"You're the manager. Don't sell yourself short. You don't need me."
She strokes his kneecap, which is angular and hard as a box terrapin. "Jax, honey, I never did," she says.
"I know."
"Or Danny, or Bruce Springsteen, or the man in the moon. It's nothing personal."
"I know. It's because of your mother's guiding myth."
"What's that?"
"That the women in your family need men only as a remedy for minor plumbing irritations."
"Well, maybe that's true. And I'm here in your bed anyway, how about that," she says. It is, technically, his bed; she got rid of hers in a yard sale when she and Turtle moved into Jax's tiny house at the edge of town. She tips her head back until it rests against his chin. "So will you shut up about my leaving you, and is that all the big news you have for this evening?"
"I'll show you big news," he says, delicately biting the nape of her neck. He lifts her breasts, which fit perfectly into his hands, though he knows this is no promise that he gets to keep them. A million things you can't have will fit in a human hand. He lets her go, gently. "No, that's not all. There's something else, but we can talk about it tomorrow."
Taylor's pulse jumps. "What?"
"Really, you do not want to hear about it now."
"Don't tell me what I want."
"Okay. Oprah Winfrey called."
She laughs, relieved. "Did she? I've been neglecting her and I feel awful about it."
"It's not a joke. Oprah Winfrey called. Not Oprah, but one of her producers, or researchers or something. They're doing a show called 'Children Who Have Saved Lives.' "
"Would you please save the hooha for your screaming fans?" She settles back against his chest.
"I agree with you, it's one of the weirder things I've heard of. They want you and Turtle to come to Chicago."
It dawns on Taylor that Jax is not making up Oprah Winfrey. "Why would we want to go to Chicago?"
"It's a happening town. You could show Turtle the Museum of Science and Industry. Since she got short-sheeted on the Grand Canyon."
"What would I say on national TV?"
"Most of the time you strike me as having no shortage. What would you like to say on national TV?"
"Would they let me say anything?"
"Well, it's not Geraldo."
"I'm serious. Could I say what I wanted to, do you think?"
"She'd probably want you to stick to the general theme of children who have saved lives."
"That's a very weird subject," Taylor points out. "How many could there be?"
"The Chinese say if you save somebody's life you're responsible for them forever."
"Somebody else told me that! I thought he was making it up. Do you think Turtle's life is changed forever?"
"Could be," Jax admits. "Not necessarily for the worse."
"I liked her the way she was."
They are quiet for a long time with their eyes looking down, listening.
Taylor says quietly, "You know what I keep going back to? Nobody believed her. They took one look at this skinny Indian kid and said, 'Well, ma'am, we don't actually have a witness.' "
"But you believed her. And Lucky Buster lives."
"I had to, Jax, I'm her mother. That part is nothing."
They both listen again. Turtle has stopped conversing with the angels.
5
The Secret of TV
TAYLOR IS GETTING A LONG, hard look at someone's bald spot. He has reclined his seat to a point where he's closer than a dinner plate, maybe twelve inches from her face. The top of his head is covered with fine, almost invisible fur that lies flattened in a complicated pattern, like a little prairie swept by a tornado. It reminds Taylor of a theory Jax once told her about, that humans evolved from some sort of water ape and spent the dawn of civilization in a swamp. Streamlined hair patterns are supposed to be the proof, but Taylor wonders as she stares, Does that mean we moved through the water headfirst? Could be. Kids move through the world that way, running into things with the tops of their heads. This man has a scar up there, no doubt forgotten through the decades until now that it's lost its cover.
The pilot comes on the intercom again. He's a chatty one; right after takeoff he introduced himself as "your captain," and Turtle's eyes grew wide. She asked Taylor if he only had one hand. Now, after mulling it over the whole afternoon, it dawns on Taylor that the only captain Turtle knows about so far is Captain Hook. She may never get on a plane again without envisioning a pirate at the helm.
Captain Hook now explains they are passing over the Mississippi River, and that if he can do anything to make the passengers more comfortable they should just let him know. Frankly, although she doubts the captain can help her out here, Taylor doesn't feel comfortable being intimate with a stranger's hair loss. She doesn't even know the top of Jax's head this well. She's looked at it, but not for three and a half hours.
