Animal Dreams: A Novel

by Barbara Kingsolver

  It was early October, and still hot. Grace was supposed to have the perfect climate, like Camelot or Hawaii, and it's true that growing up here I could hardly remember an uncomfortable day, temperature-wise. Most of the homes had neither air-conditioning nor central heating, and didn't need them, but this fall had turned into hell warmed over. Down in the desert, in Tucson, every day was in the hundred-and-teens and the TV weathermen were reporting the string of broken records almost proudly, like scores in a new sport. In Grace no one kept track especially, but we suffered just the same.

  J.T. knelt down to start the chainsaw again, but I spoke up before he could yank the cord. "I thought cockfighting was illegal."

  "Most everywhere it is, but not in the state of Arizona. And up on the reservation they've got their own laws. Loyd's not a criminal, if that's what you're asking."

  "I guess I don't know what I'm asking. I just can't see Loyd and cockfighting."

  "His daddy was real big in the sport. He was kind of a legend up there in Apache country."

  "So Loyd's got to keep up the tradition," I said, without sympathy. I knew Loyd's father was also a renowned drunk.

  J.T. asked, "You an animal lover?"

  "Not to extremes," I said. "I eat them." I thought of how unmoved I'd been watching Emelina chop off heads for our Sunday dinner, that first day in Grace. "But watching animals kill each other for sport," I said tentatively, "that's kind of an unsavory business, isn't it?" I looked toward the edge of the orchard. It was getting dark fast. Already I could see moonlight reflected in the irrigation ditches.

  J.T. sat on his heels and looked straight up into the branches over our heads. "I don't know why I mess with these trees," he said. "They're sixty years old. They don't produce worth a damn anymore. I could cut them down and get a lot better out of this ground, not to mention the firewood. But my daddy gave me this orchard." He picked up the stone of a plum, weathered shiny white like a tooth, and rubbed it with his thumb. After a minute he raised his arm with a quick overhand snap and threw it toward the river. "Loyd's old man didn't have one damn thing to give him but cockfighting." J.T. looked at me. "I'm not crazy about it either. Codi. But you've got to know Loyd before you decide."

  I dropped the subject of cockfighting. Loyd had begun to come by fairly regularly in the evenings, which is to say regular for a railroad man: I'd see him three days in a row, and then not at all for a week. It reinforced the feeling that we were only casual acquaintances, meeting nearly by accident, and I tried to limit my expectations to the point where I paid no attention to how I looked in the evenings. Sometimes as I walked around the brick floors of my living room and bedroom I'd realize I was listening for the jingle of Jack's tags, and then I'd click on the radio.

  When Loyd did show up we would drag our lawn chairs out for a view of the sun's parting shot at the canyon wall, and we'd talk about nothing in particular. For instance, he told me the story of Jack's life. Jack's mother was a coyote that Loyd took in when he was living up on the Apache reservation. She'd been crippled with buckshot in her shoulder, and had gone into heat. Loyd saw her one night skirting the arroyo behind his house, trying to get away from a pack of males. He got her attention with a low whistle, and then he left his front door open and went to bed; next morning, she was curled up under his cot.

  I didn't question this. For one thing, he seemed to hold a power over females of all types. But truly Loyd had the most unself-conscious way of telling a story I'd ever heard, as if it didn't matter whether I was impressed or not, he was just going to give me the facts. It seemed as if he didn't care enough, one way or the other, to lie.

  "I kept her shut up in the house for a week with my dad's old dog, Gunner. Gunner lost one of his back legs when he was a pup and he could get around real good, but he'd never in his life mounted a female. I thought she'd be safe with him."

  This matter-of-fact talk about heat and mounting made me slightly edgy, or rather, edgy once-removed. I felt like I ought to be uneasy with Loyd, but I wasn't. To him it was life and death and dogs. Sometimes Loyd seemed about twelve.

  "Well, Jack is here to tell the tale," I said. "So I guess she wasn't safe."

  Loyd smiled. "Nope. Old Gunner had his one chance at love. He got into some poisoned coyote bait right after that. He died before the pups were born."

  "How do you know they were his? She could have been pregnant already."

