Pigs in Heaven Page 12

  "Your daughter's not."

  "Might as well be."

  "Well then, what about your other daughter, the one that died--how about her baby?"

  When Cash first knew Rose, she made herself so comfortable in his bed that he felt safe telling her family stories. Now he regrets it. "She's gone," he says.

  "A baby ain't made with disappearing ink, Cash."

  "You read about it in the papers ever day," he tells her, but he knows this is a lie. A mother might drive her car into the river on purpose, but still there will be a basket of outstretched hands underneath her children, or should be. It's the one thought in Cash's mind that never lights and folds its wings.

  "I waited my whole life away down there in the Nation," he tells Rose. "Where nobody is nothing but poor. When my wife died, seem like I'd been waiting out something that wasn't coming. At least in Jackson Hole people have something."

  "You and me don't have any of it."

  "No, but we're right next door to it," he says, standing up to throw vegetables into hot water. "Maybe some of it will fall off the tree."

  At one o'clock exactly, Rose whips off the patterned headscarf she has to wear in the window and scoops little cascades of clicking beads back into their plastic vials, careful to let none escape onto the plank floor. Mr. Crittenden allows Rose to go to lunch with Cash if they go late, after what he imagines to be the noontime rush. The truth is there is no rush, just a slow, steady dribble. Jackson Hole has a hundred Indian trading posts, and most of them have better gimmicks than a tired mother of teenagers in the front window ruining her eyes.

  Rose wants to walk across town to the Sizzler for the salad bar, but Cash warns against it; a storm is cooking in the south. They stay close by at McDonald's just in case, taking the shortcut through the little flowered strip park on Main. While Rose talks and Cash doesn't listen, his mind counts pansies and ageratum: yellow, yellow, purple, purple, a beautiful, cast-off beaded belt of flowers stretched along the highway collecting dirt.

  "Foof," Rose says. "I don't see how it has any business being this muggy." While they wait for traffic she reaches back to adjust something in the heel of her shoe. Rose is thirty-eight, the age his daughter Alma would be now if she had lived, and Cash realizes he treats Rose more like a daughter than a lady friend, cautioning about getting caught in the rain, clucking his tongue over the escapades of her boys. He wonders what she sees in him. Cash at least doesn't drink, or eat beads, but he knows he's getting old in a way that's hard to live with. It was a purely crazy thing for him to want to move up here two years ago. Oklahoma Cherokees never leave Oklahoma. Most don't even move two hickory trees away from the house where they were born.

  In line at McDonald's, he notices men looking at Rose. Not a lot, not for long, but they look. Cash they don't even see; he is an old Indian man no one would remember having just walked by. Not just because of three generations of tragedy in his family--even without cancer and suicide and a lost grandchild, those generations would have come to pass; he would have gotten old.

  "Just french fries and a chef salad today, hon, I'm on a diet," Rose says, flirting with the teenager at the register.

  Cash misses his wife with a blank pain in his chest, and he misses his sisters and cousins, who have known him since he was a strong, good-looking boy. Everyone back there remembers, or if they are too young, they've been told. The old ones get to hang on the sweet, perfect past. Cash was the best at climbing trees; his sister Letty won the story bees. The woman who married Letty's husband's brother, a beauty named Sugar, was spotted one time drinking a root beer and had her picture in Life magazine. They all know. Now she has thin hair and a humped back but she's still Sugar, she gets to walk around Heaven, Oklahoma, with everybody thinking she's pretty and special. Which she is. That's the trouble with moving away from family, he realizes. You lose your youth entirely, you have only the small tired baggage that is carried within the body.

  It shouldn't matter so much to Cash. He still has most of what he started with: a talent for schemes and friendship, and all of his hair. No one can ever hold a thing against Cash, except his restlessness. For thirty years, whenever Cash started talking like a white man, his wife would put extra food on his plate and turn her back tenderly and a little abruptly. After she got sick, Cash came untethered somehow, decided they needed to ride horses and see the Rocky Mountains. She died the year after they claimed she was cured: the doctor found no more cancer in her, and she only wanted to sit down and breathe out slowly and watch her grandbaby grow, but Cash danced her around the kitchen and swore he would show her the world. She told him television was a bad influence. Probably she was right. Like those white birds he's been seeing outside the window, it flashes its wings and promises whatever you want, even before you knew you wanted it.

