Pigs in Heaven (6 page)

A
NNAWAKE
F
OURKILLER LOOKS UP FROM
her law briefs, startled. “Could you turn that up?”

The secretary, Jinny, automatically reaches to turn down the volume on the little TV at the end of her desk.

“No, up, please.” Annawake stares with her head cocked. Her black hair is cropped so close to the nap it stands up like an exotic pelt, and her broad mouth has the complicated curves of a foreign punctuation mark, making it anyone’s guess whether she’s smiling or not. Jinny shrinks behind her glasses, wondering if Annawake is making a joke and she’s not getting it. “It’s just Oprah Winfrey,” she says.

“I know. I want to hear this.”

Jinny shrugs. “Okay.” She stretches one blue-jeaned leg out behind her for balance as she reaches across hills of papers for the volume knob, then slumps back down to her typewriter. Mr. Turnbo is out of the office for the afternoon so it’s just the two of them, and Jinny is unsure of her relationship with Annawake. Jinny has worked here longer—she started as Franklin Turnbo’s secretary-receptionist when she graduated from high school last year; Annawake only fin
ished law school out in Phoenix a month ago, and has come back home to Oklahoma to intern here on an Indian Lawyer Training grant. Mr. Turnbo has never minded if Jinny’s little TV talked quietly on the desk, as long as she gets everything typed. She’s not wrapped up in the soaps, she just likes Oprah and Sally Jessy and sometimes
General Hospital
. Annawake doesn’t say she minds, either, but she makes faces at Sally Jessy and calls her the blonde Puerto Rican, which makes Jinny feel guilty for perming her hair. For trying to look
yonega
, as her grandma says.

Through the front window she sees a line of dusty cars and pickup trucks pulling out of the parking lot of Cherokee Nation headquarters, heading back up the highway toward Kenwood and Locust Grove; the afternoon session of Tribal Court is over. Mr. Turnbo will be back soon and she’s still behind on her work, but that’s not Oprah Winfrey’s fault.

“That little kid in the overalls?” Annawake asks. She is staring with her chin on her hand. “I heard somebody say she was adopted.”

“Yeah. Before the first commercial Oprah introduced them as being somebody and her adopted daughter Turtle.”

“Cherokee,” Annawake says. “I’ll bet you a Coke.”

“Uhn-uh,” Jinny says, “Navajo, I bet. They’re from Arizona. She looks exactly like my brother’s girlfriend’s little girl, out in Albuquerque.”

“Where in Arizona, did they say?”

“Tucson.”

Annawake eyes the TV as if it had just called her a name. Jinny finds Annawake completely fascinating: she dresses like she doesn’t give a hoot, in jeans and moccasins and white shirts from J. C. Penney’s men’s department, and she totes around a backpack held together by gray duct tape instead of a briefcase, but she has that fashion-model mouth with a deep indentation in the center of her upper lip that’s hard to stop staring at. Men must want to kiss her every minute, Jinny thinks. When the perky music comes up and Oprah fades out to another commercial, Annawake takes off her glasses and rubs her eyes. “Tired,” she says. “You too?”

“Yeah. Grandma’s mad at my brother Woody for quitting school. Nobody’s been getting much sleep at our house, except Woody. He took his bed out in the yard.”

“Robert Grass didn’t call yet?”

“Robert Grass! That turkey. Not since the drive-in two weeks ago.”

“He will,” Annawake says. “My brother Dellon knows him from the construction site over on Muskogee highway. He said Robert Grass is talking
osda
about his new girlfriend.”

“Maybe she’s nobody I know.”

“If she’s not you, you would have heard about it. Tahlequah’s not that big.”

“That’s the truth. The whole
Nation’s
not that big. Somebody all the way over to Salisaw told Grandma she’d seen me in a truck with the weediest Grass ever to come up.”

Annawake smiles. “There’s no getting away from the people that love you.” She slides her glasses back on and takes the pencil from behind her ear to mark up the page she’s reading. Jinny thinks:
You don’t even know. Nobody would gossip about you, they all adore you too much, plus you have no noticeable habits other than working
. She blows a puff of air through her bangs and flips to a new page of the Arkansas River Gravel Claim. Why anyone cares this much about river gravel is beyond Jinny Redcrow.

