Pigs in Heaven (9 page)

Annawake sits still.

“And now that she’s a cute little adorable child and gets famous and goes on television, now you want her back.”

“This has nothing to do with Turtle being on television. Except that it brought her to our attention.” Annawake looks away and thinks about her tone. Lawyer words will not win any cases in this kitchen. She is not so far from Oklahoma. “Please don’t panic. I’m only telling you that your adoption papers may not be valid because you didn’t get approval from the tribe. You need that. It might be a good idea to get it.”

“And what if they won’t give it?”

Annawake can’t think of the right answer to that question.

Taylor demands, “How can you possibly think this is in Turtle’s best interest?”

“How can you think it’s good for a tribe to lose its children!”
Annawake is startled by her own anger—she has shot without aiming first. Taylor is shaking her head back and forth, back and forth.

“I’m sorry, I can’t understand you. Turtle is my daughter. If you walked in here and asked me to cut off my hand for a good cause, I might think about it. But you don’t get Turtle.”

“There’s the child’s best interest and the tribe’s best interest, and I’m trying to think of both things.”

“Horseshit.” Taylor turns away, facing the window.

Annawake speaks gently to her back. “Turtle is Cherokee. She needs to know that.”

“She knows it.”

“Does she know what it means? Do
you?
I’ll bet she sees Indians on TV and thinks:
How
. Bows and arrows. That isn’t what we are. We have a written language as subtle as Chinese. We had the first free public school system in the world, did you know that? We have a constitution and laws.”

“Fine,” Taylor says, her eyes wandering over the front yard but catching on nothing.
We have a constitution too
, she thinks,
and it is supposed to prevent terrible unfairness
, but all she can remember is a string of words she memorized in eighth grade. “We the people,” she says out loud. She walks over to the sink and picks up a soup ladle, then puts it back down. The voice outside sings, “
I can’t feel it. You know they’re stealing it from me
.”

Annawake feels an afterimage of her niece’s egg belly under her hands. “I’m sure you’re a good mother,” she says. “I can tell that.”

“How can you tell? You march in here, you…” Taylor falters, waving a hand in the air. “You don’t know the first thing about us.”

“You’re right, I’m assuming. You seem to care about her a lot. But she needs her tribe, too. There are a lot of things she’ll need growing up that you can’t give her.”

“Like what?”

“Where she comes from, who she is. Big things. And little things, like milk, for instance. I’ll bet she won’t drink milk.”

Taylor picks up the ladle again and bangs it against the metal sink, hard, then puts it down again. “You’ve got some Goddamn balls,
telling me who my kid is. I’d like to know where you were three years ago when she was on death’s front stoop.”

“I was in law school, trying to learn how to make things better for my nation.”

“We the people, creating a more perfect union.”

Annawake offers no response.

“This here is my nation and I’m asking you to leave it.”

Annawake stands up. “I’m sorry this hasn’t been a more friendly meeting of minds. I hoped it would be. I’d still like to see Turtle.” She leaves her card on the table, a small white rectangle embossed with red letters and the seal of the Cherokee Nation. “I think it would be good for her to talk about her heritage.”

Taylor says nothing.

“Okay. Well, I’m in town till Monday. I’d like to meet her. Should I come back tomorrow maybe? After dinner?”

Taylor closes her eyes.

“Thanks for the coffee.”

Taylor walks to the front door, holds it open, and watches the visitor pick her way through the fallen fruit in the yard. Annawake finds the keys in her pocket and stands for a second with her hand on the car door.

Taylor shouts, “She loves milk. We buy it by the gallon.”

Annawake’s rental is a low-slung blue Chrysler that gives her some trouble backing out. It wobbles and crunches its way down the rutted drive, headed back toward town.

Taylor stands on the porch, arms crossed, witnessing the retreat. The words “a more friendly meeting of minds” are smacking like angry pentup bees against the inside of her head.

High overhead in the apricot branches the taped music has reached its end, and gone quiet. One by one the birds emerge from the desert and come back to claim their tree.

U
NCLE
L
EDGER WOULD SAY
, “Once you have ridden a horse, you should know what a horse is.” So it bothers Annawake that when she stands for the second time in front of the little rock house where Turtle stays she sees things she could swear were not there before. An odd stone tower at the end of the pitched roof, for instance, the kind of thing the white people in storybooks would hold prisoners in, or crazy aunts.

