Barbara Kingsolver (19 page)

“Handle that!” the referee shouted.

The handlers moved in to pull them apart. They faced the birds off, waited for the count, and let them go at each other once more. Within another minute Scratch and Gustavo had to intervene again, this time because one bird had his spurs irretrievably embedded in the breast meat of his opponent. The handlers gently pulled them apart and started them again.

It takes a very long time for one bird or the other to die. Presumably they were dying of internal wounds and hemorrhage. Punctured lungs, for example, and literally bleeding hearts. Eventually they began to bleed from the mouths. At that point I could finally tell Scratch’s bird from Gustavo’s because it lay down in the dirt and wouldn’t get up. Scratch had to place it on its feet and push it back in the direction of combat.

“Why don’t they just declare the winner?” I whispered.

“There’s rules.”

It was a ridiculous answer, but correct. A death was required. It took thirty or forty minutes, and I guess the birds were showing their mettle, but it was hard to watch. The cocks were both exhausted and near death, no longer even faintly beautiful. Their blond breasts and ruffs were spotted with blood, stringy as unwashed hair. Collie Bluestone would have his work cut out for him here.

There seemed to be elaborate rules about how to keep things going after this point, when both birds really just wanted to sit with
their beaks in the dirt. If one lay still, the other had no incentive to fight. I’ve studied a lot of biology; I quickly figured out that this industry was built around a bird’s natural impulse for territorial defense, and that’s where it broke down. No animal has reason to fight its own kind to the death. A rooster will defend his ground, but once that’s established, he’s done. After that he tends to walk around ignoring the bizarre surroundings and all the people who have next month’s rent riding on him and he’ll just act like a chicken—the animal that he is. The handlers had to keep taking the birds firmly in hand, squaring them off and trying to force the fight.

“This is making me sick,” I told Loyd.

He looked at me with such surprise it angered me. Nobody could look at this picture and fail to see cruelty.

“I’ve seen little boys do this same exact thing,” I said. “Take some pitiful animal and tease it and drag it back by the legs over and over again, trying to make it fight.”

“The knife fights go a lot faster,” he said.

“But you don’t like knife fights. You like this. That’s what you said.”

He didn’t answer. To avoid the birds I looked at the crowd, whose faces betrayed neither pain nor blood thirst but passive interest. It could have been any show at all, not two animals obliged to kill each other; it could have been TV. They were mostly old men in feed caps, or black felt cowboy hats if they were Apaches. I spotted a few families now, but knew if you asked these women about cockfighting they’d use the word
we
. “Oh, we love it,” they’d say in cigarette-husky voices, meaning
he
does. A teenager in a black tank top, a greenish tattoo flowering across her broad back, hoisted a toddler onto her shoulder. She lit a cigarette and paid scant attention to the action in the pit, but her child took it in like a sponge.

Several people yelled loudly for Gustavo’s bird. Then finally, without much warning, its opponent passed over from barely alive to dead. Without ceremony Scratch carried his limp loser out by its feet and tossed it into the back of a truck. Loyd Peregrina was called up next. A rooster was delivered into his arms, smooth as a loaf of
bread, as he made his way down to the pit. This time I watched. I owed him that.

In the first fight I’d watched birds, but this time I watched Loyd, and soon understood that in this unapologetically brutal sport there was a vast tenderness between the handler and his bird. Loyd cradled his rooster in his arms, stroking and talking to it in a low, steady voice. At each handling call he caressed the bird’s wings back into place, stroked its back, and licked the blood from its eyes. At the end, he blew his own breath into its mouth to inflate a punctured lung. He did this when the bird was nigh unto death and clearly unable to win. The physical relationship between Loyd and his rooster transcended winning or losing.

It lasted up to the moment of death, and not one second longer. I shivered as he tossed the feathered corpse, limp as cloth, into the back of the truck. The thought of Loyd’s hands on me made the skin of my forearms recoil from my own touch.

“What do they do
with the dead birds?” I wanted to know.

“
What?
”

“What do they do with them? Does somebody eat them?
Arroz con pollo
?”

He laughed. “Not here. In Mexico I’ve heard they do.”

