"So I keep it in my hand, right here. And every day when I talk to Taylor, and when I lie in bed with Taylor, it's here in my hand, and I'm thinking, If I forget for one minute then we'll roll over on this thing, uh-oh, big mess. Until that happens, I'm holding it and I can feel the shell of it as thin as the shell on your teeth. I'm choosing what Taylor knows and what she doesn't. I have the power. I will be the nervous yet powerful guy in the know, and she will be the fool."
They both watch the trail of smoke from Gundi's cigarette. It broadens into the room like a genie.
"And if she's a fool," Jax says, "then how can I worship the ground she walks on?"
"Which at the moment you are doing?"
"Which at the moment I am doing. I'm being a bad boy, but bad boys can still confess and beg for penance."
Gundi blows smoke, dispersing the apparition. "You talk about Taylor as if she is the Notre Dame Cathedral."
"She is. And the Statue of Liberty and Abbey Road and the best burrito of your life. Didn't you know?"
"I don't think so." Gundi jabs out her cigarette in the china-red bowl by the bed and gets up.
"Hey, whoa, Miss Kitty. I broke the rules, didn't I?"
"What rules would those be?" Gundi throws open her lacquered armoire and begins putting on more clothes than she has been seen in anytime this year.
"Rules like, when you're in bed with somebody, even if it's just a roll in the snow, you tell the woman you're with that she is the Snow Queen of your Heart." He folds his hands primly over his penis. "I apologize."
"I don't need you to lie to me, Jax. We both know this is nothing."
Jax lies back with his hands behind his head, trying on the feeling of "this is nothing." He finds it surprisingly painless.
"Thank you, Jax. I need to paint now. Why don't you go mop some floors."
"Yes, ma'am," he says, making no immediate move from her bed.
"And, your rent is past due."
"Tyrant," he says, and steps out her bedroom window with his clothes in his hands.
17
Treasure
IN THEIR MOTEL ROOM OUTSIDE Carson City, Barbie stands between the two double beds in her white silk pajamas, stubbornly brushing her hair one hundred strokes.
"We could rent another room if you want to pay for it," Taylor says. "Otherwise, we have to share." She is using a more patient voice than she would normally use with a person her own age. Like Lucky Buster, Barbie doesn't strike all the right chords as a true adult. Taylor wonders if this is some new national trend like a crop disease. Failure to mature. Taylor matured at age nine, she feels, on a day she remembers: a Saturday when Alice was cleaning for Mrs. Wickentot. One of the little Wickentot boys told his friend as they came in the house, "You don't have to talk to her, that's the cleaning lady's girl." Taylor presses her spine against the imitation wood headboard of the motel bed, still dressed in her T-shirt and jeans. She is thin and leggy like Barbie, but feels like a member of an entirely different species, one that wears canvas sneakers with holes in the toes instead of fluffy slippers with small heels.
"I'll share a bed with Turtle," Barbie says, and goes back to her hairbrushing project, frowning intensely.
The four of them have taken one room, as they did the night before in Tonopah, but the sleeping arrangements are awkward this time. The manager here claims he can't bring in an extra cot because of fire regulations, so they have to share two beds. Barbie feels the most appropriate thing is for herself to share with Turtle, and for Taylor and Alice to take the other bed, but Turtle will have none of it. She's sitting on Taylor's legs with a hank of Taylor's hair wound around one fist like the leash of a wayfaring dog.
"Don't worry, hon, I won't bite," Alice says, clicking off the bedside light and rolling to the far edge. "I'll probably be up most of the night anyway. I don't sleep that good since I went through the change of life."
Barbie sits, bangs her hairbrush down next to her black purse on the night table, and takes off her mules, leaving them crouched like Pekingese littermates on the carpet. Wordlessly she pulls up the covers.
"Goodnight," Taylor says. Turtle lets go of Taylor's hair and happily begins to get ready for bed.
Barbie reaches for her black purse, stuffs it under her pillow, and resettles her head with several irritated heaves. By the time Taylor and Turtle are curled under their own blanket, she is snoring demurely.
