“Ha, ha.” Gently she pushes a dry shirt over Turtle’s damp head, which smells like baby shampoo, and pulls her arms through the holes.
The cooler unit in the window thumps doggedly, over-worked but useless in the damp heat. Taylor is suddenly irritated with the prickly weight of her hair; it reminds her of Jax breathing on her neck. She yanks it over her shoulder and begins corralling it into a braid.
“Why do we have to have this vacation?” Turtle asks.
Taylor feels gooseflesh rise on the skin of her bare arms.
“Well, because we can’t be hanging around at home right now.”
“Why?”
Taylor examines the end of her rope of hair, trying to look unconcerned. It would be so simple to lie: Jax decided to paint the whole house purple. “Do you remember when I took you to Oklahoma that time to get your adoption papers?”
Turtle nods, and Taylor doesn’t doubt that she remembers.
Sometimes she will mention events from years ago. Taylor finds it miraculous and disturbing that Turtle can find words for things she witnessed before she could talk.
“We had to go on that trip because the social workers said we needed those papers so you could stay with me. And this is something like that. We need to go on another trip, to make sure we can stay together.”
“A trip to where?”
“Well, that’s the part I don’t know yet. Someplace lucky.
Where do you think we should go?”
“Sesame Street.”
“Good idea,” Taylor says.
Now the television is showing the paintings inside the church. There is a sad, long-faced Jesus made up of small squares and triangles, as if he were glass, and had been smashed and reassembled. Taylor rolls over on her stomach and nuzzles Turtle’s neck. Her spirit is revived by the exact unchanging smell of Turtle: shampoo, sweat, and something nutty and sweet, like peanut butter. She blows against her brown cheek, making a loud noise, then gives her a kiss. “This church is getting depressing,” she says.
“Could we watch something with a little more story line?”
Turtle gets up and changes the station to a movie.
“Thanks, pal.”
The movie is about a big, tough, angry wife who is trying to ruin the life of her rabbity husband, who ran off with a rich romance writer. Nothing about the movie seems realistic to Taylor, but Turtle asks her not to talk to the TV, so she tries. They both like the mean wife the best. She does spec-tacularly horrible things, and they laugh. Taylor also likes the Indian actor who plays the rich lady’s smug, smart-alecky butler. The lady keeps snapping, “Garcia, take care of it this instant!” and Garcia keeps rolling his eyes and walking away.
In the last few days Taylor has been noticing images of Indians everywhere: the Indian-chief profile on a Pontiac.
The innocent-looking girl on the corn-oil margarine. The hook-nosed cartoon mascot of the Cleveland Indians, who played in Tucson. Taylor wonders what Annawake meant when she said Turtle should be in touch with her Indian side. Maybe that doesn’t mean feathers, but if not, then what? Taylor is supposedly part Indian herself; Alice used to talk about some Cherokee great-grandmother way in the back of the closet, but everybody and his brother has one of those, even Elvis Presley did. Where do you draw the line?
Maybe being an Indian isn’t any one thing, any more than being white is one thing. What mascot would they use for a team called the Cleveland White People?
The movie has become a commercial without Taylor’s notice: she realizes now that the dancing women lifting drinks from a tray have nothing to do with Garcia the Indian butler.
Taylor doesn’t care for her own train of thought. She could end up like the woman outside, running around in the rain, asking people, “Have you seen the Indians?”
Just as Angie’s bones predicted, Lucky returned with the end of the rainstorm. He was at his friend Otis’s, working on model trains. “Next time use your brain and call me, will you, Otis?” she scolds when he drops Lucky off at the diner.
“My phone went out,” Otis says.
“My butt,” Angie replies.
Otis is very old and bald, with bad posture and big splay feet in white sneakers. She orders him inside for a piece of pie, and he obeys. Like everyone else around, he seems to turn into a child in the presence of Angie. Taylor marvels at this talent of hers, like one of the superpowers a cartoon character could possess: the hypersonic mother-ray.
Taylor is helping Angie put away the soggy yellow bows from the Virgin of Guadalupe. The storm has left them floating in a puddle around her feet like bedraggled water lilies. “Do you put these up every time he disappears?”