" I asked.
"That's jack. You met? Jack, this lady here is Codi Noline."
"We've met," I said. "I sneaked him some goat spare ribs the other day at the fiesta. I hope he's not on a special diet or anything."
"He's in love, is what he is, if you gave him a piece of that goat. That was one of Angel Pilar's yearling billy goats. Jack's had his eye on those spare ribs ever since last summer."
Jack looked at me, panting seriously. His tongue was purplish, and his eyes were very dark brown and lively. Sometimes when you look into an animal's eyes you see nothing, no sign of connection, just the flat stare of a wild creature. But Jack's eyes spoke worlds. I liked him.
"He looks like a coyote," I said.
"He is. Half. I'll tell you the story of his life sometime."
"I can't wait," I said, really meaning it, though it came out sounding a little sarcastic. Our chairs were close enough together so that I could have reached over and squeezed Loyd's hand, but I didn't do that.
"It was nice of you to come by," I said.
"So this was your first week of school, right? How's life with the juvenile delinquents of Grace?"
I was a little bit flattered that he knew about my job. But then everybody would. "I don't know," I said. "Pretty scary, I think. I'll keep you posted."
The sky had faded from orange to pale pink, and the courtyard was dusky under the fig trees. Every night as it got dark the vegetation around the house seemed to draw itself in closer, hugging the whitewashed walls, growing dense as a jungle.
Loyd touched my forearm lightly and pointed. On the cliff above the courtyard wall, a pair of coyotes trotted along a narrow animal path. Jack's ears stood up and rotated like tracking dishes as we watched them pass.
"You know what the Navajos call coyotes? God's dogs," Loyd said. His fingers were still resting on my forearm.
"Why's that?" I asked.
He took his hand back and cracked his knuckles behind his head. He leaned back in his chair, stretching out his legs. "I don't know. I guess because they run around burying bones in God's backyard."
Jack got up and went to the courtyard wall. He stood as still as a rock fence except for one back leg, which trembled, betraying all the contained force of whatever it was he wanted to do just then, but couldn't. After a minute he came back to Loyd's feet, turned his body in a tight circle two or three times, and lay down with a soft moan.
"Why do they do that? Turn in circles like that?" I asked. I'd never lived with a dog and was slightly infatuated with Jack.
"Beating down the tall grass to make a nice little nest," Loyd said. "Even if there's no tall grass."
"Well, I guess that make sense, from a dog's point of view."
"Sure it does." He bent forward to scratch J
ack between the ears. "We take these good, smart animals and put them in a house and then wonder why they keep on doing the stuff that made them happy for a million years. A dog can't think that much about what he's doing, he just does what feels right."
We were both quiet for a while. "How do you know what the Navajos call coyotes? I thought you were Apache." I felt vaguely that it might be racist to discuss Loyd's breeding, but he didn't seem offended.
"I'm a lot of stuff," he said. "I'm a mongrel, like Jack. I was born up in Santa Rosalia Pueblo. My mama still lives up there. You ever been up there to Pueblo country?"
"No," I said.
"It's pretty country. You ought to go sometime. I lived up there when I was a little kid, me and my brother Leander, God, we ran wild all over that place."
"You have a brother? I never knew that."
"Twin," Loyd said. "He's dead."
Everybody's got a secret, I thought, and for the first time that evening I remembered the child of Loyd's that was unknown to him. It felt furtive and strange to hold it in mind in his presence, as if I were truly holding it, and he might see it.
A dust-colored peafowl hopped onto the courtyard wall and then into the fig, rustling the leaves and warning us off with a throaty, chirruping sound. She was awkward and heavy-bodied, no more flight-worthy than a helicopter.
"So you're Pueblo, and Apache, and Navajo," I said.
"My dad's Apache. We boys left Mama and came down to White Mountain to live with him, but it didn't work out. I ended up in Grace with my mama's sister. You knew my tia Sonia, right?"
"I don't think so. Is she still around?"
"No. She's gone back to Santa Rosalia. I need to go up there and see her and Mama one of these days."
It sounded like a strangely scattered family. I still wasn't clear on the Navajo connection.
"Can I use your phone?" he asked suddenly.
"Sure. It might be in use, it's Emelina's and J.T.'s phone. They just ran an extension out for me."
He looked toward the main house as he ducked into my front door. Emelina and J.T. were both home tonight, and Loyd seemed a little guilty about not going over to say hello. It would have been easy for him to come by on the pretense of visiting them, but he hadn't. I wondered if Loyd still had a reputation as a ladies' man. Though it was nothing to me, one way or the other. Jack raised his head and peered at me through the darkness, then got up and moved slightly closer to me. I stretched my leg and rubbed his back with my bare foot. His coat was a strange blend of textures: wiry on top and soft, almost downy underneath.
Hallie and I almost had a dog once, back when our Tucson house was on the underground railroad. Hallie had come home one night with a refugee woman and child and a little cinnamon dog. The mother had been tortured and her eyes offered out that flatness, like a zoo animal. But I remember the girl, in a short pink dress and corduroy pants, following that puppy under the bathroom sink and all over the house. I had no reason to believe, now, that any of the three was still living. The woman and her daughter were eventually arrested and sent back to tropical, lethal San Salvador. And we'd decided realistically that we didn't have room for a dog, so it went to the Humane Society. Terms like that, "Humane Society," are devised with people like me in mind, who don't care to dwell on what happens to the innocent.
