Pigs in Heaven (11 page)

“Well, look,” he says finally. “Don’t even tell me where you’re going next, because maybe Miss Jaxkiller will come back and seduce me, and I’ll tell all.”

“I’m thinking we’ll head north,” Taylor says. “I’m so nervous right now I can’t think right. I’ll call you from somewhere outside the state.”

“Have you slept with another man yet?”

“Jax! Good Lord, it’s only been forty-eight hours.”

“So you’re saying you need more time.”

“Thanks for calling. You’re really making my day here.”

“I’m sorry. It’s just, this is harder than it looks. You pack up your unripe fruit and drive out of here and you’re gone.”

“We didn’t leave
you
, Jax.”

“I know.”

“We’ll be back. This will be all right.”

“Make me believe.”

“You’ll see.” Taylor hangs up, wishing she had Angie’s power to make the entire world sit down for milk and cookies.

“For an adventure you have to have rations,” Taylor insists. She’s in the grocery, trying to get Turtle interested in food. She made the mistake of panicking, hurrying Turtle away from Lucky and into the car after Jax’s phone call, and now Turtle has gone deep inside herself. In situations where other children have tantrums, Turtle does some strange opposite of tantrum.

“Look, these pears are three pounds for a dollar. You can tell they’re ripe because they smell like pear. We’ll eat these until the apricots turn ripe.”

Turtle sits backward in the shopping basket with her eyes fixed on Taylor’s shirt buttons. This is the Turtle of years ago; for months after Taylor found her, Turtle gazed out at the world from what seemed like an empty house. But all through those mute seasons Taylor talked and talked to Turtle, and she does it again now, to keep her fear at bay. People in the store look at her and then look closely, for ten seconds too long, at this child too big to be sitting in a shopping basket. Taylor doesn’t care.

“Okay, listen up because I’m going to give you a valuable lesson
on how to pick the best checkout clerk when you’re in a hurry. Okay? As a general rule I say go for the oldest. Somebody that went to school in the days when you still learned arithmetic.”

“I know arithmetic,” Turtle points out quietly, without expression. “I know how to add.”

“That’s true,” Taylor says, trying not to leap at this. “But that’s because you come from a privileged home. I taught you how to add when you were four years old. Right? What’s three plus seven?”

Turtle recedes again, giving no hint that she has heard. Exactly as in the old days before she spoke, Turtle seems to be concentrating hard on some taste at the back of her mouth. Or a secret sound, a tuning fork struck inside her head.

Taylor considers the checkout options: three female teenagers with identical sticky-looking hairdos, and a middle-aged Hispanic man with a huge mustache. Taylor heads her cart toward the mustache. While they wait she scans the tabloids by the register, half expecting to see news of herself and Turtle on the run. She was right about the cashier: their line moves twice as fast as the others and promptly the store has expelled them into the parking lot. When she loads in the groceries and slams the trunk, apricots go flying.

“Those damn things!” she says, and Turtle’s mouth hints at a smile. Taylor lifts her with some effort out of the basket and sets her down beside the car. She stands motionless, a stuffed child skin, while Taylor returns the cart. Taylor has been swearing at the apricots since they left Tucson, and Turtle has found it funny: the fruits roll around noisily on the shelf behind the backseat and bobble forward like a gang of little ducks at every hard stop. There are green apricots in the ashtray, on the seat, on the floor. Taylor is pretty sure they were a bad idea. Instead of turning yellow, most of them seem to be hardening and shrinking like little mummy heads.

She lifts Turtle into the front seat and she scoots across and buckles up mechanically, letting Taylor in after her. “Will you look at this?” Taylor reaches down and fishes an apricot from under the clutch. Pretending to be furious, she throws it hard out the window, then ducks her head when it hits another car. Turtle giggles, and
Taylor sees then that she is back, there is someone home behind her eyes. “So what we’re going to do now,” she says calmly, touching the tears out of her own eyes, “is we have to look for a sign. Something to tell us where to go.”

“There,” Turtle says, pointing at a billboard.

“That says to go buy snakeskin boots at Robby’s Western Wear Outlet. You think we should buy snakeskin boots?”

“No!” Turtle says, pulling her head back hard against the seat, tucking her chin down and shaking her whole body with the negative.

“Okay, look for something else.”

“There,” Turtle says after a minute, pointing at an envelope stuck under the windshield wiper.

“Shoot, how can they give you a ticket in the parking lot of a damn grocery store?” Taylor opens the door at a stop sign and reaches around to grab it. “I’m sorry to set a bad moral example for you, Turtle, but if this is a ticket I’m throwing it away. I didn’t do anything wrong, plus they’ll never find us anyway.” She hands it to Turtle and accelerates.

Turtle takes a very long time to tear open the envelope.

“What’s it say? ‘Citation’ starts with C-I-T, it means a ticket.”

“It says: Dear Cad Die…”

“Dear cad die?”

“C-A-D-D-I-E.”

“Caddie. Let me see that.”

“I can read it,” Turtle says. “It’s not too long.”

“Okay.” Taylor concentrates on being patient and not hitting pedestrians. People in Sand Dune don’t seem in tune with the concept of traffic lights.

“Dear Caddie. I am sorry I did-n’t see you at miggets…”

“Miggets?” Taylor glances over at Turtle, who is holding the paper very close to her face. “That’s okay, keep going.”

“At miggets like I pro, pro-my-sed.”

“Like I promised.”

“Like I promised. Here is the S 50.”

“S 50?” To Taylor it sounds like a fighter plane.

“The S is crossed out.”

“A line through it?” Taylor considers. “Here is the 50? Oh, a dollar sign, here is the
fifty dollars?
Look in the envelope, is there anything else in there?”

Turtle looks. “Yes.” She hands over two twenties and a ten.

“What else does it say? Is there a name at the bottom?” Taylor can’t wait any longer, and reaches for the note:

It reminds Taylor of the mysterious ads in the newspaper’s personal section: “Hoops, I’ll never forget the fried clams at B.B.O.G., Your Toots.” It stands to reason that the kind of person who would waste money on those ads would leave fifty dollars on the wrong car.

“Who’s Caddie?” Turtle wants to know.

“Somebody else with a big white car. Some guy named Hoops owed her money, and didn’t want to face her in person.”

“Why did he give it to us?”

“Because we’re lucky.”

“Was that the sign telling us where to go?” Turtle asks.

“I guess. It’s a sign our luck has turned. Money’s walking to us on its own two feet. I guess we ought to go to Las Vegas.”

“What’s Las Vegas?”

“A place where people go to try their luck.”

Turtle considers this. “Try to do what with it?”

“Try to get more money with it,” Taylor says.

“Do we want more money?”

“It’s not so much we want it. We just have to have it.”

“Why?”

“Why?” Taylor frowns and tilts the rearview mirror to get the setting sun out of her eyes. “Good question. Because nobody around
here will give us anything, except by accident. Food or gas or what all we need. We’ve got to buy it with money.”

“Even if we really need something, they won’t give it to us?”

“Nope. There’s no free lunch.”

“But they’ll give us money in Las Vegas?”

“That’s the tale they tell.”

Even a joke has some weight and takes up space, and when introduced into a vacuum, acquires its own gravity. Taylor is thinking about her high school physics teacher, Hughes Walter, and what he might say about her present situation. To amuse herself on long drives she often puts together improbable combinations of the people she’s met in her life, and imagines what they would say to each other: Her mother and Angie Buster. Lou Ann’s mean, prudish grandmother and Jax. Better yet: Jax and the woman looking for the horses.

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 resurfaced 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 ran 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.