EIGHT

The Miracle of Dog Doo Park

Of all the ridiculous things, Mama was getting married. To Harland Elleston no less, of El-Jay’s Paint and Body fame. She called on a Saturday morning while I’d run over to Matties, so Lou Ann took the message. I was practically the last to know.

When I called back Mama didn’t sound normal. She was out of breath and kept running on about Harland. “Did I get you in out of the yard?” I asked her. “Are you planting cosmos?”

“Cosmos, no, it’s not even the end of April yet, is it? I’ve got sugar peas in that little bed around to the side, but not cosmos.”

“I forgot,” I told her. “Everything’s backwards here. Half the stuff you plant in the fall.”

“Missy, I’m in a tither,” she said. She called me Taylor in letters, but we weren’t accustomed to phone calls. “With Harland and all. He treats me real good, but it’s happened so fast I don’t know what end of the hog to feed. I wish you were here to keep me straightened out.”

“I do too,” I said.

“You plant things in the fall? And they don’t get bit?”

“No.”

At least she did remember to ask about Turtle. “She’s great,” I said. “She’s talking a blue streak.”

“That’s how you were. You took your time getting started, but once you did there was no stopping you,” Mama said.

I wondered what that had to do with anything. Everybody behaved as if Turtle was my own flesh and blood daughter. It was a conspiracy.

Lou Ann wanted to know every little detail about the wedding, which was a whole lot more than I knew myself, or cared to.

“Everybody deserves their own piece of the pie, Taylor,” Lou Ann insisted. “Who else has she got?”

“She’s got me.”

“She does not, you’re here. Which might as well be Red Taiwan, for all the good it does her.”

“I always thought I’d get Mama out here to live. She didn’t even consult me, just ups and decides to marry this paint-and-body yahoo.”

“I do believe you’re jealous.”

“That is so funny I forgot to laugh.”

“When my brother got married I felt like he’d deserted us. He just sends this letter one day with a little tiny picture, all you could make out really was dogs, and tells us he’s marrying somebody by the name of She-Wolf Who Hunts by the First Light.” Lou Ann yawned and moved farther down the bench so her arms were more in the sun. She’d decided she was too pale and needed a tan.

“Granny Logan liked to died. She kept saying, did Eskimos count as human beings? She thought they were half animal or something. And really what are you supposed to think, with a name like that? But I got used to the idea. I like to think of him up there in Alaska with all these little daughters in big old furry coats. I’ve got in my mind that they live in an igloo, but that can’t be right.”

We were sitting out with the kids in Roosevelt Park, which the neighbor kids called such names as Dead Grass Park and Dog Doo Park. To be honest, it was pretty awful. There were only a couple of shade trees, which had whole dead parts, and one good-for-nothing palm tree so skinny and tall that it threw its shade onto the roof of the cooler-pad factory down the block. The grass was scraggly, struggling to come up between shiny bald patches of dirt. Mostly it put me in mind of an animal with the mange. Constellations of gum-wrapper foil twinkled around the trash barrels.

“Look at it this way, at least she’s still kicking,” Lou Ann said. “I feel like my mama’s whole life stopped counting when Daddy died. You want to know something? They even got this double gravestone. Daddy’s on the right hand side, and the other side’s already engraved for Mama. ‘Ivy Louise Logan, December 2, 1934-to blank.’ Every time I see it it gives me the willies. Like it’s just waiting there for her to finish up her business and die so they can fill in the blank.”

“It does seem like one foot in the grave,” I said.

“If Mama ever got married again I’d dance a jig at her wedding. I’d be thrilled sideways. Maybe it would get her off my back about moving back in with her and Granny.” Dwayne Ray coughed in his sleep, and Lou Ann pushed his stroller back and forth two or three times. Turtle was pounding the dirt with a plastic shovel, a present from Mattie.

“Cabbage, cabbage, cabbage,” she said.

Lou Ann said, “I know a guy that would just love her. Did you ever know that fellow downtown that sold vegetables out of his truck?” But Turtle and Bobby Bingo would never get to discuss their common interest. He had disappeared, probably to run off with somebody’s mother.

“Your mother wouldn’t be marrying Harland Elleston,” I told Lou Ann, getting back to the subject at hand.

“Of course not! That big hunk is already spoken for.”

“Lou Ann, you’re just making a joke of this whole thing.”

“Well, I can’t help it, I wouldn’t care if my mother married the garbage man.”

“But Harland Elleston! He’s not even…” I was going to say he’s not even related to us, but of course that wasn’t what I meant. “He’s got warts on his elbows and those eyebrows that meet in the middle.”

