The bottle had leaked a wet ring on the wood, which Lou Ann tried to wipe up with the hem of her jumper. She was concerned about it staining, since the furniture wasn’t actually hers. The house had come furnished. She thought for a long time about what to do with the bottle and finally set it on the glass shelf of the medicine cabinet in the bathroom.

Later, while she was nursing the baby in the front room, she closed her eyes and tried to remember being baptized in Tug Fork. She could see the child in a white dress, her sunburned arms stiff at the elbows, and could hear her cry out as she went over backwards, but she could not feel that child’s terror as the knees buckled and the green water closed over the face. The strong light from the window took on a watery look behind her closed eyelids and she could see it all perfectly. But couldn’t feel it. She thought of her mother and automatically switched the baby to her other breast.

She was still nursing when Angel came home. She opened her eyes. The late-afternoon light on the mountains made them look pink and flat like a picture postcard.

She heard Angel in the kitchen. He moved around in there for quite a while before he said anything to Lou Ann, and it struck her that his presence was different from the feeling of women filling up the house. He could be there, or not, and it hardly made any difference. Like a bug or a mouse scratching in the cupboards at night-you could get up and chase after it, or just go back to sleep and let it be. This was good, she decided.

When he came into the front room she could hear the jingle of his leg.

“They gone?” he asked behind her.

“Yes.”

“I’m packing my shaving stuff,” he said. Angel had a moustache but shaved the rest of his face often, sometimes twice a day. “Did you see my belt buckle? The silver one with the sheepshank on it?” he asked her.

“The what on it?”

“Sheepshank. It’s a rope tied in a knot.”

“Oh. I wondered what that was on there.”

“So did you see it?”

“No. Not lately, I mean.”

“What about my Toros cap?”

“Is that the blue one?”

‘Yeah.”

‘You left that in Manny Quiroz’s car. Remember?”

“Damn it, Manny moved to San Diego.”

“Well, I can’t help it. That’s what you did with it.”

“Damn.”

He was standing close enough behind her so she could smell the faint, sweet smell of beer on his breath. It was a familiar smell, but today it made Lou Ann wonder about bars and the bottling plant and the other places Angel went every day that she had never seen. She turned her head in time to watch him leave the room, his work shirt rolled up at the elbows and dirty from doing something all day, she did not know exactly what. For a brief instant, no longer than a heartbeat, it felt strange to be living in the same house with this person who was not even related to her.

But of course he’s related. He’s my husband. Was my husband.

“What the hell is this?” he called from the bathroom.

She leaned back in the rocking chair where she sat facing east out the big window. “It’s water from Tug Fork, the crick at home that I was baptized in. Me and I guess practically everybody else in my family. Granny Logan brought it for baptizing Dwayne Ray. Wouldn’t you know she’d bring something weird like that?”

She heard the chugging sound of the water as he poured it down the drain. The baby’s sucking at her felt good, as if he might suck the ache right out of her breast.

FIVE

The Republic Hotel was near the exact spot where the railroad track, which at one time functioned as a kind of artery, punctured Tucson’s old, creaky chest cavity and prepared to enter the complicated auricles and ventricles of the railroad station. In the old days I suppose it would have been bringing the city a fresh load of life, like a blood vessel carrying platelets to circulate through the lungs. Nowadays, if you could even call the railroad an artery of Tucson, you would have to say it was a hardened one.

At the point where it entered the old part of downtown, the train would slow down and let out a long, tired scream. Whether the whistle was for warning the cars at the crossings up ahead, or just letting the freeloaders know it was time to roll out of the boxcars, I can’t say. But it always happened very near six-fifteen, and I came to think of it as my alarm clock.

Sometimes the sound of it would get tangled up into a dream. I would hear it whistling through my sleep for what seemed like days while I tried to lift a heavy teakettle off a stove or, once, chased a runaway horse that was carrying off Turtle while she hollered bloody murder (something I had yet to hear her do in real life). Finally the sound would push out through my eyes and there was the daylight. There were the maroon paisley curtains made from an Indian bedspread, there was the orange-brown stain on the porcelain sink where the faucet dripped, there was the army cot where Turtle was asleep, safe and sound in the Republic Hotel. Some mornings it was like that.

On other days I would wake up before the whistle ever sounded and just lie there waiting, feeling that my day couldn’t begin without it. Lately it had been mostly this second way.

We were in trouble. I lasted six days at the Burger Derby before I got in a fight with the manager and threw my red so-called jockey cap in the trash compactor and walked out. I would have thrown the whole uniform in there, but I didn’t feel like giving him a free show.

I won’t say that working there didn’t have its moments. When Sandi and I worked the morning shift together we’d have a ball. I would tell her all kinds of stories I’d heard about horse farms, such as the fact that the really high-strung horses had TVs in their stalls. It was supposed to lower their blood pressure.

“Their favorite show is old reruns of Mr. Ed,” I would tell her with a poker face.

“No! You’re kidding. Are you kidding me?”

“And they hate the commercials for Knox gelatin.”

She was easy to tease, but I had to give her credit, considering that life had delivered Sandi a truckload of manure with no return address. The father of her baby had told everyone that Sandi was an admitted schizophrenic and had picked his name out of the high school yearbook when she found out she was pregnant. Soon afterward the boy’s father got transferred from Tucson and the whole family moved to Oakland, California. Sandi’s mother had made her move out, and she lived with her older sister Aimee, who was born again and made her pay rent. In Aimee’s opinion it would have been condoning sin to let Sandi and her illegitimate son stay there for free.

But nothing really seemed to throw Sandi. She knew all about things like how to rub an ice cube on kids’ gums when they were teething, and where to get secondhand baby clothes for practically nothing. We would take turns checking on Turtle and Seattle, and at the end of our shift we’d go over to the mall together to pick them up. “I don’t know,” she’d say real loud, hamming it up while we waited in line at Kid Central Station. “I can’t decide if I want that La-Z-Boy recliner in the genuine leather or the green plaid with the stain-proof finish.” “Take your time deciding,” I’d say. “Sleep on it and come back tomorrow.”

Turtle would be sitting wherever I had set her down that morning, with each hand locked onto some ratty, punked-out stuffed dog or a torn book or another kid’s jacket and her eyes fixed on some empty point in the air, just the way a cat will do. It’s as though they live in a separate universe that takes up the same space as ours, but is full of fascinating things like mice or sparrows or special TV programs that we can’t see.

Kid Central Station was not doing Turtle any good. I knew that.