Someone is coming toward him in a hurry through the Retarded Desert; it’s Gundi, his landlady and owner of the Fiat. She has clothes on today. She moves fearlessly among her intimate friends, the cacti, and waves a small green slip of paper toward him. He doesn’t get out of the car, but puts down his portable keyboard and sits with his elbow out the window, like a driver waiting for a long line of traffic to pass.
“A registered letter for you, Jax,” Gundi says in her purple silk voice with its foreign, deeply emphasized r’s. She hands him the green slip, but he is still listening to the dark carved valleys of her r’s: “A registered letter for you.” If his name were Robert, the sentence would have been musically perfect.
“This is a letter?” he asks eventually.
She laughs, a purple silk laugh. “You have to sign that.
Come, Bill is waiting. He says he can’t give the letter to anyone but you. It must be very important.”
Jax totes his keyboard and follows her “vurry im pohr tant”
back over Gundi’s invisible path of safety through the desert.
She moves snakishly, her blonde hair strumming the ridges of her shoulder blades. She’s wearing leather sandals of the type worn by practitioners of yoga and pacifism, though the rest of her outfit is more aggressive: something in the line of a black brassiere, he can’t get the full picture from behind, and a skirt made up of many long, satisfactorily transparent scarves.
Bill the mailman stands patiently in his blue shorts on the entry patio of Gundi’s stone house. He has left a large pile of letters and catalogs in the little grotto by her door, where all residents of Rancho Copo come to collect their mail. The stone grotto was formerly a shrine, but Gundi removed the Virgin long ago and put in one of her own sculptures, a bright-colored dancing dog with a parrot in its mouth.
“Mr. Jax Thibodeaux?” the mailman asks.
“I am he.” If Jax had a hat on, he could take it off and bow.
“Can you show some form of identification?”
Gundi says, “Oh, yes, of course, this is Jax,” waving lazily to make everything agreeable, and the letter is left in Jax’s hand. Gundi kisses Bill, who is not particularly young, on the cheek before he goes. Being European in origin, Gundi kisses everyone, probably even the exterminators who show up from time to time to rid her foundations of termites.
“Well, Jax, come in, you have to share your mystery.”
The letter is from Oklahoma, on stationery belonging to the Cherokee Nation. Jax doesn’t care to read the letter in front of Gundi’s black brassiere, but he follows her into the cave of her entry hall, and then into the light of her sun-struck studio. The rest of the odd little houses of Rancho Copo are falling down by degrees, but Gundi has done a lot of remodeling here in the main house. The windows across the west wall reach all the way to the high ceiling, framing a dramatic view of the mountains.
“Sit here,” she commands, pointing to the turquoise cushions of the long window seat. Jax puts down his keyboard and sits at one end of the window seat, his back resting against the deep windowsill, his legs stretched out on the turquoise cushions. He holds the letter at arm’s length, looks at Gundi, and drops it on the knees of his jeans.
“It’s bad news, I’ll share that much of my mystery without further ado.” He crosses his arms.
Gundi rests her weight on one sandal, a little uncertainly.
“Then I will leave you and go make a pot of raspberry tea.
When I come back you have to tell me what is so important and terrible that you have to prove with identification you’re Mr. Jax Thibodeaux.” She pronounces it correctly, “Tee-badoe,” the first person in years to do so, but Jax tries not to be too grateful; it may just be an accident on Gundi’s part, a result of being foreign-born.
When she’s gone, he slits one end of the envelope and sees the same seal on the letter inside, Cherokee Nation, an eight-pointed star inside a wreath of leaves.
Dear Jax,
I’m glad I met you in Tucson. I feel you’re a person with careful thoughts and a kind spirit. I want to tell you frankly that I’m worried about Turtle. I’ve spoken with Andy Rainbelt, a social psychiatrist who works with Cherokee children, and he authorized me to write on behalf of our Social Welfare Department. It’s premature to take legal action yet, he says, but it’s extremely important for Taylor to be in contact with the Nation; there are things she needs to know. I trust you’ll get this information to her.
It’s difficult, I know, for non-Native people to understand the value of belonging to a tribe, but I know you care about problems Turtle will face on her own. I appeal to you on those grounds. Adopted Native kids always have problems in adolescence when they’re raised without an Indian identity.