Pigs in Heaven

Cicadas scream brightly from the thorn scrub around the house. It’s a shimmering day, headed for a hundred degrees.

Taylor picks up a rock and throws it through the center of the apricot tree, raising a small commotion of brown feathers.

They immediately settle again. The birds turn their heads sideways, wet beaks shining, bead eyes fixed on Taylor. Then they return to the duty of gorging themselves.

“Granny Logan used to say she was going to take my school picture and set it out in the cornfield to scare the crows.”

“Your Granny Logan ought to be shot,” Taylor suggests.

“Too late, she’s dead.” Lou Ann puts her hands behind her neck and knocks off a few quick sit-ups on the floor of the porch. Her curtain of bobbed blond hair flaps against the lime-colored sweatband. “I should get Cameron…to come over here and…stand under the tree,” she puffs between sit-ups. “That’d scare them off.”

Cameron John is Lou Ann’s recurring boyfriend, and it’s a fact that he is scary in several ways. He has dreadlocks down to his waist, for example, and a Doberman pinscher with gold earrings in one of its ears. But Taylor expects the birds would perceive Cameron’s true nature and flock to him like St. Francis of Assisi. She can picture his dreadlocks covered with sparrows. She tosses another rock just as her neighbor, Mr. Gundelsberger, comes out of his house across the way. The rock lands near his feet. He stops short with his heels together, looks at the rock in an exaggerated way, then pulls his handkerchief out of the pocket of his gray flannel pants and waves it over his head.

“Peace,” he shouts at Taylor. “No more the war.”

“It’s a war against the birds, Mr. G.,” Taylor says. “They’re winning.”

He comes over and stands directly under the tree, shading his eyes and peering up into the branches. “Ach,” he says.

“What you need is a rahdio in the tree.”

“A rodeo?” Lou Ann asks, incredulous. Her ex-husband was a rodeo rider. She could picture him roping birds, he was that small-minded.

“No, a rahdio.” Mr. Gundelsberger holds his fist against his ear with one finger pointed up. “Transistor.”

“A radio!” Lou Ann and Taylor say at the same time.

Taylor asks, “Really?”

“Rock and roll,” Mr. Gundelsberger says, nodding firmly.

“You try it, you will see. Rock and roll will keep da birds off da peach.”

Lou Ann grabs her bag and sprints down the stone steps in her waffle-soled cross trainers. She waves at Taylor as she and Mr. Gundelsberger pull out of the drive in his Volvo.

He often gives her a ride downtown, since his jeweler’s shop is only two blocks from Fat Chance.

Mr. G. moved in just a few months ago. His daughter, a locally famous artist who goes by the name of Gundi, has for years owned this whole little colony of falling-down stone houses in the desert at the edge of town. In bygone days it was a ranch; the gravel drive that leads uphill from the main road is still marked with an iron archway that reads RANCHO COPO. The first time Jax brought her out here, they sat on his roof and he told Taylor a wild tale about fertility rites and naming the ranch Copo to get the cows to copulate.

Since then she’s discovered it means “Ranch of the Snow-flake,” which frankly makes less sense than cow copulation.

But it’s an enviable place to live. Taylor heard of it even before she met Jax. People get on waiting lists to move out here, once they’ve been approved by Gundi.

Gundi lives in the big hilltop house, where she displays her huge abstract paintings on the stone walls of what was once the ranch hands’ dining hall. All the other houses are small and strange: some have no heating or cooling; one has an outdoor bathroom. Jax’s is tiny but has a weird stone tower on its southern end. The places rent for almost nothing.

Taylor has noticed that a lot of the people who live here are musicians, or have Ph.D.s in odd things.

Before Rancho Copo, Taylor and Turtle lived downtown in a more conventional rundown house with Lou Ann and her baby. Lou Ann took them in when they first arrived in Tucson, and Taylor still feels a debt. She wouldn’t move in with Jax until Gundi had also approved Lou Ann as Rancho Copo material.

Taylor goes in the house and rummages through the studio Jax has created in his bell tower. He says the acoustics are Christian. There isn’t a lot of floor space, but the shelves on the four narrow walls go all the way up. She drags the ladder from wall to wall, certain that in all this mess of electronics he must have a transistor radio, but she can’t find one. She brings down a portable tape player instead, and one of Jax’s demo tapes. She’s decided to try out the Irascible Babies on a new audience.