Pigs in Heaven (8 page)

T
AYLOR 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.

“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 offense, 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.