Lucky Turtle, page 35
“Meet my son,” Lucky said.
The women were enchanted.
Chapter Sixty-Five
Back at the diplomat’s house, grocery bags in hand, we meant to make a beautiful family dinner, build a fire in the garden chiminea, drink a bottle of red, red wine Ricky had picked out, and just talk till the words once again were gone, plenty of room for the boy to stay with us overnight, and plenty of time in the morning for family brunch.
But at the front door, I couldn’t make the code work. At the back, my medium roller suitcase had been left out by the glass table in the garden. On the door a note:
Madame: Mr. and Mrs. Morris have requested that I change the codes on the locks and ask you to terminate. The reasons are as follow: You said you were a widow, then brought your husband in. You made unauthorized use of rooms and personal items. You left a mess. You disrespected me, the housekeeper. If you have any questions, please call Mr. Slzepkic, the houseman. He is in complete agreement. Don’t worry over the fish or reptilians—though you failed to feed them this morning, I took care. À bientôt indeed, Florita.
My mouth fell open. I read the note aloud to Lucky. You know when you’re totally in the wrong, how you want to be outraged? You want to stamp your foot as if you were the victim? Lucky was so amused at my sputtering he couldn’t contain it. And Ricky, exactly the same. The two of them roared with laughter, dos gotas de agua, as Lucky said, no translation forthcoming, and then me too. So much for an elegant bath, so much for that comfortable bed, those sleek, caressing robes.
But Lucky collected firewood as in any other forest, built a fire in the chiminea while Ricky and I prepped dinner using matched barbecue utensils Lucky found in the shed, super fancy. The wine, thank goodness, was screw top. There were plastic plates and paper napkins in a plastic bin. When the food was ready—grilled stuffed chard leaves like fragile burritos, Ricky gone vegan—Lucky built the fire back up and we sat at the glass table and ate, and talked, and laughed, and let the evening fall, no plan but the food in our mouths, so good, so spicy, the laughter at our lips, the talk, the talk, the talk, years and whole lives to fill in. Not a soul came to bother us. We asked the fire for secret things. Then we cleaned up thoroughly, doused the coals, water from a hose.
Late, Ricky called an Uber. The driver didn’t mind dropping Mom and Dad along the way at an old building in once-maligned Bayview, and Ricky, still laughing, headed back to his roommates across the bay. At Lucky’s door we had to pay an extra twenty-three dollars, lady behind bulletproof glass.
“My wife,” Lucky told her.
“My ass,” the lady said.
I paid and Lucky led me up several flights of steel stairs to a tiny, tidy, salt-sticky room with a steel cot and a grand bay view out a window so narrow it was like an archer’s slot in an ancient castle. Lucky had a duffel, and we stuffed in all his worldly possessions: a voluminous sweater, two more pairs of chef’s pants, no doubt from one of the restaurants on the Radio Flyer tour, two long-sleeved shirts, two short-sleeved, all the same pale coral color, dental-assistant stuff, all nicely laundered and folded. No underwear, not Lucky. A pair of unused eyeglasses, still in the free clinic box. The duffel held it all, and after a difficult descent in the narrow stairway, it was no big deal to terminate Lucky’s weekly lease and trundle in the sweet misty night to the hotel Ricky had helped me book on his magic phone. At the hotel, all that beautiful polished marble now to be seen as surfaces, they asked us to wear provided masks and use globs of sanitizer, some new world coming into view. Upstairs we peeled off the masks and everything else and sat on our bed and held hands in front of yet another view. “Like every room has its own square of the world,” my husband said. “A window’s worth.”
“This is so good,” I said. “This coming down in the world is so vurry good.”
He said, “I miss the fish tank, though.”
“I miss the robes.”
“Yes? Me, I miss my horrible room on the bay.”
“This will take some time, you and me.”
“I think we should go home.”
“Home,” I said. “And what does that even mean anymore?”
