FIVE

Harmonious Space

The Republic Hotel was near the exact spot where the railroad track, which at one time functioned as a kind of artery, punctured Tucson’s old, creaky chest cavity and prepared to enter the complicated auricles and ventricles of the railroad station. In the old days I suppose it would have been bringing the city a fresh load of life, like a blood vessel carrying platelets to circulate through the lungs. Nowadays, if you could even call the railroad an artery of Tucson, you would have to say it was a hardened one.

At the point where it entered the old part of downtown, the train would slow down and let out a long, tired scream. Whether the whistle was for warning the cars at the crossings up ahead, or just letting the freeloaders know it was time to roll out of the boxcars, I can’t say. But it always happened very near six-fifteen, and I came to think of it as my alarm clock.

Sometimes the sound of it would get tangled up into a dream. I would hear it whistling through my sleep for what seemed like days while I tried to lift a heavy teakettle off a stove or, once, chased a runaway horse that was carrying off Turtle while she hollered bloody murder (something I had yet to hear her do in real life). Finally the sound would push out through my eyes and there was the daylight. There were the maroon paisley curtains made from an Indian bedspread, there was the orange-brown stain on the porcelain sink where the faucet dripped, there was the army cot where Turtle was asleep, safe and sound in the Republic Hotel. Some mornings it was like that.

On other days I would wake up before the whistle ever sounded and just lie there waiting, feeling that my day couldn’t begin without it. Lately it had been mostly this second way.

We were in trouble. I lasted six days at the Burger Derby before I got in a fight with the manager and threw my red so-called jockey cap in the trash compactor and walked out. I would have thrown the whole uniform in there, but I didn’t feel like giving him a free show.

I won’t say that working there didn’t have its moments. When Sandi and I worked the morning shift together we’d have a ball. I would tell her all kinds of stories I’d heard about horse farms, such as the fact that the really high-strung horses had TVs in their stalls. It was supposed to lower their blood pressure.

“Their favorite show is old reruns of Mr. Ed,” I would tell her with a poker face.

“No! You’re kidding. Are you kidding me?”

“And they hate the commercials for Knox gelatin.”

She was easy to tease, but I had to give her credit, considering that life had delivered Sandi a truckload of manure with no return address. The father of her baby had told everyone that Sandi was an admitted schizophrenic and had picked his name out of the high school yearbook when she found out she was pregnant. Soon afterward the boy’s father got transferred from Tucson and the whole family moved to Oakland, California. Sandi’s mother had made her move out, and she lived with her older sister Aimee, who was born again and made her pay rent. In Aimee’s opinion it would have been condoning sin to let Sandi and her illegitimate son stay there for free.

But nothing really seemed to throw Sandi. She knew all about things like how to rub an ice cube on kids’ gums when they were teething, and where to get secondhand baby clothes for practically nothing. We would take turns checking on Turtle and Seattle, and at the end of our shift we’d go over to the mall together to pick them up. “I don’t know,” she’d say real loud, hamming it up while we waited in line at Kid Central Station. “I can’t decide if I want that La-Z-Boy recliner in the genuine leather or the green plaid with the stain-proof finish.” “Take your time deciding,” I’d say. “Sleep on it and come back tomorrow.”

Turtle would be sitting wherever I had set her down that morning, with each hand locked onto some ratty, punked-out stuffed dog or a torn book or another kid’s jacket and her eyes fixed on some empty point in the air, just the way a cat will do. It’s as though they live in a separate universe that takes up the same space as ours, but is full of fascinating things like mice or sparrows or special TV programs that we can’t see.

Kid Central Station was not doing Turtle any good. I knew that.

After six days the Burger Derby manager Jerry Speller, this little twerp who believed that the responsibility of running a burger joint put you a heartbeat away from Emperor of the Universe, said I didn’t have the right attitude, and I told him he was exactly right. I said I had to confess I didn’t have the proper reverence for the Burger Derby institution, and to prove it I threw my hat into the Mighty Miser and turned it on. Sandi was so impressed she burned the trench fries twice in a row.

