Animal Dreams

by Barbara Kingsolver

  “I’m five times out. Plenty of time for a fuck.”

  “That’s not what I meant. Loyd, I don’t think you’re dumb.”

  “Just not anything worth changing your plans for.”

  I laughed. “As if I had plans.”

  He looked at me, his eyes searching back and forth between my two pupils as if he were trying to decide which door concealed the prize. “What would happen if you stayed here, Codi?”

  “I would have the wrong haircut. Everybody would remind me that I don’t quite belong. ‘Oh, honey,’ they’d say, ‘you’re still here? I heard you were on your way to Rio de Janeiro to have tea with Princess Grace.’ And I’d say, ‘No, I’ve grown up to be the new Doc Homer. I’ve moved into his house and I’m taking over his practice so I can save the town.’”

  “Save us from what, Great White Mother?”

  “Oh, shit, you guys can all just go to hell.” I laughed, since the other choice was to cry. He took me in his arms and I crumpled against his chest like an armful of laundry. “This town was never kind to me,” I said into his shirt. “I never even got asked out on dates. Except by you, and you were so drunk you didn’t know better.”

  “You know what we used to call you in high school? Empress of the Universe.”

  “That’s just what I mean! And you didn’t care that the Empress of the Universe had to go home every night to a cold castle where the king stomped around saying hugs are for puppy dogs and we are housebroken.”

  Loyd seemed interested in this. “And then what?”

  “Oh, nothing much. I’d hide in my room and cry because I had to wear orthopedic shoes and was unfit to live.”

  He turned my chin to face him. I hadn’t noticed before that without shoes we were the same height. Proportioned differently—my legs were longer—but our chins punched in at the same altitude. “So, where you headed now, Empress?”

  “God, Loyd, I don’t know. I get lost a lot. I keep hoping some guy with ‘Ron’ or ‘Andy’ stitched on his pocket and a gas pump in his hand will step up and tell me where I’m headed.”

  His face developed slowly toward a grin. “I’ll tell you. You’re going with me to do something I’m real good at. The best.”

  I tried to figure this out. Behind his smile there was a look in his eyes that was profoundly earnest. It dawned on me. “Cockfights?”

  There was no way I could say no.

  A fighting cock is an animal bred for strength and streamlined for combat. His wings are small, his legs strong, and when he’s affronted his neck feathers puff into a fierce mane like a lion’s. Individuality has been lost in the breeding lines; function is everything. To me each bird looked like any other. I couldn’t tell them apart until they began dying differently.

  The deaths are protracted. That was one thing I learned when I went to see Loyd excel in the profession to which he was born.

  I’d had in mind that a cockfight would be an after-dark, furtive thing: men betting and drinking and sweating out the animal suspense under cover of night. But it was broad daylight. Loyd cut the wheel sharply, taking us off the road and up a gravel arroyo. He seemed to navigate the reservation by the same mysterious instincts that lead birds to Costa Rica and back home again unfailingly each year. We reached a thicket where a motley herd of pickup trucks were parked at odd angles, close together, like nervous horses ready to bolt. Loyd pulled his red truck into the herd. Beyond the trees was a dirt arena where roosters strutted around clearing their throats, barnyard-innocent.

  Loyd steered me through the arena, his arm around my shoulders, greeting everybody. I saw no other women, but Loyd would have been welcome here if he’d shown up with a shewolf. “Lot of people going to lose their shirts today,” a man told him. “You got some damn good-looking birds.” The man was handsome and thin, with a long ponytail tied up Navajo style. His name was Collie Bluestone. Loyd introduced us, seeming proud of me.

  “Glad to meet you,” I said. Collie’s hand felt taut with energy. A chunk of turquoise on a leather thong rested on his collarbone, below the scar of an old tracheotomy.

  “Collie’s a cock mechanic,” Loyd said. “We go back a ways.”

  I laughed. “You give them tune-ups before the fight?”

  “No, after,” Collie said. “I sew them up. So they live to fight another day.”

  “Oh. I thought it was to the death.” I dragged a finger across my throat.

