Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [52]
“Foof, it’s muggy,” says Rose when he walks into the store. “I wish that rain would get here and get over with. It’s not the heat gets me, it’s the humanity.”
Cash smiles. “That’s the whole truth.”
“Mr. Big Shot stepped out. He’ll be back in a minute.”
The cluster of tin bells over the door jingles behind Cash, but it’s a customer, a tall, thin man wearing sandals and gray-speckled socks. He nods at Rose, who is at the register.
“Take a look around,” she tells him with a broad smile Cash understands, and dislikes. “Does it look like that storm is coming in? We need some rain. We haven’t had rain in a long time.” Cash grins. He likes Rose better now because she is speaking to Cash in code, saying, “This one is going to look at everything in the entire store, and then buy some postcards.” When she asks, “You folks drive a long ways?” she’s predicting a big buy. “Front case is all marked down, rock bottom” means “All the jewelry in Jackson won’t help this homely soul.”
Cash stands near the window, looking out. He doesn’t see the white birds but he knows they’re up there still, moving in their rich, lazy wheel above it all, showing off, taking their freedom for granted. They aren’t real birds like the ones he hunted in childhood, whose eggs he shimmied trees to snatch, birds who catch insects and build nests and feed their young. These are tourist birds. Like his own restless dreams that circle with no place to land.
The man in sandals leaves finally, without even buying a postcard. “Yep, long drought,” Cash says, and Rose laughs. The tin bells jingle again, and they look up to see the white cockaded head of Mr. Crittenden. They stop talking, but the quiet that has come in with him is heavier than an absence of talk. He acknowledges Cash, then stands for a minute with his hands resting on the glass jewelry case, his thin elbows angled out. He always wears a white shirt and black bolo tie. Rose is curious about whether he is married; Cash says, just look at the pressed shirts he wears to work, but Rose maintains he could afford to send them to the laundry, which is true. She’s heard a rumor that he owns his own airport somewhere, and another rumor that he has cancer. Neither of them believes the cancer story. If he planned on dying anytime soon, why would he spend so much of his time counting beads?
He nods at Cash again, and with a tight throat Cash follows him into the office, a small room crammed with ledgers and anthropology books and strange pets. Mr. Crittenden has seven or eight shrieking birds back there, and a python in a jewelry case half filled with dry sand. Rose warned Cash about the snake; she has to come in here to get her paychecks under its cool eye. The air chokes him with bird smells and loneliness. Mr. Crittenden gets down two large books that smell of dust. When he opens them, their insides are slick as white glass.
“This is very old beadwork,” he tells Cash. He slowly turns the pages of black-and-white photographs. “Do you recognize the patterns?”
Cash does, some of them, but is afraid to admit to much, so he only nods or shakes his head at the photographs. While Mr. Crittenden turns the pages, a nervous gray bird in a cage near the window makes clicking sounds and picks at its neck as if it has a skin disease. Occasionally it raises its head and screams, and then the rest of the room rings with whistles and the scratch of dry feet on thin metal bars. Cash holds his air inside him for as long as he can between breaths.
“This whole world of knowledge is being lost,” Mr. Crittenden says, touching the page of his book as if he can feel the patterns. He leans his white head into the space between them, his blue eyes feverish, pink-edged.
“Are the men the artists in your tribe?” he asks.
Cash tries not to smile. “No, the women just let me pick it