Pigs in Heaven (7 page)

Dellon stands up and puts a hammerlock on Annawake’s neck from behind. “When you getting married, beautiful?” he asks.

“When Gabe says he’ll come to my wedding.” She feels Dellon’s body slump against her back, and she realizes she said what she did just to feel that slack sadness in another person. She’s the only one who will still say their brother Gabriel’s name.

“Leave her alone,” Millie says, shifting her heavy kettle onto the stove. “Getting married’s not what it’s cranked up to be. What time you bringing Baby Dellon back?”

“Tomorrow noon, if we’re not too hungover.”

“I’m going to kill you one of these days.”

“I’m not Baby Dellon, I’m Batman,” says Baby Dellon, and they are out the door.

“I’m going to kill him one of these days.”

“He’s a good dad,” Annawake says, setting the table back on its feet, wondering if it might give itself a dignified shake and walk off,
like a turtle. “He won’t be drinking at a stomp dance. He wouldn’t even get into the stomp grounds if he was.”

Millie laughs. “Did you ever hear what happened on our first date?”

“You went to a stomp dance.”

“That’s how Dellon tells it. If I told you the real story he’d shoot me.” Millie leans against the counter, smiling. Her bunched print skirt hangs down from her waist like a dust ruffle on a bed. She brushes crimped wires of hair from her eyes, and Annawake knows she’s going to tell the story.

“We were up in the mountains and it was hot, and Dellon wanted to have a beer. I knew there was the dance that night so I wasn’t going to drink, but he did anyway. We had a fight, and later on we both went to the dance, but not together. I was in the inside circle wearing the turtle shells, so here comes Dellon, dancing right in the next circle, trying to get my eye. Next thing I hear him say, ‘Uh-oh, here comes the fuzz.’ Ledger tapped him on the shoulder and he had to leave. He’d just had one beer, but Ledger knew. He can spot it a mile away.”

“Tell me about it. I lived through most of my teenage years under Uncle Ledger’s eagle eye.”

“But you had nothing to worry about, you were Miss Perfect,” Millie says, wagging her stirring spoon at Annawake.

“Well, of course. I never had a chance.” Annawake knocks back her soda.

“You had to make up for your wild brothers,” Millie says, grinning. “I should have known right there and then not to marry him.”

A Mason jar on the counter at Millie’s elbow is crammed with daisies and wild phlox the kids have picked by the road somewhere; Annawake reaches for the jar and sets it in the exact center of the table. “I think he wishes you’d trust him more with the kids.”

“I trust him. But you still have to tell him what to do.”

Millie’s youngest, Annie, all big dark eyes and belly, stands naked in the doorway. Annawake jumps up from her chair. “Whoah, let’s get a diaper on you, baby doll, before we get puddles.”

“It’s okay, I decided to get her started on potty training today.
Figured it’s easier to let her run around that way. Put her out in the yard every hour, like a pup.”

“Millie!”

“I’m kidding. Annie, go show Annawake your potty.”

Annie disappears.

“You’re not going back to the office, are you? On Third Saturday?”

Annawake sighs. “I’m thinking about it. There’s this wild goose I’m chasing down. An illegal adoption.”

“Forget it. Whatever it is will keep.”

“I don’t know.”

Annie reappears in the door with a stuffed bear twice her size. “Pa-pa,” she says.

“You better learn the difference between a teddy bear and a potty seat,” Millie says. “Your time’s about up as baby of the family.”

Annie drops the bear on its head and climbs onto Annawake’s lap. Annawake laces her fingers together over the child’s naked belly, which has the rubbery firmness of a hard-boiled egg. “Dellon hates it when I bring up Gabe,” she tells Millie’s back.

“I don’t think Dell was ever as close to him as you are. You’re his twin. Dell was half grown before you two were born.”

“They’re still brothers.”

“Mm,” she says. She dumps a package of macaroni into the pot of boiling water. “But now he’s got his own kids to worry about.”

“What difference does that make?”

Millie rocks her body to the table and carefully sits down. “None, that’s not what it is. He hates it when you bring up Gabe, because he’s the oldest and he thinks he should have done something to keep the family from getting torn up.”

Annawake looks at Millie’s tired face. The skin under her eyes looks bruised, the way it gets with every pregnancy. The things people go through for love. “It’s not his fault, what happened.”

“Not yours, either, Annawake, and look at you. I think it’s great you went to law school and everything. But you don’t ever stop.”

The egg of Annie slides through Annawake’s hold and vanishes again.

