Animal Dreams - Barbara Kingsolver [126]
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 Dell. “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