"Mom, remember Lucky Buster?"
"I sure do."
"I saved him, right?"
"You saved his life."
"Will we ever see him again?"
"I don't see why not. Sure."
Turtle relaxes her hold on Taylor just a little.
"You think we should get ready for bed? I think it's past my bedtime too," Taylor says. She exhales deeply when Turtle finally releases her and goes into their room.
Taylor gets up and turns out all the lights. She doesn't want to look in Barbie's room, but she has to, to make herself believe. Sure enough, even the double bed is stripped down to the ugly blue-striped mattress. At least now she and Turtle can have separate rooms, Taylor thinks--she'll move in here and let Turtle have the room with the twin beds for herself. She will meet friends in school, and invite them over. They will be a normal American family. Taylor is less optimistic about her own possibilities for sharing the double bed. She misses Jax.
By the time she goes in to kiss Turtle goodnight, Turtle is in her in-between sleeptalking stage.
"Buster has to go home, Mom, this one in the water."
"Goodnight, Turtle. Sleep tight."
"My tummy hurts. Do those trees real or the dog was talking. Is it raining?"
"Yeah," Taylor says softly. "It's starting to rain again."
She undresses and climbs into the other twin bed. She'll have to figure out how to get new sheets for the double bed before she can move into the other bedroom. There is a lot more than too much to think about. She never imagined it would be this much of a problem to lose Barbie from her life. She should have known better. You don't adopt a wild animal and count it as family. Before Taylor turns off the light, she reaches over to her nightstand to take a look at Jax in his paper-bag ensemble.
The photo cube is gone.
22
Welcome to Heaven
"WELL, TAYLOR, YOU'VE BROUGHT YOUR pigs to a pretty market. How'd you lose your telephone?"
"Not the phone, Mama, the electricity. They couldn't shut the phone off because I didn't even have one yet. This number where you just called me back is a pay phone."
"Oh," Alice says, shifting the receiver. She's about decided her bad ear hears better than the good one. "Well, what's this other number I've got written down here?"
"That's the Handi-Van number. What I'm trying to tell you is you can't call me there anymore because I had to quit."
Alice is confused. It doesn't help that Sugar keeps coming in and out of the living room to ask questions. And this living room is crowded with enough furniture for two or three households. When Alice first peered into Sugar's huge china cabinet, she expected to see fancy dishes or Jesus stuff, but it isn't, it's Indian things of every kind. Old carvings, arrowheads, tacky little ceramic Indian boys. At least no headlamps.
"You quit that handicap job?" Alice asks, when it sinks in, what Taylor has just told her. "After you got trained in artificial retrucidation and everything?"
"Yeah, I had to, because Barbie left. There was nobody to take care of Turtle during my shift. I asked if I could take the week off, just till school started, but I was still on probation so they said they had to let me go."
"Well, that don't seem right."
"I know. It's okay. I just got hired as a cashier at Penney's. At least now after school Turtle can come here and hang out in Ladies' Wear till I get off work." Taylor laughs. "Until somebody gets wise and figures out that Turtle isn't going to buy any designer jeans."
A tall, thin girl with very long hair tromps through the front door and shouts, "Grandma!"
Sugar comes running. "What in the world?"
"Mama says you're not supposed to dance if you're on your period. I think that's an old wives' tale."
"Well, honey, it's all old wives' tales, if you think about it. I don't have your shackles done yet, anyway. Come here, I'll show you how far I've got."
The girl slumps on the couch. Alice is having a hard time concentrating. "Well," she tells Taylor, "you've been wanting to get shed of that Barbie since the day we run into her."
"I know. But I kind of needed her."
Sugar comes back carrying what looks like two masses of terrapin shells. They rattle heavily when she sits down with them on the couch next to her granddaughter.
"What's your new job like?" Alice asks.
"Above minimum wage, at least. Barely. It will come to around six hundred a month, I think, after what they take out. That's going to pay our rent and buy about three jars of peanut butter, but it's not going to get the utilities turned back on. I've got to figure out something else pretty soon. But at least I got a discount on school clothes for Turtle. She's starting first grade, Mama. Can you believe it?"
