Animal Dreams

"Are you kidding? How many beautiful six-foot-tall women you think we've got in this town?"

"Five eleven," I corrected. "I'm the shorter of the bean-pole sisters." I felt suddenly drunk, though I wasn't, chemically speaking. Trish drifted off toward the barbecue pit.

He looked at me for a long time, just looked. Grinning. His left hand was fingering the tip of an olive branch and I expected him to snap it off but he didn't, he only took in its texture as someone might eat chocolate or inhale a cigarette.

"You want another beer?" he asked.

So that was going to be it, no filling in the last fifteen years. No constructing ourselves for each other-otherwise known as falling in love. "Think you can get over to that ice chest and back before this party is over?" I knew he wouldn't.

"In case I don't, I've got your phone number." He winked.

"Don't you worry. You'll be hearing from my lawyer."

I felt adrift and disappointed, though I hadn't held any conscious expectations of Loyd. I looked around at other faces, wondering if they all held secret disappointments for me. Dona Althea, the ancient woman we used to call the "Peacock Lady," was holding court in a lawn chair under the fig tree. She was the one who used to collect the feathers for pinatas. She looked today like she always had, dressed in black, fierce and miniature like a frightening breed of small dog. Even with her braided crown of silver hair she wasn't five feet tall. J.T.'s mother, Viola Domingos, and several other women sat in a group with her, fanning themselves in time to the music and drinking beer. J.T. and Loyd had apparently been commandeered into serving them food; the goat had been pronounced done. People were beginning to move toward the makeshift table, which I'd helped Emelina improvise from the doors to Mason's and the twins' rooms, covered with embroidered tablecloths compliments of the Stitch and Bitch Club. There was enough food to save an African nation. Potato salad, deviled eggs, menudo, tortillas and refried beans and a thousand kinds of dessert. I heard somebody say in a highpitched voice, "Tomato soup in that cake? I wouldn't have guessed that for love nor money."

I wasn't in any hurry. I moved out of the way of the principal rush and stood near the gate to the side yard, near my little house. I noticed a dog lying very still and alert, just on the other side of the gate. It looked like an oversized coyote but it was definitely a domestic creature. It had a green bandana tied around its neck. This dog didn't belong to Emelina's household-I was pretty sure I knew all the family animals. It sat with its mouth slightly open and its ears cocked, staring steadily through the wire gate at the people inside.

"You thinking about crashing this party?" I asked the dog.

It glanced up at me for a second, with a patient look, then fixed its gaze back on the crowd. Or maybe on the roast goat.

"I'll bring you some of that, if you're willing to wait awhile," I said. "Nobody's going to miss one little bite."

The dog didn't respond to this promise.

All the old men had served themselves first and were settling down into a huddle of folding chairs near the front door of my cottage, holding their plates carefully horizontal above their knees. I started to move away, out of deference, but I noticed they were talking about fruit drop. I plainly heard one of them say the words, "poison ground." I stood four feet away and invisible, I suppose because they were men, and women talked to women. They asked questions of each other, to which they apparently already knew the answers.

"Do you know how much sulfuric they put in the river? He said the EPA give Black Mountain thirty days to shut down that leaching operation."

"Damn, man, that's veneno. How long you think we been putting that on our trees?"

"When did anybody ever tell the Mountain what to do?" The man who said this had a remarkably wrinkled brown face, like an Indian mummy I'd once seen in a roadside museum. "They'll pull some kind of strings," he said.

A man who sat with his back to me spoke up. "They won't fight the EPA. It's not worth it. They been saying for ten years that mine is dead. They're not hardly getting anything from that leaching operation."

Another man nodded at this, pointing his fork toward the head of the canyon. "Just enough to pay the taxes. That's all. They'll shut her down."

"You think so?" asked the one who reminded me of a mummy. "They're getting gold and moly out of them tailing piles. If they wasn't, they wouldn't keep running the acid through them. You boys know that damn company. They're not going to stop no leaching operation on account of our pecan trees." His voice trailed off and he was quiet for a minute, his callused fingers fooling with an unlit cigarette. I heard women's voices rising randomly over the din of the party, calling out instructions, reining in their kids. The party seemed like something underwater, a lost continent, and I felt profoundly sad though it wasn't my continent. I would go get a bite to eat, say something grateful to Emelina, and slip back into my house.