“I’ll swan, Taylor, you talk about men like they’re a hangnail. To hear you tell it, you’d think man was only put on this earth to keep urinals from going to waste.”

“That’s not true, I like Estevan.” My heart sort of bumped when I said this. I knew exactly how it would look on an EKG machine: two little peaks and one big one.

“He’s taken. Who else?”

“Just because I don’t go chasing after every Tom’s Harry Dick that comes down the pike.”

“Who else? You never have one kind thing to say about any of your old boyfriends.”

“Lou Ann, for goodness’ sakes. In Pittman County there was nothing in pants that was worth the trouble, take my word for it. Except for this one science teacher, and the main thing he had going for him was clean fingernails.” I’d never completely realized how limited the choices were in Pittman. Poor Mama. If only I could have gotten her to Tucson.

“Well, where in the heck do you think I grew up, Paris, France?”

“I notice you didn’t stick with home-grown either. You had to ride off with a Wild West rodeo boy.”

“Fat lot of good it did me, too.”

“Well, you did get Dwayne Ray out of the deal.” I remembered what Mama always said about me and the Jackson Purchase.

“But oh, Taylor, if you could have seen him. How handsome he was.” She had her eyes closed and her face turned up toward the sun. “The first time I laid eyes on him he was draped on this fence like the Marlboro man, with his arms out to the sides and one boot up on the bottom rung. Just chewing on a match and hanging out till it was time to turn out the next bull. And do you know what else?” She sat up and opened her eyes.

“What?” I said.

“Right at that exact moment there was this guy in the ring setting some kind of a new world’s record for staying on a bull, and everybody was screaming and throwing stuff and of course me and my girlfriend Rachel had never seen a rodeo before so we thought this was the wildest thing since Elvis joined the army. But Angel didn’t even look up. He just squinted off at the distance toward the hay field behind the snack bar. Rachel said, ‘Look at that tough guy over by that fence, what an asshole, not even paying attention.’ And you know what I thought to myself? I thought, I bet I could get him to pay attention to me.”

A child in a Michael Jackson tank shirt rumbled down the gravel path on a low-slung trike with big plastic wheels, making twice as much noise as his size would seem to allow for. “This is a O-R-V,” he told us. Now I knew.

“I know you.” He pointed at Lou Ann. “You’re the one gives out money at Halloween.”

Lou Ann rolled her eyes. “I’m never going to live that down. This year they’ll be coming in from Phoenix and Flagstaff to beat down our door.”

“Watch out when the bums come,” he told us. “Go straight home.” He tore off again, pedaling like someone possessed.

The gravel path cut through the middle of the park from a penis-type monument, up at the street near Matties, down to the other end where we liked to sit in a place Lou Ann called the arbor. It was the nicest thing about the park. The benches sat in a half-circle underneath an old wooden trellis that threw a shade like a cross-stitched tablecloth. The trellis had thick, muscly vines twisting up its support poles and fanning out overhead. Where they first came out of the ground, they reminded me of the arms of this guy who’d delivered Mattie’s new refrigerator by himself. All winter Lou Ann had been telling me they were wisteria vines. They looked dead to me, like everything else in the park, but she always said, “Just you wait.”

And she was right. Toward the end of March they had sprouted a fine, shivery coat of pale leaves and now they were getting ready to bloom. Here and there a purplish lip of petal stuck out like a pout from a fat green bud. Every so often a bee would hang humming in the air for a few seconds, checking on how the flowers were coming along. You just couldn’t imagine where all this life was coming from. It reminded me of that Bible story where somebody or other struck a rock and the water poured out. Only this was better, flowers out of bare dirt. The Miracle of Dog Doo Park.

Lou Ann went on endlessly about Mama. “I can just see your mama… What’s her name, anyway?”

“Alice,” I said. “Alice Jean Stamper Greer. The last thing she needs is an Elleston on top of all that.”

“… I can just see Alice and Harland running for the sugar shack. If she’s anything like you, she goes after what she wants. I guess now she’ll be getting all the paint and body jobs she needs.”

“He’s only half owner, with Ernest Jakes,” I said. “It’s not like the whole shop belongs to him.”

“Alice and Harland sittin’ in a tree,” she sang, “K-I-S-S-I-N-G!”

I plugged my ears and sang, “I’m going back someday! Come what may! To Blue Bayou!” Turtle whacked the dirt and sang a recipe for succotash.

I spotted Mrs. Parsons and Edna Poppy coming down the gravel path with their arms linked. From a great distance you could have taken them for some wacked-out geriatric couple marching down the aisle in someone’s sick idea of a garden wedding. We waved our arms at them, and Turtle looked up and waved at us.