"You bought school clothes for Turtle instead of paying the electric bill?"
"Mama, I had to. I didn't want kids making fun of her. She looked like something off the streets."
"So I guess it's better to be out in the street than to look like something off the streets."
Taylor is quiet, and Alice feels terrible, understanding that what she just said is no joke. It's the truth. They are both stunned. A good deal of quiet static washes over the line before either one of them is willing to talk again.
"We're not living in the streets," Taylor finally says. "Yet. Mama, I feel bad enough, you don't have to tell me I've messed up."
"I'm sorry, Taylor. I hate to see you like this. Why don't you just come on down here and get it over with?"
"Mama, we don't even have gas money. And I'm not asking you to send any, either, because I know you left me all you had."
"What happened to that? The twelve hundred?"
"It's hard to explain. It's gone. It took most of it to get us moved into an apartment, because you have to pay a deposit and everything."
Alice senses that what Taylor just told her isn't completely true. But she lets it go. Trust only grows out of trusting.
"Have you met with that Annawake Fourkiller yet?" Taylor asks, her voice changed.
"I'm seeing her tomorrow. I'm so nervous I'm chasing my tail." Alice glances at Sugar and the girl, who are hunched together on the couch with the bright Oklahoma morning blazing in the window over their heads. Alice lowers her voice. "I didn't tell anybody yet, you know, what this is all about. I thought they'd make me spill the beans right off, but seems like people are willing to bide their time down here. They're all talking about me, seems like. Maybe they've all got their own explanations so they don't need mine."
"How'd you track down Miss Fourkiller?"
"There wasn't nothing to it. She just lives over here at Tahlequah, a little bit down the road: Everybody here knows everybody. I just called her up."
"What did she say?"
"Nothing. Just thanks for coming. She wants to buy me lunch and talk things over. She said she's been real worried about you and Turtle."
"I'll bet."
The girl gets up from the couch and goes. "Bye, Grandma," she calls, over the shriek of the screen-door hinge.
"Well, she could be," Alice says. "I'm not taking her side, but she sounded like she could be real worried."
"Don't tell her where we are, okay?"
"Taylor, honey, all you've given me is a phone number of a pay phone. For all I know you're at the North Pole."
"If we were, maybe Santa Claus would pull some strings and get our lights turned back on."
Alice feels the familiar deep frustration of loving someone by telephone. She wants to hug Taylor more than anything, and can't. So much voice and so little touch seems unnatural, like it could turn your skin inside out if you're not careful.
"Well, anyway, good luck when you talk to her, Mama. I better hang up on you now before you buy the phone company."
"Don't worry about it. I'm just putting it on Sugar's bill. She said we could work it out later on."
"Okay, Mama. Bye."
Alice waits. "Bye," she says, and then, "I love you," but the clear space a
t the other end of the line that held Taylor has already closed.
She sits slumped in the chair, feeling paralyzed. She feels the faces of Sugar's many grandchildren smiling at her from their frames on the wall. The ones who finished high school--mostly girls--Sugar has hung in the top row; below them, like a row of straight teeth, are the handsome, smiling, tricky-looking boys.
Sugar looks up. "Alice, honey, you look like you just run over your dog. How's that girl of yours?"
"She's all right. Having trouble making her payments."
"Isn't that the way," Sugar says, sounding as if this were an old joke. "Come over here and I'll show you what I'm making for Reena."
Alice sits next to Sugar and has a look: terrapin shells with holes drilled in them, and gravel rattling inside. "It's her shackles for the stomp dance," Sugar says. "The young girls wear them on their legs. She thinks it's the cat's meow. Most of the kids would just as soon go to the powwows, where they can drink beer, but Reena's real interested in the stomp dance."
Alice takes one of the shackles in her hands. It's surprisingly heavy. The fist-sized shells are sewn with leather thongs to the cut-off top of a cowboy boot, to make a sort of bumpy legging. The whole thing laces up the front with strips of gingham.
"Don't she get tired with all that weight on her legs?" Alice asks, not really seeing the point.
