Turtle Baby (5 page)

The street was a sociology textbook, opened to the chapter on social stratification. Beyond the beggars, Indian women of mixed blood sold woven bracelets and abalone earrings from sheets on the ground. A row of food stands scented the air with roasting cones of meat that, for fifty cents, would be shaved into tortillas and buried in sour cream, fried onions, and mouth-scorching chile peppers. Salivating, Bo chanted "Just say no to fat" and kept walking. The cooked meat was delicious and perfectly safe to eat. The frozen fruit pops further up the street, made with untreated water and named "death on a stick" by San Diego's college students, weren't.

The crush of street vendors ended abruptly at the edge of a large cement plaza boasting a central fountain that had never, in Bo's experience, worked. The plaza sported new, one-story buildings subdivided into shops that catered to the basic needs of border-hopping Americans. Liquor. Mexican-made copies of designer clothing complete with fake labels. And prescription drugs for which no prescription was necessary here.

Indians weren't allowed on the plaza. There were no churro vendors with greasy paper bags of sugary stick-donuts. No roasting meat that, on analysis, would turn out to be goat. Bo sighed. The plaza felt like a cumbersome spaceship set down in the midst of biblical Syria. Too clean. Way too quiet. The way Americans liked it.

At the plaza's far side she climbed to an overpass that led into Avenida Revolución. The cement steps, recently completed, were already crumbling. That was just Tijuana, she admitted to herself, wondering if merely noticing constituted a form of criticism. Buildings in Tijuana were invariably half completed and then left that way. Paved streets turned to dirt where least expected. The city's slapdash architecture seemed to grope toward some uncherished goal and then give up halfway there in defiance. A sense of flux. Of things falling apart and being rebuilt endlessly and with no point.

It's just a typical border town, Bradley. For once don't let it get to you.

But it did. It always did. Bo wasn't sure why. Maybe the open acknowledgment of poverty, always guilt-inspiring. More likely the suffocating crush of noise and people and things, the ceaseless clamor. A sensory overload merely tiring to the average American brain, but frightening to Bo's, which was prone to dramatic overreaction even when protected by medication.

"Kate Harding, 1892," she pronounced at a canvas-topped stall displaying at least a thousand identical pieces of terracotta pottery painted in nightmarish Day-Glo butterflies. "The British schooner Lily, 1901," she named a covered alleyway from which two men with gold teeth held out armloads of velour blankets featuring panthers attacking antelopes, an Aztec couple in full ceremonial garb doing something erotic, and the Last Supper. "And you," she remarked to an arcade of glass cases from which gleamed brass knuckles in sizes petite to extra large, enough switchblade knives to arm the entire population of Wyoming, and what looked like a collection of pie plates with razor wire edges, "are the Jennie French Potter, 1909."

The litany of Cape Cod shipwrecks was comforting. Her Irish grandmother, whose hobbies ran to the unusual, had often rocked Bo and her little sister, Laurie, on the porch of the family's Wellfleet summer cottage, singing the names of the doomed ships. Having imprinted the list under optimal circumstances, Bo never forgot it and secretly recited its reassuring syllables sometimes, just to calm herself. The names provided a quiet pathway through Avenida Revolución, where you could buy just about anything.

"I don't believe it!" she interrupted a mental retelling of the Andrea Doria story as the storefront marquee of a corner drinking establishment came into focus half a block away.

"Shooters, $1.50," the sign said in English. "Dancing Nitely Hear Record Star Singing Sensacion—Chac!"

Too easy. The name was too unusual for there to be more than one bar singer using it. Bo shook off a sense of unease. A sense of moving along some track she couldn't see toward a destination, which, at best, did not seek out her involvement. The feeling was not unfamiliar.

You will have dinner with Dr. Broussard tonight, Bo. You will talk to her about this medication, which seems to be working, but is leaving a few wrinkles. Now, just get the address of this place and then leave.

Nodding at the sensible advice, Bo jotted down the address and then stood looking at the bar's curtained doorway. The black canvas tarp hanging from a wire across the door revealed nothing. Beneath it Bo could see broken maroon asphalt tile, some cigarette butts, a chair leg. An odor of tequila, shots of which were called "shooters" when forced down your throat by costumed waiters, drifted from the tarp. So this was where Acito's mom worked.

