Turtle Baby (4 page)

Chac sighed. She knew she'd been asleep and that it was too soon to wake up, but something was wrong. A ringing in her ears. A clammy fear that made her shiver in the overcast mid-morning light. There had been a dream, but she couldn't remember it. Or else this was the dream.

"Go back to sleep," he said without turning to look at her. "Everything's okay."

For a moment she forced open her eyes and watched him. A strange gringo boy with the long hair of a woman and thin, pale hands that could make a guitar sing like the soul of a sparrow. As she watched, those hands sewed tiny, glittering stars to the sleeves of a white blouse he'd made for her from a bed sheet bleached in the sun. Row after row of silver flashes on sleeves shaped like wings. The light from the open

doorway reflected the little specks and made her eyes close again.

The dream was still real.

Her father, Tomas, stood a the edge of a small cornfield in his purple and white striped pants, playing a reed pipe as huge clouds blew close down on the surrounding forest. The little field was her family's milpa near Lake Atitlan in Guatemala, and the leaves of corn and squash seemed to whisper.

In the dark wind Chac held Acito up for her father to see. So he would see the peculiar deformity that would show all the Maya how blessed her baby was. How alike with the gods no matter what Chac had done wrong.

And when Tomas saw, a hundred other Indians were there, too, and a sound of her mother's heart in the wind. But there was something else. A duende, a dead thing from the cemetery or some other evil spirit, moving through the forest from the north. A noise signaled the duende’s presence. It buried her father's music in scratchy shrieks that became an ugly song she couldn't understand, like the noise from the loudspeakers on the evangelical church in Panajachel.

Tomas and the others vanished, fleeing the sound. And Chac realized the heartbeat filling her ears was her own. The duende was coming for Acito!

The baby seemed to weigh nothing as she ran, stumbling in squash vines. Some of the vines were snakes, watching her with furious eyes. The eyes froze her legs so she couldn't run, and suddenly Acito wasn't in her arms at all. Nothing was in her arms but her own heart, huge with terror.

A bitter scent that was like wasps came from the evil spirit chasing her, and Chac saw one of its white feet running between the forest shadows. The foot was on backward! The duende ran toward her with its terrible, wrong feet and she screamed and screamed as parrots flew up and turned black against the sky.

"Chac, wake up. You're dreaming. It's not real. Wake up."

A thread of sweat ran down her back as she sat upright on the cot. Her scalp was wet and her eyes burned with salt.

"Acito," she sobbed as the gringo boy held her. "It was going to get Acito."

From within his flat, muscled chest she felt a familiar warmth. A safety. The boy had taken on the burden of her life these last three months as a Maya accepts cargo, a responsibility for which there is no reward except the forward movement of time. Chris Joe was five years younger than she was and not any kind of Indian, but he accepted cargo. He carried her life. That he also felt for her as a man feels for his woman was something she pretended not to see.

"Acito's fine," he reassured her. "You saw him this morning and he's fine. It was just a dream."

Chac frowned into his pale blue eyes. "Estupido!" she hissed. "Mi sueno ..."

"In English, Chac." He grinned, returning to his work on the blouse. "Remember, pretty soon you're going to have to speak English all the time. Even when you're pissed!"

"A dreeem," she exaggerated the English word angrily, "is sometimes the truth your mind sees and shows it in pictures. These pictures were snakes and a duende with backward feet, and Acito was gone from my arms!" Her black eyes grew dull with panic. "I need to go out ..."

"And get all smacked up over a dream?" he replied without turning to face her. "That sucks, but you know I won't stop you. How long's it been? Two years? You go on out and score some shit off the street, do a nice, big wad. You'll be dead when it hits your heart unless you live long enough to puke to death. But go ahead."

Chac stretched trembling hands at her sides and then clenched them into fists. "I'm so fucking scared," she said quietly.

"I know," he answered. "But in a few days you'll be free as a bird. Soon as you sign that contract, you fly, right? And right now I'm making some tea to calm you. Chamomile and ginseng. It settles the nerves."

"And you fly, too, Chris Joe? You stay with me and do the music, just like now, right?"