Taylor feels pressure on her shoulder and confuses it inside her dream of being chased in a strange landscape, a city where it rains and rains and streets rise suddenly into walls. In a corner against dark buildings, a cluster of horses look at her, muscles twitching inside the cloth of their damp shoulders. The pressure comes again, and she hears Alice whisper, "Shhh."
"What?" The horses, gone. Where is Turtle?
"Shhh. Come here. You've got to see this."
Taylor slowly reassembles her memory of this room. She carefully moves Turtle's hand, which feels like a rubber glove tightly packed with flour, from her own arm. "Christ, Mama, what?" she whispers.
She can see nothing but the small outline of Alice moving toward the bathroom. She follows, and Alice closes the door behind them. She clicks on Turtle's flashlight and Taylor sees silver moons, silver edges and circles. Silver dollars. Hundreds of them, in the silk-lined cave of Barbie's black purse.
"Holy shit. Buried treasure."
"Shhh." Alice turns off the flashlight and they sit on the cold tile in total darkness.
"Mama, I told you it wasn't makeup."
"Where do you think a gal comes by about a thousand dollars in silver coin?"
Taylor grabs Alice, what turns out to be her arm in its pajama sleeve. "She stole it from the casino."
"We don't know that."
"Okay, where'd she get it?"
Alice speaks reluctantly. "I've been studying on that for a couple of hours. So far I haven't come up with a story I feel real positive about."
"No wonder she came out of that hotel like a bat out of hell!" Taylor squeaks in a high whisper, "Okay, everybody, I've got my Bank Robbin' Barbie ensemble on, let's go!"
"Hush!"
"Mama, what do we do?"
"Call the police, I reckon."
"No way. And get them on our case?"
"Taylor, the police aren't after you."
"No, but we'd have to identify ourselves. It would get in the news. Believe me, I know how that one goes. Me and Turtle and Francis the Pig are out of the hero business."
"Well, we can leave her here, then."
"Mama, you were the one that said we had to bring her. She's a pain in the butt, but still. We can't just dump her in the middle of Death Valley. That would be like those guys marooned on that fishing boat."
"It wouldn't be just dumping her, she's got coins. She wouldn't have no trouble getting her way in a phone booth."
Taylor smiles in the dark. "That hotel manager must be having a conniption. He was a creep. You lied to him, Mama. Right in front of your own grandchild."
Alice laughs. "I did lie. Like a rug."
"It's gambling money, anyway. It was wrongfully come by in the first place. It wasn't really his."
"Whose was it, then? And how come you're on her side now? Ten hours ago you were ready to dump her off at a rest stop with no facilities."
Taylor can't answer the question. She reaches out in the dark and, as if guided, her fingers touch cold silver. "That money belonged to the hard-luck cases of Vegas," she says. "Part of it's mine."
Even in the Carson City laundromat there are slot machines lined up on the wall to laugh at Taylor. "We've got to get out of this state," she says bitterly.
"Every laundromat's a gambling parlor," Alice says, making herself at home among the white-elephant appliances. "You drop your quarters in and hope maybe this time the spin cycle will work."
"We should have brought some extra change from you-know-who." Taylor glances at Turtle, who is building a tower of bright orange detergent empties. Ba
rbie claimed her clothes were clean, and elected to sleep in. She asked if they would do just a couple of things for her, which turned out to be bikini underwear and a pair of purple Spandex pants.
"How do you think she's planning on spending her loot?" Alice asks, holding a pair of Turtle's jeans under her chin and pulling a pink sock out of each leg. She throws the socks in with the whites. "I notice she hasn't offered to pick up the tab for anything yet."
"Don't you think that'd be a little suspicious, Mama? Plunking down Long John Silver's booty bag on the check-in desk and counting out thirty dollars in coin?"
A heavy young woman comes into the laundry with a jumbo box of clothes and three brown-skinned, orange-haired children. The oldest sticks out his arms and begins barnstorming around the machines. He knocks over Turtle's tower and careers away, making burning-engine noises. Turtle begins rebuilding without a word.
