Alice uncrosses and crosses her arms over her chest, understanding more than she wants to. She knows she is hearing the story Annawake has carried around her whole life long. A speedboat whines past, far away on the other side of the river. Long after the boat and its noise are gone, they are rocked by the gash it cut in the water.
"They figure about two thousand died in the detention camps," Annawake says quietly. "And a lot more than that on the trail. Nobody knows."
A bright yellow wasp hovers over the water near their feet and then touches down, delicately as a helicopter. It floats with its clear wings akimbo, like stiff little sails.
Annawake gives an odd, bitter laugh. "When I was a kid, I read every account ever written about the Trail of Tears. It was my permanent project. In high school Civics I read the class what President Van Buren said to Congress about the removal, and asked our teacher why he didn't have us memorize that, instead of the Gettysburg Address. He said I was jaded and sarcastic."
"Were you?"
"You bet."
"Well. What did President Van Buren say?"
"He said: 'It affords me sincere pleasure to be able to apprise you of the removal of the Cherokee Nation of Indians to their new homes west of the Mississippi. The measures have had the happiest effect, and they have emigrated without any apparent resistance.' "
Alice feels she could just slide down into the water without stopping herself. It's monstrous, what one person will do to another.
Annawake and Alice sit without speaking, merely looking at the stretched-out body of Tenkiller Lake, drawing their own conclusions.
"Somebody must have made it," Alice says at last. "You're here. I saw the newspapers and all, that they had."
"Well, on the good side, we had the run of the place for a while with no interference. By the late 1800s we had our act together again. If you're really inclined to be Cherokee you should go down to the museum and have a look. We had the first free public school system in the world. For girls and boys both. In secondary school they taught physiology, music, history, algebra, Virgil."
"Shoot, that's more than they ever taught me."
"In 1886 we got the first telephone line west of the Mississippi into Tahlequah. They didn't want to have to look at ugly lines, so they ran it through the woods and strung it from trees."
Alice laughs. "Sounds like some high-class people."
"It's no joke. We had the highest literacy rate in the whole country."
"It's pretty, that writing." Alice can nearly taste the mysterious curled letters that kept their silence on the crumbling newspaper she saw. "Is it hard to read it?"
"They say it isn't, but I never learned. Don't tell anybody. It pisses me off that Uncle Ledger never taught me."
"You're bringing down the literacy rate."
"Yeah, I told him that. Although it's kind of down around our ankles now."
"What happened? If you don't mind my asking. I mean no offense, but Sugar showed me all the fancy old capitol buildings and stuff, and I was thinking it looked like a hurricane hit this place since then."
Annawake snorts. "Hurricane Yonega."
"You can't blame every bad thing on white people," Alice says softly.
"Nineteen-ought-two, the railroad came in," Annawake replies, just as quietly. "Gee Dick and his band played for a stomp dance on the courthouse lawn, to celebrate the arrival of the first train. The first white folks stepped off the train and started poking around and probably couldn't believe they'd given us such a beautiful piece of real estate. No ugly telephone lines. Within four years, our tribal government was dissolved by federal order. The U.S. government started the Indian boarding schools, dividing up families, selling off land. You tell me, who do we blame?"
"I don't know. The times. Ignorance. The notion people always seem to get, that they know what's best for somebody else. At least that part's over, they're not moving you out anymore."
"No, now they just try to take our kids."
Alice feels stabbed. "Turtle was practically left for dead," she says. "My daughter saved her from starving in a parking lot, or worse. I'd think you might be grateful."
"I'm grateful that she's alive. But I'm not happy about the circumstances."
"Maybe you and me are just going to have to be enemies," Alice says.
"I don't think so. But I want you to understand how deep these feelings run. For this whole century, right up until 1978 when we got the Indian Child Welfare Act, social workers would come in here with no understanding of how our families worked. They would see a child who'd been left with someone outside the nuclear family, and they would call that neglect. To us, that is an insane rationale. We don't distinguish between father, uncle, mother, grandmother. We don't think of ourselves as having extended families. We look at you guys and think you have contracted families."