The fight had been about the Burger Derby uniform. The shorts weren’t actually plastic, it turned out, but cotton-polyester with some kind of shiny finish that had to be dry-cleaned. Three twenty-five an hour plus celery and you’re supposed to pay for dry-cleaning your own shorts.

My one regret was that I didn’t see much of Sandi anymore. Naturally I had to find a new place to eat breakfast. There were half a dozen coffee-shops in the area, and although I didn’t really feel at home in any of them I discovered a new resource: newspapers. On the tables, along with their gritty coffee cups and orange rinds and croissant crumbs, people often left behind the same day’s paper.

There was a lady named Jessie with wild white hair and floppy rainboots who would dash into the restaurants and scrounge the leftover fruit and melon rinds. “It’s not to eat,” she would explain to any- and everybody as she clumped along the sidewalk pushing an interesting-smelling shopping cart that had at some point in history belonged to Safeway. “It’s for still-lifes.” She told me she painted nothing but madonnas: Orange-peel madonna. Madonna and child with strawberries. Together we made a sort of mop-up team. I nabbed the newspapers, and she took the rest.

Looking through the want ads every day gave new meaning to my life. The For Rents, on the other hand, were a joke as far as I was concerned, but often there would be ads looking for roommates, a possibility I hadn’t considered. I would circle anything that looked promising, although people seemed unbelievably picky about who they intended to live with:

“Mature, responsible artist or grad student wanted for cooperative household; responsibilities shared, sensitivity a must.”

“Female vegetarian nonsmoker to share harmonious space with insightful Virgo and cat.”

I began to suspect that sharing harmonious space with an insightful Virgo might require even greater credentials than being a licensed phlebotomist in the state of Arizona.

The main consideration, though, was whether or not I could locate the address on my Sun-Tran maps of all the various bus routes. At the end of the week I made up my mind to check out a couple of possibilities. One ad said, among other things, “Must be open to new ideas.” The other said, “New mom needs company. Own room, low rent, promise I won’t bother you. Kids ok.” The first sounded like an adventure, and the second sounded like I wouldn’t have to pass a test. I put on a pair of stiff, clean jeans and braided my hair and gave Turtle a bath in the sink. She had acquired clothes of her own by now, but just for old time’s sake I put her in my DAMN I’M GOOD T-shirt from Kentucky Lake. Just for luck.

Both places were near downtown. The first was a big old ramshackle house with about twelve kinds of wind chimes hanging on the front porch. One was made from the silver keys of some kind of musical instrument like a flute or clarinet, and even Turtle seemed interested in it. A woman came to the door before I even knocked.

She let me inside and called out, “The prospective’s here.” Three silver earrings-a half moon, a star, and a grinning sun-dangled from holes in her left ear so that she clinked when she walked like some human form of wind chime. She was barefoot and had on a skirt that reminded me of the curtains in my room at the Republic. There was no actual furniture in the room, only a colorful rug and piles of pillows here and there, so I waited to see what she would do. She nested herself into one of the piles, flouncing her skirt out over her knees. I noticed that she had thin silver rings on four of her toes.

Another woman came out of the kitchen door, through which I was relieved to see a table and chairs. A tall, thin guy with a hairless chest hunkered in another doorway for a minute, rubbing a head of orange hair that looked like a wet cat. He had on only those beachcomber-type pants held up by a fake rope. I really couldn’t tell how old these people were. I kept expecting a parent to show up in another doorway and tell Beach Blanket Bingo to put on his shirt, but then, they could have been older than me. We all settled down on the pillows.

“I’m Fay,” the toe-ring woman said, “spelled F-E-I, and this is La-Isha and that’s Timothy. You’ll have to excuse Timothy; he used caffeine yesterday and now his homeostasis is out of balance.” I presumed they were talking about his car, although I was not aware of any automotive uses for caffeine.

