They are driving toward Las Vegas because it’s the only suggestion anyone has made so far, besides Sesame Street, and when introduced into a vacuum the idea acquired gravity.
They’re approaching the Hoover Dam now. Maybe it’s what Jax said, that they’ve been drawn back to the scene of the crime. Whether she is the one who made off with the goods, or was robbed, she doesn’t know yet. Taylor would just as soon skip the dam, but the only way out of this corner of the state is to cross the Hoover or get wet. Turtle is sitting up, looking excited.
“We’re going to see those angels again,” she says, her first words in more than thirty miles.
“Yep.”
“Can we stop?”
“And do what?”
“Go see that hole.”
Taylor is quiet.
“Can we?”
“Why do you want to do that?”
“I want to throw something at it.”
“You do? What for?”
Turtle looks out the window and speaks so quietly Taylor can barely hear. “Because I hate it.”
Taylor feels her face go hot, then cold, as her blood strangely reverses its tide. Turtle understands everything that has happened. There is no state of grace.
“Yeah, okay. We can do that.”
Taylor parks the car very near the spillway. Since the dramatic rescue, they’ve added a new fence on the mountainside and pinkish floodlights in the parking lot. It feels bright as day when they get out, but deserted and wrongly colored, like some other planet with a fading sun. They both stand with their hands in their pockets, looking down.
“What can we throw?” Turtle asks.
Taylor thinks. “We have some empty pop cans in the car.
But I hate to throw trash. It doesn’t seem right.”
“Rocks?” Turtle suggests, but the parking lot has been re-surfaced and there aren’t any rocks. The Hoover Dam people have really gone all out.
“Green apricots!” Taylor says suddenly, and Turtle laughs out loud, a chuck-willow watery giggle. They clamber into the backseat and scoop up armloads of the mummified fruits.
“This one’s for Lucky Buster,” Taylor shouts, casting the first one, and they hear it: ponk, ponk, ricocheting down the bottomless tunnel.
“Here’s for Boy Scouts that have saved lives, and that stupid purple dress they tried to make you wear on TV. And for Annawake Fourkiller wherever she is.” Handfuls of fruit rain down the hole.
“Lucky, Lucky, Lucky, Lucky,” Turtle chants, throwing her missiles slowly like precious ammunition. While the two of them, mother and child, stand shouting down the hole, a fine rain begins to fall on the desert.
Afterward, Turtle seems spent. She lies across the front seat with her head on Taylor’s right thigh and her tennis shoes wagging idly together and apart near the passenger door.
The low greenish lights of the dashboard are reflected in her eyes as she looks out at the empty space of her own thoughts.
Beside her face Turtle cradles Mary, her square utility flashlight. It’s the type that people take deer hunting, large and dark green, said to float if dropped in water. She never turns it on; Turtle doesn’t even particularly care whether it has batteries, but she needs it, this much is clear. To Taylor it seems as incomprehensible as needing to sleep with a shoebox, and just as unpleasant—sometimes in the night she hears its hollow corners clunk against Turtle’s skull. But anyone who’s tried to take Mary away has found that Turtle is capable of a high-pitched animal scream.
Taylor squints through the windshield wipers. She’s driving toward the blaze of lights she knows has to be Las Vegas, but she can barely see the sides of the road. The storm moving north from Mexico has caught up to them again.
Turtle shifts in her lap and looks up at Taylor. “Am I going to have to go away from you?”
Taylor takes a slow breath. “How could that happen?
You’re my Turtle, right?”
The wipers slap, slap. “I’m your Turtle, right.”
Taylor takes a hand off the wheel to stroke Turtle’s cheek.
“And once a turtle bites you, it doesn’t let go, does it?”
“Not till it thunders.”
Turtle seems cramped, and arches her back, pushing herself around with her feet. When she finally settles, she has crawled out of her seat belt and curled most of her body into Taylor’s lap with her head against Mary. With one hand she reaches up and clenches a fist around the end of Taylor’s braided hair, exactly as she used to do in the days before she had any other language. Outside, the blind rain comes down and Taylor and Turtle flinch when the hooves of thunder trample the roof of the car.