He turned from the battered hotplate where he was heating water. "I'll stay with you as long as you need me," he said. In his determined look and the set of his jaw Chac saw the man inside the boy, and her terror subsided to a shifting unease.

He would help her. But in her discomfort she sensed a danger the dream had warned her about. The duende with its hideous feet was a spirit of something maddened by nature. A person lost in the Guatemalan jungle, wandering in circles for days, would see this duende and go insane. It would happen to the lone ones, the ones nobody knew at all.

From beneath a flowered curtain hung over the open door, Chac saw yellow-white sun spill on the dirt alley as light broke through the low clouds. The shadow of someone walking by. Children shouting. The nose of a brown dog, curious and friendly. Everything normal, hiding something too terrible to see. Chris Joe wouldn't understand, but Chac knew it was coming. It had started toward her today.

Natalio and Ynez Cruz were not at home when Bo knocked at the address on Acito's facesheet in the file. In fact, according to a teenage girl who answered but did not open the screen door and spoke English, they might never have been there. They didn't really live there. They were relatives of somebody named Bernardo who also didn't live there. They had been paid to take care of the baby boy, Acito, and they had cared for the baby there sometimes. But now they were gone. Nobody in the sparsely furnished little apartment expected Natalio and Ynez to return. Ever.

Bo undipped the plastic Child Protective Services identification badge from the neck of her blouse and cupped it in a raised hand, the way she'd seen cops do on TV shows.

"I'm from CPS," she said, wondering how to look official. "I have to come inside and see where the baby was kept here."

From his seat on a folding chair against the wall, a man in a straw cowboy hat launched into an emotional monologue. In the torrent of Spanish Bo heard the phrase carta verde several times. On the chair beside the man, a woman who appeared to be winding colored yarn around plastic drinking straws nodded, her eyes angry and fearful at once. She was making God's Eyes, Bo realized. The compass-shaped wall decorations

sold everywhere in Tijuana. Figuring that out did nothing to account for the man's obvious anger.

Carta verde. Bo thought of Carta Blanca, the Mexican beer she didn't like nearly as well as Dos Equis, which meant "Two Xs." And Carta Blanca meant "white card," so carta verde would mean what? Surfing through root-word associations, Bo hit on "verdant." Green. The guy was yelling about green cards!

"No INS," she insisted, shaking her head. "CPS is no la migra."

Estrella talked about la migra all the time—the Mexicans' term for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, which routinely rounded up and dumped migrant workers found in the U.S. without residency permits back across the border in Tijuana. The practice was akin to emptying the ocean by scooping out buckets of seawater and throwing it on the adjacent sand. But la migra was nonetheless a source of continual fear to the thousands of undocumented Latinos who crossed U.S. borders.

The teenage girl opened the door and pointed to a pile of blankets on the floor of an area adjacent to the apartment's kitchen. The blanketed space was enclosed by upended cement blocks, probably, Bo thought, pilfered from a building site. An effective playpen. Bo nodded approval. The sharp corners of the cement blocks had been padded by towels held in place with duct tape. The needs of an eight-month-old had been thoughtfully met.

Bo took the county's Polaroid camera from its strap on her shoulder, and walked self-consciously into the apartment's little kitchen to get a shot of Acito's living quarters. A box of disposable diapers sat on the floor, and a blue plastic baby bottle half full of what looked like apple juice lay among the blankets. Beside the bottle was a small statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe, dressed in starched fabric. In the playpen's corner

a glow-in-the-dark plastic crucifix lay atop a chewed prayer card featuring a tonsured saint Bo didn't recognize. The saint looked ecstatically skyward as a rain of flaming arrows pierced his body. Acito's toys had been the religious paraphernalia of his Mexican caretakers.

Get the baby bottle, Bradley. That may be Lysol, not apple juice.

As Bo approached Acito's pen, she noticed that two more people, an elderly woman in a shawl and an expectant mother of indeterminate age, had emerged from a bedroom and were watching her as if she were about to toss them a grenade. Smiling inanely, she hooked a leg over the cement blocks, leaned to grab the blue bottle, and felt something crunch beneath her sandal. At the sound the old woman's eyes grew large and she hurried to Bo's side. From the blankets she pulled a rosary. Several of its red and black beads were smashed.

