Pigs in Heaven (34 page)

“
W
WHERE’D YOU GET A PRISSY
name like Lacey from, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” Cash tells Alice, keeping his hands on the wheel and his eye trained ahead. “It was Alma thought of it. I think she liked that TV show with the lady cops. Lacey and somebody.”

“Oh, if that don’t beat all.” Alice jerks herself around in the seat, facing away from him. She was more or less stuck for a ride home, since Taylor and Turtle had to go straight over to Cherokee Headquarters to see the man in Child Welfare. Annawake said her car was broken down and she was waiting for her brother to pick her up. That left Cash. She should have walked.

“She’s so big,” Cash says. “I can tell just how she is. The kind to keep her mind to herself, like her mother did.”

They pass by fields of harvested hay that is rolled up for the winter in what looks like giant bedrolls. A barn in the middle of a pasture is leaning so far to the east it appears to be a freak of gravity.

“Are you going to go ahead and get enrolled, and get your voting card?” he asks.

“Might as well,” Alice declares to the passing farms. “So I can get my roof fixed.”

“Don’t start talking to me about Indians on welfare.”

“I wasn’t.”

“Well, don’t. My people owned mansions in Georgia. They had to see it all burned down, and come over here to nothing but flint rocks and copperheads.” Cash’s voice rises to the pitch of a tenor in church.

“I can’t believe I ever got mixed up with a family that names babies after TV shows!” Alice cries, just as loudly. “Kitty Carlisle in the kitchen. You can keep your Kitty Carlisle. I already had me one husband that was in love with his television set. Not again, no thanks!”

“Who was asking?”

“Well, I just didn’t want you to waste your time.”

As angry and heartbroken as she is, Alice feels something hard break loose down inside of her. She feels deeply gratified to yell at someone who is paying enough attention, at least, to yell back.

The Tribal Offices sit just off the highway in a simple modern arrangement of red brick and concrete slabs, with shrubs hugging the sidewalks. Taylor expected something more tribal, though she doesn’t know what that might be.

Turtle holds tightly to her hand as they make their way around the long sidewalk, looking for the right entrance.

“You remember your grandpa, do you?” Taylor asks, talking to fend off approaching terror.

Turtle shrugs. “I dunno.”

“It’s okay if you do. You can say.”

“Yeah.”

“What else do you remember?”

“Nothing.”

“Your first mother?”

Turtle shrugs again. “He’s the good one. Pop-pop. He’s not the bad one.”

“You remember a man that hurt you?”

“I think I do.”

“Turtle, that’s good. I want you to remember. Remember him so you can throw him away.”

Their shoes make soft, sticky sounds on the warm sidewalk. Turtle steps long to avoid the cracks. This building must be half a mile long, with entrances for every possible category of human problem. Health Care. Economic Development. Taylor can’t believe the way life turns out. She has been waiting years for the revelation that just came to Turtle, and now it has happened, while they were walking along half distracted between a row of juniper hedges and the Muskogee Highway.

At last they find Child Welfare. Inside, the building is carpeted and seems more friendly. Receptionists sit at circular desks in the wide corridors, and pictures on the wall show the Tribal Council members, some in cowboy hats. When Taylor asks for directions to Andy Rainbelt’s office, the receptionist gets up and leads the way. She wears low heels and has the disposition of a friendly housewife.

“This is his office here. If he was expecting you then I imagine he’ll be on in here in a minute. He might be hung up with another appointment.”

“Okay, thanks. We’ll just wait.”

But before they’ve sat down, they hear the receptionist greet Andy in the hall. He ducks in the doorway, smiling, huge, pony-tailed, dressed like a cleaned-up rodeo man in jeans and boots. Which is fine with Taylor. She prefers bull riding to social-worker interviews any day of the week.

“I’m Andy. Glad to meet you, Miz Greer. Turtle.” His handshake is punctuated by a large turquoise ring on his index finger. When they sit, Turtle finds her way into Taylor’s lap. Taylor hugs Turtle to her, trying not to look as off-center as she feels.

He leans forward on his elbows and just looks at Turtle for quite a while, smiling, until she has finished examining the floor, the doorknob, and the ceiling, and looks at Andy Rainbelt. He has kind, deep-set eyes under arched eyebrows. “So tell me about your family, Turtle.”