“That’s too bad,” I said. “I wouldn’t do anything with caffeine but drink it.”

They all stared at me for a while.

“Oh. I’m Taylor. This is Turtle.”

“Turtle. Is that a spirit name?” La-Isha asked.

“Sure,” I said.

La-Isha was thick-bodied, with broad bare feet and round calves. Her dress was a sort of sarong, printed all over with black and orange elephants and giraffes, and she had a jungly-looking scarf wrapped around her head. And to think they used to stare at me for wearing red and turquoise together. Drop these three in Pittman County and people would run for cover.

F-E-I took charge of the investigation. “Would the child be living here too?”

“Right. We’re a set.”

“That’s cool, I have no problem with small people,” she said. “La-Isha, Timothy?”

“It’s not really what I was thinking in terms of, but I can see it happening. I’m flex on children,” La-Isha said, after giving it some thought. Timothy said he thought the baby was cute, asked if it was a boy or a girl.

“A girl,” I said, but I was drowned out by Fei saying, “Timothy, I really don’t see that that’s an issue here.” She said to me, “Gender is not an issue in this house.”

“Oh,” I said. “Whatever.”

“What does she eat?” La-Isha wanted to know.

“Mainly whatever she can get her hands on. She had half a hot dog with mustard for breakfast.”

There was another one of those blank spells in the conversation. Turtle was grumpily yanking at a jingle bell on the corner of a pillow, and I was beginning to feel edgy myself. All those knees and chins at the same level. It reminded me of an extremely long movie I had once seen about an Arabian sheik. Maybe La-Isha is Arabian, I thought, though she looked very white, with blond hair on her arms and pink rims around her eyes. Possibly an albino Arabian. I realized she was giving a lecture of some kind.

“At least four different kinds of toxins,” she was saying, more to the room in general than to me. Her pink-rimmed eyes were starting to look inflamed. “In a hot dog.” Now she was definitely talking to me. “Were you aware of that?”

“I would have guessed seven or eight,” I said.

“Nitrites,” said Timothy. He was gripping his head between his palms, one on the chin and one on top, and bending it from side to side until you could hear a little pop. I began to understand about the unbalanced homeostasis.

“We eat mainly soybean products here,” Fei said. “We’re just starting a soy-milk collective. A house requirement is that each person spend at least seven hours a week straining curd.”

“Straining curd,” I said. I wanted to say, Flaming nurd. Raining turds. It isn’t raining turds, you know, it’s raining violets.

“Yes,” Fei went on in this abnormally calm voice that made me want to throw a pillow at her. “I guess the child…”

“Turtle,” I said.

“I guess Turtle would be exempt. But we would have to make adjustments for that in the kitchen quota…”

I had trouble concentrating. La-Isha kept narrowing her eyes and trying to get Fei’s attention. I remembered Mrs. Hoge with her shakes, always looking like she was secretly saying, “Don’t do it” to somebody behind you.

“So tell us about you,” Fei said eventually. I snapped out of my daydreams, feeling like a kid in school that’s just been called on. “What kind of a space are you envisioning for yourself?” she wanted to know. Those were her actual words.

“Oh, Turtle and I are flex,” I said. “Right now we’re staying downtown at the Republic. I jockeyed fried food at the Burger Derby for a while, but I got fired.”

La-Isha went kind of stiff on that one. I imagined all the little elephants on her shift getting stung through the heart with a tiny stun gun. Timothy was trying to get Turtle’s attention by making faces, so far with no luck.

“Usually little kids are into faces,” he informed me. “She seems kind of spaced out.”

“She makes up her own mind about what she’s into.”

“She sure has a lot of hair,” he said. “How old is she?”

“Eighteen months,” I said. It was a wild guess.

“She looks very Indian.”