He pointed out the window unerringly north-northeast. Montana, of course, that’s what it meant. Just outside this window plus twelve hundred miles, nothing much to hold us here, our kisses no different from Far Turtle Wilderness kisses, and all the rest we got up to that night, no different unless better, these ageless yet aging bodies, this spinning planet, this hushed hotel.
Chapter Sixty-Six
We woke in the night, Lucky kicking in his sleep, and he confessed waking that he wasn’t so sure about family life, nor the idea of Montana. He liked things as they’d been, liked being Outreach, liked life in the city, a man living alone, plenty of time to think. He missed his narrow window, the ocean out there.
“It’s okay to be mad at me,” I said.
“I’m surprised by it,” he said, and he stewed, a subtle thing with him, inward. In the morning, way too early, first light, no further sleep, the room seemed small and hot and confining. Lucky wanted to walk and so we stopped by Harmony House, the night guard still on duty, friendly, fearless person all of five feet tall, big glasses. We collected the Radio Flyer and visited a commercial bakery, not for day-old merchandise as I’d expected but for their daily donation, the underorder, they called it, many big flat boxes of fresh danishes and little cakes and croissants and bagels, all still warm, the Harmony daily breakfast, if you added donated blocks of American cheese and bologna and reconstituted orange juice. We dropped off the pastries and walked more, bag of croissants to tide us, bottles of water, really good coffee from a kiosk, walked clear to Golden Gate Park, the gardens bursting.
“You should meet this lady,” Lucky said, pointing up a hillside.
“What lady?”
The lady in camo coveralls and utterly hidden among the plantings, it turned out, a city gardener named Hill, career position, Lucky said. And now I saw this was no coincidence, that Lucky had had an idea. He introduced us.
I said, “So early!”
Hill was super present, super centered, clear eyed, clean, head shaved both sides, flag of orange in the middle, race indeterminate, certainly all American, flag on her shirt, flag on her neckerchief, flag tattoo on her wrist. She said, “My habit is early and odd hours so as to avoid conversation.”
“Like this one?” I said.
That delighted her. “Yes, just like this one.”
She was planting azaleas among some rocks and we got to talking—I knew quite a lot about azaleas from working with them in Massachusetts, also rocks.
“Just the vibe I’m trying to promote,” Hill said. “A New England summer.”
“Anyone sleeping?” Lucky asked her.
“Yes, dear Outreach, there is a little knot of folks down under the low boughs in the spruce grove, Haight end. Girls and boys, though, so I think they’re just dharma campers. And I saw Big Jack, sleeping on the museum steps, too. Super early.”
So Lucky went off to find Big Jack—and that fear came upon me, that I’d never see my husband again. I cried, want to say briefly, but no.
Hill was taciturn about it—I was such a fem—but waited me out, then just as wordlessly included me in her project. And I knew something about the soil amendments she probably ought to be using and the amount of shade she should seek, the thorough drainage. She moved things where I suggested, and I got into it, relieved to be doing something useful. And loving the talk, which was all plants, nothing but plants. That I’d just arrived in town without prospects, Hill already seemed to know.
After a long time, she said, “Listen, lady, my assistant was promoted and got his own section. They’re hiring—got word Friday—and I’m quite nervous I’ll get a talker or a dum-dum. If you have any interest, go to the city parks website and look for the Careers tab, totally hidden but don’t worry, just keep looking, and apply with me as reference. Kathy Hillman. I can put a strong word in. You’ll have to get certified—Level One is minimum to get hired, but you’re great at this. You just take a class down here at the pavilion. I actually teach it? It’s a career job, great bennies. I rotate some, but this is my park, and this is my section. And if you’re my assistant, it’s your section, too. List your experience as institutional, that’s all. Garden Club volunteer will count. But just say institutional.”
Sometimes a vista opens in front of a person. I said, “Thank you, Kathy Hillman.”
She grimaced, said, “Hill.” And gave me her card. Which said Kathy.
I pointed it out and we laughed.
“Lucky’s been talking you up as long as I’ve known him,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Couple of years at least. I thought he made you up. And yet here you are at last.”
“At last,” I said, once again overcome.
We continued planting. We planted a long time.