"Well, she'll have to practice. They wrap towels around their legs before they put them on, so they won't blister. These are training shackles, four shells on each one. As she gets better at it we'll add more, till she gets up to thirteen."
Alice hears the cough of a reluctant lawn mower starting up, then dying. "Why thirteen?"
Sugar thinks. "I don't know. Maybe Roscoe would know. That's just the number." She stands and looks outside, shading her eyes. "There's one of the grandkids come to cut my grass. I can't tell which one. You want some hot coffee?"
"No thanks," Alice says. "I'm jumpy enough already."
Sugar looks at her. "You are. Let's go take a walk down to the blue hole. You need to look at some water."
Alice is amazed by her cousin. Sugar is bent over with arthritis and doesn't move fast, but she never seems to stop moving. Today she is wearing a flowered apron that looks like a seed catalog, and cotton slippers instead of tennis shoes. She told Alice at breakfast she always knows when there's a storm coming in, because she can't get her shoes on.
Alice follows her out the door and down a worn path through the yard, to where a tall boy in huge unlaced sneakers is fiddling with the mower. He stands up and bends his head down for Sugar's kiss. A tiny blue butterfly lands on her shoulder.
"That means I'm gonna get a new apron," Sugar says, turning her head and pursing her lips to look at the butterfly before it darts away. Sugar's laugh is a wonderful, rising giggle.
She and Alice traipse down the hill past the outdoor kitchen, a wood stove with a pile of kindling beside it for cooking and canning when it's too hot indoors. "We planted this mulberry tree when we moved here," she tells Alice. "First thing Roscoe said we had to do."
"He likes mulberries?"
"No, he likes peaches. The birds like the mulberries better, so they'll leave the peaches to us. These here are Indian peaches, they call them. Blood red in the center." Sugar stops and looks at the dark mulberries scattered on the ground. "I wonder why chickens don't eat them."
"Maybe they'd rather have peaches," Alice says.
Sugar laughs. "No, a chicken's not that smart. Here's the fire pit where we have the hog fry."
"You fry hogs?"
"Oh, yeah. Cut him up first. For a special occasion. We had one here for me and Roscoe's anniversary, I'm sorry you missed that. Quatie organized it, she's the social director. We ate up the whole hog. Everybody came, all the kids and the grandkids and the husbands and the cousins. The only ones that didn't come was the ones that's dead." Sugar laughs.
Alice tries to imagine what it would take to get her family collected in one yard. "They come from far away?" she asks.
"I guess the furtherest anybody come was from Tahlequah. My kids all live right here." She points through the woods. "See them trailer houses? That one's Johnetta's, that's Quatie's, the two boys is on the other side of the road, they moved back in together since they both got divorced." She pauses and bites her lip. "No, one's divorced and the other one, his wife died. So they've got the kids up there. They's all right around."
"Why don't they move away?"
"Well, because they'd just end up coming back anyway, because this is where the family is. Why move away just to turn around and come back? Too much trouble."
"I never heard of a family that stuck together that much."
"Listen, in the old days they didn't even go across the yard. They just added onto the house. When you married, the daughter and the husband just built another room onto her folks'house. Roscoe says the houses just got longer and longer till there wasn't no place to sweep your dirt out. I think trailer houses was a right good invention."
Their trail has joined up with an old road, two mud tracks running through deep woods. Every mud puddle is surrounded by a prayer group of small blue butterflies. Alice is fascinated by their twitching wings. She wonders if the butterflies are all related to one another too. "How much of a piece of land have you got here?" she asks Sugar.
"It was Roscoe's mama's homestead land, sixty acres. Every one of them got sixty acres, back in the allotments. Most of them sold it or give it away or got it stole out from under them some way. I don't know why she didn't, probably didn't get no offers. So we ended up here. When the kids each one got big, we told them to find a place to set a trailer house and go ahead. They have to pay taxes. We don't. I don't know why, I guess because it's homestead land. Oh, look, there's poke."
Alice spies the purple-veined shoots clustered in a sunny spot beside the road.