  Rose has nabbed a spot for them in the crowded restaurant and clears a huge mess from the table; the previous people were probably foreigners who didn't know the McDonald's custom of dumping your own burger wrappers. "It's party time in Jackson, ain't it?" Rose asks over the din, plumping down in her chair.

  Cash nods. For nine months he trudged out on sidewalks dangerous with glassy shards of ice, the dirty snow piled deep and hopeless as a whole winter's worth of laundry. Now, for five or six weeks, the laundry is done. The streets swarm with people who will take their sunny raft trips and green-meadow pictures and spend the rest of their lives claiming Jackson Hole as one of the places they know.

  The couple at the next table are speaking some language. The woman has on little green cloth slippers that you'd think would have fallen apart long before they made it halfway to anywhere from overseas. Cash knows these women; they come into the store and go crazy over anything herbal, then they march straight over to the Trading Post and buy Cash's earrings, Rose tells him, three pairs at a time. The Indian look is evidently big in Europe, where they don't have any Indians. They ask Rose personal questions, thinking she is something exotic. The Americans are different, they edge around Rose in the store, not looking, as if her clothes were terribly stained and she didn't know. Sometimes they'll come close and snap a picture. Cash has witnessed this, and he has to hand it to her for the way she sits still, holding her tongue for once. The customers pile up their purchases by the register, dropping in one minute what it takes Cash three weeks to earn.

  "That guy mopping the floor has one cute butt," Rose states, fluffing her layers of dyed-black hair. "I feel like dropping a spoon or something just to see him pick it up."

  "Rose, you have to decide if I'm your boyfriend or your daddy. I can't do both."

  She flashes her eyes at him. "You know how much I love you, honey."

  Cash doesn't add anything to that. He is grateful that McDonald's doesn't give out spoons.

  "Just think," she says, "we could be in Paris, France or Hong Kong. They have McDonald's in every country in the world."

  "That's what I hear," Cash says, but he doesn't feel like he's in Paris, France, he feels like he's in McDonald's.

  "You seem depressed," Rose observes, and Cash wonders if that's what he is, after all. He thinks of the way you press dough down with your fist: take a big, round hopeful swelling and punch the rise right out of it. Yes, he thinks. Depressed.

  Cash is off work at last. For the last ten minutes of his shift a couple stood in line arguing over whether or not to buy some expensive peaches. Cash stood silently by, wishing they would take their marriage someplace else, but Tracey rolled her eyes in a way that could not be missed, and still the couple paid no attention. The man's T-shirt said THINK ONLY OF SURFING. It amazes Cash what people will advertise, as if convictions mean so little they can put on a new one each morning after a shower.

  The birds come every day now, mysteriously increasing their numbers overnight. Cash can see them right now as he walks down Main toward the Trading Post to pick up Rose. She has repeated to him the theory that pigeons are migrating here from Salt Lake City, to escape the falcons that are nesti
ng on the ledges of tall buildings there. The balance of nature is upside-down, Cash thinks: the predators are moving to the cities and city birds taking over the land where the buffalo roam. He finds he mistrusts the pigeons. One minute they flash their silver underwings all together, all one color, and the next, their white backs, changing from moment to moment like a card trick.

  This evening Mr. Crittenden wants to talk with him, a fact Cash dreads. He finally noticed that the beadwork Rose does in the store is nothing near the quality of what she brings in. Rose hedged, fearing she'd lose her job, but finally confessed it was made by her Cherokee friend. Mr. Crittenden wasn't angry, it turns out, but wants to meet Cash to ask about his methods. Cash has been in the store more than fifty times, but Mr. Crittenden never wanted to meet him before now.

  "Foof, it's muggy," says Rose when he walks into the store. "I wish that rain would get here and get over with. It's not the heat gets me, it's the humanity."

  Cash smiles. "That's the whole truth."

  "Mr. Big Shot stepped out. He'll be back in a minute."