"Maybe we should stop at a bank and let her trade in her change for paper money," Taylor suggests. "She's going to get a hernia hauling around all that precious metal."
Alice stares. "I'll swan, Taylor. You talk like you're still going to let her ride with us."
Taylor fiddles with the unrolling hem of one of Turtle's T-shirts. "I kind of respect her now. This robbery thing adds a whole new dimension to her personality."
"Well, it's your car. If you want to use it for transporting the criminal element." Alice begins sorting a dark load. "Have you given any thought to where we're going to end up? We can't just drive and read dumb newspapers till the cows come home."
"Mama, don't you think I know that?" Taylor feels her whole self shaken by this small, continuing antagonism with her mother. Her mouth turns down at the corners as she tears open a detergent box and shakes its green-smelling contents into the machine. "How am I supposed to know? I jumped in the car with Turtle because I was scared to death and it seemed like the safest way to go. That's all I can tell you. I got started rolling down this hill, but I don't know why or how far."
"Don't you sometimes think you ought to just go talk to this Six-shooter woman, see if she'll listen to reason?"
"Fourkiller. No, Mama, I don't. Because what if she won't?"
Alice leans her hip against the washer and looks kindly at her daughter. "I know, hon. No mother that ever loved her child is going to argue with you."
Taylor feels an ocean of relief. She busies her hands with clothes. "I don't know how far we should go. I was thinking California maybe, some little town where you and me and Turtle could find a place to rent. I'm smart enough to know how to keep us from starving, I can find work. And in two or three months this thing will pass over and we can go back home."
Alice holds Barbie's stretch pants against herself, and laughs. She has hardly an ounce of extra on her frame, but against that purple Spandex outline she looks like a stout tree trunk. Taylor holds them against her own body, which is lean but nothing close to Barbie's hourglass. She tosses the pants in with their jeans. "I'll have to cross off fashion model as a career option. I've put on weight since I got Turtle." She laughs at herself. "And I wasn't even pregnant. I don't know what it is. I guess just observing regular mealtimes for Turtle's benefit."
"Taylor, I can't believe my ears. Look at you, slim as a grass snake. You're perfect."
At the light, clattering sound of cardboard boxes, they both turn and see that the orange-haired boy has leveled Turtle's tower again. His mother pays no mind; her doughy breasts in a stretched T-shirt tremble with concentration as she loads one machine after another with crumpled jeans. As the boy zooms away, Turtle keeps her eye on him for a long time. Finally she starts again from the bottom.
"Well, Mama, perfect I may be, but I have put on weight. Hanging around Miss America in her leotards makes you notice yourself."
"Taylor, I never heard you run yourself down before. You'd just as well jump off a bridge than to start in like that." Alice closes a machine lid and sighs. "When I was in my thirties I had these little square hips left over from being pregnant and I just hated it. I kept thinking, 'All those years before, I had a perfect glamour-girl body, and I didn't spend one minute appreciating it because I thought my nose had a bump in it.' And now that I'm old, my shoulder hurts and I don't sleep good and my knuckles swell up, and I think, 'All those years in my thirties and forties I had a body where everything worked perfect. And I didn't spend one minute appreciating it because I thought I had square hips.' "
Taylor smiles. "I take your point."
Turtle has made a new tower, bright and precarious by the window, nearly as tall as she is. She stands beside it with her fingers tense at her sides, following the boy around the room with her eyes like a person with a fly swatter and a killing intention. He wheels around the end of a row of washers and starts toward her. Turtle waits till his fingertips are almost in reach of the tower before she scoops both arms wide and knocks it down herself, sending the boxes flying.
Jax's voice on the phone is empty of humor. The voice by itself scares Taylor, let alone what he is reading to her, a letter from Annawake Fourkiller. She can't concentrate at all.
"...premature to take any legal action yet," he says, and Taylor is distracted by her memories of confronting social workers before Turtle's adoption--confident young women in offices who wouldn't believe in a child named Turtle without a birth certificate, any more than they believed in fairies.