  Loyd asked Jack, as politely as you'd ask a favor from a friend, to roll over. "See that?" Over Jack's heart was a white patch with a black crescent moon in its center. "That's Gunner's. There were seven pups, two black and five brown, and every one of them had that badge."

  "How did you know which one to keep?"

  He hesitated. "Dad decided," he said finally. "And Jack. Really I guess Jack's the one that decided."

  They were nothing electrifying, these chats with Loyd in the dark, but they were a relief from my days at the high school, which were spent in a standoff just shy of open war. Occasionally Loyd took the tips of my fingers and rubbed them absentmindedly between his own, the way he would surely stroke Jack, if Jack had fingers. The night of the story of Jack, he also kissed me before he left, and I was surprised by how I responded. Kissing Loyd was delicious, like some drug I wanted more of in spite of the Surgeon General's warning. Later on, when I slept, I had dreams of coyotes in heat.

  I also saw Hallie. Her hair moved around her like something alive. "I've kissed a man who kills birds," I confessed, but she looked past me as if she didn't have a sister. Her eyes were pale as marbles. I woke up confused, too shaken to get up and turn on a light.

  I'd dreamt of Carlo, too, on several occasions, for no good reason I could see. He'd written me a letter that was fairly medical and devoid of passion. He did miss me, though, and that sentiment brought comfort as I lay in my empty bed. It meant I was lonely by choice, or by difficult circumstances such as an ailing father; these things are supposed to feel better than being lonely because nobody wants you. Lately I'd started thinking about Carlo with a kind of romantic wistfulness, which I knew was bogus. The truth is, we'd essentially promised each other from the beginning that we wouldn't stay together. "No strings," we said, proving that we were mature medical students without spare time. The odd thing is that we did stay together, physically, and so I suppose falling out of love was our hearts' way of keeping the bargain. The end was always curled up there between us, like a sleeping cat, present even in our love-making.

  Especially there. Carlo and I had gone to bed together for the first time one early dawn during our rotation in pediatric intensive care, after we'd worked all night trying to save a Papago baby brought in too late from the reservation. We'd gone straight from the dead baby to my apartment, my bed. There was hardly any talk that I remembered, we just held on to each other, joined, for as long as our bodies could stand it. I wanted anything that would stop that pain, and Carlo was strong medicine. Not happiness, nothing joyful, only medicine.

  There was one other time of desperate, feverish connection that I particularly remembered. This was much later, when Carlo and I were living abroad. Carlo had been granted the opportunity to spend a year in an unbelievably remote clinic, halfway up the tallest mountain in central Crete.

  The work was rugged, but in December we took a trip away from the village, to Venice. The clinic closed for some combination of clan ritual and Greek Orthodox holiday that practically evacuated the village. We set off for Italy feeling like truant school kids, drinking wine in tin cups on the train and reeling with the heady sense of getting away with something. Before that he'd scarcely managed an afternoon off, much less a week. Then Carlo came down with a cold on the overnight ferry to Brindisi, and by the time we reached Venice we were both burning up, our skin hot to the touch, like furnaces. Our bodies' internal combustion gave rise to an unquenchable craving for carbohydrates, and for each other, so we checked into the Penzione Meraviglioso and for a week ate plates of pasta and made a kind of sweaty, deli
rious love previously unknown to either of us, in a bed that was memorably soft and huge.

  The Penzione looked out onto the cold, damp Grand Canal and a dim little plaza ominously named the Piazza of the Distraught Widows. (Distraught or Inconvenienced, it could translate either way.) The origin of this name was unknown to the elderly matron, who was born and raised in the building. She brought food up to us and was alternately scandalized by our appetites and worried for our well-being. She was of the opinion that in damp weather any illness at all would find its way to the lungs. She ventured to tell us we ought to see a doctor.

