“What’s going on?” I asked, when Loyd hung up the phone.

“I’m five times out. Plenty of time for a fuck.”

“That’s not what I meant. Loyd, I don’t think you’re dumb.”

“Just not anything worth changing your plans for.”

I laughed. “As if I had plans.”

He looked at me, his eyes searching back and forth between my two pupils as if he were trying to decide which door concealed the prize. “What would happen if you stayed here, Codi?”

“I would have the wrong haircut. Everybody would remind me that I don’t quite belong. ‘Oh, honey,’ they’d say, ‘you’re still here? I heard you were on your way to Rio de Janeiro to have tea with Princess Grace.’ And I’d say, ‘No, I’ve grown up to be the new Doc Homer. I’ve moved into his house and I’m taking over his practice so I can save the town.’”

“Save us from what, Great White Mother?”

“Oh, shit, you guys can all just go to hell.” I laughed, since the other choice was to cry. He took me in his arms and I crumpled against his chest like an armful of laundry. “This town was never kind to me,” I said into his shirt. “I never even got asked out on dates. Except by you, and you were so drunk you didn’t know better.”

“You know what we used to call you in high school? Empress of the Universe.”

“That’s just what I mean! And you didn’t care that the Empress of the Universe had to go home every night to a cold castle where the king stomped around saying hugs are for puppy dogs and we are housebroken.”

Loyd seemed interested in this. “And then what?”

“Oh, nothing much. I’d hide in my room and cry because I had to wear orthopedic shoes and was unfit to live.”

He turned my chin to face him. I hadn’t noticed before that without shoes we were the same height. Proportioned differently-my legs were longer-but our chins punched in at the same altitude. “So, where you headed now, Empress?”

“God, Loyd, I don’t know. I get lost a lot. I keep hoping some guy with ‘Ron’ or ‘Andy’ stitched on his pocket and a gas pump in his hand will step up and tell me where I’m headed.”

His face developed slowly toward a grin. “I’ll tell you. You’re going with me to do something I’m real good at. The best.”

I tried to figure this out. Behind his smile there was a look in his eyes that was profoundly earnest. It dawned on me. “Cockfights?”

There was no way I could say no.

A fighting cock is an animal bred for strength and streamlined for combat. His wings are small, his legs strong, and when he’s affronted his neck feathers puff into a fierce mane like a lion’s. Individuality has been lost in the breeding lines; function is everything. To me each bird looked like any other. I couldn’t tell them apart until they began dying differently.

The deaths are protracted. That was one thing I learned when I went to see Loyd excel in the profession to which he was born.

I’d had in mind that a cockfight would be an after-dark, furtive thing: men betting and drinking and sweating out the animal suspense under cover of night. But it was broad daylight. Loyd cut the wheel sharply, taking us off the road and up a gravel arroyo. He seemed to navigate the reservation by the same mysterious instincts that lead birds to Costa Rica and back home again unfailingly each year. We reached a thicket where a motley herd of pickup trucks were parked at odd angles, close together, like nervous horses ready to bolt. Loyd pulled his red truck into the herd. Beyond the trees was a dirt arena where roosters strutted around clearing their throats, barnyard-innocent.

Loyd steered me through the arena, his arm around my shoulders, greeting everybody. I saw no other women, but Loyd would have been welcome here if he’d shown up with a shewolf. “Lot of people going to lose their shirts today,” a man told him. “You got some damn good-looking birds.” The man was handsome and thin, with a long ponytail tied up Navajo style. His name was Collie Bluestone. Loyd introduced us, seeming proud of me.

“Glad to meet you,” I said. Collie’s hand felt taut with energy. A chunk of turquoise on a leather thong rested on his collarbone, below the scar of an old tracheotomy.

“Collie’s a cock mechanic,” Loyd said. “We go back a ways.”

I laughed. “You give them tune-ups before the fight?”

“No, after,” Collie said. “I sew them up. So they live to fight another day.”

“Oh. I thought it was to the death.” I dragged a finger across my throat.

Collie smiled. “Out of every fight, one of them dies and one lives.” He turned to Loyd. “How come the girls always forget about the one that lives?”

“Everybody loves a hero, I guess.” Loyd winked at me.

“Nothing heroic about a dead bird,” I pointed out.

The arena centered on a raked floor of reddish-brown dirt. Loyd maneuvered me through the men squatting and arguing at its perimeter to a dilapidated flank of wooden chairs where he deposited me. I felt nervous about being left alone, though the atmosphere was as innocuous as a picnic, minus women and food.

“I’ll be back,” he said, and vanished.

The place was thick with roosters but didn’t smell like poultry, only of clean, sharp dust. I suppose the birds didn’t stay around long enough to establish that kind of presence. Some men took seats near me, jarring me slightly; the chairs were all nailed together in long rows, the type used for parades. I spotted Loyd through the crowd. Everybody wanted to talk to him, cutting in like suitors at a dance. He was quite at home here, and relaxed: an important man who’s beyond self-importance.

He returned to me just as a short, dark man in deeply worn plaid pants was marking out a chalk square in the dirt of the center pit. Betting flared around the fringes. An old man stabbed the stump of a missing forefinger at the crowd and shouted, angrily, “Seventy! Somebody call seventy!”

Loyd took my hand. “This is a gaff tournament,” he explained quietly. “That means the birds have a little steel spur on the back of each leg. In the knife fights they get blades.”

“So you have gaff birds and knife birds,” I said. I’d been turning over this question since our trip to Kinishba.

“Right. They fight different. A knife fight is a cutting fight and it goes a lot faster. You never really get to see what a bird could do. The really game birds are gaff birds.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I said.

The first two fighters, men named Gustavo and Scratch, spoke to the man in plaid pants, who seemed in charge. Scratch appeared to have only one functional eye. Loyd said they were two of the best cockfighters on the reservation. The first position was an honor.

“The roosters don’t look honored,” I said. Actually they looked neither pleased nor displeased, but stalked in circles, accustomed to life on one square yard of turf. Their tail feathers ticked like weeds and one of them crowed nonstop, as if impatient. But impatience implies consciousness of time and a chicken is existential. I know that much about birds.

“How come you’re not down there playing with your friends?” I asked Loyd.

“I’ve got people to train the birds, bring the birds, weigh in, all that. I handle. You’ll see.”

“Train the birds? How do you teach a bird to fight?”

“You don’t, it’s all instinct and breeding. You just train them not to freak out when they get in a crowd.”

“I see. So you don’t train, you handle,” I said. “A handling man.”

He pinched my thigh gently along the inside seam of my jeans. I’d been handled by Loyd quite a few times since Kinishba. The crowd quieted. Scratch and Gustavo squared off in the center of the pit, their charges cradled at thigh level, and they thrust their birds toward each other three times in a rhythm that was frankly sexual. Each time the men’s hips rocked forward, the cocks dutifully bit each other’s faces. Apparently the point was to contrive a fighting mood. Two minutes ago these birds were strutting around their own closed circuits, and if they looked away from each other even now they’d probably lose their train of thought and start scratching the dust for cracked corn.