"What does she have that will see her through this into a peaceful womanhood?" Jax asks, but it isn't Jax asking, it's Annawake Fourkiller, who sat in the kitchen drinking coffee less than two weeks ago, when Taylor's world was still intact. Her mind fathoms random images of Turtle, the mean, dark eyes of that boy in the laundromat when Turtle sent boxes flying into his face.
Jax reads, "...she can't belong to you. Yours sincerely, Annawake Fourkiller."
Taylor is quiet for a long time, watching her mother and her daughter through the scratched glass of the telephone booth. They're working off steam in a playground across the highway while Taylor makes her call and Barbie attends to her cuticles. Turtle is in the swing, and Alice is trying to teach her how to pump. Turtle does the right moves, pulling back on the chains and kicking out her legs, but she does them at the wrong time and the swing goes nowhere. There are things the mind can learn but the body will only do when the time is right.
"What else, Jax? Is there anything more?" Taylor asks. Behind the phone booth is a gas station and, some distance away, a middle-aged man with longish hair leaning on his red sports car, apparently waiting to use the phone. Taylor doesn't care that he's waiting. Probably he stayed out all night gambling and is thinking up some excuse to tell his wife.
"Any more to the letter? No."
"I wish I could read it. I can't tell if I'm hearing it right. What does it mean?"
"I think this letter is about Gabriel Fourkiller, the boy who got lost."
"But the Social Welfare Department thing, that part about legal action. Does that mean I have to talk to the guy or else?"
"Taylor, sweetheart, I don't think so, but I don't know. You decide."
"I can't think straight."
Turtle has finally gotten herself going in an acute zigzag. Alice catches the chains and straightens her out a little. Tall pines shade the playground area, and the park beyond them is empty save for a heavenly field of green grass, probably the envy of every cow forced to graze in the state of Nevada.
"I took your suggestion, I'm working on the song about the Twilight Zone of Humanity," Jax says, trying for cheerful but sounding like he's trying.
"Jax, did you pay the rent yet?"
There is a pause. "In services rendered."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means I have to tell you something."
Taylor watches Turtle jump out of the swing and run for the slide. She seems, physically, happy. "You know what, hang on, I'm going to go get Mama. I want you to read that letter to her. She'll know what it means."
"Taylor, I'm craz
y in love with you," Jax says, but Taylor has dropped four more quarters in the slot and dashed across the highway, leaving the phone dangling.
Taylor sits in one of the swings; Barbie has gotten out of the car, stretched conspicuously, and ambled across the road to come and sit in the other swing. Turtle is collecting pop tops out of the dust and carefully bending the tab of each one into the ring of the next, making a chain. She says it's a necklace for Mary. Probably the most beloved utility flashlight of all times, Mary already possesses a baby bottle and some doll clothes, which naturally don't fit all that well. Taylor has offered to buy her a real doll, but Turtle is offended by the suggestion. She has accumulated yards of poptop necklace by now and is dragging it behind her, looking like an escapee from a chain gang. Alice has been on the phone a long time.
Barbie's skirt has lost some of its flounce. Her poodle bangs flip up and down as she rocks in the swing. Taylor finds herself looking at this woman a lot, trying to find the hidden casino robber in the picture.
"What time is it? You guys are like, E. T. phone home on this vacation. Why does your mother have to talk to your boyfriend? If my mother ever talked that long to my boyfriend, then for sure I'd know she had the hots for him. No offense. I mean, Alice doesn't seem like the type."
Taylor sits quietly for a while under the rain of Barbie's chatter. Then she says, "I don't know how to bring this up, but Mama and Turtle and I are not on vacation, and you've got something besides blusher in your purse."
Barbie looks at the black pocketbook in her lap, as if it had suddenly been flung there from an asteroid belt, then back to Taylor. "How do you know what's in my purse?"
"We looked. We invaded your privacy when you were asleep last night."
"Snoops." Barbie kicks out her pink boots and drifts in the swing.
"I was just curious why you always had to take it to the bathroom with you. If you'd left it sitting in front of my nose, believe me, I wouldn't have had the slightest desire to look in your purse."
"So? Okay, so I've got money in there."
The man with the red sports car sits on the front fender and crosses his arms, impatient to make his call.