Taylor follows Angie to a table near the dust-frosted window pane. Angie’s hair is dyed such a dark black that she has a slightly purple scalp, like some of Jax’s backup singers.
She turns around suddenly and tells Taylor in a quieter voice,
“I owe you for this. You just don’t know, that boy means the whole world to me.”
Taylor is startled by the tears in Angie’s eyes and can only think to say, “Thank you.” For no physical reason Taylor can work out, Angie reminds her of her own mother. It must be nothing more than the force of her love. Angie goes to retrieve Turtle and Lucky from the photographer and deliver them both to the table. Lucky looks ecstatic, and surprisingly so does Turtle.
“Everybody’s real proud of you,” Taylor tells her.
“I know. I saved my friend Buster.” She swings her feet against the legs of her chair. Lucky reaches out and strokes Turtle’s shoulder twice. Taylor thinks of the reporter’s fortune-cookie prediction that Turtle’s life has been changed forever.
Angie doesn’t take any orders, she just brings food. Lucky leans so eagerly over his mashed potatoes that Taylor has to look away. This must be what people dislike about the retarded: they get straight down to the animal business of life, revealing it for what it is. Taylor admits to herself how hungry she is.
Angie brings over a customer named Collie Bluestone.
“He’s a real good rooster fighter,” Angie says by way of introduction.
“No,” he says modestly, sitting down. “I don’t fight them.
I sew them up afterward.”
Taylor is intrigued by the man’s mystifying profession and the scar on his neck. He’s handsome in the same way Jax is, thin and knuckly. On men it works, it can be sexy. “I used to go to cockfights,” she tells him. “Well, once I did. In somebody’s barn, in Kentucky. On a blind date.”
Collie makes an odd noise, a sort of a hiss, but he is smiling so it’s apparently not a threat. “I hope your date turned out better than the chicken’s.”
“Not a whole lot better, but thanks. It’s not too legal back there. Is it legal here? Or just kind of a hobby?”
“The fights aren’t up here,” he says. “They’re down by the Crit reservation. That’s where I live. I just come up here ever so often to check on Angie.”
Taylor speculates on the relationship of Angie Buster and Collie Bluestone, and wonders briefly if Collie is Angie’s chicken supplier, but decides not to ask. Turtle is eating as if she hadn’t been fed since the change of seasons. Taylor is positive they had breakfast. “What kind of Indian is Crit?” she asks Collie. “I never heard of them.”
Collie makes the same noise again. “C-R-I-T, it stands for Colorado River Indian Tribes, which there aren’t none. It’s a fake tribe made out of whoever got left out when they carved up the territory. It’s like if they called everybody in a prison ‘the Leavenworth family.’ ”
“Oh. Sorry I asked.”
“Well, everybody’s got to live someplace, right? There’s some Hopi, Navajo, Mojave.”
“And everybody gets along okay?”
“We marry each other, but we don’t get along.”
Angie arrives again with more food and men. She introduces the men but Taylor doesn’t catch their names, only their hands to shake as they sit down. One of them wears a dog-colored cowboy hat and keeps putting his arm around Angie’s waist. “Did you see that London Bridge up at Lake Havasu?” he asks.
Lucky pipes up suddenly with his cover story. “Mom, I accidentally walked on the railroad tracks to Havasu.”
Angie and all the men throw their mouths open and laugh.
Lucky joins in, enjoying his own joke, since that’s what it turned out to be. Angie wipes her eyes and it gets very quiet.
“We didn’t stop this morning to look at the bridge,” Taylor says. “I’ve heard about it, though. Some guy really did buy it and bring it over here?”
Lucky quietly sings, “London bridges falling down.”
“Some fat cat,” says the man in the cowboy hat. “And here’s the thing. After he bought it, he decided he had to get it cleaned. He said it cost more to clean it than to buy it.”
“I had a jacket like that one time,” Taylor says, feeling a certain pressure to keep the conversation going.
“Set down,” cowboy hat tells Angie. Ordering people around seems to be the m.o. of Angie’s Diner. “Tell them about the time Lucky run off with the Hell’s Angels.”