Pigs in Heaven Page 7

  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.

  7

  A World of Free Breakfast

  THE 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."

  8

  A More Perfect Union

  TAYLOR SITS ON THE FRONT porch steps, hugging her knees, glowering at the indifferent apricot tree. It's an old knotty thing planted long ago when the house was new, and rarely bears anymore. But this summer it has hit on some prolific internal cycle to bring the neighborhood a bonanza of apricots--and birds.

  "If they'd all get together and eat the fruit off one side of the tree, I wouldn't grudge them," she tells Lou Ann. "But they just peck a little hole in each one and wreck it."

  Lou Ann looks mournful in spite of her outfit of lime-green Lycra. In ten minutes she has to go lead the Saturday-morning Phenomenal Abdominals class at Fat Chance. She's come over to Taylor's porch to wait for her ride. "I thought Jax was going to make a scarecrow," she says.

  "He did." Taylor points at a cardboard cutout of a great horned owl in the top of the tree. It has realistic eyes and a good deal of feather detail, but is hard to recognize because of all the finches perched on it.

  "Poor Turtle," says Lou Ann, sadly.

  "This kills me. Have you ever seen her make a fuss before over something to eat, ever, before this? And now all of a sudden she loves apricots. But she won't eat one if it's got a
hole pecked in it."

  "I don't blame her, Taylor. Who wants to eat after a bird? There's probably bird diseases."

  Cicadas scream brightly from the thorn scrub around the house. It's a shimmering day, headed for a hundred degrees. Taylor picks up a rock and throws it through the center of the apricot tree, raising a small commotion of brown feathers. They immediately settle again. The birds turn their heads sideways, wet beaks shining, bead eyes fixed on Taylor. Then they return to the duty of gorging themselves.

  "Granny Logan used to say she was going to take my school picture and set it out in the cornfield to scare the crows."

  "Your Granny Logan ought to be shot," Taylor suggests.

  "Too late, she's dead." Lou Ann puts her hands behind her neck and knocks off a few quick sit-ups on the floor of the porch. Her curtain of bobbed blond hair flaps against the lime-colored sweatband. "I should get Cameron...to come over here and...stand under the tree," she puffs between sit-ups. "That'd scare them off."

  Cameron John is Lou Ann's recurring boyfriend, and it's a fact that he is scary in several ways. He has dreadlocks down to his waist, for example, and a Doberman pinscher with gold earrings in one of its ears. But Taylor expects the birds would perceive Cameron's true nature and flock to him like St. Francis of Assisi. She can picture his dreadlocks covered with sparrows. She tosses another rock just as her neighbor, Mr. Gundelsberger, comes out of his house across the way. The rock lands near his feet. He stops short with his heels together, looks at the rock in an exaggerated way, then pulls his handkerchief out of the pocket of his gray flannel pants and waves it over his head.

  "Peace," he shouts at Taylor. "No more the war."

  "It's a war against the birds, Mr. G.," Taylor says. "They're winning."

  He comes over and stands directly under the tree, shading his eyes and peering up into the branches. "Ach," he says. "What you need is a rahdio in the tree."

  "A rodeo?" Lou Ann asks, incredulous. Her ex-husband was a rodeo rider. She could picture him roping birds, he was that small-minded.