Jax looks at the napkin in his hand that says, “Super urgent emergency, call Taylor.” For once, Lou Ann hasn’t exaggerated. He would give the world to know how to answer the call.
Something about the Seattle locks is reminiscent of the Hoover Dam. Taylor notices it right away, as they approach through a little park. The gate and entrance building have the same sturdy, antique look. Turtle has noticed too. “Remember those angels?” she asks.
“I sure do,” Taylor says. “I was just thinking about those guys.”
“What angels?” Steven asks.
“The guardian angels of the Hoover Dam,” Taylor tells him. “They’re sitting on this memorial for the people who died building it. Turtle and I were just there, not too long ago.”
“You like public works, do you?” he ask Turtle.
“Uh-huh. I saw Lucky Buster fall down a big hole. We saved him, but then we had to run away from the Indians.”
Steven laughs. “She’s going to be a writer someday,” he tells Taylor.
“Could be.” Taylor squeezes Turtle’s hand, a secret message. In her other hand she’s holding Steven’s umbrella, trying to give all three of them some protection from the drizzle. She feels a little self-conscious. It’s the first time she has been on a date with two people whose heads reach about to her waist. She doesn’t know whether to put her hand on Steven’s chair, or just walk alongside. She was relieved when he popped open the umbrella and handed it to her.
They pass through the entry and Turtle runs a few feet ahead, for once excited, her black pigtails swinging like runaway jump ropes. She looks tall and impossibly thin in her new stretch kneepants and T-shirt and heavy white sneakers. It seems to Taylor as if something is pulling on Turtle’s feet at night—she gets taller, but doesn’t fill in. And her skin doesn’t seem right. The worry surfaces at the front of Taylor’s mind only at times like this, when she can watch Turtle with her full attention.
Inside the lock area, the three of them wait next to the rope, looking down into a long channel of water with a gate on either end. Despite the rain, there are jolly couples out boating: two sailboats already inside the lock, steadied by ropes, and a slender, aggressive-looking speedboat just now maneuvering itself in from the sound. A man in blue overalls directs the operation. Once everyone is secured, an alarm bell rings, the gate closes, and water rushes into the lock from underneath. The boats rise slowly on the crest of the engineered tide, from sea level to lake level. Taylor watches the voyagers bob like bathtub toys. “I guess around here you can’t wait for a sunny day to go boating.”
“You’d be waiting awhile,” Steven says. “You should have seen it on the Fourth of July. Raining cats and dogs, and the traffic through here was still unbelievable. He had thirty or forty boats packed in at a time, like cars in a parking lot, all tied to each other.”
“That sounds cozy.”
“It was. There weren’t three square feet of wasted space.
You could have walked across, stepping from one deck to another. That guy is unbelievable,” he says, pointing to the man in coveralls. “He can figure out how to pack forty boats in a quarter-block area, and then get them out again, without wasting an inch or a minute. He’s got spatial skills that could get him into MIT.”
“Is that so surprising? That a guy in overalls is brilliant?”
“Well, it’s just ironic, considering what he gets paid.”
“What do you think he gets paid?”
“I don’t know, but I’m sure it’s next to nothing.”
Taylor already knew this, somehow. “I guess he should have gone to MIT,” she says, feeling wounded, even though Steven has said nothing that could rightfully offend her.
The boats are nearly up to lake level now. The gate to the lake slowly opens and water rushes in, curling itself into eddies that make the boats rock from bow to stern. Steven leads Taylor and Turtle across the bridge to the other side.
“Now we get to see how the salmon do it,” he says.
“Do what?” Turtle asks, looking at Taylor.
“Don’t ask me. Ask him.”
“Get from the ocean up into the lake,” Steven says. “They live in the ocean all year, but then they have to swim back up into the rivers where they came from, to lay eggs.”
“I’ve heard of that,” Taylor says. “I heard they have to go back to the exact same place they were born.”
“I don’t know that they have to,” Steven says. “Seems like they just always want to. Like all of us, I guess.”