Pigs in Heaven

  "I sacrificed my shirt to a medical emergency," he whispers.

  She rolls her eyes as she wheels around and butts the kitchen door open with her hind end.

  "I should have seen it coming," Taylor says. "That Barbie was petty larceny waiting to happen. I can't believe how bad I've screwed up here, Jax. Seems like I've made every wrong turn a person could make."

  "You sound like a seven-car freeway pileup."

  "I am. I didn't even tell you yet, I lost the van-driving job. I couldn't work out the babysitting. They kept me on the substitute board, but I don't get called much. Now I'm a cashier in a department store. Ladies Intimate Apparel, to be exact. Six dollars an hour."

  "That's not so bad. Forty-eight dollars a day for selling undies. That's almost a thousand a month."

  "Very good, math whiz, except it isn't. They take out some for taxes and Social Security and this mandatory insurance plan that I can't even use yet for six months. I'll get around seven hundred a month."

  "Hey, that ought to melt away those unwanted pounds."

  "I figured out a budget: our rent is three hundred and ninety, so if you figure in water and electricity and gas--we haven't turned on the heat yet, so I don't know what that will be--but say five hundred total, for rent and utilities. Then another fifty a month to keep the car going so I can get to work. If we can get by on a hundred a month for food, that should leave fifty dollars for emergencies. But Jax, we just keep getting behind. I had a car-insurance payment come due, and then today my register turned up forty-four dollars short, and they say they're going to take that out of my paycheck. I'm thinking, what paycheck?"

  "That's robbery."

  "No, it probably was my fault. I get distracted trying to keep an eye on Turtle in the store. They have this special aftercare program at her school for low-income, I guess that's me, but even that costs three dollars a day. Sixty a month. I don't have it."

  "You're eating on twenty-five bucks a week?"

  "Yeah. One dollar a meal for the two of us, plus Turtle's milk money that she has to take to school. We're not eating too high off the hog, as Mama would say."

  "No, I'd say you were eating very low off the hog. I would say you are eating the hooves."

  "Jax, poverty sucks."

  "Can I quote you on that? Maybe a bumper sticker or something?"

  "I know you're not rich either, but it was different there, with you and me to split the rent, and Lou Ann always around for babysitting."

  "You should click your heels together and get your butt back home, Dorothy."

  "Oh, I forgot to tell you the funny part. Now they're telling me I need to dress better for work. My supervisor says jeans and T-shirt is not acceptable attire for a cashier in Ladies' Wear. I wanted to tell her to shove her underwired bras and transfer me to Auto Repair. But if I lose this job we'll be living downtown on a bench, or in our car, and that's no joke. I swear I've considered shoplifting from the juniors department."

  "Taylor, read my lips: Come home. I'll send you the money. I don't think this Annawake figure is going to come after you."

  "You don't think so?"

  "She seems more like the lurk-in-the-bushes and make-scary-noises type."

  Taylor blows her nose again. "If I could get there on my own, Jax, I would. I feel tired all the time, like I could lie down and sleep a hundred years. But you can't be sending money. You don't have next month's rent."

  "Don't be insulting. I could get it from Mattie."

  "No!" Taylor cries.

  "Well, Christ, keep your fingernails on. Mattie wouldn't mind."

  "I mind," she says. "I'm going to make this work here. I have to. I'm not stupid, and I'm not lazy. I'm working so hard, Jax, but we never quite get caught up."

  "It's not your fault, Taylor."

  "Well, whose is it? I should be able to keep a roof over my own head. If I work at it."

  "That's just a story. You're judging yourself by the great American cultural myth, but Horatio Alger is compost, honey. That standard no longer applies to reality."

  "Right. Tell that to my landlord."

  "What you need is a nice musician to take care of you."

  "Now, there's a myth. Who did a musician ever take care of?"

  "Not even his most beloved M1 synthesizer, at the moment. I just poured a beer down her front and left her gargling her final breaths on stage. We're on break right now."

  "Well, guess what, I did meet this air traffic controller."

  "Damn, I knew it. You're in love."

