Pigs in Heaven (25 page)

“Lord,” Alice says.

“She was institutionalized at the age of thirty-five. But I was lucky, I had lots of people looking after me. My dad and brothers, and mainly my Uncle Ledger. He’s a medicine man. Not a doctor. Kind of a minister. Have you heard of the stomp dances?”

“I’ve seen those turtle shells. Looks like that would be a chore, to dance with all that on your legs.”

Annawake laughs. “It’s work, but it’s not a chore. I did that. But Uncle Ledger decided I would be the one of us who’d learn the white world. My brothers could do their reckless things, but I had to learn to listen to my head, every time. He made me speak English, and he pushed me to do well in school. He thought we needed an ambassador.”

“The ambassador? That’s what you are? Whatever you told my daughter Taylor scared her to death. She’s a mess, all uprooted, and now she can’t even make her payments.”

“It didn’t cross my mind that she would pack up and move.”

“Well, she did. Last time I talked to her she didn’t sound like herself. She’s depressed. It’s awful what happens when people run out of money. They start thinking they’re no good.”

“See that guy over there?” Annawake points across the street to the hardware store where Abe Charley is standing out front in his horsehide suit, talking to Cash Stillwater.

Alice leans, to look. “What’s that, a cowskin he’s got on?”

“Horsehide. There’s a rendering plant over toward Leech where you can get horse leftovers pretty cheap. Abe made that suit himself. He’s pretty proud of it.”

“Taylor’s boyfriend wears some odd getups, from what he’s told me. But to tell you the truth, not as bad as that horsehide. Taylor just bought new school clothes for Turtle instead of paying her bills. She was scared to death of Turtle looking poor at school. You know how it is.”

“Luckily I don’t. I mean, growing up here, you don’t have to bother much with pretending you’re not poor.”

Alice is tracking Abe Charley’s flamboyant hide as he crosses the street. Annawake refines the point on her sugar heart. “People say Indians are ungrateful welfare recipients, but what they really mean is we don’t act embarrassed enough about being helped out. The young people like me, the radicals, we’ll say it’s because we had everything stolen from us and we deserve the scraps we’re getting back. And that’s true, but it’s not the point. The old people around here, they’re not thinking about Wounded Knee, they’re just accepting what comes their way. For us, it’s the most natural thing in the world to ask for help if we need it.”

Alice has finally gotten her fingers into the sheet of sugar that is spreading across the table. She draws a pig, then puts a fence around it. “I was noticing that about my cousin Sugar,” she says. “We were walking along and she saw some poke growing down in the ditch, and she just went right down there and got it. Didn’t care who drove by and saw. I was thinking, ‘Now, I’ll eat poke if I have to, but I’d hate for anybody to see I was that hard up.’ ”

Annawake smiles, remembering summers of gathering greens with her uncle.

Alice puts another fence around the pig.

“Your cousin Sugar was my mother’s best friend,” Annawake says. “Ask her sometime if she remembers Bonnie Fourkiller.”

“You had that brother that got sent away, didn’t you?”

Annawake is startled to feel tears in her eyes. “How did you know that?”

“It was in that letter you wrote Jax. He read it over the phone.”

Annawake wipes her nose with her napkin. “My other brothers are still around here, and a slew of nieces and nephews. My dad is still living, he’s over in Adair now. What about you? Do you have other kids besides Taylor?”

“Nobody but Taylor. No son, no daddy, and no husband to speak of.”

“None to speak of?”

“Well, I had me one, Harland, but he never talked. It was like trying to have a conversation with a ironing board. He just wanted to
watch TV all the time. That’s what ruint him, really, I think. TV does all the talking for you, and after a while you forget how to hold up your end.”

Annawake smiles. “Interesting theory.”

“So I left him. I doubt he’s noticed yet. Now it’s just back to me and Taylor and Turtle. Seems like we’re doomed to be a family with no men in it.”

“Could be worse. You could have a family with no women in it, like I grew up in.”

“Now that’s true, that would be worse.”

They fall quiet. The window gives their eyes a place to go when they need to take a rest from each other.

“If you don’t mind my asking,” Alice pipes up, “what’s going on with that tree over there?”

“That’s Boma Mellowbug’s bottle tree,” Annawake says. “Our little thing of beauty. Boma is, I guess you’d say, the town lunatic.”

“I think maybe I saw her. In a dress and a ski hat?”

