“It doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “I still can’t stay.”
“It does mean something. It means they want you, whether you stay or not. It means you’re real good at what you do.”
I took the letter back and looked at it, not at the words but the object itself. “I guess you’re right,” I said. “I don’t think anybody ever told me that before. Not in a letter. I guess that’s something.”
“Sure it is.”
“I was thinking of it as just one more choice I’d have to make. A complication.”
“Life’s a complication.”
“Sure,” I said. “Death is probably a piece of cake by comparison.”
We looked at each other for a while. “So tell me about your day, honey,” I finally said. We both laughed at that.
“Another buck in the bank, doll.”
“Is that it? Do you like driving trains? You never talk about it.”
“You really want to hear about it?”
“I think so.”
“Okay. Yeah, I like driving trains. Today I went out on a dog catch.”
“Not the Amtrak?”
“No. A special mission.”
“You had to catch a dog?”
“A dog catch is when you go out to bring in a train after the crew’s died on the main line.”
“The whole crew died?” I was visited by the unwelcome thought of Fenton Lee in his sheared-off engine, after the head-on collision. I knew this couldn’t be what Loyd meant.
He smiled. “Died on the hours-of-service law. They’d worked a full twelve hours but there were holdups somewhere and they still hadn’t gotten to a tie-up point. You can’t work more than twelve hours straight because you’d be tired and it would be dangerous; it’s federal law. So you just stop where you are, and wait for a relief crew.”
“Good thing airline pilots don’t do that,” I said.
“I bet they go to sleep at the wheel more than we do, too.” Loyd said.
“So you went out and caught the dog.”
“Me and another engineer and a conductor and a brakeman all deadheaded out to Dragoon to pick up the train. The dead crew came back to Grace in a car.”
“And you, what, took the train on into Tucson?”
“Yep.”
“So what does that mean, what do you do exactly? Is there a steering wheel?”
He laughed. “No. You adjust throttles, you set brakes, you watch signals. You use your head. Today I had to use my head. I was the lead engineer and it was a real heavy train, over ten thousand tons. There were two helper engines coupled at the rear of the train.”
“Ten thousand tons?”
He nodded. “A little better than a mile and a half long.”
“And you’re in the front engine, and there’s two engines pushing on the back?”
“Yep. The hard part was topping over Dragoon. That’s a real long hill, a long descending grade from Dragoon to the Benson bridge, and there’s a siding you sometimes have to pull into there, at twenty-five miles an hour. But the train is so damn heavy it wants to take off on you down that hill. I’ve messed up on that hill a bunch of times before. Just between you and me, one time I went flying through there at sixty, hoping to God there was nobody coming on the main line. I never could have gotten into the siding track.”
“I guess there was nobody coming.”
“No. But today there was, and I got us in safe and sound. Today I did it exactly right.” He smiled at me over his coffee cup.
“So tell me about it.”
“Well, we topped over the hill way below the speed limit, and when I got about half the train over the hill I set a minimum amount of air brakes. Then I waited for it to take hold. The brakes take hold all along the train, in every car, front to back. And then I just watched the speedometer keep coming up.”
“You’re still speeding up? Even after you’ve set the brake?”
“You’ve got six thousand tons and a mile of train coming down the hill behind you. What do you think it’s going to do?”
Doc Homer used to pose puzzles like this to Hallie and me, to develop our cognitive skills. “But you’ve also got some-odd thousand tons still coming up the hill behind you.”
“That’s right. A little less coming up, and a little more coming down, every minute. That’s the tricky part. That’s the Zen of Southern Pacific.”
I was extremely impressed.
“On a normal train you’d be real leery of setting the brake while half your train’s still coming up the hill. The rear would start pulling backward and you’d break in two.”
“Oh,” I said. “So then you’d have two trains.”
“Then you’d have a nice long vacation without a paycheck.”
“Oh.”
“But I had helper engines that could push on me from the back, so I was pretty sure we wouldn’t break in two. I radioed my helper engineer back there to keep pushing up the hill at full throttle, that’s throttle eight, and then cut it back to throttle one when he topped over.”
“So he was pushing and you were braking at the same time.”
“Yep. Setting the brake early enough, that was the part I never got before. It kind of goes against what you think’s right.”
“Nobody can just tell you how to do that hill?”
“No, because every train’s different on every hill. Every single run is a brand-new job. You have to learn the feel of it.”
“So you can’t necessarily do the same thing next time?”
“Not exactly the same thing, no. But on this train the minimum set worked perfect. And then I worked the throttle to maintain forty miles an hour. I came down the hill through Sybil and Fenner, the last siding before the Benson bridge. I got a flashing yellow after Sybil so I knew we’d probably have to go into Fenner. Then we went by a yellow, and the next signal was a diverging approach, a red over yellow, and I had to be down to twenty-five at that signal so we could get into the siding. Sure enough, there was a train on the main line headed east.”
“What if you’d been going sixty, like last time?”
He winked. “I wouldn’t be getting any nice letters telling me how good I am at my job.”