"Oh, I'm sorry," Bo began, "I didn't mean to ..."

But the woman, no longer fearful, was yelling at Bo in nonstop Spanish that, however incomprehensible, left no doubt as to its intent. The man in the straw cowboy hat stood and began to bat at Bo with his hat, creating wafts of hair-oil-scented air. The pregnant woman crossed herself, placed her forehead against the wall, and began to moan. Bo clambered out of Acito's pen and made a dash for the door.

"What the hell ... ?" she gasped, still clutching the baby bottle.

"That rosary was a gift from my grandmother's mother," the teenager explained, pushing Bo through the screen door and then locking it. "It was, you know, like ... from her deathbed?"

In the girl's syntax Bo recognized a universal adolescent contempt for the unfathomable stupidity of adults. Beyond the door the old woman kept screaming a word Bo could have sworn was "Tampa."

"Did her mother live in Florida?" Bo asked in spite of herself.

"I dunno," the girl answered. "Her mother's dead."

As initial interviews go, Bo admitted as she tossed the camera and bottle into her car, this one was a disaster. At least she had a snapshot for Es. A snapshot of some cement blocks and a pile of blankets. Not exactly an award-winning document.

At her feet a collection of pigeons rose from pecking at a gum wrapper in the gutter, and flapped southward as if they'd been called. Bo watched the birds swoop over the border and climb the air above Tijuana, only a half mile away. It looked easy.

"Why not?" she asked her right hand as it turned the ignition switch. Acito's mother was over there, somewhere. A nightclub singer named Chac, Madge had said. And most establishments that might qualify, however marginally, as nightclubs were in Tijuana's tourist district. On Avenida Revolución. Only a few blocks from the border.

It would, Bo decided, be ridiculous not to make some casual inquiries regarding the whereabouts of the missing mother. She'd just get the address of the singer's place of employment for the report. Unofficially, of course.

Officially, she reminded herself as she headed toward the border parking lots, the jurisdiction of San Diego County ended where Mexico began. San Diego County Child Protective Services, by international law, could not set foot over that border. But Bo Bradley, U.S. citizen, could. Without a passport, visa, or any form of identification she could walk through two clanging metal turnstiles and into another country. To get back, she needed only to be able to state in unaccented English that she was a U.S. citizen. So much for security at an international border known to see its share of illegal traffic. Too easy to pass up.

Bo found a parking space in an area of packed dirt near the rotary where buses discharged Mexico-bound passengers. A short walk along a fifteen-yard iron fence led into Mexico.

Through the fence Bo watched the Border Patrol drug dogs at work on the U.S. side, happily sniffing cars selected by U.S. border officials for canine scrutiny as they left Mexico. A young German shepherd seemed to smile in her direction, and Bo waved. "Win one for the Gipper!" she yelled at the dog.

After the second turnstile, everything changed. It always did, but today the change seemed portentous. Mexico, whatever it was, began at that turnstile. Impossibly, the air smelled different. Dusty, with an acidic undertone like hot plastic. Bo quickened her pace to avoid two skinny little Indian girls heading toward her with boxes of cellophane-wrapped chiclets.

"Chicle?" the children insisted, their black eyes unreadable as those of birds. "Chicle, señorita?"

On the ground against the wall bordering the main tourist thoroughfare into Tijuana were what appeared to be piles of cloth. These were the mothers of the beggar children, most with babies at the breast. Each draped figure held up one gracefully cupped hand as Bo passed. Yaqui Indians. A Stone Age people living on scraps thrown down by the current century. Acito might be one of these, Bo thought. Except none of the swarming children along the sidewalk had that nose. That oddly bent nose.

Distracted by a pushcart laden with slab-quartz wind chimes cut in the shape of parrots, Bo lost the concentration necessary for running the gauntlet of begging children. A two-year-old boy in a grubby sweater approached her knee and looked up. His nose was running and in his dull eyes Bo recognized exhaustion. Impossible to ignore.

"Here," she sighed, and emptied her coin purse into his sticky hands. It wouldn't do any good, but she'd have nightmares if she did nothing.

"I hate this place," she smiled at a man following her and repeating, "Taxi?" over and over. "I've always hated it and today's even worse. No taxi. Thanks anyway."