"I meant, for the longer term."
"You mean later today? Or tomorrow? Holy smokes, I don't know. Get another job, I guess."
"Do you have any other prospects? Because if you ask me, this whole city looks like more of the same."
Barbie looks out the window and narrows her eyes, momentarily making a face unlike any ever seen on a teenage fashion doll. "Shit," she says, "I hate this town."
Taylor cuts Turtle's pancakes into small triangles, and smiles at her mother.
After breakfast they find the car where Taylor has hidden it, in the alley behind the Delta Queen.
"I'll just run upstairs and get my stuff and be down in ten seconds," Barbie says.
"Don't tell the manager you're with us," Alice warns.
"I'm not telling him poop," she replies.
"Mama, this is crazy," Taylor says when she's gone. "We don't know one thing about her except she's an obvious nut case. She could be a serial killer."
"You reckon she'll stab us with her eyebrow pencil?"
Taylor smiles, though she's trying to be serious. "The next town, that's all, Mama. I know you're the world's number-one soft heart, but you've been in Pittman all these years, and the world's changed. Don't you watch 'America's Most Wanted'? It's not safe to pick up hitchhikers."
"We're kind of responsible, though," Alice says. "She got fired for talking to us."
"I'm sure she talks to everybody about Barbie till their ears drop off."
"Yeah, but you and Turtle were a special case. She'd seen you on an Oprah Winfrey show devoted almost entirely to Barbie." Alice blinks her eyes twice.
"Mama, you kill me. I can't fight with you." She looks at her little mother, ready to hit the road in her white shell blouse and lavender pants.
"Well, what else are we going to do, just run off and leave her flat?"
"Flat she's in no danger of," Taylor says.
Alice is puzzled for a minute, then laughs. "You think those are real?"
"I dare you to ask."
They both watch the back door of the Delta Queen. Turtle is already in the center of the backseat, her usual post, prepared for whatever comes next.
"Are we going to fit all thirteen of her mix-and-match ensembles into the car?" Taylor asks.
"We'll see."
"It's just to the state line, right? Maybe she'll have better luck in Lake Tahoe. Maybe Ken lives there."
"We'll see," Alice repeats.
Barbie takes more than ten seconds, but less than half an hour. She appears, dressed in a traveling ensemble that includes white gloves and a hat. The rest of her outfits fill only two suitcases and a hatbox, and fit easily into the Dodge's huge trunk. While Taylor reorganizes their things in the back of the car, Barbie clutches her square black purse possessively and seems nervous. She yawns and stretches in the way people really don't do in real life. "I am so tired!" she exclaims. "Can I take a snooze in the backseat?"
Turtle nods, her whole body moving with her head, and moves far to one side of the seat to let Barbie lie down. Alice gets in front and heaves the door shut. It weighs about as much as she does. Taylor seems relaxed in the driver's seat, even without a specific destination.
From a highway overpass Alice gets a glimpse of the desert that lies around them. "Mercy, look what we've got to drive through now," she says. "A whole lot of nothing."
Taylor nods. "I think that's why Las Vegas is the way it is. It's kind of like the only trash can for a hundred miles, so all the garbage winds up in it."
"Imagine if you really lived here. I mean born and raised." They've left the city and are speeding through the suburbs now, row after row of square brick houses with yards that aren't even trying. No flowers, barely a bush. At the corner of a deathly quiet intersection, two tough little sunburnt girls have set up a lemonade stand. They aren't having a great day. A series of descending prices have been marked out on their cardboard sign. Now it says, LEMONADE: WHATEVER YOU CAN PAY.
"Look at that," Taylor says. "Socialism has arrived at the outskirts of Las Vegas."
Alice replies, "Lord, let us pray that it's so."
14
Fiat
"WE ARE COMING TO THE FINISH LINE of the human race," Jax says in the key of D, trying it out. "If you want to see who wins, then don't be in first place." Not very satisfying, but he writes it down anyway on the back of an envelope, which happens to be a telephone bill he hasn't had time to open yet.
