“Can we go inside? Is it allowed?”
He hooked his elbow around my neck, like a friendly wrestler, as we walked toward the site. “It’s allowed. I allow it.”
“What, are you the landlord here?”
“Till somebody tells me I’m not.”
He let me go and turned toward the truck, whistling once. Jack leaped in a high arc over the tailgate and streaked through the field of foot-tall grass, looking like the soul of happiness. He headed downhill toward what must have been a river; I could see cotton-woods. We were in higher country here, with more vegetation.
“That’s a good dog,” I said.
“Yep. That’s a good dog.”
The doors were no more than four feet high. I ducked through one into a small, rectangular room with a dust floor. It was cool as a cave, and quiet. The door was a square of bright light with the silhouette of Loyd coming through. Even inside the room, the ceiling was low, just inches above my head. I touched it. “People were short back then. Didn’t eat their Wonder bread.”
“They would’ve had to build a special room for you. You would have been their queen.”
I laughed, though it struck me I’d been complimented. Was that how Loyd saw me? Not as a grain elevator on the prairie, but a queen? At the back of the room a door led into another room, which was darker, having no openings to the outside. Two more doors led out of that room—one to the side, and one up through the ceiling, which was made of thick, curved trunks of small trees. There was another whole set of rooms on top of this one.
“Can we go upstairs?”
He shook his head. “I wouldn’t trust those beams. They’re kind of old.”
“How old?”
“Eight hundred years.”
I looked at him. “Are you kidding?”
“Nope.”
We went from room to room, changing directions in the dark until the compass points were entirely lost to me. It was a maze. Loyd said there were more than two hundred rooms—a village under one roof. The air smelled cold. I tried to imagine the place populated: stepping from room to room over sleeping couples, listening through all the noises of cooking and scolding and washing up for the sound of your own kids, who would know secret short cuts to their friends’ apartments.
“The walls are thick,” I observed.
“The walls are graveyards. When a baby died, they’d mortar its bones right into the wall. Or under the floor.”
I shuddered. “Why?”
“So it would still be near the family,” he said, seeming surprised I hadn’t thought of this myself.
Without warning we came out into a bright courtyard in the center, surrounded by walls and doorways on all four sides. It was completely hidden from the outside—a little haven with a carpet of fine grass and an ancient ash tree. A treasure island. I was drawn to the shade. “We should’ve brought the picnic basket,” I said, settling under the ash. The ground was cool. My brief vision of a living city was gone; it seemed ghostly again. For eight hundred years, those bones in the walls had been listening to nothing more than the dry skittering of lizards.
“We’ve got all day,” Loyd said. He sat about two feet away from me, clasping his hands around his knees and looking at the toes of his boots.
“So who built this place, eight hundred years ago?”
“My mama’s folks. The Pueblo. They had their act together back then, didn’t they?”
They did. I couldn’t stop running my eyes over the walls and the low, even roofline. The stones were mostly the same shape, rectangular, but all different sizes; there would be a row of large stones, and then two or three thinner rows, then a couple of middle-sized rows. There was something familiar about the way they fit together. In a minute it came to me. They looked just like cells under a microscope.
“It doesn’t even look like it was built,” I said. “It’s too beautiful. It looks like something alive that just grew here.”
“That’s the idea.” Loyd seemed as pleased as if he’d built it himself.
“Of what? The idea of Pueblo architecture?”
“Yep. Don’t be some kind of a big hero. No Washington Monuments. Just build something nice that Mother Earth will want to hold in her arms.”
It was a pleasant thought. I also didn’t mind the thought of being held in Loyd’s arms, but he was making no moves in that direction. He was explaining the water system—they evidently had some sort of running water—and how they’d grown squash and corn on the hillside facing the river.
I reached over and ran a finger from his knee to his ankle. He looked up. “I’m talking too much, right?”
I shook my head. “No, keep talking.”
“You sure?”
