We were stopped by Immigration about a hundred miles this side of the New Mexico border. Mattie had warned me of this possibility and we had all prepared for it as best we could. Esperanza and Estevan were dressed about as American as you could get without looking plain obnoxious: he had on jeans and an alligator shirt donated from some church on the east side where people gave away stuff that was entirely a cut above New To You. Esperanza was wearing purple culottes, a yellow T-shirt, and sunglasses with pink frames. She sat in the back seat with Turtle. Her long hair was loose, not braided, and as we sped down the highway it whipped around her shoulders and out the window, putting on a brave show of freedom that had nothing to do with Esperanza’s life. Twice I asked if it was too much wind on her, and each time she shook her head no.
Every eastbound car on the highway was being stopped by the Border Patrol. The traffic was bottled up, which gave us time to get good and nervous. This kind of check was routine; it had not been set up for the express purpose of catching us, but it still felt that way. To all of us, I believe. I was frantic. I rattled my teeth, as Mama would say.
“There’s this great place up ahead called Texas Canyon,” I told them, knowing full well that none of us might make it to Texas Canyon. Esperanza and Estevan might not make it to their next birthday. “Wait till you see it. It’s got all these puffy-looking rocks,” I chattered on. “Turtle and I loved it.”
They nodded quietly.
When our turn came I threw back my head like a wealthy person, yanked that Lincoln into gear and pulled up to the corrugated tin booth. A young officer poked his head in the car. I could smell his aftershave.
“All U.S. citizens?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. I showed my driver’s license. “This is my brother Steve, and my sister-in-law.”
The officer nodded politely. “The kid yours or theirs?”
I looked at Estevan, which was a stupid thing to do.
“She’s ours,” Estevan said, without a trace of an accent.
The officer waved us through. “Have a nice day,” he said.
After we had passed well beyond the checkpoint Estevan started apologizing. “I thought it would be the most believable thing. Since you hesitated.”
“Yeah, I did.”
“You looked at me. I thought it might seem suspicious if I said she was yours. He might wonder why you didn’t say it.”
“I know, I know, I know. You’re right. It’s no problem. The only thing that matters is we made it through.” It did bother me though, just as it bothered me that Turtle was calling Esperanza “Ma.” Which was a completely unreasonable thing to resent, I know, since Turtle called every woman Ma something. There’s no way she could have managed “Esperanza.”
We got out at the rest station in Texas Canyon. It turned out there weren’t rest rooms there, just picnic tables, so I took Turtle behind a giant marshmallow-shaped boulder. Ever since I’d found out she was three years old, we’d gotten very serious about potty training.
When we came back Estevan and Esperanza were standing by the guard rail looking out over an endless valley of boulders. A large wooden sign, which showed dinosaurs and giant ferny trees and mountains exploding in the background, explained that this was the lava flow from a volcanic explosion long ago. Along with the initials and hearts scratched into the sign with pocket knives, someone had carved “Repent.”
The setting did more or less put you in that frame of mind. There wasn’t a bush or tree in sight, just rocks and rocks, sky and more sky. Estevan said this is what the world would have looked like if God had gone on strike after the second day.
It was a peculiar notion, but then you had to consider Estevan’s background with the teachers’ union. He would think in those terms.
They seemed uncomfortable out of the car so we stayed on the move after that, driving down an endless river of highway. After my VW, driving Mattie’s wide white car felt like steering a boat, not that I had ever actually steered anything of the kind. Estevan and Esperanza didn’t have proper drivers’ licenses, of course-that was the very least of what they didn’t have-so to be on the safe side I did all the driving. The first night we would try to go straight through, pulling over for naps when I needed to. Lou Ann had made us a Thermos of iced coffee. For the second night, I told them, I knew of a nice motor lodge in Oklahoma where we could most likely stay for free.
Estevan and I talked about everything you can think of. He asked me if the alligator was a national symbol of the United States, because you saw them everywhere on people’s shirts, just above the heart.
“Not that I know of,” I told him. It occurred to me, though, that it might be kind of appropriate.
He told me that the national symbol of the Indian people in Guatemala was the quetzal, a beautiful green bird with a long, long tail. I told him I had seen military macaws at the zoo, and wondered if the quetzal was anything like those. He said no. If you tried to keep this bird in a cage, it died.
