Animal Dreams - Barbara Kingsolver [124]
“Gee, you’re pretty. Are you the new schoolteacher?”
I turned around, startled by a man on a moped. I’d never laid eyes on him before, but I was completely charmed by his line. I felt like Miss Kitty in Gunsmoke.
“Well, yes,” I said.
“You want a ride? There’s a wicked pair of brindle bulldogs up at the corner.”
“Okay.” I gathered my skirt and straddled the back of his bike. We buzzed smoothly uphill past the putative wicked bulldogs, who lay with their manifold chins on their paws.
“My son Ricky’s in one of your classes. He says you give them a pretty good round.”
“They give me one, too,” I said.
He laughed. “You’re Doc Homer’s girl, aren’t you?”
“That’s right. Homer Nolina of the white trash Nolinas. He married his second cousin for mad love.” I’d been lying to strangers all my life, and no wonder. Here was the truth and it sounded like a B-grade fairy tale. But I wanted to know if Doc Homer was right—if everyone had forgotten.
“I never heard that,” my driver said. “I just heard she was dead.”
“She’s dead all right. But she was born and grew up right here. You’re around the same age I am, you wouldn’t remember her, but it’s the truth. Her family thought unkindly of my daddy, so they ran off for a while and he put on an attitude.”
He laughed at that, but said, “You oughtn’t to talk bad about a man like him.”
“Oh, I know. Doc Homer’s inclined to be useful. But I swear it looks to me like he’s been running his whole lite on vengeful spite.”
“I got me an old Ford that runs on something like that.”
Ten seconds later he let me off at the base of the path up to Loyd’s house. Loyd was sitting outside, drinking coffee under the huge mesquite that shaded his front yard. He was just out of the shower, wearing only a pair of soft gray sweatpants. His damp hair lay loose on his shoulders. He looked very happy to see me but also unsurprised; typical, maddening Loyd. Jack betrayed excitement in his thumping tail, but Loyd made no sudden movements. He let me come to him, bend over to kiss him, sit down in the chair beside him. I was oddly conscious of his skill with animals.
“You want coffee?”
“No thanks.”
He sat looking at me, smiling, waiting.
“Guess what,” I said finally, handing him the letter. He read it, grinning broadly.
“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