Pigs in Heaven (26 page)

“Would you mind writing that on the blackboard five hundred times?”

Her voice is quiet. “I miss you, Jax. Real bad. I get this aching in my throat sometimes and I’m not sure if you’re real or not. It’s been
so long since I’ve seen you.” Jax hears her blowing her nose, the most heart-warming sound he has heard in his life to date. He wishes he could program that nose blow into his synthesizer.

“I don’t even have your picture anymore,” she says. “Goddamn Barbie stole it.”

“That’s a crime against nature,” says Jax. “She stole my photograph?”

“Well, there was money involved. It’s kind of hard to explain.”

“You had to
pay
someone to steal my photograph?”

A waitress with her blouse tied in a knot at the base of her rib cage passes Jax with a tray of dirty plates and gives him a look, running her eyes down his shirtless torso.

“I sacrificed my shirt to a medical emergency,” he whispers.

She rolls her eyes as she wheels around and butts the kitchen door open with her hind end.

“I should have seen it coming,” Taylor says. “That Barbie was petty larceny waiting to happen. I can’t believe how bad I’ve screwed up here, Jax. Seems like I’ve made every wrong turn a person could make.”

“You sound like a seven-car freeway pileup.”

“I am. I didn’t even tell you yet, I lost the van-driving job. I couldn’t work out the baby-sitting. They kept me on the substitute board, but I don’t get called much. Now I’m a cashier in a department store. Ladies Intimate Apparel, to be exact. Six dollars an hour.”

“That’s not so bad. Forty-eight dollars a day for selling undies. That’s almost a thousand a month.”

“Very good, math whiz, except it isn’t. They take out some for taxes and Social Security and this mandatory insurance plan that I can’t even use yet for six months. I’ll get around seven hundred a month.”

“Hey, that ought to melt away those unwanted pounds.”

“I figured out a budget: our rent is three hundred and ninety, so if you figure in water and electricity and gas—we haven’t turned on the heat yet, so I don’t know what that will be—but say five hundred
total, for rent and utilities. Then another fifty a month to keep the car going so I can get to work. If we can get by on a hundred a month for food, that should leave fifty dollars for emergencies. But Jax, we just keep getting behind. I had a car-insurance payment come due, and then today my register turned up forty-four dollars short, and they say they’re going to take that out of my paycheck. I’m thinking, what paycheck?”

“That’s robbery.”

“No, it probably was my fault. I get distracted trying to keep an eye on Turtle in the store. They have this special aftercare program at her school for low-income, I guess that’s me, but even that costs three dollars a day. Sixty a month. I don’t have it.”

“You’re eating on twenty-five bucks a week?”

“Yeah. One dollar a meal for the two of us, plus Turtle’s milk money that she has to take to school. We’re not eating too high off the hog, as Mama would say.”

“No, I’d say you were eating very low off the hog. I would say you are eating the hooves.”

“Jax, poverty sucks.”

“Can I quote you on that? Maybe a bumper sticker or something?”

“I know you’re not rich either, but it was different there, with you and me to split the rent, and Lou Ann always around for babysitting.”

“You should click your heels together and get your butt back home, Dorothy.”

“Oh, I forgot to tell you the funny part. Now they’re telling me I need to dress better for work. My supervisor says jeans and T-shirt is not acceptable attire for a cashier in Ladies’ Wear. I wanted to tell her to shove her underwired bras and transfer me to Auto Repair. But if I lose this job we’ll be living downtown on a bench, or in our car, and that’s no joke. I swear I’ve considered shoplifting from the juniors department.”

“Taylor, read my lips: Come home. I’ll send you the money. I don’t think this Annawake figure is going to come after you.”

“You don’t think so?”

“She seems more like the lurk-in-the-bushes and make-scary-noises type.”

Taylor blows her nose again. “If I could get there on my own, Jax, I would. I feel tired all the time, like I could lie down and sleep a hundred years. But you can’t be sending money. You don’t have next month’s rent.”

“Don’t be insulting. I could get it from Mattie.”

“No!” Taylor cries.

“Well, Christ, keep your fingernails on. Mattie wouldn’t mind.”

“I mind,” she says. “I’m going to make this work here. I have to. I’m not stupid, and I’m not lazy. I’m working so hard, Jax, but we never quite get caught up.”