“No, we’re waving at them,” I said, and pointed. She turned and folded and unfolded her hand in the right direction.

Now and again these days, not just in emergencies, we were leaving the kids with Edna and Virgie Mae on their front porch to be looked after. Edna was so sweet we just hoped she would cancel out Virgie’s sour, like the honey and vinegar in my famous Chinese recipe. It was awfully convenient, anyway, and Turtle seemed to like them okay. She called them Poppy and Parsnip. She knew the names of more vegetables than many a greengrocer, I’d bet. Her favorite book was a Burpee’s catalogue from Mattie’s, which was now required reading every night before she would go to bed. The plot got old, in my opinion, but she was crazy about all the characters.

“Ma Poppy,” Turtle said when they were a little closer. She called every woman Ma something. Lou Ann was Ma Wooahn, which Lou Ann said sounded like something you’d eat with chopsticks, and I was just Ma. We never told her these names, she just came to them on her own.

The two women were still moving toward us at an unbelievably slow pace. I thought of a game we used to play in school at the end of recess: See who can get there last. Edna had on a red knit top, red plaid Bermuda shorts, and red ladies’ sneakers with rope soles. Virgie had on a tutti-frutti hat and a black dress printed all over with what looked like pills. I wondered if there was an actual place where you could buy dresses like that, or if after hanging in your closet for fifty years, regular ones would somehow just transform.

“Good afternoon, Lou Ann, Taylor, children,” Mrs. Parsons said, nodding to each one of us. She was so formal it made you want to say something obscene. I thought of Lou Ann’s compulsions in church.

“Howdy do,” Lou Ann said, and waved at a bench. “Have a sit.” But Mrs. Parsons said no thank you, that they were just out for their constitutional.

“I see you’re wearing my favorite color today, Edna,” I said. This was a joke. I’d never seen her in anything else. When she said red was her color, she meant it in a way most people don’t.

“Oh, yes, always.” She laughed. “Do you know, I started to dress in red when I was sixteen. I decided that if I was to be a Poppy, then a Poppy I would be.”

Edna said the most surprising things. She didn’t exactly look at you when she spoke, but instead stared above you as though there might be something wonderful hanging just over your head.

“Well, we’ve heard all about that before, haven’t we?” said Mrs. Parsons, clamping Edna’s elbow in a knucklebone vice-grip. “We’ll be going along. If I stand still too long my knees are inclined to give out.” They started to move away, but then Mrs. Parsons stopped, made a little nod, and turned around. “Lou Ann, someone was looking for you this morning. Your husband, or whatever he may be.”

“You mean Angel?” She jumped so hard she bumped the stroller and woke up Dwayne Ray, who started howling.

“I wouldn’t know,” Virgie said, in such a way that she might as well have said, “How many husbands do you have?”

“When, this morning while I was at the laundromat?”

“I have no idea where you were, my dear, only that he was here.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he would come back later.”

Lou Ann bounced the baby until he stopped crying. “Shit,” she said, quite a few minutes later when they’d moved out of earshot. “What do you think that means?”

“Maybe he wanted to deliver a check in person. Maybe he wants to go on a second honeymoon.”

“Sure,” she said, looking off at the far side of the park. She was still jiggling Dwayne Ray, possibly hadn’t noticed he’d stopped crying.

“Why do you think she puts up with that coot?” I asked.

“What coot, old Vicious Virgie you mean? Oh, she’s harmless.” Lou Ann settled the baby back into his stroller. “She reminds me of Granny Logan. She’s that type. One time Granny introduced me to some cousins by marriage of hers, I was wearing this brand-new midi-skirt I’d just made? And she says, ‘This is my granddaughter Lou Ann. She isn’t bowlegged, it’s just her skirt makes her look that way.’ ”

“Oh, Lou Ann, you poor thing.”

She frowned and brushed at some freckles on her shoulder, as though they might suddenly have decided to come loose. “I read a thing in the paper this morning about the sun giving you skin cancer,” she said. “What does it look like in the early stages, do you know?”

“No. But I don’t think you get it from sitting out one afternoon.”

She pushed the stroller back and forth in an absent-minded way, digging a matched set of ruts into the dust. “Come to think of it, though, I guess that’s a little different from the way Mrs. Parsons is. Somehow it’s more excusable to be mean to your own relatives.”

She rubbed her neck and turned her face to the sun again. Lou Ann’s face was small and rounded in a pretty way, like an egg sunny side up. But in my mind’s eye I could plainly see her dashing out the door on any given day, stopping to say to the mirror: “Ugly as homemade sin in the heat of summer.” No doubt she could see Granny Logan in there too, staring over her shoulder.

