But of course there was more to the picture. Police everywhere, always. Whole villages of Indians forced to move again and again. As soon as they planted their crops, Estevan said, the police would come and set their houses and fields on fire and make them move again. The strategy was to wear them down so they'd be too tired or too hungry to fight back.

Turtle had fallen asleep with her head in Esperanza's lap.

"What's with everybody always trying to get rid of the Indians?" I said, not really asking for an answer. I thought again of the history-book pictures. Astronomers and brain surgeons. They should have done brain surgery on Columbus while they had the chance.

After a while Estevan said, "What I really hate is not belonging in any place. To be unwanted everywhere."

I thought of my Cherokee great-grandfather, his people who believed God lived in trees, and that empty Oklahoma plain they were driven to like livestock. But then, even the Cherokee Nation was someplace.

"You know what really gets me?" I asked him. "How people call you 'illegals.' That just pisses me off, I don't know how you can stand it. A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal?"

"I don't know. You tell me."

"You just can't," I said. "That's all there is to it."

On the second day we got into flatlands. The Texas panhandle, and then western Oklahoma, stretched out all around us like a colossal pancake. There was no way of judging where you were against where you were going, and as a consequence you tended to start feeling you were stuck out there, rolling your wheels on some trick prairie treadmill.

Estevan, who had apparently spent some time on a ship, said it reminded him of the ocean. He knew a Spanish word for the kind of mental illness you get from seeing too much horizon. Esperanza seemed stunned at first, then a little scared. She asked Estevan, who translated for me, whether or not we were near Washington. I assured her we weren't, and asked what made her think so. She said she thought they might build the President's palace in a place like this, so that if anyone came after him his guards could spot them a long way off.

To keep ourselves from going crazy with boredom we tried to think of word games. I told about the secretary named Jewel with the son who sees things backwards, and we tried to think of words he would like. Esperanza thought of ala, which means wing. Estevan knew whole sentences, some in Spanish and some in English. The English ones were "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama!" (which he said was a typical gringo way of looking at that endeavor), and "Able was I ere I saw Elba," which was what Napoleon supposedly said when he was sent into exile. I hadn't known, before then, where or what Elba was. I'd had a vague idea that it was a kind of toast.

Turtle was the only one of us who didn't seem perturbed by the landscape. She told Esperanza a kind of ongoing story, which lasted for hundreds of miles and sounded like a vegetarian version of Aesop's Fables, and when she ran out of story she played with her baby doll. The doll was a hand-me-down from Mattie's. It came with a pair of red-checked pajamas, complete with regular-sized shirt buttons, that someone had apparently sewn by hand. Turtle adored the doll and had named it, with no help from anyone, Shirley Poppy.

We bypassed Oklahoma City and headed north on I-35, reversing the route I had taken through Oklahoma the first time. We reached the Broken Arrow Motor Lodge by late afternoon. At first I thought the place had changed hands. Which it had, in a way: Mrs. Hoge had died, and Irene was a different person, a slipcover of her former self. She had lost 106 pounds in 24 weeks by eating one Weight Watchers frozen dinner per day and nothing else but chamomile tea, unsweetened.

"I told Boyd if he wanted something different he could learn to cook it himself. Anybody that can butcher a side of beef can learn to cook," she explained. She had started the diet on her doctor's advice, when she decided she wanted to have a baby.

Irene seemed thrilled to see Turtle and me again and insisted on feeding the whole bunch of us. She made a pot roast with onions and potatoes even though she couldn't touch it herself. She told us Mrs. Hoge had passed away in January, just a few weeks after I left.

"We knew it was coming, of course," she said to Esperanza and Estevan. "She had the disease where you shake all the time."

"That was a disease?" I asked. "I had no idea it was something you could die from. I thought it was just old age."

"No," Irene shook her head gravely. "Parkerson's."

"Who?" I asked.

"That's the disease," she said. "I notice she's talking now." She meant Turtle, who was busily naming every vegetable on Esperanza's plate. She named them individually so it went like this: "Tato, carrot, carrot, carrot, carrot, tato, onion," et cetera. Toward the end of the meal she also said "car," because underneath all the food the plates had pictures of old-timey cars on them.