Taylor yells, "Wait up!" Turtle is dragging on her fingers like a water skier. "What thing about litter?"
"He's nuts. Two or three times I caught him climbing around places a damn mountain goat should not be climbing around. Trying to pick up soda cans, would you believe. Oh, hell. Lucky Buster."
He stops at the spillway and they all look down, at nothing. The janitor is trying hard to catch his breath. "Oh, hell."
At ten o'clock Monday morning, six volunteers from the North Las Vegas Spelunking Club, plus one paramedic with rock-climbing experience, emerge from the spillway on the Arizona side. It took all night to assemble this team, and they have been down in the hole for hours more. Taylor and Turtle are front row in the crowd that is pushing quilt-cheeked against the security fence. Guards shout through bullhorns for the crowd to disperse, attracting more new arrivals.
The rescuers look like miners, blacked with grit. The rope that connects them waist to waist went down at dawn in yellow coils, but now is coming up black. Only the clinking buckles of their climbing gear catch the sun.
The stretcher comes out of the hole as a long, stiff oval, like a loaf shoved from the oven. Lucky Buster is wrapped in rubber rescue blankets and strapped down tightly from forehead to ankles with black canvas straps, so he bulges in sections. He can't stop blinking his eyes. That crowd on the fence is the brightest thing he has ever seen.
3
The True Stories
TEN O'CLOCK IN KENTUCKY: the sun has barely started thinking about Arizona. She can't call yet. Alice has been cleaning out her kitchen cabinets since dawn. She saw something on the early-morning news that disturbed her and she needs to talk to Taylor. Time zones are a mean trick, she feels, surely invented by someone whose family all lived under one roof.
Cardboard boxes crowd the linoleum floor like little barges bristling with their cargo: pots and pans, Mason jars, oven mitts, steak knives, more stuff than Alice can imagine she ever needed. The mood she's in, she's ready to turn out the cookstove. She doubts Harland would notice if she stopped cooking altogether. When she met him he was heating up unopened cans of Campbell's soup in a big pot of water every night. It amazed her to see the cans rolling around like logs in the boiling water. "Don't they bust?" she asked him, and he shyly put his hand on hers and allowed as how sometimes they did. His idea of a home-cooked meal is when you open the can first and pour it in a saucepan. Alice has been wasting her talents.
With aggressive strokes of her cleaning rag she reaches back into a high cabinet, feeling her Bermuda shorts slide up her thighs where the veins have turned a helpless blue. She's exposing herself to no one at the moment, but still feels embarrassed that her circulatory system has to start showing this way. Getting old is just a matter of getting easier to see through, until all your failing insides are in plain view and everyone's business. Even the ads aimed at old people are embarrassing: bathroom talk. You're expected to pull yourself inside-out like a sleeve and go public with your hemorrhoids.
It's hard for Alice to picture the portion of her life that still lies ahead. Her friend Lee Shanks saw a religious call-in show about turning your life around through Creative Imaging, and Lee has been trying ever since to image a new Honda Accord. But when Alice closes her eyes she sees, at the moment, Mason jars. She knows that no woman with varicose veins and a brain in her head would walk away from a decent husband, but she's going to anyway. Aloneness is her inheritance, like the deep heartline that breaks into match sticks across her palm. The Stamper women might sometimes think they're getting somewhere, nailing themselves down to kin, but some mystery always cuts them loose from people in the long run. Her mother used to tromp around the farm with her eyes on the sky as if some sign up there said: FREEDOM AND HAPPINESS THIS WAY, AT THE END OF THE LONELY ROAD.
Alice never wanted to be like her. She married young and misguided but with every intention of staying with her first husband, Foster Greer. She met him in a juke joint at the edge of the woods by the Old Miss slaughter pen, and on that very first night he danced her out to the parking lot and told her he was going to take her away from that smell. Between the hog farm and the slaughter pen Alice had lived her whole life within a perimeter of stench, and didn't know what he meant. It amazed her to discover that air, on its own, was empty of odor. She breathed through her nose again and again like an addict high on a new drug, and in the narrow parting of a highway cut through cypress swamps they drove all the way to New Orleans before breakfast. Even now Alice can feel in her skin the memory of that crazy adventure: speeding through the alligator bayous at midnight, feeling alive and lucky, as if there were only one man and one woman on earth this night and they were the ones chosen.
