Pigs in Heaven Page 9

  "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 clou
ds 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.

  Jax stands up and goes inside and stays for quite a while. She's uncertain whether this signifies the end of the interview. She hears a few dramatic nose blows, and then she can hear him singing quietly: "Be careful what you take, Anna Wake, be careful what you break." She decides that if he starts playing the piano she will leave, but he comes back out with his fingers hooked into the mouths of two slim brown bottles of beer.

  "Here," he says. "Let's have a party. Kennedy and Khrushchev drink to a better world." He sits beside her, very close, and she can feel his body heat through her jeans. Strangely, she feels comforted rather than threatened, as if Jax were one of her brothers. Possibly it's because she has only heard her brothers, and no other man before now, confess to her his absolute love for some other woman.

  Jax leans back on one elbow and begins pointing out constellations: Ursa Major, which Annawake has known since she could walk, and the Pleiades.

  "The what?"

  "Pleiades. Seven sisters."

  She takes a long pull on her beer and squints at the sky. "You people must have better eyes than we do. In Cherokee there are only six. The Six Bad Boys. Anitsutsa."

  "Anitsutsa?"

  "Yeah. Or disihgwa, the pigs. The Six Pigs in Heaven."

  "Excuse me but you're making this up."

  "No. There's a story about these six boys that wouldn't do their work. Wouldn't work in the corn, wouldn't fix their mothers' roofs, wouldn't do the ceremony chores--there's always stuff to be done at the ceremonial grounds, getting firewood and repairing shelters and things like that. They weren't what you'd call civic-minded."

  "And they got turned into pigs."

  "Now wait, don't jump ahead. It's their fault, they turned themselves into pigs. See, all they wanted to do, ever, was play ball and have fun. All day long. So their mothers got fed up. They got together one day and gathered up all the boys' sgwalesdi balls. It's a little leather ball about like this." Annawake holds up a green apricot. "With hair inside. Animal hair, human, whatever. And they put all the balls in the stewpot. They cooked them."

  "Yum, yum," says Jax.

  She throws the apricot, carefully aiming at nothing. "Okay. So the boys come home for lunch after playing around all morning, and their mothers say, 'Here's your soup!' They plop those soggy old cooked balls down on their plates. So the boys get mad. They say, 'Forget it, only a pig would eat this,' and they rush down to the ceremonial grounds and start running around and around the ball court, asking the spirits to listen, yelling that their mothers are treating them like pigs. And the spirits listened, I guess. They figured, 'Well, a mother knows best,' and they turned the boys into pigs. They ran faster and faster till they were just a blur. Their little hooves left the ground and they rose up into the sky, and there they are."

  "Holy crow," Jax says. "Your mom tell you that, when you wouldn't make your bed?"

  "My Uncle Ledger," she says. "There's a lot of different versions of all the stories, according to what mood you're in. But you're right, that's the general idea. The Pigs, and also Uktena, this big snake with horns--those are the Cherokee boogeymen. I was always very civic-minded when I lived with my uncle."

  "So that's your guiding myth. Do right by your people or you'll be a pig in heaven."

  Annawake thinks this over. "Yes. I had a hundred and one childhood myths, and they all added up more or less to 'Do right by your people.' Is that so bad?"

  "Myths are myths. They're good if they work for you, and bad if they don't."

  "What are yours?"

  "Oh, you know, I heard the usual American thing. If you're industrious and have clean thoughts you will grow up to be vice president of Motorola."

  "Do right by yourself."

  Jax finishes the last half of his beer in one swallow. She watches his Adam's apple with amazement. "You think Taylor's being selfish," he states.

  Annawake hesitates. There are so many answers to that question. "Selfish is a loaded word," she says. "I've been off the reservation, I know the story. There's this kind of moral argument for doing what's best for yourself."

  Jax puts his hands together under his chin and rolls his eyes toward heaven. "Honor the temple, for the Lord hast housed thy soul within. Buy that temple a foot massage and a Rolex watch."

  "I think it would be hard to do anything else. Your culture is one long advertisement for how to treat yourself to the life you really deserve. Whether you actually deserve it or not."

  "True," he says. "We all ought to be turned into pigs."

  Annawake's mouth forms a tight, upside-down smile. "Some of my best friends are white people."

  Jax goes limp, as if he's been shot.

  "We just have different values," she says. "Some people say religion is finding yourself, an
d some people say it's losing yourself in a crowd."

  Jax revives. "You can do that? Lose yourself?"

  "Oh, sure. At the dances."

  "Dancing?"

  "Not like American Bandstand, not recreational dancing, it's ceremonial. A group thing. It's church, for us."

  "I say po-tay-toes, and you say po-tah-toes." Jax lies flat on his back and balances his empty bottle on his stomach. It tilts a little when he breathes or talks. "And never the Twain shall meet, because he's dead." He laughs crazily and the bottle rolls off and clinks down the stone steps, but doesn't break. He sits up. "You're being kind of anisnitsa yourself, you know."

  "Anti-what?"

  "Anisnitsa. Isn't that what you said, for pig?"

  "Sihgwa."

  "Whatever. You're being one. In your own fashion."

  "I'm trying to see both sides."

  "You can't," Jax says. "And Taylor can't. It's impossible. Your definitions of 'good' are not in the same dictionary. There is no point of intersection in this dialogue."

  "Surely you don't think it's good for the tribe to lose its children? Or for Turtle to lose us? She's entitled to her legacy."

  "Her legacy at the moment may be green apricots for dinner."

  "What a thought. Did they have someplace to go?"

  Jax doesn't answer.

  "It's not a trick question."

  "Well, then, yes. The answer is yes. Right now they are someplace."

  "Please tell her I'm sorry if I'm the cause of this."

  "If you're the cause of this?"

  "You have to believe this much, the last thing I want is to put Turtle through more dislocation."

  Jax reaches down carefully and sets the beer bottle on its head. "Dislocation," he says.

  "You're the only connection between Turtle and me at this point, and," she waits for him to meet her eyes, "and I need that connection."

  "Don't look at me, Mama Bear," says Jax. "I'm just picking blueberries."

  10

  The Horses

  "TURTLE, DRINK YOUR MILK."

  Turtle's plate is a boneyard of grilled-cheese sandwich crusts. She picks up her full glass and drinks, holding a steady sidelong eye on Taylor. As soon as Taylor looks away, she sets down her glass.

  Angie Buster's diner is deserted. At four o'clock Angie declared that not even the starving Armenians would come out for a meal in this weather, and she went home to take a nap. Taylor and Turtle and Pinky the bulldog sit near the front window watching long knives of rain attack the ground at a hard slant. The first storm of the summer has blown in from Mexico, arousing the dust and dampening the Virgin of Guadalupe outside, causing her yellow bows to drop off one by one. Lucky is missing in action again. Angie isn't worried; it has only been half a day, and she says she can feel in her bones when it's going to be a long one. Her bones say this one isn't.