People trailed out of the church in twos and threes, mostly women, carrying out the same color scheme in their blouses and skirts. They all looked at me as they passed, not with hostility, but with the kind of curiosity you’d have if you noticed an odd plant had popped up in your garden: you wouldn’t yank it out right away. You’d give it a few days to see what developed.
I could hear roosters cock-a-doodling somewhere, and I was curious. As I went down the steps an adobe-colored dog scooted out of my way and ran under the porch. The store, I discovered, had a deep backyard. The chain-link fence was overgrown with weedy vines, but I could still see in: it was a rooster garden in there. Roosters in small cubicles laid out in neat rows, one bird per cage. They strutted and turned in circles, eying each other as if each moment were new, as if they hadn’t for all their natural lives been surrounded by these other birds. They had red faces and glossy black feathers that threw off iridescent flashes of color, like a hummingbird’s throat. Beautiful. But the claustrophobic energy was tiring to watch.
I heard a door slam and I quickly went back around front. Loyd was ready to go, but not in the bad mood I expected. By the time we got to the edge of town he was smiling.
I offered him the last of my soda. “So, did you waste a tank of gas?”
He put his arm across the back of the seat, his thumb touching the nape of my neck, and shot me a sideways look. “No way.”
We weren’t headed back toward Grace, we drove north. There were no more towns, just reddish hills and a badly rutted road. “Was that Whiteriver?” I asked.
“No. This is what you’d call the Whiteriver metropolitan area.”
“You used to live here? After you left your mother’s pueblo?”
“Around here. We lived up at Ghost River. It’s a little higher ground up there. It’s nice, there’s trees.”
“You and your dad and…” I wanted to ask about his dead twin brother, but then again I didn’t. Not today.
“And Jack,” he said.
“Whatever happened to Jack’s coyote mother?”
“After she had her litter, she left us. She went back to live in God’s backyard.”
I was quiet for a minute, taking in the hills. “And where are we headed now?”
He smiled. “Who wants to know?”
“A hometown girl, looking for some adventure.”
“Well, then, we’re headed for some adventure.”
Loyd kept both hands on the wheel in the washed-out stretches, driving like a race-car driver-I don’t mean fast, but skillfully, with that generous kind of concentration that seems easy as a reflex. We were gaining ground, getting higher, passing through intermittent stands of evergreens. In between were meadows, solidly carpeted in yellow flowers, punctuated by tall white poppies with silver leaves and tissue-paper petals. In the distance, the southern slopes of the mountainsides were dappled with yellow. We passed through another tiny enclave of houses and horse corrals. The people there would have been born into that life; I couldn’t imagine it. For some reason I thought of Hallie’s first letter-the babies playing around the cook fire, in the refugee camps. But this wasn’t like that; it didn’t look desperate, just lonely. It was hard to understand why a person would stay. Loyd hadn’t. But then again, he wasn’t born here. And yet he seemed drawn back, for reasons beyond fighting cocks.
The road smoothed out a bit and Loyd took his right hand off the wheel and laid it on my leg. For a little while he and I both pretended it wasn’t there. Then I asked him, “What would these people around here say if they knew you had your hand on a white girl’s thigh?”
He smiled. “They’d say I was a lucky son of a bitch.”
He lifted the hand and ran his palm up the length of my arm, from my wrist to my shoulder, lightly, just stroking the hairs and not the skin. My nipples stood up and my scalp tingled and my whole body wanted that hand on it, everywhere at once. But he took it back and put it on the steering wheel, and I pitied myself for envying a steering wheel.
“You still haven’t told me where we’re going,” I said.
He nodded at the road. “That’s where we’re going. We’re almost there.” After a minute he geared down into four-wheel drive and turned off the dirt road onto a side path, not really a road but a pair of tracks in the gravelly ground. If you hadn’t known it was there, you’d never have seen it.
If we are going to see some more people about gaffers and knife birds, I thought, I’m going to have to sit and be still, be a white girl. No matter what, I’m going to have to stop thinking about kissing Loyd. I looked away from his face, out the window. There was nothing out there now but fields of yellow flowers, rocky red hills in the near distance, and off to the east very high mountains softly blackened around their tops by a pelt of pine forests. It would be cool up there now, even today. I pictured myself lying under the pines on a floor of brown needles. It was hard to keep Loyd out of the picture.
“What is this?” I was out of the truck, entranced, before he’d even set the brake.
“Kinishba,” Loyd said. “Prehistoric condos.”
That’s just about what it looked like. Out there in the middle of God’s backyard, without a fence in sight, sat a long rectangular building made entirely of carefully set stone, no mortar. Dozens of small doors opened into it across the front.
“Can we go inside? Is it allowed?”
He hooked his elbow around my neck, like a friendly wrestler, as we walked toward the site. “It’s allowed. I allow it.”
“What, are you the landlord here?”
“Till somebody tells me I’m not.”
He let me go and turned toward the truck, whistling once. Jack leaped in a high arc over the tailgate and streaked through the field of foot-tall grass, looking like the soul of happiness. He headed downhill toward what must have been a river; I could see cotton-woods. We were in higher country here, with more vegetation.
“That’s a good dog,” I said.
“Yep. That’s a good dog.”
The doors were no more than four feet high. I ducked through one into a small, rectangular room with a dust floor. It was cool as a cave, and quiet. The door was a square of bright light with the silhouette of Loyd coming through. Even inside the room, the ceiling was low, just inches above my head. I touched it. “People were short back then. Didn’t eat their Wonder bread.”
“They would’ve had to build a special room for you. You would have been their queen.”
I laughed, though it struck me I’d been complimented. Was that how Loyd saw me? Not as a grain elevator on the prairie, but a queen? At the back of the room a door led into another room, which was darker, having no openings to the outside. Two more doors led out of that room-one to the side, and one up through the ceiling, which was made of thick, curved trunks of small trees. There was another whole set of rooms on top of this one.
“Can we go upstairs?”
He shook his head. “I wouldn’t trust those beams. They’re kind of old.”
“How old?”
“Eight hundred years.”
I looked at him. “Are you kidding?”
“Nope.”
We went from room to room, changing directions in the dark until the compass points were entirely lost to me. It was a maze. Loyd said there were more than two hundred rooms-a village under one roof. The air smelled cold. I tried to imagine the place populated: stepping from room to room over sleeping couples, listening through all the noises of cooking and scolding and washing up for the sound of your own kids, who would know secret short cuts to their friends’ apartments.