After a while I said, “Lou Ann, I have to know something for Turtle’s and my sake, so tell me the honest truth. If Angel wanted to come back, I mean move back in and have everything the way it was before, would you say yes?”

She looked at me, surprised. “Well, what else could I do? He’s my husband, isn’t he?”


There may have been a world of things I didn’t understand, but I knew when rudeness passed between one human being and another. The things Mrs. Parsons had said about aliens were wrong and unkind, and I still felt bad even though weeks had passed. Eventually I apologized to Estevan. “She’s got a mean streak in her,” I told him. “If you’re unlucky enough to get ahold of a dog like that, you give it away to somebody with a big farm. I don’t know what you do about a neighbor.”

Estevan shrugged. “I understand,” he said.

“Really, I don’t think she knew what she was saying, about how the woman and kid who got shot must have been drug dealers or whatever.”

“Oh, I believe she did. This is how Americans think.” He was looking at me in a thoughtful way. “You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.”

I wanted to tell him this wasn’t so, but I couldn’t. “I guess you’re right,” I said. “I guess it makes us feel safe.”

Estevan left Mattie’s every day around four o’clock to go to work. Often he would come down a little early and we’d chat while he waited for his bus. “Attending my autobus” was the way he put it.

“Can I tell you something?” I said. “I think you talk so beautifully. Ever since I met you I’ve been reading the dictionary at night and trying to work words like constellation and scenario into the conversation.”

He laughed. Everything about him, even his teeth, were so perfect they could have come from a book about the human body. “I have always thought you had a wonderful way with words,” he said. “You don’t need to go fishing for big words in the dictionary. You are poetic, mi’ija.”

“What’s miha?”

“Mi hija,” he pronounced it slowly.

“My something?”

“My daughter. But it doesn’t work the same in English. We say it to friends. You would call me mi’ijo.”

“Well, thank you for the compliment,” I said, “but that’s the biggest bunch of hogwash, what you said. When did I ever say anything poetic?”

“Washing hogs is poetic,” he said. His eyes actually twinkled.

His bus pulled up and he stepped quickly off the curb, catching the doorway and swinging himself in as it pulled away. That is just how he would catch a bus in Guatemala City, I thought. To go teach his classes. But he carried no books, no graded exams, and the sleeves of his pressed white shirt were neatly rolled up for a night of dishwashing.

I felt depressed that evening. Mattie, who seemed to know no end of interesting things, told me about the history of Roosevelt Park. I had just assumed it was named after one of the Presidents, but it was for Eleanor. Once when she had been traveling across the country in her own train she had stopped here and given a speech right from a platform on top of her box car. I suppose it would have been a special type of box car, decorated, and not full of cattle and bums and such. Mattie said the people sat out in folding chairs in the park and listened to her speak about those less fortunate than ourselves.

Mattie didn’t hear Eleanor Roosevelt’s speech, naturally, but she had lived here a very long time. Thirty years ago, she said, the homes around this park belonged to some of the most fortunate people in town. But now the houses all seemed a little senile, with arthritic hinges and window screens hanging at embarrassing angles. Most had been subdivided or otherwise transformed in ways that favored function over beauty. Many were duplexes. Lee Sing’s was a home, grocery, and laundromat. Mattie’s, of course, was a tire store and sanctuary.

Slowly I was coming to understand exactly what this meant. For one thing, people came and went quietly. And stayed quietly. Around to the side of Mattie’s place, above the mural Lou Ann and I called Jesus Around the World, there was an upstairs window that looked out over the park. I saw faces there, sometimes Esperanza’s and sometimes others, staring across the empty space.

Mattie would occasionally be gone for days at a time, leaving me in charge of the shop. “How can you just up and go? What if I get a tractor tire in here?” I would ask her, but she would just laugh and say, “No chance.” She said that tire dealers were like veterinarians. There’s country vets, that patch up horses and birth calves, and there’s the city vets that clip the toenails off poodles. She said she was a city vet.

And off she would go. Mattie had numerous cars that ran, but for these trips she always took the four-wheel Blazer and her binoculars, and would come back with the fenders splattered with mud. “Going birdwatching” is what she always told me.

After she returned, a red-haired man named Terry sometimes came by on his bicycle and would spend an hour or more upstairs at Mattie’s. He didn’t look any older than I was, but Mattie told me he was already a doctor. He carried his doctor bag in a special rig on the back of his bike.

“He’s a good man,” she said. “He looks after the ones that get here sick and hurt.”

“What do you mean, that get here hurt?” I asked.

“Hurt,” she said. “A lot of them get here with burns, for instance.”

I was confused. “I don’t get why they would have burns,” I persisted.

