Pigs in Heaven (12 page)

C
ASH
S
TILLWATER LOOKS UP FROM
his work and sees a splash of white birds like water thrown at the sky. They stay up there diving in circles through the long evening light, changing shape all together as they fly narrow-bodied against the sun and then wheel away, turning their bright triangular backs.

Cash had only glanced up to rest his eyes but there were the birds, shining outside his window. His eyes fill with tears he can’t understand as he follows their northward path to the dark backdrop of the Tetons, then back again to some place he can’t see behind the Jackson Hole fire station. They make their circle again and again, flaunting their animal joy. He counts the birds without knowing it, sorting the shifting group into rows of odd and even, like beads. In the daytime Cash works at a healthfood store putting tourists’ slender purchases into paper bags, but in the evenings he makes bead jewelry. His lady friend Rose Levesque, who works at the Cheyenne Trading Post, takes in the things he’s made, pretending to the owner
that she did it herself. Cash learned beadwork without really knowing it, simply because his mother and sisters, and then his daughters, were doing it at the kitchen table all his life. Before his wife died and the family went to pieces and he drove his truck to Wyoming, he raised up two girls on the Cherokee Nation. He never imagined after they were grown he would have to do another delicate thing with his hands, this time to pay the rent. But since he started putting beads on his needle each night, his eye never stops counting rows: pine trees on the mountainsides, boards in a fence, kernels on the ear of corn as he drops it into the kettle. He can’t stop the habit, it satisfies the ache in the back of his brain, as if it might fill in his life’s terrible gaps. His mind is lining things up, making jewelry for someone the size of God.

Rose walks in his door without knocking and announces loudly, “Nineteen silver quills down the hatch, did I tell you?” She plumps herself down at his kitchen table.

“Down whose hatch?” Cash wants to know, watching his needle. The backs of his hands remind him of paper burning in the fireplace, the moment the taut membrane goes slack into a thousand wrinkles, just before it withers to ash and air. He wonders if you get used to waking up old.

“Willie Levesque’s big old, ugly, hungover hatch, that’s whose.” Rose lights a cigarette and drags on it with an inward sigh. Willie is Rose’s oldest boy, who is half her age, nineteen, and twice as big. “I had them in an aspirin bottle in the kitchen. In the
kitchen
, for God’s sake, it’s not like they were in the medicine cabinet.”

Cash glances at Rose, who is peevishly brushing ash off her blouse. Because she is shorter and heavier than she feels she ought to be, she clacks through her entire life in scuffed high heels, worn with tight jeans and shiny blouses buttoned a little too low. You can tell at thirty paces she’s trying too hard.

“Didn’t he look what he was taking?” he asks her.

“No. He said they went down funny, though. Like fillings.” Cash works his needle and Rose smokes inside another comma of silence, then says, “The
silver
ones, wouldn’t you know. Twenty dollars’ worth.
I’m about ready to take it out of his hide. Why couldn’t he have eat up some fake turquoise?”

Rose brings Cash the supplies for making jewelry, pretending she is taking them home herself, but her boss, Mr. Crittenden, holds her accountable for every bead. In the morning he puts on his jeweler’s glasses and counts the beads in every piece she’s brought in, to make sure they’re all there. It must be hard work, this business of mistrust.

“Those quills ought to pass on through without much trouble,” he tells Rose. “My girls used to swallow pennies and all kinds of things, you’d be surprised. They always turned up. You could tell Willie to give them back when he’s done.”

“Maybe I’ll do that,” Rose says. “Hand them over to Mr. Crittenden in a little paper sack.” Cash can tell she is smiling; he knows Rose’s voice, its plump amusement and thinned-out resentments, because so often he is looking at something else while she speaks to him.

He met her, or rather saw her first, in the window of the Trading Post. He made a habit of pecking on the glass and winking at her each day on his way to work, which apparently won her heart, since she says she feels like a plastic dummy up there on display. Mr. Crittenden makes her sit at a little antique schoolroom desk in the bay-window storefront, where tourists can behold a genuine Indian hunched over her beadwork, squinting in the bad glare. Presumably they will be impressed or moved by pity to come inside.

Rose’s beadwork is unimpressive, close up. She’s nothing close to a full-blooded Indian, that’s her excuse, but she could learn the more complicated patterns Cash does, if she cared to. It’s a skill you acquire, like tuning an engine. The things you have to be an Indian to know, in Cash’s experience—how to stretch two chickens and a ham over sixty relatives, for example—are items of no interest in the tourist trade.