"That's true," Alice says, thinking of her empty address book. She can't deny it. It struck her back in Kentucky, when she wanted to leave Harland but couldn't think where else home might be.
"We couldn't understand why they were taking us apart. My brother Gabe, going to a man and woman in Texas when we had a whole family here. I've seen babies carried off with no more thought than you'd give a bag of brown sugar you picked up at the market. Just a nice little prize for some family. The Mormon families love our kids, because they think we're the lost tribe of Israel. Little pagan babies to raise up and escort you into heaven!"
Annawake's eyes are streaming tears. She looks up at the darkening sky. "These were our kids," she tells Alice, and the sky. "Thousands of them. We've lost more than a quarter of our living children."
There is a whole fleet of yellow wasps floating on the water now. A breeze too slight for Alice to feel causes them all to slide across the surface along the same diagonal. One by one, they lift off into the air.
Annawake wipes her face with the back of her wrist, and looks at Alice. "I concede your point that Turtle was abandoned. She wasn't stolen, she was lost and found. It's not the first time an Indian parent has given a child away, I have to admit that to you. There's a real important case, Choctaw vs. Holyfield, where that happened. But the way our law looks at it is, the mother or father doesn't have that right. It's like if I tried to give you, I don't know, a piece of the Tahlequah courthouse."
Alice hands Annawake a handkerchief. Young people never carry them, she's noticed. They haven't yet learned that heartbreak can catch up to you on any given day.
Annawake folds and unfolds the cotton square on her lap. "We see so many negative images of ourselves, Alice. Especially off-reservation. Sometimes these girls make a break for the city, thinking they'll learn to be blonde, I guess, but they develop such contempt for themselves they abandon their babies at hospitals or welfare departments. Or a parking lot. Rather than trust to family."
"It's a sad story," Alice says. "But if you make Turtle leave the only mama she knows now, you're going to wreck a couple of lives."
"I know that." Annawake looks down, tucking behind her ear a lock of hair that immediately falls out again. "I could also tell you that some wrecked lives would be made whole again. There's no easy answer. I'm trying everything I can think of to avoid legal intervention. I'd kind of cooked up an alternate plan, but it doesn't seem like it's working out." She gives Alice the same careful study again, looking for something.
"What does the law say?"
"That's easy. The ICWA says a child should be placed with relatives if they're available, or with other members of the child's tribe, or, third choice, with a member of another Native American tribe. The law is clear."
"How's your conscience?" Alice asks.
Annawake lifts her feet out of the water and splashes a little, causing the minnows to flee. "The thing is, I'm really not jaded and cynical. My boss thinks I'm a starry-eyed idealist. That's the whole reason I pursued this case, instead of minding my own business. At the time I met your daughter, I had never experienced a crisis of faith."
&nbs
p; Alice looks up at the sky, so much brighter and more silent than the one reflected below. "I wish I could say I always knew what was right," she tells this mysterious child.
Annawake brushes Alice's hand so lightly she could have imagined it.
28
Surrender Dorothy
THUNDER POUNDS IN THE DISTANCE and rain coats the Dodge's windshield, drifting across it in sheets like the hard spatter against a shower curtain. Taylor bangs on the steering wheel. "This isn't a city, it's a carwash!"
Turtle looks away, out the window on her side. They are parked in front of the Kwik Mart, held hostage by the rain, hoping it might lighten up enough to let Taylor make a call from the pay phone.
Taylor grips the steering wheel hard, until the weakness in her forearms runs in slow warm-water currents up into her shoulders and neck. She blows out air. "I'm sorry, sweetheart. I'm not mad at you, I'm mad at the rain."
Turtle mumbles something, rolling Mary idly in her lap.
"What?"
Still looking away, she pronounces: "You're always mad at something."