  Carlo spoke Italian. His father had come to America on a steamer carrying cured leather and Chianti. He explained in grammatically imperfect but polite terms that we were both doctors. We could not be in better hands, he said. For my benefit, later, he'd translated the double entendre. By the end of the week, Carlo and the matron were bosom friends. In spite of his notorious shyness, whenever she brought us hot tea he would sit up in bed with a shirt on and give opinions on the infertility of her eldest daughter and the lung ailment of her son-in-law who worked in the glassblowing trade. I lay beside him, meanwhile, with the sheets pulled around my neck, feeling sinful and out of place, like a whore taken home to meet Mother. The matron didn't ask for my opinions, probably because she didn't believe I was actually a doctor. Which I wasn't, technically. I did some work at the clinic--rural Crete was not overly concerned about licensure--but to be completely honest, I was Carlo's paramour. I did the shopping. I learned the Greek words for oil and soap and bread.

  I know that a woman's ambitions aren't supposed to fall and rise and veer off course this way, like some poor bird caught in a storm. All I can say is, at one of the many junctures in my life when I had to sink or swim, Crete was an island, a place to head for, new and far away. I had just dropped out of medicine in my first year of residency, a few months shy of becoming a licensed M.D. I'd discovered there was something serious, mainly a matter of nerve and perhaps empathy, that stood in my way. I learned all this while a baby was trying to be born feet first. I couldn't think how I was going to tell Doc Homer, and I'll admit I was attracted just then to the idea of putting an ocean between myself and that obelisk of disapproval. It also helped that Carlo really wanted me to go with him. But I had no mission beyond personal survival; it was nothing like Hallie's going to Nicaragua. Our village had its own kind of bleakness, the bones and stones of poverty, but the landscape was breathtaking. Our classmates were treating intestinal parasites in Niger and Haiti, black lung in Appalachia, while Carlo and I set broken legs on the steep slope of Mount Ida, mythical birthplace of Zeus. Poverty in a beautiful place seemed not so much oppressive as sublime. Basically it's the stuff of the world's great religions, I told myself, although I knew better.

  It was 100 degrees in the shade, and the burgeoning minds of Biology I and II took a field trip to the river; our putative goal was to get some samples of water to examine under the microscope. We were learning about the plant and animal kingdoms, starting right down at the bottom of the ladder with the protozoans and the blue-green algae. I could easily have collected a gallon of river water myself and brought it in, but the school had no air conditioning and I'm not completely without a heart. I'd played it tough with the kids long enough to prove my point, if there was one, and I was tired of it. We all were.

  I knew the trip to the river would turn into a party. I didn't try too hard to go against nature. The tall kid with the skinhead haircut, whose name was Raymo, was the first one to get wet up to his T-shirt. It took about ninety seconds. I only drew the line when boys started throwing in girls against their will.

  "Okay, knock it off, scientists, Marta says she doesn't want to get wet," I said. Marta shot me a lipstick-red pout when they put her down, but she'd shrieked "No" and I felt there was a lesson to be learned here, all the way around.

  "I've got a ton of sample bottles here, so let's get going." I sat a safe distance up the riverbank under an ash tree, labeling full bottles as they were brought to me. I'd suggested that they collect shallow and deep water, moving and stagnant, but they went far beyond this, collecting anything that moved. It was enough to make you believe in the hunting instinct. There was a low, grassy island in the middle of the riffle, and several kids were out there on their knees catching bugs and frogs. Raymo actually caught a six-inch perch with a net fashioned from his T-shirt. "Sooner or later I figure we'll get around to fish," he said. "A fish is an animal, right?"

  "Right," I said, and let him dump it, along with the frogs, into a mop bucket we'd cajoled from the janitor. I don't know what teaching in a big-city school is like, but at Grace High we were flexible about interdepartmental appropriations.

  Back in the lab, we rounded up all the creatures visible to the naked eye and made a home for them in an aquarium that had once held blue and orange Ping-Pong balls used for some mystical experiment in physics. Marta and two other cheerleaders disposed of the Ping-Pong balls and took over the terrarium project. They made a pond on one side for the fish, and an admirable mossy island on the other side, complete with a beach, and a cave they called the Motel Frog. They refused to deal directly with the clients, though. Raymo transferred the fish and frogs (with his bare hands) from the mop bucket.