I hesitated. I hadn’t expected to have to make the suggestion, and my stomach felt tight. “Yeah. Just, could you move over here and talk?”
His eyes brightened. I’d taken him by surprise. He leaned over and I took his head in my hands and gave him the kiss I’d been thinking about for the last two hours. It lasted a good long while. He twisted his fingers gently through the hair at the base of my skull and held on tight, and my breath stopped while he laid down a track of small kisses from my earlobe to my collarbone. We lay back on the grass and I rolled against him, looking down into his eyes. They were dark brown, a color with depth to it, like stained glass. It was a little surprising to look at brown eyes after all the pale blues of Grace.
Just being held felt unbelievably good, the long drink I’d been dying for. For a second I hugged back as tightly as I could. Something inside his buttoned shirt pocket made a crackling, cellophane sound. I raised up a little and poked it with my finger. “If you’ve got a condom in your pocket, Loyd Peregrina, this is my lucky day.”
He did. It was.
By late afternoon the shade had moved, and we also had rolled over a few times in the grass, I suppose, traveling from our original spot. Anyway we were in the sun. We disconnected and I lay on my back, feeling the forbidden touch of sun on my nipples and eyelids.
Loyd lay with his head propped on his elbow, just looking at me again, the way he had on the day of Emelina’s party. With a finger he traced concentric circles around my breasts, and triangles on my abdomen, as if warpainting me for some ceremonial mission. Whatever it might be, I felt up to the job. I knew when reason returned I’d be scared to death of feeling that good with another person, but my body was renewed. I felt like a patch of dry ground that had been rained on.
Jack had come into the courtyard and was sleeping in the shade, a little distance away. “He found his way in here without any trouble,” I said. “You boys must come here a lot.”
Loyd kissed my check and sat up and pulled on his jeans. “Yep, kind of a lot. Not as much as I’d like to.”
I thought of the condom in his pocket, the presumption, and felt irritated. “Well it’s a good seduction spot. It worked on me.” I found the rest of my clothes and concentrated on getting my shirt buttoned up. I’d lost an earring somewhere.
Loyd stared at me for a full half minute, and then lay back down, his hands clasped behind his head, looking straight up. “I don’t mean that I bring people here. Nobody but me and Jack’s ever been here before.” He glanced at me, and then away again. “But I guess that’s just what you expect me to say.” He didn’t say anything more for another minute, and then he said, “Shit.”
“I’m sorry. I guess I believe you. I do believe you.”
He was wounded. I suppose some sharp thing in me wanted to sting him, for making me need him now. After he’d once cut me to the edge of what a soul will bear. But that was senseless. Anybody would say that baby was my own fault, and he didn’t even know about it. I looked at this grown-up Loyd and tried to make sense of him, seeing clearly that he was too sweet to survive around me. I would go to my grave expecting the weapon in the empty hand.
“Codi, I couldn’t believe it when you said you’d come up here with me. I couldn’t even believe I asked.”
/>
I sat forward, letting the point of my chin dig into my knee. “I can see what it means to you. I’m sorry for thinking what I did.”
He spoke slowly. “I’ve been looking forward to this ever since Labor Day. Not because I thought we’d…Not for any one reason. I just wanted to come here with you.”
I looked at him. It was the truth. I could think of nothing at all to say.
“I don’t blame you if you’re still pissed off at me for when we were in high school.”
My heart lost its rhythm for a second. “What for?”
“For being a jerk.”
“You remember that?”
I suppose it was an insulting question. He said, “I have a lot of reasons in my mind for the way I was, but they don’t make much difference. I hurt a lot of people.”
I looked at him carefully. “In what way exactly do you think you hurt me?”
He shrugged. “Well, maybe I didn’t. Maybe you didn’t care. But still, I could have been a lot nicer. We went out those couple of times, and then so long sucker, that’s it. Loyd’s a good-time boy, he don’t call the same girl twice.”
