Annawake bumps up the long gravel drive in her rented car until she’s stopped by the sight of a woman in a tree. She can’t be sure from the legs that it’s the same woman she saw on Oprah Winfrey, but the address seems right so she parks and gets out. The ground is covered with spoiled fruits and hard pits that hurt the soles of her feet through her moccasins. She shouts into the branches, “Hello, I’m looking for Taylor Greer.”
“You’ve found her, and she’s up a tree.” Taylor is using a rope to attach a boom box to an upper limb. “You just stay right there. To tell you the truth I prefer the ground.”
A thunderous bass line begins to pound through the leaves.
Annawake watches the woman’s sneakers step down the cross-hatched ladder of limbs, then hang for a second, then drop. At ground level she’s a few inches shorter than Annawake and maybe a few years younger, with long brown hair and unsuspicious eyes. She slaps the thighs of her jeans a few times, looks at the palm of her right hand, and extends it.
“Annawake Fourkiller,” Annawake says, shaking Taylor’s hand. “I’m from Oklahoma, in town for a professional meeting. You’ve got some pretty country out here.”
Taylor smiles at the mountains, which at this hour of the morning look genuinely purple. “Isn’t it? Before I came here I didn’t expect so many trees. The only difference between here and anywhere else is that here everything’s got thorns.”
“Tough life in the desert, I guess. Be prickly or be eaten.”
Taylor has to raise her voice now to compete with Jax, who is singing loudly from the treetops. “You want to talk?
Come in and I’ll shut the door so we can hear ourselves think.”
Annawake follows Taylor inside, through a narrow stone hallway that barely accommodates an upright piano, which they squeeze past into the kitchen. The walls there are cool slant faces of slate. Annawake sits at a wooden table, whose legs are painted four different colors; she thinks of Millie and Dell fixing the table at home, and the new baby ruling the roost now. Taylor is putting water on for coffee.
“So, what did you kill four of, if I may ask?”
Annawake smiles. This is the woman she saw on TV—she recognizes the confidence. “It’s a pretty common Cherokee surname.”
“Yeah? Is there a story?”
“The story is, when my great-great-grandfather first en-countered English-speaking people, that’s the name he got.
He had four kids, so he’d carved four notches in his rifle barrel—it was something they did back then. Out of pride, I guess, or maybe to help remind them how much game to bring home every day. But the white guys took it to mean he’d shot four men.” Annawake glances at Taylor. “I guess Grandpa never set them straight.”
Taylor smiles, catching the slender, almost dangerous thing that has passed between them. She clatters coffee mugs and pours black grounds into the filter. “Your accent makes me homesick. I know it’s Okie, but to me it doesn’t sound that far off from Kentucky.”
“I was just thinking that,” Annawake says. “You sound like home to me. Almost. There’s a difference but I can’t name it.”
Taylor stands by the stove and for a while neither woman speaks. Taylor takes in Annawake’s appearance: her black brush of hair all seems to radiate out from a single point, the widow’s peak in her forehead. Her skin is a beautiful pottery color you want to touch, like Turtle’s. She’s wearing a maroon cotton shirt with blue satin ribbons stitched on the yoke and shoulder seams. Taylor fiddles with the gas burner. They listen to a long guitar riff and Jax’s voice coming from outside:
“Big boys…play games. Their toys…follow me home. Big boys play games, big bang, you’re gone…”
Annawake raises an eyebrow.
“That’s my boyfriend’s band.” Taylor looks out the window. “Hey, it’s working. No birds.”
“Is this some kind of experiment?”
Taylor laughs. “You must think I’m cracked. I’m trying to keep the birds out of the apricot tree. My little girl likes apricots more than anything living or dead, and she’s the kind of kid that just doesn’t ask for much. I’ve been going out of my head trying to think how to get the birds out of the fruit.”
“My grandma planted mulberry trees next to her peach trees. The birds liked the mulberries better. They’d sit in the mulberry and laugh, thinking they were getting away with something good, and leave all the peaches for us.”