Of course, last time she was nervous. And watching a woman up a tree. Now there is only a skinny man in black jeans sitting on the porch steps. He’s staring at his hands, which seem to be dozing on his knees, a pair of colossal, torpid spiders.

“Hi,” Annawake tries. She stands with her own hands in her pockets, waiting for some kind of offer. “I’m Annawake,” she adds.

“Oh, believe me, I know that.” He seems to be rousing himself from his thoughts, very slowly, with a lot of effort, as if coming out of hibernation. “Where are my manners?” he says finally in a voice deep with despair, or the South. “Sit down here on this dirty old porch.”

The stone step is broad and slumped like the gateway to some
ancient wonder of the world. When she sits, it bleeds coolness into her thighs, a feeling of dampness. “Are you the musician?”

“Jax,” he says, nodding a couple of times, as if barely convinced that this is his actual name.

“I heard your work yesterday. From that tree.”

“It terrified the birds, I hear. I think I’ve found my market.” Jax picks up a green apricot the size of a golf ball and flings it toward the cardboard owl in the treetops. It misses by a generous margin.

“Maybe. I liked your music all right,” she says. She throws an apricot and hits the owl with a loud pop, causing it to shudder and list on its branch.

“Jesus,” he says. Jax throws again, this time aiming for the trunk, and nicks the side. Annawake follows quickly, hitting the spot where his shot bounced off.

He looks at her sideways. With his dark brows and glint of gold earring, he resembles a pirate. “Is this one of those visitations? Are you about to reveal the meaning of my life?”

Annawake doesn’t feel she ought to laugh. “I used to be kind of good at this throwing game we have,
sgwalesdi
. It’s just a coincidence, I’m not that good at everything.”

“If you are, I don’t want to hear about it.”

“I don’t know the meaning of your life.”

“Good. Because I’m not ready to hear it. Takes the fun away, you know? Like when you’re reading a good book and somebody says, ‘Oh, that’s a great one, did he get hit by the train yet?’ ”

Annawake smiles. She’s noticed that the house is truly run-down by social-service standards, worse than some things she’s seen in the Cherokee Nation, and accepts that this could be used to her advantage. Toward the west, the desert rises up to meet the splintered rock peaks of the Tucson Mountains. Annawake shades her eyes to look at the descending sun. It’s an effort for her not to shove the conversation forward. “I can see why you’d want to live out here,” she says. “Out of the city.”

“Oh, well, that’s a very sad story. I got kicked out of the city of Tucson. They have an ordinance against Irascible Babies.”

“Who?”

“My band. We all used to live together in a chicken house, downtown. But by some estimates we were too loud.”

“Why would they have a chicken house downtown?”

“It wasn’t, anymore. They’d closed it down because of the smell. I’m telling you, it’s a very intolerant town.”

This boyfriend is nothing that Annawake planned on. She’s surprised to find him so serene and obliging, though she knows she may be mistaken. He may simply be in a coma. “Jacks is short for Jackson?”

“No, with an X.” He makes a cross with his marvelously long index fingers. “Short for nothing. My mother was one of the best-known alcoholics in the French Quarter of New Orleans. I was named after a venerated brand of beer.”

“You’re named after Jax Beer?”

He nods morosely. “Somewhere in this world I have a sister named Hurricane. I’m telling you the God’s honest truth.”

“You don’t know where she is?”

“Mother nor sister. If they are even on this earth.”

“Damn. I used to think all you needed was white skin to have an easy life,” Annawake says.

“I used to wish I was an Indian. I shaved my head one time and wore beads and made everybody call me Soaring Elk.”

Annawake looks at him, and this time she does laugh. “You’re not a Soaring Elk.”

Jax studies his sneakers. “I could use a more meaningful name, though, don’t you think? Something athletic. Maybe Red Ball Jets.”

For a minute they regard their four shoes lined up on the step. Jax’s trashed-out hightops look oversized and tragic, whereas Annawake’s moccasins are perfect: stitched suede, the burnished red of iron-oxide soils in Oklahoma.

“Cool moccasins,” Jax observes. “They look brand new.”

