Moonbird Boy (15 page)

Bo stuffed the envelope back into the mailbox. "I'm, uh, I had an appointment with Dr. Keith to discuss, um, a new dog food Ralston-Purina is test-marketing in St. Louis," she told a tall woman of about seventy who was standing behind the chain link fence holding one of three Jack Russell terriers. The woman wore stylishly pleated gray flannel slacks and a red sweatshirt adorned with a cartoon of a deer in cartridge belts and a deerstalker cap over a caption that read, "Arm Deer." The hand holding the terrier was bigger than Bo's and not at all frail. "I thought maybe that..." Bo gestured toward the envelope, "was a message, you know, canceling the appointment."

"She didn't mention any appointment," the woman said. "I live next door, just got home from my Girl Scout troop meeting. I'm taking care of the dogs, watching the place. Why don't you leave your card. She can call you when she returns."

"She," Bo thought. So Dr. Keith was a woman. But who was "the boy," and what could this St. Louis doctor have to do with Zachary Crooked Owl and Ghost Flower Lodge? Maybe "the boy" was Bird! Had the note been a threat against Bird? "...if you want him alive," it warned.

"I'll phone Dr. Keith at her office to set another time," Bo said, backing down the steps into fading light.

"Office? You must mean at the university. Well, suit yourself." The woman set the dog on the ground where it jumped against her legs with the other two. In the autumn dusk their leaping white bodies glowed hypnotically. There was something about those dogs...

"Yes, the university," Bo concluded. St. Louis boasted several institutions of higher learning, she remembered from the time she'd spent there long ago. Among them three universities—the Jesuit-run St. Louis University, Washington University, and the University of Missouri at St. Louis. Calls to their switchboards would locate this Dr. Keith, but then what?

"Um, when do you expect Dr. Keith to return?" she called over her shoulder.

The older woman narrowed her eyes suspiciously. "I have no idea," she answered.

Bo hurried the three blocks back toward the street where the cab would be waiting. A deliciously autumnal dusk was falling fast, and warm amber light glowed from the windows of several houses. The street was a chronicle of domestic solidity from which she was excluded by nature. But maybe not, she thought. She could marry Andy, have a house like one of these. At dusk she'd turn on the lights.

The silly, simple fantasy was calming as she turned the corner expectantly. Where she'd begun this puzzling adventure a mature sugar maple dropped a cascade of leaves that rustled in the empty street. The cab was gone.

"That jerk!" she whispered angrily at the space where a yellow car should have been. But it was just an inconvenience. She was an adult, after all. She had money and a credit card. She wasn't dependent on cab drivers with ratty beards and no sense of honor. Lindbergh Boulevard was a few blocks away. The major street was lined with gas stations, restaurants, sundry businesses. She'd hike to it, grab a sandwich somewhere, and phone for another cab to the airport.

To her delight, a Steak'n'Shake restaurant was visible from the corner when she got to Lindbergh. Its black-and-white logo actually made her salivate as she sprinted toward the promise of a real hamburger and crispy, sinful French fries. Nobody would see her, she grinned to herself as she entered the brightly lit diner. She was out of place, unconnected, a wraith no one would notice as she savored the forbidden.

After phoning Southwest Airlines and arranging for a return flight that would leave in three hours, Bo checked with Directory Assistance and learned that Dr. Ann Lee Keith's number had been removed from the directory "at the customer's request." An unlisted number. Not surprised, she selected a corner booth and ordered a burger, fries, and a vanilla shake. Then she took a pen from her purse and began to write on a napkin.

"Who is Dr. Keith?" she wrote. "What is Keith's connection to Zach Crooked Owl, and what is Zach's connection to the gangster? Why did Zach and the gangster come here? (To threaten Keith, but she wasn't available.) What other reason do they have for being in St. Louis? (They wouldn't fly here just for that; there's something else going on. What?) Who is the boy in the threatening note? Bird? Why would this Dr. Keith want Bird? (Is Keith Bird's mother?) Why are Zach and the gangster suggesting that they have this 'boy' and will harm him if Keith doesn't 'call off her dogs'? (If Bird is the boy, Zach and the gangster don't have him; they don't even know where he is.)"

