Turtle Baby (9 page)

"Okay," Bo began, "you're depressed. You feel like dirty paint on the walls of a dark room where nobody ever goes. You don't blame them. You wouldn't go there, either. You think you might prefer being dead, but it's such a hassle it's not worth it. Am I right?"

"You're right," Estrella sighed. "Every time I think I've got on top of this, it falls apart. I don't know what to do."

"First, remind yourself that it won't last. Your chemistry will stabilize in a while. In the meantime, you need something to distract you. Like a good time."

Estrella's eyelids remained at half-mast. "Hah," she muttered.

"I'm serious," Bo went on, warming to an idea. "Andy's going with me down to T.J. tonight. I want to talk to Chac again, and the easiest way's to see her show at this bar on Revolución. How about you and Henry coming along?"

"You're going out with him again?" Faint color was returning to Estrella's face. "But I thought ..."

Estrella's approval of Andrew LaMarche knew no boundaries. To further escalate her friend's mood, Bo showed her ace.

"Not just going out." She grinned, displaying the little foil-wrapped items she had just purchased in Hillcrest.

"Wow! What made you change your mind about him? Oh, Bo, that's terrific. And of course I'd love to go along, but shouldn't you two be alone?"

"We will be," Bo vamped dramatically over the top of a report on welfare fraud she grabbed from her desk and held like a Japanese fan, "later."

A sadness overcame Dewayne Singleton as he stood watching people hurry back and forth across the border. They looked like mice in clothes. But that wasn't why he felt sad. At his feet swirls of dust puffed up and then fell to nothing with every step.

It almost made him cry, but he couldn't stop walking just to stop the little puffs of dust, which would have to die. Maybe, he thought, this was how Allah felt. How Allah couldn't stop walking just to stop creating people with every step. Maybe people were just dust kicked up by something walking by. Something big, not paying attention to its feet.

The sadness of that made his bones vibrate and feel sick, although he didn't know why. Allah could do whatever He wanted without Dewayne Singleton feeling one way or the other about it.

Even from a quarter-mile distance the problem in Mexico seemed to rattle in the air like somebody's radio on to something you can't really hear, but you can't not hear. The whore, his wife. She might not still be there, but he thought she probably was. Unless she was dead from shooting up. That might be. But then why was he here? Allah would know, as long at Dewayne prayed five times a day. That was the important thing.

Dewayne flung himself upon the cluttered dust beside the border and faced Mecca. Five Japanese tourists from a guided group took snapshots of him before being led to the metal turnstiles where no one asked to see their passports.

The dust in Dewayne's nose smelled like cooking poule d'eau, he thought. Water chicken. Like the black, swimming chickens on Bayou Teche with their little pod claws. His family lived on poule d'eau, and the baitfish called chou picque. It was pretty good. But his family didn't worship Allah.

Tears filled Dewayne's eyes again as he rose and brushed himself off. His family would die in Allah's wrath, too, if the curse rising from this place wasn't stopped.

Overhead the sun wobbled a little, like a rolling egg, and then stopped. Dewayne watched it and thought about Papa and Buster, the day they ran him off.

"You're nuthin' but trouble," Papa said. "Go on outta here an' don' come back!"

His younger brother, Buster, didn't say anything, just whomped him with a board until his nose bled. Dewayne knew Mama was back at the house cryin' and prayin'. Mama always loved Dewayne best. No matter what. He'd have to save Mama, at least.

Beyond the border turnstiles a man held a rack of stone wind chimes that clinked in the breeze. Dewayne felt his mind ride the sound as he headed into Mexico.

By nine o'clock Avenida Revolución reminded Bo of the bar scene from Blade Runner. A festival of nations in a boozy neon-lit haze pouring from a hundred open doorways. "Free Margaritas for the ladies!" yelled a man in one doorway, countered by another yelling, "Your first shooter only fifty cents!"

Groups of foreign tourists bused down from San Diego's hotels walked expectantly through streams of colored light, their plastic name badges reflecting magenta, then greenish yellow. Five pale college boys, already very drunk and wearing newly purchased ponchos and sombreros, stood on a bus bench singing "Hava Nagila." Bo didn't miss the look of hate crossing the face of a Mexican busboy working an adjacent sidewalk cafe.

