Moonbird Boy (2 page)

encounters had a human perished. So why would this shark choose to kill this human on an October afternoon off the coast of San Diego, thereby joining a statistically improbable short list of gilled killers? Something about the story, Bo mused, seemed unlikely. The newsman capped his show with a cheerful description of four hundred "Christian family advocates" rallying to terminate public health care for single mothers and anyone else who "chose sin over righteousness."

"Mort's starving. Time to get dressed for dinner," Estrella said, grimacing at the TV. "He says this place we're going to is pretty casual, so just slacks and a top will do."

"I am dressed," Bo said, demonstrating the fact by tugging on a fold of lank T-shirt. "And remind me not to watch the news again this year."

"Well, you're not naked," Estrella agreed fondly, "but you're a mess. Get cleaned up or we'll have to eat in the car."

The predictable standoff between psychiatric outsider and insider over the issue of appearance. Bo glanced at her friend's shining dark hair and the starched white maternity blouse lying in folds over Estrella's expanding middle. The effort necessary to construct a tidy outward appearance, Bo thought, could be overwhelming when all your energy was consumed by arduous tasks like standing up and walking from one piece of furniture to another. She calculated that the achievement of a normal standard for appearance would probably take her about three days.

"I don't mind eating in the car," she said hopefully.

"Dr. Broussard says this is important," Estrella replied with finality. "Come on. I'll help you."

"My psychiatrist harbors a secret desire to sell overpriced makeup in department stores. You should ignore her."

"You're getting out of here in a day or two," Estrella sighed. "You can't come back to work looking like a used shoelace. This is practice. Let's go."

A half-hour later Bo allowed Estrella to blow-dry her freshly washed silver and auburn curls in the bathroom Bo shared with another guest known only as Old Ayma. Crusty Old Ayma, the facility's current albatross.

Bo had tried but couldn't bring herself to like the towering black woman. With her layers of musty shawls and veils and her habit of muttering angrily at invisible antagonists, Old Ayma was a walking stereotype of mental illness. Bad PR. The very image they were all fighting to overcome. Another guest told Bo he'd heard that Old Ayma lived on the street, that she'd been arrested for harassing the guest tenor at one of the Sunday afternoon organ concerts in San Diego's Balboa Park. Since she wasn't really a "danger to herself or others" the county psychiatric hospital wouldn't admit her and the police had phoned Zachary Crooked Owl out of desperation. And Zach's wife, Dura, had driven the sixty miles down into San Diego to get the old woman.

But Bo had seen Ayma "cheeking" her meds, pretending to swallow the pills that might help her and then secretly spitting them out. A lot of the younger people did that, before they'd accepted the truth about what was wrong. Bo had done it herself when she was young. But Ayma was so obnoxious ... Bo shook her head and tried not to think about the old woman. She was glad Estrella hadn't seen Ayma. Too embarrassing.

"You can't tell me you don't feel better, even though you need a haircut," Estrella said as Bo selected a navy poplin blazer from her closet and switched off the light. "It's obvious that you feel better."

"Appearance isn't everything." Bo smiled, suspecting that it probably was. "Let's go eat."

Half an hour later she surveyed the interior of a restaurant that had once been a gas station as Mort Wagman smiled conspiratorially over an O'Doul's. The decorating motif reflected a Western theme featuring framed barbed wire samples orange with rust and an abundance of bovine skulls.

"Maybe we should just have eaten dinner back at the lodge," Henry said. "This table's sticky and I'm afraid the ceiling fan's going to fall on us."

"Oh, no, this is just great," Bo and Mort insisted in unison.

"Really good for us to get out!" Mort went on.

"And I hear they have great refried beans," Bo added, ignoring Estrella's look of sheer disbelief.

California's child protection laws, exhaustive in their intent to avert harm, were actually responsible for the presence of the Benedicts, Bo, and Mort Wagman in a high desert eatery so desolate a tumbleweed had blown in the door with their arrival. When Estrella heard that Bo's friend Mort would be leaving Ghost Flower the next day, again stabilized on his medications, she had insisted on joining them and the other patients at the lodge for dinner to say good-bye. And that, Bo had explained to Mort, could not be.

