Animal Dreams - Barbara Kingsolver [42]
I dropped the subject of cockfighting. Loyd had begun to come by fairly regularly in the evenings, which is to say regular for a railroad man: I’d see him three days in a row, and then not at all for a week. It reinforced the feeling that we were only casual acquaintances, meeting nearly by accident, and I tried to limit my expectations to the point where I paid no attention to how I looked in the evenings. Sometimes as I walked around the brick floors of my living room and bedroom I’d realize I was listening for the jingle of Jack’s tags, and then I’d click on the radio.
When Loyd did show up we would drag our lawn chairs out for a view of the sun’s parting shot at the canyon wall, and we’d talk about nothing in particular. For instance, he told me the story of Jack’s life. Jack’s mother was a coyote that Loyd took in when he was living up on the Apache reservation. She’d been crippled with buckshot in her shoulder, and had gone into heat. Loyd saw her one night skirting the arroyo behind his house, trying to get away from a pack of males. He got her attention with a low whistle, and then he left his front door open and went to bed; next morning, she was curled up under his cot.
I didn’t question this. For one thing, he seemed to hold a power over females of all types. But truly Loyd had the most unself-conscious way of telling a story I’d ever heard, as if it didn’t matter whether I was impressed or not, he was just going to give me the facts. It seemed as if he didn’t care enough, one way or the other, to lie.
“I kept her shut up in the house for a week with my dad’s old dog, Gunner. Gunner lost one of his back legs when he was a pup and he could get around real good, but he’d never in his life mounted a female. I thought she’d be safe with him.”
This matter-of-fact talk about heat and mounting made me slightly edgy, or rather, edgy once-removed. I felt like I ought to be uneasy with Loyd, but I wasn’t. To him it was life and death and dogs. Sometimes Loyd seemed about twelve.
“Well, Jack is here to tell the tale,” I said. “So I guess she wasn’t safe.”
Loyd smiled. “Nope. Old Gunner had his one chance at love. He got into some poisoned coyote bait right after that. He died before the pups were born.”
“How do you know they were his? She could have been pregnant already.”
Loyd asked Jack, as politely as you’d ask a favor from a friend, to roll over. “See that?” Over Jack’s heart was a white patch with a black crescent moon in its center. “That’s Gunner’s. There were seven pups, two black and five brown, and every one of them had that badge.”
“How did you know which one to keep?”
He hesitated. “Dad decided,” he said finally. “And Jack. Really I guess Jack’s the one that decided.”
They were nothing electrifying, these chats with Loyd in the dark, but they were a relief from my days at the high school, which were spent in a standoff just shy of open war. Occasionally Loyd took the tips of my fingers and rubbed them absentmindedly between his own, the way he would surely stroke Jack, if Jack had fingers. The night of the story of Jack, he also kissed me before he left, and I was surprised by how I responded. Kissing Loyd was delicious, like some drug I wanted more of in spite of the Surgeon General’s warning. Later on, when I slept, I had dreams of coyotes in heat.
I also saw Hallie. Her hair moved around her like something alive. “I’ve kissed a man who kills birds,” I confessed, but she looked past me as if she didn’t have a sister. Her eyes were pale as marbles. I woke up confused, too shaken to get up and turn on a light.
I’d dreamt of Carlo, too, on several occasions, for no good reason I could see. He’d written me a letter that was fairly medical and devoid of passion. He did miss me, though, and that sentiment brought comfort as I lay in my empty bed. It meant I was lonely by choice, or by difficult circumstances such as an ailing father; these things are supposed to feel better than being lonely because nobody wants you.