  Collie smiled. “Out of every fight, one of them dies and one lives.” He turned to Loyd. “How come the girls always forget about the one that lives?”

  “Everybody loves a hero, I guess.” Loyd winked at me.

  “Nothing heroic about a dead bird,” I pointed out.

  The arena centered on a raked floor of reddish-brown dirt. Loyd maneuvered me through the men squatting and arguing at its perimeter to a dilapidated flank of wooden chairs where he deposited me. I felt nervous about being left alone, though the atmosphere was as innocuous as a picnic, minus women and food.

  “I’ll be back,” he said, and vanished.

  The place was thick with roosters but didn’t smell like poultry, only of clean, sharp dust. I suppose the birds didn’t stay around long enough to establish that kind of presence. Some men took seats near me, jarring me slightly; the chairs were all nailed together in long rows, the type used for parades. I spotted Loyd through the crowd. Everybody wanted to talk to him, cutting in like suitors at a dance. He was quite at home here, and relaxed: an important man who’s beyond self-importance.

  He returned to me just as a short, dark man in deeply worn plaid pants was marking out a chalk square in the dirt of the center pit. Betting flared around the fringes. An old man stabbed the stump of a missing forefinger at the crowd and shouted, angrily, “Seventy! Somebody call seventy!”

  Loyd took my hand. “This is a gaff tournament,” he explained quietly. “That means the birds have a little steel spur on the back of each leg. In the knife fights they get blades.”

  “So you have gaff birds and knife birds,” I said. I’d been turning over this question since our trip to Kinishba.

  “Right. They fight different. A knife fight is a cutting fight and it goes a lot faster. You never really get to see what a bird could do. The really game birds are gaff birds.”

  “I’ll take your word for it,” I said.

  The first two fighters, men named Gustavo and Scratch, spoke to the man in plaid pants, who seemed in charge. Scratch appeared to have only one functional eye. Loyd said they were two of the best cockfighters on the reservation. The first position was an honor.

  “The roosters don’t look honored,” I said. Actually they looked neither pleased nor displeased, but stalked in circles, accustomed to life on one square yard of turf. Their tail feathers ticked like weeds and one of them crowed nonstop, as if impatient. But impatience implies consciousness of time and a chicken is existential. I know that much about birds.

  “How come you’re not down there playing with your friends?” I asked Loyd.

  “I’ve got people to train the birds, bring the birds, weigh in, all that. I handle. You’ll see.”

  “Train the birds? How do you teach a bird to fight?”

  “You don’t, it’s all instinct and breeding. You just train them not to freak out when they get in a crowd.”

  “I see. So you don’t train, you handle,” I said. “A handling man.”

  He pinched my thigh gently along the inside seam of my jeans. I’d been handled by Loyd quite a few times since Kinishba. The crowd quieted. Scratch and Gustavo squared off in the center of the pit, their charges cradled at thigh level, and they thrust their birds toward each other three times in a rhythm that was frankly sexual. Each time the men’s hips rocked forward, the cocks dutifully bit each other’s faces. Apparently the point was to contrive a fighting mood. Two minutes ago these birds were strutting around their own closed circuits, and if they looked away from each other even now they’d probably lose their train of though
t and start scratching the dust for cracked corn.

  But now they were primed, like cocked pistols. Their handlers set them down on opposite chalk lines and they shook themselves and inflated their pale ruffs. When the plaid-pants referee gave the word, the men let go. The birds ran at each other and jumped up, spurs aimed for the other bird’s breast. They hopped over one another, fluttering their short wings, pecking each other’s heads and drawing blood. After about thirty seconds the birds’ spurs tangled and they lay helpless, literally locked in combat.

  “Handle that!” the referee shouted.

  The handlers moved in to pull them apart. They faced the birds off, waited for the count, and let them go at each other once more. Within another minute Scratch and Gustavo had to intervene again, this time because one bird had his spurs irretrievably embedded in the breast meat of his opponent. The handlers gently pulled them apart and started them again.

