Turtle Baby (10 page)

"When I saw you yesterday, I noticed the tracks on your arms," she said. "They were old and healed, but Acito is eight months old now. You could have been using while you were pregnant with him. If you shared needles with other addicts while you were using IV drugs, you and Acito could have been exposed to the AIDS virus."

"We have to test the children of IV drug-using mothers," Andrew LaMarche interjected sadly. "It's standard procedure." He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. "And I'd also like to ask if you know anything about poisonous plants. Do you know what I'm talking about, Chac?"

"Andy!" Bo interjected. "She doesn't know anything about—"

"What is he talking about?" Chac asked Bo. "What plant?"

Over Chac's shoulder Bo could see Chris Joe and the Australian discussing a piece of paper and stacking cassettes beside the tape deck feeding four speakers flanking the narrow stage. Chac's program for the second set, Bo assumed. As Chac's accompanist, Chris Joe would need to know the order of music. But who was this cowboy Australian with his stripe of white hair and easygoing grin?

"The substance that harmed Acito," Bo explained, "was from a plant. A tropical plant."

"I don't know anything about a plant," Chac said, frowning.

Bo lowered her voice. "Do you think Chris Joe might know something about it?"

"Chris Joe? Do you mean you think ...?" Chac looked uneasily over her shoulder. "Chris Joe is like a ... a curandero." She glanced at Estrella. "With the herbs. Many people here use herbs. There are shops on the streets ... to buy herbs."

Estrella nodded. "A curandero is a sort of folk healer, Bo. Among poor people this is still the practice. Few have money for doctors. And there are farmacias everywhere that sell herbs. Right outside on Revolución, as well as in every village in Mexico. I'm surprised you haven't noticed."

"I just assumed farmacia meant pharmacy." Bo plowed through her own cultural failing and pursued the original goal. "Was Chris Joe with you when you visited Acito in San Ysidro yesterday morning, Chac?"

"Si, yes, he brought fresh apple juice. He strain it for, you know, the bottle, and boil it so there was no germs."

Nervous, the young woman was losing facility in what Bo realized was probably a third language.

"When you were a child in Guatemala, did you speak Spanish?" Bo asked, changing the subject.

"No, we spoke Tzutuhil. That is the language of the Maya in my region near Atitlan. My village was San Juan la Laguna. Why? What does Tzutuhil have to do with this plant that poisoned Acito?"

"I don't know," Bo admitted. "I'm just really impressed with all you've done, all the languages you speak, your singing career. How did you get here, Chac, all the way from Guatemala to stardom in Tijuana? I hear your songs on the radio in San Diego. You're going places! But the journey from there to here must have been difficult. Was it?"

Beneath her tawny skin a flush crept up the young woman's cheeks. She glanced toward both men at the table, and a hard smile, almost a sneer, distorted her mouth. "Tell your friend," she said to Estrella in Spanish, "she asks too many questions."

"Never mind," Bo went on miserably, having seen the ugly truth on Chac's face. "We just need to tell you about the hearing in court on Monday."

Bradley, as a diplomat you'd make a terrific sideshow barker. How in hell do you think she got this far? How does any young woman with nothing get anything? You need to listen to more country and western music or else shut up!

The house lights, such as they were, were dimming.

"I have to go," Chac said, standing. "What is this hearing?"

Bo handed her a card with the address of San Diego County's Juvenile Court embossed on it, as well as her own number at CPS. "Nine o'clock Monday," Bo said. "Dress conservatively, like you were going to church. You won't get Acito back at this hearing, but if you're not there it'll only make things worse."

"I'm going to get my baby back!" Chac insisted, heading for the stage. "I am!"

"Do you think we should leave?" Henry Benedict suggested. "God, Strell, I don't know how you deal with this every day."

The Australian was onstage, apparently introducing Chac. Even in his Spanish Bo could hear the characteristic accent. In a sweeping spotlight he exuded confidence and an articulate excitement that might have been genuine and might, Bo thought, have been blown up his nose through a straw. His companion was nowhere in sight.

"Let's stay just a little longer," she said. "Es, what's he saying?"

"That he's Munson Terrell, Chac's manager, and that he's proud to introduce the Maya singing sensation who's about to sign a contract with a Hollywood music producer. A contract that's going to make Chac a star."