Turtle is finally sleeping. She seems to be coming down with a cold, and really needed a nap, but was so excited she sat for hours with her face pressed hard against the window. When the window turned icy cold, even when there was nothing to see but a vast, frosted field of clouds spread over a continent, rutted evenly as if it had been plowed, Turtle still stared. Everybody else on the plane is behaving as though they are simply sitting in chairs a little too close together, but Turtle is a child in a winged tin box seven miles above Planet Earth.
Taylor hasn't flown before either, and for the first few hours she felt the same excitement. Especially when they were taking off, and before, buckling up, watching the stewardess show how to put on a yellow oxygen mask without messing up your hair. And before that, leaving the airport: walking behind Turtle down the sloping hallway to the door of the plane, stepping across from solid ground to something unknown, furtively checking the rivets around the door, but what can you do? She has no choice but to follow her daughter into this new life she's claimed from a fortune cookie.
Chicago is tall on one side of the freeway, open sky on the other, because of the lake. Taylor never thought of Chicago as a beach town, but there they are, hundreds of people in swimsuits throwing Frisbees into the wind. It's the first week of June. She and Turtle are cruising down the freeway in a long white limousine with smoked-glass windows and baby blue velvet upholstery. As they speed away from the airport, people in other cars turn their heads to try and get a look inside this vehicle of mystery. The driver calls them both "Miss," as if they are the types to travel everywhere by limo.
It occurs to Taylor that this would be quite the line of work, driving Oprah Winfrey guests around: some would be royalty and some would be famous murderers or men with a wife in every state, and if you're only the driver you'd never know which was which. You'd have to play it safe and treat them all politely.
"This is the best-planned city in the nation," the driver explains. Turtle is glued to the window, still. "It all burned down in the great fire of October 8, 1871. Everything went. Two hundred million dollars of property damage. So they had the opportunity of starting it over from the ground up."
"I've heard of that fire," Taylor says. "I heard it was started by a cow."
"No, that is not true, that is a myth. The Great Chicago Fire was not started by a cow." He hesitates a little, and Taylor realizes she's blown their cover; bringing up the subject of livestock has put them more on the criminal than the royalty side of the fence.
"Well, it makes a good story," she says. She doesn't care if he thinks she and Turtle are serial killers. He still has to take them to their hotel.
For all this city's famous planning, the traffic is horrible. As soon as they turn away from the lake toward the tall glass buildings, they are mired in a flock of honking cars. The driver has evidently finished with the glories of his city. Once in a while as they sit there he hits the horn with his fist.
Turtle sneezes. She's got a cold, there's no getting around it. Taylor hands her a tissue out of her pocket. "How're you feeling,
Toots?"
"Fine," she says, blowing her nose carefully, still looking out the window. Turtle almost never complains. Taylor is well aware of how unusual this is. If all you knew about kids came from watching the sitcoms, she thinks, you would never guess there were children on earth like Turtle.
"Mom, look." She pulls on Taylor's finger and points at a City of Chicago garbage truck, which is stalled next to them in the traffic jam. A fancy gold seal painted on the side gives it an air of magnificence. The driver smiles down at them from his perch on high. Then he raises one eyebrow and winks.
"Why'd he do that?"
"He thinks you're cute," Taylor says, "and he likes my legs. Also he probably thinks we're rich."
"But we're not, are we?"
"Nope, we're not."
"He gets to drive a better truck than Danny's."
"Definitely."
Taylor is wearing a skirt--something she's not accustomed to, but Lou Ann insisted on loaning her a nice beige suit for Oprah Winfrey. She claimed it was against some regulation to wear jeans on television. Jax got a good laugh out of that, but to his credit, he is nicer to Lou Ann than most guys would be.
Taylor gets a nervous stomach when she thinks about the taping tomorrow morning. She suspects these shows are just a way of making a spectacle out of bad things that happen to people. But Turtle really wanted to do it. She'd never understood before that actual people could appear on television. She seems to have a vague idea they will meet the Ninja Turtles.
The garbage guy is still looking. He has curly hair and a terrific smile. Taylor crosses her legs and raises her hand just a little. If he can really see in, he'll take it as a wave.