He gets up to take his bread out of the oven and start dinner. Cash has discovered cooking in his old age, since moving away from his sisters and aunts, and according to Rose he acts like he invented the concept. She doesn’t seem to mind eating what he cooks, though—
she’s here more nights than she’s not. While she smokes at the kitchen table, Cash unpacks the things he brought home from the Health Corral, lining them up: six crimson bell peppers, five white potatoes, six orange carrots. He imagines putting all these colors on a needle, and wishes his life were really as bright as this instant.

“Looky here, girl,” he says, waving a bell pepper at Rose.

“Cash, you watch out,” she says. The pepper is deformed with something like testicles. Cash gets to bring home produce that is too organic even for the health-food crowd. In his tiny apartment behind this tourist town’s back, Cash feeds on stews of bell peppers with genitals and carrots with arms and legs.

He spreads newspapers on the table and sits to peel his potatoes. He feels comforted by the slip-slip-slip of his peeler and the potatoes piling up like clean dry stones. “Somebody come in the store today and told me how to get rich,” he says.

“Well, from what I hear you’ve gotten rich fifty times over, except for the money part,” Rose says.

“No, now listen. In the store we sell these shampoos they make with ho-hoba. It’s this natural business the girls want now. A fellow come in today and says he’s all set up down in Arizona to grow ho-hoba beans on his farm. They’ll just grow in the dirt desert, they don’t need nothing but a poor patch of ground and some sunshine. I’ll bet you can buy you a piece of that land for nothing.”

“Why would somebody sell it for nothing if they could get rich growing shampoo beans on it?”

“It takes five years before the plants start to bear, that’s the hitch. Young people don’t have that much patience.”

“And old people don’t have that much time.”

“I’ve got my whole retirement ahead of me. And I know how to make things grow. It could work out good.”

“Like the silver foxes did,” Rose says, slicing him carelessly. In January, before the tourist jobs opened up, Cash skinned foxes. With frozen fingers he tore the delicate membranes that held pelt to flesh, earning his own pair to breed. It seems like a dream to him now, that he believed he could find or borrow a farm of his own. He was think
ing he was still on the Nation, where relatives will always move over to give you a place at the table.

“Johnny Cash Stillwater,” Rose says, shaking her head, blowing smoke in a great upward plume like a whale. She speaks to him as if she’s known him her whole life long instead of two months. “I don’t think you’ve ever gotten over being your mama’s favorite.”

Cash only lets Rose hurt him this way because he knows she is right. As a young man he turned his name around in honor of his mother’s favorite singer. Now he’s working as a fifty-nine-year-old bag boy at the Health Corral; his immediate superior there is an eighteen-year-old named Tracey who pops the rubber bands on her braces while she runs the register. And still Cash acts like luck is on his side, he’s just one step away from being a cowboy.

Rose says suddenly, “They’re going to shoot a bunch of pigeons that’s come into town.”

“Who is?”

“I don’t know. A fellow from town council, Tom Blanny, came in the Trading Post today and told Mr. Crittenden about it.”

Cash knows Tom Blanny; he comes into the Health Corral to buy cigarettes made of lettuce leaves or God knows what, for people who wish they didn’t smoke.

“Tom said they’re causing a problem because they don’t belong here and they get pesty. They flock together too much and fly around and roost in people’s trees.”

Cash looks up, surprised. “I saw those birds tonight. I could see them out this window right here.” His heart beats a little hard, as if Rose had discovered still another secret she could use to hurt him. But her concern is Town Council men and information, not an unnamable resentment against some shining creatures whose togetherness is so perfect it makes you lonely. Cash attends to peeling his potatoes.

“Tom says they could crowd out the natural birds if they last out the winter. A pigeon isn’t a natural bird, it’s lived in cities so long, it’s like a weed bird.”

“Well, aren’t they natural anywhere?” He knows that in Jackson Hole people are very big on natural.

“New York City,” she says, laughing. Rose has been around. “There’s nothing left there for them to crowd out,” she says.

Slip-slip-slip goes the peeler. Cash doesn’t feel like saying anything else.

“What’s eating on you, Cash? You thinking about going back to Oklahoma?”

“Naw.”

“What’s the weather like there now?”

