Moonbird Boy (13 page)

As if nothing had happened, the butterfly rose from the safety of the cholla's spines and drifted upward on a thermal of cooler air rising from the canyon floor. The snake tasted the air with its tongue several times and then withdrew into the hole. Sweating, Bo jammed a rock into the hole's opening and held it there with the heel of her left boot. Her position, she realized with amusement, would test the mettle of a contortionist. Now, if Zachary Crooked Owl would just put on his shirt and leave...

Glancing through the cleft rock once again, she took heart. Apparently Zach had found whatever he was looking for, because he was holding something small between the fingers and thumb of his right hand, staring at it. Then he looked upward to the spot at the canyon's rim where Mort Wagman had died. Suddenly stamping and sending staccato clatters from his wooden rattles bouncing off the canyon walls, he flung back his head, released a guttural scream of rage, and tore the owl's claw from its leather thong about his neck. Bo could see a faint stripe of red where the leather had cut into his flesh.

The owl's claw dropped to the ground as Zach turned and vanished into the path leading up behind the falls overhang. He couldn't see her now, and she clambered stiffly up the ten yards of canyon wall to safety and the short hike back to the car. What she had just seen was puzzling.

Why was Zach dancing alone in the heat? What had he found, and why would he tear off the owl's claw that was his family's fetish? He had told her the claw would be given to Juana or Ojo, Maria Jueh or even little Cunel. It would be given to the one among his children who would grow up to assume leadership of the Neji Band and of Ghost Flower Lodge.

Bo remembered Eva Broussard's words over dinner only yesterday in Ocean Beach. "Quite possibly the Kumeyaay will have to sell." That must be it, Bo thought. The little band of Indians had overextended their resources in building the lodge, and were going bankrupt. Or else Mort's death and the disappearance of Old Ayma had prompted the county to terminate their license as a board-and-care. Either way, it couldn't be allowed to happen.

Bo skirted a particularly vicious outcropping of chollas near the Pathfinder and drank from the water can's spigot. She'd drive to the little desert restaurant where Mort Wagman had eaten his last meal, she decided. She'd grab a sandwich and then go straight to Ghost Flower Lodge for a serious talk with Zachary Crooked Owl.

The Neji, like all the Kumeyaay, were too private and self-contained to elicit help from a dominant culture that had systematically ignored them. They would simply accept whatever came their way with an accommodating fatalism. The other bands of Kumeyaay, she remembered, had fallen easily into the hands of casino sharks and dumping entrepreneurs for that reason. Only the Neji had managed to build something splendid out of their ruined history. And that couldn't be sacrificed.

She'd convince Zach to try a public appeal, borrow money, lobby the state legislature in Sacramento, something. And then they'd walk back down into Yucca Canyon to retrieve the owl's claw bequeathed by John Crooked Owl, who'd cared for his brother Catomka and saved the Neji land by siring a son in his old age.

It was a lovely story, Bo thought as she revved the Pathfinder along the Tule creekbed. And something was trying to kill it. Was that something related to Mort Wagman's murder? Could Old Ayma's disappearance be more than a sad psychiatric accident? And for that matter, could a barking dog on her answering machine have anything to do with the secret that was destroying Ghost Flower Lodge?

"I'm not letting go of this!" she yelled into airy desert silence. "Whoever you are, you're not getting away with it!"

The food at the little desert diner was even worse than Bo remembered. After a few bites of limp salad and stale tortilla, she remembered to take her Depakote with the rest of an orange soda, paid the bill and left. The same waitress who'd sneered at Mort Wagman's medication-induced twitchiness watched Bo's exit with the air of a woman who had a loaded gun behind her counter and wouldn't hesitate to use it.

Bo caught the look and yelled, "Your lettuce might have a chance if you used Tupperware!" through the torn screen door. Later, she mused, she might mail the German strudel cookbook to the diner. In a plain brown wrapper and taped to a ticking clock. She felt alive and competent. An appropriate frame of mind from which to address some serious issues with Zachary Crooked Owl.