“Native American,” Fei corrected him. “She does. Is her father Native American?”

“Her great-great-grandpa was full-blooded Cherokee,” I said. “On my side. Cherokee skips a generation, like red hair. Didn’t you know that?”


The second house on my agenda turned out to be right across the park from Jesus Is Lord’s. It belonged to Lou Ann Ruiz.

Within ten minutes Lou Ann and I were in the kitchen drinking diet Pepsi and splitting our gussets laughing about homeostasis and bean turds. We had already established that our hometowns in Kentucky were separated by only two counties, and that we had both been to the exact same Bob Seger concert at the Kentucky State Fair my senior year.

“So then what happened?” Lou Ann had tears in her eyes. I hadn’t really meant to put them down, they seemed like basically good kids, but it just got funnier as it went along.

“Nothing happened. In their own way, they were so polite it was pathetic. I mean, it was plain as day they thought Turtle was a dimwit and I was from some part of Mars where they don’t have indoor bathrooms, but they just kept on asking things like would I like some alfalfa tea?” I had finally told them no thanks, that we’d just run along and envision ourselves in some other space.

Lou Ann showed me the rest of the house except for her room, where the baby was asleep. Turtle and I would have our own room, plus the screened-in back porch if we wanted it. She said it was great to sleep out there in the summer. We had to whisper around the house so we wouldn’t wake the baby.

“He was just born in January,” Lou Ann said when we were back in the kitchen. “How old’s yours?”

“To tell you the truth, I don’t even know. She’s adopted.”

“Well, didn’t they tell you all that stuff when you adopted her? Didn’t she come with a birth certificate or something?”

“It wasn’t an official adoption. Somebody just kind of gave her to me.”

“You mean like she was left on your doorstep in a basket?”

“Exactly. Except it was in my car, and there wasn’t any basket. Now that I think about it, there should have at least been a basket. Indians make good baskets. She’s Indian.”

“Wasn’t there even a note? How do you know her name’s Turtle?”

“I don’t. I named her that. It’s just temporary until I can figure out what her real name is. I figure I’ll hit on it sooner or later.”

Turtle was in a high chair of Lou Ann’s that must have been way too big for a kid born in January. On the tray there were decals of Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy, which Turtle was slapping with her hands. There was nothing there for her to grab. I picked her up out of the chair and hefted her onto my shoulder, where she could reach my braid. She didn’t pull it, she just held on to it like a lifeline. This was one of our normal positions.

“I can’t get over it,” Lou Ann said, “that somebody would just dump her like an extra puppy.”

“Yeah, I know. I think it was somebody that cared for her, though, if you can believe it. Turtle was having a real rough time. I don’t know if she would have made it where she was.” A fat gray cat with white feet was sleeping on the windowsill over the sink. Or so I thought, until all of a sudden it jumped down and streaked out of the kitchen. Lou Ann had her back to the door, but I could see the cat in the next room. It was walking around in circles on the living-room rug, kicking its feet behind it again and again, throwing invisible sand over invisible cat poop.

“You wouldn’t believe what your cat is doing,” I said.

“Oh, yes, I would,” Lou Ann said. “He’s acting like he just went potty, right?”

“Right. But he didn’t, as far as I can see.”

“Oh, no, he never does. I think he has a split personality. The good cat wakes up and thinks the bad cat has just pooped on the rug. See, we got him as a kitty and I named him Snowboots but Angel thought that was a stupid name so he always called him Pachuco instead. Then a while back, before Dwayne Ray was born, he started acting that way. Angel’s my ex-husband, by the way.”

It took some effort here to keep straight who was cats and who was husbands.

Lou Ann went on. “So just the other day I read in a magazine that a major cause of split personality is if two parents treat a kid in real different ways, like one all the time tells the kid it’s good and the other one says it’s bad. It gives them this idea they have to be both ways at once.”

