Pigs in Heaven

Presumably they will be impressed or moved by pity to come inside.

Rose’s beadwork is unimpressive, close up. She’s nothing close to a full-blooded Indian, that’s her excuse, but she could learn the more complicated patterns Cash does, if she cared to. It’s a skill you acquire, like tuning an engine. The things you have to be an Indian to know, in Cash’s experience—how to stretch two chickens and a ham over sixty relatives, for example—are items of no interest in the tourist trade.

He gets up to take his bread out of the oven and start dinner. Cash has discovered cooking in his old age, since moving away from his sisters and aunts, and according to Rose he acts like he invented the concept. She doesn’t seem to mind eating what he cooks, though—she’s here more nights than she’s not. While she smokes at the kitchen table, Cash unpacks the things he brought home from the Health Corral, lining them up: six crimson bell peppers, five white potatoes, six orange carrots. He imagines putting all these colors on a needle, and wishes his life were really as bright as this instant.

“Looky here, girl,” he says, waving a bell pepper at Rose.

“Cash, you watch out,” she says. The pepper is deformed, with something like testicles. Cash gets to bring home produce that is too organic even for the health-food crowd. In his tiny apartment behind this tourist town’s back, Cash feeds on stews of bell peppers with genitals and carrots with arms and legs.

He spreads newspapers on the table and sits to peel his potatoes. He feels comforted by the slip-slip-slip of his peeler and the potatoes piling up like clean dry stones. “Somebody come in the store today and told me how to get rich,” he says.

“Well, from what I hear you’ve gotten rich fifty times over, except for the money part,” Rose says.

“No, now listen. In the store we sell these shampoos they make with ho-hoba. It’s this natural business the girls want now. A fellow come in today and says he’s all set up down in Arizona to grow ho-hoba beans on his farm. They’ll just grow in the dirt desert, they don’t need nothing but a poor patch of ground and some sunshine. I’ll bet you can buy you a piece of that land for nothing.”

“Why would somebody sell it for nothing if they could get rich growing shampoo beans on it?”

“It takes five years before the plants start to bear, that’s the hitch. Young people don’t have that much patience.”

“And old people don’t have that much time.”

“I’ve got my whole retirement ahead of me. And I know how to make things grow. It could work out good.”

“Like the silver foxes did,” Rose says, slicing him carelessly.

In January, before the tourist jobs opened up, Cash skinned foxes. With frozen fingers he tore the delicate membranes that held pelt to flesh, earning his own pair to breed. It seems like a dream to him now, that he believed he could find or borrow a farm of his own. He was thinking he was still on the Nation, where relatives will always move over to give you a place at the table.

“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 named after your mama’s favorite singer.”

Cash only lets Rose hurt him this way because he knows she is right. He’s working as a fifty-nine-year-old bag boy at the Health Corral; his immediate superior there is an eight-een-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.