Jax is writing the song in Gundi's Fiat. The car doesn't have a steering column at the moment, and is parked in what the neighborhood kids call the Retarded Desert, since this piece of land lies between Rancho Copo and a former halfway house for retarded adults. Jax has already written a song called "The Retarded Desert," so he isn't concerned about that right now. Like many musicians and other people who have tried out singing in different locales, he feels his voice expresses its best qualities inside a small car. Jax doesn't have a car of any size, so he borrows Gundi's. The windows have to be rolled up for acoustical reasons, and since it's July, Jax is sweating a good deal. His skin reminds him of porpoises. He rolls down the window for a breather. Above his house he can see a hawk with white underwings, riding air currents. It has been there for hours. The sparrows in the apricot tree have achieved perfect stillness, waiting for death, each one hoping to outlast its small feathered neighbor.
Turtle should be here now. She likes to sit in Gundi's Fiat with him in all seasons except summer, and often contributes verses. Jax feels that children below the age of, say, driving are more lyrical than adults.
He misses Taylor too, badly. She's been gone twelve days, with no homecoming party in sight. Taylor's and Jax's arrangement, sex-wise, is indefinite: Taylor said if Jax felt like being with someone else, that was okay with her, because it was going to be a long haul. "It's not like we're married," Taylor told him, and Jax felt the small green tree that had been growing up in the center of their bed suddenly chopped back to the root. He doesn't feel fine about Taylor's being with someone else. He wants her to get his name tattooed on her person, or have his baby. Or both. Jax would like his own baby. He and Turtle could take it to the park, where they go to observe duck habits. He would wear one of those corduroy zipper cocoons with the baby wiggling inside, waiting for metamorphosis. He likes the idea of himself as father moth.
Someone is coming toward him in a hurry through the Retarded Desert; it's Gundi, his landlady and owner of the Fiat. She has clothes on today. She moves fearlessly among her intimate friends, the cacti, and waves a small green slip of paper toward him. He doesn't get out of the car, but puts down his portable keyboard and sits with his elbow out the window, like a driver waiting for a long line of traffic to pass.
"A registered letter for you, Jax," Gundi says in her purple silk voice with its foreign, deeply emphasized r's. She hands him the green slip, but he is still listening to the dark carved valleys of her r's: "A registered letter for you." If his name were Robert, the sentence would have been musically perfect.
"This is a letter?" he asks eventually.
She laughs, a purple silk laugh. "You have to sign that. Come, Bill is waiting. He says he can't give the letter to anyone but you. It must be very important."
Jax totes his keyboard and follows her "vurry impohrtant" back over Gundi's invisible path of safety through the desert. She moves snakishly, her blonde hair strumming the ridges of her shoulder blades. She's wearing leather sandals of the type worn by practitioners of yoga and pacifism, though the rest of her outfit is more aggressive: something in the line of a black brassiere, he can't get the full picture from behind, and a skirt made up of many long, satisfactorily transparent scarves.
Bill the mailman stands patiently in his blue shorts on the entry patio of Gundi's stone house. He has left a large pile of letters and catalogs in the little grotto by her door, where all residents of Rancho Copo come to collect their mail. The stone grotto was formerly a shrine, but Gundi removed the Virgin long ago and put in one
of her own sculptures, a bright-colored dancing dog with a parrot in its mouth.
"Mr. Jax Thibodeaux?" the mailman asks.
"I am he." If Jax had a hat on, he could take it off and bow.
"Can you show some form of identification?"
Gundi says, "Oh, yes, of course, this is Jax," waving lazily to make everything agreeable, and the letter is left in Jax's hand. Gundi kisses Bill, who is not particularly young, on the cheek before he goes. Being European in origin, Gundi kisses everyone, probably even the exterminators who show up from time to time to rid her foundations of termites.
"Well, Jax, come in, you have to share your mystery."
The letter is from Oklahoma, on stationery belonging to the Cherokee Nation. Jax doesn't care to read the letter in front of Gundi's black brassiere, but he follows her into the cave of her entry hall, and then into the light of her sun-struck studio. The rest of the odd little houses of Rancho Copo are falling down by degrees, but Gundi has done a lot of remodeling here in the main house. The windows across the west wall reach all the way to the high ceiling, framing a dramatic view of the mountains.
