Moonbird Boy (3 page)

"John Crooked Owl," Dura had begun that day many weeks ago, pointing to an amateurish oil painting of an old but bright-eyed Indian man over the lodge's stone fireplace, "once had a brother named Catomka. But something happened to Catomka. Something sad. In the old days the people believed in witches, and they said a witch had put a special stone in a spring that is in our mountains. A very terrible stone."

In the dramatic pause the children's eyes grew somber.

"This stone could hurt people's minds if they drank the water. This stone could make people hear voices that nobody else could hear, and see things that nobody else could see. This stone could make it so people couldn't think!"

Bo had thought she was just listening to a children's story, but her eyes filled with tears as she realized what was really being taught. The children, who had obviously heard the story many times, shook their heads sadly.

"But John Crooked Owl's brother, Catomka, drank from that spring," Dura continued. "Which is just a story-way of saying he got an illness in his brain. And Catomka heard voices that nobody else could hear, and saw things that nobody else could see, and couldn't think right anymore. And so his brother, John Crooked Owl, took care of Catomka for a long time until Catomka died. He took care of Catomka right here on his own land, the Neji land. John Crooked Owl cared for his brother, Catomka, until Catomka died and John was very old. Do you want to know what happened next?"

Embarrassed, Bo had caught herself answering, "Yes," along with the children.

"John Crooked Owl was the last of the Neji Band, the last of the Kumeyaay people who lived on this land. He never married because he had to care for his brother, and so he had no children. If he died, there would be no one to inherit the land, and the United States government would take the land and own it. It wouldn't be Kumeyaay land anymore."

"Nooo," the children whispered.

"So John Crooked Owl walked down into San Diego and looked and looked for a wife to love and have his baby even though he was an old man. But the people there just thought he was a stupid old Indian, too silly to talk to."

"Hah!" came a chorus of small voices.

"Finally John Crooked Owl was ready to give up and go home alone, when he found a lovely black lady who was running from a bad man and had no food and no place to sleep. Her name was Bea and she came here with John Crooked Owl to hide from the bad man and they began to take care of other people who were like Catomka. People who had no one to care for them. After a while Bea had a baby boy with John Crooked Owl, and they named him Zachary. He grew up and Bea went away and John Crooked Owl died, but Zachary Crooked Owl stayed. And that is how the Neji Band and the Kumeyaay land were saved. And that is why we care for people who are like Catomka at Ghost Flower Lodge to this very day."

"Wow," Bo breathed as the children whooped and ran back to whatever they'd been doing. She'd enjoyed the story. Now she thought of it again as the man sitting in her window turned to face her.

"What are your thoughts?" Zach asked softly, his words breaking the silence like stones slipping into water.

"I was thinking about your parents, the story Dura tells the children."

"Is there something you want to know?"

Bo stretched in the darkness, no longer quite so tired.

"Who was the bad man Bea was hiding from?" she asked.

"Her pimp," Zach answered, pronouncing the word in a way that made it sound like a balloon full of poison. "He was also her brother."

"Where did she go?"

The big man placed one hand gently against the horizontally banded earthen wall as if touching a face. Then he nodded.

"My father told me she went 'down the hill' as we say, back into San Diego. She had become very strong inside herself after many years in these hills, but there was still a bitterness. My father heard that my mother's brother had been released from prison and had come back to San Diego. He heard that my mother found her brother and killed him with a knife, but no one really knows if that's true or not. We never saw her again."

Bo felt another question leap unexpectedly from the darkness inside her.

"Was it hard for you when she left?" she asked.

"I was ten years old, nearly a man. But I still remember her voice, the way she held me all night in her arms when I had whooping cough, the songs she'd sing. I'm forty now, only a year younger than you are. I still remember. There's no way to stop missing love that's gone, Bo. Which is why I'm here."

"I don't want to talk about it," Bo said, tight-lipped. "I'm doing fine on the meds; I'm almost ready to go back to work. It's a depressive episode. I have to expect that when... when these things happen."

Soundlessly the big man slid from the window and placed a hand in Bo's long, tousled hair. "I'm not talking about the part your meds can control," he said. "I'm talking about your heart."

