Pigs in Heaven (31 page)

“Hi, I’m Doctor Washington,” says a tall woman in a white coat who breezes into the room as if she’s run a long way and doesn’t see any point in slowing down now. She has long flat feet in black loafers, and a short, neat Afro that curves around her head like a bicycle helmet. She looks around the room quickly, as if she might in fact be anticipating a blow to the head. Her eyes settle on Turtle for a moment, but the rest of her body remains tense. She holds the clipboard in one hand and a pencil in the other, poised between two fingers, jiggling in the air.

“Stomachache?” she says to Turtle. “Cramps, diarrhea? For two or three months?”

Turtle nods solemnly, owning up to all this.

“Let’s take a look.” Actually she looks at the ceiling, appearing to give it her full concentration as she pulls up Turtle’s T-shirt and probes her belly with long, cold-looking hands.

“Here?”

Turtle nods, making a crackling sound as her head grinds against the white paper.

“How about here? This hurt?”

Turtle shakes her head.

Dr. Washington pulls down Turtle’s shirt and turns to Taylor. “How is the child’s diet.” She states it, rather than asks.

Taylor feels her mind blank out, the way it used to in school during history tests. She tries to calm down. “I make sure she gets protein,” she says. “We eat a lot of peanut butter. And tuna fish. And she always gets milk. Every single day, no matter what.”

“Well, actually, that might be the problem.”

“What, milk?”

The doctor turns to Turtle. “How do you feel about milk, kiddo?”

“I hate it,” Turtle says to the ceiling.

“What kind do you give her?”

“I don’t know,” Taylor says defensively, feeling as if the two of them are ganging up. “The store brand. Two percent.”

“Try leaving out the milk from now on. I think you’ll see a difference right away. Bring her back in, in a week or two, and if that hasn’t taken care of it we’ll check on other possibilities. But I think cutting the milk’s going to do it.” She writes something on the clipboard.

Taylor senses that Dr. Washington is about to move on to an ear or an ankle. “Excuse me, but I don’t get this,” she says. “I thought milk was the perfect food. Vitamins and calcium and everything.”

Dr. Washington slumps against the counter, losing a few of her imposing inches and visibly shifting into a slower gear. “Cow’s milk is fine for white folks,” she says, looking directly at Taylor when she says this, “but somewhere between sixty and ninety percent of the rest of us are lactose intolerant. That means we don’t have the enzymes in our system to digest some of the sugar in cow’s milk. So it ferments in the intestines and causes all kinds of problems.”

“Uck. I never knew that.”

“Yogurt may be okay, and aged cheeses. You can give them a try. And some kinds of orange juice are calcium-fortified, that can help you out some with her calcium. If you’re determined to give her milk, you can get the kind that’s lactose-reduced. There’s a large Asian-American population in this city, so you can find that in most of the markets.”

“My daughter isn’t Asian-American. She’s Cherokee.”

The doctor lifts her shoulders in an offhand shrug. “Asian, Native American, African, we’re all in the same boat. A lot of times it doesn’t present until adulthood, but it can start showing up right around her age.”

Taylor can’t understand how such a major truth could have passed her by. “I always thought milk was the great health food. The people look so perky in those commercials.”

The doctor taps her pencil eraser against her cheek and looks at Taylor with something that could be loosely defined as a smile. Her eyes are so dark the irises appear almost bluish around the edges, and her half-closed lids give her a lizardish look. “Who do you think makes those commercials?”

“The guardians of truth,” Taylor says, sulkily. “Sorry, I didn’t think about it.”

For the first time, Dr. Washington’s superior-reptile look melts into genuine sympathy. “Listen, nobody does. I break this news to parents of every color, a dozen times a week. You were doing what you thought was best, that’s the main thing.”

Her white coat is standing up straight again, then gone.

Turtle slides off the gift-wrapped examining table and bounds out the examining-room door like a puppy let out of its pen. Taylor finds she can’t get up from her chair. She is paralyzed by the memory of Annawake Fourkiller’s final warning, in Tucson, before she drove away: “I bet she hates milk.”

Taylor catches up to Turtle outside the clinic. Turtle is shading her eyes and looking straight up at the sky, which for once is miraculously unclouded. A jet has left a white, rubbed-out gash of a trail, ugly as graffiti.

“An airplane makes that,” Turtle informs her, and Taylor wonders how she knows this. It’s one of several million things they have never yet spoken of, precisely. Did she learn it in school? Then again, do you have to be told every single thing about the world before you
know it? The idea of rearing Turtle exhausts Taylor and makes her want to lie down, or live in a simpler world. She would like for the two of them to live in one of those old-time cartoons that have roundheaded animals bobbing all together to the music, and no background whatsoever.

