Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [31]
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