Bo felt a familiar convulsion of grief. What was Zach trying to do, send her over the edge again?

"I've lost my best friend and I have to go on living," she pronounced in a voice that wavered like the bands of earth that comprised the walls. "What else is there to say?"

"That you must grieve or you can't go on living in the right way," Zach answered. "The Kumeyaay, the Yuma, the Cahuilla, the Chemehuevi—all the peoples of this region— have known this and made special ceremonies for grieving. The details have been lost over the years when we were not allowed to speak our languages or perform our ceremonies, but enough has been passed down. We can do a kind of Kurok, a Kumeyaay grieving ceremony, for you tonight if you will permit it. I decided on tonight so that your friend Raven could be with you before he leaves tomorrow. And your psychiatrist, Blindhawk, is also here."

Bo had no idea how her shrink, a half-Iroquois French-Canadian transplant to Southern California, had learned about Ghost Flower Lodge. But it wasn't surprising. Eva Blindhawk Broussard and Zach Crooked Owl had similar ideas about the proper care and treatment of people with brain disorders. That they continually called each other "Blindhawk" and "Owl" rather than their usual names was a source of amusement to everyone at the lodge.

"So Eva thinks I should do this grieving ceremony?" Bo asked.

Zach was already in the hall before he answered.

"No," he said. "She's just here to offer support in case you think you should do it. We'll be outside."

Zach was right, Bo acknowledged with a nod to her own reflection in a mirror over the bureau. The death of Mildred, her companion and closest friend, however predictable, had so shocked Bo's precarious neurochemical balance that she'd plummeted into a clinical depression. That nasty chemical trick that turns joy to loathing and makes daily activity into a marathon of exhausting tasks that can't be done. And while the antidepressant medication had corralled her symptoms, the precipitating reality was still there.

Bo wondered if the Kumeyaay, who'd lived on San Diego County's beaches, deserts, and mountains for thousands of years until their near-disappearance by the end of the early twentieth century, had ever performed a grieving ceremony for a dog. Probably not, she thought. This would be a first.

Squaring her shoulders, she walked through the silent lodge and made her way along a boulder-lined path to an arbor of cottonwoods over a dry creekbed. A natural gathering place, people seemed to gravitate to it at all hours. And a few of the Kumeyaay were always there, telling stories in a traditional allegorical mode that their guests could internalize and ponder without feeling vulnerable. Always easier to hear about a crow who betrays a tortoise than to admit that a trusted co-worker got you fired from your job. Bo had decided that every psychiatric treatment program should employ Indian storytellers and skip group therapy altogether. She hated group therapy.

"Since long ago," Dura said as though continuing a narrative begun before Bo's arrival at the creekbed, "the Kumeyaay knew that any spirit on earth may honor any other spirit with friendship. When this happens, it is important. Once Lizard and Butterfly were friends, and as Butterfly grew weak with the coming of autumn, Lizard would carry him from place to place on her back. One day ..."

Bo found a seat on the ground near Mort Wagman and fixed her gaze on a granite outcropping half a mile in the distance. No one looked up, but continued to listen as Dura told a story Bo already knew would end in Butterfly's death. Most of the staff and the other guests were present, including Old Ayma in her shawls and veil. Bo wrapped her arms around her knees and let herself cry as the story went on and on, punctuated occasionally by the howl of a distant coyote. One of the Dog People, she thought. A dog singing. Mort Wagman nodded as if he'd thought the same thing.

Ten feet away Eva Broussard's cropped white hair shone in the faint moonlight like something metallic glimpsed under sand. She was humming, keeping time with Dura's voice. But her moccasined feet, Bo noticed, were flat on the ground as if she expected to move. The fact was reassuring to Bo as pictures from the seventeen years she'd shared with a small fox terrier rose in her mind and then were gone.

A young husband named Mark Bradley giving her a puppy for her birthday. The sadness later when they'd known the marriage couldn't work and they'd parted. But Mildred had stayed with Bo and been a link to that other life which was gone, no longer an option. Then the suicide of Bo's sister, Laurie, and shortly after, the accidental deaths of their parents. And the illness, the hospitalizations, the wretched old-fashioned medications, the shame when people whispered "crazy" and tapped their temples. Somehow the loyal little dog had made the losses bearable by providing a sort of continuity. Mildred had simply been there and had loved Bo, no matter what.