Shortly after sunset we left the interstate to take a two-lane road that cut through the mountains and would take about two hundred miles of New Mexico off our trip. I wished we could keep New Mexico in and cut out two hundred miles of Oklahoma instead, but of course Oklahoma was where we were going. I had to keep reminding myself of that. For some reason I had in the back of my mind that we were headed for Kentucky. I kept picturing Mama’s face when we all pulled up in the driveway.
I squinted and flashed my lights at a car coming toward us with its brights on. They dimmed.
“Do you miss your home a lot?” I asked Estevan. “I know that’s a stupid question. But does it make you tired, being so far away from what you know? That’s how I feel sometimes, that I would just like to crawl in a hole somewhere and rest. Go dormant, like those toad frogs Mattie told us about. And for you it’s just that much worse; you’re not even speaking your own language.”
He let out a long breath. “I don’t even know anymore which home I miss. Which level of home. In Guatemala City I missed the mountains. My own language is not Spanish, did you know that?”
I told him no, that I didn’t.
“We are Mayan people; we speak twenty-two different Mayan languages. Esperanza and I speak to each other in Spanish because we come from different parts of the highlands.”
“What’s Mayan, exactly?”
“Mayans lived here in the so-called New World before the Europeans discovered it. We’re very old people. In those days we had astronomical observatories, and performed brain surgery.”
I thought of the color pictures in my grade-school history books: Columbus striding up the beach in his leotards and feathered hat, a gang of wild-haired red men in loin cloths scattering in front of him like rabbits. What a joke.
“Our true first names are Indian names,” Estevan said. “You couldn’t even pronounce them. We chose Spanish names when we moved to the city.”
I was amazed. “So Esperanza is bilingual. You’re, what do you call it? Trilingual.”
I knew that Esperanza spoke some English too, but it was hard to say how much since she spoke it so rarely. One time I had admired a little gold medallion she always wore around her neck and she said, with an accent, but plainly enough: “That is St. Christopher, guardian saint of refugees.” I would have been no more surprised if St. Christopher himself had spoken.
Christopher was a sweet-faced saint. He looked a lot like Stephen Foster, who I suppose you could say was the guardian saint of Kentucky. At least he wrote the state song.
“I chose a new name for myself too, when I left home,” I said to Estevan. “We all have that in common.”
“You did? What was it before?”
I made a face. “Marietta.”
He laughed. “It’s not so bad.”
“It’s a town in Georgia where Mama’s and my father’s car broke down once, I guess, when they were on their way to Florida. They never made it. They stayed in a motel and made me instead.”
“What a romantic story.”
“Not really. I was a mistake. Well, not really a mistake, according to Mama, but an accident. A mistake I guess is when you regret it later.”
“And they didn’t?”
“Mama didn’t. That’s all that counts, in my case.”
“So Papa went on to Florida?”
“Or wherever.”
“Esperanza also grew up without her father. The circumstances were different, of course.”
In the back seat Esperanza was stroking Turtle’s hair and singing to her quietly in a high, unearthly voice. I had heard enough Spanish to understand that the way her voice was dipping and gliding through the words was more foreign than that. I remembered Estevan’s yodely songs the day of our first picnic. They had to have been Mayan songs, not Spanish. Songs older than Christopher Columbus, maybe even older than Christopher the saint. I wondered if, when they still had Ismene, they had sung to her in both their own languages. To think how languages could accumulate in a family, in a country like that. When I thought of Guatemala I imagined a storybook place: jungles full of long-tailed birds, women wearing rainbow-threaded dresses.
But of course there was more to the picture. Police everywhere, always. Whole villages of Indians forced to move again and again. As soon as they planted their crops, Estevan said, the police would come and set their houses and fields on fire and make them move again. The strategy was to wear them down so they’d be too tired or too hungry to fight back.
Turtle had fallen asleep with her head in Esperanza’s lap.
“What’s with everybody always trying to get rid of the Indians?” I said, not really asking for an answer. I thought again of the history-book pictures. Astronomers and brain surgeons. They should have done brain surgery on Columbus while they had the chance.
After a while Estevan said, “What I really hate is not belonging in any place. To be unwanted everywhere.”
I thought of my Cherokee great-grandfather, his people who believed God lived in trees, and that empty Oklahoma plain they were driven to like livestock. But then, even the Cherokee Nation was someplace.
“You know what really gets me?” I asked him. “How people call you ‘illegals.’ That just pisses me off, I don’t know how you can stand it. A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
“You just can’t,” I said. “That’s all there is to it.”
