Turtle Baby (24 page)

"The verses are about a white orchid that shelters a turtle with its heart," Estrella explained, sitting on the floor beside Eva and taking a red paper napkin from her purse. "Lots of stuff about forests and a monster called a duende that wants to hurt the turtle, but the orchid protects it. A duende is an evil spirit, sort of, and there are lots of them. This one has something wrong with its feet. The choruses are just the orchid saying, 'I love you, my little turtle,' over and over. The last verse that Chac sang the night she died is strange, though. Something about how sinful it is for a man to eat in front of a pregnant woman. That part doesn't fit with the earlier story. It doesn't make any sense. And then the words are garbled, something about the orchid dying, the duende trampling the orchid. That was right before she ... she died."

Eva Broussard was nodding slowly, her white hair framing her bronze face like that in a classic Greek portrait. "The duende with its feet on backward is the Maya version of the Northwestern Indian Wendigo story," she said. "It's 'the spirit of the wild,' the madness that can overtake and destroy someone lost in a wild place, in nature. Both versions of the tale involve mutilated feet, although nobody knows why. And there is a Maya folk tale about a lazy man who eats in front of a pregnant woman, offering her nothing. Her hunger pangs are so great that she aborts. The man's punishment is that he must take her home, where he already has a wife, impregnate her, feed her for nine months, and return her to her husband pregnant. Among the Maya, no man will eat in the presence of an expectant mother without offering her some of his food."

"Henry, did you hear that?" Estrella grinned from her seat on the floor.

"Chac specifically wanted Bo to hear that song," Andrew said thoughtfully. "Remember? We were about to leave the club, and she called to Bo from the stage."

Eva arched an eyebrow expectantly at Bo.

"The answer is in Chac's song, isn't it?" Bo concluded.

"I think so," Eva said. "Especially if the lyrics she sang that night were altered to create a message. Didn't you say you had a commercial tape that includes Acito's song?"

Bo was out the door in seconds, grabbing Chac's cassette from the tape deck in her car. Back in the house, Martin slid it into their sound system and Chac's voice filled the room. Bo could see the singer again, her sequined huipil flashing blue sparks in the smoky bar. As the taped lullaby reached its final verse, every eye in Rombo and Martin's living room was on Estrella, the only one who could understand the words.

Estrella was listening intently. "It's not the same," she whispered over the music. "The business about the duende is still there in the beginning, but the last verse is just about the orchid watching the little turtle grow into a cerro grande, a great hill, and giving shade to his people. There's nothing about men eating in front of pregnant women or the orchid dying. That's not in the recorded version."

"Wow," Rombo said, puzzled. "So what does it mean?"

Bo watched five people staring blankly at each other. "We don't have a clue," she admitted. "But we will. We'll figure it out."

"We'll do that on our way to New Orleans," Andrew said. "We need to get to the airport, Bo."

On the three-hour flight Bo drifted in and out of sleep as Andrew read a new paperback on the Maya called The Road from Xibalba, waking her regularly to share significant pieces of information.

Over Yuma, Arizona, he frowned and read aloud a description of Guatemalan army officers removing Maya babies from the government-run refugee villages. Some of the babies would be "adopted" by army personnel, some would be sold to orphanages that would quickly resell them in the international baby black market, and some would be sold directly to baby brokers. The illiterate parents, often unable to communicate even with other Maya refugees because of differing community languages, had no legal recourse, he told Bo.

"Chac was trying to escape from all that," she mumbled. "Look what she got for her effort."

Somewhere in New Mexico he said, "Ah. In Maya astronomy the constellation we know as Gemini was called Ac. It means 'The Turtle.' "

"Yeah," Bo answered, not really waking up. In the darkened plane cabin she imagined Acito asleep in his crib at the Dooleys', a turtle made of stars shining in the sky outside his window.

By the descent into New Orleans, she'd freshened her makeup in the plane's lurching cubicle of a restroom, and was ready for a cigarette.