I thought of Hallie and wondered if they had cockfights in Nicaragua. In the new, humane society that had already abolished capital punishment, I’d bet money they still had cockfights.

Loyd watched the road and executed a tricky turn. He was driving a little fast for gravel road and dusk, but driving well. I tried to picture Loyd driving a train, and came up with nothing. No picture. No more than I could picture Fenton Lee in his head-on wreck.

“What do they do with them here?”

“Why, you hungry?”

“I’m asking a question.”

“There’s a dump, down that arroyo a ways. A big pit. They bury them in a mass grave. Tomb of the unknown chicken.”

I ignored his joke. “I think I’d feel better about the whole thing if the chickens were getting eaten.”

“The meat’d be tough,” Loyd said, amused. He was in a good mood. He’d lost his first fight but had won four more after that—more than anyone else that day.

“It just seems like such a pathetic waste. All the time and effort that go into those chicken lives, from the hatched egg to the grave of the unknown chicken. Pretty pointless.” I needed to make myself clear. “No, it’s not pointless. It’s pointed in a direction that makes me uncomfortable.”

“Those roosters don’t know what’s happening to them. You think a fighting cock understands its life is pointless?”

“No, I think a fighting cock is stupider than a head of lettuce.” I glanced at Loyd, hoping he’d be hurt by my assessment, but apparently he agreed. I wanted him to defend his roosters. It frightened me that he could connect so intensely with a bird and then, in a breath, disengage.

“It’s a clean sport,” he said. “It might be hard to understand, for an outsider, but it’s something I grew up with. You don’t see drunks, and the betting is just a very small part of it. The crowd is nicer than at a football game.”

“I don’t disagree with any of that.”

“It’s a skill you have in your hands. You can go anywhere, pick up any bird, even one that’s not your own, a bird you’ve never seen before, and you can do this thing with it.”

“Like playing the piano,” I said.

“Like that,” he said, without irony.

“I could see that you’re good at it. Very good.” I struggled to find my point, but could come up only with disturbing, disjointed images: A woman in the emergency room on my first night of residency, stabbed eighteen times by her lover. Curty and Glen sitting in the driveway dappled with rooster blood. Hallie in a jeep, hitting a land mine. Those three girls.

“Everything dies, Codi.”

“Oh, great. Tell me something I don’t know. My mother died
when I was a three-year-old baby!” I had no idea where that came from. I looked out the window and wiped my eyes carefully with my sleeve. But the tears kept coming. For a long time I cried for those three teenage girls who were split apart from above while they picked fruit. For the first time I really believed in my heart it had happened. That someone could look down, aim a sight, pull a trigger. Feel nothing. Forget.

Loyd seemed at a loss. Finally he said gently, “I mean, animals die. They suffer in nature and they suffer in the barnyard. It’s not like people. They weren’t meant to live a good life and then go to heaven, or wherever we go.”

As plainly as anything then, I remembered trying to save the coyotes from the flood. My ears filled with the roar of the flooded river and my nose with the strong stench of mud. I gripped the armrest of Loyd’s truck to keep the memory from drowning my senses. I heard my own high voice commanding Hallie to stay with me. And then, later, asking Doc Homer, “Will they go to heaven?” I couldn’t hear his answer, probably because he didn’t have one. I hadn’t wanted facts, I’d wanted salvation.

Carefully, so as not to lose anything, I brought myself back to the present and sat still, paying attention. “I’m not talking about chicken souls. I don’t believe roosters have souls,” I said slowly. “What I believe is that humans should have more heart than that. I can’t feel good about people making a spectator sport out of puncture wounds and internal hemorrhage.”

Loyd kept his eyes on the dark air above the road. Bugs swirled in the headlights like planets cut loose from their orbits, doomed to chaos. After a full half hour he said, “My brother Leander got killed by a drunk, about fifteen miles from here.”

In another half hour he said, “I’ll quit, Codi. I’m quitting right now.”

“H
e’s giving up cockfighting for you?” Emelina’s
eyes were so wide I could only think of Mrs. Dynamite’s husband watching Miss America.

“I guess. We’ll see if he stays on the wagon.”

