Pigs in Heaven Read online

  "No, a rahdio." Mr. Gundelsberger holds his fist against his ear with one finger pointed up. "Transistor."

  "A radio!" Lou Ann and Taylor say at the same time. Taylor asks, "Really?"

  "Rock and roll," Mr. Gundelsberger says, nodding firmly. "You try it, you will see. Rock and roll will keep da birds off da peach."

  Lou Ann grabs her bag and sprints down the stone steps in her waffle-soled cross trainers. She waves at Taylor as she and Mr. Gundelsberger pull out of the drive in his Volvo. He often gives her a ride downtown, since his jeweler's shop is only two blocks from Fat Chance.

  Mr. G. moved in just a few months ago. His daughter, a locally famous artist who goes by the name of Gundi, has for years owned this whole little colony of falling-down stone houses in the desert at the edge of town. In bygone days it was a ranch; the gravel drive that leads uphill from the main road is still marked with an iron archway that reads RANCHO COPO. The first time Jax brought her out here, they sat on his roof and he told Taylor a wild tale about fertility rites and naming the ranch Copo to get the cows to copulate. Since then she's discovered it means "Ranch of the Snowflake," which frankly makes less sense than cow copulation. But it's an enviable place to live. Taylor heard of it even before she met Jax. People get on waiting lists to move out here, once they've been approved by Gundi.

  Gundi lives in the big hilltop house, where she displays her huge abstract paintings on the stone walls of what was once the ranch hands' dining hall. All the other houses are small and strange: some have no heating or cooling; one has an outdoor bathroom. Jax's is tiny but has a weird stone tower on its southern end. The places rent for almost nothing. Taylor has noticed that a lot of the people who live here are musicians, or have Ph.D.s in odd things.

  Before Rancho Copo, Taylor and Turtle lived downtown in a more conventional rundown house with Lou Ann and her baby. Lou Ann took them in when they first arrived in Tucson, and Taylor still feels a debt. She wouldn't move in with Jax until Gundi had also approved Lou Ann as Rancho Copo material.

  Taylor goes in the house and rummages through the studio Jax has created in his bell tower. He says the acoustics are Christian. There isn't a lot of floor space, but the shelves on the four narrow walls go all the way up. She drags the ladder from wall to wall, certain that in all this mess of electronics he must have a transistor radio, but she can't find one. She brings down a portable tape player instead, and one of Jax's demo tapes. She's decided to try out the Irascible Babies on a new audience.

  Annawake bumps up the long gravel drive in her rented car until she's stopped by the sight of a woman in a tree. She can't be sure from the legs that it's the same woman she saw on Oprah Winfrey, but the address seems right so she parks and gets out. The ground is covered with spoiled fruits and hard pits that hurt the soles of her feet through her moccasins. She shouts into the branches, "Hello, I'm looking for Taylor Greer."

  "You've found her, and she's up a tree." Taylor is using a rope to attach a boom box to an upper limb. "You just stay right there. To tell you the truth I prefer the ground."

  A thunderous bass line begins to pound through the leaves. Annawake watches the woman's sneakers step down the cross-hatched ladder of limbs, then hang for a second, then drop. At ground level she's a few inches shorter than Annawake and maybe a few years younger, with long brown hair and unsuspicious eyes. She slaps the thighs of her jeans a few times, looks at the palm of her right hand, and extends it.

  "Annawake Fourkiller," Annawake says, shaking Taylor's hand. "I'm from Oklahoma, in town for a professional meeting. You've got some pretty country out here."

  Taylor smiles at the mountains, which at this hour of the morning look genuinely purple. "Isn't it? Before I came here I didn't expect so many trees. The only difference between here and anywhere else is that here everything's got thorns."

  "Tough life in the desert, I guess. Be prickly or be eaten."

  Taylor has to raise her voice now to compete with Jax, who is singing loudly from the treetops. "You want to talk? Come in and I'll shut the door so we can hear ourselves think."

  Annawake follows Taylor inside, through a narrow stone hallway that barely accommodates an upright piano, which they squeeze past into the kitchen. The walls there are cool slant faces of slate. Annawake sits at a wooden table, whose legs are painted four different colors; she thinks of Millie and Dell fixing the table at home, and the new baby ruling the roost now. Taylor is putting water on for coffee.

  "So, what did you kill four of, if I may ask?"

  Annawake smiles. This is the woman she saw on TV--she recognizes the confidence. "It's a pretty common Cherokee surname."

  "Yeah? Is there a story?"

  "The story is, when my great-great-grandfather first encountered English-speaking people, that's the name he got. He had four kids, so he'd carved four notches in his rifle barrel--it was something they did back then. Out of pride, I guess, or maybe to help remind them how much game to bring home every day. But the white guys took it to mean he'd shot four men." Annawake glances at Taylor. "I guess Grandpa never set them straight."