“Seriously. What if you saw a headlight coming at you in the dark?”
“You heard about Fenton Lee, then, did you?”
“What would you do?”
Loyd looked at me. “Jump off.”
“Yeah?”
“Oh, yeah. I did it one time already, when I was a fireman. The engineer hit a siding too fast and that sucker looked like it was going off the track. I was out of there like buckshot. I got a big old bruise on my butt, and the guys laughed at me because they didn’t derail. I don’t care. There’s things worth risking your life for, but a hunk of metal’s not one of them.”
I watched him drink his coffee. In the hot sun his hair had dried to its normal glossy, animal black. The mesquite leaves cast feathery shadows all over his face and the muscular slope of his chest. The sight of his bare feet stirred me oddly. I badly wanted to take him inside to bed.
“Well. But you are real good at your job,” I said.
“I’m getting there.”
“I guess I never knew there was so much to it.”
He set down his cup and crossed his arms. “Pretty good for an Injun boy, huh?”
“You could have told me more about it.”
He smiled. “Codi, did anybody ever tell you a damn thing you didn’t want to know?”
I stalled, avoiding the question. “If I told you I wanted to go to bed with you right now, would you think I only loved you for your mind?”
His eyes sparkled. “I think I could overlook it.”
That night I lay in Loyd’s arms and cried. Since the day I spent with Uda in the attic, wishes and anger had backed up in me, and now they rushed out, rocketing my mind around on a wild track toward emptiness. I told Loyd about the photographs and unrelated things, old things, like making pies with Uda Del
l. “I have all these memories I couldn’t get hold of before, but it doesn’t make me feel any better,” I said.
“What kind of memories?”
“Everything. Really, my whole childhood. Most of it I had no idea was there. And most of it’s happy. But Loyd, it’s like the tape broke when I was fifteen, and my life started over then. The life I’d been living before that was so different—I don’t know how to say this, but I just couldn’t touch that happiness anymore, I’d changed so much. That was some other little bright-eyed, righteous girl parading around trying to rescue drowning coyotes and save chickens from the stewpot. A dumb little kid who thought the sun had a smiley face on it.”
“And what happened when she was fifteen?”
I withdrew from Loyd’s arms. Had I set him up to ask? I lay looking at the wall, considering whether I could tell him. If I only had two more months in Grace, it wasn’t long enough. “I can’t explain it,” I said. “I guess it finally hit me that nobody was going to take care of me.”
“In high school you were doing a pretty good job of taking care of yourself.”
“That’s what it looked like. It probably looks like that now, too.”
Loyd took me back onto his shoulder, which felt hard like a cradleboard under my head. He stroked my cheek. “You still have all the family you grew up with. Hallie’s somewhere out there. She’ll come back. And Doc’s still here.”
“Neither one of them is here.”
“Codi, for everybody that’s gone away, there’s somebody that’s come to you. Emelina thinks you’re her long-lost sister. You know what she told me? She wants you there in that little house forever. She said if I let you leave Grace she’ll bust my butt. She loves you to death.”
“So this is all a conspiracy, I said.”
“Yeah. Emelina bribed me to fall in love with you.” He laughed and kissed my hair. “Honey, there’s not that much money in the world.”
I didn’t wish to be comforted. “You can’t replace people you love with other people,” I said. “They’re not like old shoes or something.”
“No. But you can trust that you’re not going to run out of people to love.”
“I don’t think I can trust life that far. I lost my mother. You don’t know what that’s like.”
“No, I don’t.”
“You don’t have any idea what the whole story is, Loyd. You don’t know everybody I’ve lost.”
He gathered me into his arms and we didn’t talk anymore, but in my chest I could still feel a small, hard knot of anger and I held on to it. It was my wings. My exit to safety.
Finally I read all of Hallie’s letters. There were half a dozen I’d never opened, the ones that came after. I knew she’d mailed them before she was kidnapped—I could read the postmarks—but I still held the hope that there might be some clue in there that would help bring her back. Once I opened the letters that hope would be gone.
But I was past a certain point now, like Loyd’s train going over the hill. The momentum of wanting to hear Hallie, even for a few minutes, was growing heavier than anything I might have had to lose. More than ever in my life I needed to ask her what to do, how to live without guarantees, without safety.
So I read the letters, and there were no clues. Only the ordinary, heartbreaking details of war and rural life and the slow progress of hope.
I’d forgotten that her last letter, which I’d read on the trip to Santa Rosalia, was a tirade. I had to get it out and read it again to remember, and the sting was gone. “If I get another letter that mentions SAVING THE WORLD, I am sending you, by return mail, a letter bomb.” (Had I really used those words? But I knew I had, more than once.) “I don’t expect to see perfection before I die. What keeps you going isn’t some fine destination but just the road you’re on, and the fact that you know how to drive.” Two hours after she’d mailed that, she had written a pained apology that reached me now, a lifetime later. Any one moment could be like this, I thought. A continental divide.