Bo remembered promising the baby she'd try to find his mother. How could she just walk away? This Chac might be in the bar right now, unaware that her little son had come close to death. Inside Bo heard voices. A few English words.

"Oh, why not?" She grinned at a burro on the corner, painted in black stripes to approximate a zebra. The burro shook long ears through holes in its flowered sombrero as Bo pulled the black curtain aside and went in.

A passageway running diagonally toward the center of the block between two adjacent storefronts was hung with colored plastic doilies and strands of Christmas tree lights. Eight feet in, a sawhorse over a plastic-draped pile of construction rubble held a sign that said Peligro. Bo had seen the word on Tijuana's streets. It meant "danger."

"I can't believe you don't know where she is," a male voice spoke in a British accent with overtones Bo couldn't quite identify.

The voice came from just inside a large room at the end of the passageway. The room was half filled with small tables beyond which a bare expanse of soaped concrete served as a dance floor. Into this a wooden ramp supported by oil drums extended about fifteen feet. The oil drums had been painted gold. Along the left wall a long bar rested on forklift pallets, backed by more plastic doilies and yards of hanging metallic strips that looked like limp slices of mirror. Where the two walls would have met was a gaping hole revealing bent concrete reinforcers and more rubble.

"A margarita, señorita?" asked the bartender in a white shirt and red satin cummerbund. He seemed genuinely happy to see Bo. Delighted, actually.

"Um, no, just a Coke, please," she answered. For some reason it seemed wise to say nothing, just sit and wonder why a Mexican bartender was radiating joy at her presence. At the end of the bar a man of about thirty with long dark hair pulled back in a ponytail under a leather gaucho hat was working on the wiring of a sound board and bass amplifier.

"The show tomorrow night's critical," he said thoughtfully. "She knows what's at stake."

"Señorita Chac, she never miss a performance," the bartender said to Bo, as though she had asked. In his hands a perfectly dry bar glass was being dried ferociously with a red paper napkin.

Bo stabbed at the lime wedge in her Coke and let it happen. That wide intensity of awareness that, even when dutifully medicated, she possessed as the dubious gift of an illness that could also destroy her. The bartender, she assessed, was defending Chac, and knew perfectly well where she was. He was afraid of the man in the ponytail, glad to have a customer as a buffer between them.

"I'm a buyer for a little import shop in Idyllwild," she said, noticing an exquisite silver bracelet with a geometric pattern of stone inlay on the wrist of the man with the ponytail. "I'm looking for some quality silver jewelry. Could you recommend a few dealers?"

The question was directed to the bartender as she pulled a pen from her purse and grabbed a paper napkin.

"Si, silver," he answered with enthusiasm. "Lots of good places for silver."

As he named a number of dealers, Bo wrote on the paper napkin. "Acito in peligro. Donde esta Chac?" Acito in danger. Where is Chac? The Spanish was pathetic, but the message clear.

"Did I get the street names right?" She smiled, pushing the napkin toward the bartender. Then, "Oh, that's what I'm looking for! Something like that." Pretending to notice ponytail for the first time, she strode to his side. "Where did you get that incredible bracelet?" she gushed.

"Someplace in Venezuela," he replied. "I'm sorry I really don't remember exactly where." His smile was warm, revealing slightly crooked front teeth in a tanned, outdoorsy face shadowed by the brim of the leather hat pulled low on his brow. And his pronunciation was a dead giveaway. "Someplyce," he'd said. "In Venezwyla." Australian.

"Well, it's certainly fine work," Bo murmured, retreating.

What did an Australian with expensive taste in jewelry have to do with the poisoned Indian baby who'd drooled his way into her heart only that morning? And why was the bartender afraid of what seemed to be a perfectly nice guy?

"Thanks for your help." Bo smiled over the bar as she gathered her briefcase and the red napkin, and left.

Outside she petted the zebra-striped burro and read the napkin. An address was on it, and the words "muy peligroso." Very dangerous. In the eyes of the burro's owner, hunched on the painted cart where every day he photographed sombreroed tourists, Bo saw something she could only translate as hate.

Dewayne Singleton threw a handful of Tecate cypress cones into the air and listened as they hit the rocky ground. Sometimes you could hear things they said that way. Sometimes almost a real word. This time it was the word "ut-ut," which didn't mean anything. At least not to Dewayne Singleton.