“Codi, that’s so romantic. I don’t think J.T. ever gave up a thing for me except cracking his knuckles.”

“Well, that’s something,” I said.

“No, it doesn’t even count, because I terrorized him out of it. I told him it would give him arthritis or something.”

Emelina and I were eating chili dogs at a roadside diner on 1-10. Loyd’s pickup, which we’d borrowed for the trip, was parked where we could keep an eye on it. Piled high in the back, individually wrapped in dry-cleaner bags, were fifty peacock piñatas with genuine peacock tail feathers. We were headed for Tucson, prepared to hit the streets with the biggest fund-raising enterprise in the history of the Stitch and Bitch Club.

The project was Viola’s brainchild, although she shared credit with Doña Althea, who had opened up her storehouse of feathers. They’d held two all-night assembly lines to turn out these masterpieces, and really outdid themselves. These were not the likes of the ordinary piñata, destined to meet its maker at the end of a blindfolded ten-year-old’s baseball bat. They had glass-button eyes and feather crests and carefully curled indigo crepe-paper wings. These birds were headed for the city, and so was the Stitch and Bitch Club,
en masse
, by Greyhound. Our plan was to meet at the bus station and take it from there.

I was surprised when Viola asked if I’d come. She said they needed me, I knew the city; you’d think it was a jail break. But Loyd was doing switch-engine time in Lordsburg and it was Christmas break, so I had time on my hands. I begged Emelina to come too, and spend a few days in Tucson. I needed to walk on flat sidewalks, risk my neck in traffic, go see a movie, that kind of thing. J.T. could stay with the kids. He was home on thirty days’ probation from the railroad, for the derailment that was officially not his fault. The railroad moves in mysterious ways.

Emelina hadn’t gone anywhere without a child in thirteen years. Out of habit she packed a roll of paper towels in her purse. As we drove out of Grace she gasped for air, wide-eyed, like a hooked fish. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she kept saying. “Turn the truck around. I can’t go.”

I drove westward, ignoring my hostage. “What, you think J.T. doesn’t know how to take care of his own sons?”

“No,” she said, staring at the center line. “I’m afraid I’ll come back and find him dead on the kitchen floor with a Conquerers of the Castle arrow stuck on his head and a fistful of Hostess Ding Dongs.”

By the time we hit the interstate she’d decided it would work out. The boys could go to college on J.T.’s life insurance.

“Oh, they won’t pay if it’s murder,” I said gravely.

She brightened a little. “I always forget. He’s the one that wanted so many kids.”

It was mid-December, fourteen shopping days till Christmas, and by afternoon it was clear and cold. Twenty-two women in winter coats and support hose took the streets of downtown Tucson by storm, in pairs, each cradling a papier-mâché piñata in her arms. No one who witnessed the event would soon forget it.

Emelina and I and the truck were more or less set up as headquarters. We parked in front of a chichi restaurant called the Café Gertrude Stein, for the sole reason that it sported an enormous green plastic torso out front and the women felt they could find their way back to this landmark. As soon as they sold their birds, they were to head back for more. Emelina and I held the fort, perched carefully in the midst of our pyramid of paper birds.

A man in a black fedora and glen plaid scarf came out of the café and gave us a startled look. We’d not been there when he went in. “How much?” he asked.

This had been a much-debated question; apparently the Greyhound driver had threatened to stop the bus if the Stitch-and-Bitchers didn’t quit yelling about it. Ultimately we’d been instructed to try and get what we could.

“How bad do you want it?” asked Emelina, saucily crossing her legs. Monogamous as a goose, and a natural-born flirt.

A small crowd of homeless people had gathered on the other side of the street from where our truck was parked. It seems we were by a good margin the best entertainment of their day.

“Fifty dollars?” the man in the scarf asked.

Emelina and I looked at each other, cool as cukes. “They’re made by hand,” I said.

“Sixty?”

“Okay.”

He handed us three twenties and Emelina forked over a plastic-wrapped bird. Its tail bobbed gently behind him as he made his way down the street. I mouthed the words, “Sixty dollars!” and we collapsed against each other.

