Taylor leans farther over the rail and makes a splay-fingered megaphone with her hands, to show Turtle this is fun, and will work. “Hey! Youuu! Hello down there, can you hear me? Heyy! Got two dimes for a nickel? Whooo!
Hello!”
From far away over the lake comes the high buzz of a motorboat. Nothing else. Turtle cries without making a sound.
She feels for her mother’s fingers, the one sure thing. They are standing in the dark. Taylor makes the round moon of flashlight go all over the policeman in the chair but he doesn’t wake up. Behind the metal house are machines with long animal necks, and they are sleeping too.
“Hey, mister,” Taylor says, louder. The light slides up his brown shirt and brights out a square name badge. Then his eyes. He wakes up and goes for his gun.
“What the fuck?”
“Excuse me, Mister Decker, but don’t shoot us, okay? My daughter here is six and we’re real defenseless.”
Turtle makes herself feel her mother’s hand. The man gets up and switches on a world of light. A motor sings and cries in the metal house. “What the hell you after?”
“We’d like to report an emergency, okay? Somebody fell into the dam. Into the spillway.”
Mister Decker stares while all his dreams run away.
“He had on a dark shirt, and a green bandana around his head.” Taylor looks down, and Turtle touches her hair.
“And long hair. Dark brown.”
“Intoxicated?”
“We don’t know. It’s not somebody we know, we’re just reporting it.”
Mister Decker fixes his crotch. “When?”
“Around sunset.”
“And you decided to come tell me about it in the middle of the night.”
“There’s nobody at the museum. It took us forever to find anybody.”
“Its fucking Easter Sunday tomorrow. You want a parade?”
“Well, I’m sorry you got stuck on a dog shift, but we’re trying to report a human life in danger here.”
“Sumbitch.”
Taylor clicks her flashlight on and off. “You ever think about a new line of work?”
Mister Decker goes into the shed and makes a phone call.
When he comes back out he asks, “Any more I.D. on this guy? How old?”
Taylor asks Turtle, “How old was he?”
Turtle looks inside her forehead. “Big.”
“Like, a big kid? Or my age? Or older than me.”
“Bigger than a kid. Maybe like you.”
Mister Decker’s whole body slumps suddenly, like a sack with nothing in it. “Are you telling me you personally didn’t see the incident occur?”
“My daughter saw the incident occur.”
“She saw it.” He looks. “You believe in Santa Claus, honey?”
Turtle finds her mother with the front of her face and doesn’t say. Inside her mother she feels the air rising up.
“Sir, you’re intimidating your witness here. She saw what she says she saw. My daughter doesn’t miss much. When your boss gets here she could tell him how hilarious you looked when we found you up here snoring on your shift. So you want to take some happy pills and try acting a little nicer to us, or what?”
Hugo Alvarez, Decker’s boss, looks them over. His office is the kind of no-frills arrangement that goes out of its way to prove the Park Service isn’t wasting taxpayers’ money. Taylor makes herself sit still in the orange plastic chair while Mr. Alvarez takes down the facts. “Your daughter doesn’t look a thing like you,” he notes.
She’s used to this. Strangers stare at the two of them with that inquiring-minds-want-to-know look, wondering if maybe they’ve seen that child on a milk carton somewhere. “She’s adopted,” Taylor says flatly.
“Mexican-American?”
“Indian. Cherokee.”
Mr. Alvarez writes this down on his notepad; apparently its one of the facts.
“The guy might be banged up,” Taylor points out. “Could we speed this up at all”
Mr. Alvarez has a dark fringe around his bald head, and the eyes of an indifferent hound. He states with no apparent emotion, “There’s an eight-foot security fence around the spillway.”
“We don’t know how he got over the fence,” Taylor says, trying to match his tone. The fluorescent lights seem abusive at this hour, and she squints, trying to remember the hillside near the dam. “Maybe he came the other way, down the mountain. Or off the lake.”
“We have security personnel watching that area like hawks.”