“I don’t have one.”

Taylor earnestly wishes she were not alive.

“Well, who do you live with, then?”

“I live with my mom. And I have a grandma. I used to have Jax, too, hack when we lived in a good house.”

“Sounds like a family to me.”

“And Barbie. She used to live with us. Barbie and all her clothes.”

“Now, is she a real person or a doll?”

Turtle glances up at Taylor, who nearly laughs in spite of the dire circumstances. “She’s both,” Taylor answers for her. “She was a friend. Kind of clothes-oriented.”

“What kind of things do you do for fun at your house?” he asks.

“Barbie played with me sometimes when Mom was at work,” Turtle explains. “We made stuff. And clothes. She always ate Cheese Doritos and then went and throwed up in the bathroom.”

“What? She did that?” Taylor feels ambushed. “I never knew that. Every time she ate?”

“I think every time.”

“So that was her secret!” Taylor looks at Andy Rainbelt, feeling as if she might as well throw up too. “I guess we must sound like a pretty weird family.”

“All families are weird,” he says. “My job is to see which ones are good places for kids.”

“Barbie is out of our lives, completely. I know it sounds bad that Turtle was exposed to that. I don’t know what to tell you. She baby-sat for a while, while I was trying to get started in a new job. But she’s gone.”

“She took all our money,” Turtle adds helpfully. “The guy that catches gooses had to take our electricity because we didn’t pay.”

Taylor knows her face must look like the cow in the corral who finally comprehends the slaughterhouse concept. “I was working full-time,” she explains. “But somehow there just still wasn’t enough money. It’s probably hard for her to remember, but we had a pretty good life before all this happened.”

Andy looks patient. “Listen. I hear everything in this office. I’m not grading you on what you say. I’m watching, more than listening,
to tell you the truth. What I see is this little girl in your lap, looking pretty content there.”

Taylor holds her so close she feels her own heart pounding against Turtle’s slender, knobbed spine. “It’s real hard on her to have to be separated from me. I just want to tell you that, for your records.”

“I understand,” he says.

“No, I mean it’s terrible. Not like other kids. Sometimes Turtle lies in the bathtub with a blanket over her head for hours and hours, if she thinks I’m mad at her.” She squeezes Turtle harder into her arms. “She went through some bad stuff when she was a baby, before I got her, and we’re still kind of making up for lost time.”

“Is that right, Turtle?”

Turtle is silent. Taylor waits for some awful new revelation, until it dawns on her that her daughter may be suffocating. She relaxes her hold, and Turtle breathes.

“Yeah,” she says. “The bad one wasn’t Pop-pop.”

“She just met Mr. Stillwater. I mean, met him again. Her grandfather. I guess she’s started remembering stuff from when she was little.”

Andy has a way of looking Turtle in the eye that doesn’t frighten her. Taylor is amazed. A giant who can make himself small. “Some tough times back then, huh?” he asks her.

“I don’t know.”

“It’s okay to remember. Scares you though, sometimes, doesn’t it?”

Turtle shrugs.

“Nobody’s going to hurt you now.”

Taylor closes her eyes and sees stars. She wishes on those stars that Andy Rainbelt could keep his promise.

Late that same afternoon, Taylor and Alice walk the dirt shoulder of the road out of Heaven. Turtle came back to Sugar’s and fell into a hard sleep, but Taylor wanted to get out of the house for a while.

“I’m sorry you broke up with your new boyfriend,” she tells Alice.

“Lord, what a soap opry,” Alice declares. “All the fish out there, and I have to go for the one that’s related to Turtle.”

“Mama, that’s not just bad luck. You were set up.”

“Well, still, he didn’t have to be so handy, did he? And related some way to Sugar?”

“To hear Sugar tell it, she’s related some way to everybody from here to the Arkansas border. If they were determined to get you two together, it was bound to happen.”

“Well, that’s so. But I still have to say I got the worst darn luck in men.”

“I’m not about to argue with that.” Taylor has begun picking long-stemmed black-eyed Susans from the roadside as they walk along.

“The thing is, it’s my own fault. I just can’t put up with a person that won’t go out of his way for me. And that’s what a man is. Somebody that won’t go out of his way for you. I bet it says that in the dictionary.”

Taylor hands Alice a bouquet of orangey-yellow Susans and begins picking another one.