“They’re made by hand,” Emelina said, eyebrows arched, in perfect imitation of an Empress of the Universe.

Miss Lorraine Colder and Miss Elva Dann came back to the truck almost immediately. They’d enlisted a bag lady named Jessie, who owned her own shopping cart. When Miss Lorraine explained the threat to the homes of Grace, Jessie cried for a little while and then rallied her wits. They were able to pack half a dozen piñatas into her cart, and the trio of women set out to sell them all in a single foray.

Norma Galvez, in the meantime, lost her partner at a crosswalk and had to be escorted back to the big green naked lady by a bicycle policeman named Officer Metz. In a conversation that lasted only five blocks she’d acquired an amazing number of facts about this man: for example, he had twin daughters born on Christmas Day, and wore a hernia belt. She told Emelina and me these things when she introduced him. Officer Metz was sympathetic, but did ask if the ladies had a vendor’s permit. Mrs. Galvez, a quick thinker, explained that we weren’t selling anything. We were soliciting donations to save our town. Each and every donor got a free peacock piñata. In the interest of public relations she gave him one to take home to his twins.

By five o’clock we were out of birds. As it turned out, Emelina and I didn’t make the best sale of the day. While too many peacocks went for only ten or fifteen, Doña Althea haggled one elderly gentleman up to seventy-five dollars. When the transaction was completed, the Doña allowed him to kiss her hand.

By the time they were back in Grace on the last evening bus, I was later informed, the Stitch and Bitch Club had already laid plans to come back in ten days with five hundred peacock piñatas. There would be only two deviations from the original plan. First, each piñata would be accompanied by a written history of Grace and its heroic struggle against the Black Mountain Mining Company. To my shock I was elected, in absentia, to write this epic broadside and get it mimeographed at the school. (Miss Lorraine and Miss Elva had retired.) Second, the price would be fixed at sixty dollars. Some argued for seventy-five but the Doña overruled, pointing out that she couldn’t be expected to kiss every damn cowboy in Tucson.

Emelina and I
let ourselves into my old house. Carlo was expecting us and had left the key under the usual brick. The neighborhood seemed even seedier than when I left. There was some demolition going on, with cheerfully nasty graffiti decorating the plywood construction barriers. Our old house with its bolted-down flowerpots stood eerily untouched, inside and out. Carlo had let all the plants finish dying, as expected, but beyond that he’d made no effort to make the place his own. He seemed to be living like a man in mourning, not wishing to disturb the traces of a deceased wife. Or wives.

“This is creepy, Carlo,” I told him when he got home late that night from his ER shift. “Why haven’t you moved things around? It looks like Hallie and I just walked out yesterday.”

He shrugged. “What’s to move around?”

Emelina had gone to bed, trying, I believe, to stay out of our way. She’d kept asking me if it wouldn’t be awkward for us to stay with my “ex.” It was hard for her to understand that Carlo and I were really “exes” right from the start. Having no claim on each other was the basis of our relationship.

I’d stayed up watching the news so I could see him when he got home. He slumped down next to me on the couch with a bag of potato chips.

“That your dinner?”

“You my mother?”

“I should hope not.” On the news they were talking about an ordinance that banned charity Santas from collecting donations in shopping malls. The owner of a sporting-goods store was explaining that it took away business. Rows of hunting bows were lined up behind him like the delicately curved bones of a ribcage.

“You look exhausted,” I told Carlo. He really did.

“I sewed a nose back on tonight. Cartilage and all.”

“That’ll take it out of you.”

“So what’s creepy about the way I’m living?” In his light-green hospital scrubs, Carlo looked paler and smaller than I remembered him. No visible muscles.

“It looks like you’re living in limbo,” I said. “Waiting for somebody else to move in here and cook a real meal for you and hang up pictures.”

“You never did either of those things.”

“I know. But it’s different when there’s
two
people living in a house with no pictures. It looks like you’re just too busy having fun with each other to pay attention to the walls.”

“I miss you. We did have fun.”

“Not that much. You miss Hallie.” Being here made me miss her too, more tangibly than in Grace. On these scarred wooden floors, Hallie had rolled up the rugs and attempted to teach us to moonwalk.