Maybe it was like the sound of feet, somebody with a limp, walking up and down outside his cell at Wade. One of the guards had limped like that. Said he busted his knee playing baseball and the damned state of Louisiana didn't pay him enough to get it fixed. The guard stopped and talked sometimes because he knew nobody ever came on visiting days to the medium-security prison in the Kisatchie National Forest Preserve near the Louisiana/Arkansas border. At least nobody ever came to visit Dewayne Singleton.

"Ut-ut" also sounded a little like the breath catching in the back of the dogs' throats after they ran awhile. Bloodhounds mostly, barking and running right on past Dewayne in a big old pine tree, his socks full of Iodoform. The stuff the prison infirmary dumped into wounds made by knives and axes. He'd put the disinfectant powder in his armpits, too, and in his hair and his crotch, and tied down his shirt and pants cuffs with rubber bands. The dogs couldn't get a scent. An old Choctaw convict taught him that. Said the dogs couldn't smell you unless they were sitting in your lap.

So Dewayne packed himself in Iodoform, went with his crew to clean ditchbanks along the two-lane asphalt road leading to the prison, and waited for his chance. When another convict spotted a water moccasin in the ditch and the freeman guard got off his horse to shoot it, Dewayne sprinted into the dense pine forest and kept going. It was twenty minutes before he heard the dogs behind him, and he climbed the tree.

The Choctaw'd been right, Dewayne nodded as a warm breeze blew up the unpopulated mountain from the Mexican border below. Because the dogs had run on. And Dewayne was far away now, in California.

"Ut-ut," he whispered into the wind, toward Mexico. The syllables blew back, one in each ear. "Al-lah," they said now, and he turned to his left and threw himself facedown on the ground. Left would be east, since Mexico was south. It was easier to figure out which way Mecca was on the outside than it was in Wade, for sure. The prison's narrow, louvered windows set six feet up under the roof overhang kept out the sun, but not Allah's message. The message that he had to tell his wife, down there in Mexico.

As her husband it was his duty to protect her. To tell her what Allah had told him in a prison called Wade Correctional Center sixty miles from Shreveport, Louisiana. To tell her the Angel Jabril, called Gabriel by the infidels, was coming. Coming right here. Because Allah was angry. The Angel Jabril was going to kill a lot of people here because their ways displeased Allah.

With his face pressed to the ground Dewayne prayed and tried to remember this wife he'd married a long time ago. He'd been drunk for weeks in Tijuana then, trying to stop the headaches. She was some foxy lady, he remembered. But she was a whore. The shame of it brought tears to his eyes and he pushed his forehead against a sharp pebble until he smelled blood.

Rising, he crawled to the circle of stones where he'd cooked a squirrel last night, and rubbed ashes into the cut with both hands. The mark, he imagined, would show his devotion to Allah. It would show his wife and everyone else that Allah was the one, the true God. He hoped she'd hear. Because if she didn't, she might have to die.

Bo looked at the scribbled address on the red paper napkin in her hand. She couldn't really read it. "Calle something-or-other," it said, with a number. It might have been the address of the Dalai Lama, for all she knew about the city before her. Standing on the corner beside the painted burro, Bo realized that her understanding of Mexico centered entirely on food and fear, nothing more. A cultivated appreciation of fresh salsas, tempered by an uneasy awareness of inexplicable difference.

The address was more than sufficient for Estrella's report. In fact, it would probably earn Es some needed brownie points with Madge, who knew perfectly well what effort an investigator would have to expend to get a parent's Mexican address. Madge might even take Estrella out to lunch, Bo thought. Except that at the moment Estrella's tolerance for lunch wasn't impressive.

It was only 12:30.

"The English vessel Sparrowhawk," Bo began the sequence of shipwrecks again. "Aground at Nauset, mid-December 1626." Over Avenida Revolución's thousand purveyors of goods, the sun burned off the last of the haze. Bo thought about the passengers on the Sparrowhawk, a tiny ship with room for only about twenty people. They had come all the way from England on an icy dark sea, her grandmother said, courting death from storms, disease, possible starvation once they arrived. And these were mere English. Could an Irishwoman display less courage in obviously safer circumstances?