Under the applause generated by Terrell's introduction, Chris Joe began a traditional rock 'n' roll guitar accompaniment, backed by acoustical guitar and drums on a tape. Chac jumped into the song at a chorus, full out, no slow build up. The audience loved it. Bo, frustrated, could only make out one word, "libertad."

"What's she singing?" she asked Estrella.

"About freedom. She's saying, 'You can't have my freedom, set me free.' That kind of thing."

"No, no, no!" Chac ended the brief number, already sweating.

"I want to get Estrella home," Henry suggested again. "She shouldn't overdo it tonight."

"Madre de dios." Estrella sighed. "I'm sitting right here, Henry. Stop talking about me as if I were a child. I can't stand it when you get like this, and if it's going to be this way for seven more months ..."

"I'd like to get on the road, too," LaMarche mentioned, looking at Bo. "There may be a wait at the border."

"You're right," Estrella agreed in an about-face that made up in enthusiasm what it lacked in subtlety, standing and smoothing her jacket.

"Wait. Bo Bradley!"

It was Chac's voice, from the stage. "This song ... you must hear this song."

After a whispered consultation with Chris Joe, the young musician unfastened his guitar strap and picked up the wooden flute Bo had seen the day before. During the melodic introduction Chac merely stood, head bowed, one hand pressed against her stomach.

In a blue spotlight she seemed pale, although Bo could see perspiration still beading on her forehead. Odd, Bo thought, for her to be sweating so profusely only one song into the set.

"She's going to do Acito's song," she whispered. "Es, can you translate it for me?"

LaMarche handed Estrella a pen, and she grabbed one of the club's red napkins for use as a notepad.

The melody was as evocative as before, enhanced by lighting and a sense of desperation emanating from the slight figure singing on the stage. Bo couldn't help thinking of the French chanteuse, Edith Piaf, called "The Little Sparrow" in her time. A picture of Chac as a little bird drifted up in Bo's mind. A white bird with huge, black eyes.

Signaling the photographer, she dug a dollar from her purse and said, "A photograph of Chac, por favor." In seconds the damp, developing snapshot was in her hands.

On stage Chac had stopped between verses and was speaking in English over the haunting flute.

"The Maya believe that the huipil," she tugged at her blouse, "is the symbol of woman, who is like the caves and the surface of water. The woman is the passageway," she whispered breathlessly, "between the underworld and this life. The Maya live to keep time going. That is our task."

Her rapid, shallow breathing suggested great feeling. Her face was contorted as if from pain. "And at the center of time," she went on, "is a woman birthing a child. No one may interfere with that. No one."

Estrella, Bo noticed, was crying. And Chac actually was pale under the blue light. Deathly pale. Her voice as she began the last verse of the song was too high and strangely off-key. Her black eyes seemed polished, and then suddenly empty. The microphone slipped from her hand.

"Mi corazon," she whispered, her eyes rolling back in her head. "Mi Acito."

Bo watched as a white bird simply slid from the air and crumpled on a plywood stage held up by oil drums. Chac's arms stiffened for a moment, as though she were reaching for something far away, and then she was still. A bubbling foam at her lips continued to reflect the light in blue sparkles.

In the pandemonium that followed, people yelled, "Doctor! Medico!" and Andrew LaMarche flung a khakied knee onto the narrow stage and crawled to the white form lying in the pool of blue light. In less than a minute he turned and found Bo's eyes in the panicked crowd.

"She's dead," he mouthed. "Call the police."

The Australian named Munson Terrell, Bo noticed, was on the stage cradling Chac's head. At the back of the room a skinny, long-haired boy with a guitar pulled aside the plastic tarp where a wall should have been, and vanished into the rubble-strewn darkness on the other side.

Bo woke from an uncomfortable sleep and for moments wasn't sure where she was. Checking her darkened surroundings, she recognized an open closet door revealing a familiar clutter of clothes. Mildred asleep and snoring in her basket beside the bed. And outside, the endless surging of the Pacific Ocean against Sunset Cliffs. Home. Relentlessly accurate, her digital clock radio announced in green numbers that dawn was a thing of the future: "4:23 A.M.," it said.

