He’s probably retired. There couldn’t be a whole lot of brownie points involved in nailing him now.”
She understands suddenly what Jax is doing, and admires it: he is neither obliging nor comatose, he’s protecting the people he loves. He has learned much more from her than she from him. She feels some lawyerly chagrin. “I’m not necessarily looking to nail people,” she says.
“You’re a good shot, Ms. Fourkiller. Maybe you should just make sure you’re not loaded.”
“I want to do the best thing for the most people.”
“She loves Turtle, that’s one thing you should know. She would jump off Hoover Dam herself for that kid, headfirst.
Me, the great Jax, she enjoys, but Turtle she loves. She didn’t exactly have to meditate before she walked out of here. It was no contest.” He looks at her, his eyes luminous and hard, and then back at the mountains. For the first time Annawake notices his strange profile: a perfectly straight line from his forehead to the end of his nose. She finds it beautiful and disturbing. She clamps her hands tightly between her knees, shivering a little. The temperature has dropped unbelievably, as it will when the desert loses the sun.
Jax stands up and goes inside and stays for quite a while.
She’s uncertain whether this signifies the end of the interview. She hears a few dramatic nose blows, and then she can hear him singing quietly: “Be careful what you take, Anna Wake, be careful what you break.” She decides that if he starts playing the piano she will leave, but he comes back out with his fingers hooked into the mouths of two slim brown bottles of beer.
“Here,” he says. “Let’s have a party. Kennedy and Khrushchev drink to a better world.” He sits beside her, very close, and she can feel his body heat through her jeans.
Strangely, she feels comforted rather than threatened, as if Jax were one of her brothers. Possibly it’s because she has only heard her brothers, and no other man before now, confess to her his absolute love for some other woman.
Jax leans back on one elbow and begins pointing out constellations: Ursa Major, which Annawake has known since she could walk, and the Pleiades.
“The what?”
“Pleiades. Seven sisters.”
She takes a long pull on her beer and squints at the sky.
“You people must have better eyes than we do. In Cherokee there are only six. The Six Bad Boys. Anitsutsa”.
“Anitsutsa?”
“Yeah. Or disihgwa, the pigs. The Six Pigs in Heaven.”
“Excuse me but you’re making this up.”
“No. There’s a story about these six boys that wouldn’t do their work. Wouldn’t work in the corn, wouldn’t fix their mothers’ roofs, wouldn’t do the ceremony chores—there’s always stuff to be done at the ceremonial grounds, getting firewood and repairing shelters and things like that. They weren’t what you’d call civic-minded.”
“And they got turned into pigs.”
“Now wait, don’t jump ahead. It’s their fault, they turned themselves into pigs. See, all they wanted to do, ever, was play ball and have fun. All day long. So their mothers got fed up. They got together one day and gathered up all the boys’ sgwalesdi balls. It’s a little leather ball about like this.” Annawake holds up a green apricot. “With hair inside.
Animal hair, human, whatever. And they put all the balls in the stewpot. They cooked them.”
“Yum, yum,” says Jax.
She throws the apricot, carefully aiming at nothing. “Okay. So the boys come home for lunch after playing around all morning, and their mothers say, ‘Here’s your soup!’ They plop those soggy old cooked balls down on their plates. So the boys get mad. They say, ‘Forget it, only a pig would eat this,’ and they rush down to the ceremonial grounds and start running around and around the ball court, asking the spirits to listen, yelling that their mothers are treating them like pigs. And the spirits listened, I guess. They figured, ‘Well, a mother knows best,’ and they turned the boys into pigs.
They ran faster and faster till they were just a blur. Their little hooves left the ground and they rose up into the sky, and there they are.”
“Holy crow,” Jax says. “Your mom tell you that, when you wouldn’t make your bed?”
“My Uncle Ledger,” she says. “There’s a lot of different versions of all the stories, according to what mood you’re in. But you’re right, that’s the general idea. The Pigs, and also Uktena, this big snake with horns—those are the Cherokee boogeymen. I was always very civic-minded when I lived with my uncle.”