On the second day we got into flatlands. The Texas panhandle, and then western Oklahoma, stretched out all around us like a colossal pancake. There was no way of judging where you were against where you were going, and as a consequence you tended to start feeling you were stuck out there, rolling your wheels on some trick prairie treadmill.
Estevan, who had apparently spent some time on a ship, said it reminded him of the ocean. He knew a Spanish word for the kind of mental illness you get from seeing too much horizon. Esperanza seemed stunned at first, then a little scared. She asked Estevan, who translated for me, whether or not we were near Washington. I assured her we weren’t, and asked what made her think so. She said she thought they might build the President’s palace in a place like this, so that if anyone came after him his guards could spot them a long way off.
To keep ourselves from going crazy with boredom we tried to think of word games. I told about the secretary named Jewel with the son who sees things backwards, and we tried to think of words he would like. Esperanza thought of ala, which means wing. Estevan knew whole sentences, some in Spanish and some in English. The English ones were “A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!” (which he said was a typical gringo way of looking at that endeavor), and “Able was I ere I saw Elba,” which was what Napoleon supposedly said when he was sent into exile. I hadn’t known, before then, where or what Elba was. I’d had a vague idea that it was a kind of toast.
Turtle was the only one of us who didn’t seem perturbed by the landscape. She told Esperanza a kind of ongoing story, which lasted for hundreds of miles and sounded like a vegetarian version of Aesop’s Fables, and when she ran out of story she played with her baby doll. The doll was a hand-me-down from Mattie’s. It came with a pair of red-checked pajamas, complete with regular-sized shirt buttons, that someone had apparently sewn by hand. Turtle adored the doll and had named it, with no help from anyone, Shirley Poppy.
We bypassed Oklahoma City and headed north on I-35, reversing the route I had taken through Oklahoma the first time. We reached the Broken Arrow Motor Lodge by late afternoon. At first I thought the place had changed hands. Which it had, in a way: Mrs. Hoge had died, and Irene was a different person, a slipcover of her former self. She had lost 106 pounds in 24 weeks by eating one Weight Watchers frozen dinner per day and nothing else but chamomile tea, unsweetened.
“I told Boyd if he wanted something different he could learn to cook it himself. Anybody that can butcher a side of beef can learn to cook,” she explained. She had started the diet on her doctor’s advice, when she decided she wanted to have a baby.
Irene seemed thrilled to see Turtle and me again and insisted on feeding the whole bunch of us. She made a pot roast with onions and potatoes even though she couldn’t touch it herself. She told us Mrs. Hoge had passed away in January, just a few weeks after I left.
“We knew it was coming, of course,” she said to Esperanza and Estevan. “She had the disease where you shake all the time.”
“That was a disease?” I asked. “I had no idea it was something you could die from. I thought it was just old age.”
“No,” Irene shook her head gravely. “Parkerson’s.”
“Who?” I asked.
“That’s the disease,” she said. “I notice she’s talking now.” She meant Turtle, who was busily naming every vegetable on Esperanza’s plate. She named them individually so it went like this: “Tato, carrot, carrot, carrot, carrot, tato, onion,” et cetera. Toward the end of the meal she also said “car,” because underneath all the food the plates had pictures of old-timey cars on them.
After the others went to bed I stayed up with Irene, who was expecting her husband in from Ponca City after midnight. We sat on high stools behind the desk in the bright front office, looking out through the plate glass at the highway and the long, flat plain behind it. She told me she missed Mrs. Hoge something fierce.
“Oh, I know she wasn’t kind,” Irene said, her thinned-down bosom heaving with a long, sad sigh. “It was always ‘Here’s my daughter-in-law Irene that can’t make up a bed with hospital corners and is proud of it.’ But really I think she meant well.”
The next morning we had to make a decision. Either we would go straight to the sanctuary church, which was a little to the east of Oklahoma City, or we could all stay together for another day. They could come with me to the bar where I’d been presented with Turtle, to help me look for whatever I thought I was going to find in the way of Turtle’s relatives. I admitted to them that I could use the moral support, but on the other hand I would understand if they didn’t want to risk being on the road any more than they had to be. Without hesitation, they said they wanted to go with me.
Retracing my original route became a little more complicated. I had left the interstate when my steering column set itself free, that much I knew, and I’d stayed on a side road for several hours before joining back up with the main highway. I could remember hardly any exact details from that night, in the way of landmarks, and of course there were precious few there to begin with.
The clue that tipped me off was a sign to the Pioneer Woman Museum. I remembered that. We found a two-lane road that I was pretty sure was the right one.
