“Money from the casino,” Taylor says.

“Yeah. From the silver-dollar machine. Stupid Wallace kept the key in the cash register. At the better establishments they keep all the machine keys in a safe.”

Taylor is startled that Barbie makes no effort to lie. “Well, that’s between you and Wallace,” she says. “I personally don’t care that you ripped him off, but I’m not interested in being chased by the police.”

“Wally would never call the cops.” Barbie narrows her eyes at the highway. “They’d check his gaming odds and send him directly do not pass go to San Quentin.”

Taylor understands that where Barbie is concerned she has no idea what she’s dealing with. But she finds she prefers this to her previous assumption, which was that Barbie had cotton candy for brains. “Well, here’s my true confession,” Taylor says. “I don’t want the police around because Turtle and I are hiding from somebody. Not the police exactly.

Somebody that might get custody of Turtle.”

“Oh, your ex-husband? I’ve seen that on America’s Most Wanted.”

“No. It’s complicated.” Taylor wonders if child-custody disputes really do make it onto America’s Most Wanted.

“Well, whatever,” Barbie says. “Ask me no questions I’ll tell you no lies.”

Alice has come out of the phone booth. Taylor looks up and sees her standing by the road with her hands dangling at her sides and tears streaming down her face. She looks like she’s been hit by something. Two cars in succession slow down to look.

“Could you stay here a minute and keep an eye on Turtle?”

Taylor asks, setting off at a jog. By the time she’s crossed the highway, Alice is in the car. Taylor gets in on the driver’s side.

“I could take the bus from Reno,” Alice says, staring forward, though her line of sight seems unable to pass through the windshield.

“Take the bus to where? We have the car.”

“I can stay with my cousin Sugar. Somebody ought to go talk to them, Taylor. I understand why you ran when they yelled fire, but I think there’s another way to handle this.”

“Mama, I’m not giving up Turtle.”

“I think all they’re saying is they need to talk to you, to tell you there’s another side to it.” Alice speaks low, and Taylor feels shut out.

“I already talked to her. She wants to take Turtle.”

“Maybe not. She’s just touchy on the subject, on account of her brother.” Alice looks out at the sky. “That poor little boy,” she croons, hugging herself, as if she’s had a dream.

“What little boy?”

“The one they took away.”

“Jesus, Mama, whose side are you on here?”

Alice turns to Taylor and hugs her. “Yours. I’m with you and Turtle to the crack of doom, hon. You know that.”

They sit rocking back and forth by the highway while Taylor holds on to Alice, trying to understand the bad news.

Through the car window she can plainly see the man leaning on the red car, who suddenly brightens at the sight of a woman who must be his wife, coming from the service station.

They hail each other with words in a strange language. Taylor is startled. This ordinary man in jeans, whose thoughts she believed she knew, opens his mouth and becomes a foreigner.

It occurs to her that this one thing about people you can never understand well enough: how entirely inside themselves they are.

18

NATURAL SYSTEMS

ALONG THE HIGHWAY THE CORNFIELDS lie newly flayed, mile after mile, their green skin pulled back to reveal Oklahoma’s flesh of orange velvet dirt. The uncultivated hills nearby show off a new summer wardrobe of wildflowers.

The massed reds flecked with gold are Indian blanket; Cash recalls this name with pleasure, like a precious possession lost and retrieved. He fixes the radio on the sweet, torn voice of George Jones and breathes deeply of the air near home.

A woman in the Oklahoma Welcome Station told him that schoolkids take up collections of pennies to buy the wildflower seeds. Cash had thought wildflowers just grew.

He considers this now as he drives, and decides maybe they just tell the kids they use their money for wildflowers. So the little ones can look out the car window and think they did all that with their pennies.

Cash hums along with George, who is gloating about putting a gold ring on the right left hand this time. He thinks briefly of Rose, back in Jackson Hole, admiring the rear ends of boys in McDonald’s; he wonders how quickly she’ll forget about his tired, flat hind end altogether. He doesn’t much care. He is headed back to the home he never should have left, and right now he feels the possibility of fresh love for his own life. When he stopped for the restroom at the welcome station, he gazed at the educational display of the seven different types of barbed-wire and felt he could leap over all seven in one bound.