“I have a mystery parent. Two of them. The transfer of custody was witnessed by a notary in Oklahoma City, who had no business with this kind of placement. The parents are listed as Steven and Hope Two-Two, allegedly Cherokees but not enrolled, also not enrolled Social Security-paying citizens of the U.S.A.”
Franklin’s eyebrows rise. “You found all that?”
“It was Jinny Redcrow’s big moment. She got to call up Oprah Winfrey on official business. The researchers were pretty helpful with i.d. and background. And the United States government is always eager to be of assistance, naturally.”
He doesn’t smile. “You still don’t have anything that makes it officially our business.”
Annawake touches her fingertips together, making a little fish basket of her hands, and looks into it. Sometimes she mentions her spirit guide, a thing Franklin Turnbo can only half understand. She is so quick she seems guided by racehorses or the fox that runs ahead of the dogs.
“You heard the mother on TV, right? Her story was that on her way out to Arizona she picked up this baby, who is obviously Native American, in Cherokee territory, from the sister of its dead mother. But in the official records we have consent-to-adoption forms filed by two living parents with invented names. I’d say it’s incumbent on the mother to prove it’s not our business.”
“You seem angry,” he says.
She looks surprised, then says, “Well, yeah. Maybe. All the housewives watching TV last Friday saw that our kids can be picked up as souvenirs.”
“Like your brother was.”
Her eyes don’t register any change. She says only, “I’m asking you if we could make a case for vacating an improperly conducted adoption.”
“And then what?”
“And then we could work with Cherokee Nation Child Welfare Services to find a proper placement.”
“Are you getting ahead of yourself?”
“Okay, or to evaluate the existing placement, first. But that should all be the tribe’s decision. That baby should never have been taken out.”
Franklin Turnbo leans back in his chair and sighs like a punctured air mattress. Annawake respectfully waits for him to run out of air.
“Annawake, I admire your energy. I wish I had it. But we have child-welfare problems filed in this office that could keep us all busy till I personally am old and gray. And then there are the land-use disputes and civil rights cases and the divorces and the drunks and the disorder-lies. And all the people trying to hold on to what little there is left.”
Annawake makes a basket with her hands again, and waits for the question.
“You’ve gone to school, and now you’ve come back to fight for your tribe. Who’s going to do this work if you’re riding your white horse around, gathering up lost children?”
“Don’t you think there’s a hole in somebody’s heart because that child is gone? Did you ever hear of a Cherokee child that nobody cared about?”
“But somebody cares about her now, too. That mother who found her.”
Annawake’s eyes register a cloud of doubt, but she asks,
“Finders keepers? Is that fair?”
“Not for wallets. Maybe for kids.”
“You and I could have been lost children. I very nearly was. What would you be, without the tribe?”
Franklin, avoiding her eyes, looks out his office window, which reveals the highway to Muskogee. Along with the sound of tanker trucks there is the crazy music of a meadowlark on a telephone wire. Franklin has a powerful, physical memory of the time he ran out of gas on I-40 at age nineteen, a mixed-up kid playing hooky from university, driving home to see his mother. He coasted into a Chevron station laughing at his good luck. It took him a minute to realize the place was boarded up, the nozzles padlocked to the pumps. All around him were fields of oil derricks, and he was on empty. But the fields were so beautiful, and a meadowlark above him on the wire was singing its head off, and Franklin still couldn’t stop laughing at his good luck.
She asks, “What did you mean when you said, trying to hang on to what little there is left? You think we’re that pitiful?”
Franklin is embarrassed, and reaches for his meadowlark: the memory, at least, of right-mindedness. “I used to feel about this place the way you do,” he says. “That the Nation is spiritually indestructible, because the birds in the woods don’t care who owns the title to the land. And you’re right, belonging to this tribe gave me a reason to stop chasing girls and show up for Judicial Process classes. But I’ve been a lawyer so long now I mainly just see how people fight and things get used up.”