As a husband, though, Foster wore his adventures thin. He made a career of what he called "fresh starts," which meant getting fired from one house-framing job after another and consoling himself with Old Grand-Dad. Anything that's worth doing, he told Alice, is worth starting over right in a new town. And then he told her she was too much fun, as if it were her fault he could never settle down. He made Alice promise she would never try anything cute like getting pregnant, and she didn't, for nearly ten years. It wasn't so easy in those days; it was an endeavor. When it finally did happen, she'd known Foster long enough to know a good trade when she saw one, him for a baby. He had given her fresh air, but that's not such a gift that you have to stay grateful your whole life long. When he moved on from Pittman, Alice and the baby stayed.
She'd believed that motherhood done fiercely and well would end her family's jinx of solitude; Alice threw herself into belief in her daughter as frankly as Minerva had devoted herself to hogs. But kids don't stay with you if you do it right. It's one job where, the better you are, the more surely you won't be needed in the long run. She looks at the clock again: seven-thirty in Tucson. She picks up the phone and dials.
A baritone voice says, "Yo."
That would be Jax. Alice feels ridiculous. What she saw on TV was not about Taylor and Turtle. They are probably still in bed. "Oh, well, hi," she says. "It's me, Alice."
"Hey, pretty Alice. How's your life?"
"It'll do," she says. She never knows what she ought to say to Jax. She hasn't met him and finds him hard to picture. For one thing, he plays in a rock and roll band. He comes from New Orleans, and according to Taylor he is tall and lanky and wears a little gold earring, but his voice sounds like Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind.
"Your daughter has fled the premises," Jax reports. "She took the second generation and went to see the Grand Canyon. How do you like that?"
"Then it's true!" Alice shouts, startling herself.
Jax isn't rattled. "True blue. They abandoned me here to talk things over with the door hinges." He adds, "Then what's true?"
Alice is completely confused. If something had happened to them, Jax would know. "Nothing," she says. "Some darn thing I saw on TV. Harland had the news on and they had somebody falling over the Hoover Dam, and I could have swore there was Taylor Greer talking to the camera, just for a second."
"If Taylor fell off the Hoover Dam, she wouldn't be talking to the camera," Jax points out.
"Well, no, she wouldn't, so I got worried that it was Turtle that had fell off."
"Couldn't be," Jax says in his gentleman's drawl. "She would never let Turtle fall off anything larger than a washing machine. And if she did, she'd be on the phone to you before the kid hit bottom."
Alice is disturbed by the image but feels fairly sure Jax is right. "I kept hoping they'd show it again, but Harland's gone over to Home Shopping now and there's no coming back from that."
"Could be they're at the Hoover Dam," Jax says thoughtfully. "She doesn't always keep me up to date."
"They both did go, then? She took Turtle out of school?"
"School is out for Easter break. They thought they'd go have a religious experience with sedimentary rock."
"You should have gone with them. That ought to be something, that Grand Canyon."
"Oh, believe me, I wanted to. But my band got a gig in a bar called the Filth Encounter, and you can't miss something like that."
Alice finds herself calming down, listening to Jax. He always sounds so relaxed she wonders sometimes about his vital signs. "Well, that's good they went," she says mournfully. "That little girl's already way ahead of me. I've never even got down to see the new Toyota plant at Georgetown yet."
"Is everything okay?" Jax asks.
Alice touches her eyes. Half the time he comes across like he was raised on Venus, but his voice is wonderfully deep and slow, something she could use around the house. "Well, not really," she says. "I'm a mess. Just crazy enough to think I was seeing my own daughter on TV." She pauses, wondering how she can confess her troubles to someone she's never met. It's midmorning in an empty kitchen: the territory of lonely-hearts call-in shows and radio preachers for the desperate. She tells him, "I guess I'm leaving Harland."
"Hey, that happens. You never did like him much."