"We'll have to be sure and pick those on our way back," Sugar says. "Roscoe told me there was a lot of them here. He come down here the other day looking for the eggs. We got one hen that's real bad about stealing the nest."
"That looks like a tobacco plant growing there," Alice says, pointing.
"Probably is. You might find marijuana, too." Sugar giggles.
The forest opens before them onto a grassy park with a long bank sloping down to the creek. Where the water is deep it stands a cool, turquoise blue. A steep limestone cliff pocked with caves rises behind the creek, and above the cliff, a wooded hill. Alice and Sugar stand a long time looking.
"I'll bet there's crawdads right in there." Sugar points to the shallows.
Alice feels herself relax, looking at the water. Bright orange dragonflies zip low and dive and stab their tails at their own reflections, then light in the rushes, transforming all that energy into perfect stillness. The sunlight reflected upward from the water lights the undersides of Sugar's and Alice's faces and the broad hickory leaves above them, as if they're all on a stage. "I can see why you'd call it Heaven," she says.
"Oh, this isn't the good one yet. This one they call the mushrat hole. I guess they used to trap a lot of mushrat and mink down here. Heaven's on down the trail a little bit," Sugar says, and she strikes out again downstream.
When Alice arrives in Heaven at last, a little breathless, she instantly begins to worry about boys cracking their skulls. Sugar is right, this blue hole is clearer, much larger and deeper, and the limestone cliff is alive with children leaping like frogs into the water. Sugar stands without a trace of worry on her face, watching small boys, most of whom are presumably her descendants, dive off twenty-and thirty-foot rocks. Some of the kids are barely past toddler age; they have more trouble climbing up the bank than jumping off. Alice is astonished. "Don't you worry about them?" she asks.
"Nobody's ever got drowned here," Sugar says. "They do sometimes up in the river, but not here."
The kids have noticed the two women; they wave their arms in wide arcs, shouting, "Hi, Grandma!" Sugar waves back, not ver
y energetically, Alice thinks, as if it is no big deal to her to be acknowledged publicly by grandsons. Several older children stand knee-deep in water farther down the bank, fishing, and they, too, wave at Sugar. One boy crosses the creek and makes his way toward them carrying a heavy string of fish. He lays the fish on the grass in front of Sugar, just exactly the way Alice's old cat used to bring birds to lay at her doorstep. Alice can't get over what she is seeing: adolescent boys being polite. Even more than polite, they are demonstrating love.
Sugar makes over the fish. "Where'd you get all these? You must have been down here since Friday."
"No," he says, embarrassed. He is a stocky, long-haired teenager with broad shoulders and a gold razor blade on a chain hanging on his bare chest.
"What kind of fish are they?" Alice asks.
"The purple ones are perch," he tells her politely. "These are goggle-eyes. They go under rocks. The ones with the pink fins are chub." He turns back to Sugar, animated. "We caught a snapping turtle in the mud. Leon poked a stick at it and it bit it and wouldn't turn loose. We just pulled it right out of the water. Those things are stout."
"They'll give you a stout bite, too, if you don't leave them be."
"I'll clean these and bring them up later, Grandma."
"Okay, Stand. Bring me some watercress, too. I see some growing down there by them red rocks."
"Okay." Stand walks away with his catch.
Sugar hobbles over to a pair of decrepit aluminum folding chairs that are leaning against a tree and shakes them open, setting them in the shade. "That Stand likes to get drunk, but he's a good boy. He loves to hunt. He brings me something every week. 'Grandma, I brung you this,' he'll say. He don't stay home. Junior is always taking him somewhere and dumping him off and then about three o'clock he'll go after him, he'll have something. Squirrel, or anything green, you know."
"He's your older son's boy?"
"No, not exactly, he's Quatie's, but she already had six or seven when he was born, so Junior adopted him. You know how people do. Share the kids around."
Alice doesn't exactly know, but she can gather.
"I wish he wouldn't drink, though. I swear he's the spit image of Roscoe, when I first met him."
"You must have fell hard for Roscoe," Alice says. "You wrote me you'd met him at the railroad yard, and then the next thing I know you'd run off and married him."