"I think I'm technically off the hook as a mandated reporter as long as I'm in a licensed psychiatric facility," she told him the day before. "I'm technically nuts. But Estrella isn't. In California anybody who has regular contact with children is legally mandated to report any suspicion of child abuse, anywhere. Failure to do so can result in fines and a jail sentence. Estrella and I are employed by San Diego County to investigate cases of child abuse. Es will have to report that Bird is here with you."

Mort had pushed the mirrored sunglasses he wore day and night up into the long, dense black hair that had prompted the Indians to nickname him Raven, and hugged his son. The wiry little boy pulled away and rolled like a hedgehog under the pool table as his father replied.

"Keeping Bird with me here, where there were several other adults to care for him when I couldn't, isn't child abuse," he said quietly. "What does your system want parents who have psychiatric illness to do, give their kids away?"

"It isn't my system," Bo had answered. "I don't have systems. But if Estrella eats dinner here she'll see Bird and find out he's yours. Red flags will go up. A sick parent can't take care of a kid, and besides, when most people hear 'psychiatric rehab facility' they imagine gaunt, wild-eyed people in rags, chained to stone walls while screaming obscenities. Not exactly something a kid should see."

"There isn't a serviceable stone wall anywhere in Southern California and besides, Bird sees worse things every night on television." Mort laughed without humor. "Some of them are commercials I do. And this isn't a hospital emergency room. Everybody except Old Ayma is mellow, just recuperating. But why don't we duck the whole thing by inviting your friends to go out?"

Bo had glanced at the two-foot-thick rammed-earth walls of Ghost Flower Lodge, beyond which lay nothing but five thousand acres of unpopulated high desert—the Neji Indian Reservation.

"Out where?" she asked.

"Zach will know of someplace." Mort grinned, gesturing to the lodge's director, Zachary Crooked Owl. "Zach, baby," he'd asked in a flawless mockery of Hollywood patois, "where can Bo and I take some sane people out to dinner around here?"

There was a diner a couple of miles from the reservation, Zach said, but it was a dump. Bo and Mort had been delighted.

As Henry perused a handwritten menu in its cracked plastic slipcase, Bo pondered a framed announcement on the restaurant's wall.

"BEWARE THE DESERT!" it warned in block letters above a black-and-white photo of a dead, mummified body half covered with blown sand. The man's shriveled hands looked like claws emerging from his faded shirt cuffs. Vultures had left only blackened indentations where his eyes had been, and in one sand-filled socket a tiny cholla cactus displayed its murderous spines to the camera. Below a list of desert safety tips was the logo of San Diego County's Backcountry Sheriff"s Department.

Bo sighed and tried to distract Estrella from the poster.

"I saw it when we came in," Estrella said. "Don't think about it."

"You shouldn't be looking at it," Bo answered, eyeing Estrella's bulging waistline. "It's not good for the baby."

Estrella shook her head and grinned. "Three weeks out here and you think like an Indian, old wives' tales and all."

"Yep," Bo agreed. Zach's wife, Dura, was a fountain of folk wisdom and never tired of telling stories. According to Dura an ancient Kumeyaay woman had spent her entire pregnancy trying not to see anything unpleasant that would mark her baby. "You can't touch guns, either, or the sights will go crooked," Bo went on. "Same for arrows."

"World peace through pregnancy." Estrella nodded. "If only it were true, we could end all wars just by organizing teams of pregnant women to fondle their heat-seeking missiles. I love it!"

"So, Mort," Henry interrupted uncomfortably, "Bo has told us you do TV commercials. What's the most recent one?"

Bo watched Mort Wagman smile his full-lipped smile inside the fashionable stubble of a two-day beard.

"Athletic shoes," he crooned. "The big bucks. The gig I went off my meds for."

"You went off your medications to do a commercial?" Estrella gasped. "I thought you had schizophrenia, and—"

"And nobody in his right mind would risk going back into that hell for anything," Mort finished and then took a pull on his nonalcoholic beer. "Except the Raven here. Except for the right money, the really huge money, the fuckin' mother-money of all time, dig? These guys just love insanity. Their market, teenage boys mostly, gets off on it. I'd already done three commercials just acting crazy. But this time I sold them the real thing, and they paid for it."