Codi [she wrote], I’m sorry, I didn’t say it right. I’m touchy about being worshiped. I’m afraid of becoming Doc Homer Junior, standing on a monument of charity and handing down my blessings, making sure everybody knows where we all stand. I don’t feel like I’m doing that, but it’s the thing you fear most that walks beside you all the time. I don’t want you of all people to see me that way. I’m not Saving Nicaragua, I’m doing the only thing I can live with under the circumstances. The circumstances being that in Tucson I was dying among the garden pests. Working with refugees, and also subsidizing the war that was killing them. I had to get out.
By virtue of our citizenship we’re on one side of this war or the other. I chose sides. And I know that we could lose. I’ve never seen people suffer so much for an ideal. They’re sick to death of the embargo and the war. They could say Uncle, vote for something else, just to stop this bludgeoning. And you know what? I don’t even consider that, it’s not the point.
You’re thinking of revolution as a great all-or-nothing. I think of it as one more morning in a muggy cotton field, checking the undersides of leaves to see what’s been there, figuring out what to do that won’t clear a path for worse problems next week. Right now that’s what I do. You ask why I’m not afraid of loving and losing, and that’s my answer. Wars and elections are both too big and too small to matter in the long run. The daily work—that goes on, it adds up. It goes into the ground, into crops, into children’s bellies and their bright eyes. Good things don’t get lost.
Codi, here’s what I’ve decided: the very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance but live right in it, under its roof. What I want is so simple I almost can’t say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed. That’s about it. Right now I’m living in that hope, running down its hallway and touching the walls on both sides.
I can’t tell you how good it feels. I wish you knew. I wish you’d stop beating yourself up for being selfish, and really be selfish, Codi. You’re like a mother or something. I wish you knew how to squander yourself.
I sat with this letter for a long time trying to understand what peace she was asking me to make.
The others were impersonal, full of description and the usual manic-depressive mélange of experience. The weather had been too dry. A shipment of Yugoslav tractors had come in and they were working out well. “The Deeres were better,” she lamented, “but you have to run them like glass hammers, they can be drydocked for lack of a bolt. The U.S. refuses to trade with us and then makes secret, niggling lists of what we get from the Eastern bloc. The embargo having slipped their minds, apparently.”
In another letter she said they heard gunfire almost every night. “People talk about the second reconstruction. They mean after the U.S. invades. We get up every day and scan the horizon for holocaust.” In this same letter she talked about her young trainees and the joy of seeing a new idea take root in a mind; I knew the moment. When Raymo grasped DNA, his countenance was touched with light. We’d shared something.
I stayed up most of the night rereading letters, all the way back to the first one from the Guatemalan border, where she saw women running from the army carrying babies and backstrap looms. And earlier, on the beach, where she’d watched a man sell shrimp from a bucket that was counterweighted with a plastic jug of drinking water. He drank as he went along, to keep the load balanced. The purity of direct necessity.
But the letters ended, finite as a book or a life, and I had no choice but to keep coming back to the last one, scrutinizing it for a sign of goodbye. It wasn’t there. It was a description of the children’s Christmas Eve pageant, three or four words about Julio, and a self-effacing story of how she’d broken her plate that morning at breakfast. Of course it was a disaster; there was only one anything per person in the house. Sh
e was mad at herself for being careless, but the neighbor women rounded up a new plate. They made a joke of its being tin, unbreakable.
Nothing else. The closest thing to prescience had come a few days earlier, in a pensive pared-down note that said: “Sometimes I still have American dreams. I mean literally. I see microwave ovens and exercise machines and grocery-store shelves with thirty brands of shampoo, and I look at these things oddly, in my dream. I stand and I think, ‘What is all this for? What is the hunger that drives this need?’ I think it’s fear. Codi, I hope you won’t be hurt by this but I don’t think I’ll ever be going back. I don’t think I can.”
I had my own nightmare again, but this time I understood that it wasn’t blindness. It was a flashbulb in my father’s camera. Even from inside the dream I knew that, and I didn’t wake myself when I heard the glass pop. I took the risk of staying where I was, and went on dreaming. What I saw next was an infant face that wasn’t my own but my child’s, lit in the flash. Then I saw her whole body in moonlight. She was a seventeen-year-old girl, naked and long-limbed, walking up the path toward our house. I stood in the kitchen and watched her through the screen door as she came up the path from the river. For a second she disappeared in the inky shadows under the cottonwoods and I felt completely afraid, but then she emerged again in the light. Her skin glowed white.
I thought: “If she tries to walk through this screen door into Doc Homer’s kitchen, she’ll evaporate. She can’t come in here.” So I ran outside and gathered her up, a ridiculous bundle of long arms and legs. I carried her back through the cottonwood grove and down the path, away from the house. Over our heads was a chalky full moon with cloud rubbed across it, like something incompletely erased. I was hunched over and stumbling and I started to run along the dry riverbed, absurdly burdened with this long-legged child as big as myself. I didn’t talk or look at her, I just carried her along.
Hallie followed me down the path. I didn’t see her come, but I heard her voice right behind me.
“Codi, stop. She’s too heavy. You can put her down now.”
Animal Dreams Page 29