The milkshake arrived, foamy and vanilla-scented. Before scooping the whipped cream off its top with an iced-tea spoon, Bo made a last notation on the napkin. "Call off what dogs? Why does Dr. Keith have three Jack Russell terriers? Is that a Jack Russell's bark in those weird phone calls I've been getting? What in hell is going on?"

Later in the airport ladies' room she dropped the seductively dark lipstick in a trash container and splashed warm water on her face. Her reflection in the mirror looked a little bright-eyed and tense, she thought, but within reasonable boundaries. She'd been up since six, but she'd napped during the three-hour flight to St. Louis. By most standards this impulsive trip would be judged odd, but she'd chosen to do it because not doing it made her feel worthless. And she'd uncovered something. She had no idea what it was, but it was definitely something. The trip, despite its expense, had definitely been worthwhile. She felt okay.

"Eva," she said into a pay phone near her departure gate, "I'm just calling to check in like you asked. Everything's fine. Don't worry."

Over the loudspeaker a booming voice announced a commuter flight to Peoria, Illinois.

"Yeah, I'm at the airport," Bo hedged the answer to her psychiatrist's question. "Peoria? I thought he said Petrolia. It's up in Northern California. I'll call you tomorrow, okay?" There was no point in worrying her shrink, who was in constant contact, Bo knew, with Andrew.

She had given Dr. Broussard permission to discuss her progress with Andrew. It only seemed fair not to exclude him. But neither of them would readily grasp the rationale behind her presence in St. Louis. They both loved her and she returned their feelings, but neither really understood how different from theirs her balance was, and how deadly their commonsense approach to life sometimes felt. Mort Wagman had understood, and that, Bo nodded solemnly at the pay phone, was what made him a brother.

On the plane she curled next to the window and dozed, an image of small white terriers leaping behind her eyes.

Bo stretched and wrinkled her nose at an airplane headache as her flight made its approach through shining fog toward San Diego's Lindbergh Field. She still wasn't tired, and the fog seemed to swirl and clutch at the plane in vaporous despair. Not a good sign.

"This is our lucky night!" the pilot announced after touching down on the runway. "I've just heard from the control tower; we're the last plane in. As of now the airport's closed due to fog."

Several passengers cheered, but Bo continued to watch the wispy streams of water vapor as they swept past her window. There were shapes lost in the whiteness, half-formed things dissolving, dimensionless. She could feel their rage and grief. "Lost souls," her grandmother said when the fog drifted over Cape Cod and Bo and her little sister, Laurie, curled in the old woman's lap. "It's them that never was, it is, and them that was but isn't more."

A thrill of bathos made Bo shiver as she waited to exit the plane. The airport was built over a marshy trail the Kumeyaay had followed from village to summer village along the water. Now the trail was lost, and with Zach's betrayal the last band of quiet Indian storytellers would become "them that was but isn't more." Already something wept in the fog, outraged. Or maybe it had been there all along.

In the drive to her Ocean Beach apartment Bo decided to take a mild sedative and go to bed. Her imagination was locked in high gear, spinning out skeins of feeling. Dr. Broussard had warned her to rest, close the doorway to mania now gaping open. But she hadn't rested. She'd flown halfway across the continent and back, placed herself in literal and neurochemical danger. And for what? Not really for Mort or Bird, she admitted, but for a sense of movement, of being fully alive. It was worth it.

When she unsnapped her purse to retrieve the apartment key, she saw the handful of colored leaves tucked beside her wallet. A receipt from Steak'n'Shake. And a napkin covered in questions the answers to which might just save a lost soul dissolved in fog. That soul, she smiled as she climbed her apartment steps, might even be hers.

After drawing a hot bath Bo threw twelve chamomile tea bags into the tub, and then soaked in the aromatic water. Chamomile was supposed to be soothing, but she hated tea. Bathing in it seemed a reasonable alternative. There had been no further barks on her answering machine. She'd taken the sedative, and it would kick in in an hour or so. Everything seemed orderly, uneventful.

Actually, she realized while toweling her hair, everything seemed stiff and strangely lifeless. Boring. Her hairbrush was old. The perfume bottles in the corner of the sink-top were dull with dust. Her terrycloth bathrobe was uninspiring, and even her toothbrush seemed withered and drab. A hunger for new things, new colors and shapes, expanded gleefully in her mind. Too late to go shopping, she knew, but there was the all-night supermarket only blocks away.

