“Cool moccasins,” Jax observes. “They look brand new.”
“They are. I have to buy them out here. Nobody in Oklahoma wears moccasins anymore.”
“No?”
She shakes her head. “The ones they sell to tourists at the Cherokee Heritage Center are made by this hippie in Albuquerque.”
Jax sighs. “What is this world coming to?”
Suddenly, noticeably, the failing sunlight turns golden and benevolent. The cacti lit from behind glow with halos of golden fur, and Jax’s and Annawake’s faces and limbs seem similarly blessed. After a minute the light changes again, to flat dusk.
“They’re gone, aren’t they?” Annawake finally asks.
“Yep.”
“How gone?”
Jax ponders the question. “She packed all Turtle’s clothes.
All of her books. She picked about two hundred green apricots and laid them out on the shelf behind the backseat hoping they’d ripen. When they pulled out of here it looked like the Joads.”
Annawake has to think awhile to place the Joads, and then remembers The Grapes of Wrath, from high school English.
White people fleeing the dust bowl of Oklahoma, ending up as fruit pickers in California. They think they had it bad. The Cherokees got marched out of their homelands into Oklahoma.
“No forwarding address, I guess.”
Jax smiles.
“She manages an automotive place downtown, right? For a woman named Mattie, who must be a friend because she couldn’t come to the phone when I called. You’re lucky to have a mechanic in the family.”
“Good work, Sherlock, only, A, even if Taylor were a mechanic she’d probably tell me to fix my own car. And B, she’s not one. It used to be mainly a tire store, but Taylor hates tires so when they branched into auto parts Mattie let her take over the muffler and fanbelt side of the enterprise.”
“I guess she had vacation time saved up.”
“Nobody down there exactly punches a clock,” Jax says.
“It’s a nice outfit. Kind of sixties Amish. They take in strays.”
“Like Turtle?”
“Like Central American refugees. Could I remind you that you are the engineer of my recent wrecked life? Is this an official interrogation?”
“I’m sorry. No. I can get the information some other way, if you’d like me to go now and leave you alone.”
“Left alone is exactly what I have been,” Jax says. He’s quiet long enough for Annawake to hear air moving around them.
“Mattie loves Taylor like a son,” he says suddenly. “So you’re going to end up talking to the air compressors down there. Don’t waste your time.”
“But you can’t tell me where she’s gone, I don’t suppose.”
“You suppose correctly.”
They both watch as the sun touches the mountains. The horizon is softly indented as if the landscape had been worn down right there, like the low spot in the center of an old marble step, by the repeated tread of sunset. The red ball collapses, then silently hemorrhages into the surrounding clouds.
“I may get phone calls now and again, to let me know they’re all right. But there is no forwarding address.”
“Well, thanks for being honest,” Annawake says.
Jax laces his fingers behind his head and cracks some junction of his bones with a resounding pop. “I do a lot of wicked things to my body, but I never perjure it.”
“Wise choice,” she says. “Only we’re not in court.”
“So are they really in trouble? Is this going to be a James Dean kind of situation where the Cherokee Nation chases them down to the riverbank and shines the lights in their eyes and finally they surrender?”
Annawake says, “No.”
“Could I have that in writing?”
“You haven’t told me anything, but you’ve been very nice about it, so I’ll be honest with you. The Cherokee Nation isn’t pursuing this case, I am. The thing is full of holes. I don’t know how we can prove Turtle is Cherokee, unless some relatives come forward on the Nation. And even if that happens, I’m not positive the tribe’s Child Welfare Department would take her from Taylor. Or even if they should.”
“What does the law say?”
“The law says we can take her. There have been kids who were with adoptive parents five, ten years, that the Indian Child Welfare Act has brought back to their tribe, because the adoptions were illegal.”
“Wow. That’s radioactive.”