I breathed out. Nobody knew, so Loyd couldn’t, but for one minute I’d been afraid. I didn’t want him to know how much of a mark his careless love had made on my life. It would oblige him to one of two mean possibilities: compulsory kindness or a vanishing act. I leaned over and kissed him. “You’re forgiven,” I said. “Plain Jane forgives Mr. High School Honcho for being a red-blooded boy.”
“Plain Jane my ass,” he said, rolling me over on top of him and grabbing mine. “I like you a lot. A real, whole lot. You buy that?”
“I’ll buy it. Just don’t try to sell me no knife birds.”
He looked straight into my eyes. “I’m serious, Codi.”
“Okay,” I said. “Sold.” I laid my head on his chest and nearly went to sleep while he gently stroked my spine. I felt like a baby being coaxed, reluctantly, into dreamland. A few yards away, Jack was already there. His legs jerked helplessly, making him look vulnerable.
“I’ve lost an earring. You see it?”
“No. I’ll help you look in a minute.”
“What’s Jack dreaming about?”
“Chasing rabbits,” Loyd said.
“That’s what everybody says, but I don’t think all dogs dream about that. You watch a city dog that’s never even heard of a rabbit—it’ll do that same thing.”
“How do you know they really dream?”
“They do. All mammals that have been tested have REM sleep, except spiny anteaters.” I cringed after I said this. I sounded like Codi Noline, brain of the seventh grade, despised by her peers.
“Spiny anteaters?”
“Well, I’m sorry, but it’s the truth. I read it in the encyclopedia one time.”
“You are an amazing person.”
He meant it, he wasn’t making fun of me. His hand stopped moving and came to rest on the small of my back. He was actually thinking about all this. Carlo wouldn’t have paid the slightest attention to a conversation like this; he’d be thinking about whatever men think about, how much gas is left in the tank. Loyd asked, “What do you think animals dream about?”
“I don’t know. Animal heaven.” I laughed.
“I think they dream about whatever they do when they’re awake. Jack chases rabbits, and city dogs chase, I don’t know what. Meter readers.”
“But that’s kind of sad. Couldn’t a dog have an imagination, like a person?”
“It’s the same with people. There’s nothing sad about it. People dream about what they do when they’re awake. God, when I used to work for Tía sorting the pecans I’d go to bed and dream about pecans, pecans, pecans.”
I studied his face. “Didn’t you ever dream you could fly?”
“Not when I was sorting pecans all day.”
“Really, though. Didn’t you ever fly in your dreams?” Even I had done that, though not often.
“Only when I was real close to flying in real life,” he said. “Your dreams, what you hope for and all that, it’s not separate from your life. It grows right up out of it.”
“So you think we all just have animal dreams. We can’t think of anything to dream about except our ordinary lives.”
He gently moved a lock of hair out of my eyes. “Only if you have an ordinary life. If you want sweet dreams, you’ve got to live a sweet life.”
“Okay,” I said, feeling happy. I was sure no other man I’d ever known would have concerned himself with what animals dream about. “I’m going to sleep now, and I’ll give you a report.” I settled my head back down on his chest. His heartbeat moved faintly against my ear as I looked out across the ground. I saw my silver earring gleaming in the grass.
HOMERO
13
Crybabies
His name is gone. He understands that this is his own fault. He took a pen to paper and changed it, canceled his ancestors, and now his grandchild—Codi’s child—has been erased like something in writing too, rather than flesh and blood. He knows she’s no longer carrying it. He’s aware of the signs.
The red darkroom light burns like a dying sun, very old: red dwarfs, they call them when they reach that stage. He sometimes reads astronomy now, when he can’t sleep. But at this moment, outside this sealed room, it’s daytime. He considers carefully the time of day and of year, and his daughters’ ages, a ritual he performs a dozen times daily to keep himself rooted in time. That was nearly twenty years ago, when Codi lost the baby. He has photographed the eyes of so many babies. He gets lost among years now, the way he used to lose track when he sat in the dark movie theater for too many hours. He has always loved the dark.
