Fragile Beasts (21 page)

“But I’ve never gone to art school or sold a painting or anything like that.”

“Being an artist is not like being a lawyer or a dentist or even a baseball player like your brother,” he tells me. “You have to earn the right to be called these things. You need society’s permission. An artist simply is what he is with or without anyone’s approval.”

He keeps staring at me like he’s expecting a brilliant response from me. He goes on when he doesn’t get one.

“An artist doesn’t create in order to get money, or fame, or acceptance, or love. It’s a force inside him, something he must do or his soul will shrivel up and die.”

This part of his explanation I can relate to.

“Once when I was real little, my dad bought my mom this blown-glass fish for her birthday,” I start to tell him. “My mom’s always had a thing for blown-glass animals, I think because her dad bought her a couple before he ran out on them. This fish my dad got for her was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. It seemed to have every color in the world in it. They were all swirled together in ribbons with tiny frozen bubbles caught between them.

“I stared and stared at it and I knew I had to draw it. If I drew it, somehow I would make it mine. Dad was at work. Klint was at school. Mom was on the phone. I couldn’t find any paper so I took my crayons and drew it on the kitchen wall. The whole time I was doing it I knew I was going to get smacked and sent to my room. I knew my mom wasn’t even going to like it. It was going to make her hate me. But I couldn’t stop myself. I had to draw it. Is that what you’re talking about?”

Luis is watching me. He doesn’t look so stern anymore.

“Yes, that’s what I mean.”

It’s a strange feeling having someone want to know about me. I keep waiting for the conversation to turn into questions about Klint.

“When I paint and draw, I feel like I’m not part of the real world anymore. I sort of get lost but lost in a good way, like taking a long walk down the railroad tracks and you know where you are but no one else does. Not in a scary way like when you’re a little kid and you can’t find your mom in the grocery store. I guess it’s escaping reality even though I need reality because I’m
drawing what I see, but I’m making it look the way I want other people to see it. Does that make any sense?”

“It makes good sense,” Luis says. “It reminds me of something Manuel once said to me about bullfighting.

“He began when he was a little boy, too. He was a farmer’s only son and it was expected he would grow up to be a farmer, also, but from the moment he saw his first fiesta del toros he knew he was born for the ring. As he used to say, the bulls called to his soul. Just as you could say this glass fish called to your soul.

“One day when he was only eight years old and he knew his father was nearby, Manuel took one of his mother’s aprons from the clothesline and jumped into the corral where there was a very mean cow, one who kicked and bit and had even been known to charge. He began taunting her.

“He performed the poses he’d seen the toreros do. He threw off his shoes, made his face very commanding, and shuffled his feet in the sand calling, ‘Hey, hey, Vaca,’ mimicking the torero’s call of, ‘Hey, Toro.’

“His father came to the fence, shouting at him to stop. Then his mother and sister and a farmhand came running. Manuel ignored them all even though he knew he was going to get in trouble, even though he knew this cow could easily crush him if he made the wrong move.

“He waved the apron and kept shouting at her and what he calls the miracle of his life happened: this mean old cow charged him.

“That moment, as the cow was running toward him, when he knew if he turned and ran, he would be dead, or if he froze, he would be dead, that his only chance of survival was to control this animal with his cape and his will, he described that to me as the thrill of being lost.”

“Wow,” I say when Luis falls silent. “That’s a much cooler story than one about drawing a fish on a wall.”

“It’s a good story,” he agrees.

“But I thought bullfighting was a sport, not an art.”

“A sport!?” he exclaims. “Forgive me, Manuel.”

He looks at the sky yet again the same way he did when he mentioned God earlier and Miss Jack getting in his face. He must really believe in heaven.

“Americans and their sports. Everything is a sport. A competition. Even your relationships. Everything is about winning and losing,” he says disgustedly.

“It took me so long to get used to that American expression, You win. You use it for everything. A simple conversation. ‘Where shall we go for dinner?’ ‘I’d like to go here.’ ‘I’d like to go there.’ ‘Okay, you win.’ Win what? What have I won? Was choosing a restaurant a contest between us? Have I now proven that I’m somehow better than you?”

