Animal Dreams

"I found a whole clay pot in here one time," Loyd said. "It's in my mother's house." He lowered his voice. "Don't tell any Navajos, they'll throw Mama in jail."

"You brought it back to her at the end of one summer, right? As a present. And she still treasures it."

He smiled a little shyly. The image of a ten-year-old Loyd brought the threat of tears to my eyes. I'd spent my life watching mother-child rituals from outside the window.

"So you played in here when you were little?"

"Oh, yeah. This used to be me and Leander's fort."

"Cowboys and Indians?"

He laughed. "Good Indians and bad Indians."

"Which were you?"

"Nobody can be good all the time. Or bad all the time. We took turns."

He led me over a couple of tumbledown walls to the base of the cliff, and knelt down. I looked where he pointed. Set carefully among an assortment of old petroglyphs were two modern ones: the outlined left hands of two small boys, just touching, perfectly matched.

We crossed the high desert from Chinle to Ship Rock, New Mexico, and on to the Jemez Mountains. Wind battered the windows and we warmed our hands at the heater vents and talked about everything under the sun. Loyd talked about his marriage to Cissie Ramon, which he said was noisy and short. Cissie was crazy about rooster fighting, men, and unusual colors of nail polish, like green. He'd thought she was exotic, but she was just wild; there was a difference. She ran out on him.

He was a good deal more interested in talking about working in his aunt's pecan orchards, in Grace. This aunt was his mother's sister, Sonia. She married a Pueblo man from her village but moved with him to Grace when Black Mountain drafted Native American men into the mines during World War II. Sonia and her husband planted fruit trees there, thinking the war would last at least twenty years, and when it didn't they felt they ought to stay on in Grace anyway, for the sake of the orchards.

It was a different story from farming in Canyon de Chelly, Loyd said. Sonia had started out as a tenant picker, before buying her own pecan orchard, and she learned harvesting the modern way. Usually the harvest started in October and ran till Thanksgiving. To get the nuts off the trees, they used a machine called a tree shaker.

"I remember guys hitting the branches with sticks, when I was a kid," I said.

"Nah, we were high-tech. After the tree shaker comes the harvester, which is this big thing with a vacuum-scooper that you drive along between the rows. It scoops up everything and blows the sticks and leaves out the back, and the pecans and rocks fall down into this cage at the bottom. More junk falls out the slots as it rolls around, and the hulls fall off, and the idea is you end up with mostly pecans. But really you end up with pecans and pecan-sized dirt clods and pecan-sized rocks."

"So did you get to drive the big machines?"

"Nope. Mostly I got to pick rocks and dirt clods off the conveyor. I think that was the best job I ever had. The hardest, but the best, because I grew up on it. Stopped thinking about myself all the time and started thinking about something else, even if it was just damn pecans."

I took it from Loyd's use of the singular pronoun that Leander was dead by this time. Slowly I was patching together Loyd's life, and it was not the poor little gypsy story I'd imagined. I suppose I'd wanted to see him as a fellow orphan. But everywhere he'd been, he'd been with family.

"How long will Grace last without the river?" I asked.

"Two or three years, maybe. The old orchards will go longer because their roots are deeper." He glanced at me. "You know I have an orchard?"

"No. In Grace?"

"Yep. Not the pecans, those belong to my cousins, but Tia Sonia's leaving me the peach orchard. The fruit trees were always my job, keeping the birds and squirrels off the fruit."

"How do you do that?"

"Well, the main way is by killing them."

I laughed.

"What's funny?"

"I don't know." I stared out the windshield. In the distance, Ship Rock floated like a ghost vessel on the snowy plain. "So you now have a dying orchard to call your own. Your Aunt Sonia's moved back to Santa Rosalia, right?"

"Right. But the orchard's not mine till I have kids."

"That doesn't seem fair."

"No, it makes sense. When you have a family, you need trees." He paused, carefully, it seemed to me, and redirected the conversation. "What job did you grow up on?"

I thought this over. "Maybe I haven't had it yet."