Pigs in Heaven

  "Why does everybody think I'm mad? I'm not going to get mad. Tell me."

  "I think you and Turtle ought to go on and come down here."

  Taylor doesn't respond to this. She turns her back on the wall of holes and looks out through the rain at her car. She knows Turtle is in there but the blank, dark windows are glossed over like loveless eyes, revealing nothing.

  "Go ahead and borry the gas money and come on. There isn't nothing to finding us here. Take the interstate to Tahlequah, Oklahoma, and ask around for Heaven. Everybody knows the way."

  Taylor still doesn't speak.

  "It would just be to talk things over."

  "Mama, there's nothing to talk over with Annawake Fourkiller. I have no bargaining chips: there's just Turtle, and me. That's all." Taylor hangs up the phone.

  Taylor has been waiting so long with Turtle in the free clinic waiting room she feels sure they've had time to pick up every disease known to science. One little boy keeps licking his hand and coming over to hold it up in front of Turtle, presumably to give her an unobstructed view of his germs. Each time, Turtle withdraws her face slightly on her neck like a farsighted woman trying to focus on small print. The little boy chuckles and pitches crazily back to his mother, his disposable diaper crackling as he goes.

  Every now and then, the waiting-room door opens and they all look hopefully to the nurse as she reads off someone else's name. In the bright passage behind her, Taylor hears busy people scurrying and saying things like "The ear is in number nine. I put the ankle in two." The longer they wait, the more vividly Taylor can picture piles of body parts back there.

  At last the nurse calls Turtle's name, in the slightly embarrassed way strangers always do, as if they expect the child answering to this name to have some defect or possibly a shell. As she follows Turtle down the hall, Taylor wonders if she did wrong, legalizing this odd name. She has no patience with people who saddle their children with names like "Rainbo" and "Sunflower" to suit some oddball agenda of their own. But "Turtle" was a name of Turtle's own doing, and it fits now, there is no getting around it.

  They wind up in a room empty of body parts. The glass jars on the counter by the sink contain only cotton balls and wooden tongue depressors. Turtle climbs onto the examining table covered with white butcher paper while Taylor lists her symptoms and the nurse writes them on a clipboard. When she leaves them and closes the door, the room feels acutely small.

  Turtle lies flat on her back, making crinkly paper noises. "Am I going to get a shot?"

  "No. No shots today. Very unlikely."

  "A operation?"

  "Positively not. I can guarantee you that. This is a free clinic, and they don't give those out for free."

  "Are babies free?"

  Taylor follows Turtle's eyes to a poster on the wall, drawn in weak, cartoonish shades of pink, showing what amounts to one half a pregnant woman with an upside-down baby curled snugly into the oval capsule of her uterus. It reminds Taylor of the time she cut a peach in half and the rock-hard pit fell open too, revealing a little naked almond inside, secretly occupying the clean, small open space within the peach flesh.

  "Are they what? Are babies free?"

  "Yeah."

  "Well, let me think how to answer that. You don't have to buy them. Just about anybody can get one to grow inside her. In fact, seems like the less money you have, the easier it is to get one. But after they come out, you have to buy all kinds of stuff for them."

  "Food and diapers and stuff."

  "Right."

  "Do you think that's why the real mom that grew me inside her didn't want me?"

  "No, she died. Remember? Her sister, the woman that put you into my car, told me your mother had died, and that's why they had to give you up. You told me one time you remembered seeing your first mama get buried."

  "I do remember that," Turtle says. She continues to study the peach-pit baby poster. Taylor picks up a magazine and is startled to read news about a war, until she realizes the magazine is several years old.

  "Hi, I'm Doctor Washington," says a tall woman in a white coat who breezes into the room as if she's run a long way and doesn't see any point in slowing down now. She has long flat feet in black loafers, and a short, neat Afro that curves around her head like a bicycle helmet. She looks around the room quickly, as if she might in fact be anticipating a blow to the head. Her eyes settle on Turtle for a moment, but the rest of her body remains tense. She holds the clipboard in one hand and a pencil in the other, poised between two fingers, jiggling in the air.

  "Stomachache?" she says to Turtle. "Cramps, diarrhea? For two or three months?"

