Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [51]
Rose has nabbed a spot for them in the crowded restaurant and clears a huge mess from the table; the previous people were probably foreigners who didn’t know the McDonald’s custom of dumping your own burger wrappers. “It’s party time in Jackson, ain’t it?” Rose asks over the din, plumping down in her chair.
Cash nods. For nine months he trudged out on sidewalks dangerous with glassy shards of ice, the dirty snow piled deep and hopeless as a whole winter’s worth of laundry. Now, for five or six weeks, the laundry is done. The streets swarm with people who will take their sunny raft trips and green-meadow pictures and spend the rest of their lives claiming Jackson Hole as one of the places they know.
The couple at the next table are speaking some language. The woman has on little green cloth slippers that you’d think would have fallen apart long before they made it halfway to anywhere from overseas. Cash knows these women; they come into the store and go crazy over anything herbal, then they march straight over to the Trading Post and buy Cash’s earrings, Rose tells him, three pairs at a time. The Indian look is evidently big in Europe, where they don’t have any Indians. They ask Rose personal questions, thinking she is something exotic. The Americans are different, they edge around Rose in the store, not looking, as if her clothes were terribly stained and she didn’t know. Sometimes they’ll come close and snap a picture. Cash has witnessed this, and he has to hand it to her for the way she sits still, holding her tongue for once. The customers pile up their purchases by the register, dropping in one minute what it takes Cash three weeks to earn.
“That guy mopping the floor has one cute butt,” Rose states, fluffing her layers of dyed-black hair. “I feel like dropping a spoon or something just to see him pick it up.”
“Rose, you have to decide if I’m your boyfriend or your daddy. I can’t do both.”
She flashes her eyes at him. “You know how much I love you, honey.”
Cash doesn’t add anything to that. He is grateful that McDonald’s doesn’t give out spoons.
“Just think,” she says, “we could be in Paris, France or Hong Kong. They have McDonald’s in every country in the world.”
“That’s what I hear,” Cash says, but he doesn’t feel like he’s in Paris, France, he feels like he’s in McDonald’s.
“You seem depressed,” Rose observes, and Cash wonders if that’s what he is, after all. He thinks of the way you press dough down with your fist: take a big, round hopeful swelling and punch the rise right out of it. Yes, he thinks. Depressed.
Cash is off work at last. For the last ten minutes of his shift a couple stood in line arguing over whether or not to buy some expensive peaches. Cash stood silently by, wishing they would take their marriage someplace else, but Tracey rolled her eyes in a way that could not be missed, and still the couple paid no attention. The man’s T-shirt said THINK ONLY OF SURFING. It amazes Cash what people will advertise, as if convictions mean so little they can put on a new one each morning after a shower.
The birds come every day now, mysteriously increasing their numbers overnight. Cash can see them right now as he walks down Main toward the Trading Post to pick up Rose. She has repeated to him the theory that pigeons are migrating here from Salt Lake City, to escape the falcons that are nesting on the ledges of tall buildings there. The balance of nature is upside-down, Cash thinks: the predators are moving to the cities and city birds taking over the land where the buffalo roam. He finds he mistrusts the pigeons. One minute they flash their silver underwings all together, all one color, and the next, their white backs, changing from moment to moment like a card trick.
This evening Mr. Crittenden wants to talk with him, a fact Cash dreads. He finally noticed that the beadwork Rose does in the store is nothing near the quality of what she brings in. Rose hedged, fearing she’d lose her job,