  "No. But Turtle and I got to see the control room yesterday. It's this dark room full of little radar screens, with somebody in charge of each one. They sit there all day hunched over watching yellow blinking dots and drinking coffee and talking the pilots out of crashing into each other. What a life, huh? It looks kind of like a submarine."

  "Is that what submarines look like? I always wondered."

  "Well, I don't know. It seemed like it. It's called the Terminal Radar Approach Control. Turtle kept calling it the Terminal Roach Control. I'm not sure she had a real good understanding of the concepts."

  "Don't be surprised if she did. Not much passes her by."

  "That's true. It was kind of reassuring to see. At least somebody is in control of something in this world."

  "Sounds like true love to me," Jax says miserably.

  "Jax, I'm not in love with Steven Kant."

  "Well, just make sure Steven Doesn't."

  "That's great. You're telling me to be a nun, while you're finally getting the landlady interested in the plumbing."

  Jax laughs, in spite of himself. "She's lost interest again, I promise you. Our toilet still defies the laws of hydrodynamics."

  "Well, I'm sure glad to hear that. I wouldn't want to think she was showing you any special favors."

  "You know what? I'm glad you're jealous. It makes me feel less remorseful about what I'm going to do to this Steven Can't when I locate his control tower."

  "I'm not in love, Jax. He's nice, but he doesn't laugh at my jokes the way you do." She stops, but Jax knows from the quality of her silence to keep listening. She goes on. "I hate to say this, after what I just told you about making my own way, but he took Turtle and me to this nice restaurant in the airport, and I sat there thinking: everything on this menu costs more than our whole week's food budget. It was such a relief just to eat. Sometimes it's hard to separate that from love."

  Jax can see through the bar to the stage, where his band is beginning to accumulate once again. Rucker and the drummer are standing over his synthesizer like forlorn relatives at a wake. The bobbing woman is still bobbing in a slow circle. Suddenly, as Jax watches, she keels like a mannequin and hits the floor with a somewhat frightening sound. Jax understands that he despises her because she is pitiful.

  "I'm sending you two plane tickets home. Just tell me your address."

  Taylor says nothing.

  "I'm having trouble reading your lips."

  "No. Don't send plane tickets. I can't just ditch the car here."

  "This is not about your car."

  "Jax, no."

  "You damn proud little hillbilly."

  She says nothing, and Jax holds his breath, afraid she'll hang up. Then her voice comes. "If that's what you want to call me, I don't care. I've hardly ever had a dime's worth of nickels but I always knew I could count on myself. If I bail out here, I won't even have that."

  "You're breaking my heart," he tells Taylor.

  "I'm breaking mine, Jax. I don't believe this is my life. I look in the mirror and I see a screwup."

  Jax looks at the napkin in his hand that says, "Super urgent emergency, call Taylor." For once, Lou Ann hasn't exaggerated. He would give the world to know how to answer the call.

  Something about the Seattle locks is reminiscent of the Hoover Dam. Taylor notices it right away, as they approach through a little park. The gate and entrance building have the same sturdy, antique look. Turtle has noticed too. "Remember
those angels?" she asks.

  "I sure do," Taylor says. "I was just thinking about those guys."

  "What angels?" Steven asks.

  "The guardian angels of the Hoover Dam," Taylor tells him. "They're sitting on this memorial for the people who died building it. Turtle and I were just there, not too long ago."

  "You like public works, do you?" he ask Turtle.

  "Uh-huh. I saw Lucky Buster fall down a big hole. We saved him, but then we had to run away from the Indians."

  Steven laughs. "She's going to be a writer someday," he tells Taylor.

  "Could be." Taylor squeezes Turtle's hand, a secret message. In her other hand she's holding Steven's umbrella, trying to give all three of them some protection from the drizzle. She feels a little self-conscious. It's the first time she has been on a date with two people whose heads reach about to her waist. She doesn't know whether to put her hand on Steven's chair, or just walk alongside. She was relieved when he popped open the umbrella and handed it to her.