Driving toward the lodge through the Neji Reservation land, Bo framed the discussion. First, she wanted a report on the Sheriff Department's findings. What evidence had they found? Were there any suspects? From there she'd bring up licensing. Had the county withdrawn the lodge's board-and-care license because of Mort and Old Ayma? Maybe the lodge had just been placed on probationary status pending an investigation. That was more likely, given San Diego County's epic disinterest in funding services for poor people additionally burdened with psychiatric illness. The county's board-and-care licensing staff would be too overburdened with work to investigate Ghost Flower for months unless there were a public outcry. And there would be no public outcry because nobody would care what happened to a bunch of lunatics holed up in the desert.

Next, Bo planned, she'd ask Zach about Ghost Flower's finances. Exactly who was the private funding source he'd mentioned when she asked how the new building had been financed? And why was Ghost Flower Lodge now in danger of having to sell? Why? What had happened?

Her own month-long stay at the lodge, Bo calculated, had cost about three thousand dollars. Inexpensive by any standard for psychiatric care but still a respectable source of income for the Neji, all of whom lived in or near the lodge, and all of whom lived simply. If only half the fourteen guests who'd been recuperating at Ghost Flower with her were paying, the Neji would still gross about twenty-five thousand dollars a month, including small county welfare and Social Security benefits for the other seven guests.

None of the Neji received salaries. Their work was simply a part of their communal life. And the psychiatrists who prescribed and supervised the medications for those who couldn't afford private doctors worked as volunteers, earning substantial tax write-offs in the process. So where, Bo pondered, was the money going? How could the Neji have reduced themselves to bankruptcy? It didn't seem possible.

A dust cloud moving rapidly along the road from Ghost Flower's gate captured Bo's attention. Somebody was leaving the lodge. She slowed to allow the car, a gunmetal gray limousine, to pull onto the road in front of her. In the back seat were two men, one of them a large black man with a single braid hanging over the back of his suit jacket. Zach.

"Damn," Bo muttered, pounding the steering wheel with the heel of her right hand. "And what's he doing in a suit?" The image, even from the back, was that of a bear crammed into a lawyer's costume. Zach's companion was younger and shorter, but also dressed more formally than could be expected among the desert's coyotes and equally dangerous plants.

Bo allowed the Pathfinder to fall behind the limo, and followed. The road went nowhere except to a junction with Interstate 8, where the choices of destination were limited to west toward San Diego, or east toward El Centro. The latter featureless desert way station bearing no distinction save being the birthplace of a singer named Cher, Bo was certain that Zach and his companion were being driven to San Diego. But why? Ghost Flower had its own four-wheel-drive vehicle, and many of the Neji had their own cars and trucks. A chauffeured drive down the hill was wholly out of character for Zach. What was going on?

When the ostentatious car turned west on I-8, so did Bo. It was easy to track the limo from the Pathfinder's high cab. And Zach had never seen Bo's car. Even if he happened to glance back through the smoked glass he wouldn't recognize it, wouldn't know she was following.

"I'm not really following him," she remarked to the dashboard. "This is just the easiest way to get home."

But when the limo finally turned south on I-5 after the long trip down into the heart of San Diego, Bo turned, too. Impossible to quit now. There was something heady about tracking another person, knowing things you weren't supposed to know. Something arrogant about it, also something mildly shifty. In her sunglasses and straw hat Bo felt deliciously sneaky, a spy on a covert mission. She wished she had a cloak. And a dagger.

The limo then edged into a lane marked "Airport," and minutes later discharged its passengers at the East Terminal curb. Quickly parking in the short-term lot, Bo dashed into the airport terminal through another set of doors.

Zach and the shorter man were browsing at a newsstand, glancing occasionally toward the nearest gate, leased to Southwest Airlines. Either they were meeting someone or they were going somewhere, she thought.

A brilliant leap of logic, Bradley. Now what?

Burying herself amid a tour group of Midwestern retirees wearing Disneyland Tshirts, Bo studied the airline's departures monitor. The next Southwest flight, boarding in ten minutes, was going to St. Louis. Over the beefy shoulder of a sunburnt septuagenarian in a John Deere cap Bo watched as Zach paid for a bag of M&M's and then walked with his companion through the Southwest gate. So Zach was going to St. Louis. Gone, in fact.

The moment tasted erroneous, futile. Nothing made any more sense than it had before this wild-goose chase, and now she was standing pointlessly in an airport terminal amid hundreds of people whose behavior actually had direction. The contrast was dizzying.

