Pigs in Heaven (4 page)

L
UCKY AND
T
URTLE ARE ASLEEP
in the backseat: Taylor can make out their separate snores, soprano and bass. She scrapes the dial of the car radio across miles of West Arizona static and clicks it off again. Suspended before her in the rearview mirror is an oblong view of Lucky’s head rolled back on the seat, and now that it’s safe to stare, she does. His long, clean hair falls like a girl’s across his face, but his pale throat shows sandpaper stubble and a big Adam’s apple. He’s thirty-eight years old; they are a woman, man, and child in this car, like any family on the highway headed out on an errand of hope or dread. But Taylor can’t see him as a man. The idea unsettles her.

From the moment of his rescue he has begged them not to tell his mother what happened. Angie Buster runs a diner in Sand Dune, Arizona, and over the phone sounded tired. Lucky has no idea that she has spoken with Taylor, or that she watched his body come out of the hole again and again on the TV news. Computer graphics turned the Hoover Dam inside-out for America, showing a red toy image of Lucky moving jerkily down into the spillway and lodging there like the protagonist of a dark-humored video game. Only Lucky
and Turtle, perpetrators of the miracle, still believe they’ve witnessed a secret.

It was Turtle’s idea to drive him home once the doctors had bandaged his sprained ankle and held him for observation. Turtle is a TV heroine now, so police officers and even doctors pay attention to her. One reporter said that Turtle’s and Lucky’s destinies were linked now; that according to Chinese belief, if you save someone’s life you’re responsible for that person forever. Taylor wonders if he was making this up. Why would you owe them more than what you’d already provided? It sounds like the slightly off-base logic you sometimes get in a fortune cookie.

She turns the car south on Arizona 93 and picks up a signal on the radio. An oldies station, they’re calling it, though it’s playing the Beatles. If Beatles are oldie now, where does that leave Perry Como, she wonders, and all those girl groups with their broken-heart songs and bulletproof hair? As nearly as she remembers, Taylor was in kindergarten when the Beatles first hit it big, but they persisted into her adolescence, shedding the missionary suits and skinny ties in favor of LSD and little round sunglasses. She can’t identify the song but it’s one of their later ones, with that odd sound they developed toward the end—as if their voices are coming from inside a metal pipe.

What did he think about for a day and a half down there? Taylor can’t bring herself to imagine. Now, with his fingernails scrubbed, his red checked shirt cleaned and respectfully pressed in the hospital laundry, what he’s been through seems impossible. The doctors presumed he never lost consciousness, unless he slept. From the looks of him now, he didn’t, or not much.

She came so close to driving away that night. Worn down by the uniforms and beard stubble and patronizing looks, it would have been such a small thing to get back in the car and go on to Nevada. She shivers.

The Beatles give up the ghost and Elton John takes over, his honkytonk piano chords bouncing into “Crocodile Rock.” This one Taylor remembers from dances on the bleached wood floor of the Pittman High gym, with some boy or other who never could live up
to her sense of celebration on those occasions. They were always too busy trying to jam a hand between two of your buttons somewhere. The song is about that exact war, and it excited the girls as much as the boys to hear it because you knew how Suzy felt when she wore her dresses—as the song says—tight. Like something no boy could ever touch. Taylor liked Elton John, his oversized glasses and preposterous shoes, laughing at himself—such a far cry from other rock stars with long limp hair and closed eyes and heads rolled back to the sounds of their own acid chords, going for the crucifixion look.

Music is all different now: Jax belongs to neither breed, the Jesuses or the Elton Johns. Now they don’t just laugh at themselves but also their audience and the universe in general. Jax’s wide-eyed, skinny band members wear black jeans and shirts made of torn newspapers. Irascible Babies, pleading ignorance, just wishing they could suckle forever at the breast of a pulsing sound wave.

Jax is a problem in Taylor’s life, though she would never say that aloud. She feels disloyal for thinking it, even. He’s the first boyfriend she’s ever had who is actually funnier than he thinks he is. He is nice to Turtle to the point that it’s nearly embarrassing. Jax is so laid-back it took Taylor months to figure out what was going on here: that he’s crazy in love with her. Possibly that’s the problem. Jax’s adoration is like the gift of a huge, scuffling white rabbit held up at arm’s length for her to take. Or a European vacation. Something you can never give back.