  The next day we got out the microscopes. The kids groaned, preferring to do experiments on the frogs. It's hard to get people interested in animals that have no discernible heads, tails, fins, or the like--and plants, forget it. There's no drama. You just don't have the skulking and stalking and gobbling up of innocent prey in the plant world. They don't even eat, except in the most passive sense. In college I knew a botany professor who always went around saying, "It takes a superior mind to appreciate a plant." Hallie and I were a case in point, I guess. We divided the world in half, right from childhood. I was the one who went in for the instant gratification, catching bright, quick butterflies, chloroforming them in a Mason jar and pinning them onto typewritten tags with their Latin names. Hallie's tastes were quieter; she had time to watch things grow. She transplanted wildflowers and showed an aptitude for gardening. At age ten she took over the responsibility of the Burpee's catalogue.

  But now I was on my own in the Garden of Eden. I was expected to teach the entire living world to these kids. I would write Hallie and ask her advice on how to turn adolescents on to organisms that have no appreciable sex life. In the meantime we were doing protozoans, which I could handle. I drew huge, fantastic pictures in colored chalk of what we could expect to see in this river water: strands of Nostoc like strings of blue pearls; multi-tentacled hydras; rotifers barreling into each other like hyperactive kids. I demonstrated the correct way to put a drop of water on a glass slide, coverslip it, and focus the scope. The lab grew quiet with concentration.

  They couldn't see anything. At first I was irritated but bit my tongue and focused a scope myself, prepared to see the teeming microscopic world of a dirty river. I found they were right, there was nothing. It gave me a strange panic to see that stillness under powerful magnification. Our water was dead. It might as well have come from a river on the moon.

  For homework I assigned my classes the task of being spies. They were to find out from their parents what the hell was going on with this river. The pH, which we tested, from some areas came in just a hair higher than battery acid. I couldn't believe the poisoning from the mine had gone this far. Protozoans are the early-warning system in the life of a river, like a canary in a mine. And this canary was dead. We took a closer look at Raymo's perch (named Mr. Bad Fish) and the frogs in the terrarium, which seemed in reasonably good health. But then, they'd been awfully easy to catch.

  "It can't be legal," I lamented to Viola as we sat on the front porch with three of the boys and four grocery bags of snap beans. Emelina and John Tucker were in the kitchen canning as fast as we could snap. When it came to childbearing and gardening, Emelina seemed unable to walk the path of moderation.

  "It's not legal,"
Viola said grumpily. "What difference does it make?"

  We worked in silence for a while. The aluminum bowl between us rang like a bell when we threw our hard green beans against its sides. Mason hadn't managed to master the art of snap beans and had fallen asleep in the glider. The twins elbowed each other like irritable birds on a wire. Viola had been overseeing the boys in the garden most of the morning, and for once seemed tired. She was wearing lavender stretch pants, an embroidered blouse, and a baseball cap with the insignia of the Steelworkers' Union. J.T.'s father had worked in the smelter for forty years, from age eighteen until he died of lung cancer. The cap sat forward on Viola's head because her long hair was pinned in a thick circle at the back. According to Emelina, Viola felt the boys were losing touch with their past, but looking at her now I couldn't get a fix on what that past might be. I thought of the Elvis whiskey bottle collection up in her room. I didn't really know Viola the way I knew Emelina and J.T. and the kids. She was always skirting around the edges of rooms with her hands full, just ready to go somewhere, too busy to sit down and talk.

  "They'll have to pay a fine if they don't stop polluting the river," I said cheerfully. "The EPA will shut them down if they don't clean it up." At Emelina's urging, I'd gone down to the courthouse and filed an affidavit with local authorities on the pH and biotic death of the river. I used the most scientific language I could muster, such as "biotic death" and "oxygen load." I'd written Hallie about it.

  Viola said without looking up, "They're just going to divert the river."

  "What?"

  She bent over with a soft groan and took another double handful of beans out of the grocery bag between her legs, and set them into her apron. Curtis and Glen had stopped hitting each other for the moment and were having a race. It took them forever to snap any beans because they had to stop every two minutes to count who had done the most.

  "Dam up the river," Viola said. "That's all they have to do to meet with the EPA laws. Dam it up and send it out Tortoise Canyon instead of down through here. The EPA just says they can't put it down here where people live."