  Turtle nods solemnly, owning up to all this.

  "Let's take a look." Actually she looks at the ceiling, appearing to give it her full concentration as she pulls up Turtle's T-shirt and probes her belly with long, cold-looking hands.

  "Here?"

  Turtle nods, making a crackling sound as her head grinds against the white paper.

  "How about here? This hurt?"

  Turtle shakes her head.

  Dr. Washington pulls down Turtle's shirt and turns to Taylor. "How is the child's diet." She states it, rather than asks.

  Taylor feels her mind blank out, the way it used to in school during history tests. She tries to calm down. "I make sure she gets protein," she says. "We eat a lot of peanut butter. And tuna fish. And she always gets milk. Every single day, no matter what."

  "Well, actually, that might be the problem."

  "What, milk?"

  The doctor turns to Turtle. "How do you feel about milk, kiddo?"

  "I hate it," Turtle says to the ceiling.

  "What kind do you give her?"

  "I don't know," Taylor says defensively, feeling as if the two of them are ganging up. "The store brand. Two percent."

  "Try leaving out the milk from now on. I think you'll see a difference right away. Bring her back in, in a week or two, and if that hasn't taken care of it we'll check on other possibilities. But I think cutting the milk's going to do it." She writes something on the clipboard.

  Taylor senses that Dr. Washington is about to move on to an ear or an ankle. "Excuse me, but I don't get this," she says. "I thought milk was the perfect food. Vitamins and calcium and everything."

  Dr. Washington slumps against the counter, losing a few of her imposing inches and visibly shifting into a slower gear. "Cow's milk is fine for white folks," she says, looking directly at Taylor when she says this, "but somewhere between sixty and ninety percent of the rest of us are lactose intolerant. That means we don't have the enzymes in our system to digest some of the sugar in cow's milk. So it ferments in the intestines and causes all kinds of problems."

  "Uck. I never knew that."

  "Yogurt may be okay, and aged cheeses. You can give them a try. And some kinds of orange juice are calcium-fortified, that can help you out some with her calcium. If you're determined to give her milk, you can get the kind that's lactose-reduced. There's a large Asian-American population in this city, so you can find that in most of the markets."

  "My daughter isn't Asian-American. She's Cherokee."

  The doctor lifts her shoulders in an offhand shrug. "Asian, Native American, African, we're all in the same boat. A lot of times it doesn't present until adulthood, but it can start showing up right around her age."

  Taylor can't understand how such a major truth could have passed her by. "I always thought milk was the great health food. The people look so perky in those commercials."

  The doctor taps her pencil eraser against her cheek and looks at Taylor with something that could be loosely defined as a smile. Her eyes are so dark the irises appear almost bluish around the edges, and her half-closed lids give her a lizardish look. "Who do you think makes those commercials?"

  "The guardians of truth," Taylor says, sulkily. "Sorry, I didn't think about it."

  For the first time, Dr. Washington's superior-reptile look melts into genuine sympathy. "Listen, nobo
dy does. I break this news to parents of every color, a dozen times a week. You were doing what you thought was best, that's the main thing."

  Her white coat is standing up straight again, then gone.

  Turtle slides off the gift-wrapped examining table and bounds out the examining-room door like a puppy let out of its pen. Taylor finds she can't get up from her chair. She is paralyzed by the memory of Annawake Fourkiller's final warning, in Tucson, before she drove away: "I bet she hates milk."

  Taylor catches up to Turtle outside the clinic. Turtle is shading her eyes and looking straight up at the sky, which for once is miraculously unclouded. A jet has left a white, rubbed-out gash of a trail, ugly as graffiti.

  "An airplane makes that," Turtle informs her, and Taylor wonders how she knows this. It's one of several million things they have never yet spoken of, precisely. Did she learn it in school? Then again, do you have to be told every single thing about the world before you know it? The idea of rearing Turtle exhausts Taylor and makes her want to lie down, or live in a simpler world. She would like for the two of them to live in one of those old-time cartoons that have roundheaded animals bobbing all together to the music, and no background whatsoever.

  "You're right," Taylor says. "A jet plane."

  "Why is it doing that?"