The liquid feels cool on his hands, though it’s a chemical bath, not particularly good for the elasticity of human skin. He should use the Piper forceps from the kitchen, but he has misplaced them. He moves the photograph into the fixative and stares at the lines. And frowns. They are a precise copy of what the real world offered his camera, and nothing more: the branched shadow of a cane cholla falling across a square of pale, cracked ground. He found the image while walking in the arroyo, and immediately saw the illusion he could draw out of it: a river in the desert. He’d seen exactly this sight, in aerial view. It was years ago, in wartime—they had taken him in a small plane over the bombing range near Yuma; a soldier lay wounded out there and couldn’t be moved. They flew the quickest route, over the Algodones dunes, a dead ocean of undulating sand. The pilot said it was harder to fly over dunes on a hot day than through a tornado; the plane shuddered until its rivets creaked. Then suddenly they were over the Colorado River agricultural plain. He marveled, feeling lucky as a spaceman. Surely no one had ever seen this amazing sight, a complex river fretted with canals cutting an unearthly path through the bone-dry land.
He can’t remember the wounded soldier. He closes his eyes and tries, but he can’t. Possibly some chest wound, a punctured lung? No, he can’t bring the soldier back. But he remembers the vision of that water. He gently agitates the photograph in its stop bath, lost in technical possibilities. He knows there must be a way to transfigure this cactus shadow into that other vision, which no longer exists outside his mind. All his photographs begin in his memory. That is the point. He might be the only man on earth who can photograph the past.
He stops suddenly, feeling a presence outside the door.
“Codi?” He listens. “I’m printing, it will be a few more minutes. Codi, are you there?” He hears nothing. It’s a Monday morning, she can’t be here. She’s teaching school. He drops the print into the fixer, annoyed, and goes back to the enlarger to try again. He should lock that door to guard against accidents. What a shock that would be to the girls, a locked door. They have always had rules about this; a closed door is a sacred thing. Privacy is respected. There is no call for bolted doors in the Noline household. But she still locked him out—she was in the bathroom that night for more than four hours. When he walked by he cou
ld see that the upper bolt was turned. She’d gone in right after dinner. There are rules about this.
“Codi?”
He listens again, but there is no sound at all.
He knocks. “I just want to know that you’re all right.”
“I’m all right.”
She is crying softly. “I can hear that you’re crying,” he says. “Your sister is concerned. You could just tell us what’s wrong.”
“Nothing’s wrong. I’m just a crybaby. You’re always telling me I’m a crybaby, so you’re right.”
That isn’t true, he doesn’t use that word. He tells them they should try to be grown-up girls. But he hasn’t needed to tell them that for years.
In another minute she calls out quietly, “Is Hallie out there? I need to talk to her.”
Hallie is in her room, reading. She doesn’t seem especially concerned; Codi has been so moody of late that Hallie leaves her alone. They don’t argue but there is a new distance between them. A gulf. Codi crossed over into adolescence, leaving Hallie behind for the time being. They both seem lost. All three of them, really: a marooned family, shipwrecked on three separate islands. Before, when the girls were close, he worried about what would happen when they lost each other. Now they have.
“Hallie.” He stands in the doorway to their room and repeats her name quietly. “Hallie.” She is reading in poor light, ruining her eyes. She looks up, her eyes nearly marble-white under the small, high-intensity lamp above her bed.
“Your sister has asked for you. Can you please find out what she needs?”
She puts her open book face down on the bed and gets up without a word. The two of them confer through the bathroom door. He tries to hear their whispers from the kitchen. He sees that Codi is not letting her in.
“The black one. That old one that was mother’s.”
Hallie is gone for only a minute, then comes back. “I can’t find it. I got your green jacket.”
Animal Dreams Page 13