Pigs in Heaven (2 page)

“
L
OOK UP
, T
URTLE
. A
NGELS
.”

Taylor stoops to her daughter’s eye level and points up at the giant granite angels guarding the entrance to the Hoover Dam: a straight-backed team, eyes on the horizon, their dark, polished arms raised toward the sky.

“They look like Danny,” Turtle observes.

“Biceps to die for,” Taylor agrees. Danny, their garbage man, is a body builder on his days off.

“What do angels need muscles for?”

Taylor laughs at the thought of some saint having to tote around the overfilled garbage bags of heaven. “They made this back in the thirties,” she says. “Ask Grandma about the Depression sometime. Nobody could get a job, so they had this WPA thing where people made bridges and sidewalks and statues that look like they could sweat.”

“Let’s take a picture.” Turtle’s tone warns off argument; she means Taylor will stand under the angels and
she
will take the photo. Taylor stands where she’s placed and prepares to smile for as long as
it takes. Turtle concentrates through the rectangular eye, her black eyebrows stranded above it in her high forehead. Turtle’s photos tend to come out fairly hopeless in terms of composition: cut-off legs or all sky, or sometimes something Taylor never even saw at the time. When the pictures come back from the drugstore she often gets the feeling she’s gone on someone else’s vacation. She watches Turtle’s snub-nosed sneakers and deliberately planted legs, wondering where all that persistence comes from and where it will go. Since she found Turtle in her car and adopted her three years ago, she has had many moments of not believing she’s Turtle’s mother. This child is the miracle Taylor wouldn’t have let in the door if it had knocked. But that’s what miracles are, she supposes. The things nobody saw coming.

Her eyes wander while Turtle fiddles. The sun is hot, hot. Taylor twists her dark hair up off her neck.

“Mom!”

“Sorry.” She drops her arms to her sides, carefully, like a dancer, and tries to move nothing but her eyes. A man in a wheelchair rolls toward them and winks. He’s noticeably handsome from the waist up, with WPA arms. He moves fast, his dark mane flying, and turns his chair smoothly before the angels’ marble pedestal. If she strains her peripheral vision Taylor can read the marble slab: it’s a monument to the men who died building the dam. It doesn’t say who they were, in particular. Another panel across the way lists the names of all the directors of the dam project, but this one says only that many who labored here found their final rest. There is a fairly disturbing bronze plaque showing men in work clothes calmly slipping underwater. “Poor guys,” she says aloud. “Tomb of the unknown concrete pourer.”

“Working for fifty cents an hour,” the wheelchair man says. “A bunch of them were Navajo boys from the reservation.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yeah.” He smiles in a one-sided way that suggests he knows his way around big rip-offs like this, a fancy low-paying job that bought these Navajo boys a piece of the farm.

The shutter clicks, releasing Taylor. She stretches the muscles in her face.

“Are you the trip photographer?” he asks Turtle.

Turtle presses her face into her mother’s stomach. “She’s shy,” Taylor says. “Like most major artists.”

“Want me to take one of the two of you?”

“Sure. One to send Grandma.” Taylor hands him the camera and he does the job, requiring only seconds.

“You two on a world tour?” he asks.

“A small world tour. We’re trying to see the Grand Canyon all the way around. Yesterday we made it from Tucson to the Bright Angel overlook.” Taylor doesn’t say that they got manic on junk food in the car, or that when they jumped out at the overlook exactly at sunset, Turtle took one look down and wet her pants. Taylor couldn’t blame her. It’s a lot to take in.

“I’m on a tour of monuments to the unlucky.” He nods at the marble slab.

Taylor is curious about his hobby but decides not to push it. They leave him to the angels and head for the museum. “Do not sit on wail,” Turtle says, stopping to point at the wall. She’s learning to read, in kindergarten and the world at large.

“On wall,” Taylor says. “Do not sit on wall.”

The warning is stenciled along a waist-high parapet that runs across the top of the dam, but the words are mostly obscured by the legs of all the people sitting on the wall. Turtle looks up at her mother with the beautiful bewilderment children wear on their faces till the day they wake up knowing everything.