“I’m not blaming myself for Gabe.”

“If you say so. Seems to me like all of you do. Like you’re all married to him, some way.”

They both listen to the small, steady sounds of children in other parts of the house. Annie comes back to the kitchen again, this time dragging her white potty seat. “Bear,” she says.

“What would you do,” Annawake asks Millie, “if you found out somebody was trying to take a Cherokee kid out of the Nation?”

“It’s a whole different thing, asking me that now. You were little when they took Gabriel. I’m not little.”

“That’s what I mean. If it happened right now, what would you do?”

Millie pulls a bedraggled daisy out of the Mason jar and twirls its stem between her thumb and fingers. “It can’t happen now. That’s what we’ve got people like you for, isn’t it? To watch out for the kids.”

Annawake feels the weight of this confidence exactly as if Millie had lovingly sat down upon her chest.

Tahlequah is a town that might as well roll up its sidewalks at sunset. Annawake knows what night life there is—the stray dogs stealthily marking streetside oaks, and the bootleg liquor houses where music from parked cars stakes an otherworldly claim on the night air. She’s walked these streets after dark since high school, pacing the length of her loneliness, Annawake the perfectly admired untouchable. Tonight she has nearly finished her circular route home. Her restlessness had no destination until just now, when she thought of a shoebox of old things she stashed in Millie’s carport shed years ago, before she left for Phoenix. The box seemed empty at the time; the only thing of any value at all was the gold locket her mother used to wear for luck. But tonight she could use the company of family secrets. She turns up Blue Spring Street, finding her way by moonlight.

The back shed has a metal door that complains when she scrapes it open. She snaps the chain of the overhead bulb at the same
moment a thin slice of white cat, an antishadow, slips past her legs. “Hi, little ugly,” she tells it. The cat skits away and turns its head far sideways like a bird to look at Annawake. It’s been hanging around for a week or two—Millie even put out a can of tuna for it, and now the can is empty but the cat has nothing to show for it, still just ears and bones. Annawake feels guilty for getting its hopes up. In the pocket of her backpack she finds half a hard peanut candy bar degenerating to sand. “Come on,” she says, holding out the candy on her flat palm. The cat watches her with its head oddly tipped; it might be blind in one eye. It makes no move to come to her, but when she sets the candy bar on the doorsill the cat makes a predatory leap, holding the candy down with its paws, making cracking sounds as it jerks its tiny head up and down, laboring over the peanuts. It’s pitiful food for a carnivore. With one finger Annawake tentatively strokes its back. The cat allows this, but its little back is nothing. A hammock of fur slung between shoulder blades.

She finds her shoebox wedged under a pile of Millie’s baby equipment waiting to make its comeback. Annawake sits cross-legged on the floor with the box on her lap, sorting its treasures with her slender fingers. She finds the locket and works the catch gently to open it. Inside is a photograph of her mother and father in front of the old brick Cherokee County courthouse on the day they married. Her mother’s hair is blowing across her eyes, and she looks worried. She’s already carrying the beginnings of a boy whose name will be Soldier, who will die before he’s old enough to fight back.

Annawake closes the locket and tucks it into her pocket. She doesn’t want to jinx it, but she seriously doubts its power. Her mother was wearing it the day she met her husband and thereafter believed in it so thoroughly she wouldn’t go anywhere important—not to a baptism or a funeral or even the landlord’s to borrow another month—without it. It’s difficult, though, for Annawake to picture the more luckless version of that life.

She wishes her mother had left her something that held more promise for blessing her decisions: a beaded medicine pouch with oak leaves inside, or ash from a ceremonial fire. But there’s no
chance; all the ceremony is on her father’s side of the family. Her mother would have called anything of that nature a piece of junk. Annawake smiles a little, hearing her mother’s profound Okie accent say “
a pace of ju-unk
.” Bonnie Fourkiller was a die-trying acculturated Cherokee, like most of her generation, who chose the Indian Baptist Church over stomp dances and never wore moccasins in her life. She owned one pair of nylons at a time, throughout her lifetime, each folded carefully into the same piece of tissue paper that had harbored all its forebears.