"Sit here," she commands, pointing to the turquoise cushions of the long window seat. Jax puts down his keyboard and sits at one end of the window seat, his back resting against the deep windowsill, his legs stretched out on the turquoise cushions. He holds the letter at arm's length, looks at Gundi, and drops it on the knees of his jeans.
"It's bad news, I'll share that much of my mystery without further ado." He crosses his arms.
Gundi rests her weight on one sandal, a little uncertainly. "Then I will leave you and go make a pot of raspberry tea. When I come back you have to tell me what is so important and terrible that you have to prove with identification you're Mr. Jax Thibodeaux." She pronounces it correctly, "Tee-ba-doe," the first person in years to do so, but Jax tries not to be too grateful; it may just be an accident on Gundi's part, a result of being foreign-born.
When she's gone, he slits one end of the envelope and sees the same seal on the letter inside, Cherokee Nation, an eight-pointed star inside a wreath of leaves.
Dear Jax,
I'm glad I met you in Tucson. I feel you're a person with careful thoughts and a kind spirit. I want to tell you frankly that I'm worried about Turtle. I've spoken with Andy Rainbelt, a social psychiatrist who works with Cherokee children, and he authorized me to write on behalf of our Social Welfare Department. It's premature to take legal action yet, he says, but it's extremely important for Taylor to be in contact with the Nation; there are things she needs to know. I trust you'll get this information to her.
It's difficult, I know, for non-Native people to understand the value of belonging to a tribe, but I know you care about problems Turtle will face on her own. I appeal to you on those grounds. Adopted Native kids always have problems in adolescence when they're raised without an Indian identity. They've gone to school with white kids, sat down to dinner every night with white parents and siblings, and created themselves in the image of the family mirror. If you ask them what they think about Indians, they'll recall Westerns on TV or doing Hiawatha as a school play. They think Indians are history.
If these kids could stay forever inside the protection of the adoptive family, they'd be fine. But when they reach high school there's enormous pressure against dating white peers. They hear ugly names connected with their racial identity. If you think this kind of prejudice among teenagers is a thing of the past, think again. What these kids find is that they have no sense of themselves as Native Americans, but live in a society that won't let them go on being white, either. Not past childhood.
My boss thinks I'm crazy to pursue this case, but I have to tell you something. I used to have a brother named Gabriel. We grew up wearing each other's jeans and keeping each other's secrets and taking turns when our uncle asked, "Who made this mischief?" Gabe was my ayehli, my other wing. When I was ten, our mother was hospitalized with alcoholism and other problems. Social workers disposed of our family: my older brothers went with Dad, who did construction in Adair County. I stayed with my Uncle Ledger. And Gabe was adopted by a family in Texas. No one has ever told me why it was done this way. I assume they thought my dad could handle grown, income-earning sons, but not Gabe and me. As for Gabe, probably the social workers knew a couple who wanted a little boy--something as simple as that. He wrote me letters on fringe-edged paper torn out of his ring-bound school notebooks. I still have them. Texas was hot and smelled like fish. His new parents told him not to say he was Indian at school, or they would treat him like a Mexican. He asked me, "Is it bad to be Mexican?"
They put him into the Mexican classrooms anyway; his parents were bigots of the most innocent kind, never realizing that skin color talks louder than any kid's words. He failed in school because the teachers spoke to him in Spanish, which he didn't understand. The Mexican kids beat him up because he didn't wear baggy black pants and walk with his hands in his pockets. When we were thirteen he wrote to tell me his new Mom had closed the bedroom door and sat on the foot of his bed and said quietly he was letting his new family down.
When he was fifteen, he was accessory to an armed robbery in Corpus Christi. Now I only know where he is when he's in prison.
You said, the night we met, that I was only capable of seeing one side of things. I've thought about that. I understand attachments between mothers and their children. But if you're right, if I have no choice here but to be a bird of prey, tearing flesh to keep my own alive, it's because I understand attachments. That's the kind of hawk I am--I've lost my other wing.