She hoped the young revelers would stay on Revolución, where it was safe. But they probably wouldn't. The darker side streets only blocks away offered other, sometimes deadly, attractions. Drugs, prostitution, live pornography in floor shows rumored to include women enjoying the sexual prowess of German shepherds.

San Diego's abundance of collegiate and military adolescent males learned through folklore passed from generation to generation how to "do" Tijuana. Out-of-town boys sometimes found themselves drugged, beaten, robbed, and left to wake up the next morning in rancid alleys. Occasionally one of them didn't wake up.

"An interesting environment," Andrew LaMarche said, steering Bo around an ancient woman begging in the middle of the sidewalk. "One scarcely knows what to make of it."

Bo slid her right arm around his waist and found the gesture comfortable. "I love it when you don't have an opinion." She grinned, enjoying the warmth of his hand cupping her shoulder. In June, nights were still cool, but she'd worn a clingy cowl-necked shell in black silk that had no sleeves and weighed about as much as a wooden match. With black lame gaucho pants and dramatic gold earrings, the dark silk would, she calculated, create an aura of sensual worldliness. If only Estrella could bring herself to stop beaming.

"How much further is this bar?" Lieutenant Commander Henry Benedict, Estrella's husband, asked. "You know, Tijuana's off-limits to navy personnel. And I've already forgotten where we parked the car."

Gangly in a sport coat and tie instead of his usual navy uniform, he bent his tall frame over Estrella protectively. The colored lights made his short blond hair look like shaved tinsel.

"You're not in uniform, and it's in the lot on Benito Juarez," Estrella grinned. "Only four blocks from here. How on earth do you keep from getting lost when you're running around underwater in submarines?"

"Fortunately my field's communication, not navigation." Henry grinned back as Estrella wrapped both arms around his waist.

Bo looked approvingly at her friend, carefully made-up and dressed in a chic peach satin peacoat over caramel brown slacks that as yet gave no hint of the debatably blessed event. Es was, Bo thought, resplendent. In fact they were all

resplendent, and it was nice to be one of them. Nice to be part of a couple out with another couple to do something interesting. Nice just to be normal.

Too nice.

Watch it, Bradley. You're falling into a trap that has been known to involve Tupperware and loss of identity. You did take your medication today, didn't you?

Bo remembered the vitamin-sized pink pills, tossed back with tomato juice morning and evening. No problem.

"This must be the place." LaMarche nodded at the corner doorway ahead, above which the name "Chac" was spelled in twinkling Christmas tree lights Bo had not seen earlier. In the dark the little club seemed sophisticated, devil-may-care.

"Hey!" Estrella whispered as they traversed the long hall and entered the club's main room. "If that's Chac, she's good!"

Every table was filled, and Bo's party leaned against the bar as the singer finished the lyrics to a traditional Mexican polka, prancing on the narrow runway stage like a wiry pony. Her black hair hung thick and straight, flashing blue sparks as she moved gracefully despite three-inch spike heels and white satin toreador pants so tight her abdominal muscles could be seen. Flat abdominal muscles, like brickwork. Bo sucked in her own stomach and made another vow to get to the gym soon. Maybe this week. Maybe tomorrow.

Andrew ordered a pitcher of margaritas and a Coke for Estrella, and toasted Bo as Chac began another song. A photographer with a Polaroid camera was snapping shots of couples for a dollar apiece.

At the end of the bar Bo noticed the Australian she'd met yesterday, still wearing the unusual inlaid-stone bracelet. He seemed to be controlling the sound mix for Chac's accompanying taped music. Without the gaucho hat he was less theatrical, more ruggedly handsome with a patch of white hair curling over the right side of his forehead amid the mass of dark waves pulled back in a ponytail. Beside him a slender woman whose profile reminded Bo of Nefertiti smiled and leaned to say something in his ear.

Where the stage intersected the missing far wall, Bo noted, Chris Joe Gavin sat on a stool, his Martin six-string in his hands. As Chac completed the song's introductory bars, he began a thrumming counterpoint to her melody.

The song's words were Spanish, but Bo was sure she could name the theme. Some things transcended mere language. As the music escalated, Chac's clear voice grew husky, then hoarse. A single pin spotlight framed her head and shoulders against smoky darkness, and the guitar's notes seemed to move through her like electricity.