“It’s the family misfortune,” Alice says. “I handed it right on down to you.”

“I called Jax,” Taylor says, feeling faintly guilty.

“Well, honey, that’s good. I mean it, I think he’s tops. What’s he up to?”

“His band is sort of breaking up. Their lead guitar quit, but they’re getting an electric fiddle. Kind of going in a new direction, he says. He’s trying to think of a new name with a country element. Renaissance Cowboys, something like that.”

“Well, it beats the Irritated Babies all to pieces.”

“Irascible Babies.”

“What’s that mean, irascible?”

“Irritated, I think.”

“So I had the right idea, anyway.”

“Yeah, I’m sure you did.”

“And you forgave him for going to bed with that what’s her name? That landlady gal?”

“Mama, I’d given him permission to do whatever he pleased. I The Snake
told him when I left in June that we weren’t, you know, anything long-term. So how could I hold it against him?”

A passing pickup truck, whose paint job looks very much like whitewash, slows down, then speeds on by when the driver doesn’t recognize the two women carrying flowers.

“Mama, I’ve decided something about Jax. I’ve been missing him all summer long. Whether or not we get to keep Turtle, I’ve decided I want to start thinking of me and Jax as kind of more permanent.”

“Well, that don’t sound too definite.”

“No, it is. I mean, I want us to be long-term. He’s real happy. He wants to get married. I don’t know if
married
is really the point, but you know what I mean.”

“Well, Taylor, that’s wonderful!” Alice cries, sounding ready enough to be wrong about men this once. She sings “Dum, dum da dum,” to the tune of “Here Comes the Bride,” and ties knots in the stems of her flowers, pulling each one through the next to make a crown. When it’s finished she holds it out in her two hands like the cat’s cradle, then places it on Taylor’s dark hair. “There you go, all set.”

“Mama, you’re embarrassing me,” Taylor says, but she leaves the flowers where they are.

“What changed your mind about Jax?”

Taylor uses her long bouquet like a horse’s tail, to swish away gnats. “When the social worker asked Turtle about her family today, you know what she said? She said she didn’t have one.”

“That’s not right! She was confused.”

“Yeah. She’s confused, because I’m confused. I
think
of Jax and Lou Ann and Dwayne Ray, and of course you, and Mattie, my boss at the tire store, all those people as my family. But when you never put a name on things, you’re just accepting that it’s okay for people to leave when they feel like it.”

“They leave anyway,” Alice says. “My husbands went like houses on fire.”

“But you don’t have to
accept
it,” Taylor insists. “That’s what your family is, the people you won’t let go of for anything.”

“Maybe.”

“Like, look at Mr. Stillwater. Cash. He’s still just aching for Turtle after all this time. I hate to admit it, and I’m not going to say I think he should have her. Turtle is mine now. But he doesn’t accept that she’s gone. You can see it.”

Alice
has
seen it in Cash. She saw it long before she knew what it was. A man who would go out of his way.

Taylor has woven her flowers into a circle, and she crowns her mother with it. Alice reaches deep into herself and evinces a dramatic sigh. “Always the bridesmaid, never the bride.”

A string of cars crackles by on the gravel, all following an old truck that is fairly crawling. The drivers stare, each one in turn, as they pass.

“Where’s that sign?” Taylor asks.

“What sign?”

“The one that was in that magazine ad, remember? With Sugar, when she was young? You’ve showed me that fifty times.”

“That sign that says
WELCOME TO HEAVEN
.” Alice looks thoughtful. “You know, I haven’t seen it.”

“Maybe this isn’t really Heaven!” Taylor says. “Maybe we’re in the wrong place, and none of this is really happening.”

“No, it’s Heaven all right. It says so on the phone book.”

“Shoot, then they ought to have that sign up. I wish we could go pose in front of it. Maybe somebody’d come along and take our picture.”

“I wonder if they tore that down. I’ll have to ask Sugar. I bet anything they did.”

“Does that mean we’re not welcome anymore?” Taylor asks.

Two more cars pass by, and this time Alice and Taylor smile and wave like Miss America contestants.

Alice says, “I reckon we’ll stay till they run us out of town.”

Some kind of fish jumps in the river. Annawake stares at the ring of disturbed water it left behind. “Uncle Ledger, just tell me what to do,” she says.