“It’s not your fault, Taylor.”

“Well, whose is it? I should be able to keep a roof over my own head. If I work at it.”

“That’s just a story. You’re judging yourself by the great American cultural myth, but Horatio Alger is compost, honey. That standard no longer applies to reality.”

“Right. Tell that to my landlord.”

“What you need is a nice musician to take care of you.”

“Now, there’s a myth. Who did a musician ever take care of?”

“Not even his most beloved M1 synthesizer, at the moment. I just poured a beer down her front and left her gargling her final breaths on stage. We’re on break right now.”

“Well, guess what, I did meet this air traffic controller.”

“Damn, I knew it. You’re in love.”

“No. But Turtle and I got to see the control room yesterday. It’s this dark room full of little radar screens, with somebody in charge of each one. They sit there all day hunched over watching yellow blinking dots and drinking coffee and talking the pilots out of crashing into each other. What a life, huh? It looks kind of like a submarine.”

“Is that what submarines look like? I always wondered.”

“Well, I don’t know. It seemed like it. It’s called the Terminal Radar Approach Control. Turtle kept calling it the Terminal Roach
Control. I’m not sure she had a real good understanding of the concepts.”

“Don’t be surprised if she did. Not much passes her by.”

“That’s true. It was kind of reassuring to see. At least somebody is in control of something in this world.”

“Sounds like true love to me,” Jax says miserably.

“Jax, I’m not in love with Steven Kant.”

“Well, just make sure Steven Doesn’t.”

“That’s great. You’re telling me to be a nun, while you’re finally getting the landlady interested in the plumbing.”

Jax laughs, in spite of himself. “She’s lost interest again, I promise you. Our toilet still defies the laws of hydrodynamics.”

“Well, I’m sure glad to hear that. I wouldn’t want to think she was showing you any special favors.”

“You know what? I’m glad you’re jealous. It makes me feel less remorseful about what I’m going to do to this Steven Can’t when I locate his control tower.”

“I’m not in love, Jax. He’s nice, but he doesn’t laugh at my jokes the way you do.” She stops, but Jax knows from the quality of her silence to keep listening. She goes on. “I hate to say this, after what I just told you about making my own way, but he took Turtle and me to this nice restaurant in the airport, and I sat there thinking: everything on this menu costs more than our whole week’s food budget. It was such a relief just to eat. Sometimes it’s hard to separate that from love.”

Jax can see through the bar to the stage, where his band is beginning to accumulate once again. Rucker and the drummer are standing over his synthesizer like forlorn relatives at a wake. The bobbing woman is still bobbing in a slow circle. Suddenly, as Jax watches, she keels like a mannequin and hits the floor with a somewhat frightening sound. Jax understands that he despises her because she is pitiful.

“I’m sending you two plane tickets home. Just tell me your address.”

Taylor says nothing.

“I’m having trouble reading your lips.”

“No. Don’t send plane tickets. I can’t just ditch the car here.”

“This is not about your car.”

“Jax, no.”

“You damn proud little hillbilly.”

She says nothing, and Jax holds his breath, afraid she’ll hang up. Then her voice comes. “If that’s what you want to call me, I don’t care. I’ve hardly ever had a dime’s worth of nickels but I always knew I could count on myself. If I bail out here, I won’t even have that.”

“You’re breaking my heart,” he tells Taylor.

“I’m breaking
mine
, Jax. I don’t believe this is my life. I look in the mirror and I see a screwup.”

Jax looks at the napkin in his hand that says, “Super urgent emergency, call Taylor.” For once, Lou Ann hasn’t exaggerated. He would give the world to know how to answer the call.

Something about the Seattle locks is reminiscent of the Hoover Dam. Taylor notices it right away, as they approach through a little park. The gate and entrance building have the same sturdy, antique look. Turtle has noticed too. “Remember those angels?” she asks.

“I sure do,” Taylor says. “I was just thinking about those guys.”

“What angels?” Steven asks.

“The guardian angels of the Hoover Dam,” Taylor tells him. “They’re sitting on this memorial for the people who died building it. Turtle and I were just there, not too long ago.”

“You like public works, do you?” he ask Turtle.

“Uh-huh. I saw Lucky Buster fall down a big hole. We saved him, but then we had to run away from the Indians.”