As soon as we left the interstate, trading the fast out-of-state tourist cars for the companionship of station wagons and pickup trucks packed with families, we were on the Cherokee Nation. You could feel it. We began to understand that Oklahoma had been a good choice: Estevan and Esperanza could blend in here. Practically half the people we saw were Indians.
“Do Cherokees look like Mayans?” I asked Estevan.
“No,” he said.
“Would a white person know that?”
“No.”
After a little bit I asked him, “Would a Cherokee?”
“Maybe, maybe not.” He was smiling his perfect smile.
I asked Turtle if anything looked familiar. When I looked in the rear-view mirror I caught sight of her on Esperanza’s lap, playing with Esperanza’s hair and trying on Esperanza’s sunglasses. Later I saw them playing a clapping-hands game. The two of them looked perfectly content: “Madonna and Child with Pink Sunglasses.” Nobody, not even a Mayan, could say they weren’t. One time I thought-though I couldn’t swear it-I heard her call Turtle Ismene. I was getting a cold feeling in the bottom of my stomach.
I tried to keep myself cheerful. “I always tell Turtle she’s as good as the ones that came over on the Mayflower,” I told Estevan. “They landed at Plymouth Rock. She just landed in a Plymouth.”
Estevan didn’t laugh. In all fairness, I might not have told him before that she was born in a car, but also he was preoccupied, going over and over the life history he had invented for himself and his Cherokee bride. He was quite imaginative. He had a whole little side plot about how his parents had disapproved of the marriage, but had softened their hearts when they saw what a lovely woman Hope was.
“Steven and Hope,” he said. “But we need a last name.”
“How about Two Two?” I said. “That’s a good solid Cherokee name. It’s been in my family for months.”
“Two Two,” he repeated solemnly.
I missed my own car. I missed Lou Ann, who always laughed at my jokes.
I was positive I wouldn’t recognize the place, if it was even still there, but as soon as I laid eyes on it I knew. A little brick building with a Budweiser sign, and across the parking lot a garage. The garage looked closed.
“That’s it,” I said. I slowed down. “What do I do?”
“Stop the car,” Estevan suggested, but I kept going. My heart was pounding like a piston. A quarter of a mile down the road I stopped.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t do this,” I said.
We all sat quietly for a minute.
“What is the worst thing that can happen?” Estevan asked.
“I don’t know. That I won’t find anybody that knows Turtle. Or that I will, and they’ll want her back.” I thought for a minute. “The worst thing would be that we lose her, some way,” I said finally.
“What if you don’t go in?”
“We lose her.”
Estevan gave me a hug. “For courage,” he said. Then Esperanza gave me a hug. Then Turtle did. I turned the car around and drove back to the bar.
“First let me go in alone,” I said.
It looked like a different place. I remembered all the signs-IN CASE OF FIRE YELL FIRE. They were gone. Blue gingham curtains hung in the windows and there were glasses of plastic roses and bachelor buttons on all the tables. I would have walked right out again, but I recognized the TV. Good picture, but no sound. And there was the same postcard rack too, although it seemed to have changed its focus, placing more emphasis on scenic lakes and less on Oral Roberts University.
A teenaged girl in jeans and an apron came through a door from the kitchen. She had a round Indian face behind large, blue-rimmed glasses.
“Get you some coffee?” she asked cheerfully.
“Okay,” I said, and sat down at the counter.
“Now, what else can I do for you?”
“I’m not sure. I’m looking for somebody.”
“Oh, who? Were you meeting them here for lunch?”
“No, it’s not like that. It’s kind of complicated. I was in here last December and met some people I have to find again. I think they might live around here. It’s very important.”
She leaned on her elbows on the counter. “What was their names?”
“I don’t know. There was a woman, and two men in cowboy hats. I think one of them might have been her husband, or her boyfriend. I know, this isn’t getting anywhere. Ed knew their names.”
“Ed?”
“Isn’t that who runs this place?”
“No. My parents own it. We bought it in March, I think. Or April.”
“Well, would your parents know Ed? Would he be around here?”
She shrugged. “The place was just up for sale. I think whoever owned it before musta died. It was gross in here.”
“You mean he died in here?”
She laughed. “No, I just mean all the dirt and stuff. I had to scrub the grease off the back of the stove. It was black. I was thinking about running away and going back home. We’re not from here, we’re from over on tribal land. But I like some kids here now.”