The feeling was a kind of ecstasy unweighted by any link to consequence. Buoyant. Clean as morning light. And impossible to hate despite knowing what it was, a brain-bath of chemicals that in ordinary combinations merely attached pleasure to the

acquisition of necessary things. But those chemical combinations weren't ordinary now. They were a river. And riding it required skill.

Okay, Bradley, enjoy a manic spending spree. It'll be harmless if you confine it to ten dollars. Twenty, max.

Dressed in clean sweats and tennis shoes, Bo took her keys and one twenty-dollar bill from her purse. The credit cards would remain behind. Also the checks. She'd learned several times in the past how it felt to pay, literally, the price for this experience. But it couldn't be stopped. Nobody, she thought, could resist the joy of it, the heady, generous fun. But it could be controlled. Sort of.

The supermarket throbbed with fluorescent light as she approached the automatic doors and enjoyed their woosh-clicking sound. A thousand objects gleamed for her approval. But it had to be real things, not food, and that eliminated most of the brightly lit aisles. Peripherally Bo wondered why food didn't count, wasn't attractive. Why it had to be solid, physical things that would last awhile. There was no reason.

In the health care aisle she examined racks of toothbrushes, finally selecting one in clear blue plastic with bold diagonal stripes in white across the handle. It reminded her of Andrew, and the thought of him made her smile. He'd be home soon. She'd welcome him with a new toothbrush to be kept at her apartment. The toothbrush would be a symbol for the continuity of their relationship. Toothpaste, too.

In the travel-size section Bo picked out three miniature tubes of toothpaste, a tiny can of mint shaving gel, and a bag of six disposable razors with blue handles. These she combined with other toiletries, a blue plastic spatula from the housewares aisle, and a collapsible cheese grater that fit into its own little canvas pouch for storage. He liked to cook, after all. Finally she selected a large white colander to hold the gifts, and headed for the checkout lane. Nineteen dollars and sixty-three cents. Delightful.

Outside, the fog had thickened to a cottony gray presence that muted sound and diffused light in vaporous blurs. Bo could smell the sea, its salt and iodine and tangled kelp, blowing inside the wall of mist that parted and closed around her at every step. She'd walk home on the beach, she decided. She'd run with the fog where it rose from black water to become pale and glistening confusion. It was an image of manic depression, she thought. The dark cold and its frenzied mists. She'd run along that line, be the thing entire. For once, she belonged to the real world completely.

It was easy to walk two blocks along familiar, lighted doorways, but at the seawall Bo realized that she couldn't see her feet. They were there; she could feel them. But the absence of visual affirmation made her suddenly clumsy. Reaching into mist, she pulled off her shoes and held them up like rabbits pulled from a hat. They were still warm from contact with feet already alien and untrustworthy against the invisible surface of the ground.

In the sand it was better. Something about the gritty texture shifting under her weight was familiar and reassuring. And besides, the steady thrum of visual disorientation had become pleasantly scary. Bo slipped her shoes into the plastic bag with her gifts for Andrew and then swung the white bag in a circle about her. It was like casting a spell. Like some lonely blessing and exorcism at once.

"Aye, and it's your spawn I am, Cally," she whispered in her grandmother's Irish brogue to a crone named Caillech Beara who once haunted the myths and foggy crossroads of Scotland and Ireland, "but I'll neither be dead nor mad when mornin' comes. I've a work to do here, old poet. I've a friend's murder to see to and his wee boy to watch. It's just walkin' here we are. You'll be gone in the light, you will."

The whispered speech to an ancient goddess of death and madness had come from nowhere, but provided a sort of grounding. Wrapped in fog, Bo knew she wasn't lost. It was a game, nothing more. And a way of setting boundaries. For luck she swung the bag around her head one last time before leaving the wet sand where waves hissed and retreated unseen.

Except this time the heavy bag nicked something in its arc around her head. Bo felt the touch. Just a palpable thump, inconsequential and tiny against the plastic frame of the colander. It had been behind her, on the right. The bag had hit something close behind her. Except there couldn't be something there. She was walking along the littoral at the water's edge, twenty yards from the wooden uprights supporting a volleyball net close to the sidewalk. And there was nothing else on Ocean Beach tall enough to reach her shoulders.