“Look, Turtle, lick the side toward you. Like this.” Taylor licks the crown of her own pistachio cone to demonstrate.
Turtle nods, but goes right on turning her ice cream cone upside-down to lick the opposite side. A growing dampness is spreading outward from her chin onto her T-shirt like a full, green beard. Kevin, inscrutable as a traffic cop in his mirrored aviator sunglasses, has been ignoring Turtle.
It’s a hot day, but the sycamore trees, with their mottled brown-and-white trunks leaning like the necks of tired giraffes, seem to know it’s almost fall. Their leaves are browning mournfully at the edges, starting to give up the ghost. Quite a few have already fallen. They curl together in piles like brown-paper lunch bags, and Turtle kicks up noisy crowds of them as the three cross through the little park under a wrought-iron gazebo. Listless men and women sit on the benches in every kind of clothing—some in grubby overcoats, some in thin cotton trousers—but still they seem alike, with weathered faces and matted hair, as if these clothing styles were all variations of the uniform of homelessness. Kevin leads Taylor away from the benches toward the street, past a parked car that must have come from somewhere less rainy because it is covered in a deep tan fur of dust. Someone has written WASH ME across the rear window. Kevin takes this opportunity to explain to Taylor that the eastern part of the state is a virtual desert.
“Mom, here,” Turtle says, holding up the lumpy remains of her ice cream.
“What, don’t you want the rest of it?”
“I don’t like ice cream.”
“Turtle, sure you do. It’s good for you. It’s got calcium and helps your bones grow. Who ever heard of a kid that didn’t like ice cream?”
Turtle looks at her mother with sorrowful eyes.
“Okay, there’s a garbage can.” Taylor takes the sodden offering and throws it away.
They cross the street in the shadow of a huge totem pole that overlooks the park. Taylor thinks for the first time in several days of Annawake Fourkiller. She imagines being quizzed on which kind of Indians carved totem poles, which ones lived in teepees, which ones hunted buffalo, which ones taught the Pilgrims to put two fish in the bottom of the hole with each corn plant. She feels ashamed. She has no idea what she should be telling Turtle about her ancestors.
These days she hardly has the energy to tell her to eat right and get to bed on time.
“Yesler Way used to be called Skid Road,” Kevin explains.
Taylor notes that the green ice cream on his mustache makes it more noticeable. “They changed the name recently. This was actually the original skid row. In the old logging days they skidded the logs down this hill to the waterfront, to load them onto the ships, and I guess it was kind of a natural congregating place for out-of-work loggers, looking for a handout.” He laughs thinly. “As you can see, it still is.”
Across the street from them, some formidable paintings of Jesus adorn the windows of a storefront soup kitchen.
Turtle pulls Taylor forward stickily by the finger, up the hill toward the imagined beach.
“I can’t believe this sun,” Taylor declares. “Two days in a row, even. I was starting to go crazy with all the rain.”
“They thought changing the name of the street might clean the place up,” Kevin says. “It doesn’t help that those projects are right on the other side of the hill.”
Kevin doesn’t know that Taylor lives in one of the so-called projects. Kevin lives with his parents. His eight dollars an hour minus taxes goes mostly for home-computer equipment, from what Taylor gathers.
To reach Kevin’s car they cross through another small park with two more totem poles: a gigantic wooden dog and man, facing each other with outstretched arms. They might be tossing an imaginary ball, but they don’t seem happy. Their open, painted mouths are enormous, as if they might swallow the world. Taylor’s eyes slip toward a woman on a bench with two stunned-looking children beside her.
The woman has swollen knuckles and a stained red blouse and she bluntly follows Taylor with her eyes. Taylor looks down, feeling exactly as if she were carrying something stolen in her hands.
In Kevin’s sleek blue Camaro they continue the travelogue up Yesler. “That’s the Smith Tower,” he says, “the white building with the pointy top. That would be the oldest sky-scraper west of the Mississippi.”
“Would be?”
“Is, I mean.”
Taylor says nothing. They pass a grocery-deli, the school that will soon require Turtle’s attendance, and a lot of signs in Chinese, then turn onto Martin Luther King Way, where the frame houses have peaked roofs and little yards of leggy flowers. She knows these streets. A man on her route goes to Rogers Thriftway every other day for Coca-Cola Classic, microwave popcorn, and Depends. Kevin doesn’t have to tell Taylor that just a few blocks away, closer to the lakeshore and farther from Skid Road, the property values skid upward rather drastically.