“Do any of the same people come in here that always did? Like men, drinking after work and that kind of thing.”
She shrugged.
“Right. How would you know.”
I stared at my cup of coffee as though I might find the future in it, like the chickenbone lady back home.
“I don’t know what to do,” I finally said.
She nodded out the window. “Maybe you should bring your friends in for lunch.”
I did. We sat at one of the spick-and-span tables with plastic flowers and had grilled-cheese sandwiches. Turtle bounced in her seat and fed tiny pieces of grilled cheese to Shirley Poppy. Estevan and Esperanza were quiet. Of course. You couldn’t speak Spanish in this part of the country-it would be noticed.
After lunch I went up to the register to pay. No other member of the family had materialized from the kitchen, so I asked the girl if there was anyone else around that might help me. “Do you know the guy that runs the garage next door? Bob Two Two?”
She shook her head. “He never came over here, because we serve beer. He was some religion, I forget what.”
“Are you telling me he’s dead now too? Give me a break.”
“Nah, he just closed. I think Pop said he was getting a place closer to Okie City.”
“It wasn’t even a year ago that I was here.”
She shrugged. “Nobody ever comes out here anyway. I never could see who would go to that garage in the first place.”
I put the change in my pocket. “Well, thanks anyway,” I told her. “Thanks for trying to help. I hope your family does all right by this place. You’ve fixed it up real nice.”
She made a small gesture with her shoulders. “Thanks.”
“What did you mean when you said you came from tribal land? Isn’t this the Cherokee Nation?”
“This! No, this is nothing. This is kind of the edge of it I guess, they do have that sign up the road that says maintained by the Cherokee tribe. But the main part’s over east, toward the mountains.”
“Oklahoma has mountains?”
She looked at me as though I might be retarded. “Of course. The Ozark Mountains. Come here, look.” She went over to the postcard rack and picked out some of the scenery cards. “See how pretty? That’s Lake o’ the Cherokees; we used to go there every summer. My brothers like to fish, but I hate the worms. And this is another place on the same lake, and this is Oologah Lake.”
“That looks beautiful,” I said. “That’s the Cherokee Nation?”
“Part of it,” she said. “It’s real big. The Cherokee Nation isn’t any one place exactly. It’s people. We have our own government and all.”
“I had no idea,” I said. I bought the postcards. I would send one to Mama, although she was married now of course and didn’t have any use for our old ace in the hole, the head rights. But even so I owed an apology to great grandpa, dead though he was.
As we were leaving I asked her about the TV. “That’s the one thing that’s still the same. What’s with it anyway? Doesn’t anybody ever turn the sound up?”
“The stupid thing is broke. You get the sound on one station and the picture on the other. See?” She flipped to the next channel, which showed blue static but played the sound perfectly. It was a commercial for diet Coke. “My gramma likes to leave it on 9, she’s just about blind anyway, but the rest of us like it on 8.”
“Do you ever get the Oral Roberts shows?”
She shrugged. “I guess. I like Magnum P.I.”
Somehow I had been thinking that once we got back in the car and on the road again, everything would make sense and I would know what to do. I didn’t. This time I didn’t even know which way to head the car. If only Lou Ann were here, I thought. Lou Ann with her passion for playing Mrs. Neighborhood Detective. I knew she would say I was giving up too easily. But what was I supposed to do? Stake out the bar for a week or two and see if the woman ever showed up again? Would I recognize her if she did? Would she be willing to go to Oklahoma City with me to sign papers?
There had never been the remotest possibility of finding any relative of Turtle’s. I had driven across the country on a snipe hunt. A snipe hunt is a joke on somebody, most likely some city cousin. You send him out in the woods with a paper bag and see how long it takes for him to figure out what a fool he is.
But it also occurred to me to wonder why I had come this far. Generally speaking, I am not a fool. I must have wanted something, and wanted it badly, to believe that hard in snipes.
“I can’t give up,” I said as I turned the car around. I smacked my palms on the steering wheel again and again. “I just can’t. I want to go to Lake o’ the Cherokees. Don’t even ask me why.”
They didn’t ask.
“So do you want to come with me, or should we take you to your church now? Really, I can go either way.”
They wanted to come with me. I can see, looking back on it, that we were getting attached.
“We’ll have a picnic by the lake, and stay in a cabin, and maybe find a boat somewhere and go out on the water. We’ll have a vacation,” I told them. “When’s the last time you two had a vacation?”
Estevan thought for a while. “Never.”
“Me too,” I said.