Pigs in Heaven

But that’s what miracles are, she supposes. The things nobody saw coming.

Her eyes wander while Turtle fiddles. The sun is hot, hot.

Taylor twists her dark hair up off her neck.

“Mom!”

“Sorry.” She drops her arms to her sides, carefully, like a dancer, and tries to move nothing but her eyes. A man in a wheelchair rolls toward them and winks. He’s noticeably handsome from the waist up, with WPA arms. He moves fast, his dark mane flying, and turns his chair smoothly before the angels’ marble pedestal. If she strains her peripheral vision Taylor can read the marble slab: it’s a monument to the men who died building the dam. It doesn’t say who they were, in particular. Another panel across the way lists the names of all the directors of the dam project, but this one says only that many who labored here found their final rest.

There is a fairly disturbing bronze plaque showing men in work clothes calmly slipping underwater. “Poor guys,” she says aloud. “Tomb of the unknown concrete pourer.”

“Working for fifty cents an hour,” the wheelchair man says.

“A bunch of them were Navajo boys from the reservation.”

“Really?”

“Oh, yeah.” He smiles in a one-sided way that suggests he knows his way around big rip-offs like this, a fancy low-paying job that bought these Navajo boys a piece of the farm.

The shutter clicks, releasing Taylor. She stretches the muscles in her face.

“Are you the trip photographer?” he asks Turtle.

Turtle presses her face into her mother’s stomach. “She’s shy,” Taylor says. “Like most major artists.”

“Want me to take one of the two of you?”

“Sure. One to send Grandma.” Taylor hands him the camera and he does the job, requiring only seconds.

“You two on a world tour?” he asks.

“A small world tour. We’re trying to see the Grand Canyon all the way around. Yesterday we made it from Tucson to the Bright Angel overlook.” Taylor doesn’t say that they got manic on junk food in the car, or that when they jumped out at the overlook exactly at sunset, Turtle took one look down and wet her pants. Taylor couldn’t blame her. It’s a lot to take in.

“I’m on a tour of monuments to the unlucky.” He nods at the marble slab.

Taylor is curious about his hobby but decides not to push it. They leave him to the angels and head for the museum.

“Do not sit on wail,” Turtle says, stopping to point at the wall. She’s learning to read, in kindergarten and the world at large.

“On wall,” Taylor says. “Do not sit on wall.”

The warning is stenciled along a waist-high parapet that runs across the top of the dam, but the words are mostly obscured by the legs of all the people sitting on the wall.

Turtle looks up at her mother with the beautiful bewilderment children wear on their faces till the day they wake up knowing everything.

“Words mean different things to different people,” Taylor explains. “You could read it as ‘Don’t sit on the wall.’ But other people, like Jax for instance, would think it means ‘Go ahead and break your neck, but don’t say we didn’t warn you.’ ”

“I wish Jax was here,” Turtle says solemnly. Jax is Taylor’s boyfriend, a keyboard player in a band called the Irascible Babies. Taylor sometimes feels she could take Jax or leave him, but it’s true he’s an asset on trips. He sings in the car and is good at making up boredom games for Turtle.

“I know,” Taylor says. “But he’d just want to sit on the wall. You’d have to read him his rights.”

For Taylor, looking over the edge is enough, hundreds of feet down that curved, white wing of concrete to the canyon bottom. The boulders below look tiny and distant like a dream of your own death. She grips her daughter’s arm so protectively the child might later have marks. Turtle says nothing. She’s been marked in life by a great many things, and Taylor’s odd brand of maternal love is by far the kindest among them.

Turtle’s cotton shorts with one red leg and one white one flap like a pair of signal flags as she walks, though what message she’s sending is beyond Taylor’s guess. Her thin, dark limbs and anxious eyebrows give her a pleading look, like a child in the magazine ads that tell how your twenty cents a day can give little Maria or Omar a

real chance at life. Taylor has wondered if Turtle will ever outgrow the poster-child look. She would give years off her own life to know the story of Turtle’s first three, in eastern Oklahoma, where she’s presumed to have been born. Her grip on Turtle is redundant, since Turtle always has a fist clamped onto Taylor’s hand or sleeve. They cross through the chaotic traffic to the museum.