“Not me. I got out of Kentucky just as soon as I could get the tires of my car pointed rubber side down.”
“And you’ll never go back?”
“Oh, I might, I guess. You shouldn’t forget who made you.”
“How about you, Turtle, where were you born?” he asks.
“In a car,” she says.
Steven looks at Taylor.
“It was a Plymouth,” she tells him. “That’s about all I know about it. She’s adopted.”
“I don’t want to go back to live in a car,” Turtle states.
Taylor thinks: Let’s hope you don’t have to.
They take the elevator down to the viewing area of the fish ladder. Steven explains that the fish have to swim up fourteen steps, against the strong current, to reach the lake. Through a thick window as high as a movie screen they see hundreds of grimacing, pale-bellied, pink-finned fish all headed the same way, working their bodies hard but barely moving forward. They look like birds trying to fly against a hurricane.
“Most of those are silver salmon,” Steven says. “Those few you see that are bigger are king salmon.”
They look beaten up, their fins bedraggled. “Poor things, why do they even come in here?” Taylor asks. “Seems like they’d be looking around for an easier way to go. A free ride in the locks, maybe.”
“No, believe it or not, the strong gush of water flowing out at the bottom is what attracts them in here. The Corps of Engineers figured that out a few years back. They narrowed the channel to increase the flow, and a lot more fish came in. You know the really sad part?”
“What?”
“There are a couple of fat sea lions that like to hang around at the top, just licking their chops, waiting to meet these guys at the end of their hard day’s work.”
“That is so sad.”
“Well, it’s life, I guess. The law of the jungle.”
The fish curve and buck and thrust themselves against the current, dying to get upstream and pass themselves on.
Taylor stands flanked by Turtle and Steven. For a long time the three of them are very still before the glass, framed by greenish light and a wall of solid effort.
“I know how they feel,” Steven says, his voice amused.
“It’s like getting into someplace that isn’t wheelchair access-ible.”
I know how they feel, Taylor thinks, and it’s not like getting into anywhere at all. It’s working yourself for all you’re worth to get ahead, and still going backward. She holds Turtle against her side so she won’t look up and see her mother’s tears.
25
PICKING
ALICE HAS A DATE. ANY minute now Cash Stillwater is going to pick her up and take her for a drive over to the huckleberry fields near Leech. She can’t understand why, but there it is.
Some out-and-out stranger has called her up and said, “Let’s go pick berries.”
Sugar insists he isn’t a stranger—that Alice met Cash the day they were in town. She swears they spotted him opening the door for Pearl Grass coming out of the Sanitary Market, and went over to say hello. It must be so, she argues, because Roscoe’s sister-in-law Letty claims Cash is sweet on Alice, and how could that be, if they hadn’t met? Alice has to agree, it seems unlikely.
She is standing by the front window when his truck pulls up. His long legs come out first, in jeans and cowboy boots with curled-up toes, and then the rest of him. His face is flat and broad under the eyes, the dark skin creased rather than wrinkled. He wears gold-rimmed glasses that give him a kind, twinkling appearance. She has never laid eyes on this man in her life. But that’s not to say she won’t go for a ride with him, at least this one time. If someone is sweet on you without ever having met you, she reasons, you owe him that much.
She meets him at the door, gripping her purse for courage.
“You all set to go?” he asks. He seems to be looking her over just as thoroughly as she is eyeing him.
“Ready as I’ll ever be,” she states, looking down at her slacks and workshirt. “Are these tennis shoes all right? If we’re going to be in mud, I better borrow some boots from Roscoe. Sugar’s wouldn’t do me a bit of good, she wears a five. She always had the smallest feet of anybody.”
“I don’t expect we’ll run into mud today, no. I think you’ll do all right.”
Alice follows him around to the passenger side of his truck, where he opens the door and gives her a hand up onto the running board. The truck is a wondrous, buttery copper color, though it seems about as old as anything with a motor could possibly be. The windshield is divided into two flat panes with a dark, puttied seam running down the center.