He does. He makes a small motion with his chin, indicating that she and Turtle should abandon their limo in favor of his garbage truck. Taylor gives it some thought, but decides to go ahead with Oprah.
"It's an adorable outfit," the wardrobe woman tells Taylor, "but I'm just suggesting something a little more feminine. We have this little jumper from wardrobe, see? The color would look absolutely super on the set."
Lou Ann can have the last laugh now: Oprah Winfrey's people don't want Turtle to wear her overalls on television. The overalls are brand new, bright green, perfectly decent. "That dress is ten sizes too big for Turtle," Taylor says.
"Doesn't matter. We just pin it in back, see? Nobody sees the back. That's the secret of TV--you only have to worry about what shows up front, your back can be a mess. And we'll put this bow in her hair, okay, sweetheart? She'll look super."
"She'll look younger," Taylor says. "If that's what you're going for. She'll look like a baby doll that saved somebody's life."
The woman crosses her arms and frowns. Her short, black hair looks wet and oiled, like a sea otter. The comb rakes through it stay perfectly in place. "It's going to be difficult," she says. "We'd have to run her mike wire up from the back."
"You can manage," Taylor says, knowing this can't be the problem. Men wear pants on television every day of the week. The other guests are not being harassed about wardrobe concerns. Taylor met them all in the hotel lobby this morning while they waited for the limos. There's a Cub Scout who flagged down help when his scoutmaster collapsed on their tenderfoot survival hike; a fourth-grader who saved her sister from a pitbull attack by hitting it with a dog dish and the whole Barbie Dream Date ensemble, including the convertible; and an eleven-year-old who drove the car home when her baby-sitter passed out from multiple bee stings in a city park. Taylor feels, frankly, that the eleven-year-old showed bad judgment all around, and the other two probably just acted without thinking. Turtle is the youngest and has the best story. She doesn't see why they need to blow it out of proportion by dressing her up like Barbie's baby sister.
The small green room where they are waiting is crowded and tense. Turtle fidgets, and the wardrobe woman hovers, her raised eyebrows still pushing the question.
"What do you want to wear?" Taylor asks Turtle.
Turtle hugs herself. "This," she says.
Taylor smiles at the sea-otter woman. "Looks like she's made up her mind."
The woman pushes the purple jumper against Turtle's front, looking at Taylor. "I really think, look, don't you? It's so much more of a visual."
"My daughter said no, thank you." Turtle recoils from the bunched fabric, and Taylor narrows her eyes at the woman, who seems nevertheless to be holding her ground. A makeup man comes over at a trot. He's wearing the laced-up, tassely loafers that people call "boating shoes," even though most of them will never lay leather to a boat. Taylor wonders why everyone here seems dressed for some kind of sport--the secretaries in leggings, the camera crew in running shoes, all bustling around frowning, with nothing the least bit sporty on their agendas. It's as if they're expecting at any minute a sudden announcement: Vacation starts now.
"You have wonderful cheekbones, dear," the makeup man tells Taylor, and he lobs her in the face with a powder puff.
6
Thieves of Children
ANNAWAKE FOURKILLER LOOKS UP FROM her law briefs, startled. "Could you turn that up?"
The secretary, Jinny, automatically reaches to turn down the volume on the little TV at the end of her desk.
"No, up, please." Annawake stares with her head cocked. Her black hair is cropped so close to the nap it stands up like an exotic pelt, and her broad mouth has the complicated curves of a foreign punctuation mark, making it anyone's guess whether she's smiling or not. Jinny shrinks behind her glasses, wondering if Annawake is making a joke and she's not getting it. "It's just Oprah Winfrey," she says.
"I know. I want to hear this."
Jinny shrugs. "Okay." She stretches one blue-jeaned leg out behind her for balance as she reaches across hills of papers for the volume knob, then slumps back down to her typewriter. Mr. Turnbo is out of the office for the afternoon so it's just the two of them, and Jinny is unsure of her relationship with Annawake. Jinny has worked here longer--she started as Franklin Turnbo's secretary-receptionist when she graduated from high school last year; Annawake only finished law school out in Phoenix a month ago, and has come back home to Oklahoma to intern here on an Indian Lawyer Training grant. Mr. Turnbo has never minded if Jinny's little TV talked quietly on the desk, as long as she gets everything typed. She's not wrapped up in the soaps, she just likes Oprah and Sally Jessy and sometimes General Hospital. Annawake doesn't say she minds, either, but she makes faces at Sally Jessy and calls her the blonde Puerto Rican, which makes Jinny feel guilty for perming her hair. For trying to look yonega, as her grandma says.