He’s starting to get really mad, but then he takes a deep breath and calms down.

“No, bullfighting is not a sport. It is an art.”

“Like dancing?” I ask. “When I look at the bullfight posters in Miss Jack’s house, the bullfighters kind of look like they’re dancing with their capes.”

“A dance? Yes, in some ways. Toreo requires athleticism, strength, and grace just like dancing does. But it is a dance with an unpredictable, deadly, wild animal.”

“Yeah.” I smile at the idea. “I guess if you threw a tiger onto the stage of America’s Best Dance Crew it would be a whole different show.”

“Some people compare it to dance. Others compare it to theater. They say what unfolds in the corrida is a drama depicting the eternal struggle between man and beast where the civilized torero with his suave manners and lavish suit tames and then destroys Nature’s champion, El Toro. But what most people forget is bullfighting requires a mental composure that no other art demands. It’s something more. It’s something unique. Something incomparable.”

The passion in his voice and the zeal in his eyes remind me of an evangelist talking about the healing powers of God. His words soothe and arouse at the same time and make me want to know more about this strange religion of blood and beauty.

We ride a little farther before Luis suggests we turn back.

The whole time I can’t stop thinking about an eight-year-old El Soltero taking on a pissed-off cow. I’ve been around plenty of cows and even the docile ones are intimidating just because of their size. To a kid, they seem as big as dinosaurs.

I picture him staring down the cow, his serious little face all scrunched up with concentration and determination the same way Krystal’s face was the first time I put her on the tire swing over the Hamiltons’ pond and explained when and how she was supposed to jump.

His dad must have been proud of him.

I remember how Dad used to love to show off Klint’s hitting. Back when
Klint was still too young for Little League but he’d been banned from all the T-ball teams, Dad used to take him to parks in the summer where people were having family reunions or company picnics. He’d put him in a Pirates ball cap, pack his lower lip with bubblegum chew, and set him up in a field with the shiny blue aluminum L’il Slugger bat he bought with money Mom had saved to buy a new lawn chair and start throwing him pitches. Within ten minutes, a crowd would form around him, marveling at how far the pint-sized dynamo could hit a ball. Dad’s head and chest would swell. He’d eventually pass off the ball to someone else who wanted to try pitching to Klint, and he’d stand nearby calling out already unneeded instructions to him to “choke up” to “drop your shoulders” to “watch the inside corner,” while also making small talk with bystanders about how someday they’d be watching his boy on a major-league diamond and they could talk about the time they saw him as a little kid practicing with his dear old dad.

“What did Manuel’s family do after his show with the cow?” I ask Luis. “Were they amazed? were they excited? Did they go out and buy him a real cape?”

“No,” he replies, glancing skeptically at me from the corner of his eye. “He was sent to bed without supper for dirtying his mother’s clean apron.”

I
’ve never regretted not having children. I’ve never mourned my barren womb. People don’t believe me. People never believe that a single woman prefers to remain single. They never believe a childless woman is content to have no children.

This is one of the many reasons why I’ve chosen to live in relative isolation away from my fellow man. I have no tolerance for strangers who know nothing about me yet are constantly telling me what I should think and feel. This is one of the curses of the American people: our moral arrogance. We’re well known for wielding it as a nation, but each individual also possesses it and beats everyone he or she encounters over the head with it.

No matter how many times I insisted that I didn’t care to have children, I was informed that I didn’t know what I was talking about. Sometimes this was conveyed to me bluntly and rudely, sometimes subtly and sympathetically, but always with great condescension.

I’ve been coolly lectured that it’s my biological imperative to have children. I’ve had my hand patted kindly and been assured there was no need to worry: I was young, I was pretty, I still had time. I’ve been told whether or not I had children was in God’s hands, not mine. I’ve been told whether or not I had children was in some random man’s hands who I hadn’t even met yet, not mine. I’ve been told a woman who doesn’t have children isn’t a real woman.