It was a wail of longing barely confined by the music. Erotic longing. The near-obsessive need of one person to join wholly with one another. Alone. Bo noticed that her knees felt like gauze, and carefully set her drink on the bar behind her to avoid simply dropping it on her feet. At her right shoulder the presence of Andrew LaMarche's chest had created a magnetic field that made it impossible to move. Or breathe.

As the music crescendoed, Chac dropped to her knees and threw her head back. Her hair was a cascade of sleek blackness, damp at the temples. Her eyes were closed as she held the last, long note, then doubled forward over the handheld mike to breathless silence and then thunderous applause.

Bo let her head fall back against the man at her side, and felt his lips brush her temple and remain there as he pressed his skull against hers.

"It's good that you went shopping today," Estrella whispered happily into her Coke. "Hey, people are leaving. We'd better grab a table before you collapse."

"Let me get Chac," Bo said, forcing herself to move. "I have to talk to her."

In the shuffle of people leaving to barhop elsewhere or just milling around between musical sets, Bo gestured toward the young singer. "Chac!" she yelled. "It's Bo Bradley, remember? Could you join us between sets? There are some important things we need to discuss."

The singer was signing tape cassettes at the end of the bar, flanked by Chris Joe, the Australian, and his companion, who in the light looked as though she'd know her way around Hollywood. That attitude. Open, self-assured, expensively dressed. Not the usual habitué of Tijuana nightspots. Bo found a ten dollar bill in her purse and bought one of Chac's tapes.

"Si, un momento," Chac answered, and then jumped in fear as an altercation broke out in the hallway. Over a cacophony of Spanish as leather-jacketed bouncers flung themselves into the dim passageway, Bo heard a voice bellowing something in English. Something about Allah and a curse on infidels. The speaker was invisible, the Mideastern words weirdly out of place among the hanging plastic doilies and omnipresent Christmas tree lights of Tijuana.

"What's that all about?" she asked Estrella over the din after pushing her way to their table.

"Just some nut," Es answered, immediately wincing at the choice of words. "I mean, it's probably a Saudi tourist who's had too much to drink. You know how it is down here."

Bo frowned. "You mean a Muslim? They don't drink."

"Well, this one's a backslider then." Es laughed as the offender was hauled into the street, his words fading.

LaMarche had succeeded in securing a table in the front, and as Bo, Estrella, and Henry took their seats, Chac approached.

"Why are you keeping Acito from me?" she asked, slamming an oversize shot glass of tequila on the table. The full sleeves of her white blouse were covered with thousands of flashing sequins, and the front and back of the garment fell to points.

The blouse was made, Bo realized, by folding a square of fabric corner-to-corner. The traditional Maya woman's costume with the addition of sleeves. There had been an exhibit of these huipiles at a San Diego museum only a few months ago.

"You can't take him away. You have no right!"

"Please sit down for a moment," Bo said. "And let me introduce Estrella Benedict and her husband, Henry, and Dr. Andrew LaMarche, the director of the Child Abuse Unit at St. Mary's Hospital."

"Child abuse!" Chac bristled, nearly overturning her drink as she shook a trembling fist at Bo. She was unconsciously squashing a wedge of lime cupped in her hand. Estrella caught the shot glass before it tipped, and pushed a salt shaker toward the distraught singer.

"We'd like to help you," Estrella said in Spanish.

"To Little Turtle," Bo toasted, holding up her margarita.

Chac's black eyes softened momentarily as she squeezed lime juice on the back of her left wrist, sprinkled salt on it, licked her wrist, and then downed the tequila.

"You know his name," she said, shuddering at the high-proof alcohol. "How did you...?"

"I have a friend," Bo explained, "who's an Iroquois, among other things, and she's read a lot about the Maya ..."

"Then she has read that a Maya mother does not hurt her baby," Chac finished the sentence for Bo, demonstrating impressive fluency in English. "And why are they doing this AIDS test on my son, on a baby?"

In theatrical makeup and her sequined costume the young woman was exquisitely beautiful. Bo wished there were a way to avoid shattering that illusion, but there wasn't.