Worse, a familiar, nasty shadow had materialized near the baggage claim area and was roiling toward her like a dry mist. It was the texture of her inadequacy, an enveloping pointlessness. Following Zach had been dumb, she realized. She'd learned nothing except that all her attempts to avenge the death of a brother like some classical goddess who lived on figs and wine were producing nothing. And she hated figs.

The encroaching shadow was the damn depression again, she knew. It was soaking up the light, sinking toward her with every breath. The bad play. Despair of the Rutabaga. The fine gray foam continued its breathless progress.

"If you see the gray cloak of her Down the boreen," her grandmother's voice echoed in her head,

"Let you close the door softly

And wait there unseen.

"For if she comes in on you

Never you'll part,

Till the fire burns out

In the core of your heart."

It was an Irish poem her grandmother had recited, one of many about sadness and sorrow. A warning. Sorrow in her gray cloak was coming down the boreen, all right. But where was the door to close softly and wait there unseen? The only "door" in the full metaphoric sense that Bo could see was the one leading to an airplane bound for St. Louis. An obvious choice over the lifelong companionship of sorrow. What the hell.

Dashing to the ticket counter, Bo smiled at the Irish poetic facility with mood. It was like a wordless language, she thought, another experience entirely that Ireland's sons and daughters would forever attempt to articulate. The Southwest ticket agent nodded that there were plenty of seats on the St. Louis flight, and took her credit card as the shadow dissolved into luggage and people and ordinary airport noise.

In a nearby gift shop Bo bought a hideous scarf with "San Diego—America's Finest City" printed over a tropical beach scene, and a tube of lipstick in a wine-red color that clashed with her hair, skin, and sense of propriety. After tying the scarf over her hair and slathering on the lipstick, she replaced her sunglasses and straw hat. With luck, Zach wouldn't recognize her.

And he didn't. Once aboard the plane, she'd grabbed a magazine, blanket, and two pillows for further camouflage as she walked past the big man and his companion. The other man seemed oddly familiar, but she couldn't place him. A nondescript, shortish guy with thick, mouse-brown hair and a darker mustache, he merely sat with his hands on his knees, staring into the seat back before him.

Zach had wadded a fist beneath his chin, and was watching through the window as the ground crew loaded last-minute baggage. From their body language Bo concluded that the two men were not friends and were not taking this trip for fun. A sense of irritation surrounded them like a weak electric field. Other passengers straggling onto the plane universally glanced at them in passing, and then quickly looked elsewhere.

Bo found two unoccupied seats in the back of the half-empty plane, and stretched across them beneath her blanket to rest. Someone wearing a musky cologne had obviously used the blanket on a previous flight. Bo pulled it over her face and tried to doze, images of honeymooning rodents drifting across her mind from the scent.

Much later it seemed that the rodents were on television, or one of them was, following a shark. The shark was already gone, and the rodent was a criminal. Bo knew she was dreaming, and the dream was one of those boring, aimless productions her subconscious choreographed for its own entertainment.

The knowledge brought an awareness of cramped long legs and itchy upholstery against her sunburnt left arm. She was on a plane. She was going to wake up and stretch. Except there was something about that criminal rodent, something familiar. In the last moments before fully wakening, Bo saw that it had thick, dull hair and a mustache that didn't match. It was a man, and she'd seen him on a TV screen right after a story about a shark.

"Wow," she breathed to herself as she sat up. The man with Zach was the organized crime figure some agency was investigating for illegal involvement in Indian gambling casinos. The story had been on the news the night before Mort died, right after the more riveting description of a young woman's death from a shark attack. None of them had paid much attention to the man. Bo was sure she hadn't even heard his name.

In the phone-booth-sized bathroom Bo freshened her garish lipstick and frowned into the mirror. Zach must be selling out, she thought. Sacrificing the Neji to organized crime, turning Ghost Flower into a casino! The thought made her maroon lip curl in distaste. From the mirror a grotesque mask stared back, an Ensor painting of dissolute carnival revelers losing the battle with death. Ghost Flower had been a garden for people like her, a haven, a place of quiet understanding. The debasement of that garden debased her!