I never paid any attention to these sentiments.

For me the mere thought of having a child, of being solely responsible for the welfare of an innocent, unformed creature, of knowing that my own life would be forever controlled by concern for someone else, was overwhelming and terrifying to me.

I remembered too well what it felt like to be the child who depended on the parent. I loved my parents, and I lost them. I loved them in the way that only a child can love. It wasn’t a feeling, it was a simple reality. They were the earth from which I grew. When I lost them, I lost not only a family and a home but I lost myself, the self I would have been if I had continued to be blessed with the love of a mother and a father.

When others would start to berate or console me on the absence of my own offspring, my thoughts would instantly turn to my relationship with my own mother and I’d ask myself, Would I ever want to be that important to another human being?

Manuel and I never got around to discussing having children together. We talked about marriage, and it was disastrous. We were young, though, and even as we fought and accused each other of outrageous selfishness, we knew in the backs of our minds that we had plenty of time to resolve our differences and make a life together. We were so sure of this, and we were so wrong.

If we had married, I was well aware I would have been obligated to produce a litter of caramel-skinned, coffee-eyed replicas of their famous father. He was a Spaniard, after all, and incredibly yet selectively Catholic, which meant he was very devout but his religion never stopped him from doing whatever he wanted.

When we talked about marriage, we didn’t argue about religion or children or money or any of the usual topics couples struggle with. We fought over the fact that he couldn’t leave his country and I couldn’t leave mine.

No one was more surprised by my insistence that I had to return to America than I was. When I had left home almost a year earlier, I left at a gallop with no intention of ever going back.

I left so abruptly and so recklessly that I didn’t even know the woman I was traveling with or where we were going. She was a friend of Bert’s and that was good enough for me. Bert wanted to take me to Europe himself, but he had to stay behind and help my brother.

I ran away from Stan. It was the first and last time I would ever abandon him.

At the time I thought there was one specific reason for my going. The strike had become too ugly and gone on for too long. The miners and their families were starving. There had been too much violence and even a death.
Stan had become irrationally obstinate. He had done exactly what he promised he would never do. He had become the enemy of the miner, the type of owner our father used to curse.

Stan and I were barely on speaking terms the day Randy Dawes walked into his office with a crowbar and attempted to beat the life out of him. He might have succeeded except he was weak not only from lack of food but from the advanced stages of black lung, and Stan was able to subdue him despite the blows he suffered to his head and shoulders.

When I received the news, I was filled with panic and concern but not with outrage. I didn’t go so far as to let myself believe my brother deserved to be attacked, but I couldn’t hate the man who did it.

Three days later that man would be dead in his jail cell. No one believed it was suicide, but it was called that and no one dared to say otherwise.

I went to see Stan in the hospital right after I heard about the miner’s death. He was already looking tremendously better than he had a few days earlier. His respirator and IV had been removed. His head was still bandaged, his left arm was in a sling, and he had two black eyes; but he was sitting propped up in bed, on the phone, with a sheaf of business papers in his lap.

He smiled when he saw me and called me his Dandy Candy.

I wanted to ask him outright if he had had Randy Dawes killed, just as I had wanted to ask him years earlier if he had pushed Joe Peppernack off that mountain.

Then as now I couldn’t do it because I didn’t want to know the truth.

The problem for me was I understood Stan, so I couldn’t judge him. I knew why he did what he did and although I couldn’t condone it, I couldn’t condemn him either. We had been through the same trauma but had dealt with it in completely different ways and who was I to say my way was right and his was wrong. After the loss of our parents and our home, and our own close encounter with death, we had both been filled with a constant dread. I hid from it inside myself; he conquered it from outside himself. These would be our separate paths through life: I would avoid the world while he would rule it.

What he felt compelled to do in order to stay on his path was none of my business, just as my actions were none of his. This isn’t to say he didn’t control me and tell me what to do to an extent, but he understood there were a few lines he couldn’t cross. Joe represented one of those lines.