Animal Dreams

"So he married your mother," I said. "And came here."

"The women are kind of the center of things up here. The man goes to the wife's place."

"But he didn't stay."

"I never really knew Dad that well. He was already gone when he was still here, if you know what I mean. I don't know what it was that hurt him. I know he grew up at a boarding school and never had much family and he couldn't keep to the old ways. Or didn't know them. I don't know. It was real hard for him here."

I let the subject go. As the twig is bent, so grows the tree, Doc Homer used to say, referring mostly to the bone structure of the feet but it applied to moral life as well. And who knew how the kinks happened; they just did. I ought to know. As Hallie had bluntly pointed out in her letter, I'd marked myself early on as a bad risk, undeserving of love and incapable of benevolence. It wasn't because of a bad grade on a report card, as she'd supposed. It ran deeper than that. I'd lost what there was to lose: first my mother and then my baby. Nothing you love will stay. Hallie could call that attitude a crutch, but she didn't know, she hadn't loved and lost so deeply. As Loyd said, she'd never been born-not into life as I knew it. Hallie could still risk everything.

Loyd and I dangled our feet over the side of the roof, looking out over the plaza and beyond, to where the plaza ended suddenly, perforce, by the drop of a sheer cliff. I could only see this precipice as a threat, and wonder how toddlers lived to the age of reason without toddling over it, but many little feather-bedecked children were running along its edge as if it were nothing more than the end of a yard.

I heard a drum and a brief burst of what sounded like sleigh bells. Then nothing. If anything ever did happen, we'd have a good view. We'd climbed a ladder to get where we were. Jack had given a long, dejected look up the rungs as if he might consider the climb, if he weren't so dignified. Now he lay curled at the bottom keeping watch. Old wooden ladders and aluminum extension ladders were propped everywhere; second-and third-story roofs served as patios. All around the plaza, legs hung like fringe over the sides of buildings. I spotted Inez and some other relatives across the way. Inez's owlish glasses were the type that turn dark outdoors; two huge black disks hid her round face as she sat, hands folded, inscrutable as a lifeguard.

Not far from us in a sheltered corner of the roof was a wire pen full of geese and turkeys muttering the subdued prayers of the doomed. "Does your mama know you were a cockfighter?" I asked Loyd.

"No." He hesitated. "She knew Dad did it, and that he took Leander and me to the fights when we were little, but she didn't care for him doing that. She never knew I went on with it. And you better not tell her."

"I'm gonna tell," I said, poking him in the ribs. "I'm going to look up in my Keres-English dictionary, 'Your son is a dirty low-down rooster fighter.'"

Loyd looked pained. Pleasing his mother was nothing to joke about. He'd given up cockfighting for Inez, not for me, I now understood. I'd just been the cricket in his ear. But that wasn't insignificant, I decided. I could settle for that. I looked down at the plaza, whose quilt of fresh snow remained a virginal white, unmarred by tracks. This seemed miraculous, considering the huge number of people crowded around its edges-a good two hundred or more. People must have come from outside the Pueblo. Jicarilla Apaches looking for knockout wives.

"How come those houses over there near the edge of the cliff are falling down?" I asked. Their adobe plaster had cracked off, revealing the same artful masonry as Kinishba, in a state of collapse.

"Because they're old," Loyd said.

"Thank you. I mean, why doesn't somebody fix them up? You guys are the experts, you've been building houses for nine hundred years."

"Not necessarily in the same place. This village was in seven other places before they built it up here."

"So when something gets old they just let it fall down?"

"Sometimes. Someday you'll get old and fall down."

"Thanks for reminding me." I shaded my eyes, looking to the east. Something was happening near the kiva, which was a building with a ladder poking out through a hatch in its roof. Loyd had suggested I shouldn't show too much interest in it.

"The greatest honor you can give a house is to let it fall back down into the ground," he said. "That's where everything comes from in the first place."

I looked at him, surprised. "But then you've lost your house."

"Not if you know how to build another one. All those great pueblos like at Kinishba-people lived in them awhile, and then they'd move on. Just leave them standing. Maybe go to a place with better water, or something."