Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [80]
“Dwayne Ray, honey, don’t mess with Jax’s stuff.”
Dwayne Ray, a resolute child with disorganized mud-colored hair, is pulling an assortment of bamboo flutes out of a milk crate and laying them end to end.
“I’m making a space shovel,” he explains.
“No problem,” Jax says. “Take them out in the hall. You can line up the whole star fleet out there.”
Dwayne Ray happily drags the crate out the door. In the hallway he begins to accompany his industry with Indy 500 sounds. Lou Ann simply stares at Jax. He finds a socket for the yellow plug and then glances up, feeling her eyes.
“Jax, you never let him touch those before. You would have cut his little pecker off if he’d tried to use your music stuff for toys.”
Jax returns to his wires. “So, I’m feeling generous. Your male line has escaped dismemberment.”
Lou Ann’s blue eyes are wide. “Jax, honey, I miss her too, but you have got to get a grip.”
He puts down his pliers and really looks at Lou Ann. The sun from the high east window lights her upturned face and her electric blue leggings and the bag of tangerines she brought over, and Jax wishes merely to weep. All this color and worry focused on his welfare, and it’s going to waste. He sits down next to her.
“Do you know,” he says, curling his long fingers through Lou Ann’s, “all her earthly clothing fit into two drawers in the bureau. Can you believe God made a woman like that? And she saw fit to live with me?”
“Gosh, Jax, I could never be your girlfriend,” Lou Ann says, sounding hurt. “I’d get disqualified just on the basis of shoes alone.”
“I love you anyway. But you’ve got to let me wallow in my misery. This is not a situation that can be resolved through Welcome Wagon technology.” He leans sideways and gives her a kiss of dismissal.
Lou Ann stands up and, with one last worried look, leaves him. She steps over the electrical cords as if they might be napping snakes. In the hall she collects Dwayne Ray and the flutes. Jax hears the sounds of their internal wooden emptiness as she piles them back into their crate. He stands up again, facing the window, realizing how clearly these days he can hear the emptiness inside things. He lets his hands walk around on the keyboard, which is powerless, its internal circles of current still interrupted somewhere by an imperceptible fault line. It makes no sound at all as his fingers modulate their laments in one key after another.
Jax feels entirely separate from his hands as he looks out the window. His eyes follow the golden, drawn-out shape of what he finally understands to be a coyote circling the trunk of a palo verde tree. His hands go still. The coyote’s belly hangs low with incipient pups or with milk, it’s impossible to tell which, because she keeps herself low in the brush.
Suddenly with violent effort she leaps into the tree and falls back, bouncing a little on her forelegs, with a nest of sticks in her mouth. A dove flies off in the same instant, startled as a heartbeat. The coyote crouches at the base of the tree and consumes the eggs in ugly, snapping gulps. She stands a moment licking her mouth, then creeps away.
Jax is crying. He feels deeply confused about whom he should blame for his losses. The predator seems to be doing only what she has to do. In natural systems there is no guilt or virtue, only success or failure, measured by survival and nothing more. Time is the judge. If you manage to pass on what you have to the next generation, then what you did was right.
19
Chewing Bones
ALICE DIALS DIRECTORY ASSISTANCE FROM a motel room in Sacramento, in pursuit of Hornbuckles.
“You can’t find a Robert? No, wait,” she commands the operator, shifting the receiver to her better ear. “It’s Roland, I think. Roland Hornbuckle. Look up that one.” She waits, rolling her eyes across the room to Taylor, who returns a less irritated, more troubled version of her own expression. Alice has never gotten over the initial shock of seeing her own facial features plastered across another human being, with plans of their own.
“You worrying about Turtle?