“How is she? Does she ever write you? I got one postcard, from Nogales.”

“Yeah, we write. She’s real busy.” I didn’t tell him we wrote a
lot
. We’d revived an intensity of correspondence we hadn’t had since 1972, the year I escaped from Grace and Hallie came into a late puberty, both of us entirely on our own. This time she was over her head with joy and I with something like love or dread, but we still needed each other to make sure it was real. We had to live with an odd, two-week lag to our conversations. I’d be writing her about some small, thrilling victory at school, and she’d be addressing the blue funk I was in two weeks ago when I was getting my period. It didn’t matter; we kept writing, knowing it would someday even out.

“How’s your father?”

“Oh,” I said, “deteriorating. Forgetting who I am. Maybe it’s a blessing.”

“Are you sleeping these days?”

“Yeah, I am, as a matter of fact,” I said, evasively.

“You haven’t had that eyeball dream?”

I’d never been able to explain this to Carlo’s satisfaction. “It’s not really an eyeball dream.”

“What is it, then?”

“Just a sound, like popping glass, and then I’m blind. It’s a very short dream. I’d rather not talk about it if you don’t mind. I’m afraid I’ll jinx myself.”

“So you haven’t been having it?”

“No, not for a while.”

It was kind of him to be interested. He gently squeezed my shoulder in the palm of his hand, releasing the tightness in my deltoid muscle. Not that it applied to us anymore, but people who know a lot about anatomy make great lovers. “So you’re getting along okay there?”

“As well as I get along anywhere,” I said, and he laughed, probably believing I meant “As poorly as I get along anywhere.”

“I’ve been giving some thought to Denver,” he said. “Or Aspen.”

“That would be a challenge. You could sew the faces back onto people who ski into trees.”

“You want to come? We could ski into trees together.”

“I don’t know. I’m not really thinking too far ahead right now.”

He took my feet into his lap and massaged my arches. He had the famous hands of a surgeon, there was no denying it, but I had no sexual interest in Carlo. I still had a slight hope he’d come up with the perfect plan for the two of us that would make me happy and fulfilled, but even that was fading.

“What else could a modern couple like ourselves do in Aspen?” I asked him. “Besides ski into trees, and try to spot movie stars snorting coke in hotel lounges? Aspen sounds kind of fast-lane.”

“After Grace, it would be, yes.”

“Don’t make fun of my country of origin.”

Carlo looked surprised. “I’ve never heard you defend it before.”

“It was a joke.”

“Well, what about Denver, then. Not so fast-lane.”

“Denver’s nice.” I felt the familiar tug of a brand-new place that might, this time, turn out to be wonderful. And the familiar tug of Carlo wanting me to go with him. I’d seen Denver once. It had endless neighborhoods of sweet old brick houses with peaked roofs and
lawns shaded by huge maples. It would be a heavenly place to walk a dog.

“Would you ever consider getting a dog, Carlo?”

“A dog?”

“They have four legs and say ‘woof woof.’”

“Oh, right.”

“I’ve met this wonderful dog, in Grace. He’s half coyote and he’ll sit for five hours in the back of a pickup truck waiting for you, just because he trusts you to come back.”

“This sounds serious.”

“He’s a good dog.” I realized I hadn’t thought about Loyd all day, which I viewed as an accomplishment. This must be how it is to be alcoholic: setting little goals for yourself, proving you can live without it. When really, giving it all that thought only proves that you can’t. My mood suddenly began to plummet; I’d felt elated all afternoon, but now I recognized the signs of a depression coming. If I timed it right, Hallie’s letter addressing my
last
depression would arrive on target.

“Shoot, look at that!” Carlo dropped my feet and jumped to turn up the volume on the TV. “That’s you!”

It was. I yelled for Emelina but the spot was over by the time she showed up in the doorway wearing one of J.T.’s shirts, looking stunned.

“You were on the news,” Carlo explained excitedly. “They said something about the Peacock Ladies and then they said something about Southwestern folk art, and they showed you two standing up in the truck, and this old lady in a black dress…”

“Doña Althea,” I said.

“…holding up the piñata, and another lady and a cop…”