  It takes a very long time for one bird or the other to die. Presumably they were dying of internal wounds and hemorrhage. Punctured lungs, for example, and literally bleeding hearts. Eventually they began to bleed from the mouths. At that point I could finally tell Scratch’s bird from Gustavo’s because it lay down in the dirt and wouldn’t get up. Scratch had to place it on its feet and push it back in the direction of combat.

  “Why don’t they just declare the winner?” I whispered.

  “There’s rules.”

  It was a ridiculous answer, but correct. A death was required. It took thirty or forty minutes, and I guess the birds were showing their mettle, but it was hard to watch. The cocks were both exhausted and near death, no longer even faintly beautiful. Their blond breasts and ruffs were spotted with blood, stringy as unwashed hair. Collie Bluestone would have his work cut out for him here.

  There seemed to be elaborate rules about how to keep things going after this point, when both birds really just wanted to sit with their beaks in the dirt. If one lay still, the other had no incentive to fight. I’ve studied a lot of biology; I quickly figured out that this industry was built around a bird’s natural impulse for territorial defense, and that’s where it broke down. No animal has reason to fight its own kind to the death. A rooster will defend his ground, but once that’s established, he’s done. After that he tends to walk around ignoring the bizarre surroundings and all the people who have next month’s rent riding on him and he’ll just act like a chicken—the animal that he is. The handlers had to keep taking the birds firmly in hand, squaring them off and trying to force the fight.

  “This is making me sick,” I told Loyd.

  He looked at me with such surprise it angered me. Nobody could look at this picture and fail to see cruelty.

  “I’ve seen little boys do this same exact thing,” I said. “Take some pitiful animal and tease it and drag it back by the legs over and over again, trying to make it fight.”

  “The knife fights go a lot faster,” he said.

  “But you don’t like knife fights. You like this. That’s what you said.”

  He didn’t answer. To avoid the birds I looked at the crowd, whose faces betrayed neither pain nor blood thirst but passive interest. It could have been any show at all, not two animals obliged to kill each other; it could have been TV. They were mostly old men in feed caps, or black felt cowboy hats if they were Apaches. I spotted a few families now, but knew if you asked these women about cockfighting they’d use the word we. “Oh, we love it,” they’d say in cigarette-husky voices, meaning he does. A teenager in a black tank top, a greenish tattoo flowering across her broad back, hoisted a toddler onto her shoulder. She lit a cigarette and paid scant attention to the action in the pit, but her child took it in like a sponge.

  Several people yelled loudly for Gustavo’s bird. Then finally, without much warning, its opponent passed over from barely alive to dead. Without ceremony Scratch carried his limp loser out by its feet and tossed it into the back of a truck. Loyd Peregrina was called up next. A rooster was delivered into his arms, smooth as a loaf of bread, as he made his way down to the pit. This time I watched. I owed him that.

  In the first fight I’d watched birds, but this time I watched Loyd, and soon understood that in this unapologetically brutal sport there was a vast tenderness between the handler and his bird. Loyd cradled his rooster in his arms, stroking and talking to it in a low, steady voice. At each handling call he caressed the bird’s wings back into place, stroked its back, and licked the blood from its eyes. At the end, he blew his own breath into its mouth to inflate a punctured lung. He did this when the bird was nigh unto death and clearly unable to win. The physical relationship between Loyd and his rooster transcended winning or losing.

  It lasted up to the moment of death, and not one second longer. I shivered as he tossed the feathered corpse, limp as cloth, into the back of the truck. The thought of Loyd’s hands on me made the skin of my forearms recoil from my own touch.

  “What do they do with the dead birds?” I wanted to know.

  “What?”

  “What do they do with them? Does somebody eat them? Arroz con pollo?”

  He laughed. “Not here. In Mexico I’ve heard they do.”

  I thought of Hallie and wondered if they had cockfights in Nicaragua. In the new, humane society that had already abolished capital punishment, I’d bet money they still had cockfights.

  Loyd watched the road and executed a tricky turn. He was driving a little fast for gravel road and dusk, but driving well. I tried to picture Loyd driving a train, and came up with nothing. No picture. No more than I could picture Fenton Lee in his head-on wreck.