She turns southwest at the little noncity of Kingman, back toward the Colorado River or what’s left of it after all those dams, a tributary robbed blind and fighting hard to make the border. Mountains rise low and purple behind the river like doctor’s-office art. She’ll follow the river south through Lake Havasu City, where some rich person, she has heard, actually bought the London Bridge and shipped it over block by block to stand lonely in the desert. Eventually they’ll reach Sand Dune, where Angie Buster awaits her son. Taylor can call Jax from there and tell him about the new twist on their vacation.

She’s not keeping close track of the radio: now it’s Otis Redding singing “Dock of the Bay.” This one always chokes her up. You can picture poor Otis looking out over the water, the terrible sadness in his voice suggesting he already knows he’s going to end up frozen in a Wisconsin lake while the fans wait and wait for his plane to come in, for the concert to begin.

You can’t think too much about luck, good or bad. Taylor has decided this before, and at this moment renews her vow. Lucky Buster is lucky to be alive and unlucky to have been born with the small wits that led him to disaster in the first place. Or lucky, too, for small wits, that allow him so little inspection of the big picture. In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, he wanted to go to McDonald’s.

Over the phone, Angie Buster confided that Lucky had run away many times before. She asked Taylor not to repeat this to the doctors, fearing that it might interfere somehow with Lucky’s insurance. “He’s not really running away,” Angie explained, “he just don’t have a real good understanding of where home ends and the rest of the world takes up.”

Taylor agreed that was sometimes a tough call.

Sand Dune is not sandy so much as dusty. Everything Taylor can see in the Parker Strip is covered with dust: battle-scarred regiments of mobile-home parks, cellophane flags whipping from the boat docks, and out in the river the duckish, bobbing boats with yellow bathtub rings on their bellies. A fine silt clings even to the surface of the Colorado, proof that this river has had all the fight knocked out of it.

The town is a congregation of swayback tile roofs and front yards blighted with the kind of short, trashy palm trees that harbor worlds of sparrows. Portions of dilapidated stucco wall stand along the road like billboards, crowded with a square-lettered style of graffiti. There’s no chance of losing her way here: the approach to Angie’s Diner is festooned with yellow ribbons and a bedsheet banner stat
ing:
HAPPY EASTER LUCKY BUSTER.
Taylor pulls in at the motor lodge Angie told her to look for, the Casa Suerte, next door to the diner.

“Wake up, kiddos,” she says gently. She’s afraid Lucky might bolt, but he doesn’t. He and Turtle both rub their eyes, equally children. “We’re here,” she says, and helps Turtle out of the car. She’s uncertain how to handle Lucky. He takes off in no particular hurry across the courtyard of the Casa Suerte toward the diner. At the building’s front entry is a shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe, who is studded all over with yellow stick-on bows as if she’s been visited with some kind of pox. On the other side of the door a colorless bulldog is ensconced on a padded chair, panting in the air-conditioning. He stands up and barks twice. A big woman in Lycra shorts and a tight yellow T-shirt appears, arms open, to envelop Lucky like a starfish.

“Get in here!” she shouts at Taylor, scooping a hefty arm through the air. Taylor has Turtle in hand and was hanging back to give them their reunion, but apparently this is routine. Some women have swarmed out to make a brief fuss over Lucky, while an old man stands picking the bows off the Virgin, putting them in a plastic sack to save for next time.

Angie’s Diner is draped with paper streamers and banners welcoming Lucky home. “Get in here,” Angie repeats, once they are inside. “This photographer here wants to take the little girl’s picture that saved my son’s life. Is this her?”

“This is Turtle,” Taylor says. Turtle’s grip on her fingers is jeopardizing the blood circulation.

“Oh, Lord,” Angie says, swamping Taylor with a hug. “I about lost my mind this time. Once he got kidnapped down to the border by some mules, and that was bad but I think this was worst. Sit, let me get you some pie. Did you all eat lunch yet? Red, get over here!”

The counter is crowded with porcelain knickknacks, and Angie is so busty and energetic in her yellow T-shirt it seems likely she’ll knock something over. A freckled man with a camera introduces himself as “Red from the paper.” He hands Taylor a copy of the
Sand Dune Mercury
and attempts to remove Turtle from her other hand.

