Turtle takes a very long time to tear open the envelope.
"What's it say? 'Citation' starts with C-I-T, it means a ticket."
"It says: Dear Cad Die..."
"Dear cad die?"
"C-A-D-D-I-E."
"Caddie. Let me see that."
"I can read it," Turtle says. "It's not too long."
"Okay." Taylor concentrates on being patient and not hitting pedestrians. People in Sand Dune don't seem in tune with the concept of traffic lights.
"Dear Caddie. I am sorry I did-n't see you at miggets..."
"Miggets?" Taylor glances over at Turtle, who is holding the paper very close to her face. "That's okay, keep going."
"At miggets like I pro, pro-my-sed."
"Like I promised."
"Like I promised. Here is the S 50."
"S 50?" To Taylor it sounds like a fighter plane.
"The S is crossed out."
"A line through it?" Taylor considers. "Here is the 50? Oh, a dollar sign, here is the fifty dollars? Look in the envelope, is there anything else in there?"
Turtle looks. "Yes." She hands over two twenties and a ten.
"What else does it say? Is there a name at the bottom?" Taylor can't wait any longer, and reaches for the note:
Dear Caddie, I'm sorry I didn't see you at Midget's like I promised. Here's the $50. Now we're even and I'll beat the pants off you next time, right, Toots? Love, Hoops.
It reminds Taylor of the mysterious ads in the newspaper's personal section: "Hoops, I'll never forget the fried clams at B.B.O.G., Your Toots." It stands to reason that the kind of person who would waste money on those ads would leave fifty dollars on the wrong car.
"Who's Caddie?" Turtle wants to know.
"Somebody else with a big white car. Some guy named Hoops owed her money, and didn't want to face her in person."
"Why did he give it to us?"
"Because we're lucky."
"Was that the sign telling us where to go?" Turtle asks.
"I guess. It's a sign our luck has turned. Money's walking to us on its own two feet. I guess we ought to go to Las Vegas."
"What's Las Vegas?"
"A place where people go to try their luck."
Turtle considers this. "Try to do what with it?"
"Try to get more money with it," Taylor says.
"Do we want more money?"
"It's not so much we want it. We just have to have it."
"Why?"
"Why?" Taylor frowns and tilts the rearview mirror to get the setting sun out of her eyes. "Good question. Because nobody around here will give us anything, except by accident. Food or gas or what all we need. We've got to buy it with money."
"Even if we really need something, they won't give it to us?"
"Nope. There's no free lunch."
"But they'll give us money in Las Vegas?"
"That's the tale they tell."
Even a joke has some weight and takes up space, and when introduced into a vacuum, acquires its own gravity. Taylor is thinking about her high school physics teacher, Hughes Walter, and what he might say about her present situation. To amuse herself on long drives she often puts together improbable combinations of the people she's met in her life, and imagines what they would say to each other: Her mother and Angie Buster. Lou Ann's mean, prudish grandmother and Jax. Better yet: Jax and the woman looking for the horses.
They are driving toward Las Vegas because it's the only suggestion anyone has made so far, besides Sesame Street, and when introduced into a vacuum the idea acquired gravity. They're approaching the Hoover Dam now. Maybe it's what Jax said, that they've been drawn back to the scene of the crime. Whether she is the one who made off with the goods, or was robbed, she doesn't know yet. Taylor would just as soon skip the dam, but the only way out of this corner of the state is to cross the Hoover or get wet. Turtle is sitting up, looking excited.
"We're going to see those angels again," she says, her first words in more than thirty miles.
"Yep."
"Can we stop?"
"And do what?"
"Go see that hole."
Taylor is quiet.
"Can we?"
"Why do you want to do that?"
"I want to throw something at it."
"You do? What for?"
Turtle looks out the window and speaks so quietly Taylor can barely hear. "Because I hate it."
Taylor feels her face go hot, then cold, as her blood strangely reverses its tide. Turtle understands everything that has happened. There is no state of grace.
"Yeah, okay. We can do that."
Taylor parks the car very near the spillway. Since the dramatic rescue, they've added a new fence on the mountainside and pinkish floodlights in the parking lot. It feels bright as day when they get out, but deserted and wrongly colored, like some other planet with a fading sun. They both stand with their hands in their pockets, looking down.
"What can we throw?" Turtle asks.
Taylor thinks. "We have some empty pop cans in the car. But I hate to throw trash. It doesn't seem right."
"Rocks?" Turtle suggests, but the parking lot has been resurfaced and there aren't any rocks. The Hoover Dam people have really gone all out.
"Green apricots!" Taylor says suddenly, and Turtle laughs out loud, a chuck-willow watery giggle. They clamber into the backseat and scoop up armloads of the mummified fruits.
"This one's for Lucky Buster," Taylor shouts, casting the first one, and they hear it: ponk, ponk, ricocheting down the bottomless tunnel.
"Here's for Boy Scouts that have saved lives, and that stupid purple dress they tried to make you wear on TV. And for Annawake Fourkiller wherever she is." Handfuls of fruit ran down the hole.
"Lucky, Lucky, Lucky, Lucky," Turtle chants, throwing her missiles slowly like precious ammunition. While the two of them, mother and child, stand shouting down the hole, a fine rain begins to fall on the desert.