  Taylor wonders which level of answer Turtle wants. Why does a jet churn up white dust in the sky? (She doesn't know.) Or, what is this particular jet's motivation? (This, maybe nobody knows.) "Remember in Dorothy, when the witch wrote in the sky?"

  "Yeah, I do," Taylor says. "In the Wizard of Oz. She wrote, 'Surrender Dorothy.' "

  "Did that mean they were supposed to give Dorothy to the witch?"

  "That's what she was asking for. Yeah."

  "Are you going to give me to the Indians?"

  "No. I'll never do that. But I think we have to go back and talk to them. Are you scared?"

  "Yeah."

  "Me too."

  29

  The Secret of Creation

  CASH MOVES THROUGH HIS KITCHEN the way a lanky squirrel might, if a squirrel could cook: stepping quickly from sink to stove, pausing, sensing the air. By comparison, Alice feels like the lazy squirrel wife, sitting at the table separating hickory nuts from their crushed shells. "Slow down, Cash," she tells him, smiling. "You're making my eyes hurt."

  "I always do that to women," he says. "I'm just ugly, is all."

  "Pish posh, you are not." Alice picks a nearly whole nut from the curled chambers of its shell and drops it into the bowl. For reasons she couldn't explain, the naked, curled little nuts remind her of babies waiting to get born.

  Cash told her this log cabin was the original dwelling on his family's homestead. It has stood empty for years, and seemed the right size for him when he came back from Wyoming. It's all one room, with a kitchen at one end and a pair of parlor chairs flanking the lace curtain on the other end. For the summer he's moved his bed out to the porch, for air. His rifle, his toothbrush, and a lucky horseshoe hang over the stone fireplace. The cabin seems sturdy enough to stand through a tornado, or small enough to be overlooked by one in favor of the larger house that was built later on, where Letty now lives. The cabin has been occupied by most of Letty's children at one time or another; they were the ones who installed plumbing and strung out the electrical wire, which now supplies Cash's few light bulbs and--Alice was distressed to note--the little TV set that squats on the kitchen counter amongst the bowls and flour canisters. He did shut it off right away when she came in. She'll hand him that much.

  "You don't have to get all them shells out. Just the big pieces," he tells her. "Are you watching this, now? You got to know how to make kunutche, if you're going to sign up to be Cherokee here in a while."

  "Is that right? Will they give me a test?"

  "Oh, I think so, probably. But if you decide not to enroll, then don't bother learning. No yonega would fool around with a thing that's this much trouble."

  "Maybe I oughtn't to, then, and just go on letting you do all the work." Alice is startled to hear what she's just said, words that contain a presumption about the future. If Cash is in any way riled, he doesn't show it. He dumps the nuts with a clatter into a dented metal bucket and pounds them deftly with a wooden club, making a steady gritch-gritch like a cow chewing. The pounding club resembles a sawed-off baseball bat. Alice saw one in Sugar's kitchen and had no earthly notion what kind of cooking implement it might be. It looked so forceful.

  "You pound it till it's powder, that's the way you start out," Cash instructs. "Then you roll it into balls about yay big." He holds up his right fist, wrist forward, to show her, looking to see that she has understood. "There's enough oil in it so it holds together good." He turns back to pounding, and goes on talking with a slightly breathless rhythm over the nutty gritching sound, which has now gone to more of a hiss. "When you get ready to fix it, you just break off a piece of the ball and add it to boiling water, and then you strain it through a good clean sock to get out the little bits of shell, and you mix it with rice, or hominy. It's kindly a soupy consistency."

  "Sounds good," Alice says, reverently. In her life she has experienced neither men who talk a lot nor men who cook, and here is one doing both at once. She would have paid money to witness this, and not been disappointed.

  "I love it with hominy," he adds. "It kindly puts you in the mood of fall, when you smell kunutche."

  "Did your wife teach you how to make it?"

  "Well, now," he pauses and stares at the wall calendar. "I guess my mama did. My wife did the cooking, mostly, but I always pounded up the kunutche. She said all that grinding hurt her bones."