“You’re right,” Taylor says. “A jet plane.”

“Why is it doing that?”

Taylor wonders which level of answer Turtle wants. Why does a jet churn up white dust in the sky? (She doesn’t know.) Or, what is this particular jet’s motivation? (This, maybe nobody knows.)

“Remember in Dorothy, when the witch wrote in the sky?”

“Yeah, I do,” Taylor says. “In the
Wizard of Oz
. She wrote, ‘Surrender Dorothy.’ ”

“Did that mean they were supposed to give Dorothy to the witch?”

“That’s what she was asking for. Yeah.”

“Are you going to give me to the Indians?”

“No. I’ll never do that. But I think we have to go back and talk to them. Are you scared?”

“Yeah.”

“Me too.”

C
ASH MOVES THROUGH HIS KITCHEN
the way a lanky squirrel might, if a squirrel could cook: stepping quickly from sink to stove, pausing, sensing the air. By comparison, Alice feels like the lazy squirrel wife, sitting at the table separating hickory nuts from their crushed shells. “Slow down, Cash,” she tells him, smiling. “You’re making my eyes hurt.”

“I always do that to women,” he says. “I’m just ugly, is all.”

“Pish posh, you are not.” Alice picks a nearly whole nut from the curled chambers of its shell and drops it into the bowl. For reasons she couldn’t explain, the naked, curled little nuts remind her of babies waiting to get born.

Cash told her this log cabin was the original dwelling on his family’s homestead. It has stood empty for years, and seemed the right size for him when he came back from Wyoming. It’s all one room, with a kitchen at one end and a pair of parlor chairs flanking the lace curtain on the other end. For the summer he’s moved his bed out to
the porch, for air. His rifle, his toothbrush, and a lucky horseshoe hang over the stone fireplace. The cabin seems sturdy enough to stand through a tornado, or small enough to be overlooked by one in favor of the larger house that was built later on, where Letty now lives. The cabin has been occupied by most of Letty’s children at one time or another; they were the ones who installed plumbing and strung out the electrical wire, which now supplies Cash’s few light bulbs and—Alice was distressed to note—the little TV set that squats on the kitchen counter amongst the bowls and flour canisters. He did shut it off right away when she came in. She’ll hand him that much.

“You don’t have to get all them shells out. Just the big pieces,” he tells her. “Are you watching this, now? You got to know how to make
kunutche
, if you’re going to sign up to be Cherokee here in a while.”

“Is that right? Will they give me a test?”

“Oh, I think so, probably. But if you decide not to enroll, then don’t bother learning. No
yonega
would fool around with a thing that’s this much trouble.”

“Maybe I oughtn’t to, then, and just go on letting you do all the work.” Alice is startled to hear what she’s just said, words that contain a presumption about the future. If Cash is in any way riled, he doesn’t show it. He dumps the nuts with a clatter into a dented metal bucket and pounds them deftly with a wooden club, making a steady gritch-gritch like a cow chewing. The pounding club resembles a sawed-off baseball bat. Alice saw one in Sugar’s kitchen and had no earthly notion what kind of cooking implement it might be. It looked so forceful.

“You pound it till it’s powder, that’s the way you start out,” Cash instructs. “Then you roll it into balls about yay big.” He holds up his right fist, wrist forward, to show her, looking to see that she has understood. “There’s enough oil in it so it holds together good.” He turns back to pounding, and goes on talking with a slightly breathless rhythm over the nutty gritching sound, which has now gone to more of a hiss. “When you get ready to fix it, you just break off a piece of
the ball and add it to boiling water, and then you strain it through a good clean sock to get out the little bits of shell, and you mix it with rice, or hominy. It’s kindly a soupy consistency.”

“Sounds good,” Alice says, reverently. In her life she has experienced neither men who talk a lot nor men who cook, and here is one doing both at once. She would have paid money to witness this, and not been disappointed.

“I love it with hominy,” he adds. “It kindly puts you in the mood of fall, when you smell
kunutche
.”

“Did your wife teach you how to make it?”

“Well, now,” he pauses and stares at the wall calendar. “I guess my mama did. My wife did the cooking, mostly, but I always pounded up the
kunutche
. She said all that grinding hurt her bones.”

Alice stands up and wanders the length of the cabin, wishing for family pictures or some other hint of what Cash belongs to. Her eyes rest on his toothbrush, which seems small and stranded up there, and his gun. “You shoot anything with that rifle?”

“Oh, a squirrel now and then, if he’ll set still long enough to get hit. My eyes isn’t what they was. Usually I’ll miss three or four time, and then one’ll keel over and die of a heart attack.”