She looked at me for so long that I felt edgy. “Cigarette burns,” she said. “On their backs.”

The sun was setting, and most of the west-facing windows on the block reflected a fierce orange light as if the houses were on fire inside, but I could see plainly into Mattie’s upstairs. A woman stood at the window. Her hair was threaded with white and fell loose around her shoulders, and she was folding a pair of men’s trousers. She moved the flats of her hands slowly down each crease, as if folding these trousers were the only task ahead of her in life, and everything depended on getting it right.


True to his word, Angel came back. He didn’t come to move in, but to tell Lou Ann he was going away for good. I had taken Turtle for a doctor’s appointment so I didn’t witness the scene; all I can say is that the man had a genuine knack for dropping bombshells at home while someone was sitting in Dr. Pelinowsky’s waiting room. But of course, I had no real connection to Angel’s life. It was just a coincidence.

Turtle was healthy as corn, but as time went by I got to thinking she should have been taken to a doctor, in light of what had been done to her. (Lou Ann’s main question was: Shouldn’t you tell the police? Call 88-CRIME or something? But of course it was all in the past now.) I had thought of asking Terry, the red-haired doctor on the bicycle, but couldn’t quite get up the gumption. Finally I called for an appointment with the famous Dr. P., on Lou Ann’s recommendation, even though he wasn’t exactly the right kind of doctor. His nurse agreed that he could see my child this once.

We found the doctor’s office all right, but checking her in was another story. They gave me a form to fill out which contained every possible question about Turtle I couldn’t answer. “Have you had measles?” I asked her. “Scabies? Date of most recent polio vaccination?” The one medical thing I did know about her past was not on the form, unless they had a word for it I didn’t know.

Turtle was in my lap but had turned loose of me completely, since she needed both arms to turn through the pages of her magazine in search of vegetables. She wasn’t having much luck. Every other woman in that waiting room was pregnant, and every magazine was full of nursing-bra ads.

I knew how to trample my way through most any situation, but you can’t simply invent a person’s medical history. I went up and tapped on the glass to get the nurse’s attention. I saw that she was actually pregnant too, and I felt an old panic. In high school we used to make jokes about the water fountains outside of certain home rooms.

‘Yes?” she said. Her name tag said Jill. She had white skin and broad pink stripes of rouge in front of her ears.

“I can’t answer these questions,” I said.

“Are you the parent or guardian?”

“I’m the one responsible for her.”

“Then we need the medical history before we can fill out an encounter form.”

“But I don’t know that much about her past,” I said.

“Then you are not the parent or guardian?”

This was getting to be a trip around the fish pond. “Look,” I said. “I’m not her real mother, but I’m taking care of her now. She’s not with her original family anymore.”

“Oh, you’re a foster home.” Jill was calm again, shuffling through a new stack of papers. She blinked slowly in a knowing way that revealed pink and lavender rainbows of makeup on her eyelids. She handed me a new form with far fewer questions on it. “Did you bring in your DES medical and waiver forms?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, remember to bring them next time.”

By the time we got in to see Dr. Pelinowsky I felt as though I’d won this man in one of those magazine contests where you answer fifty different questions about American cheese. He was fiftyish and a little tired-looking. His shoulders slumped, leaving empty space inside the starched shoulders of his white coat. He wore black wing-tip shoes, I noticed, and nylon socks with tiny sea horses above the ankle bones.

Turtle became clingy again when I pulled off her T-shirt. She squeezed wads of my shirttail in both fists while Dr. Pelinowsky thumped on her knees and shined his light into her eyes. “Anybody home?” he asked. The only time she perked up at all was when he looked in her ears and said, “Any potatoes in there?” Her mouth made a little O, but then she spaced out again.

“I didn’t really think she’d turn out to be sick, or anything like that. She’s basically in good shape,” I said.

“I wouldn’t expect to turn up anything clinically. She appears to be a healthy two-year-old.” He looked at his clipboard.

“The reason I brought her in is I’m concerned about some stuff that happened to her awhile ago. She wasn’t taken care of very well.” Dr. Pelinowsky looked at me, clicking his ballpoint pen.

“I’m a foster parent,” I said, and then he raised his eyebrows and nodded. It was a miracle, this new word that satisfied everyone.

“You’re saying that she was subjected to deprivation or abuse in the biological parents’ home,” he said. His main technique seemed to be telling you what you’d just said.

‘Yes. I think she was abused, and that she was,” I didn’t know how to put this. “That she was molested. In a sexual way.”

Dr. Pelinowsky took in this information without appearing to notice. He was scribbling something on the so-called encounter form. I waited until he finished, thinking that I was going to have to say it again, but he said, “I’ll give her a complete exam, but again I wouldn’t expect to turn up anything now. This child has been in your care for five months?”