“That’s amazing,” I said. “Your cat ought to be in Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Or one of those magazine columns where people write in and tell what cute things their pets do, like parakeets that whistle Dixie or cats that will only sleep on a certain towel with pictures of goldfish on it.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t want anyone to know about Snowboots, it’s too embarrassing. It’s just about proof-positive that he’s from a broken home, don’t you think?”

“What does Pachuco mean?”

“It means like a bad Mexican boy. One that would go around spray-painting walls and join a gang.”

Pachuco alias Snowboots was still going at it in the living room. “Seriously,” I said, “you should send it in. They’d probably pay good money-it’s unbelievable what kinds of things you can get paid for. Or at the very least they’d send you a free case of cat chow.”

“I almost won a year of free diapers for Dwayne Ray. Dwayne Ray’s my son.”

“Oh. What does he do?”

Lou Ann laughed. “Oh, he’s normal. The only one in the house, I guess. Do you want some more Pepsi?” She got up to refill our glasses. “So did you drive out here, or fly, or what?”

I told her that driving across the Indian reservation was how I’d ended up with Turtle. “Our paths would never have crossed if it weren’t for a bent rocker arm.”

“Well, if something had to go wrong, at least you can thank your stars you were in a car and not an airplane,” she said, whacking an ice-cube tray on the counter. I felt Turtle flinch on my shoulder.

“I never thought of it that way,” I said.

“I could never fly in an airplane. Oh Lord, never! Remember that one winter when a plane went right smack dab into that frozen river in Washington, D.C.? On TV I saw them pulling the bodies out frozen stiff with their knees and arms bent like those little plastic cowboys that are supposed to be riding horses, but then when you lose the horse they’re useless. Oh, God, that was so pathetic. I can just hear the stewardess saying, ‘Fasten your seat belts, folks,’ calm as you please, like ‘Don’t worry, we just have to say this,’ and then next thing you know you’re a hunk of ice. Oh, shoot, there’s Dwayne Ray just woke up from his nap. Let me go get him.”

I did remember that airplane crash. On TV they showed the rescue helicopter dropping down a rope to save the only surviving stewardess from an icy river full of dead people. I remember just how she looked hanging on to that rope. Like Turtle.

In a minute Lou Ann came back with the baby. “Dwayne Ray, here’s some nice people I want you to meet. Say hi.”

He was teeny, with skin you could practically see through. It reminded me of the Visible Man we’d had in Hughes Walter’s biology class. “He’s adorable,” I said.

“Do you think so, really? I mean, I love him to death of course, but I keep thinking his head’s flat.”

“They all are. They start out that way, and then after a while their foreheads kind of pop out.”

“Really? I never knew that. They never told me that.”

“Sure. I used to work in a hospital. I saw a lot of newborns coming and going, and every one of them’s head was flat as a shovel.”

She made a serious face and fussed with the baby for a while without saying anything.

“So what do you think?” I finally said. “Is it okay if we move in?”

“Sure!” Her wide eyes and the way she held her baby reminded me for a minute of Sandi. The lady downtown could paint either one of them: “Bewildered Madonna with Sunflower Eyes.” “Of course you can move in,” she said. “I’d love it. I wasn’t sure if you’d want to.”

“Why wouldn’t I want to?”

“Well, my gosh, I mean, here you are, so skinny and smart and cute and everything, and me and Dwayne Ray, well, we’re just lumping along here trying to get by. When I put that ad in the paper, I thought, Well, this is sure four dollars down the toilet; who in the world would want to move in here with us?”

“Stop it, would you? Quit making everybody out to be better than you are. I’m just a plain hillbilly from East Jesus Nowhere with this adopted child that everybody keeps on telling me is dumb as a box of rocks. I’ve got nothing on you, girl. I mean it.”

Lou Ann hid her mouth with her hand.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing.” I could see perfectly well that she was smiling.

“Come on, what is it?”

“It’s been so long,” she said. “You talk just like me.”

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