  They pass through the entry and Turtle runs a few feet ahead, for once excited, her black pigtails swinging like runaway jump ropes. She looks tall and impossibly thin in her new stretch kneepants and T-shirt and heavy white sneakers. It seems to Taylor as if something is pulling on Turtle's feet at night--she gets taller, but doesn't fill in. And her skin doesn't seem right. The worry surfaces at the front of Taylor's mind only at times like this, when she can watch Turtle with her full attention.

  Inside the lock area, the three of them wait next to the rope, looking down into a long channel of water with a gate on either end. Despite the rain, there are jolly couples out boating: two sailboats already inside the lock, steadied by ropes, and a slender, aggressive-looking speedboat just now maneuvering itself in from the sound. A man in blue overalls directs the operation. Once everyone is secured, an alarm bell rings, the gate closes, and water rushes into the lock from underneath. The boats rise slowly on the crest of the engineered tide, from sea level to lake level. Taylor watches the voyagers bob like bathtub toys. "I guess around here you can't wait for a sunny day to go boating."

  "You'd be waiting awhile," Steven says. "You should have seen it on the Fourth of July. Raining cats and dogs, and the traffic through here was still unbelievable. He had thirty or forty boats packed in at a time, like cars in a parking lot, all tied to each other."

  "That sounds cozy."

  "It was. There weren't three square feet of wasted space. You could have walked across, stepping from one deck to another. That guy is unbelievable," he says, pointing to the man in coveralls. "He can figure out how to pack forty boats in a quarter-block area, and then get them out again, without wasting an inch or a minute. He's got spatial skills that could get him into MIT."

  "Is that so surprising? That a guy in overalls is brilliant?"

  "Well, it's just ironic, considering what he gets paid."

  "What do you think he gets paid?"

  "I don't know, but I'm sure it's next to nothing."

  Taylor already knew this, somehow. "I guess he should have gone to MIT," she says, feeling wounded, even though Steven has said nothing that could rightfully offend her.

  The boats are nearly up to lake level now. The gate to the lake slowly opens and water rushes in, curling itself into eddies that make the boats rock from bow to stern. Steven leads Taylor and Turtle across the bridge to the other side.

  "Now we get to see how the salmon do it," he says.

  "Do what?" Turtle asks, looking at Taylor.

  "Don't ask me. Ask him."

  "Get from the ocean up into the lake," Steven says. "They live in the ocean all year, but then they have to swim back up into the rivers where they came from, to lay eggs."

  "I've heard of that," Taylor says. "I heard they have to go back to the exact same place they were born."

  "I don't know that they have to," Steven says. "Seems like they just always want to. Like all of us, I guess."

  "Not me. I got out of Kentucky just as soon as I could get the tires of my car pointed rubber side down."

  "And you'll never go back?"

  "Oh, I might, I guess. You shouldn't forget who made you."

  "How about you, Turtle, where were you born?" he asks.

  "In a car," she says.

  Steven looks at Taylor.

  "It was a Plymouth," she tells him. "That's about all I know about it. She's adopted."

  "I don't want to go back to live in a car," Turtle states.

  Taylor thinks: Let's hope you don't have to.

  They take the elevator down to the viewing area of the fish ladder. Steven explains that the fish have to swim up fourteen steps, against the strong current, to reach the lake. Through a thick window as high as a movie screen they see hundreds of grimacing, pale-bellied, pink-finned fish all headed the same way, working their bodies hard but barely moving forward. They look like birds trying to fly against a hurricane.

  "Most of those are silver salmon," Steven says. "Those few you see that are bigger are king salmon."

  They look beaten up, their fins bedraggled. "Poor things, why do they even come in here?" Taylor asks. "Seems like they'd be looking around for an easier way to go. A free ride in the locks, maybe."

  "No, believe it or not, the strong gush of water flowing out at the bottom is what attracts them in here. The Corps of Engineers figured that out a few years back. They narrowed the channel to increase the flow, and a lot more fish came in. You know the really sad part?"

  "What?"

  "There are a couple of fat sea lions that like to hang around at the top, just licking their chops, waiting to meet these guys at the end of their hard day's work."

  "That is so sad."

  "Well, it's life, I guess. The law of the jungle."