  Alice stands up and wanders the length of the cabin, wishing for family pictures or some other hint of what Cash belongs to. Her eyes rest on his toothbrush, which seems small and stranded up there, and his gun. "You shoot anything with that rifle?"

  "Oh, a squirrel now and then, if he'll set still long enough to get hit. My eyes isn't what they was. Usually I'll miss three or four time, and then one'll keel over and die of a heart attack."

  Alice wants to give him a hug. If men only knew, modesty makes women fall in love faster than all the cock-a-doodling in the world. She touches her earrings, whose tiny beads shiver away from her fingers. They were delivered to her one morning in an envelope marked only, "From a secret admirer." Sugar, who had stood breathing on Alice's head while she ripped open the envelope, instantly identified the turquoise-and-silver beadwork as Cash's. She said he had been selling earrings just like that to the trading post at the Heritage Center.

  Alice sent Cash back a note that said, "Many thanks and a special hug from your mystery date." She gave it to Sugar to mail at the P.O., and was mortified later to find that Sugar had run into Letty in town and asked her to hand-deliver it.

  "Sugar says you do beadwork for the trading post. That a fact?"

  "I do a little. It relaxes me at night."

  "Somebody sent me these earrings. Can you imagine? Some fellow must think he can knock me over with a feather."

  Cash grins. "I got your note."

  "I'll bet Letty opened it up and read it first."

  "Looked like it. She's not as professional as she used to be." Cash's face broadens under the eyes with a smile that seems to be settling in and getting comfortable.

  "I guess I ought to try my hand at that," she says, coming over to stand next to him. "Either that, or sing for my supper. Of the two I think you'd ruther me mash nuts."

  He positions her hands on the club, then stands back to watch. "I don't know about that. You got a real nice talking voice. I was thinking the other day, if I had a telephone I'd call up Alice just to listen at her voice. I bet you could sing like a bird."

  "A turkey buzzard," Alice says.

  "Now, you stop right there, I don't believe you. I'd pay a dollar to hear you sing 'Amazing Grace.' Or 'Don't Set Under the Apple Tree.' Here, it helps sometimes if you put more shoulder into it."

  He
stands behind her with his arms over hers, gripping her hands gently and pushing downward. The precise hissing sound returns to the kitchen, nut powder urged against metal. Alice feels a similar sound in her chest.

  "You'd ask for your dollar back when I was done," she says.

  Cash eases the pressure on her hands. "I wouldn't. Even if you did sound like a turkey buzzard, I wouldn't care."

  Alice leans her head back against him at the same moment he lifts his arms across her chest, holding her there and dropping his face into the crown of her hair.

  "Cash," she says.

  "Hm?" He turns her around, keeping her within the circle of his arms. She looks up at his face, which at close range without her reading specs is blurry, except for the window-shaped lights in his eyes.

  "You might be able to knock me over with a feather," she tells him. "It'd be worth a try."

  Cash's cabin is in deep woods, a quarter-mile behind Letty's back garden. From his iron bed out on the screen porch, Alice wonders how it would be to wake up every morning to the sight of nothing but leaves.

  "Did you hear what happened to that Mr. Green?"

  "The ostrich rancher?" she asks. "I heard his ostriches like to sashay around and drop their feathers on the wrong side of the fence."

  Cash runs a finger down Alice's nose. Without his glasses his eyes look soft and hopeful, like they're in need of something. Alice honestly can't remember the last time she was naked under the quilts with a man who was awake, but even so, neither she nor Cash seems to be in any big rush. It's such a pleasure just to realize they've gotten this far. And to listen to talk.

  "He tried to break into Boma's house to get that feather back," Cash tells her.

  "Lord! Was she home?"

  "No. They was all at a wedding. Can you imagine? Reading about a wedding in the paper, he must have done, because he sure wasn't invited. And going over to burglarize the groom's own grandma?"

  "Well, did he get it?"

  "He got it all right." Cash rolls over onto his back and laughs, then clucks his tongue. "I oughtn't to laugh. He's in the hospital."

  "With what?"

  "Nine thousand bee stings."

  Alice gasps. "And still no feather, I'll bet."

  "Naw. It'd be like Boma to send it to him in a big vase of flowers, though. With a get-well card from the bees."