"I did so. At first." She drops her voice. "Not to live with, but I thought he'd improve. Under the influence of good cooking."
"You can't rehabilitate a man who collects light bulbs."
"No, it's headlights."
"Headlights. Is that actually true?"
"Off old cars. Any old car parts really, as long as they don't make any noise. You should see my living room. I feel like I've died and gone to the junkyard."
"Well, come live with us. Taylor leaves all her car parts at work. We need you, Alice. Taylor hates to cook, and I'm criminal at it."
"There's no hanging crimes you can do in the kitchen," Alice says. "I give a man extra points just for trying."
"Your daughter doesn't give a man extra points just for anything."
Alice has to laugh. "That's a fact."
"She says I cook like a caveman."
"Well, forever more." Alice laughs harder. Clark Gable with a gold earring and stooped shoulders and a club. "What does that mean?"
"No finesse, apparently."
"Well, I couldn't move in with Taylor. I've told her that fifty times. I'd be in your way." Alice has never lived in a city and knows she couldn't. What could she ever say to people who pay money to go hear a band called the Irritated Babies? Alice doesn't even drive a car, although few people know this, since she walks with an attitude of preferring the exercise.
"I don't think Taylor loves me anymore," Jax says. "I think she's got her eye on Danny, our garbage man."
"Oh, go on."
"You haven't seen this guy. He can lift four Glad Bags in each hand."
"Well, I'm sure you've got your good points too. Does she treat you decent?"
"She does."
"You're in good shape, then. Don't worry, you'd know. If Taylor don't like somebody, she'll paint the barn with it."
Jax laughs. "She does wish you'd come visit," he says.
"I will." Alice has tears in her eyes.
"I do too," he says, "I wish you would come. I need to meet this Alice. When Taylor says she wants you to live with us, I'm thinking to myself, this is ultra. Everybody else I know is in a twelve-step program to get over their dysfunctional childhoods."
"Well, it's my fault that she don't give men the extra points. I think I turned her against men. Not on purpose. It's kind of a hex. My mama ran that hog farm by herself for fifty years, and that's what started it."
"You have a hog farm in your maternal line? I'm envious. I wish I'd spent my childhood rocked in the bosom of swine."
"Well, it wasn't all that wonderful. My mother was a Stamper. She was too big and had too much on her mind to answer to 'Mother,' so I called her Minerva, just the same as the neighbors and the creditors and the traveling slaughter hands did. She'd always say, 'Mister, if you ain't brung it with you, you won't find it here.' And that was the truth. She had hogs by the score but nothing much to offer her fellow man, other than ham."
"Well," says Jax. "Ham is something."
"No, but she'd never let a man get close enough to see the whites of her eyes. And look at me, just the same, chasing off husbands like that Elizabeth Taylor. I've been thinking I raised Taylor to stand too far on her own side of the plank. She adopted the baby before she had a boyfriend of any kind, and it seemed like that just proved out the family trend. I think we could go on for thirteen generations without no men coming around to speak of. Just maybe to do some plumbing once in a while."
"Is this the Surgeon General's warning?"
"Oh, Jax, honey, I don't know what I'm saying. I'm a lonely old woman cleaning my kitchen cupboards to entertain myself. You kids are happy and I'm just full of beans."
"No, you stand by your stories. Whatever gets you through."
"I better let you go. Tell Taylor to send pictures of the baby. The last one I have is the one from Christmas and she's looking at that Santa Claus like he's Lee Harvey Oswald. I could live with something better than that setting on my TV."
"Message registered. She'll be back Sunday. I'll tell her you called, Alice."
"Okay, hon. Thanks."
She's sad when Jax hangs up, but relieved that Taylor and Turtle aren't dead or in trouble. She hates television, and not just because her husband has left her for one; she hates it on principle. It's like the boy who cried wolf, spreading crazy ideas faster than you can find out what's really up. If people won't talk to each other, they shouldn't count on strangers in suits and makeup to give them the straight dope.