  The cluster of tin bells over the door jingles behind Cash, but it's a customer, a tall, thin man wearing sandals and gray-speckled socks. He nods at Rose, who is at the register.

  "Take a look around," she tells him with a broad smile Cash understands, and dislikes. "Does it look like that storm is coming in? We need some rain. We haven't had rain in a long time." Cash grins. He likes Rose better now because she is speaking to Cash in code, saying, "This one is going to look at everything in the entire store, and then buy some postcards." When she asks, "You folks drive a long ways?" she's predicting a big buy. "Front case is all marked down, rock bottom" means "All the jewelry in Jackson won't help this homely soul."

  Cash stands near the window, looking out. He doesn't see the white birds but he knows they're up there still, moving in their rich, lazy wheel above it all, showing off, taking their freedom for granted. They aren't real birds like the ones he hunted in childhood, whose eggs he shimmied trees to snatch, birds who catch insects and build nests and feed their young. These are tourist birds. Like his own restless dreams that circle with no place to land.

  The man in sandals leaves finally, without even buying a postcard. "Yep, long drought," Cash says, and Rose laughs. The tin bells jingle again, and they look up to see the white cockaded head of Mr. Crittenden. They stop talking, but the quiet that has come in with him is heavier than an absence of talk. He acknowledges Cash, then stands for a minute with his hands resting on the glass jewelry case, his thin elbows angled out. He always wears a white shirt and black bolo tie. Rose is curious about whether he is married; Cash says, just look at the pressed shirts he wears to work, but Rose maintains he could afford to send them to the laundry, which is true. She's heard a rumor that he owns his own airport somewhere, and another rumor that he has cancer. Neither of them believes the cancer story. If he planned on dying anytime soon, why would he spend so much of his time counting beads?

  He nods at Cash again, and with a tight throat Cash follows him into the office, a small room crammed with ledgers and anthropology books and strange pets. Mr. Crittenden has seven or eight shrieking birds back there, and a python in a jewelry case half filled with dry sand. Rose warned Cash about the snake; she has to come in here to get her paychecks under its cool eye. The air chokes him with bird smells and loneliness. Mr. Crittenden gets down two large books that smell of dust. When he opens them, their insides are slick as white glass.

  "This is very old beadwork," he tells Cash. He slowly turns the pages of black-and-white photographs. "Do you recognize the patterns?"

  Cash does, some of them, but is afraid to admit to much, so he only nods or shakes his head at the photographs. While Mr. Crittenden turns the pages, a nervous gray bird in a cage near the window makes clicking sounds and picks at its neck as if it has a skin disease. Occasionally it raises its head and screams, and then the rest of the room rings with whistles and the scratch of dry feet on thin metal bars. Cash holds his air inside him for as long as he can between breaths.

  "This whole world of knowledge is being lost," Mr. Crittenden says, touching the page of his book as if he can feel the patterns. He leans his white head into the space between them, his blue eyes feverish, pink-edged.

  "Are the men the artists in your tribe?" he asks.

  Cash tries not to smile. "No, the women just let me pick it up a little."

  "Do your daughters know how to do this kind of work?"

  "They do it," Cash tells him, and it's true, they did, before Alma landed upside-down in the river and Sue landed in the hospital for the third or fourth time with a broken cheekbone and a few other presents from her boyfriend. But even before all the sadness, they didn't do beadwork in the picture-perfect way Mr. Crittenden surely imagines. Cash's daughters and nieces have perms and belong to Weight Watchers. If they make up a pair of earrings from time to time, it happens while they're on the phone with each other, laughing their deep smokers' laughs, criticizing their husbands' friends. Cash was never entirely in on the conversation, but still, that is the world he's sad to have lost.

  Mr. Crittenden sees Cash staring at the window. "That's a gray-tailed cockatoo. They used to be terrible pests in Australia. Wheat farmers shot them by the thousands. Now there aren't a great many of her kind left."

  But Cash had been thinking how sad it was there was not even a plant on the windowsill in here. Not one green thing that can sit in the sun and be quiet.