“More or less,” I said. ‘Yes.”

While he examined her he explained about abrasions and contusions and the healing process. I thought of how I’d handled Jolene Shanks exactly this way, as calm as breakfast toast, while her dead husband lay ten feet away under a sheet. “After this amount of time we might see behavioral evidence,” Dr. P. said, “but there is no residual physical damage.” He finished scribbling on the form and decided it would be a good idea to do a skeletal survey, and that sometime soon we ought to get her immunizations up to date.

I was curious to see the x-ray room, which was down a hall in another part of the office. Everything was large and clean, and they had a machine that turned out the x-rays instantly like a Polaroid camera. I don’t believe Dr. Pelinowsky really understood how lucky he was. I used to spend entire afternoons in a little darkroom developing those things, sopping the stiff plastic sheets through one and another basin of liquid, then hanging them up on a line with tiny green clothespins. I used to tell Mama it was nothing more than glorified laundry.

We had to wait awhile to see him again, while he saw another patient and then read Turtle’s x-rays. I hung around asking the technician questions and showing Turtle where the x-rays came out, though machines weren’t really her line. She had one of her old wrestling holds on my shoulder.

When we were called back to Dr. Pelinowsky’s office again he looked just ever so slightly shaken up. “What is it?” I asked him. All I could think of was brain tumors, I suppose from hanging around Lou Ann, who had learned all she knew about medicine from General Hospital.

He laid some of the x-rays against the window. Dr. Pelinowsky’s office window looked out onto a garden full of round stones and cactus. In the dark negatives I could see Turtle’s thin white bones and her skull, and it gave me the same chill Lou Ann must have felt to see her living mother’s name carved on a gravestone. I shivered inside my skin.

“These are healed fractures, some of them compound,” he said, pointing with his silver pen. He moved carefully through the arm and leg bones and then to the hands, which he said were an excellent index of age. On the basis of height and weight he’d assumed she was around twenty-four months, he said, but the development of cartilage in the carpals and metacarpals indicated that she was closer to three.

“Three years?”

“Yes.” He seemed almost undecided about telling me this. “Sometimes in an environment of physical or emotional deprivation a child will simply stop growing, although certain internal maturation does continue. It’s a condition we call failure to thrive.”

“But she’s thriving now. I ought to know, I buy her clothes.”

“Well, yes, of course. The condition is completely reversible.”

“Of course,” I said.

He put up more of the x-rays in the window, saying things like “spiral fibular fracture here” and “excellent healing” and “some contraindications for psycho-motor development.” I couldn’t really listen. I looked through the bones to the garden on the other side. There was a cactus with bushy arms and a coat of yellow spines as thick as fur. A bird had built her nest in it. In and out she flew among the horrible spiny branches, never once hesitating. You just couldn’t imagine how she’d made a home in there.


Mattie had given me the whole day off, so I had arranged to meet Lou Ann at the zoo after Turtle’s appointment. We took the bus. Mattie and I hadn’t gotten around to fixing the ignition on my car, so starting it up was a production I saved for special occasions.

On the way over I tried to erase the words “failure to thrive” from my mind. I prepared myself, instead, for the experience of being with Lou Ann and the kids in a brand-new set of hazards. There would be stories of elephants going berserk and trampling their keepers; of children’s little hands snapped off and swallowed whole by who knows what seemingly innocent animal. When I walked up to the gate and saw her standing there with tears streaming down her face, I automatically checked Dwayne Ray in his stroller to see if any of his parts were missing.

People were having to detour around her to get through the turnstile, so I led her to one side. She sobbed and talked at the same time.

“He says he’s going to join up with any rodeo that will take a one-legged clown, which I know isn’t right because the clown’s the hardest job, they jump around and distract them so they won’t tromple on the cowboys’ heads.”

I was confused. Was there an elephant somewhere in this story? “Lou Ann, honey, you’re not making sense. Do you want to go home?”

She shook her head.

“Then should we go on into the zoo?”

She nodded. I managed to get everybody through the turnstile and settled on a bench in the shade between the duck pond and the giant tortoises. The sound of water trickling over a little waterfall into the duck pond made it seem cool. I tried to get the kids distracted long enough for Lou Ann to tell me what was up.

“Look, Turtle, look at those old big turtles,” I said. The words “childhood identity crisis” from one of Lou Ann’s magazines sprang to mind, but Turtle seemed far more interested in the nibbled fruit halves strewn around their pen. “Apple,” she said. She seemed recovered from her doctor’s visit.