I expected Big Jack, some eloquent story from Lucky of why we needed to accompany him back to Harmony, but Lucky returned alone, and from his gait I could see he was no longer inward. He was a little impatient with Hill’s conversation, simply cut her off, wanted to show me a spot, goodbye.
Another long walk, that enormous park, the day getting hotter. I told him about the assistant gardener idea and he was so pleased he picked me up, threw me over his shoulder like we’d used to do, so funny. Still not a soul around, just a brightly dressed jogger or two, aggressive bicyclists in a peloton, a few moms with babies. On a knoll there was a stand of dense shrubs. Lucky put me down and led me ducking through a kind of twig tunnel, and after a long crawl we emerged in a clearing, the eye of the shrubby storm, big flat boulder to climb up on—kids had done so, and the vandals with their paint. “Sometimes I find one of the People in here,” Lucky said.
But no one that day. Perched on the rock and looking north you could see just the tops of the orange bridge. “I used to come here,” Lucky said.
“And just sit?”
“I’d think of you.”
I snuggled close.
“In Kansas I had a spot, too. In the library. After the tutor. Library was always empty. I’d think how you and I were in the wilderness.”
I knew just what he meant. I’d had a spot at the back of our yard in Massachusetts. You’d feel the sun on your face and along with the melancholy a surge of crisp memory, a strong presence. “That time, right? When we’d found the tarn? With the floating floe? You froze your knees.”
He nodded, unsurprised, yes exactly that time, and said, “And also that sort-of sand dune far from any water?”
“Yes, yes, I was just thinking of that. And that place, the moss at the edge of the doe meadow.”
“The high rocks that time? You got a bruise.”
We went on a long while, spots we’d made love. And a little kiss turned into a snog, soon husband and wife wrassling, naked people at the center of that fragrant shrub galaxy.
“If we went home,” Lucky said, stretched out after.
“Yes,” I said.
“We could come back, yes?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes. This is our lodge.”
“Hoppo,” he said gently.
“We decide that together.”
“It is decided,” he said.
My phone buzzed and it was Ricky, proposing via urgent text that instead of meeting at the crowded breakfast spot he’d planned, we meet outdoors. He’d been reading up in the pandemic literature and sounded alarmed: “They’re going to start shutting stuff down.”
We met an hour later farther down in the park, Ricky carrying food.
Lucky and I explained what sitting clover meant, and the three of us sat that way on a picnic table at the head of the park—quite a bit of arranging, big kid—and ate the takeout Ricky had brought, tamales and tiny tacos, delicious. Ate and then sat there like that, back-to-back-to-back, napping a little, one sapped family.
Some indefinite time later, Ricky cleared his throat.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ve been thinking. Lucky, you’re my dad, and so I want to ask some advice of you. I’ve been talking to Dora. Your mother. I know that she makes Mom mad. Maybe you, too? But she’s my grandmother, and I have been talking with her several times each day since we found her. She started it—calling me at all hours. But they are okay talks.”
Lucky’s shoulder blades flexed—sitting clover, you felt the unspoken.
Ricky’s shoulders just felt busy, words falling faster: “Well, she wants me to borrow her car and go to Montana and straighten out this thing with Turtle Butte Ranch. There’s a hearing about the deed. It’s next week. Apparently new laws have been ginned up. Someone has to be there. The deed is in her name, I guess. I’m the one who’s left.”
“You and Lucky, you mean,” I said. “If you own that land, you own it together.”
“The land owns itself,” Lucky said.
Ricky said, “Yes, yes, beautifully said. But the land will be raped, Dad. We have to fight or lose. It’s spring break. They might even be closing campus. The timing is auspicious, Dora says. We three could all go.”
“Son,” Lucky said. Because Ricky had called him Dad.
“Much to consider,” I said. But intrigued: home to Montana, and Ricky along.
Agitated, Ricky got to his feet. “Please!” he cried, for all the world to hear.