Loyd came back out, being careful not to slam the decrepit screen door. "I'm next in line," he said. "Three guys ahead of me laid off to watch the Padres game. I better get home." Jack got up instantly and went to his side.
"Well, thanks," I said, still thinking of the cinnamon dog. I held up my bottle. "It's nice to see you again, Loyd."
He stood there grinning, the fingers of his right hand playing with Jack's nape. I didn't know quite how to finish off the evening. Loyd hesitated and then said, "I've got to drive up to Whiteriver, a week from Saturday. To see about something."
"Well, that sounds mysterious," I said.
"To see about some game birds. Anyway I thought you might like to get out of here for some fresh air. You want to go?"
I took a deep breath. "Sure," I said. I wasn't sure at all, but my mind had apparently made itself up. "Okay. I could use some fresh air."
Loyd gave a funny little nod, and went out through the gate. Jack disappeared behind him into the cactus jungle.
HOMERO
10
The Mask
He is lying on his own examining table, resting his eyes. The telephone buzzes quietly but Mrs. Quintana, his receptionist, has given up the battle with insurance forms and gone home.
He places his long hands over his face, the fingertips lightly touching his forehead, thumbs resting on the maxillary bones beneath his eyes. His office in the hospital basement is cool even in this late-September heat, and pleasant in winter as well. As practical and comforting as a cave. The lack of windows has never been a problem; artificial lighting is adequate. He has just examined his last patient of the day, a sixteen-year-old with six small gold rings piercing the cartilage of her left ear. She is expecting twins. They will be born small, and in trouble. There was no reason to tell her everything.
He imagines the procedure by which the tiny gold wires were inserted through flesh and spongy bone. It would have to be painful. He is mystified. Children devote slavish attention to these things, but can't be bothered with prophylactics.
He drifts between wakefulness and sleep, thinking of Codi. Her eyes are downturned and secretive, her heart clearly hardened against him already, to have done this. Her hair is in her eyes. She flips it sideways, chewing the inside of her lip and looking out the window when he talks to her. She'd wanted pierced ears at thirteen; he'd explained that self-mutilation was preposterous and archaic. Now they discuss shoes. He wants to ask, "Do you know what you have inside you? Does your sister know?" Hallie is young to understand reproductive matters but it's impossible that she wouldn't know, they're so much of a single mind, and he is outside of it completely. He has no idea what he can say.
She's in the fifth or sixth month, from the look of her, although Codi was always too thin and now is dangerously thin, and so skillful at disguising it with her clothes he can only tell by other signs. The deepened pigmentation under her eyes and across the bridge of her nose, for one thing, is identical to the mask of pregnancy Alice wore both times, first with Codi, then with Hallie. It stuns him. He feels a sharp pain in his spleen when he looks across the breakfast table each morning and sees this: his wife's face. The ghost of their happiest time returned to inhabit the miserable body of their child. He can't help feeling he has damaged them all, just by linking them together. His family is a web of women dead and alive, with himself at the center like a spider, driven by different instincts. He lies mute, hearing only in the tactile way that a spider hears, touching the threads of the web with long extended fingertips and listening. Listening for trapped life.
COSIMA
11
A River on the Moon
Loyd and I didn't go to Whiteriver. He was called out on Friday for a seven-day stand on a switch engine in Lordsburg. He seemed disappointed and promised we'd go another time. Loyd didn't have much seniority on the railroad; he'd only moved back to Grace a few years earlier, and at Southern Pacific he was still getting what he called "bumped" a lot. It was hard to plan his time off.
I was somewhat relieved. I'd been unsure of what I was getting into, and had my doubts. Once I found out, I had more.
I'd asked J.T. what "game birds" were. He and I were out working in the old plum orchard one evening, pruning dead branches out of the trees. My job was mainly to stay out of the way of falling timber. It was a fair distance from the house, and Emelina had asked if I could go along to keep an eye on him. She wasn't the type to worry, but a man hanging from the treetops wielding a chainsaw is a nerve-racking sight, believe me. Even if he isn't your husband.
J.T. informed me that game birds were fighting cocks. He was taking a break just then, leaning on one hand against a tree trun
k and drinking what seemed like gallons of water.
I was stunned. "You mean like cockfights."
J.T. smiled. "You been talking to Loyd?"
"He invited me to go with him up to Whiteriver. He said something about game birds, and..." I laughed at myself. "I don't know, I was thinking of something you'd eat. Cornish hens."
He laughed too. He offered me the jar of water and I drank from it before handing it back. I was surprised at the easy intimacy I felt with J.T. We hadn't been friends in high school--he was, after all, captain of the football team. Through no meanness on his part, but simply because of the natural laws of adolescent segregation, we might as well have gone to high school on different planets. Being neighbors again now brought back what we'd forgotten then: we had a relationship that dated back even before Emelina. We were next-door neighbors in toddlerhood. We'd played together before male and female had meaning.
He turned up the glass jar and drank it to the bottom, tensing the muscles in his jaw when he swallowed. J.T.'s whole body shone with sweat. I briefly imagined him naked, which disturbed me. I'd slept with someone's husband before--an Asian history professor in college--mistaking his marital status for something comforting and fatherly. But I was devoted to Emelina. No, that wouldn't happen.