"Oh, Turtle." Taylor has to bite her tongue to keep from snapping, "I am not!" If she weren't so miserable, she would laugh at her terrible mothering skills. She stares out the window on her side, toward the washed-out vacant lot next door, empty tonight. Apparently the criminal element has the sense to stay home in this weather. They probably have nice homes, Taylor thinks, and VCRs. As drug dealers, they would have a decent income. Probably they're home watching America's Most Wanted, with their heat cranked up to seventy-five degrees.
"How was school today?"
"Okay, I guess."
"That's all?"
"Yeah."
Taylor turns in the seat to face Turtle, tucking her feet under her. She taps Turtle on the shoulder politely. "Listen, you, I want to talk about it."
Turtle slowly brings around her face, with its question-mark eyebrows.
"What was the best thing that happened?"
Turtle thinks about it. "There wasn't any best thing."
"Okay, what was the worst thing?"
"Lisa Crocker made fun of my pants."
"Your bicycle pants? What's wrong with those? All the kids wear those, I've seen them."
"She says I wear them every day."
"Well, that's not true. On the other days you wear your jeans."
Turtle pushes her palms against her thighs. "The other kids have more than two pairs."
"I know, Turtle. I used to get made fun of in school too. Mama cleaned people's houses, and they'd give her their kids' outgrown stuff for me to wear. They thought they were doing us a favor, but I ended up going to school looking like a clown."
Turtle slides her eyes sideways and suppresses a grin. "With a big red nose?"
"I should have worn a big red nose. I copped an attitude instead."
"What's that?"
Taylor notices that the rain is changing from a major to a minor key, maybe letting up a little.
"Copping an attitude? Oh, it just means I acted real tough. Like I wanted to look like that, and everybody else was ridiculous for wearing their little matching sweaters and skirts."
Turtle thinks this over. "I don't think I can cop an attitude," she says.
"You shouldn't have to! Kids your age should not even like the idea of clothing. You should still be trying to throw everything off and roll in the mud."
Turtle looks attentively skeptical.
"I'm telling you, this Lisa Crocker character is a social deviant."
"She's just like the other girls, Mom."
"Good grief, they're all going to grow up to be like Barbie! Can you imagine what that means for the future of our planet?"
"I want them to be my friends."
Taylor sighs and strokes Turtle's hair. "I think it's harder to be an underprivileged kid than it used to be."
"One time I wore the school's pants," Turtle says. "Those gray sweater pants with letters on them. When I had that accident."
"Well, that's true. That wasn't much fun, though, was it?"
"No."
"I'm glad your stomach's feeling better these days."
Turtle is quiet.
"Aren't you feeling better?"
"No," Turtle says faintly.
"No?" Taylor feels a wave of panic.
"It hurts mostly."
"Oh, Turtle. This doesn't make any sense. You've never been sick before."
"I'm sorry, Mom. I just get the stomach cramps. I can't help it."
"Oh, Turtle."
"Mom, it stopped raining. Look."
It's true, the noisy assault is over, but the windshield is still blurred with a serious drizzle. "You poor kid, you've forgotten what good weather is. You think a sunny day is when you only need a raincoat instead of an umbrella."
"No, I don't. I remember sun."
"Remember Tucson?"
"Yeah."
"What do you remember best?"
Turtle closes her eyes for a long time. "There isn't any best," she says, finally. "I liked it all."
"But we didn't have much money then, either. I think you only had one or two pairs of pants even in Tucson."
"We had Jax, though. And Lou Ann and Dwayne Ray, and Mattie, down at your store."
"That's true. We had them."
"Will they let us come back?"
"We don't have enough money for gas. And we can't tell anybody where we are."
"But if we did have gas, I mean. Does Jax and everybody still want us to live there?"
"I think he does."
"He's not mad because we went away from home?"
Taylor rolls down the window and closes her eyes and lets the hissing night lick her face like a cat. "That's what home means, Turtle," she says. "Even if they get mad, they always have to take you back."
Alice answers the phone at last.
"Mama, I've been trying to call you all different times today. Where were you?"
