Pigs in Heaven

“Tom says they could crowd out the natural birds if they last out the winter. A pigeon isn’t a natural bird, it’s lived in cities so long, it’s like a weed bird.”

“Well, aren’t they natural anywhere?” He knows that in Jackson Hole people are very big on natural.

“New York City,” she says, laughing. Rose has been around. “There’s nothing left there for them to crowd out,” she says.

Slip-slip-slip goes the peeler. Cash doesn’t feel like saying anything else.

“What’s eating on you, Cash? You thinking about going back to Oklahoma?”

“Naw.”

“What’s the weather like there now?”

“Hot, like it ought to be in summer. This place never heats up good. We’re going to be snowed under here again before you know it. I wasn’t cut out for six feet of snow.”

“Nobody is, really. Even up in Idaho.” Rose fluffs her hair.

“You’d think they’d be used to it by now, but I remember when I was a kid, people going just crazy in the wintertime.

Wives shooting their husbands, propping them up on a mop handle, and shooting them again.”

Cash is quiet, leaving Rose to muse over murdered husbands.

“Well, go on back, then,” she says. “If the weather’s not suiting you good.”

They have had this argument before. It isn’t even an argument, Cash realizes, but Rose’s way of finding out his plans without appearing to care too much. “Nothing to go back for,” he says. “My family’s all dead.”

“Your daughter’s not.”

“Might as well be.”

“Well then, what about your other daughter, the one that died—how about her baby?”

When Cash first knew Rose, she made herself so comfortable in his bed that he felt safe telling her family stories.

Now he regrets it. “She’s gone,” he says.

“A baby ain’t made with disappearing ink, Cash.”

“You read about it in the papers ever day,” he tells her, but he knows this is a lie. A mother might drive her car into the river on purpose, but still there will be a basket of outstretched hands underneath her children, or should be. It’s the one thought in Cash’s mind that never lights and folds its wings.

“I waited my whole life away down there in the Nation,” he tells Rose. “Where nobody is nothing but poor. When my wife died, seem like I’d been waiting out something that wasn’t coming. At least in Jackson Hole people have something.”

“You and me don’t have any of it.”

“No, but we’re right next door to it,” he says, standing up to throw vegetables into hot water. “Maybe some of it will fall off the tree.”

At one o’clock exactly, Rose whips off the patterned head-scarf she has to wear in the window and scoops little cascades of clicking beads back into their plastic vials, careful to let none escape onto the plank floor. Mr. Crittenden allows Rose to go to lunch with Cash if they go late, after what he imagines to be the noontime rush. The truth is there is no rush, just a slow, steady dribble. Jackson Hole has a hundred Indian trading posts, and most of them have better gimmicks than a tired mother of teenagers in the front window ruining her eyes.

Rose wants to walk across town to the Sizzler for the salad bar, but Cash warns against it; a storm is cooking in the south. They stay close by at McDonald’s just in case, taking the shortcut through the little flowered strip park on Main. While Rose talks and Cash doesn’t listen, his mind counts pansies and ageratum: yellow, yellow, purple, purple, a beautiful, cast-off beaded belt of flowers stretched along the highway collecting dirt.

“Foof,” Rose says. “I don’t see how it has any business being this muggy.” While they wait for traffic she reaches back to adjust something in the heel of her shoe. Rose is thirty-eight, the age his daughter Alma would be now if she had lived, and Cash realizes he treats Rose more like a daughter than a lady friend, cautioning about getting caught in the rain, clucking his tongue over the escapades of her boys. He wonders what she sees in him. Cash at least doesn’t drink, or eat beads, but he knows he’s getting old in a way that’s hard to live with. It was a purely crazy thing for him to want to move up here two years ago. Oklahoma Cherokees never leave Oklahoma. Most don’t even move two hickory trees away from the house where they were born.

In line at McDonald’s, he notices men looking at Rose.

Not a lot, not for long, but they look. Cash they don’t even see; he is an old Indian man no one would remember having just walked by. Not just because of three generations of tragedy in his family—even without cancer and suicide and a lost grandchild, those generations would have come to pass; he would have gotten old.