“It’s okay, I’ll be right here,” Taylor promises Turtle’s upturned
eyes. She rubs the feeling back into her fingers and stares distractedly at the paper while Red poses Lucky and Turtle in front of the salad bar. She’s stunned when the banner headline eventually registers:

LUCKY BUSTER SAVED BY PERVERSERING TUCSON PAIR
.

She has to read it twice to get the intention of
perversering
. “Wow,” she says.

“The papers picked it up all over the state,” Angie informs her. “Would you sit down and let me get you something to eat? You kids must be starved.”

Taylor follows Angie to a table near the dust-frosted window pane. Angie’s hair is dyed such a dark black that she has a slightly purple scalp, like some of Jax’s backup singers. She turns around suddenly and tells Taylor in a quieter voice, “I owe you for this. You just don’t know, that boy means the whole world to me.”

Taylor is startled by the tears in Angie’s eyes and can only think to say, “Thank you.” For no physical reason Taylor can work out, Angie reminds her of her own mother. It must be nothing more than the force of her love. Angie goes to retrieve Turtle and Lucky from the photographer and deliver them both to the table. Lucky looks ecstatic, and surprisingly so does Turtle.

“Everybody’s real proud of you,” Taylor tells her.

“I know. I saved my friend Buster.” She swings her feet against the legs of her chair. Lucky reaches out and strokes Turtle’s shoulder twice. Taylor thinks of the reporter’s fortune-cookie prediction that Turtle’s life has been changed forever.

Angie doesn’t take any orders, she just brings food. Lucky leans so eagerly over his mashed potatoes that Taylor has to look away. This must be what people dislike about the retarded: they get straight down to the animal business of life, revealing it for what it is. Taylor admits to herself how hungry she is.

Angie brings over a customer named Collie Bluestone. “He’s a real good rooster fighter,” Angie says by way of introduction.

“No,” he says modestly, sitting down. “I don’t fight them. I sew them up afterward.”

Taylor is intrigued by the man’s mystifying profession and the
scar on his neck. He’s handsome in the same way Jax is, thin and knuckly. On men it works, it can be sexy. “I used to go to cockfights,” she tells him. “Well, once I did. In somebody’s barn, in Kentucky. On a blind date.”

Collie makes an odd noise, a sort of a hiss, but he is smiling so it’s apparently not a threat. “I hope your date turned out better than the chicken’s.”

“Not a whole lot better, but thanks. It’s not too legal back there. Is it legal here? Or just kind of a hobby?”

“The fights aren’t up here,” he says. “They’re down by the Crit reservation. That’s where I live. I just come up here ever so often to check on Angie.”

Taylor speculates on the relationship of Angie Buster and Collie Bluestone, and wonders briefly if Collie is Angie’s chicken supplier, but decides not to ask. Turtle is eating as if she hadn’t been fed since the change of seasons. Taylor is positive they had breakfast. “What kind of Indian is Crit?” she asks Collie. “I never heard of them.”

Collie makes the same noise again. “C-R-I-T, it stands for Colorado River Indian Tribes, which there aren’t none. It’s a fake tribe made out of whoever got left out when they carved up the territory. It’s like if they called everybody in a prison ‘the Leavenworth family.’ ”

“Oh. Sorry I asked.”

“Well, everybody’s got to live someplace, right? There’s some Hopi, Navajo, Mojave.”

“And everybody gets along okay?”

“We marry each other, but we don’t get along.”

Angie arrives again with more food and men. She introduces the men but Taylor doesn’t catch their names, only their hands to shake as they sit down. One of them wears a dog-colored cowboy hat and keeps putting his arm around Angie’s waist. “Did you see that London Bridge up at Lake Havasu?” he asks.

Lucky pipes up suddenly with his cover story. “Mom, I accidentally walked on the railroad tracks to Havasu.”

Angie and all the men throw their mouths open and laugh. Lucky joins in, enjoying his own joke, since that’s what it turned out to be. Angie wipes her eyes and it gets very quiet.

“We didn’t stop this morning to look at the bridge,” Taylor says. “I’ve heard about it, though. Some guy really did buy it and bring it over here?”

Lucky quietly sings, “London bridges falling down.”

“Some fat cat,” says the man in the cowboy hat. “And here’s the thing. After he bought it, he decided he had to get it cleaned. He said it cost more to clean it than to buy it.”

“I had a jacket like that one time,” Taylor says, feeling a certain pressure to keep the conversation going.