Under the table his right leg was jiggling nervously, a side effect of the medications he was taking again. The side effect would wear off in a few weeks, but meanwhile it gave him a twitchy, Hollywood-killer aura. Bo could see the waitress eyeing him with distaste.

"The next SnakeEye shoe promotion you see," he finished, twitching his ponytail over a shoulder, "will feature a real psychotic crawling around under the bleachers chewing on the basketball star's sneakers, not the usual half-baked fake. It's so high-concept the competition will wet themselves, I get rich, and nobody with a grain of human decency will ever buy another pair of SnakeEye shoes. This gig is my gift to posterity."

And a way to assure your son's future, Bo thought, but said nothing. Something in Mort's eyes suggested there might be another reason as well. A look of personal triumph, confidence. She wondered what it meant.

"My God," Henry breathed, "that's horrible!"

"Yeah," Mort said, grinning. "Don't ya love it?"

"That business about the shark was pretty horrible, too," Estrella said, deliberately changing the subject. "It's like Jaws right here in San Diego."

Bo glanced out the smudged glass door into desert darkness. "Nice to know it doesn't have anything to do with us," she mused aloud. "That shark isn't our problem at all."

But the words sounded hollow and the blackness against the glass outside seemed to shiver as if it were giggling. Just a spook of the depression, Bo told herself. There could be, after all, no sharks in the desert.

By nine o'clock Bo was glad to see the reassuring outlines of Ghost Flower Lodge silhouetted against the mountains as the group returned from dinner. Behaving normally, tracking and joining a conversation shared by four people, had been exhausting. So had the effort to disguise the fact that canned-chicken tacos and greasy refried beans held about as much appeal as a plate of pond scum. A serious depressive episode, she acknowledged, could be an effective weight-loss program. Nothing tasted good and what was the point in eating anyway? It only prolonged the inevitable. After hugging Estrella and Henry good-bye she headed for the solace of her room, only to find Zachary Crooked Owl waiting for her.

As was the way with all the Indians who ran the lodge, Zach said nothing but merely sat on the thick window ledge fingering the owl's claw he wore on a leather thong around his neck. His massive body filled the arched opening like a buffalo seen through a keyhole, and his dark skin seemed to absorb the dim light.

"Zach," Bo said. "I'm tired."

He merely nodded without noticeable movement of the wiry braid resting on the back of his denim shirt. He'd say whatever he had to say when it felt right, Bo knew. The Kumeyaay who owned and ran the lodge all did that, a practice eminently suited to the needs of their frazzled guests. Leaving the door open, she settled into the room's only chair to wait.

It was a requirement that doors remain ajar when a man and a woman were alone in a room at Ghost Flower Lodge. One of the many old-fashioned Indian rules designed in a more realistic past when it wasn't politically correct to ignore the danger inherent in the nature of things. Zachary Crooked Owl wasn't dangerous, but Bo approved of the rule. Like the rammed-earth building with its massive walls and courtyard fountain, the rule made her feel safe.

"Ahh," Zach exhaled sadly, apparently lost in his own thoughts. Then he continued to sit in silence.

She'd been a little surprised when Eva Broussard first introduced her to Ghost Flower's Kumeyaay Indian director, who was also black, but at the time her depression had precluded any interest in the anomaly. Later she'd learned that the anomaly existed only in her mind.

"The poor living in city streets aren't so poor that a woman can't trade sex for the protection of a man from other men," Dura explained after Bo had been at Ghost Flower Lodge for a few days. "That's always there when she hasn't got anything else left to sell. Lots of street people are black, lots are Indian. The children they make are black Indians. And no tribe will refuse a home to a child whose mother can claim membership, whether that child has red hair and freckles like you or black skin like my husband. Except that it was his father who was Indian, not his mother. And that is why Zach has his own story."

That afternoon this tag line had pulled children from all over the lodge to Dura as if she'd blown a whistle. Sun-bronzed Indian children of the Neji Band of Kumeyaay, Dura and Zach's darker brood with their curly hair, who were also members of the band, and Mort's pale little boy, Bird, all ran to fling themselves on the floor at Dura's feet. Bo had been reminded of Pavlov's experiments with dogs. Except these weren't dogs, she noted, but people. And the reward for their response would be the ultimate human treat—a story.