"Law, Taylor, I couldn't even tell you. Someplace called Lip Flint Crick, or Flint Chip Lick, something. On a picnic."
"A picnic? I thought you were supposed to be arguing with the Fourkiller woman."
"I did. But then we went on a picnic."
"You argued, and then you went on a picnic?"
"No, not with her. I've got me a boyfriend."
"Mama, I swear, I can't turn my back on you for one minute!" Taylor hears a bitterness in her voice like green potato skins, but she can't stop up the place it's growing from.
Alice is quiet.
"I'm happy for you, Mama. Really. What's his name?"
A flat answer: "Cash."
"Oh, that sounds good. Is he rich?"
Alice laughs, finally. "Believe me, Taylor, this is not the place to come if you're looking to find you a millionaire typhoon."
"Tycoon, Mama. A typhoon is a hurricane, I think. Or maybe it's that kind of snake that strangles you."
"Well, they got more snakes here than you can shake your tail at, but no millionaire typhoons. The man-about-town is a fellow wears a horsehide suit. He's a sight. It looks like he got up too early and put on the bath rug." She pauses. "How are you all doing? I been hoping you'd call."
"Not hoping bad enough to sit around by the phone, I notice."
Alice's voice changes. "Taylor, you got a bee in your bonnet. I don't know what you're mad at me for."
"I'm not mad at you. Turtle said that just a minute ago. She said I'm mad all the time. But I'm not. I've just fallen on some bad luck and landed jelly side down." Taylor digs in all of her jeans pockets for a handkerchief, but doesn't find one. She rips a yellow page from the damp directory underneath the pay phone. "I think I'm getting a cold."
"You still got that job?"
"Yeah, but they won't let Turtle hang around in Ladies' Wear anymore. She has to go out in the parking lot and sit in the Dodge for a couple hours, till I get off."
"In the car? Goodness, aren't you afraid she'll get lonesome and drive herself to
Mexico or something? Remember when we read that in the paper when we was driving across Nevada? That six-year-old that drove the family car to Mexico?"
"That wasn't a newspaper, Mama, that was one of those supermarket things with Liz Taylor on the front. They make all those stories up."
"Well, stranger things have happened."
"I know. But I don't think Turtle's thinking in terms of Mexico."
"Well, good. But you might ought to leave her some stuff in there to play with, just in case."
"I do. I gave her some packing boxes and stuff from the store. She doesn't complain, you know how she is. But I feel like a murderer. Everything I've been doing, for this whole crazy summer, was just so I could keep Turtle. I thought that was the only thing that mattered, keeping the two of us together. But now I feel like that might not be true. I love her all right, but just her and me isn't enough. We're not a whole family."
"I don't know. Seems like half the families you see nowadays is just a mama and kids."
"Well, that's our tough luck. It doesn't give you anything to fall back on."
"What's that noise?"
"Oh, nothing. The Yellow Pages. I just blew my nose on half the landscape contractors in the city."
"Oh, well. I reckon you showed them."
"Mama, I'm thinking about going home."
"Don't hang up yet!"
"No, I mean back to Tucson. I'm at the end of the line here. Jax offered to send me money for gas. If my tires will just hold out. I'm worried about my tires."
"Oh, law, Taylor."
"What?"
"I've got some bad news."
Taylor feels numb. "What is it?"
"I talked to Annawake Fourkiller. She says there's somebody, relatives of a missing girl they think is Turtle, and they want to see her. Annawake said she was going to send you a, what was it? Something Italian sounding. A semolina? Papers, anyway. Saying you have to show up here in court."
"A subpoena?"
"That was it."
"Oh, God. Then I can't go home." Taylor feels blood rushing too fast out of her heart toward her limbs, a tidal wave. She stares at the symmetrical rows of holes in the metal back of the telephone hutch. Her life feels exactly that meaningless.
Alice's voice comes through the line, coaxing and maternal. "Taylor, don't get mad at me for something I'm fixing to say."