“Hot, like it ought to be in summer. This place never heats up good. We’re going to be snowed under here again before you know it. I wasn’t cut out for six feet of snow.”

“Nobody is, really. Even up in Idaho.” Rose fluffs her hair. “You’d think they’d be used to it by now, but I remember when I was a kid, people going just crazy in the wintertime. Wives shooting their husbands, propping them up on a mop handle, and shooting them again.”

Cash is quiet, leaving Rose to muse over murdered husbands.

“Well, go on back, then,” she says. “If the weather’s not suiting you good.”

They have had this argument before. It isn’t even an argument, Cash realizes, but Rose’s way of finding out his plans without appearing to care too much. “Nothing to go back for,” he says. “My family’s all dead.”

“Your daughter’s not.”

“Might as well be.”

“Well then, what about your other daughter, the one that died—how about her baby?”

When Cash first knew Rose, she made herself so comfortable in his bed that he felt safe telling her family stories. Now he regrets it. “She’s gone,” he says.

“A baby ain’t made with disappearing ink, Cash.”

“You read about it in the papers ever day,” he tells her, but he knows this is a lie. A mother might drive her car into the river on purpose, but still there will be a basket of outstretched hands underneath
her children, or should be. It’s the one thought in Cash’s mind that never lights and folds its wings.

“I waited my whole life away down there in the Nation,” he tells Rose. “Where nobody is nothing but poor. When my wife died, seem like I’d been waiting out something that wasn’t coming. At least in Jackson Hole people have something.”

“You and me don’t have any of it.”

“No, but we’re right next door to it,” he says, standing up to throw vegetables into hot water. “Maybe some of it will fall off the tree.”

At one o’clock exactly, Rose whips off the patterned headscarf she has to wear in the window and scoops little cascades of clicking beads back into their plastic vials, careful to let none escape onto the plank floor. Mr. Crittenden allows Rose to go to lunch with Cash if they go late, after what he imagines to be the noontime rush. The truth is there is no rush, just a slow, steady dribble. Jackson Hole has a hundred Indian trading posts, and most of them have better gimmicks than a tired mother of teenagers in the front window ruining her eyes.

Rose wants to walk across town to the Sizzler for the salad bar, but Cash warns against it; a storm is cooking in the south. They stay close by at McDonald’s just in case, taking the shortcut through the little flowered strip park on Main. While Rose talks and Cash doesn’t listen, his mind counts pansies and ageratum: yellow, yellow, purple, purple, a beautiful, cast-off beaded belt of flowers stretched along the highway collecting dirt.

“Foof,” Rose says. “I don’t see how it has any business being this muggy.” While they wait for traffic she reaches back to adjust something in the heel of her shoe. Rose is thirty-eight, the age his daughter Alma would be now if she had lived, and Cash realizes he treats Rose more like a daughter than a lady friend, cautioning about getting caught in the rain, clucking his tongue over the escapades of her boys.
He wonders what she sees in him. Cash at least doesn’t drink, or eat beads, but he knows he’s getting old in a way that’s hard to live with. It was a purely crazy thing for him to want to move up here two years ago. Oklahoma Cherokees never leave Oklahoma. Most don’t even move two hickory trees away from the house where they were born.

In line at McDonald’s, he notices men looking at Rose. Not a lot, not for long, but they look. Cash they don’t even see; he is an old Indian man no one would remember having just walked by. Not just because of three generations of tragedy in his family—even without cancer and suicide and a lost grandchild, those generations would have come to pass; he would have gotten old.

“Just french fries and a chef salad today, hon, I’m on a diet,” Rose says, flirting with the teenager at the register.

Cash misses his wife with a blank pain in his chest, and he misses his sisters and cousins, who have known him since he was a strong, good-looking boy. Everyone back there remembers, or if they are too young, they’ve been told. The old ones get to hang on the sweet, perfect past. Cash was the best at climbing trees; his sister Letty won the story bees. The woman who married Letty’s husband’s brother, a beauty named Sugar, was spotted one time drinking a root beer and had her picture in
Life
magazine. They all know. Now she has thin hair and a humped back but she’s still Sugar, she gets to walk around Heaven, Oklahoma, with everybody thinking she’s pretty and special. Which she is. That’s the trouble with moving away from family, he realizes. You lose your youth entirely, you have only the small tired baggage that is carried within the body.