“This Oprah show is about kids that saved people’s lives,” she offers Annawake as an afterthought, wondering if there’s a legal angle she has missed. Annawake and Mr. Turnbo are always speaking to each other in a language Jinny types but can’t read.

“Mmm-hm,” Annawake says, not looking up. She’s ignoring the sexy-sounding commercial and doing the smile-frown thing she does when she is reading. Annawake is known for being a super brain. Jinny went to Tahlequah High School seven years after her, and the teachers were still talking about Annawake Fourkiller like some comet that only hits Oklahoma once per century. Once at a stomp dance the chief gave her as an example of a good life path. He didn’t embarrass the family by singling out her name, though of course
everybody knows who he meant. But Annawake acts like
she
hasn’t figured it out yet. She lives with one of her sisters-in-law in a bad little house on Blue Springs Street, and she ducks her head into the files when the good-looking guys come in making noise about their land-use papers, and she’s even nice enough to ask about stupid Robert Grass. The only real problem with her is her hair is strange. She used to have long Pocahontas hair—Jinny has seen pictures in the yearbook: valedictorian, jock, president of Cherokee Pride club, nicknamed “Wide Awake Annawake”—but she cut it all off when she went away to law school. Now it’s spiky and short like Jinny’s little brothers’, more Sinead O’Connor than Cherokee Pride. She doesn’t see how Annawake can go pointing her finger at Sally Jessy Raphael.

“Can I put Arkansas River on the floor?” Annawake asks suddenly. Oprah is back, and Annawake is scooting some papers around to make room for herself on the edge of Jinny’s desk.

“You can put Arkansas River in the river,” Jinny says. Annawake laughs, and Jinny feels guilty for thinking bad-hair thoughts. Actually, Jinny thinks, if she had Annawake’s bone structure she’d cut her hair off too, or do
something
different.

“So what’s the story on that little kid?”

There are four kids: a show-off boy in a scout uniform who keeps patting the hand of his huge father; two tall, skinny white girls in braces who could be sisters; and the Indian girl in overalls.

“That white girl with her is the mom. The adopted mom.”

The mother is young-looking and pretty, dressed in a nice beige suit but swinging her crossed leg like it’s not her business to act like Nancy Reagan. She is telling the story of how her little girl saw a man fall down a hole in the Hoover Dam.

Annawake makes a face of pain. “Give me a break. She made up that Hoover Dam to get on the show.”

“No, that was on the news. You were out there in Phoenix when it happened, didn’t you see it on TV?”

“Really? Maybe. I can’t think of it if I did. In law school I missed all the news that was legally uncomplicated.”

“Oprah has people that check your story,” Jinny says, a little
defensive. She spends almost every afternoon with Oprah, and feels she can be trusted.

“You think it’s true?”

Jinny shrugs. “Listen. You can tell.” The woman explains that she herself didn’t see the man fall down the hole, only Turtle did. For two whole days no one else believed it, but she did, and they kept trying to get help.

“
National Enquirer
for sure,” Annawake says. “She read it in the grocery store.”

Oprah is talking to the mother now, whose name is something Taylor. “I can see there’s a wonderful bond between you and your daughter. Can’t you see it?” Oprah turns around, her loose rayon jacket swirling and the studio audience says Yes, they can. She asks, “You adopted her when she was how old, two?”

“Probably she was three,” the mother says. “We don’t know for sure. She was abused and hadn’t been growing right before I got her. It was kind of an unusual situation. Somebody just gave her to me.”

“
Gave her to you?
”

“Left her in my car.”

Oprah makes one of her funny big-eyed faces at the camera. “You all hear that?” she asks in a deeper, down-home voice. “
Check your car
before you drive out of the parking lot.”

Annawake looks at Jinny with raised eyebrows, and asks the TV set, “Where?”

“I’d just stopped for a cup of coffee,” the mother says, and seems a little surprised when the audience laughs.
No way is she making this story up
, Jinny thinks. “I was on a trip across the country. I’d just left home and was headed out West. The funny part about it is, all the time I was growing up in Kentucky my main goal was to not get pregnant. All my girlfriends had these babies up to their ears.”

“But that wasn’t going to happen to you,” says Oprah.

“No, ma’am.”

“And your first day out, somebody gives you a baby.”

“Second day out,” she says, and the audience laughs again. With
Annawake watching, Jinny feels slightly embarrassed about the low laugh threshold of Oprah’s studio audience.