“That was Boma. You really have to be sure you don’t run over her with your car. Sometimes she’ll stand in the middle of the street and have a conversation with the oaks. But everybody’s crazy about Boma.”

“She did all that by herself?”

“No. She got it going. Back when I was little, she started sticking old empties down over the ends of the branches of that redbud. And pretty soon somebody else would come along and add another one, and then we all got into it, keeping our eyes peeled for something special. Once I found an old blue milk bottle in a ditch, and another time, one of those fancy glass cups they used to have up on the electric lines. I couldn’t wait for Uncle Ledger to drive me over here in his truck so I could put my things on the tree.”

“Well,” Alice says, “it’s different.”

“Not for here. For here it’s just kind of normal.” She laughs. “One time in law school we were discussing the concept of so-called irresponsible dependents. That a ward of society can’t be a true citizen.
I wanted to stand up and tell the class about Boma and the bottle tree. That there’s another way of looking at it.”

“What’s that?”

“Just that you could love your crazy people, even admire them, instead of resenting that they’re not self-sufficient.”

“Why didn’t you?”

Annawake shrugs. “There are things I can’t explain to white people. Words aren’t enough.”

“Well, that’s it, isn’t it?” Alice says. “If we could get it across, we wouldn’t be sitting here right now.”

Earlene comes back carrying two bowls of soup and grinning from ear to ear. “Oops,” she says, “I forgot to get up that sugar.” She lumbers briskly away singing, “Here comes the bride!”

Annawake stares at Alice, the woman from the family without men, and hatches the most reckless plan of her life.

L
ETTY IS STANDING IN HER
garden with a butcher knife when Annawake drives up. She looks formidable, but Annawake kills the engine anyway and makes her way through the bean patch. She waves Letty’s pie plate in the air. “I’m returning this to you,” she says.

Letty puts a hand on top of her dead husband’s hat and squints at Annawake, frowning, until her face lights with recognition. “Annawake, I swear I wouldn’t have knowed you, except you was here at the hog fry. With that hair all cut off.”

“Well, Letty, I’m growing it back. I’ll look presentable in a year or two.”

“I reckon you will.” Now Letty stares at her pie plate. “How’d you get hold of that?”

“I took some of your sweet potato pie home from that hog fry you had for Cash. We took it home to Millie, remember? It’s her favorite.”

“Well, she should have come. She missed a good one.”

“She wanted to, but the baby was cranky from getting his shots.”

“Oh, that’s a shame.”

“He got over it. Millie says thanks for the pie. She wasn’t going
to return the plate till she had a chance to catch her breath and cook something to send back in it. But that’s not going to happen for about twelve more years, so I snuck out with it this morning. I figured you’d rather just have the plate.”

Letty laughs. “That’s how it is with kids, all right. They’re all over you like a bad itch. I miss mine, though, now that they’s done growed.”

Annawake looks around for evidence that a person might need a butcher knife to stand out here in the garden. There is no danger she can see. “You look like you’re hunting for another hog to kill.”

“I would, if one run through here, and that’s no lie. Or a ostrich. Did you hear about that ostrich feather Boma Mellowbug’s got hold of?”

“No.”

“She says it fell on her side of the fence. That Green fellow figures she climbed over and got it, and he wants it back. He says he’ll take her to court over it. Cash saw her downtown yesterday, a-wearin’ it in her hat.”

Annawake is sorry to have missed that. “How’s Cash settling in, anyway?” she asks.

“Oh, I guess he’s all right. I think he broods. I got him fixing up my roof for me to improve his disposition.”

“That must be why I saw him yesterday talking to Abe Charley at the hardware store. You know, he’s got a secret admirer.”

Annawake can see Letty’s ears rise half an inch in her head. “Who are you thinking of?”

“There’s a woman staying over at Sugar and Roscoe’s place. She’s some kind of relative of Sugar’s.”

“Oh, honey, I know all about that. I was standing right over there in my own kitchen the day the woman called on my telephone and told Sugar she had to come here in a big old hurry. She’s got some secret business with the Nation. A big claim. I can’t tell you no more about it. I really oughtn’t to go into it even that much.”

Annawake smiles. “Well, she’s dying to meet Cash Stillwater, that’s what I heard.”

“We ought to tell him, don’t you think?”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Annawake says. “He’d just be embarrassed, I imagine.”