“They are. I have to buy them out here. Nobody in Oklahoma wears moccasins anymore.”

“No?”

She shakes her head. “The ones they sell to tourists at the Cherokee Heritage Center are made by this hippie in Albuquerque.”

Jax sighs. “What is this world coming to?”

Suddenly, noticeably, the failing sunlight turns golden and benevolent. The cacti lit from behind glow with halos of golden fur, and Jax’s and Annawake’s faces and limbs seem similarly blessed. After a minute the light changes again, to flat dusk.

“They’re gone, aren’t they?” Annawake finally asks.

“Yep.”

“How gone?”

Jax ponders the question. “She packed all Turtle’s clothes. All of her books. She picked about two hundred green apricots and laid them out on the shelf behind the backseat hoping they’d ripen. When they pulled out of here it looked like the Joads.”

Annawake has to think awhile to place the Joads, and then remembers
The Grapes of Wrath
, from high school English. White people fleeing the dust bowl of Oklahoma, ending up as fruit pickers in California. They think they had it bad. The Cherokees got marched out of their homelands
into
Oklahoma.

“No forwarding address, I guess.”

Jax smiles.

“She manages an automotive place downtown, right? For a woman named Mattie, who must be a friend because she couldn’t come to the phone when I called. You’re lucky to have a mechanic in the family.”

“Good work, Sherlock, only, A, even if Taylor were a mechanic she’d probably tell me to fix my own car. And B, she’s not one. It used to be mainly a tire store, but Taylor hates tires so when they branched into auto parts Mattie let her take over the muffler and fanbelt side of the enterprise.”

“I guess she had vacation time saved up.”

“Nobody down there exactly punches a clock,” Jax says. “It’s a nice outfit. Kind of sixties Amish. They take in strays.”

“Like Turtle?”

“Like Central American refugees. Could I remind you that you
are the engineer of my recent wrecked life? Is this an official interrogation?”

“I’m sorry. No. I can get the information some other way, if you’d like me to go now and leave you alone.”

“Left alone is exactly what I have been,” Jax says. He’s quiet long enough for Annawake to hear air moving around them.

“Mattie loves Taylor like a son,” he says suddenly. “So you’re going to end up talking to the air compressors down there. Don’t waste your time.”

“But you can’t tell me where she’s gone, I don’t suppose.”

“You suppose correctly.”

They both watch as the sun touches the mountains. The horizon is softly indented as if the landscape had been worn down right there, like the low spot in the center of an old marble step, by the repeated tread of sunset. The red ball collapses, then silently hemorrhages into the surrounding clouds.

“I may get phone calls now and again, to let me know they’re all right. But there is no forwarding address.”

“Well, thanks for being honest,” Annawake says.

Jax laces his fingers behind his head and cracks some junction of his bones with a resounding pop. “I do a lot of wicked things to my body, but I never perjure it.”

“Wise choice,” she says. “Only we’re not in court.”

“So are they really in trouble? Is this going to be a James Dean kind of situation where the Cherokee Nation chases them down to the riverbank and shines the lights in their eyes and finally they surrender?”

Annawake says, “No.”

“Could I have that in writing?”

“You haven’t told me anything, but you’ve been very nice about it, so I’ll be honest with you. The Cherokee Nation isn’t pursuing this case, I am. The thing is full of holes. I don’t know how we can prove Turtle is Cherokee, unless some relatives come forward on the Nation. And even if that happens, I’m not positive the tribe’s Child Welfare Department would take her from Taylor. Or even if they
should
.”

“What does the law say?”

“The law says we can take her. There have been kids who were with adoptive parents five, ten years, that the Indian Child Welfare Act has brought back to their tribe, because the adoptions were illegal.”

“Wow. That’s radioactive.”

“It’s hard for someone outside of our culture to understand, I guess. To see anything more sacred than Mom and Dad and little red baby makes three.”

“What do you see?”

Annawake hesitates. “First choice? I’d rather have seen her go into a Cherokee home, with relatives, that’s always the best thing. But we can’t always get first choice. And now that she’s been taken out, it’s way complicated. My boss thinks I’m on the warpath. Annawake Crazy Horse.”

“Are you?”

