Suddenly two shadows are at the door, tall and short.
Annawake jumps up to lead them in. Turtle is hanging so close to Alice’s knees they bump together like a three-legged race. Her eyes are round, and never look away from the man in the corner.
“Turtle, I want you to meet some people,” Taylor says through the hoarseness in her throat.
Turtle takes a half step from behind Alice, and stares.
Suddenly she holds up her arms to Cash like a baby who wants to be lifted into the clouds. She asks, “Pop-pop?”
Cash pulls off his glasses and drops his face into his hands.
32
THE SNAKE UK’TEN
“WHERE’D YOU GET A PRISSY name like Lacey from, anyway?”
“I don’t know,” Cash tells Alice, keeping his hands on the wheel and his eye trained ahead. “It was Alma thought of it.
I think she liked that TV show with the lady cops. Lacey and somebody.”
“Oh, if that don’t beat all.” Alice jerks herself around in the seat, facing away from him. She was more or less stuck for a ride home, since Taylor and Turtle had to go straight over to Cherokee Headquarters to see the man in Child Welfare. Annawake said her car was broken down and she was waiting for her brother to pick her up. That left Cash.
She should have walked.
“She’s so big,” Cash says. “I can tell just how she is. The kind to keep her mind to herself, like her mother did.”
They pass by fields of harvested hay that is rolled up for the winter in what looks like giant bedrolls. A barn in the middle of a pasture is leaning so far to the east it appears to be a freak of gravity.
“Are you going to go ahead and get enrolled, and get your voting card?” he asks.
“Might as well,” Alice declares to the passing farms. “So I can get my roof fixed.”
“Don’t start talking to me about Indians on welfare.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Well, don’t. My people owned mansions in Georgia. They had to see it all burned down, and come over here to nothing but flint rocks and copperheads.” Cash’s voice rises to the pitch of a tenor in church.
“I can’t believe I ever got mixed up with a family that names babies after TV shows!” Alice cries, just as loudly.
“Kitty Carlisle in the kitchen. You can keep your Kitty Carlisle. I already had me one husband that was in love with his television set. Not again, no thanks!”
“Who was asking?”
“Well, I just didn’t want you to waste your time.”
As angry and heartbroken as she is, Alice feels something hard break loose down inside of her. She feels deeply gratified to yell at someone who is paying enough attention, at least, to yell back.
The Tribal Offices sit just off the highway in a simple modern arrangement of red brick and concrete slabs, with shrubs hugging the sidewalks. Taylor expected something more tribal, though she doesn’t know what that might be.
Turtle holds tightly to her hand as they make their way around the long sidewalk, looking for the right entrance.
“You remember your grandpa, do you?” Taylor asks, talking to fend off approaching terror.
Turtle shrugs. “I dunno.”
“It’s okay if you do. You can say.”
“Yeah.”
“What else do you remember?”
“Nothing.”
“Your first mother?”
Turtle shrugs again. “He’s the good one. Pop-pop. He’s not the bad one.”
“You remember a man that hurt you?”
“I think I do.”
“Turtle, that’s good. I want you to remember. Remember him so you can throw him away.”
Their shoes make soft, sticky sounds on the warm sidewalk.
Turtle steps long to avoid the cracks. This building must be half a mile long, with entrances for every possible category of human problem. Health Care. Economic Development.
Taylor can’t believe the way life turns out. She has been waiting years for the revelation that just came to Turtle, and now it has happened, while they were walking along half distracted between a row of juniper hedges and the Muskogee Highway.
At last they find Child Welfare. Inside, the building is carpeted and seems more friendly. Receptionists sit at circular desks in the wide corridors, and pictures on the wall show the Tribal Council members, some in cowboy hats. When Taylor asks for directions to Andy Rainbelt’s office, the receptionist gets up and leads the way. She wears low heels and has the disposition of a friendly housewife.
“This is his office here. If he was expecting you then I imagine he’ll be on in here in a minute. He might be hung up with another appointment.”