Annawake leafs through other mementoes in the box. A photo of Redbird, her dog, taken in front of their house in Kenwood. Several other shots of her Uncle Ledger’s shantyboat on Tenkiller Lake, where she and her four brothers lived out most summers until they were old enough for more productive employment. She finds a picture of herself and Gabe on the wide porch of the shantyboat, wearing baggy cutoff jeans and dumb-kid smiles, and there goes all their ragged laundry strung from the porch posts to the willow trees. The lard buckets were strung up high on poles, out of reach of the notorious thieving armies of raccoons that ran the riverbanks at night. Uncle Ledger claimed the raccoons would steal anything, even a child, but Annawake could never see the point in that. Children were the one thing you could always have plenty of. She’d had no idea.

She and Gabriel passed the months on Ledger’s shantyboat with their hearts in their throats, dreading the end of summer. Gabe, her roommate in the before-life, who followed her out the birth door and right through childhood. Sweet Gabe, who was stolen from the family and can’t find his way home. She holds the photo as close as her eyes will focus, and drinks the frightening liquor of memory: an A-frame of twins leaning on themselves, elbows around each other’s necks. When Annawake runs she can feel the stitch in her side where the invisible wound closed over, the place where they tore him out. How would it have been to go through high school with Gabe? To walk into adulthood? To have had that permanent date, instead of being the Only. The perfect lonely heart. Two hearts, they became, separated by the Texas Panhandle and a great plain of want.

She turns the photos facedown and glances through other things. Letters from her brothers and Uncle Ledger, a photo of someone’s new baby. And the family inheritance: a very old book of medicine incantations written by her grandfather in the curly Cherokee alphabet Annawake wishes she could read. She still speaks Cherokee in her dreams sometimes, but never learned to write it. By the time she was six, they only taught English in school.

With her fingertips she delicately unfolds another old document and is surprised to recognize a fragile, creased magazine ad, black and white, showing a smiling young woman wearing a halo of flowers and holding up a soft drink under the sign outside their town.
WELCOME TO HEAVEN,
the sign in the ad declared, so everybody in America could laugh at the notion of finding heaven in eastern Oklahoma, she supposes. The ad is older than Annawake—the woman was a friend of her mother’s, Sugar Hornbuckle. The picture made her famous for a time.

The cat is back at the door, staring in.

“No, you go on now. I’m not a reliable source.”

She puts the photographs away. She should have taken these things to school with her. In that air-conditioned universe of mute law books she was terrified that she might someday fail to recognize her own life. You can’t just go through life feeding cats, pretending you’re not one of the needy yourself. Annawake has spent years becoming schooled in injustices and knows every one by name, but is still afraid she could forget the face.

T
HE WORDS ON THE PAGE
in front of Franklin Turnbo have disappeared. He stares at the front door of his office and sees a little forest of African violets there, leafy and leggy and growing out of their pots, heading for the light as if they intend to walk once they get out there. A bright yellow eye blinks in the center of each purple flower. The front office space where Jinny and Annawake work is overgrown with plants as healthy as children: a huge rubber tree slouches at ceiling level like a too-tall girl, and something with small leaves spreads itself flat-handed against the storefront window. Jinny brings them in and tends them, Franklin supposes. He feels sure he’s never seen the plants before this moment, although he could have been hanging his hat and coat on the rubber tree for months, for all he knows. As usual, the place is being taken over benignly by women, without his notice.

The front door jingles and Pollie Turnbo brushes past the violets. She comes into her husband’s office cubicle and sets a basket on his desk. “I made bean bread, it’s still warm,” she says, breathless as if she herself were fresh from the oven.

Franklin never makes it home for dinner on Monday nights, though their ritual is that he pretends he’ll try, and she pretends she just happened to be passing by his office with food in hand. He stands up to kiss Pollie. Her hair is coming loose at the back of her neck and her eyes are bright, in a hurry. She looks like the African violets. Franklin wishes Pollie would stay and talk, but she won’t.

“I have to get out there and keep the boys from running under cars,” she says, as if the boys had a plan to do that.

He looks into the basket after she’s gone. Bean bread, pork chops, much more than he can eat. Pollie misses him these days; he is working too much, and it’s her way to try to make up for every loss with food. She still cooks all the old-fashioned things that take more time than most women have had for decades. She learned from her mother, a full-blooded Cherokee, who grew up around Kenwood and never learned English. Franklin’s mother is full-blood too, but his father is white, and Franklin grew up in Muskogee. His mother served time in the kitchen only at Christmas and when it was her turn for the PTA bake sales. Franklin never gave two thoughts to being Cherokee until he began to study Native American Law—like many his age, he’s a born-again Indian. He laughs at this. Annawake would like him better if he had that title on a little plaque on his desk.