“Probably. Far be it from me to go butt in. What’s she like, the cousin?”

“Alice Greer is her name. She’s nice-looking, divorced. She despises watching TV, that’s the main thing I know about her. She said she likes a man that will talk to her.”

“Well, goodness me, Cash will talk your ear plumb off. I ought to know that.”

“I gather she’s going to be in town for a while,” Annawake says. “They’ll run into each other one way or another, don’t you think?”

“Oh, sure,” Letty says. Her knife blade catches the sun and winks in Annawake’s eyes. “One way or another.”

Annawake decides not to ask again about the knife. She will drop off the plate and go, leaving Letty to her own devices.

T
HE MAN WHO COLLECTS
T
AYLOR’S
rent has pulled up in front of their apartment, just as she was about to leave to walk Turtle to school. His truck is loaded with strange things: large, long-handled nets, for example, and shipping crates. He gets out of the truck and steps snappily up the walk before Taylor can pretend she didn’t see him.

“Hi,” she says. “I was going to put it in the mail tomorrow.”

“Well, they wanted me to get it from you today, if you don’t mind. Since it’s a week past due.”

“Okay. Let me go in and get my checkbook.”

The manager, a young man whose name she doesn’t know, wears broad, flat-paned glasses that reflect the light, giving him a glassy-fronted appearance, like a storefront. Taylor actually feels a little sorry for him: what a hateful job. He once told her, apologetically, that his real job is in City Park Maintenance; he had to take on managing the apartments for extra cash after his wife had a baby. He has
pale, uncommanding fuzz on his cheeks and seems too young to have all these worries.

She has just paid to get the electricity back on, so she dates the check for the middle of next week, after payday, and tries to think of something to say to distract him from looking at it too closely. “What’s that on your truck?” she asks.

“Goose-catching stuff,” he replies.

She tucks her checkbook into the back pocket of her jeans and returns her hand to Turtle’s suspended grasp. “You catch geese?”

“We’re having the big goose roundup today.”

Taylor looks from his glassy face to the truck and back again, unsure of what one says in this exact situation.

“Canadian geese,” he adds, to shed more light.

“Is that, like, a sport?”

“No, it’s a citywide crisis,” he says, hitching his brown Parks and Recreation jacket on his shoulders with the air of a man who considers himself something of a goose expert. “We’ve got these Canadian geese that come down here to the lakeshore,” he explains knowledgeably, “while they’re supposed to be on their way to somewhere else. Stopping for a little break, supposed to be. But everybody goes down there with their darling little child and a bag of day-old bread to feed the geese, and next thing you know, these birds have no intention of moving on. No intention whatsoever.”

Turtle is tugging with a light pressure on Taylor’s hand and looking at the toes of her new sneakers, which clearly want to head toward the schoolyard. But Taylor needs to be polite. This fellow may look nineteen, but his power over her life right now is infinite. “Well, I guess you wouldn’t want every AWOL goose in Canada hanging out down by the docks.”

“No, ma’am, you certainly do not. There’s goose poop piled up to kingdom come down there. But our main interest is in protecting the welfare of these birds. It’s poor wildlife management to allow a bird to live on handouts. A lot of these birds, and I’m not exaggerating this, ma’am, a lot of these birds have become too obese to fly.”

Taylor clamps her teeth together so hard, to avoid smiling, she’s
afraid she’s going to get a cramp. “Where are you taking them once you round them up?”

“Shipping them out to eastern Washington,” he replies with satisfaction. “It’s no party out there. Not a lot of rainfall. These geese will have to slim down and learn to fend for themselves, I’m telling you. Hard work will straighten out their bad habits pretty quick.”

“What if they’re just too lazy to learn better ways?” Taylor asks in a solemn voice. “You think they might just waddle on back west?”

“Oh, no, ma’am, there’s no chance of them coming back here. No chance at all. Not where they’re going. This trip is going to separate out the men from the boys, you might say.”

“The sheep from the goats,” Taylor says, nodding, a studied frown on her face.

“That’s right,” the manager says. He folds Taylor’s check without a glance and places it carefully in his shirt pocket. “I have to be going now,” he says.

“You certainly do,” she says. “I sure hope you catch all the perpetrators.”

Charged with Taylor’s confidence, the manager practically sprints back to his truck and drives away in a hurry.

“I wish somebody’d give
us
some day-old bread,” Taylor says to Turtle. “Don’t you?”

