“I don’t think so.” Gundi jabs out her cigarette in the china-red bowl by the bed and gets up.

“Hey, whoa, Miss Kitty. I broke the rules, didn’t I?”

“What rules would those be?” Gundi throws open her lacquered armoire and begins putting on more clothes than she has been seen in anytime this year.

“Rules like, when you’re in bed with somebody, even if it’s just a roll in the snow, you tell the woman you’re with that she is the Snow Queen of your Heart.” He folds his hands primly over his penis. “I apologize.”

“I don’t need you to lie to me, Jax. We both know this is nothing.”

Jax lies back with his hands behind his head, trying on the feeling of “this is nothing.” He finds it surprisingly painless.

“Thank you, Jax. I need to paint now. Why don’t you go mop some floors.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he says, making no immediate move from her bed.

“And, your rent is past due.”

“Tyrant,” he says, and steps out her bedroom window with his clothes in his hands.

17

TREASURE

IN THEIR MOTEL ROOM OUTSIDE Carson City, Barbie stands between the two double beds in her white silk pajamas, stubbornly brushing her hair one hundred strokes.

“We could rent another room if you want to pay for it,” Taylor says. “Otherwise, we have to share.” She is using a more patient voice than she would normally use with a person her own age. Like Lucky Buster, Barbie doesn’t strike all the right chords as a true adult. Taylor wonders if this is some new national trend like a crop disease. Failure to mature. Taylor matured at age nine, she feels, on a day she remembers: a Saturday when Alice was cleaning for Mrs.

Wickentot. One of the little Wickentot boys told his friend as they came in the house, “You don’t have to talk to her, that’s the cleaning lady’s girl.” Taylor presses her spine against the imitation wood headboard of the motel bed, still dressed in her T-shirt and jeans. She is thin and leggy like Barbie, but feels like a member of an entirely different species, one that wears canvas sneakers with holes in the toes instead of fluffy slippers with small heels.

“I’ll share a bed with Turtle,” Barbie says, and goes back to her hairbrushing project, frowning intensely.

The four of them have taken one room, as they did the night before in Tonopah, but the sleeping arrangements are awkward this time. The manager here claims he can’t bring in an extra cot because of fire regulations, so they have to share two beds. Barbie feels the most appropriate thing is for herself to share with Turtle, and for Taylor and Alice to take the other bed, but Turtle will have none of it. She’s sitting on Taylor’s legs with a hank of Taylor’s hair wound around one fist like the leash of a wayfaring dog.

“Don’t worry, hon, I won’t bite,” Alice says, clicking off the bedside light and rolling to the far edge. “I’ll probably be up most of the night anyway. I don’t sleep that good since I went through the change of life.”

Barbie sits, bangs her hairbrush down next to her black purse on the night table, and takes off her mules, leaving them crouched like Pekingese littermates on the carpet.

Wordlessly she pulls up the covers.

“Goodnight,” Taylor says. Turtle lets go of Taylor’s hair and happily begins to get ready for bed.

Barbie reaches for her black purse, stuffs it under her pillow, and resettles her head with several irritated heaves. By the time Taylor and Turtle are curled under their own blanket, she is snoring demurely.

Taylor feels pressure on her shoulder and confuses it inside her dream of being chased in a strange landscape, a city where it rains and rains and streets rise suddenly into walls.

In a corner against dark buildings, a cluster of horses look at her, muscles twitching inside the cloth of their damp shoulders. The pressure comes again, and she hears Alice whisper,

“Shhh.”

“What?” The horses, gone. Where is Turtle?

“Shhh. Come here. You’ve got to see this.”

Taylor slowly reassembles her memory of this room. She carefully moves Turtles hand, which feels like a rubber glove tightly packed with flour, from her own arm. “Christ, Mama, what?” she whispers.

She can see nothing but the small outline of Alice moving toward the bathroom. She follows, and Alice closes the door behind them. She clicks on Turtle’s flashlight and Taylor sees silver moons, silver edges and circles. Silver dollars.

Hundreds of them, in the silk-lined cave of Barbie’s black purse.