Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [49]
“Johnny Cash Stillwater,” Rose says, shaking her head, blowing smoke in a great upward plume like a whale. She speaks to him as if she’s known him her whole life long instead of two months. “I don’t think you’ve ever gotten over being your mama’s favorite.”
Cash only lets Rose hurt him this way because he knows she is right. As a young man he turned his name around in honor of his mother’s favorite singer. Now he’s working as a fifty-nine-year-old bag boy at the Health Corral; his immediate superior there is an eighteen-year-old named Tracey who pops the rubber bands on her braces while she runs the register. And still Cash acts like luck is on his side, he’s just one step away from being a cowboy.
Rose says suddenly, “They’re going to shoot a bunch of pigeons that’s come into town.”
“Who is?”
“I don’t know. A fellow from town council, Tom Blanny, came in the Trading Post today and told Mr. Crittenden about it.”
Cash knows Tom Blanny; he comes into the Health Corral to buy cigarettes made of lettuce leaves or God knows what, for people who wish they didn’t smoke.
“Tom said they’re causing a problem because they don’t belong here and they get pesty. They flock together too much and fly around and roost in people’s trees.”
Cash looks up, surprised. “I saw those birds tonight. I could see them out this window right here.” His heart beats a little hard, as if Rose had discovered still another secret she could use to hurt him. But her concern is Town Council men and information, not an unnamable resentment against some shining creatures whose togetherness is so perfect it makes you lonely. Cash attends to peeling his potatoes.
“Tom says they could crowd out the natural birds if they last out the winter. A pigeon isn’t a natural bird, it’s lived in cities so long, it’s like a weed bird.”
“Well, aren’t they natural anywhere?” He knows that in Jackson Hole people are very big on natural.
“New York City,” she says, laughing. Rose has been around. “There’s nothing left there for them to crowd out,” she says.
Slip-slip-slip goes the peeler. Cash doesn’t feel like saying anything else.
“What’s eating on you, Cash? You thinking about going back to Oklahoma?”
“Naw.”
“What’s the weather like there now?”
“Hot, like it ought to be in summer. This place never heats up good. We’re going to be snowed under here again before you know it. I wasn’t cut out for six feet of snow.”
“Nobody is, really. Even up in Idaho.” Rose fluffs her hair. “You’d think they’d be used to it by now, but I remember when I was a kid, people going just crazy in the wintertime. Wives shooting their husbands, propping them up on a mop handle, and shooting them again.”
Cash is quiet, leaving Rose to muse over murdered husbands.
“Well, go on back, then,” she says. “If the weather’s not suiting you good.”
They have had this argument before. It isn’t even an argument, Cash realizes, but Rose’s way of finding out his plans without appearing to care too much. “Nothing to go back for,” he says. “My family’s all dead.”
“Your daughter’s not.”
“Might as well be.”
“Well then, what about your other daughter, the one that died—how about her baby?”
When Cash first knew Rose, she made herself so comfortable in his bed that he felt safe telling her family stories. Now he regrets it. “She’s gone,” he says.
“A baby ain’t made with disappearing ink, Cash.”
“You read about it in the papers ever day,” he tells her, but he knows this is a lie. A mother might drive her car into the river on purpose, but still there will be a basket of outstretched hands underneath her children, or should be. It’s the one thought in Cash’s mind that never lights and folds its wings.
“I waited my whole life away down there in the Nation,” he tells Rose. “Where nobody is nothing but poor. When my wife died, seem like I’d been waiting out something that wasn’t coming. At least in Jackson Hole people have something.”
“You and me don’t have