She hands Turtle a fistful of fast-food napkins from the glove compartment, but has to keep her eyes on the road once they get going. The Dodge Corona drives like a barge and the road is narrow and crooked, as bad as the roads she grew up risking her neck on in Kentucky.
Eventually they level out on the Nevada plain, which looks clinically dead. Behind them the lake stretches out its long green fingers, begging the sky for something, probably rain.
Turtle asks, “How will he get out?”
“Will who get out?”
“That man.”
“Which man is that, sweetheart?” Turtle isn’t a big talker; she didn’t complete a sentence until she was four, and even now it can take days to get the whole story. “Is this something you saw on TV?” Taylor prompts. “Like the Ninja Turtles?”
“No.” She looks mournfully at the waffled corpse of her ice cream cone. “He picked up a pop can and fell down the hole by the water.”
Taylor narrows her eyes at the road. “At the dam? You saw somebody fall?”
“Yes.”
“Where people were sitting, on that wall?”
“No, the other side. The water side.”
Taylor takes a breath to find her patience. “That man out on the lake, riding around on that boat thing?”
“No,” Turtle says. “The man that fell in the hole by the water.”
Taylor can make no sense of this. “It wasn’t on TV?”
“No!”
They’re both quiet. They pass a casino where a giant illuminated billboard advertises the idea of cashing your paycheck and turning it into slot-machine tokens.
Turtle asks, “How will he get out?”
“Honey, I really don’t know what you mean. You saw somebody fall down a hole by the dam. But not into the water?”
“Not the water. The big hole. He didn’t cry.”
Taylor realizes what she could mean, and rejects the possibility, but for the half second between those two thoughts her heart drops. There was a round spillway where the water could bypass the dam during floods. “You don’t mean that spillway, do you? The big hole between the water and the parking lot?”
“Yes.” Turtle’s black eyes are luminous. “I don’t think he can get out.”
“There was a big high fence around that.” Taylor has slowed to about fifteen miles an hour. She ignores the line of traffic behind her, although the drivers are making noise, impatient to get to Las Vegas and throw away their money.
“Turtle, are you telling me the absolute truth?”
Before she can manage an answer, Taylor U-turns the Dodge, furious at herself. She’ll never ask Turtle that question again.
Hoover’s guardian angels are in the dark now. The place is abandoned. They bang on the locked museum doors and Taylor cups her hands to see inside, but it is deserted. A huge blueprint of the dam shows elevators, maintenance towers, and on each side a long spillway looping like a stretched intestine under the dam to the river below. Taylor’s own gut feels tight. “They’ve gone home,” she tells Turtle, who won’t stop banging the door. “Come on. Show me where he fell.”
Turtle is willing to substitute one course of action for another. The legs of her shorts whip against each other as they cross to the Arizona side, where she dripped a trail of ice cream an hour before. “There,” she says, pointing down.
Taylor examines the throat of the spillway: a rectangular concrete funnel, maybe fifty feet across, whose lower end narrows into a large round hole.
Dots of car lights twist down the mountain, looking lonely.
Out over the lake, bats dip and flutter after mosquitoes.
Taylor looks at the dark gullet. “Head first, or feet first?”
Turtle ponders this. “He was walking on there.” Her finger projects a line down the retaining wall between lake and spillway. “He picked up a pop can. Then he fell down.
Sideways first.” Her hand burrows into her shorts pocket, frightened of its own revelations.
Taylor squeezes the other hand. “Don’t worry. He’s one lucky sucker that you’ve got such sharp eyes. Did you see him go all the way into the hole?”
Turtle nods.
Taylor feels weak-kneed, as she did looking over the parapet wall. The hardest thing about motherhood, she thinks, is that you can never again be the baby of your family, not even for ten seconds. She tries to sound steady. “Should we yell? Think he might hear us?”
Turtle nods.
Taylor screams: “Anybody in there? Hey!” They listen to the passive response of two million tons of concrete.