“No, Dellon, it’s nothing personal against your body organs. But men are just not necessarily always the solution.”

He stares at her until his truck runs into the ditch. He glances up and swerves back. “I’m going to have to put that in my pipe and smoke it awhile,” he says.

She gives him the smile that has been knocking boys dead for twenty-seven years, with absence of malice. “You just do that.”

33

THE GAMBLING AGENDA

THE MEETING THAT TOOK PLACE previously in the Council Chamber room must have been concerned with the Bingo question. On the blackboard at the front of the room someone has written in narrow, forward-slanting letters: TODAY’S AGENDA—

GAMING ON TRIBAL LAND, YAY OR NAY? PRESENTA-TIONS

1. Cyrus Stonecipher. “The pritfalls of gambling, a story too often told”

2. Betty Louise Squirrel. “BINGO, everybody wins!”

Annawake Fourkiller and Andy Rainbelt sit at the long speakers’ table down in front with their backs to the chalk-board, apparently unaware of the gambling agenda. Andy Rainbelt seems festive in a blue calico shirt with satin ribbon trim at the yoke, similar to the one Annawake wore the day she and Taylor met. Taylor can remember exactly how she looked. Today she’s a different person, in black-rimmed glasses and a haircut that seems worrisome to her. She keeps pushing it out of her way.

Turtle, Taylor, and Alice are sitting together in the red movie-theater chairs that fill the small auditorium. Turtle swings her legs so the toes of her sneakers drum out a steady tha-bump against the empty seat in front of her. The rows are set in a V-shape facing the speakers’ table, with an aisle down the center. Those in attendance have assumed a wedding interpretation, in which the center aisle divides the two families; the seats on the other side are filling up briskly.

Cash in over there and so is Letty, in a red dress with an imposing row of gold buttons down the front; countless other friends and relations have trailed in with children and greetings and messages for their neighbors. Boma Mellowbug is wearing a man’s pin-striped suit and a baseball cap, looking very sporting. She holds the hand of an old, extremely thin man whose hair hangs between his shoulder blades in a white plait as thin a prickly as binder’s twine. The heavyset woman who waited on Alice and Annawake in the coffee shop hustles in, leaning into Letty’s row in a businesslike way to inform Letty that the half-size dress patterns are in at Woolworth’s in Tahlequah.

“What is half-size, Aunt Earlene?” asks a young woman who’s nursing a baby. “I always wondered that.”

Earlene turns her back and speaks over her shoulder, reaching her hands around to her waist and the back of her neck to demonstrate. “It’s when you’ve got less inches from here to here than you have in the inseam and the bust measurements.”

“It’s for when you’re shorter than you are wide,” says Roscoe.

“You hush,” Letty tells him. “I don’t know why Sugar feeds you.”

Earlene plumps herself down next to the nursing mother.

The baby is making a good deal of noise at his task, sounding like the squeaky wheel determined to get all the grease.

Sugar comes in late, long after Roscoe has taken the one vacant seat next to his sister-in-law Letty, and she seems uncertain where to go. She takes Alice’s side at last, but a seat on the aisle, as close as possible to the Stillwaters.

The talking falls to a hush when a small woman in heels and a white silk blouse clicks in and takes her place at the front table next to Andy Rainbelt. She has a good deal of hair, which she shakes when she sits down, as if it might have gathered dust somewhere along the road to this point.

Annawake puts on her glasses, squares the pile of papers in front of her, and stands up. She looks out at the small assembled crowd and smiles oddly. “Have you all decided this is Stillwater versus Greer?”

The auditorium owns up to this by its silence.

She leans forward on the palms of her hands, peering out over her glasses, looking just like a lawyer in blue jeans.

“Well, it isn’t. This is not a court battle, it’s just a hearing.

I’m Annawake Fourkiller, you all know me here. I was hired by the tribe to oversee its interests in this case. This is Andy Rainbelt, who has jurisdiction as the appointed representative of Child Welfare Services. And this is his boss, Leona Swimmer, here to make sure we all do our jobs.”

Leona Swimmer nods very slightly, apparently wishing to acknowledge nothing more than that she is, in fact, here.

Annawake goes on. “Mr. Rainbelt and I have conferred, and we’re prepared to make a recommendation about the child known as Turtle Greer, also known as Lacey Stillwater.”