“Words mean different things to different people,” Taylor explains. “You could read it as ‘Don’t sit on the wall.’ But other people, like Jax for instance, would think it means ‘Go ahead and break your neck, but don’t say we didn’t warn you.’ ”

“I wish Jax was here,” Turtle says solemnly. Jax is Taylor’s boyfriend, a keyboard player in a band called the Irascible Babies. Taylor sometimes feels she could take Jax or leave him, but it’s true he’s an asset on trips. He sings in the car and is good at making up boredom games for Turtle.

“I know,” Taylor says. “But he’d just want to sit on the wall. You’d have to read him his rights.”

For Taylor, looking over the edge is enough, hundreds of feet down that curved, white wing of concrete to the canyon bottom. The boulders below look tiny and distant like a dream of your own death. She grips her daughter’s arm so protectively the child might later have marks. Turtle says nothing. She’s been marked in life by a great many things, and Taylor’s odd brand of maternal love is by far the kindest among them.

Turtle’s cotton shorts with one red leg and one white one flap like a pair of signal flags as she walks, though what message she’s sending is beyond Taylor’s guess. Her thin, dark limbs and anxious eyebrows give her a pleading look, like a child in the magazine ads that tell how your twenty cents a day can give little Maria or Omar a real chance at life. Taylor has wondered if Turtle will ever outgrow the poster-child look. She would give years off her own life to know the story of Turtle’s first three, in eastern Oklahoma, where she’s presumed to have been born. Her grip on Turtle is redundant, since Turtle always has a fist clamped onto Taylor’s hand or sleeve. They cross through the chaotic traffic to the museum.

Inside, old photos line the walls, showing great expanses of scaffolded concrete and bushy-browed men in overalls standing inside huge turbines. The tourists are being shuffled into a small theater. Turtle tugs her in for the show, but Taylor regrets it as soon as the projector rolls. The film describes the amazing achievement of a dam that tamed the Colorado River. In the old days it ran wild, flooding out everyone downstream, burying their crops in mud. “There was only one solution—the dam!” exclaims the narrator, who reminds Taylor of a boy in a high school play, drumming up self-importance to conquer embarrassment. Mr. Hoover’s engineers prevailed in the end, providing Arizona with irrigation and L.A. with electricity and the Mexicans with the leftover salty trickle.

“Another solution is they didn’t need to grow their cotton right on the riverbank,” Taylor points out.

“Mom!” hisses Turtle. At home Turtle whines when Taylor talks back to the TV. Jax sides with Turtle on the television subject, citing the importance of fantasy. Taylor sides with her mother, who claims over the phone that TV has supernatural powers over her husband. “Just don’t believe everything on there is true,” Taylor warns often, but she knows this war is a lost cause in general. As far as her daughter is concerned, Mutant Ninja Turtles live in the sewers and that is that.

Outside the museum, a foil gum wrapper skates along the sidewalk on a surprise gust of wind. A herd of paper cups and soda straws rolls eastward in unison. Lucky Buster sits on the ramparts of the Hoover Dam, trying to figure out how to save the day. People will throw anything in the world on the ground, or even in the water. Like pennies. They end up down there with the catfish. There could be a million dollars at the bottom of the lake right now, but everybody thinks there’s just one red cent—the one they threw.

Lucky sits very still. He has his eye on a bright red soda-pop can. His friend Otis is an engineer for the Southern Pacific, and he’s warned Lucky about pop cans. They catch the sun just right and they’ll look like a red signal flare on the tracks. When you see that, you’ve got to stop the whole train, and then it turns out it’s just a pop can. Bad news.

The people are all up above him. One girl is looking. Her round face like a sweet brown pie can see him over the wall. He waves, but she bobs behind the mother and they go away. Nobody else is looking. He could go down there now. The water is too close, though, and scares him: water is black, blue, pink, every color. It gets in your eyes there’s so much light. He looks away at the nicer camel hump desert. Now:
go
.

Lucky drops down and scoots along the gray wall that runs along the edge. One side is water, fish-colored; on the other side you fall into the hole. He is as careful as the circus girls in silver bathing suits on TV, walking on wires. One foot, another foot.

A white bird with scabbed yellow feet lands in front of Lucky.
“Ssss,” he says to the bird, shaking his hands at it. The bird walks away fast, one spread foot and then the other one. Lucky is two steps away from the pop can. Now one step away. Now he’s got it.