She nods. “With strawberry jam.”

The pair of them turn their toes out and pretend they are obese geese, waddling to school.

Late Saturday morning Taylor is headed south through steady rain toward the airport, wishing with all her might that she were flying somewhere too, instead of driving a man in a wheelchair to meet his plane. She’s still on the Handi-Van roster as a substitute, and this morning she is filling in for Kevin. He isn’t speaking to her but he let her drive his Saturday shift, since there was nobody else available, so he could go to a computer fair. Taylor feels uneasy about the baby-sitting she had to settle for; Turtle is with an elderly
Chinese neighbor who wears a red wig and black stockings with brown plastic sandals. She sews uniforms for cheerleaders and baseball teams in her home, and seemed a safe enough bet. Unfortunately she doesn’t speak English, so Taylor has no idea what she’s being charged for the baby-sitting, and prays she’ll come out ahead.

She has only one passenger at the moment, the man going to the airport. Taylor likes his looks: he’s about her age, and has nice eyes that remind her a little of Jax. “You heading for someplace where the sun shines?” she asks him.

“Not likely,” he says. “I work in the air traffic-control tower.”

“You do?” She feels embarrassed; she had assumed he was just a passenger, not a working person. “What’s that like? I heard that leads to heart attacks.”

“Only if you let the planes run into each other. We try to discourage that.”

“But how can you keep your eyes on everything at once? I think I’d be terrible at that job. I kind of freak out if the telephone and the doorbell both ring at the same time.”

“We have radarscopes. You should come up to the control room sometime and see. Ask for Steven Kant.”

She slows down to force a tailgater to pass. The windshield wipers are beating across the glass like a hypnotist’s watch, instructing her to feel very, very sleepy. Taylor tries not to think about Turtle sitting in Mrs. Chin’s dark apartment with no one to talk to, bearing mute witness to the flickering TV while Mrs. Chin’s sewing machine plods through gaudy layers of satin. It would make Turtle’s day if she could go see an air traffic control center. “Okay, I’ll do that,” Taylor says.

“Well, great.”

The wide freeway is full of cars but empty of interest, merely blank and wet, the place where everyone on earth has surely been before. The air traffic controller doesn’t seem to have anything more to say, which is too bad. In Taylor’s opinion Steven Kant is probably the most upbeat passenger in the history of the Handi-Van corporation, and he’s handsome, besides. “I’m Taylor, by the way,” she tells him. “I don’t usually drive this route. I guess you know that.”

“No, I didn’t. I don’t usually go this route, either. My MG is in the shop.”

“Oh, that’s too bad.”

“I don’t mind the limo service once in a while.” He catches her eye in the rearview mirror and smiles. “The service is friendly.”

“Only the best. You just sit back there, sir, and pour yourself a glass of champagne.”

“In my line of work they kind of frown on people showing up tipsy. But I’ll take a rain check.”

She looks in the mirror again, wondering if this is an invitation of some kind. She decides it is, but he’s made it so gently that if she overlooks it neither one of them will feel bad. She supposes living in a wheelchair might train you in that kind of skill.

“You really drive an MG?”

“Yep. Convertible. Canary yellow, with wire wheels and hand controls and a very sporty wheelchair rack on the back.”

“You got headers on that thing?”

“You bet. Headers and a glass pack.”

“Whew. I’ll bet she purrs.”

“You know a lot about sports cars.”

Taylor smiles. “Not a thing, really. I just used to sell them, a piece at a time.”

Steven Kant laughs. “Sounds like a life of crime.”

“No, nothing so profitable. A car-parts store.” Taylor finds she can hardly remember working at Mattie’s. She can picture herself in the store, joking with the men, among all those organized metal pieces of dream. But that saucy salesgirl seems to Taylor now like a confident older sister, rather than herself. Someone with her life well in hand.

“How about when your MG’s fixed
you
can drive
me
someplace,” she says. “Not to work, though. My other job is at the world’s most hideous shopping mall.”

“Okay. How about the locks?”

“The locks?”

“Yeah. Haven’t you seen them before?”

“I’ve got about seven on my front door.”

He laughs. “The locks between the sound and the lake, where the boats pass through. Really, you’ve never been there?”

“I’m new in town, sailor.”

“Well, okay then, I’m going to show you the locks. And afterward I’ll take you out for the freshest salmon of your life. What do you think, next Saturday?”