“You could have walked away. Why did you take her?” Oprah asks in a caring way.

“Seeing as how it’s against the law,” Annawake adds.

“Which law?” Jinny asks, surprised.

“Indian Child Welfare Act. You can’t adopt an Indian kid without tribal permission.”

Franklin Turnbo has come in and hung up his jacket. Annawake motions him over, still concentrating on the black-and-white screen. The three of them watch the mother push her hair out of her eyes, thinking. She seems unaware that she’s on TV—unlike the Cub Scout, who keeps bobbing on the edge of his chair and raising his hand as if he knows the answer.

“I felt like I
had
to take her,” the mother finally answers. “This woman just plunked her down on the seat of my car and looked at me and said, ‘Take her.’ I said, ‘Where do you want me to take her?’ I thought she needed a ride somewhere.”

Finally the audience is completely quiet.

“Take who?” Franklin Turnbo asks.

“That Cherokee kid,” Annawake says, nodding at the screen. The mother looks down at the little girl and then back at Oprah. “The woman told me Turtle’s mother was dead, and that somebody had been hurting Turtle. She was the dead mother’s sister, and it looked like somebody’d been hurting her too. Then she got in this truck with no lights, and drove off. It was the middle of the night. At the time I felt like there was nothing else in the world I could do but take the baby. I’d been driving forty-eight hours. I guess my judgment was impaired.”

The audience laughs, uneasily. The little girl is staring at Oprah and clutching a fistful of her mother’s skirt. The mother carefully moves the child’s hand into one of hers. “The next summer I went back and legally adopted her.”

“Can’t be,” says Annawake. “Not legally.”

Oprah asks, “Where did all this happen?”

“Oklahoma, Indian country. Turtle’s Cherokee.”

Annawake bangs the desk like a judge, bringing the court to order.

The sky has gone dishwater gray. There could be rain on this west wind, Annawake thinks. But it’s Third Saturday, stomp-dance night, and old people love to tell you that rain always holds back till the dancing is over. They’re mostly right. She parks her truck, gathers up her bouquet of blue and white papers from the office, and wonders briefly what ought to be done about the aluminum siding that is buckling on the north side of the house. With two free fingers she forks up the handlebars of a tricycle from the front walk and parks it out of harm’s way on the porch.

“
Siyo
,” she says, latching the screen door to keep kids in and dogs out. Her brother and sister-in-law are kneeling on the kitchen floor and return her greeting without looking up. They must be on speaking terms this week: they’re hammering the legs back onto the old pine dining table, and it’s not easy to take on a project like that without communicating.

Annawake watches the two of them, united for once as they both concentrate on keeping the table leg on straight while Dellon drives the nail. His thick braid swings like a bell rope as he hammers, and their heads almost touch. “Got her?” he asks, and Millie nods, her crinkled perm softly brushing Dellon’s shining black crown. They were married less than a year and have been divorced for five, but it hasn’t interfered with their rate of producing children. When the table leg is secure, Millie rolls sideways and takes hold of the lip of the sink. Annawake takes her other hand and pulls her up.

“Seems like you take one month longer with every baby,” Dellon says, and Annawake laughs because it’s true: the first was premature, the second right on time, the third one three weeks late, and this one seems to have staked Millie’s ample territory for its homestead.

“Don’t say that out loud, he’ll hear you.” Millie leans over her stomach and tells it, “You’re coming out of there this weekend, you hear? If you go any longer past due you’re walking home from the hospital yourself.”

Annawake gets a soda out of the refrigerator and sits in a chair, moccasins together, facing the upside-down table. “Is this thing going to live?”

“It’ll never walk again,” Dellon says, squatting on his heels. He shrugs his braid back over the great round loaf of his shoulder and gives the table leg a couple of trial knocks with the hammer. He grins up at his little sister. “You scalp the cowboys today?”

“I did my best.”

“Don’t make fun of Annawake’s job, Dell,” Millie says, turning her back on them, running water into a big aluminum kettle. The sun shining through her shocked hair reveals the perfect globe of her skull.

“I never make fun of Annawake. She’d beat me up.”

“Dad, let’s go.” Baby Dellon, who is almost six and hates to be called Baby Dellon, runs into the kitchen with a football helmet on.