"Shit," Bo remarked, noting that her beige pinstriped sheets were knotted in ropes and three of the four pillows with which she liked to bank herself against potential things that go bump in the night were on the floor. The fourth was squeezed to a damp wad against her chest. In the dark beyond the end of the bed the scene in Tijuana seemed to be just out of sight. A small white bird, fallen and still. Bo rubbed at her eyes with the edge of a rumpled pillowcase, flung long legs over the side of the bed, and stumbled onto the little balcony facing the sea.

"It's okay to cry," she told the foggy breeze blowing up from the beach. "Healthy, even. Who wouldn't?" Wrapping her arms around her ribs under one of the old Tshirts she always slept in, she allowed herself the experience popularly termed “a good cry”. Except in Bo's experience, crying invariably caused nothing but a lingering headache, sore throat, and burning eyes. Sniffling, she wondered why everyone else in the world waxed so rhapsodic about crying. It just wasn't her thing, she acknowledged, popular wisdom notwithstanding.

Wandering back into the apartment, she pulled on a pair of sweat pants and her most closely guarded secret, armadillo houseslippers. The stuffed-toy footwear boasted washable vinyl plating and cute suedecloth faces, one of which was missing its nose after an early encounter with Mildred. Bo had found the slippers at a swap meet only weeks ago, and decided to allow herself the eccentricity of owning them. Pretending not to be eccentric all the time was so draining. Andrew, she thought with amusement, would undoubtedly abandon his suit for her hand if he could, at the moment, see her feet.

But he couldn't. He'd stayed at the Avenida Revolución club with Chac's lifeless body, urging Henry to take Estrella and Bo home. Determined to stay, Bo had only begun a tirade against patronizing men who think women swoon at unpleasantness, when Estrella obliterated Bo's thesis by actually swooning. Or almost swooning. She'd been caught in the crush of people trying either to leave or to gawk at the singer's body, turned pale under her makeup, and slumped to a chair in which she quickly placed her head between her knees. Bo had recognized no option but to accompany her friend to the street as Henry ran to retrieve the car. When he returned, Estrella had recovered but Henry seemed to be hyperventilating. Needed, Bo gave up hope of immediate information regarding Chac's death, and climbed into the Benedicts' car. Andrew would have to walk back over the border, she'd assessed ruefully. The cab fare back to his Del Mar condo would rival minor aspects of the space program in cost.

Brewing a cup of instant mocha decaf cappuccino in the microwave, Bo rubbed her temples and considered the night's terminal event. Acito's mother, dead. But why? Had the stress of her baby's seizure by San Diego County authorities caused Chac to relapse? To start using drugs again? On either side of the border, drugs were a fixture of nightclub life. Chac would have had no trouble scoring any drug she wanted without leaving the bar. Bo felt a clammy, metallic weight on her chest. Guilt.

Maybe their presence at the club had driven the marginal young woman over the edge. Maybe if they'd just stayed home like nice Anglos and reinforced their cultural imperative by watching reruns of old Andy Griffith shows on TV, Chac would still be alive. Acito would still have a mother.

"You screwed up," Bo said to her reflection in the microwave's door. "Got up to your neck in a situation you didn't understand, and made it worse. Now a little boy will grow up among strangers. He'll know nothing of his mother or what she might have taught him about being what he is, a Maya Indian. Now there's nothing left of his history but a lullaby. You're an arrogant, ignorant, meddling imperialist. You might as well be Madge Aldenhoven."

Bo held the hot coffee in both hands and wiggled her ears. The scalp movement sometimes helped the throbbing tension headaches that could descend out of thin air and felt like sock-cymbals thudding in her skull. That dull reverberation. But it wasn't working.

"Mildred," she called softly into the bedroom. "How about a little ride?"

The dog placed one paw over a furry head and pretended not to hear.

"There will be treats," Bo mentioned, grabbing a paint-smudged sweatshirt that had once been avocado green from a pile of clothes on the closet floor. "Among them your favorite peanut-butter bones and the ever-popular desiccated liver jerky."

Stiffly the old dog capitulated to bribery, and got up. After providing one of the promised bones, Bo massaged the fox terrier's arthritic joints and dressed her in a warm parka Bo had made out of an old down vest. In the red nylon garment Mildred might have modeled, Bo thought, for an L.L. Bean catalogue.

"We're going to Jamul," she told the dog. "To talk our way through this before it gets any worse."