Taylor’s stomach flips upstream when it hears about the salmon. Freshness is not the issue, either; right now she wouldn’t be above taking home a salmon if she found one dead in the road. She’s so tired of peanut butter she has stopped acting for Turtle’s benefit like she cares about the murdered peanuts.

“Saturday would be good,” she says, after pretending to think about it. “Only, I’m going to have to tell you right up front, I have a little girl that would love to come too. No husband or anything, but a kid. Would that be okay?”

“Two dates for the price of one,” he says. “That’s even better.”

Taylor thinks: it won’t be for the price of one. She eats too.

Jax has knocked over a nearly full bottle of beer into his synthesizer in the middle of “Dancing at the Zombie Zoo.” He manages to play through to the last chords, touching the keys gingerly, not going for the demonstrative ending this time. He just hopes he won’t get electrocuted. While they’re fading on the final, he signals his lead guitarist for a break. Once the stage spots go off and they begin playing taped music through the house amps, Jax takes off his T-shirt and starts mopping the keyboard. He’ll have to take the whole thing apart. He can’t decide whether to start doing that now, before the beer has a chance to settle into the microprocessors, or wait until later. A young woman with terrible posture and limp, cherry-red hair hanging from exactly one half of her scalp is still dancing right in front of the stage. Or rather, she is doing shallow knee bends, bobbing in a slow rotation with her eyes closed. She has been drilling herself into the same
spot for nearly an hour, annoying Jax for no particular reason. He picks up the beer bottle that committed its crime against music, and rolls it toward her, hoping it will fall off the stage and shatter her reverie. It merely clonks loudly and rolls past her. He takes his keyboard off its legs and kicks some amp cables out of the way to clear a space for it on the floor.

Rucker, the lead guitarist, crosses the stage and stands over him. “Man, you drowned it.”

“Yeah. In beer, though, so it’s happy. Do you know CPR?”

“No, man, I don’t even
pay
my taxes.”

“Rucker, you have no appreciable IQ.”

“Jax, what do women see in you? The brunette working the bar sent you this note. She said it’s urgent.”

“Tell her I’ve got a disease, okay?” Jax takes a screwdriver out of his keyboard case and begins taking off the back plate.

“That’s not funny.”

“I’m only paid to entertain people with music here.”

“What’s wrong with you, some dog buried your bone? Did you see her? She’s luminous.”

“That’s nice.”

Rucker unfolds the note, which is inked on a cocktail napkin. “I’m reading this little love letter myself.”

“I didn’t know you could read.” Jax kneels down with his head near the floor and peers inside his machine. It always amazes him: it can produce sounds exactly like a piano, a Hammond organ, a muted French horn, even breaking glass or a marble rolling down the inside of a pipe, and yet there is practically nothing inside. He remembers feeling this same astonishment the first time he took apart a TV.

“Who’s Lou Ann?”

Jax looks up. “Let me see that.”

“Lou Ann called,” Rucker reads. “Super urgent emergency, call Taylor back at this number.”

Jax swipes the napkin out of Rucker’s hand and bounds off the stage, bumping into the bobbing half-bald dancer but still not wak
ing her up. He makes a beeline for the pay phone between the bar and the kitchen. There’s no hope of quiet, but he can’t wait until he gets home. Taylor picks up on the first ring.

“Jax?”

“I’m going to die if I don’t kiss your navel within one hour. Tell me you’re calling from the Triple T Truck stop in south Tucson.”

“I’m not. It kind of looks like the Triple T, though. I’m at a pay phone in the parking lot between a Kwik Mart and, I think, an open-air festival of drug users.”

“Where’s Turtle?”

“Asleep in the car. Hey, listen, you, I don’t even know if I’ve forgiven you for screwing Gundi. Why would I let you kiss my navel?”

“Well, good, Taylor, you sound like yourself. You must be okay.”

“I don’t know if I am or not. I feel like I’m in hell. Do you have to pay rent and utilities in hell?”

“No. I think you make all the payments before you get there.”

“Jax, my life’s a mess.”

“I wrote you another song. Listen.”

“I don’t know if I can listen to another broken-heart song.”

“This one isn’t as bad. Listen:

“Broken-heart song,” Taylor diagnoses. “
Pissed-off
broken-heart song, which is worse. Jax, we’ve been over this. I didn’t leave
you
, I left a situation.”