Animal Dreams - Barbara Kingsolver [74]
Hallie wrote:
This morning I saw three children die. Pretty thirteen-year-old girls wearing dresses over their jeans. They were out in a woods near here, picking fruit, and a helicopter came over the trees and strafed them. We heard the shots. Fifteen minutes later an alert defense patrol shot the helicopter down, twenty miles north, and the pilot and another man in the helicopter were killed but one is alive. Codi, they’re American citizens, active-duty National Guards. It’s a helicopter from the U.S., guns, everything from Washington. Please watch the newspapers and tell me what they say about this. The girls were picking fruit. When they brought them into town, oh God. Do you know what it does to a human body to be cut apart from above, from the sky? We’re defenseless from that direction, we aren’t meant to have enemies attack us from above. The girls were alive, barely, and one of the mothers came running out and then turned away saying, “Thank you, Holy Mother, it’s not my Alba.” But it was Alba. Later when the families took the bodies into the church to wash them, I stayed with Alba’s two younger sisters. They kept saying, “Alba braided our hair this morning. She can’t be dead. See, she fixed our hair.”
Codi, please tell me what you hear about this. I can’t stand to think it could be the same amnesiac thing, big news for one day and then forgotten. Nobody here can eat or talk. There are dark stains all over the cement floor of the church. It’s not a thing you forget.
She signed it, perversely, “The luckiest person alive.”
I heard nothing. I listened to the radio, but there wasn’t a word. Two days, nothing. Then, finally, there was one brief report about the American in the helicopter who was taken prisoner by the Nicaraguan government. He was an ex-mercenary running drugs, the radio said, no connection to us. He was shot down and taken prisoner, and that is all. No children had died in an orchard, no sisters, no mothers, no split skulls. And I’m sorry to say this, I knew it was a lie, but I was comforted.
“Who came up with the idea that Indians are red?” I asked Loyd one morning. If I wasn’t careful I could lose myself in this man. His color was like some wholesome form of bread, perfectly done. His forearm, which my head rested on, was sparsely covered with silky black hair.
He turned his head. His hair was perfectly straight, and touched his shoulders. “Old movies,” he said. “Westerns.”
We were in my bed very late on a Sunday morning. Loyd was a wonderful insomnia cure, good enough to bottle. That’s what I’d written Hallie, whom I told everything now, even if my daily letters were comparatively trivial. “He’s a cockfighter,” I’d confessed, “but he’s better than Sominex.” When Loyd lay next to me I slept deep as a lake, untroubled by dreams. First I’d felt funny about his being here—exposing Emelina’s children, and all that. But he didn’t invite me to his place, saying mine was better. He liked to pull books down off my slim shelf and read parts aloud in bed, equally pleased with poetry or descriptions of dark-phase photosynthesis. It occurred to me that Emelina would have a good laugh over my delicacy concerning her children. She probably was daring them to look in the windows and bring back reports.
But the shades were drawn. “Old westerns were in black and white,” I reminded him. “No red men.”
“Well, there you go. If John Wayne had lived in the time of color TV, everybody would know what Indians look like.”
“Right,” I said, gently picking up Loyd’s forearm and taking a taste. “Like that white guy in pancake makeup that played Tonto.”
“Tonto who?”
“Tonto Schwarzenegger. Who do you think? Tonto. The Lone Ranger’s secretary.”
“I didn’t grow up with a TV in the house.” He withdrew his arm and rolled over on his stomach,