The bird turns its head and looks straight at Lucky with a mean eye.

The sun has dropped into the Nevada hills and rung up a sunset the color of cherries and lemons. Turtle and Taylor take one last stroll across Mr. Hoover’s concrete dream. Turtle is holding on so tightly that Taylor’s knuckles ache. Their hypochondriac friend Lou Ann has warned Taylor about arthritis, but this snap-jawed grip is a principle of their relationship; it won Turtle a nickname, and then a mother. She hasn’t deliberately let go of Taylor since they met.

The water in the shadow of the dam is musky green and captivating to Turtle. She yanks on Taylor’s fingers to point out huge cat-fish moving in moss-colored darkness. Taylor doesn’t really look. She’s trying to take in the whole of Lake Mead, the great depth and weight of water that formerly ran free and made life miserable for the downstream farmers. It stretches far back into the brown hills, but there is no vegetation along the water’s edge, just one surface meeting another, a counterfeit lake in the desert that can’t claim its own shoreline. In the distance someone is riding a kind of small water vehicle that seems pesty and loud for its size, like a mosquito.

Storm clouds with high pompadours have congregated on the western horizon, offering the hope of cooler weather, but only the hope. The Dodge when they get back to it is firecracker hot and stinks of melted plastic upholstery. Taylor opens both front doors and tries to fan cooler air onto the seat. The ice-cream cone she bought Turtle was a mistake, she sees, but she’s not an overly meticulous parent. She’s had to learn motherhood on a wing and a prayer in the last three years, and right now her main philosophy is that everything truly important is washable. She hands Turtle a fistful of fast-food napkins from the glove compartment, but has to keep her eyes on the road once they get going. The Dodge Corona drives like a barge
and the road is narrow and crooked, as bad as the roads she grew up risking her neck on in Kentucky.

Eventually they level out on the Nevada plain, which looks clinically dead. Behind them the lake stretches out its long green fingers, begging the sky for something, probably rain.

Turtle asks, “How will he get out?”

“Will who get out?”

“That man.”

“Which man is that, sweetheart?” Turtle isn’t a big talker; she didn’t complete a sentence until she was four, and even now it can take days to get the whole story. “Is this something you saw on TV?” Taylor prompts. “Like the Ninja Turtles?”

“No.” She looks mournfully at the waffled corpse of her ice cream cone. “He picked up a pop can and fell down the hole by the water.”

Taylor narrows her eyes at the road. “At the dam? You saw somebody fall?”

“Yes.”

“Where people were sitting, on that wall?”

“No, the other side. The water side.”

Taylor takes a breath to find her patience. “That man out on the lake, riding around on that boat thing?”

“No,” Turtle says. “The man that fell in the hole by the water.”

Taylor can make no sense of this. “It wasn’t on TV?”

“No!”

They’re both quiet. They pass a casino where a giant illuminated billboard advertises the idea of cashing your paycheck and turning it into slot-machine tokens.

Turtle asks, “How will he get out?”

“Honey, I really don’t know what you mean. You saw somebody fall down a hole by the dam. But not into the water?”

“Not the water. The big hole. He didn’t cry.”

Taylor realizes what she could mean, and rejects the possibility, but for the half second between those two thoughts her heart drops. There was a round spillway where the water could bypass the dam
during floods. “You don’t mean that spillway, do you? The big hole between the water and the parking lot?”

“Yes.” Turtle’s black eyes are luminous. “I don’t think he can get out.”

“There was a big high fence around that.” Taylor has slowed to about fifteen miles an hour. She ignores the line of traffic behind her, although the drivers are making noise, impatient to get to Las Vegas and throw away their money.

“Turtle, are you telling me the absolute truth?”

Before she can manage an answer, Taylor U-turns the Dodge, furious at herself. She’ll never ask Turtle that question again.

Hoover’s guardian angels are in the dark now. The place is abandoned. They bang on the locked museum doors and Taylor cups her hands to see inside, but it is deserted. A huge blueprint of the dam shows elevators, maintenance towers, and on each side a long spillway looping like a stretched intestine under the dam to the river below. Taylor’s own gut feels tight. “They’ve gone home,” she tells Turtle, who won’t stop banging the door. “Come on. Show me where he fell.”