  Taylor smiles, catching the slender, almost dangerous thing that has passed between them. She clatters coffee mugs and pours black grounds into the filter. "Your accent makes me homesick. I know it's Okie, but to me it doesn't sound that far off from Kentucky."

  "I was just thinking that," Annawake says. "You sound like home to me. Almost. There's a difference but I can't name it."

  Taylor stands by the stove and for a while neither woman speaks. Taylor takes in Annawake's appearance: her black brush of hair all seems to radiate out from a single point, the widow's peak in her forehead. Her skin is a beautiful pottery color you want to touch, like Turtle's. She's wearing a maroon cotton shirt with blue satin ribbons stitched on the yoke and shoulder seams. Taylor fiddles with the gas burner. They listen to a long guitar riff and Jax's voice coming from outside:

  "Big boys...play games. Their toys...follow me home. Big boys play games, big bang, you're gone..."

  Annawake raises an eyebrow.

  "That's my boyfriend's band." Taylor looks out the window. "Hey, it's working. No birds."

  "Is this some kind of experiment?"

  Taylor laughs. "You must think I'm cracked. I'm trying to keep the birds out of the apricot tree. My little girl likes apricots more than anything living or dead, and she's the kind of kid that just doesn't ask for much. I've been going out of my head trying to think how to get the birds out of the fruit."

  "My grandma planted mulberry trees next to her peach trees. The birds liked the mulberries better. They'd sit in the mulberry and laugh, thinking they were getting away with something good, and leave all the peaches for us."

  "No kidding," Taylor says. "Wish I'd thought of that twenty years ago."

  "Your daughter. That's Turtle, the apricot lover?"

  "That's right."

  After another long minute of quiet, the teakettle begins to rattle. Taylor lifts it and pours hissing water into the coffee grounds. "She's not here at the moment. She'll be real surprised when she comes back and sees those birds gone." Taylor smiles down at the counter in a way that surprises Annawake because it is almost timid. Private. It passes, and Taylor looks back at Annawake. "Jax took her and a neighbor kid to see these two new rhinoceroses they got in at the zoo. He and Turtle are trying to write a song about endangered species."

  "What's the story of that name?"

  "What, Turtle? Well, not as good as yours. It's just a nickname more or less, because of her personality. Turtle is...well, she holds on. From the time she was little she'd just grab me and not let go. In Kentucky where I grew up, people used to say if a snapping turtle gets hold of you it won't let go till it thunders. Do you take cream or anything?"

  "Black, please."

  "That's the story," she says, serving Annawake and sitting down opposite. "There's not much about us that hasn't been in the papers already. To tell you the truth, I think we're storied out. No o
ffense, but we're hoping to just get back to normal."

  Annawake shakes her head slightly.

  "You're a reporter, right? I just assumed you saw us on TV. You said you're here for some kind of a journalist convention?"

  Annawake holds her coffee mug in both hands and takes a sip. "I'm sorry, I've misled you," she says carefully, one phrase at a time. "I did see you on television, but I'm not a reporter. I'm an attorney. I'm in town for a Native American Law conference."

  "A lawyer? I never would have guessed a lawyer."

  "Well, thanks, I guess. I work in an office that does a lot of work for the Cherokee Nation. That's what I want to talk with you about. Turtle's adoption might not be valid."

  Taylor's cup stops an inch from her lips, and for nearly half a minute she does not appear to breathe. Then she puts down the cup. "I've been through all this already. The social worker said I needed adoption papers, so I went to Oklahoma City and I got papers. If you want to see, I'll go get them."

  "I've already looked at the records. That's the problem, it wasn't done right. There's a law that gives tribes the final say over custody of our own children. It's called the Indian Child Welfare Act. Congress passed it in 1978 because so many Indian kids were being separated from their families and put into non-Indian homes."

  "I don't understand what that has to do with me."

  "It's nothing against you personally, but the law is crucial. What we've been through is a wholesale removal."

  "Well, that's the past."

  "This is not General Custer. I'm talking about as recently as the seventies, when you and I were in high school. A third of all our kids were still being taken from their families and adopted into white homes. One out of three."

  Taylor's eyes are strangely enlarged. "My home doesn't have anything to do with your tragedy," she says. She gets up and stands at the window, looking out.

  "I don't mean to scare you," Annawake says quietly. "But I want you to have some background on the problem. We need to make sure our laws are respected."

  Taylor turns around and faces Annawake, her hair wheeling. "I didn't take Turtle from any family, she was dumped on me. Dumped. She'd already lost her family, and she'd been hurt in ways I can't even start to tell you without crying. Sexual ways. Your people let her fall through the crack and she was in bad trouble. She couldn't talk, she didn't walk, she had the personality of--I don't know what. A bruised apple. Nobody wanted her." Taylor's hands are shaking. She crosses her arms in front of her chest and slumps forward a little in the manner of a woman heavily pregnant.

  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.

  9

  The Pigs in Heaven

  UNCLE LEDGER 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 comin
g 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."