Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [36]
Annawake doesn’t feel she ought to laugh. “I used to be kind of good at this throwing game we have, sgwalesdi. It’s just a coincidence, I’m not that good at everything.”
“If you are, I don’t want to hear about it.”
“I don’t know the meaning of your life.”
“Good. Because I’m not ready to hear it. Takes the fun away, you know? Like when you’re reading a good book and somebody says, ‘Oh, that’s a great one, did he get hit by the train yet?’ ”
Annawake smiles. She’s noticed that the house is truly run-down by social-service standards, worse than some things she’s seen in the Cherokee Nation, and accepts that this could be used to her advantage. Toward the west, the desert rises up to meet the splintered rock peaks of the Tucson Mountains. Annawake shades her eyes to look at the descending sun. It’s an effort for her not to shove the conversation forward. “I can see why you’d want to live out here,” she says. “Out of the city.”
“Oh, well, that’s a very sad story. I got kicked out of the city of Tucson. They have an ordinance against Irascible Babies.”
“Who?”
“My band. We all used to live together in a chicken house, downtown. But by some estimates we were too loud.”
“Why would they have a chicken house downtown?”
“It wasn’t, anymore. They’d closed it down because of the smell. I’m telling you, it’s a very intolerant town.”
This boyfriend is nothing that Annawake planned on. She’s surprised to find him so serene and obliging, though she knows she may be mistaken. He may simply be in a coma. “Jacks is short for Jackson?”
“No, with an X.” He makes a cross with his marvelously long index fingers. “Short for nothing. My mother was one of the best-known alcoholics in the French Quarter of New Orleans. I was named after a venerated brand of beer.”
“You’re named after Jax Beer?”
He nods morosely. “Somewhere in this world I have a sister named Hurricane. I’m telling you the God’s honest truth.”
“You don’t know where she is?”
“Mother nor sister. If they are even on this earth.”
“Damn. I used to think all you needed was white skin to have an easy life,” Annawake says.
“I used to wish I was an Indian. I shaved my head one time and wore beads and made everybody call me Soaring Elk.”
Annawake looks at him, and this time she does laugh. “You’re not a Soaring Elk.”
Jax studies his sneakers. “I could use a more meaningful name, though, don’t you think? Something athletic. Maybe Red Ball Jets.”
For a minute they regard their four shoes lined up on the step. Jax’s trashed-out hightops look oversized and tragic, whereas Annawake’s moccasins are perfect: stitched suede, the burnished red of iron-oxide soils in Oklahoma.
“Cool moccasins,” Jax observes. “They look brand new.”
“They are. I have to buy them out here. Nobody in Oklahoma wears moccasins anymore.”
“No?”
She shakes her head. “The ones they sell to tourists at the Cherokee Heritage Center are made by this hippie in Albuquerque.”
Jax sighs. “What is this world coming to?”
Suddenly, noticeably, the failing sunlight turns golden and benevolent. The cacti lit from behind glow with halos of golden fur, and Jax’s and Annawake’s faces and limbs seem similarly blessed. After a minute the light changes again, to flat dusk.
“They’re gone, aren’t they?” Annawake finally asks.
“Yep.”
“How gone?”
Jax ponders the question. “She packed all Turtle’s clothes. All of her books. She picked about two hundred green apricots and laid them out on the shelf behind the backseat hoping they’d ripen. When they pulled out of here it looked like the Joads.”
Annawake has to think awhile to place the Joads, and then remembers The Grapes of Wrath, from high school English. White people fleeing the dust bowl of Oklahoma, ending up as fruit pickers in California. They think they had it bad. The Cherokees got marched out of their homelands into Oklahoma.
“No forwarding address, I guess.”
Jax smiles.
“She manages an automotive place downtown, right? For a woman named Mattie, who must be a friend because she couldn’t come to the phone when I called. You’re