Animal Dreams - Barbara Kingsolver [76]
“I would have the wrong haircut. Everybody would remind me that I don’t quite belong. ‘Oh, honey,’ they’d say, ‘you’re still here? I heard you were on your way to Rio de Janeiro to have tea with Princess Grace.’ And I’d say, ‘No, I’ve grown up to be the new Doc Homer. I’ve moved into his house and I’m taking over his practice so I can save the town.’”
“Save us from what, Great White Mother?”
“Oh, shit, you guys can all just go to hell.” I laughed, since the other choice was to cry. He took me in his arms and I crumpled against his chest like an armful of laundry. “This town was never kind to me,” I said into his shirt. “I never even got asked out on dates. Except by you, and you were so drunk you didn’t know better.”
“You know what we used to call you in high school? Empress of the Universe.”
“That’s just what I mean! And you didn’t care that the Empress of the Universe had to go home every night to a cold castle where the king stomped around saying hugs are for puppy dogs and we are housebroken.”
Loyd seemed interested in this. “And then what?”
“Oh, nothing much. I’d hide in my room and cry because I had to wear orthopedic shoes and was unfit to live.”
He turned my chin to face him. I hadn’t noticed before that without shoes we were the same height. Proportioned differently—my legs were longer—but our chins punched in at the same altitude. “So, where you headed now, Empress?”
“God, Loyd, I don’t know. I get lost a lot. I keep hoping some guy with ‘Ron’ or ‘Andy’ stitched on his pocket and a gas pump in his hand will step up and tell me where I’m headed.”
His face developed slowly toward a grin. “I’ll tell you. You’re going with me to do something I’m real good at. The best.”
I tried to figure this out. Behind his smile there was a look in his eyes that was profoundly earnest. It dawned on me. “Cockfights?”
There was no way I could say no.
A fighting cock is an animal bred for strength and streamlined for combat. His wings are small, his legs strong, and when he’s affronted his neck feathers puff into a fierce mane like a lion’s. Individuality has been lost in the breeding lines; function is everything. To me each bird looked like any other. I couldn’t tell them apart until they began dying differently.
The deaths are protracted. That was one thing I learned when I went to see Loyd excel in the profession to which he was born.
I’d had in mind that a cockfight would be an after-dark, furtive thing: men betting and drinking and sweating out the animal suspense under cover of night. But it was broad daylight. Loyd cut the wheel sharply, taking us off the road and up a gravel arroyo. He seemed to navigate the reservation by the same mysterious instincts that lead birds to Costa Rica and back home again unfailingly each year. We reached a thicket where a motley herd of pickup trucks were parked at odd angles, close together, like nervous horses ready to bolt. Loyd pulled his red truck into the herd. Beyond the trees was a dirt arena where roosters strutted around clearing their throats, barnyard-innocent.
Loyd steered me through the arena, his arm around my shoulders, greeting everybody. I saw no other women, but Loyd would have been welcome here if he’d shown up with a shewolf. “Lot of people going to lose their shirts today,” a man told him. “You got some damn good-looking birds.” The man was handsome and thin, with a long ponytail tied up Navajo style. His name was Collie Bluestone. Loyd introduced us, seeming proud of me.
“Glad to meet you,” I said. Collie’s hand felt taut with energy. A chunk of turquoise on a leather thong rested on his collarbone, below the scar of an old tracheotomy.
“Collie’s a cock mechanic,” Loyd said. “We go back a ways.”
I laughed. “You give them tune-ups before the fight?”
“No, after,” Collie said. “I sew them up. So they live to fight another day.”
“Oh. I thought it was to the death.” I dragged a finger across my throat.
Collie smiled. “Out of every fight, one of them dies and one lives.” He turned to Loyd. “How come the girls