Steven laughs. “She’s going to be a writer someday,” he tells Taylor.

“Could be.” Taylor squeezes Turtle’s hand, a secret message. In her other hand she’s holding Steven’s umbrella, trying to give all three of them some protection from the drizzle. She feels a little self-conscious. It’s the first time she has been on a date with two people whose heads reach about to her waist. She doesn’t know whether to
put her hand on Steven’s chair, or just walk alongside. She was relieved when he popped open the umbrella and handed it to her.

They pass through the entry and Turtle runs a few feet ahead, for once excited, her black pigtails swinging like runaway jump ropes. She looks tall and impossibly thin in her new stretch kneepants and T-shirt and heavy white sneakers. It seems to Taylor as if something is pulling on Turtle’s feet at night—she gets taller, but doesn’t fill in. And her skin doesn’t seem right. The worry surfaces at the front of Taylor’s mind only at times like this, when she can watch Turtle with her full attention.

Inside the lock area, the three of them wait next to the rope, looking down into a long channel of water with a gate on either end. Despite the rain, there are jolly couples out boating: two sailboats already inside the lock, steadied by ropes, and a slender, aggressive-looking speedboat just now maneuvering itself in from the sound. A man in blue overalls directs the operation. Once everyone is secured, an alarm bell rings, the gate closes, and water rushes into the lock from underneath. The boats rise slowly on the crest of the engineered tide, from sea level to lake level. Taylor watches the voyagers bob like bathtub toys. “I guess around here you can’t wait for a sunny day to go boating.”

“You’d be waiting awhile,” Steven says. “You should have seen it on the Fourth of July. Raining cats and dogs, and the traffic through here was still unbelievable. He had thirty or forty boats packed in at a time, like cars in a parking lot, all tied to each other.”

“That sounds cozy.”

“It was. There weren’t three square feet of wasted space. You could have walked across, stepping from one deck to another. That guy is unbelievable,” he says, pointing to the man in coveralls. “He can figure out how to pack forty boats in a quarter-block area, and then get them out again, without wasting an inch or a minute. He’s got spatial skills that could get him into MIT.”

“Is that so surprising? That a guy in overalls is brilliant?”

“Well, it’s just ironic, considering what he gets paid.”

“What do you think he gets paid?”

“I don’t know, but I’m sure it’s next to nothing.”

Taylor already knew this, somehow. “I guess he should have gone to MIT,” she says, feeling wounded, even though Steven has said nothing that could rightfully offend her.

The boats are nearly up to lake level now. The gate to the lake slowly opens and water rushes in, curling itself into eddies that make the boats rock from bow to stern. Steven leads Taylor and Turtle across the bridge to the other side.

“Now we get to see how the salmon do it,” he says.

“Do what?” Turtle asks, looking at Taylor.

“Don’t ask me. Ask him.”

“Get from the ocean up into the lake,” Steven says. “They live in the ocean all year, but then they have to swim back up into the rivers where they came from, to lay eggs.”

“I’ve heard of that,” Taylor says. “I heard they have to go back to the exact same place they were born.”

“I don’t know that they
have
to,” Steven says. “Seems like they just always
want
to. Like all of us, I guess.”

“Not me. I got out of Kentucky just as soon as I could get the tires of my car pointed rubber side down.”

“And you’ll never go back?”

“Oh, I might, I guess. You shouldn’t forget who made you.”

“How about you, Turtle, where were you born?” he asks.

“In a car,” she says.

Steven looks at Taylor.

“It was a Plymouth,” she tells him. “That’s about all I know about it. She’s adopted.”

“I don’t want to go back to live in a car,” Turtle states.

Taylor thinks: Let’s hope you don’t have to.

They take the elevator down to the viewing area of the fish ladder. Steven explains that the fish have to swim up fourteen steps, against the strong current, to reach the lake. Through a thick window as high as a movie screen they see hundreds of grimacing, pale-bellied, pink-finned fish all headed the same way, working their bodies hard but barely moving forward. They look like birds trying to fly against a hurricane.

“Most of those are silver salmon,” Steven says. “Those few you see that are bigger are king salmon.”

They look beaten up, their fins bedraggled. “Poor things, why do they even come in here?” Taylor asks. “Seems like they’d be looking around for an easier way to go. A free ride in the locks, maybe.”