Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [32]
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