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 Tía 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.”
He smiled. “You went to medical school, right? And almost finished. That can’t be too easy.”
“When it stopped being easy, I quit.”
“What were you doing in Tucson, then, before you came to Grace?”
“You don’t want to know. Cashier in a 7-Eleven.”
“Shoot. And I thought you were too good to go out with a locomotive engineer. What about before that?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, I did medical research at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.”
“Damn! Really?”
“Yep. I was living up there two years ago when I first found out Doc Homer was sick.”
“And before that?”
I rolled my head back and looked at the roof of the car. “You really don’t want to know.”
“You were President of the United States.”
“Guess again.”
“You hotwired Porsches.”
I laughed. “The biggest thing I ever stole was a frozen lobster, for my boyfriend’s birthday. I was working in frozen foods and I think I actually wanted to get fired. Doesn’t that sound stupid?”
“Yes, it sounds stupid. So that came before Mayo Clinic?”
“That, and a bunch of different odd little things. A few piddly research jobs in between. Believe me, I never put everything on the same résumé.”
“And what’s the one you never mention? The one you’re trying not to tell me about.”
“For a few years in there I lived overseas.”
“No kidding. Did you fly? Shoot, I’d love to go someplace in an airplane.”
“Flying’s okay,” I said. In truth, flying terrified me. It’s the one thing I knew I had in common with my mother, who’d flat-out refused, there at the end. In my own life I handled it by means of steadfast denial. I’d flown over the Atlantic Ocean twice without even checking to see if there really was a flotation device under my seat; flotation seemed beside the point. Oh, I flew like a bird.
“So, okay, what were you doing overseas?”
I glanced at him. “I was my boyfriend Carlo’s girlfriend. On the island of Crete.”
He seemed amused. “What, you mean you cleaned house and made cookies?”
“Kind of. Sometimes I’d help out in the clinic. One time I set the broken leg of a sheep. But mostly I was a housewife.”
“So you’d, what, go shopping in a bikini?”
I laughed.
