Pigs in Heaven - Barbara Kingsolver [12]
“No, you stand by your stories. Whatever gets you through.”
“I better let you go. Tell Taylor to send pictures of the baby. The last one I have is the one from Christmas and she’s looking at that Santa Claus like he’s Lee Harvey Oswald. I could live with something better than that setting on my TV.”
“Message registered. She’ll be back Sunday. I’ll tell her you called, Alice.”
“Okay, hon. Thanks.”
She’s sad when Jax hangs up, but relieved that Taylor and Turtle aren’t dead or in trouble. She hates television, and not just because her husband has left her for one; she hates it on principle. It’s like the boy who cried wolf, spreading crazy ideas faster than you can find out what’s really up. If people won’t talk to each other, they shouldn’t count on strangers in suits and makeup to give them the straight dope.
She crosses the kitchen, stepping high over boxes of spatulas and nested mixing bowls. It looks like an estate sale, and really Alice does feel as though someone has died. She just can’t think who. Out in the den, the voice of a perky young woman is talking up some kitchen gadget that will mix bread dough and slice onions and even make milk shakes. “Don’t lose this chance, call now,” the woman says meaningfully, and in her mind Alice dares Harland to go ahead and order it for their anniversary. She will make him an onion milk shake and hit the road.
4
Lucky Buster Lives
LUCKY AND TURTLE ARE ASLEEP in the backseat: Taylor can make out their separate snores, soprano and bass. She scrapes the dial of the car radio across miles of West Arizona static and clicks it off again. Suspended before her in the rearview mirror is an oblong view of Lucky’s head rolled back on the seat, and now that it’s safe to stare, she does. His long, clean hair falls like a girl’s across his face, but his pale throat shows sandpaper stubble and a big Adam’s apple. He’s thirty-eight years old; they are a woman, man, and child in this car, like any family on the highway headed out on an errand of hope or dread. But Taylor can’t see him as a man. The idea unsettles her.
From the moment of his rescue he has begged them not to tell his mother what happened. Angie Buster runs a diner in Sand Dune, Arizona, and over the phone sounded tired. Lucky has no idea that she has spoken with Taylor, or that she watched his body come out of the hole again and again on the TV news. Computer graphics turned the Hoover Dam inside-out for America, showing a red toy image of Lucky moving jerkily down into the spillway and lodging there like the protagonist of a dark-humored video game. Only Lucky and Turtle, perpetrators of the miracle, still believe they’ve witnessed a secret.
It was Turtle’s idea to drive him home once the doctors had bandaged his sprained ankle and held him for observation. Turtle is a TV heroine now, so police officers and even doctors pay attention to her. One reporter said that Turtle’s and Lucky’s destinies were linked now; that according to Chinese belief, if you save someone’s life you’re responsible for that person forever. Taylor wonders if he was making this up. Why would you owe them more than what you’d already provided? It sounds like the slightly off-base logic you sometimes get in a fortune cookie.
She turns the car south on Arizona 93 and picks up a signal on the radio. An oldies station, they’re calling it, though it’s playing the Beatles. If Beatles are oldie now, where does that leave Perry Como, she wonders, and all those girl groups with their broken-heart songs and bulletproof hair? As nearly as she remembers, Taylor was in kindergarten when the Beatles first hit it big, but they persisted into her adolescence, shedding the missionary suits and skinny ties in favor of LSD and little round sunglasses. She can’t identify the song but it’s one of their later ones, with that odd sound they developed toward the end—as if their voices are coming from inside a metal pipe.
What did he think about for a day and a half down there? Taylor can’t bring herself