The doctor taps her pencil eraser against her cheek and looks at Taylor with something that could be loosely defined as a smile. Her eyes are so dark the irises appear almost bluish around the edges, and her half-closed lids give her a lizardish look. “Who do you think makes those commercials?”

“The guardians of truth,” Taylor says, sulkily. “Sorry, I didn’t think about it.”

For the first time, Dr. Washington’s superior-reptile look melts into genuine sympathy. “Listen, nobody does. I break this news to parents of every color, a dozen times a week.

You were doing what you thought was best, that’s the main thing.”

Her white coat is standing up straight again, then gone.

Turtle slides off the gift-wrapped examining table and bounds out the examining-room door like a puppy let out of its pen. Taylor finds she can’t get up from her chair. She is paralyzed by the memory of Annawake Fourkiller’s final warning, in Tucson, before she drove away: “I bet she hates milk.”

Taylor catches up to Turtle outside the clinic. Turtle is shading her eyes and looking straight up at the sky, which for once is miraculously unclouded. A jet has left a white, rubbed-out gash of a trail, ugly as graffiti.

“An airplane makes that,” Turtle informs her, and Taylor wonders how she knows this. It’s one of several million things they have never yet spoken of, precisely. Did she learn it in school? Then again, do you have to be told every single thing about the world before you know it? The idea of rearing Turtle exhausts Taylor and makes her want to lie down, or live in a simpler world. She would like for the two of them to live in one of those old-time cartoons that have roundheaded animals bobbing all together to the music, and no background whatsoever.

“You’re right,” Taylor says. “A jet plane.”

“Why is it doing that?”

Taylor wonders which level of answer Turtle wants. Why does a jet churn up white dust in the sky? (She doesn’t know.) Or, what is this particular jet’s motivation? (This, maybe nobody knows.)

“Remember in Dorothy, when the witch wrote in the sky?”

“Yeah, I do,” Taylor says. “In the Wizard of Oz. She wrote,

‘Surrender Dorothy.’ ”

“Did that mean they were supposed to give Dorothy to the witch?”

“That’s what she was asking for. Yeah.”

“Are you going to give me to the Indians?”

“No. I’ll never do that. But I think we have to go back and talk to them. Are you scared?”

“Yeah.”

“Me too.”

29

THE SECRET OF CREATION

CASH MOVES THROUGH HIS KITCHEN the way a lanky squirrel might, if a squirrel could cook: stepping quickly from sink to stove, pausing, sensing the air. By comparison, Alice feels like the lazy squirrel wife, sitting at the table separating hickory nuts from their crushed shells. “Slow down, Cash,” she tells him, smiling. “You’re making my eyes hurt.”

“I always do that to women,” he says. “I’m just ugly, is all.”

“Pish posh, you are not.” Alice picks a nearly whole nut from the curled chambers of its shell and drops it into the bowl. For reasons she couldn’t explain, the naked, curled little nuts remind her of babies waiting to get born.

Cash told her this log cabin was the original dwelling on his family’s homestead. It has stood empty for years, and seemed the right size for him when he came back from Wyoming. It’s all one room, with a kitchen at one end and a pair of parlor chairs flanking the lace curtain on the other end. For the summer he’s moved his bed out to the porch, for air. His rifle, his toothbrush, and a lucky horseshoe hang over the stone fireplace. The cabin seems sturdy enough to stand through a tornado, or small enough to be overlooked by one in favor of the larger house that was built later on, where Letty now lives. The cabin has been occupied by most of Letty’s children at one time or another; they were the ones who installed plumbing and strung out the electrical wire, which now supplies Cash’s few light bulbs and—Alice was distressed to note—the little TV set that squats on the kitchen counter amongst the bowls and flour canisters. He did shut it off right away when she came in. She’ll hand him that much.

“You don’t have to get all them shells out. Just the big pieces,” he tells her. “Are you watching this, now? You got to know how to make kunutche, if you’re going to sign up to be Cherokee here in a while.”

“Is that right? Will they give me a test?”