“He said something about the Colorado-Montana circuit, which I don’t even know what that means, only that he’s leaving town. And he said he might not be sending any checks for a while until he’d got on his feet. He actually said on his foot, can you believe that? The way Angel sees himself, it’s like he’s an artificial leg with a person attached.”

A woman on a nearby bench stopped reading and tilted her head back a little, the way people do when they want to overhear your conversation. She had on white sneakers, white shorts, and a visor. It looked as if she must have been on her way to a country club to play tennis before some wrongful bus change landed her here.

“It’s her husband that’s the problem,” I told the woman. “He’s a former rodeo man.”

“Taylor!” Lou Ann whispered, but the woman ignored us and took a drag from her cigarette, which she balanced beside her on the front edge of the bench. She shook out her newspaper and folded back the front page. It showed a large color picture of Liz Taylor with a black man in a silver vest and no shirt, and there was a huge block headline that said, WORLD’S YOUNGEST MOM-TO-BE: INFANT PREGNANT AT BIRTH. Apparently the headline wasn’t related to the picture.

A kid with orange foam-rubber plugs in his ears whizzed by on a skateboard. Another one whizzed right behind him. They had a fancy way of tipping up their boards to go over the curbs.

“They shouldn’t allow those in here. Somebody will get killed,” Lou Ann said, blowing her nose. I noticed that one of the giant tortoises in the pen was pursuing another one around and around a clump of shrubby palm trees.

“So what about Angel?” I asked.

A woman in a flowery dress sat down on the bench with the country-club woman. She had very dark, tightly wrinkled skin and wore enormous green high-heeled pumps. The country-club woman’s cigarette, on the bench between them, waved up a little boundary line of smoke.

“He said there would be papers to sign for the divorce,” Lou Ann said.

“So what’s the problem, exactly?” I didn’t mean to be unkind. I really didn’t know.

“Well, what am I going to do?”

“Well, to be honest, I don’t think it much matters what you do. It probably doesn’t make any difference what kind of a divorce you get, or even if you get one at all. The man is gone, honey. If he stops sending checks I don’t imagine there’s anything to be done, not if he’s out riding the range in God’s country. I guess you’ll have to look for a job, sooner or later.”

Lou Ann started sobbing again. “Who would want to hire me? I can’t do anything.”

“You don’t necessarily have to know how to do something to get a job,” I reasoned. “I’d never made a trench fry in my life before I got hired at the Burger Derby,” She blew her nose again.

“So how’d she get born pregnant?” the green-shoes woman asked the woman with the newspaper.

“It was twins, a boy and a girl,” the woman told her. “They had sexual intercourse in the womb. Doctors say the chances against it are a million to one.

“Yeah,” the green-shoes woman said in a tired way. She bent over and shuffled through a large paper shopping bag, which was printed with a bright paisley pattern and had sturdy-looking green handles. All three of us waited for her to say something more, or to produce some wonderful answer out of her bag, but she didn’t.

Lou Ann said to me, in a quieter voice, ‘You know, the worst thing about it is that he wouldn’t ask me to come with him.”

“Well, how in the world could you go with him? What about Dwayne Ray?”

“It’s not that I’d want to, but he could have asked. He did say if I wanted to come along he wouldn’t stop me, but he wouldn’t actually say he wanted me to.”

“I don’t follow you, exactly.”

“You know, that was always just the trouble with Angel. I never really felt like he would put up a fight for me. I would have left him a long time ago, but I was scared to death he’d just say, ‘Bye! Don’t let the door hit your butt on the way out.’ ”

“Well, maybe it’s not that he doesn’t want you, Lou Ann. Maybe he’s just got better sense than to ask you and a four-month-old baby to come along on the Montana-Colorado circuit, or whatever. I can just see it. Dwayne Ray growing up to be one of those tattooed midgets that do somersaults in the sideshow and sell the popcorn at intermission.”

“It’s not a circus, for God’s sake, it’s a rodeo.” Lou Ann honked in her handkerchief and laughed in spite of herself.

At the edge of the pond there was a gumball machine full of peanuts, for feeding to the ducks, I presumed. But these ducks were so well fed that even where peanuts were scattered by the fistful at the water’s edge they just paddled right on by with beady, bored eyes.

Turtle dug one out of the mud and brought it to me. “Bean,” she said.

“This is a peanut,” I told her.

“Beanut.” She made trip after trip, collecting peanuts and mounding them into a pile. Dwayne Ray, in his stroller, was sleeping soundly through his first zoo adventure.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the x-rays, and how Turtle’s body was carrying around secret scars that would always be there. I wanted to talk to Lou Ann about it, but this wasn’t the time.

“So why are you taking his side?” Lou Ann wanted to know.