"The huipil, the sort of blouse Chac was wearing for her act, is actually a Maya symbol for womanhood itself," Andrew explained as they waited to exit the plane. "The opening for the head is the interface between the worlds of myth and reality, the worlds before and after birth. Many of them are woven in a diamond design that has remained unchanged since the seventh century. A shame to think that the entire Maya culture will be lost now."

Bo gasped as warm, humid air engulfed her in the raised walkway from the plane to the airport terminal. "It's worse than a shame," she replied. "But it's something that can't be stopped. The best we can do is to protect what's left. For us, that's Acito."

A short cab ride later, Bo was seated beneath an enormous potted ficus in a French Quarter bistro called Galatoire's, inhaling the rich scent from a plate of crab-and shrimp-stuffed eggplant.

"The city is fascinating if history interests you," Andrew mentioned over a double order of steamed crawfish. "Perhaps you'd enjoy a brief walking tour of the Quarter tonight, or a moonlit visit to the tomb of Marie Laveau in St. Louis Cemetery. She was reportedly a voodoo queen and many people still believe—"

"Andy," Bo smiled, trailing her fingers down the sides of his face and across his trim mustache, "no graveyards. Let's just let tonight be lovely."

The tiny Rue de Chartres hotel he'd chosen surpassed Bo's fantasy in opulence. Beyond the open balcony of their room a magnolia tree sent washes of fragrance from its white blossoms, while somebody on the street a block away played bluesy notes on a saxophone. Dimming the light of a fringe-shaded lamp beside the Louis Quinze bed, Bo decided a magnolia-colored silk gown would have been superfluous. Totally.

It was dark, and Dewayne could feel the damp ocean air chilling his lungs in a sick, clammy way that felt like a fish market smells. Like dead fish on top of crushed ice, their eyes staring at you like they still were afraid of dying. That dim smell of fishiness everywhere, filling his chest with cold.

He was on a beach. Some guy with three kids in his car had picked up Dewayne and dropped him here. The guy had said this was "Oceanside." From what Dewayne could tell, everything around here could be called that. The ocean stretched off into nothing, with just a little white line of bubbles where it stopped at the land. The line of bubbles looked like a string wrinkling on forever.

There were some people on the beach, doing something around a fire. The people kept moving back and forth, and the black stripes following them seemed to dance and stretch across the cold sand toward Dewayne. Even when he moved around to the other side the shadows kept reaching at him. They were devils of some kind. And the Angel Jabril had left California already. Left Dewayne Singleton alone here.

The people were talking about him. He could tell by the way they made patterns like a jumble of dark letters around the orange fire. They thought there was something wrong with him. Maybe they thought he should have stayed in that hospital. Dewayne couldn't put together a reason why they thought that because his mind wouldn't stay still. It was like a picture book when you grab the edge of all the pages and flip them.

There was a blue heron, he thought, standing beside a trash can on the beach. Or was that the heron Buster shot down on the Teche, and Mama cooked because it was a sin to waste food worse than it was a sin to kill a grosbec. You could go to prison for killing them. Dewayne had gone to prison even though it was Buster that shot the blue bird. But he couldn't remember which prison was the real one, or the last one, the one he'd run off from.

He did remember getting write-ups for aggravated disobedience a lot of times in one of them. They put him in solitary for ten days at a time, over and over. Sometimes he thought he'd die in solitary, and beat his head against the wall to make the thoughts slow down. And then they took him to another one. Wade, it was called. Dewayne thought Wade was the wrong name for a place where you didn't have wet feet. But he knew what it meant. There was plenty of water here.

He hurried to the ocean to wade, and splashed and jumped in the bubbles, feeling his feet grow sloshy and cold in new, white tennis shoes that seemed to glow in the water. As long as he ran up and down in the waves he was doing right, and Allah would be praised by this and the people at the fire couldn't hurt him.

"Bastard's fucking crazy," he heard one of them say. "Better call the cops before he kills somebody."

That made his heart pull up with fear. One of them was going to kill somebody. One of them was going to kill him!

Dewayne ran faster up and down the beach, kicking up sheets of water that would be like prayers to Allah, the one, the true God. Allah would protect him from the infidels. This running was necessary to stay alive.