  The fish curve and buck and thrust themselves against the current, dying to get upstream and pass themselves on. Taylor stands flanked by Turtle and Steven. For a long time the three of them are very still before the glass, framed by greenish light and a wall of solid effort.

  "I know how they feel," Steven says, his voice amused. "It's like getting into someplace that isn't wheelchair accessible."

  I know how they feel, Taylor thinks, and it's not like getting into anywhere at all. It's working yourself for all you're worth to get ahead, and still going backward. She holds Turtle against her side so she won't look up and see her mother's tears.

  25

  Picking

  ALICE HAS A DATE. Any minute now Cash Stillwater is going to pick her up and take her for a drive over to the huckleberry fields near Leech. She can't understand why, but there it is. Some out-and-out stranger has called her up and said, "Let's go pick berries."

  Sugar insists he isn't a stranger--that Alice met Cash the day they were in town. She swears they spotted him opening the door for Pearl Grass coming out of the Sanitary Market, and went over to say hello. It must be so, she argues, because Roscoe's sister-in-law Letty claims Cash is sweet on Alice, and how could that be, if they hadn't met? Alice has to agree, it seems unlikely.

  She is standing by the front window when his truck pulls up. His long legs come out first, in jeans and cowboy boots with curled-up toes, and then the rest of him. His face is flat and broad under the eyes, the dark skin creased rather than wrinkled. He wears gold-rimmed glasses that give him a kind, twinkling appearance. She has never laid eyes on this man in her life. But that's not to say she won't go for a ride with him, at least this one time. If someone is sweet on you without ever having met you, she reasons, you owe him that much.

  She meets him at the door, gripping her purse for courage.

  "You all set to go?" he asks. He seems to be looking her over just as thoroughly as she is eyeing him.

  "Ready as I'll ever be," she states, looking down at her slacks and workshirt. "Are these tennis shoes all right? If we're going to be in mud, I better borrow some boots from Roscoe. Sugar's wouldn't do me a bit of good, she wears a five. She always had the smallest feet of anybody." br />
  "I don't expect we'll run into mud today, no. I think you'll do all right."

  Alice follows him around to the passenger side of his truck, where he opens the door and gives her a hand up onto the running board. The truck is a wondrous, buttery copper color, though it seems about as old as anything with a motor could possibly be. The windshield is divided into two flat panes with a dark, puttied seam running down the center. Alice remembers Sugar's counseling, that Cash is a big talker, and she hurries to get some kind of conversation going. "You had this truck long?"

  Cash starts it up. "All my life, near about. I keep putting new engines in her, and she keeps a-going. Wish I could do the same for myself." He pats his chest gently with his right hand, then reaches down to shift gears, which makes a sound like slamming the spoon drawer.

  "They do that, now. Put new hearts and livers and stuff in people," Alice points out.

  "I know. But that don't seem right, trading parts with dead folks just to keep yourself around, pestering the younguns. When you're wore out, I'd say that's a sure sign it's time to go."

  "I agree," Alice says. She takes notice of some flower growing in the ditch that looks like a dandelion gone crazy, as big as a child's head.

  "Ask me in ten year, though, and I might sing a different tune," Cash says, laughing.

  "I know. It's hard to admit to being old, isn't it? I keep thinking, How'd this happen? Sixty-one! When I was young I looked at people this age and thought they must feel different inside. As different from me as a dog might feel, or a horse. I thought they would just naturally feel like they were wrinkled up and bent and way far along."

  "It don't feel that way, though, does it?"

  "No," Alice says, running a hand through her short hair. "It feels regular."

  The trees crowd up against the road, each one a different shade of green. The oaks are the darkest. Their leaves angle downward and seem to absorb more light. Cash's truck rolls across a little bridge, and below them Alice can see a creek banked by a world of ferns, their spears all pointed straight up.

  "You're kin to Sugar some way, is it?"

  "We're cousins," Alice replies. "We grew up together, but we lost touch after I married."

  "Well, it had to be Sugar's side you was related on, and not Roscoe's. If it was Roscoe's I'd of knowed you, because my sister Letty's the widowed wife of Roscoe's brother. Did you and your husband have a big family?"