Thinking of Annawake brings the return of his dread. He leans out his door and asks her to come into his office. Franklin already knows what she is going to do, but has to make the show of talking her out of it.

“Would you like something to eat? Pollie makes this bread.”

Annawake shakes her head. “Thanks, Jinny just brought me a Big Mac, and like a fool I ate it. I should have waited.”

“No baby at your house yet?”

Annawake smiles and shakes her head. “We think it’s waiting for a new administration.”

She breaks off a slice of bean bread anyway, and Franklin uses the silence to wrestle his doubts. The AILTP is paying her to work in his office and learn from him, but he feels like an ungenuine article—a new car put together from the parts of a lot of old ones and given a fresh coat of paint. A born-again Indian lawyer. Annawake learned about truth from her old uncle, who, Franklin has heard, comes from a medicine family and lives on a houseboat on Tenkiller and shoots squirrel with a blowgun.

Franklin opens his mouth for a long time before talking, and then starts slowly, the way he would get into ice water if he had to.

“This case you’ve opened. You have to have something on a birth parent,” he tells her.

Annawake slaps crumbs off her hands and leans forward, her eyes alive. “Okay, but look. In the case of Mississippi Band of Choctaw
versus
Holyfield, the mother voluntarily gave her children to the white couple. The children had never even lived on the reservation. And the Supreme Court
still
voided that adoption.” Annawake apparently has learned enough white-lawyer ways to leap into ice water without flinching.

“And how does that apply here? In that case, both birth parents were known and involved.”

She lifts her chin a little. Annawake always enunciates her words as if she can taste each one and there is nothing else left to eat. “The birth mother gave the children up, but her choice was overruled.”

“Meaning?”

“It shows the spirit of the law. The Indian Child Welfare Act is supposed to protect the interests of the Indian community in keeping its children. It’s not supposed to be defeatable by the actions of individual tribe members.”

Franklin waits until there is a question, and Annawake finds it. “So why do we need a birth parent?”

“The Supreme Court recognized that the tribal court had exclusive jurisdiction over that adoption, you’re right,” he says, correcting
her as tactfully as a knife touching up a pencil point. The Holyfield decision was handed down just weeks ago, and Annawake appears to have memorized it. “But if I’m remembering it right, that birth mother was domiciled on the Choctaw reservation, making the child a tribe member. In this case, we have no idea whether this child falls under our jurisdiction. You don’t have a domiciled parent or an enrolled parent because you don’t have a parent.”

“I have a mystery parent. Two of them. The transfer of custody was witnessed by a notary in Oklahoma City, who had no business with this kind of placement. The parents are listed as Steven and Hope Two-Two, allegedly Cherokees but not enrolled, also not enrolled Social Security-paying citizens of the U.S.A.”

Franklin’s eyebrows rise. “You found all that?”

“It was Jinny Redcrow’s big moment. She got to call up Oprah Winfrey on official business. The researchers were pretty helpful with i.d. and background. And the United States government is always eager to be of assistance, naturally.”

He doesn’t smile. “You still don’t have anything that makes it officially our business.”

Annawake touches her fingertips together, making a little fish basket of her hands, and looks into it. Sometimes she mentions her spirit guide, a thing Franklin Turnbo can only half understand. She is so quick she seems guided by racehorses or the fox that runs ahead of the dogs.

“You heard the mother on TV, right? Her story was that on her way out to Arizona she picked up this baby, who is obviously Native American, in Cherokee territory, from the sister of its dead mother. But in the official records we have consent-to-adoption forms filed by two living parents with invented names. I’d say it’s incumbent on the mother to prove it’s
not
our business.”

“You seem angry,” he says.

She looks surprised, then says, “Well, yeah. Maybe. All the housewives watching TV last Friday saw that our kids can be picked up as souvenirs.”

“Like your brother was.”

Her eyes don’t register any change. She says only, “I’m asking you if we could make a case for vacating an improperly conducted adoption.”

“And then what?”

“And then we could work with Cherokee Nation Child Welfare Services to find a proper placement.”

“Are you getting ahead of yourself?”

“Okay, or to evaluate the existing placement, first. But that should all be the tribe’s decision. That baby should never have been taken out.”

Franklin Turnbo leans back in his chair and sighs like a punctured air mattress. Annawake respectfully waits for him to run out of air.

“Annawake, I admire your energy. I wish I had it. But we have child-welfare problems filed in this office that could keep us all busy till I personally am old and gray. And then there are the land-use disputes and civil rights cases and the divorces and the drunks and the disorderlies. And all the people trying to hold on to what little there is left.”

