Animal Dreams

"No, that was Hallie. She's the one that had such a soft heart. We've always been real different that way. She'd cry if she stepped on a bug." I drained my beer. "She's still like that, except now she cries about bag ladies. I swear. She gives them quarters and then she wishes she'd given them a dollar."

I stared out at the treetops and the leaf-green gables of the roof on a house below us. The shingles were an odd, elaborate shape like the spade in a deck of cards. I wondered in what decade they'd stopped making shingles like that, and how this neighbor might repair the roof after a bad storm.

"You really do look great," Emelina said. "That's a terrific haircut, I mean it. You'll stand out in a crowd here till you get your first cut down at Beth's Butcher Shop."

I ran my fingers over my weedy scalp, feeling despair. I'd spent my whole childhood as an outsider to Grace. I was willing to march downtown and submit myself to butchery this minute if that would admit me to the club. I'd led such an adventurous life, geographically speaking, that people mistook me for an adventurer. They had no idea. I'd sell my soul and all my traveling shoes to belong some place.

"I always forget you have so much auburn. Doc Homer had the same coloring, didn't he? Sort of reddish before he went gray?" She fingered her own shoulder-length hair. "Speaking of him..."

"Speaking of him," I said.

"Have you talked to him?" She looked apprehensive. Emelina was my informant. When he started getting lost on his way home from the drugstore, she was the one person in Grace who thought to call me, rather than just draw him a map.

"I'll go up and see him tomorrow."

"And where's Hallie gone? You told me, but I forgot."

"Nicaragua," I said. "To save the crops. Cross between Johnny Appleseed and a freedom fighter."

Emelina laughed and I felt disloyal. I hadn't meant to sound glib. It was just hard to put Hallie into the context of regular life. "I guess it's really dangerous," I said. "But she's excited about it. She'll be happy." I was sure of this. Hallie didn't have my problem. She belonged wherever she was.

Emelina nodded. She watched the boys, who sat cross-legged on the driveway, transfixed by the importance of their task. They were dappled with blood and looked like they'd been through a strange war themselves-a children's war.

A scarlet bougainvillaea covered the front porch. In fact, it was so overgrown that the wood of the vine seemed to be supporting the structure over our heads. The breeze coming up the valley felt like a warm liquid against my arms and face. I held the sweaty beer can against my temple and watched the bougainvillaea arms swaying around us like seaweed under the ocean.

"No," Emelina said after a while. "I'm sure it was you that had a fit over the chickens. You'd start, and then Hallie would do it too. She always followed whatever you did."

"No. Hallie? We're chalk and cheese. Somebody ought to do a study on us, if they want to know how kids in the same family can turn out totally different. She was born with her own mind."

"Maybe she was, but she copied you like a picture," Emelina said. "She used to get so pissed off at me because I wouldn't go along with your boycott of Abuelita's chicken and rice."

I didn't remember organizing boycotts. "Well, you're the witness here. Blood all over the driveway and I didn't faint."

"People change," she said. "Not everything stays with you all your life."

I sat watching my suitcases for a good fifteen minutes, as if they might become inspired to unpack themselves, and then I went into the bedroom and lay down for just a minute, letting my shoes drop one at a time onto the brick floor. I tried to think how far Hallie might have gotten by now. Guatemala. Maybe farther. It was frightening to speculate on specifics; I'd been rationing my thoughts about her, but now I was exhausted and my mind ran its own course. I thought of Hallie at border crossings. Men in uniforms decorated with the macho jewelry of ammunition. No, not that far. I pulled her back to Tucson, where I'd seen her last and she was still safe.

She'd come by the 7-Eleven, all packed up, at the end of my graveyard shift. She knocked her knuckles on the plate glass to get my attention. I locked the cash drawer and took off. Sparrows were ruffling themselves in the sheets of fresh rain on the asphalt. As I walked her across the parking lot to her truck I could see just how we'd look to somebody, hanging on to each other by the elbows: like two swimmers in trouble, both of us equally likely to drown.