From the moment of his rescue he has begged them not to tell his mother what happened. Angie Buster runs a diner in Sand Dune, Arizona, and over the phone sounded tired.
Lucky has no idea that she has spoken with Taylor, or that she watched his body come out of the hole again and again on the TV news. Computer graphics turned the Hoover Dam inside-out for America, showing a red toy image of Lucky moving jerkily down into the spillway and lodging there like the protagonist of a dark-humored video game.
Only Lucky and Turtle, perpetrators of the miracle, still believe they’ve witnessed a secret.
It was Turtle’s idea to drive him home once the doctors had bandaged his sprained ankle and held him for observation. Turtle is a TV heroine now, so police officers and even doctors pay attention to her. One reporter said that Turtle’s and Lucky’s destinies were linked now; that according to Chinese belief, if you save someone’s life you’re responsible for that person forever. Taylor wonders if he was making this up. Why would you owe them more than what you’d already provided? It sounds like the slightly off-base logic you sometimes get in a fortune cookie.
She turns the car south on Arizona 93 and picks up a signal on the radio. An oldies station, they’re calling it, though it’s playing the Beatles. If Beatles are oldie now, where does that leave Perry Como, she wonders, and all those girl groups with their broken-heart songs and bulletproof hair? As nearly as she remembers, Taylor was in kindergarten when the Beatles first hit it big, but they persisted into her adolescence, shedding the missionary suits and skinny ties in favor of LSD and little round sunglasses. She can’t identify the song but it’s one of their later ones, with that odd sound they developed toward the end—as if their voices are coming from inside a metal pipe.
What did he think about for a day and a half down there?
Taylor can’t bring herself to imagine. Now, with his fingernails scrubbed, his red checked shirt cleaned and respectfully pressed in the hospital laundry, what he’s been through seems impossible. The doctors presumed he never lost consciousness, unless he slept. From the looks of him now, he didn’t, or not much.
She came so close to driving away that night. Worn down by the uniforms and beard stubble and patronizing looks, it would have been such a small thing to get back in the car and go on to Nevada. She shivers.
The Beatles give up the ghost and Elton John takes over, his honky-tonk piano chords bouncing into “Crocodile Rock.”
This one Taylor remembers from dances on the bleached wood floor of the Pittman High gym, with some boy or other who never could live up to her sense of celebration on those occasions. They were always too busy trying to jam a hand between two of your buttons somewhere. The song is about that exact war, and it excited the girls as much as the boys to hear it because you knew how Suzy felt when she wore her dresses—as the song says—tight. Like something no boy could ever touch. Taylor liked Elton John, his oversized glasses and preposterous shoes, laughing at himself—such a far cry from other rock stars with long limp hair and closed eyes and heads rolled back to the sounds of their own acid chords, going for the crucifixion look.
Music is all different now: Jax belongs to neither breed, the Jesuses or the Elton Johns. Now they don’t just laugh at themselves but also their audience and the universe in general. Jax’s wide-eyed, skinny band members wear black jeans and shirts made of torn newspapers. Irascible Babies, pleading ignorance, just wishing they could suckle forever at the breast of a pulsing sound wave.
Jax is a problem in Taylor’s life, though she would never say that aloud. She feels disloyal for thinking it, even. He’s the first boyfriend she’s ever had who is actually funnier than he thinks he is. He is nice to Turtle to the point that it’s nearly embarrassing. Jax is so laid-back it took Taylor months to figure out what was going on here: that he’s crazy in love with her. Possibly that’s the problem. Jax’s adoration is like the gift of a huge, scuffling white rabbit held up at arm’s length for her to take. Or a European vacation.
Something you can never give back.
She turns southwest at the little noncity of Kingman, back toward the Colorado River or what’s left of it after all those dams, a tributary robbed blind and fighting hard to make the border. Mountains rise low and purple behind the river like doctor’s-office art. She’ll follow the river south through Lake Havasu City, where some rich person, she has heard, actually bought the London Bridge and shipped it over block by block to stand lonely in the desert. Eventually they’ll reach Sand Dune, where Angie Buster awaits her son. Taylor can call Jax from there and tell him about the new twist on their vacation.