Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [13]
She came so close to driving away that night. Worn down by the uniforms and beard stubble and patronizing looks, it would have been such a small thing to get back in the car and go on to Nevada. She shivers.
The Beatles give up the ghost and Elton John takes over, his honkytonk piano chords bouncing into “Crocodile Rock.” This one Taylor remembers from dances on the bleached wood floor of the Pittman High gym, with some boy or other who never could live up to her sense of celebration on those occasions. They were always too busy trying to jam a hand between two of your buttons somewhere. The song is about that exact war, and it excited the girls as much as the boys to hear it because you knew how Suzy felt when she wore her dresses—as the song says—tight. Like something no boy could ever touch. Taylor liked Elton John, his oversized glasses and preposterous shoes, laughing at himself—such a far cry from other rock stars with long limp hair and closed eyes and heads rolled back to the sounds of their own acid chords, going for the crucifixion look.
Music is all different now: Jax belongs to neither breed, the Jesuses or the Elton Johns. Now they don’t just laugh at themselves but also their audience and the universe in general. Jax’s wide-eyed, skinny band members wear black jeans and shirts made of torn newspapers. Irascible Babies, pleading ignorance, just wishing they could suckle forever at the breast of a pulsing sound wave.
Jax is a problem in Taylor’s life, though she would never say that aloud. She feels disloyal for thinking it, even. He’s the first boyfriend she’s ever had who is actually funnier than he thinks he is. He is nice to Turtle to the point that it’s nearly embarrassing. Jax is so laid-back it took Taylor months to figure out what was going on here: that he’s crazy in love with her. Possibly that’s the problem. Jax’s adoration is like the gift of a huge, scuffling white rabbit held up at arm’s length for her to take. Or a European vacation. Something you can never give back.
She turns southwest at the little noncity of Kingman, back toward the Colorado River or what’s left of it after all those dams, a tributary robbed blind and fighting hard to make the border. Mountains rise low and purple behind the river like doctor’s-office art. She’ll follow the river south through Lake Havasu City, where some rich person, she has heard, actually bought the London Bridge and shipped it over block by block to stand lonely in the desert. Eventually they’ll reach Sand Dune, where Angie Buster awaits her son. Taylor can call Jax from there and tell him about the new twist on their vacation.
She’s not keeping close track of the radio: now it’s Otis Redding singing “Dock of the Bay.” This one always chokes her up. You can picture poor Otis looking out over the water, the terrible sadness in his voice suggesting he already knows he’s going to end up frozen in a Wisconsin lake while the fans wait and wait for his plane to come in, for the concert to begin.
You can’t think too much about luck, good or bad. Taylor has decided this before, and at this moment renews her vow. Lucky Buster is lucky to be alive and unlucky to have been born with the small wits that led him to disaster in the first place. Or lucky, too, for small wits, that allow him so little inspection of the big picture. In the ambulance on the way to the hospital, he wanted to go to McDonald’s.
Over the phone, Angie Buster confided that Lucky had run away many times before. She asked Taylor not to repeat this to the doctors, fearing that it might interfere somehow with Lucky’s insurance. “He’s not really running away,” Angie explained, “he just don’t have a real good understanding of where home ends and the rest of the world takes up.”
Taylor agreed that was sometimes