“Well, sure. Taylor should have gotten permission from the tribe. And Turtle should have connections with her people. She should know…” Annawake pauses, corrects her aim. “There are ways of letting her know about who she is. My position is essentially neutral. I have information Taylor could use.”

“Neutral snootral. You know that thing they say about getting between a mother bear and her cub? Annie dear,
you
might think you’re just out picking blueberries, but that’s highly irrelevant to Mama Bear.”

“I accept your point.”

A small breeze seems to come right up out of the ground, stirring the tree branches in every direction. Voices drift down from the large stone house on the hill, fragments of laughter, and a chorus of bird chatter rises from the mesquite thicket. Annawake listens to the bird music, identifying some of its individual parts: the monotonous croon of a dove, a woodpecker’s laugh, and stitched through it all, the intermittent shriek of crickets. She stops listening so closely then, preferring the whole song to any of its solo voices.

Jax slaps his knee abruptly. “Damn this,” he says.

“I agree.”

“You don’t know the half of it, listen. Taylor is the woman my mama used to tell me to save myself for. I swear, I kind of wish I had. You ever feel that way about a person?”

“Not one person, no,” Annawake says. She doesn’t have to think about it.

“Well, then, maybe you can’t understand what I’m going through. If I went in and played it on the piano, you’d understand. You’d say, This Jax, boy, I think he going to lie down here and die if that woman stays away past the fourth of July.”

The clouds in the western sky are still lit brightly on their undersides like the yellowy-silver bellies of fish, but overhead some stars are out. “There you go,” Jax tells Annawake. “That’s Venus, the goddess of love. Don’t ask me why she comes out at eight o’clock when people are still washing their supper dishes.”

“Prime time,” Annawake says. Listening to Jax encourages free association.

“You bet.”

“You know the thing that first really got my attention about this case?”

Jax says, “The sheer awesome height of Hoover Dam.”

“No, I missed that part of the show, believe it or not. What got me interested is that her story doesn’t square up. On TV she said Turtle was a foundling, more or less. That some Cherokee woman handed her this kid in a coffee shop. But the records show two parents who voluntarily gave Turtle up.”

“Did anyone ever tell you that you, personally, are beautiful beyond the speed of light?”

She stares at Jax for a minute, then laughs. “In those words, no.”

“Just wondering. Could I kiss you?”

“Is this a diversionary tactic?”

“Yes, more or less. Although I’d probably have a good time.”

“Your heart’s not in it, Jax. Nice try, though.”

“Thank you.”

“So apparently, from what I’ve found out, the story of the
foundling in the coffee shop is the true one. Strange but true. They fixed up that adoption, didn’t they?”

“Righty-o.”

“Why?”

“Well, you know. You need papers in this big old world. Some social worker here in Tucson figured out that legalwise Taylor’s goose was cooked, finding the birth parents was hopeless. So she put her onto some official in Okie City that apparently is not obsessed with the long arm of the law. Taylor went back there with two friends that posed as Turtle’s parents.”

“So Steven and Hope Two Two are a fraud.”

Jax runs a hand through his ragged hair. “You’d already figured that out, don’t play Little Bo Peep. But you’ll never find Steven and Hope; they were Guatemalans without papers and they’ve disappeared into America the beautiful. And the guy that approved the adoption, he was old, Taylor says. He’s probably retired. There couldn’t be a whole lot of brownie points involved in nailing him now.”

She understands suddenly what Jax is doing, and admires it: he is neither obliging nor comatose, he’s protecting the people he loves. He has learned much more from her than she from him. She feels some lawyerly chagrin. “I’m not necessarily looking to nail people,” she says.

“You’re a good shot, Ms. Fourkiller. Maybe you should just make sure you’re not loaded.”

“I want to do the best thing for the most people.”

“She loves Turtle, that’s one thing you should know. She would jump off Hoover Dam herself for that kid, headfirst. Me, the great Jax, she
enjoys
, but Turtle she loves. She didn’t exactly have to meditate before she walked out of here. It was no contest.” He looks at her, his eyes luminous and hard, and then back at the mountains. For the first time Annawake notices his strange profile: a perfectly straight line from his forehead to the end of his nose. She finds it beautiful and disturbing. She clamps her hands tightly between her
knees, shivering a little. The temperature has dropped unbelievably, as it will when the desert loses the sun.