Afterward, Turtle seems spent. She lies across the front seat with her head on Taylor's right thigh and her tennis shoes wagging idly together and apart near the passenger door. The low greenish lights of the dashboard are reflected in her eyes as she looks out at the empty space of her own thoughts. Beside her face Turtle cradles Mary, her square utility flashlight. It's the type that people take deer hunting, large and dark green, said to float if dropped in water. She never turns it on; Turtle doesn't even particularly care whether it has batteries, but she needs it, this much is clear. To Taylor it seems as incomprehensible as needing to sleep with a shoebox, and just as unpleasant--sometimes in the night she hears its hollow corners clunk against Turtle's skull. But anyone who's tried to take Mary away has found that Turtle is capable of a high-pitched animal scream.
Taylor squints through the windshield wipers. She's driving toward the blaze of lights she knows has to be Las Vegas, but she can barely see the sides of the road. The storm moving north from Mexico has caught up to them again.
Turtle shifts in her lap and looks up at Taylor. "Am I going to have to go away from you?"
Taylor takes a slow breath. "How could that happen? You're my Turtle, right?"
The wipers slap, slap. "I'm your Turtle, right."
Taylor takes a hand off the wheel to stroke Turtle's cheek. "And once a turtle bites you, it doesn't let go, does it?"
"Not till it thunders."
Turtle seems cramped, and arches her back, pushing herself around with her feet. When she finally settles, she has crawled out of her seat belt and curled most of her body into Taylor's lap with her head against Mary. With one hand she reaches up and clenches a fist around the end of Taylor's braided hair, exactly as she used to do in the days before she had any other language. Outside, the blind rain comes down and Taylor and Turtle flinch when the hooves of thunder trample the roof of the car.
SUMMER
11
Someone the Size of God
CASH STILLWATER LOOKS UP FROM his work and sees a splash of white birds l
ike water thrown at the sky. They stay up there diving in circles through the long evening light, changing shape all together as they fly narrow-bodied against the sun and then wheel away, turning their bright triangular backs.
Cash had only glanced up to rest his eyes but there were the birds, shining outside his window. His eyes fill with tears he can't understand as he follows their northward path to the dark backdrop of the Tetons, then back again to some place he can't see behind the Jackson Hole fire station. They make their circle again and again, flaunting their animal joy. He counts the birds without knowing it, sorting the shifting group into rows of odd and even, like beads. In the daytime Cash works at a healthfood store putting tourists' slender purchases into paper bags, but in the evenings he makes bead jewelry. His lady friend Rose Levesque, who works at the Cheyenne Trading Post, takes in the things he's made, pretending to the owner that she did it herself. Cash learned beadwork without really knowing it, simply because his mother and sisters, and then his daughters, were doing it at the kitchen table all his life. Before his wife died and the family went to pieces and he drove his truck to Wyoming, he raised up two girls on the Cherokee Nation. He never imagined after they were grown he would have to do another delicate thing with his hands, this time to pay the rent. But since he started putting beads on his needle each night, his eye never stops counting rows: pine trees on the mountainsides, boards in a fence, kernels on the ear of corn as he drops it into the kettle. He can't stop the habit, it satisfies the ache in the back of his brain, as if it might fill in his life's terrible gaps. His mind is lining things up, making jewelry for someone the size of God.
Rose walks in his door without knocking and announces loudly, "Nineteen silver quills down the hatch, did I tell you?" She plumps herself down at his kitchen table.
"Down whose hatch?" Cash wants to know, watching his needle. The backs of his hands remind him of paper burning in the fireplace, the moment the taut membrane goes slack into a thousand wrinkles, just before it withers to ash and air. He wonders if you get used to waking up old.
"Willie Levesque's big old, ugly, hungover hatch, that's whose." Rose lights a cigarette and drags on it with an inward sigh. Willie is Rose's oldest boy, who is half her age, nineteen, and twice as big. "I had them in an aspirin bottle in the kitchen. In the kitchen, for God's sake, it's not like they were in the medicine cabinet."
Cash glances at Rose, who is peevishly brushing ash off her blouse. Because she is shorter and heavier than she feels she ought to be, she clacks through her entire life in scuffed high heels, worn with tight jeans and shiny blouses buttoned a little too low. You can tell at thirty paces she's trying too hard.
"Didn't he look what he was taking?" he asks her.
"No. He said they went down funny, though. Like fillings." Cash works his needle and Rose smokes inside another comma of silence, then says, "The silver ones, wouldn't you know. Twenty dollars' worth. I'm about ready to take it out of his hide. Why couldn't he have eat up some fake turquoise?"
Rose brings Cash the supplies for making jewelry, pretending she is taking them home herself, but her boss, Mr. Crittenden, holds her accountable for every bead. In the morning he puts on his jeweler's glasses and counts the beads in every piece she's brought in, to make sure they're all there. It must be hard work, this business of mistrust.
"Those quills ought to pass on through without much trouble," he tells Rose. "My girls used to swallow pennies and all kinds of things, you'd be surprised. They always turned up. You could tell Willie to give them back when he's done."
"Maybe I'll do that," Rose says. "Hand them over to Mr. Crittenden in a little paper sack." Cash can tell she is smiling; he knows Rose's voice, its plump amusement and thinned-out resentments, because so often he is looking at something else while she speaks to him.
He met her, or rather saw her first, in the window of the Trading Post. He made a habit of pecking on the glass and winking at her each day on his way to work, which apparently won her heart, since she says she feels like a plastic dummy up there on display. Mr. Crittenden makes her sit at a little antique schoolroom desk in the bay-window storefront, where tourists can behold a genuine Indian hunched over her beadwork, squinting in the bad glare. 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 healthfood 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 your mama's favorite."
Cash only lets Rose hurt him this way because he knows she is right. As a young man he turned his name around in honor of his mother's favorite singer. Now he's working as a fifty-nine-year-old bag boy at the Health Corral; his immediate superior there is an eighteen-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 abou
t 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.
"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."