Now that continuity and that love were gone, leaving an absence that spiraled from Bo's past into nothingness. It wasn't fair, and it hurt. She sobbed and let herself rock back and forth, her hands knotted in her hair. Zach rose and threw a basket of sage leaves on a small fire in the creekbed, fanning the smoke toward Bo with something that looked like a white pillowcase knotted in four corners. Bo could hear the wooden rattles tied around his feet and wrists, and noticed that the white fabric he was holding had black-circle eyes and painted brown spots.

"A Kurok is a ceremony to tell the spirit that has gone we will never, never forget," Dura explained. "A Kurok says we remember the spirit's image here, how it appeared in life, but know it is now free. We release the spirit to its freedom, even though it hurts to do this."

The rattling sound from Zach's ankles and wrists was like sand blowing in Bo's mind, abrasive and relentless. She didn't want to release Mildred's spirit, she wanted Mildred back, wanted her whole life back, wanted to start over and do everything right. But that wasn't possible. She felt like tearing her hair out.

"In great grief a Kumeyaay woman will go away alone and cut her hair," Dura said softly. "It is a natural thing to do."

Only then did Bo see what Mort held in his hand near her right knee. It was an old Indian knife, its handle made of mahogany-colored manzanita wood and bound in strips of bleached rawhide. He demonstrated the sharpness of the blade by shaving the bark from a cottonwood twig and then turned to her somberly. He'd taken off his sunglasses and Bo could see both the question in his eyes and his pride in helping her. Like a little brother, Bo thought. A brother she'd never had, until now.

When she stood and nodded her answer, he stood as well and followed her away from the group. So did Eva Broussard, her moccasins making no sound on the rocky path. Bo traversed the bare spaces between creosote bushes and cholla cactus for a while, watching for some private niche in the desert rocks. In minutes she found it, just a dim grotto where the sandy ground had washed away over centuries, exposing a cluster of half-buried granite boulders. Inside the enclosure she turned to Mort, who extended the knife to her, handle first. Then he left.

Eva Broussard remained, her eyes hooded and downcast. No shrink on the planet would send a depressed patient off alone into the desert with a knife in the middle of a grieving ceremony. There were enough suicides without urging that option on people. But Eva could make herself un-present, could withdraw from Bo's awareness and not intrude while remaining physically there. She didn't move and in seconds seemed nothing more than one of the rocks as Bo grabbed the first hunk of her own long red-silver hair in her left hand and with her right, raised the knife.

Afterward Bo stood and watched her hair blowing away in tufts into the high desert. She hoped quail might use some of it for nesting material, or more likely woodrats, since quail wouldn't be building nests in October. She felt tired and hollow, but the knot of despair around her heart had dissolved. After awhile she turned to the motionless form that was her psychiatrist and friend, and said, "How does it look?"

Eva Broussard's black eyes caught a shard of moonlight and twinkled as she battled an obvious impulse to chuckle. "Appropriate to the situation," she finally answered. "Tomorrow you can go into town and have it styled."

Halfway back to the gathering Mort Wagman sat on a rock, waiting. Bo handed him the knife and smiled. As the three of them walked back toward the lodge a coyote howled far up in the hills, another answered, and then there was silence.

A choir of Spanish monks filled the darkened Phoenix offices of MedNet, Inc. with a Gregorian chant. The music was amplified from a CD by state-of-the-art speakers to an intensity far surpassing the original human voices. Alexander Morley, his white shirtfront turned a flickering green by the laptop computer monitor glowing before him, listened.

The music, as usual, calmed him. Its monophonic notes defined the only place left where he could remember who he really was. Not the chairman of a medical management consortium that had just lost a four-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar judgment. Not the husband and father to a wife and now-grown children who had for more than thirty years seemed to him like actors in a tedious play. Certainly not the soulless entrepreneurial predator described on the financial pages of every major paper only three weeks ago. And not a fool.