The people at the fire were moving faster, picking things up and moving away. A car drove into the parking lot, and one of them yelled something at it. Dewayne's side hurt, and he stopped running and walked to the trash can where the blue heron had been. There were no heron tracks in the sand, just some beer cans and a Big Mac box. He looked in the box to see if the sandwich was still there, but it wasn't. Just two pieces of pickle and a little white plastic knife. He didn't see his right hand curl around the little knife when the two demons came toward him shining bright lights in his eyes.

"What the hell you doing in that trash?" one demon said. "We got a call, said you were havin' some trouble out here. Better come with us, now. Just do like we say and there won't be any trouble."

"Jabril!" Dewayne screamed as he ran toward the prison, the cement building sitting a block away on the sand. It had a bathroom, he saw. A big bathroom with no roof and sand all over the floor. Behind him he could hear crunching footsteps running so he turned on the water in all three sinks to keep them out, and then he stood on top of one of the toilets with his back against the light blue wall.

There were things written in there, he noticed. One of the things said, "Eat my pussy," and he wondered if you could go to prison for eating cats like you could for eating herons. Except he was already in a prison. And the demons were there, with guns pointed at him.

"Get down," one said in a voice that sounded quavery, like it wasn't a human voice, but a demon voice. Then they started toward him.

"Mama!" he called as he tried to climb over the cement wall, and slipped back down, and turned to try to jump over them from the rim of the toilet. His arms were in the air as he jumped, and he could see the little white plastic knife still in his hand. Except all of a sudden he couldn't hear for the ringing in his ears and the burnt white flashes where he used to see. He was on the floor in something wet, and there was a hole in the front of his plaid shirt. And a hole in his chest underneath.

"Mama," he tried to say, but his mouth wouldn't work. And then a silence came where his thoughts had been, and he was dead.

Andrew was up and moving briskly about the room when the Monday morning light was still hazy and peach-colored. Or else Bo's vision, unaccustomed to purposeful movement at this hour, was hazy and peach-colored. She wasn't sure which. The scent of soap wafting after him alerted her to the fact that he'd already showered. From his carry-on he took a starched shirt wrapped in cellophane and folded over a piece of cardboard with "Li's Laundry" printed on it in red. The sound of cellophane being wadded into a ball seemed to go on interminably.

"How can you wear a long-sleeved shirt in this weather?" she groaned, admiring the lean physique more than adequately emphasized by his skimpy underwear. Today's low-cut briefs were of bright red cotton knit with black pinstriping.

"Mmmm," she murmured appreciatively. "Come here."

In seconds the desired effect was in evidence, causing a distortion in certain pinstripes.

"I had thought we'd have breakfast at Brennan's," he said huskily, "then a walk in the Garden District before my conference and your trip to Dewayne's prison."

"We'll skip breakfast," Bo decided, and then watched as a wad of red knit fabric was tossed across the room to land on a rosewood escritoire already littered with magnolia petals blown in from the balcony.

The Garden District, seen an hour later from beneath a flowered umbrella donated by the hotel for the protection of its delicate female guests from a hazy sun, was lovely. Like a collection of leaded glass jewel boxes preserved in steam. Bo admired what seemed like several miles of cast iron fences, gallery balustrades, doorway capitals, and supports before admitting to herself that she was feeling funny.

The incessant buzz of cicadas in the air was disturbing. The heat and humidity sickening. And there was something terrible and sad about the old houses. A brave hopelessness in the face of a future that would not see their kind again. They were like the Maya, Bo thought. Still here, but almost gone.

"At first all the cast iron had to be brought in from New York and Philadelphia," Andrew told her. "But then a foundry was opened in Holly Springs, Mississippi, and ... Bo, are you all right?"

"I'd like to sit down," she said irritably.

This could happen. Like a drug flashback, some symptoms could break through the fragile normalcy provided by medication. Stress, exhaustion, emotional excess—any of these could stir up a flurry of weird, intense perceptions out of nowhere. It was embarrassing to realize that an unaccustomed erotic activity had probably been the last straw, following on the heels of a terrifying night being stalked through primordial desert wastes. Bo was less surprised than angry at herself for failing to take precautions. Like getting some sleep.