“I’m not taking his side. Whose side?”

“You are too. Or at least you’re not taking mine. Whenever I complain about Angel you won’t agree with me that he’s a scum bucket. You just listen and don’t say anything.”

I picked up a green bottle cap and threw it in the duck pond. The ducks didn’t even turn their heads. “Lou Ann,” I said, “in high school I used to lose friends that way like crazy. You think he’s a scum bucket now, but sooner or later you might want him back. And then you’d be too embarrassed to look me in the eye and admit you’re still in love with this jerk whose anatomical parts we’ve been laughing about for the last two months.”

“It’s over between me and Angel. I know it is.”

“Just the same. I don’t want you to have to choose him or me.”

She dug through her purse looking for a clean handkerchief. “I just can’t get over him leaving like that.”

“When, now or last October?” I was starting to get annoyed. “He moved out over six months ago, Lou Ann. Did you think he’d just stepped out for some fresh air? It’s April now, for God’s sake.”

“Did you see that?” Lou Ann pointed at Turtle. Her head had bobbed up like an apple on a string, and her eyes fixed on me as if she had seen the Lord incarnate.

“What’s up, Turtle?” I asked, but she just stared fearfully from her pile of peanuts.

“She did that one other time that I know of. When we were talking about the phone bill you thought we’d got gypped on,” Lou Ann said.

“So what are you saying, that she understands when we’re mad? I already knew that.”

“No, I’m saying that bill was for April. She looks up when you say April, especially if you sound mad.”

Turtle did look up again.

“Don’t you get it?” Lou Ann asked.

I didn’t.

“That’s her name! April’s her name!” Now Lou Ann was kind of hopping in her seat. “April, April. Looky here, April. That’s your name, isn’t it? April!”

If it was her name, Turtle had had enough of it. She had gone back to patting the sides of her peanut mound.

“You have to do it scientifically,” I said. “Say a bunch of other words and just casually throw that one in, and see if she looks up.”

“Okay, you do it. I can’t think of enough words.”

“Rhubarb,” I said. “Cucumber. Porky Pig. Budweiser. April.” Turtle looked up right on cue.

“May June July August September!” Lou Ann shouted. “April!”

“Lord, Lou Ann, the child isn’t deaf.”

“It’s April,” she declared. “That’s her legal name.”

“Maybe it’s something that just sounds like April. Maybe it’s Mabel.”

Lou Ann made a face.

“Okay, April, that’s not bad. I think she’s kind of used to Turtle though. I think we ought to keep calling her that now.”

A fat duck with a shiny green head had finally decided Turtle’s cache of peanuts was too much to ignore. He came up on shore and slowly advanced, stretching his neck forward.

“Ooooh, oooh!” Turtle shouted, shaking her hands so vigorously that he wheeled around and waddled back toward the water.

“Turtle’s okay for a nickname,” Lou Ann said, “but you have to think of the future. What about when she goes to school? Or like when she’s eighty years old? Can you picture an eighty-year-old woman being called Turtle?”

“An eighty-year-old Indian woman, I could. You have to remember she’s Indian.”

“Still,” Lou Ann said.

“April Turtle, then.”

“No! That sounds like some weird kind of air freshener.”

“So be it,” I said, and it was.

We sat for a while listening to the zoo sounds. There were more trees here than most places in Tucson. I’d forgotten how trees full of bird sounds made you sense the world differently: that life didn’t just stop at eye level. Between the croaks and whistles of the blackbirds there were distant cat roars, monkey noises, kid noises.

“I’ll swan, the sound of that running water’s making me have to go,” Lou Ann said.

“There’s bathrooms over by where we came in.”

Lou Ann took a mirror out of her purse. “Death warmed over,” she said, and went off to find a bathroom.

The giant tortoise, I noticed, had caught up to its partner and was proceeding to climb on top of it from behind. Its neck and head strained forward as it climbed, and to tell the truth, it looked exactly like a bald, toothless old man. The knobby shells scraping together made a hollow sound. By the time Lou Ann came back from the bathroom, the old fellow on top was letting out loud grunts that rang out all the way down to the military macaws.

“What on earth? I could hear that noise up by the bathrooms,” Lou Ann declared. “Well, I’ll be. I always did wonder how they’d do it in those shells. That’d be worse than those panty girdles we used to wear in high school to hold our stockings up. Remember those?”

A teenage couple holding hands bounced up to investigate, giggled, and moved quickly away. A woman with an infant on her hip turned the baby’s head away and walked on. Lou Ann and I laughed till we cried. The country-club woman gave us a look, folded her paper, stabbed out her cigarette, and crunched off down the gravel path.

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