Annawake makes a basket with her hands again, and waits for the question.

“You’ve gone to school, and now you’ve come back to fight for your tribe. Who’s going to do this work if you’re riding your white horse around, gathering up lost children?”

“Don’t you think there’s a hole in somebody’s heart because that child is gone? Did you
ever
hear of a Cherokee child that nobody cared about?”

“But somebody cares about her now, too. That mother who found her.”

Annawake’s eyes register a cloud of doubt, but she asks, “Finders keepers? Is that fair?”

“Not for wallets. Maybe for kids.”

“You and I could have been lost children. I very nearly was. What would you be, without the tribe?”

Franklin, avoiding her eyes, looks out his office window, which
reveals the highway to Muskogee. Along with the sound of tanker trucks there is the crazy music of a meadowlark on a telephone wire. Franklin has a powerful, physical memory of the time he ran out of gas on I-40 at age nineteen, a mixed-up kid playing hooky from university, driving home to see his mother. He coasted into a Chevron station laughing at his good luck. It took him a minute to realize the place was boarded up, the nozzles padlocked to the pumps. All around him were fields of oil derricks, and he was on empty. But the fields were so beautiful, and a meadowlark above him on the wire was singing its head off, and Franklin still couldn’t stop laughing at his good luck.

She asks, “What did you mean when you said, trying to hang on to what little there is left? You think we’re that pitiful?”

Franklin is embarrassed, and reaches for his meadowlark: the memory, at least, of right-mindedness. “I used to feel about this place the way you do,” he says. “That the Nation is spiritually indestructible, because the birds in the woods don’t care who owns the title to the land. And you’re right, belonging to this tribe gave me a reason to stop chasing girls and show up for Judicial Process classes. But I’ve been a lawyer so long now I mainly just see how people fight and things get used up.”

Annawake stares at him, and Franklin wishes she were less beautiful. A treacherous thought, for many different reasons. “It’s such a terrible long shot,” he says. “There may be nothing at all, no relatives, no proof.”

“I know,” Annawake says gently, the same way Pollie would, the way women talk to men: I know, honey. Relax.

“You’ll probably lose what you put into it,” he tells her. “I want to give you free rein, but it’s also my business to look after the investments of time in this office.”

“The Native American Law conference starts on the fifteenth, so I have to be in Tucson anyway, to give my paper. That’s where she lives, Tucson. I can just go by and talk to the mother, see what her story is. No big investment.”

“No matter what her story is, a lot of hearts are involved.”

“I know,” Annawake says again, but this is one thing Franklin doesn’t believe she can truly know. She isn’t a mother.

“Can you tell me why you’re sure this is the best thing?”

She presses her curved lips together, thinking. “In law school I slept in the library pretty often. There was a couch in the women’s lounge. After I pass my bar exams they’re probably going to put up a plaque there. The Annawake Fourkiller Couch.”

Franklin smiles. He finds he can picture it.

“People thought my life was so bleak. And I guess it was, so far from home, hearing the ambulances run by all night to the hospital, somebody cracked up or beat up or old and dumped out by their family, and laws jumping up and down in my head. But I always dreamed about the water in Tenkiller. All those perch down there you could catch, any time, you know? A world of free breakfast, waiting to help get you into another day. I’ve never been without that. Have you?”

“No,” he admits. Whether or not he knew it, he was always Cherokee. The fish were down there, for him as much as for Annawake.

“Who’s going to tell that little girl who she is?”

Franklin wants to say, “She will have other things,” but he can’t know this for certain. Franklin wears a Seiko watch and looks as Cherokee as Will Rogers or Elvis Presley or the eighty thousand mixed-blood members of his Nation, yet he knows he isn’t white because he can’t think of one single generalization about white people that he knows to be true. He can think of half a dozen about Cherokees: They’re good to their mothers. They know what’s planted in their yards. They give money to their relatives, whether or not they’re going to use it wisely. He rotates his chair a little. On his desk is an ugly little duck-shaped paper-clip holder his kids gave him as a present. He told Annawake once that it was his spirit guide. She didn’t laugh.

“Okay,” he says finally, “I trust your judgment on where to go with this.”

Annawake’s mouth moves into its most irresistible presentation, the strange upside-down grin. Her eyes are laughing, not at him, but at something. Crazy chances. “Thanks, boss,” she says, standing up, touching his desk. “While I’m in Arizona I’ll see if I can find me a big white horse.”