And wasn’t the park bustling. Sports teams and more bicyclists and kids off to play tennis, guitar guys and food carts and joggers and cops. Right in front of us an elderly couple stopped in their stroll so the wife could button her husband’s shirt correctly, loving little pat of his face when she got to the top.
“It’s a long ride up there,” Lucky said.
Such a sweet way of saying yes.
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Dora’s car turned out to be an enormous Lincoln, a half-stretched limousine, not particularly new, lustrous bronze, vast in all proportions, square at the edges, polished and gleaming, tall whitewall tires with golden wheels, golden trim all around, the initials DDC on the driver’s door in gold filigree. Upon the death of Dora’s parents, Ricky had informed us (old People magazine article online), she’d regained access to the trust that held her child-acting money, some kind of small fortune, plus their assets, which had only been withheld in life, substantial.
Ricky wanted to drive, wanted Lucky and me in the back, liked the idea of playing chauffeur. My husband slid close to me on that couch of a seat. My impulse was to slide away, but that would have been my family—no one touching, no sign of affection, so. I cuddled up even closer, kissed his shoulder, just as I wanted to do, no hiding it, no withholding. I held both his hands. He leaned deeply into my neck. Ricky drove sensibly, picking his way through those tangled streets, his phone giving directions from his lap, the car all but floating on regal springs. After an eternity, we crossed the Bay Bridge into the future, or at least into Oakland.
“Lot of Native people from all over here,” Lucky called.
Static in speakers above our heads, a startling voice, Ricky’s: “There’s an intercom, just talk.”
I said, “Daddy says lots of Native people.”
“I heard him. People he knows?”
“Some were ours, sure. I’d bring them back and forth if they turned up at Harmony. Most are just living like anyone else, though.”
Ricky said, “Well, maybe anyone else with a foot on their neck.”
Lucky cracked a smile. “Some live pretty well, Mountain Turtle. Though it’s true, some live pretty poor. Some, it’s their own foot on their neck. Not that you’re wrong. That’s a big foot, the one you speak of.”
“One of my math profs at MIT was Cree,” Ricky said.
“Those are tough people,” Lucky said.
“Like the Taishanese,” Ricky said.
“Like my grandfather, sure. He’s the only one I know.”
“There’s a big store in Chinatown. The whole staff’s from there. We’ll go someday.”
The intercom crackled off. The ride was super smooth. Ricky’s eyes were upon us at all the stoplights, so much stopping and going. I felt my cup overflowing, all right.
“Good driving,” Lucky called: he didn’t trust the intercom.
Ricky tipped an imaginary chauffeur’s cap.
At the Berkeley Engineering quad it felt so good to sit out in the car among other parents while our son ran into the Applied Simulation Lab, people from all over the country, judging by the license plates, an orderly evacuation. There were masks, sorry to keep bringing it up, not so many as there’d be soon, but. So many suitcases, so many boxes, so many desktops and outsize monitors, cardboard boxes full of projects, books stacked in arms, so many black portfolios, briefcases, bizarre constructions in every sort of material. Lucky took it all in, no interest in getting out of the car, the stream of students, of parents, of solemnity here, hilarity there. These were the Legos kids, the calculator crowd.
I said, “Mountain Turtle has found his tribe.”
“This is no tribe,” Lucky said. Then, “Reminds me a little of Kansas.”
“Kansas?”
“All this certain kind of building.” Prison, he meant.
I turned his face to me, squeezed his cheeks emphatically: “You’re a college dad, mister. You better think hard about that.”
He laughed, then didn’t, pushed my hand away—everything was funny, sure, but everything was poignant, too, all he’d missed, just is notwithstanding, a lot of pain, all the things that were but that might not have been, and the other way, too. We untangled a bit in that back seat, the windows cracked, the air so hot, an atoll in the storm.
To secure the future, I said, “One day let’s ride bikes around the city.”
Lucky scoffed. “Bikes, never learned.”
“Oh, jeez, it’s easy. We will name them Chickadee and View!”
My husband liked that.
Here came Ricky, box full of notebooks and laptops, twenty or thirty flash drives on colorful lanyards around his neck: his students.