  “What do they do with them here?”

  “Why, you hungry?”

  “I’m asking a question.”

  “There’s a dump, down that arroyo a ways. A big pit. They bury them in a mass grave. Tomb of the unknown chicken.”

  I ignored his joke. “I think I’d feel better about the whole thing if the chickens were getting eaten.”

  “The meat’d be tough,” Loyd said, amused. He was in a good mood. He’d lost his first fight but had won four more after that—more than anyone else that day.

  “It just seems like such a pathetic waste. All the time and effort that go into those chicken lives, from the hatched egg to the grave of the unknown chicken. Pretty pointless.” I needed to make myself clear. “No, it’s not pointless. It’s pointed in a direction that makes me uncomfortable.”

  “Those roosters don’t know what’s happening to them. You think a fighting cock understands its life is pointless?”

  “No, I think a fighting cock is stupider than a head of lettuce.” I glanced at Loyd, hoping he’d be hurt by my assessment, but apparently he agreed. I wanted him to defend his roosters. It frightened me that he could connect so intensely with a bird and then, in a breath, disengage.

  “It’s a clean sport,” he said. “It might be hard to understand, for an outsider, but it’s something I grew up with. You don’t see drunks, and the betting is just a very small part of it. The crowd is nicer than at a football game.”

  “I don’t disagree with any of that.”

  “It’s a skill you have in your hands. You can go anywhere, pick up any bird, even one that’s not your own, a bird you’ve never seen before, and you can do this thing with it.”

  “Like playing the piano,” I said.

  “Like that,” he said, without irony.

  “I could see that you’re good at it. Very good.” I struggled to find my point, but could come up only with disturbing, disjointed images: A woman in the emergency room on my first night of residency, stabbed eighteen times by her lover. Curty and Glen sitting in the driveway dappled with rooster blood. Hallie in a jeep, hitting a land mine. Those three girls.

  “Everything dies, Codi.”

  “Oh, great. Tell me something I don’t know. My mother died when I was a three-year-old baby!” I had no idea where that came from. I looked out the window and wiped my eyes carefully with my sleeve. But the
tears kept coming. For a long time I cried for those three teenage girls who were split apart from above while they picked fruit. For the first time I really believed in my heart it had happened. That someone could look down, aim a sight, pull a trigger. Feel nothing. Forget.

  Loyd seemed at a loss. Finally he said gently, “I mean, animals die. They suffer in nature and they suffer in the barnyard. It’s not like people. They weren’t meant to live a good life and then go to heaven, or wherever we go.”

  As plainly as anything then, I remembered trying to save the coyotes from the flood. My ears filled with the roar of the flooded river and my nose with the strong stench of mud. I gripped the armrest of Loyd’s truck to keep the memory from drowning my senses. I heard my own high voice commanding Hallie to stay with me. And then, later, asking Doc Homer, “Will they go to heaven?” I couldn’t hear his answer, probably because he didn’t have one. I hadn’t wanted facts, I’d wanted salvation.

  Carefully, so as not to lose anything, I brought myself back to the present and sat still, paying attention. “I’m not talking about chicken souls. I don’t believe roosters have souls,” I said slowly. “What I believe is that humans should have more heart than that. I can’t feel good about people making a spectator sport out of puncture wounds and internal hemorrhage.”

  Loyd kept his eyes on the dark air above the road. Bugs swirled in the headlights like planets cut loose from their orbits, doomed to chaos. After a full half hour he said, “My brother Leander got killed by a drunk, about fifteen miles from here.”

  In another half hour he said, “I’ll quit, Codi. I’m quitting right now.”

  17

  Peacock Ladies at the Café Gertrude Stein

  “He’s giving up cockfighting for you?” Emelina’s eyes were so wide I could only think of Mrs. Dynamite’s husband watching Miss America.

  “I guess. We’ll see if he stays on the wagon.”

  “Codi, that’s so romantic. I don’t think J.T. ever gave up a thing for me except cracking his knuckles.”