“Mama, you kill me. I can’t fight with you.” She looks at her little mother, ready to hit the road in her white shell blouse and lavender pants.

“Well, what else are we going to do, just run off and leave her flat?”

“Flat she’s in no danger of,” Taylor says.

Alice is puzzled for a minute, then laughs. “You think those are real?”

“I dare you to ask.”

They both watch the back door of the Delta Queen. Turtle is already in the center of the backseat, her usual post, prepared for whatever comes next.

“Are we going to fit all thirteen of her mix-and-match ensembles into the car?” Taylor asks.

“We’ll see.”

“It’s just to the state line, right? Maybe she’ll have better luck in Lake Tahoe. Maybe Ken lives there.”

“We’ll see,” Alice repeats.

Barbie takes more than ten seconds, but less than half an hour. She appears, dressed in a traveling ensemble that includes white gloves and a hat. The rest of her outfits fill only two suitcases and a hatbox, and fit easily into the Dodge’s huge trunk. While Taylor reorganizes their things in the back of the car, Barbie clutches her square black purse possessively and seems nervous. She yawns and stretches in the way people really don’t do in real life. “I am so tired!” she exclaims. “Can I take a snooze in the backseat?”

Turtle nods, her whole body moving with her head, and moves far to one side of the seat to let Barbie lie down. Alice gets in front and heaves the door shut. It weighs about as much as she does. Taylor seems relaxed in the driver’s seat, even without a specific destination.

From a highway overpass Alice gets a glimpse of the desert that lies around them. “Mercy, look what we’ve got to drive through now,” she says. “A whole lot of nothing.”

Taylor nods. “I think that’s why Las Vegas is the way it is. It’s kind of like the only trash can for a hundred miles, so all the garbage winds up in it.”

“Imagine if you really lived here. I mean born and raised.”

They’ve left the city and are speeding through the suburbs now, row after row of square brick houses with yards that, aren’t even trying. No flowers, barely a bush. At the corner of a deathly quiet intersection, two tough little sunburnt girls have set up a lemonade stand. They aren’t having a great day. A series of descending prices have been marked out on their cardboard sign. Now it says, LEMONADE: WHATEVER

YOU CAN PAY.

“Look at that,” Taylor says. “Socialism has arrived at the outskirts of Las Vegas.”

Alice replies, “Lord, let us pray that it’s so.”

14

FIAT

“WE ARE COMING TO THE FINISH LINE of the human race,” Jax says in the key of D, trying it out. “If you want to see who wins, then don’t be in first place.” Not very satisfying, but he writes it down anyway on the back of an envelope, which happens to be a telephone bill he hasn’t had time to open yet.

Jax is writing the song in Gundi’s Fiat. The car doesn’t have a steering column at the moment, and is parked in what the neighborhood kids call the Retarded Desert, since this piece of land lies between Rancho Copo and a former halfway house for retarded adults. Jax has already written a song called “The Retarded Desert,” so he isn’t concerned about that right now. Like many musicians and other people who have tried out singing in different locales, he feels his voice expresses its best qualities inside a small car. Jax doesn’t have a car of any size, so he borrows Gundi’s. The windows have to be rolled up for acoustical reasons, and since it’s July, Jax is sweating a good deal. His skin reminds him of porpoises. He rolls down the window for a breather. Above his house he can see a hawk with white underwings, riding air currents. It has been there for hours. The sparrows in the apricot tree have achieved perfect stillness, waiting for death, each one hoping to outlast its small feathered neighbor.

Turtle should be here now. She likes to sit in Gundi’s Fiat with him in all seasons except summer, and often contributes verses. Jax feels that children below the age of, say, driving are more lyrical than adults.

He misses Taylor too, badly. She’s been gone twelve days, with no homecoming party in sight. Taylor’s and Jax’s arrangement, sex-wise, is indefinite: Taylor said if Jax felt like being with someone else, that was okay with her, because it was going to be a long haul. “It’s not like we’re married,” Taylor told him, and Jax felt the small green tree that had been growing up in the center of their bed suddenly chopped back to the root. He doesn’t feel fine about Taylor’s being with someone else. He wants her to get his name tattooed on her person, or have his baby. Or both. Jax would like his own baby. He and Turtle could take it to the park, where they go to observe duck habits. He would wear one of those corduroy zipper cocoons with the baby wiggling inside, waiting for metamorphosis. He likes the idea of himself as father moth.