Alice wants to give him a hug. If men only knew, modesty makes women fall in love faster than all the cock-a-doodling in the world. She touches her earrings, whose tiny beads shiver away from her fingers. They were delivered to her one morning in an envelope marked only, “From a secret admirer.” Sugar, who had stood breathing on Alice’s head while she ripped open the envelope, instantly identified the turquoise-and-silver beadwork as Cash’s. She said he had been selling earrings just like that to the trading post at the Heritage Center.

Alice sent Cash back a note that said, “Many thanks and a special hug from your mystery date.” She gave it to Sugar to mail at the P.O., and was mortified later to find that Sugar had run into Letty in town and asked her to hand-deliver it.

“Sugar says you do beadwork for the trading post. That a fact?”

“I do a little. It relaxes me at night.”

“Somebody sent me these earrings. Can you imagine? Some fellow must think he can knock me over with a feather.”

Cash grins. “I got your note.”

“I’ll bet Letty opened it up and read it first.”

“Looked like it. She’s not as professional as she used to be.” Cash’s face broadens under the eyes with a smile that seems to be settling in and getting comfortable.

“I guess I ought to try my hand at that,” she says, coming over to stand next to him. “Either that, or sing for my supper. Of the two I think you’d ruther me mash nuts.”

He positions her hands on the club, then stands back to watch. “I don’t know about that. You got a real nice talking voice. I was thinking the other day, if I had a telephone I’d call up Alice just to listen at her voice. I bet you could sing like a bird.”

“A turkey buzzard,” Alice says.

“Now, you stop right there, I don’t believe you. I’d pay a dollar to hear you sing ‘Amazing Grace.’ Or ‘Don’t Set Under the Apple Tree.’ Here, it helps sometimes if you put more shoulder into it.”

He stands behind her with his arms over hers, gripping her hands gently and pushing downward. The precise hissing sound returns to the kitchen, nut powder urged against metal. Alice feels a similar sound in her chest.

“You’d ask for your dollar back when I was done,” she says.

Cash eases the pressure on her hands. “I wouldn’t. Even if you did sound like a turkey buzzard, I wouldn’t care.”

Alice leans her head back against him at the same moment he lifts his arms across her chest, holding her there and dropping his face into the crown of her hair.

“Cash,” she says.

“Hm?” He turns her around, keeping her within the circle of his arms. She looks up at his face, which at close range without her reading specs is blurry, except for the window-shaped lights in his eyes.

“You might be able to knock me over with a feather,” she tells him. “It’d be worth a try.”

Cash’s cabin is in deep woods, a quarter-mile behind Letty’s back garden. From his iron bed out on the screen porch, Alice wonders how it would be to wake up every morning to the sight of nothing but leaves.

“Did you hear what happened to that Mr. Green?”

“The ostrich rancher?” she asks. “I heard his ostriches like to sashay around and drop their feathers on the wrong side of the fence.”

Cash runs a finger down Alice’s nose. Without his glasses his eyes look soft and hopeful, like they’re in need of something. Alice honestly can’t remember the last time she was naked under the quilts with a man who was awake, but even so, neither she nor Cash seems to be in any big rush. It’s such a pleasure just to realize they’ve gotten this far. And to listen to talk.

“He tried to break into Boma’s house to get that feather back,” Cash tells her.

“Lord! Was she home?”

“No. They was all at a wedding. Can you imagine? Reading about a wedding in the paper, he must have done, because he sure wasn’t invited. And going over to burglarize the groom’s own grandma?”

“Well, did he get it?”

“He got it all right.” Cash rolls over onto his back and laughs, then clucks his tongue. “I oughtn’t to laugh. He’s in the hospital.”

“With what?”

“Nine thousand bee stings.”

Alice gasps. “And still no feather, I’ll bet.”

“Naw. It’d be like Boma to send it to him in a big vase of flowers, though. With a get-well card from the bees.”

“Hope you’re back in the pink soon,
honey
,” Alice says, getting the giggles.

“We’re bad.”

“We are,” Alice says. “What would our kids think of us?”

The lines around Cash’s eyes go soft, and he seems to drift for a moment. She traces the honed ridge of his breastbone with her finger, feeling deeply sad for whatever it is that takes him away, sometimes, at the mention of his family. She would do anything to ease that burden. She finds his hand, which was resting on her waist, and holds it against her lips. “I’m sorry,” she says. “For whatever it is.”

Cash moves forward to kiss her. He tastes like woodsmoke and the color of leaves. When he touches her breast, she feels the skin of her nipples gather itself in. She is pierced with a sharp, sweet memory of nursing Taylor, and when he puts his mouth there she feels once again that longing to be drained, to give herself away entirely. Slowly Cash moves himself against her, and then very gently into her, and she feels the same longing coming through his body to hers. They rock against each other, holding on, and the birds in the forest raise their voices to drown out the secret of creation.