She crosses the kitchen, stepping high over boxes of spatulas and nested mixing bowls. It looks like an estate sale, and really Alice does feel as though someone has died. She just can't think who. Out in the den, the voice of a perky young woman is talking up some kitchen gadget that will mix bread dough and slice onions and even make milk shakes. "Don't lose this chance, call now," the woman says meaningfully, and in her mind Alice dares Harland to go ahead and order it for their anniversary. She will make him an onion milk shake and hit the road.
4
Lucky Buster Lives
LUCKY AND TURTLE ARE ASLEEP in the backseat: Taylor can make out their separate snores, soprano and bass. She scrapes the dial of the car radio across miles of West Arizona static and clicks it off again. Suspended before her in the rearview mirror is an oblong view of Lucky's head rolled back on the seat, and now that it's safe to stare, she does. His long, clean hair falls like a girl's across his face, but his pale throat shows sandpaper stubble and a big Adam's apple. He's thirty-eight years old; they are a woman, man, and child in this car, like any family on the highway headed out on an errand of hope or dread. But Taylor can't see him as a man. The idea unsettles her.
From the moment of his rescue he has begged them not to tell his mother what happened. Angie Buster runs a diner in Sand Dune, Arizona, and over the phone sounded tired. Lucky has no idea that she has spoken with Taylor, or that she watched his body come out of the hole again and again on the TV news. Computer graphics turned the Hoover Dam inside-out for America, showing a red toy image of Lucky moving jerkily down into the spillway and lodging there like the protagonist of a dark-humored video game. Only Lucky and Turtle, perpetrators of the miracle, still believe they've witnessed a secret.
It was Turtle's idea to drive him home once the doctors had bandaged his sprained ankle and held him for observation. Turtle is a TV heroine now, so police officers and even doctors pay attention to her. One reporter said that Turtle's and Lucky's destinies were linked now; that according to Chinese belief, if you save someone's life you're responsible for that person forever. Taylor wonders if he was making this up. Why would you owe them more than what you'd already provided? It sounds like the slightly off-base logic you sometimes get in a fortune cookie.
She turns the car south on Arizona 93 and picks up a signal on the radio. An oldies station, they're calling it, though it's playing the Beatles. If Beatles are oldie now, where does that leave Perry Como, she wonders, and all those girl groups with their broken-heart so
ngs and bulletproof hair? As nearly as she remembers, Taylor was in kindergarten when the Beatles first hit it big, but they persisted into her adolescence, shedding the missionary suits and skinny ties in favor of LSD and little round sunglasses. She can't identify the song but it's one of their later ones, with that odd sound they developed toward the end--as if their voices are coming from inside a metal pipe.
What did he think about for a day and a half down there? Taylor can't bring herself to imagine. Now, with his fingernails scrubbed, his red checked shirt cleaned and respectfully pressed in the hospital laundry, what he's been through seems impossible. The doctors presumed he never lost consciousness, unless he slept. From the looks of him now, he didn't, or not much.
She came so close to driving away that night. Worn down by the uniforms and beard stubble and patronizing looks, it would have been such a small thing to get back in the car and go on to Nevada. She shivers.
The Beatles give up the ghost and Elton John takes over, his honkytonk piano chords bouncing into "Crocodile Rock." This one Taylor remembers from dances on the bleached wood floor of the Pittman High gym, with some boy or other who never could live up to her sense of celebration on those occasions. They were always too busy trying to jam a hand between two of your buttons somewhere. The song is about that exact war, and it excited the girls as much as the boys to hear it because you knew how Suzy felt when she wore her dresses--as the song says--tight. Like something no boy could ever touch. Taylor liked Elton John, his oversized glasses and preposterous shoes, laughing at himself--such a far cry from other rock stars with long limp hair and closed eyes and heads rolled back to the sounds of their own acid chords, going for the crucifixion look.
Music is all different now: Jax belongs to neither breed, the Jesuses or the Elton Johns. Now they don't just laugh at themselves but also their audience and the universe in general. Jax's wide-eyed, skinny band members wear black jeans and shirts made of torn newspapers. Irascible Babies, pleading ignorance, just wishing they could suckle forever at the breast of a pulsing sound wave.
Pigs in Heaven Page 3