Through the front window she sees a line of dusty cars and pickup trucks pulling out of the parking lot of Cherokee Nation headquarters, heading back up the highway toward Kenwood and Locust Grove; the afternoon session of Tribal Court is over. Mr. Turnbo will be back soon and she's still behind on her work, but that's not Oprah Winfrey's fault.
"That little kid in the overalls?" Annawake asks. She is staring with her chin on her hand. "I heard somebody say she was adopted."
"Yeah. Before the first commercial Oprah introduced them as being somebody and her adopted daughter Turtle."
"Cherokee," Annawake says. "I'll bet you a Coke."
"Uhn-uh," Jinny says, "Navajo, I bet. They're from Arizona. She looks exactly like my brother's girlfriend's little girl, out in Albuquerque."
"Where in Arizona, did they say?"
"Tucson."
Annawake eyes the TV as if it had just called her a name. Jinny finds Annawake completely fascinating: she dresses like she doesn't give a hoot, in jeans and moccasins and white shirts from J. C. Penney's men's department, and she totes around a backpack held together by gray duct tape instead of a briefcase, but she has that fashion-model mouth with a deep indentation in the center of her upper lip that's hard to stop staring at. Men must want to kiss her every minute, Jinny thinks. When the perky music comes up and Oprah fades out to another commercial, Annawake takes off her glasses and rubs her eyes. "Tired," she sa
ys. "You too?"
"Yeah. Grandma's mad at my brother Woody for quitting school. Nobody's been getting much sleep at our house, except Woody. He took his bed out in the yard."
"Robert Grass didn't call yet?"
"Robert Grass! That turkey. Not since the drive-in two weeks ago."
"He will," Annawake says. "My brother Dellon knows him from the construction site over on Muskogee highway. He said Robert Grass is talking osda about his new girlfriend."
"Maybe she's nobody I know."
"If she's not you, you would have heard about it. Tahlequah's not that big."
"That's the truth. The whole Nation's not that big. Somebody all the way over to Salisaw told Grandma she'd seen me in a truck with the weediest Grass ever to come up."
Annawake smiles. "There's no getting away from the people that love you." She slides her glasses back on and takes the pencil from behind her ear to mark up the page she's reading. Jinny thinks: You don't even know. Nobody would gossip about you, they all adore you too much, plus you have no noticeable habits other than working. She blows a puff of air through her bangs and flips to a new page of the Arkansas River Gravel Claim. Why anyone cares this much about river gravel is beyond Jinny Redcrow.
"This Oprah show is about kids that saved people's lives," she offers Annawake as an afterthought, wondering if there's a legal angle she has missed. Annawake and Mr. Turnbo are always speaking to each other in a language Jinny types but can't read.
"Mmm-hm," Annawake says, not looking up. She's ignoring the sexy-sounding commercial and doing the smile-frown thing she does when she is reading. Annawake is known for being a super brain. Jinny went to Tahlequah High School seven years after her, and the teachers were still talking about Annawake Fourkiller like some comet that only hits Oklahoma once per century. Once at a stomp dance the chief gave her as an example of a good life path. He didn't embarrass the family by singling out her name, though of course everybody knows who he meant. But Annawake acts like she hasn't figured it out yet. She lives with one of her sisters-in-law in a bad little house on Blue Springs Street, and she ducks her head into the files when the good-looking guys come in making noise about their land-use papers, and she's even nice enough to ask about stupid Robert Grass. The only real problem with her is her hair is strange. She used to have long Pocahontas hair--Jinny has seen pictures in the yearbook: valedictorian, jock, president of Cherokee Pride club, nicknamed "Wide Awake Annawake"--but she cut it all off when she went away to law school. Now it's spiky and short like Jinny's little brothers', more Sinead O'Connor than Cherokee Pride. She doesn't see how Annawake can go pointing her finger at Sally Jessy Raphael.
Pigs in Heaven Page 5