I wonder what you are giving Turtle now that she can keep. Soon she's going to hear from someone that she isn't white. Some boy will show her that third-grade joke, the Land O'Lakes Margarine squaw with a flap cut in her chest, the breasts drawn in behind the flap, and ask her, "Where does butter come from?" On the night of the junior prom, Turtle will need to understand why no white boy's parents are happy to take her picture on their son's arm. What does she have that will see her through this into a peaceful womanhood? As a citizen of Turtle's nation, as the sister of Gabriel Fourkiller, I want you to understand why she can't belong to you.
Yours sincerely,
Annawake Fourkiller
15
Communion
"IT'S NOT SUCH A HARD NAME, Teebadoe," Gundi says. "It's Cajun, right? A bayou name." The turquoise cushions are on the floor around them, and Jax's head is in her lap. The raspberry tea is gone; they are past that stage of the consolation.
"My daddy was an alligator," Jax tells her, enjoying the pity. "He only bit once."
"What do people usually say, when they get your name wrong?"
"Thimble Dukes."
"And your girlfriend, what does she say?"
"She says, 'Jax, honey, get your butt in here please and pick up your socks.'" He rests his long hands on his face and rubs his eye sockets deeply.
Gundi strokes Jax's hair. "I'm very sorry for this strange disaster that has entered your life."
"I'm sorry too." Jax sits up, putting a few inches of turquoise cushion between himself and Gundi. She talks like a nineteenth-century romance novel with twentieth-century intentions. "I'm sorry Taylor and Turtle are living in a Dodge Corona. That part I know is a disaster. The rest I'm not sure about." He picks up his cup and cradles its warmth in his palms. They're drinking saki. Gundi believes in drinking warm things on warm days. The afternoon sun through the west windows is finally losing some of its hostility, but Jax's skin remains salty from his session in Gundi's Fiat. She commented on his taste, earlier, when she put a teacup in his hands and kissed his forehead.
"What if this Fourkiller is right?" he asks. "Just as an exercise in giving equal consideration to out-there points of view. What if the best thing for Turtle is to go back?"
"You mean go back permanently?"
"I think that's what she means."
"Isn't there another path?" Gundi asks. She says pahth, and moves her hea
d in a large, lazy loop so that her light hair slides out of her eyes. Her earrings are made of beads that glitter like small metallic sparks. "The I Ching advises the moderate path," she says.
"Unfortunately, skin color doesn't come in 'moderate.' It comes in 'white' and 'other.'"
"I don't know about this. When I was a girl in Germany we read a little story in school about the Hopi, and I wanted to grow up to be an Indian. I think that's why I came here to Arizona, because of unconscious desires. I wanted my paintings to be touched by the primeval spirits of the land."
On the wall behind her, facing Jax, is a full-length portrait of nude Gundi with a saguaro. She stands in profile, her arms outstretched, so close to the cactus that her chin and other parts of her body appear to be recklessly touching its spines. The painting is more realistic than those in her previous series, which represented the moods of water. It will sell for more money, too.
"Do you think people like you and me can understand the value of belonging to a tribe?"
She looks at him, tilting her head. "Of course. We all long for connection."
"What do you want most in the world?" he asks.
"For my paintings to be extraordinary and great," she says without hesitation.
"And you write your name on every one."
"Well, I paint it on there. With a fine brush. Yes. Does that make me a bad person?"
"It makes you a solo flyer. Charles Lindbergh aiming for France. Not a group migration of geese."
"But I don't make paintings for myself, they are for other people. For the world. I want them to bring the world something more than its ordinary light."
"But you also want it known that Gundi made that light."
"Well, I want to get paid for my paintings, sure."
"Okay," Jax says, stretching his limbs. "Say I'm a genial millionaire and I will pay you a stellar salary to live on Rancho Copo and paint the great paintings, and donate them benevolently to the universe. Then you wouldn't sign them?"
"I think I would, still."
"Why?"
"Because I would want people to know this was the work of Gundi, and it didn't fall out of the sky."