  The humidity rises all week. Friday afternoon feels weighted and endless, like the end of a life. By six, Cash feels desperate. He is back at the Trading Post again, waiting for Rose to finish up. Maybe they will go to a movie. Something to take his mind away from here for two hours. But Mr. Crittenden still hasn't come in to lock up and dole out his beads.

  "When was he in last?"

  Rose thinks. "Didn't he come at lunchtime?"

  "No, we just went."

  "That's right."

  Cash stands in the bay window, looking up at the birds he despises, wheeling in a tight, anxious circle. Tonight they seem to be looking for something--their own lost wishes. New York City, maybe. He smiles to himself.

  "His door's open," Rose says.

  "Maybe we should close it up and go."

  "Maybe we should go find where he keeps all the money."

  "Rose, I swear. Just close the door. I don't know how you listen to them parakeets all day, they would drive me insane." He watches the gathering storm. Man, you're already crazy, no driving needed, he thinks, just as Rose shouts: a tremulous, rising "Whooo?"

  Cash's shoulders tighten and he turns. "What is it?"

  "He's in here."

  Cash wonders instantly if Mr. Crittenden has been listening to their talk, to Rose's gossip. Her joke about taking his money! He tries to remember what other wild thing she might have said that could lose her job for her.

  "Cash," Rose says, her face white, her voice once again a rising note, and then he understands what it is. Mr. Crittenden has not heard a thing.

  Cash stays up late working on a beaded belt. He is tired, but can't imagine sleeping. He and Rose spent a long time repeating the details to each other, as if they'd been shipwrecked in some new place where only this event existed: the police said suicide, no question, he'd taken prescription sleeping pills and left his account books organized. There is a wife, it turns out; she lives in Rock Springs and probably had nothing to do with his shirts. Her instructions over the phone were to keep the store open for the rest of the season, if possible. A management company in town will see that Rose gets paid. Cash doubts that she will have the nerve to go back. The whole time the police were there she clutched her bosom and breathed as if she'd run a mile in those high heels.

  Cash wants to know things Rose hadn't even considered: who will come get the animals, for example? He doesn't favor the idea of her working under the same roof as a starving snake. And how long was Mr. Crittenden dead in there? He can't get
his mind's eye to stop staring at Mr. Crittenden blue at the mouth and fingertips, frozen in his last slump while three men turned him through the doors like furniture and carried him out of the store. Did he kill himself in the middle of the night, or at dawn? Cash wanted every single how and what, in order to muffle the sound of "Why?"

  Rose has taken the Valium the doctor gave her and gone to untroubled sleep in Cash's bed, leaving Cash alone with the bare light bulb and the wall calendar from Wickiup Hauling. The month of July shows families on a yellow river raft. They have cameras and bright-colored clothes and expressions of surprise, each mouth like a slack little rip in the face: they're coming into white water. He recognizes his own innocence, before he came up here. Now he knows enough about shining promises to wonder who sat by the river all day slapping mosquitoes to get this picture, and what he got paid for it. His knuckles ache because of the changing weather, and twice tonight he has lost plastic beads into the orange linoleum, which is curled up and cracked in places as if volcanoes planned to erupt from under his floor. "Let them go," he whispers aloud, but the habit of holding on to every small, bright bit of color is hard to forget.

  When he finally goes to bed he still doesn't rest, but has a dream about his dead wife. She is standing in the kitchen of their little crooked house in the woods, cutting up a hen for soup.

  "How come you won't turn around and face me?" he asks.

  "You turned loose of family," she says. "I have to turn my back on you."

  "Why even talk to me, then?" he asks.

  "I'm cooking for you, aren't I?"

  "Yes. But I'm afraid you hate me."

  "Why would I cook for you, then?"

  "I don't know," he says.

  "Pay attention to who takes care of you."

  She stirs the huge pot on the stove. Turning in the bubbling surface, Cash can see a dry tuft of Mr. Crittenden's white hair. His wife is very large. There is no roof on the kitchen, only a forest clearing and legs like trees. Her head looks like carved stone against the sky, a head he can't precisely recognize. It could as easily be his mother, or his daughter. "There's a hundred ways to love someone," her voice tells Cash. "All that matters is that you stay here in the same room."