Moonbird Boy (7 page)

"But not everybody pays at Ghost Flower," she went on. "Half the guests are indigent, trying to stay alive on Social Security Disability benefits. Ghost Flower is actually licensed by the county as a board-and-care."

"Ycchh!" Estrella said. "I've seen those places, private homes where the owners get paid to keep mentally ill people. Most of them are pits. But Ghost Flower has that fabulous building with the thick walls. It must have cost a fortune to build."

"The walls are made out of dirt," Bo answered, thinking. "And there's plenty of that on the reservation. But the Neji had an architectural firm from Los Angeles do the building, so it couldn't have been cheap. You're right. Wonder where they got the money?"

"Why don't you ask them?" Estrella said, wiping lipstick from the corner of her mouth with her little finger. "I've got to go, try to make sure these kids get sent to the same foster home."

"Maybe I will," Bo answered as the door closed behind her officemate. The other bands of Kumeyaay left in San Diego County after sequential displacement by Spanish, Mexican, and then American invaders, had all lived in grueling poverty until casino interests and waste-management entrepreneurs discovered them. Only the Neji Reservation had avoided becoming either a hazardous waste dump or a gambling mecca.

The Neji history was interesting, Bo thought. But it couldn't have anything to do with the death of a stand-up comic. Or could it? Zachary Crooked Owl would know. And she was going to ask him.

Hiking her long skirt with one hand, Bo climbed into the four-wheel-drive Pathfinder she'd bought at a police auction four months earlier, and sighed. The CPS parking lot looked exactly the same as it had for three years. Her office building, a rambling two-story structure of colorless brick, also looked the same. In the yard overlooked by rows of gray windows, an unchanging eucalyptus tree wore the same mantle of dust it wore every October. What was lacking, she realized as she guided the Pathfinder carefully past Madge's immaculately clean beige coupe, was autumn. Just one red leaf anywhere on the horizon would provide a focus. But there would be no red leaf. San Diego's autumns brought nothing but dust and a nearly unendurable glare.

Sunlight's good for depression, Bradley. Enjoy it and save some money so you can fly to New Zealand in the spring, where it will be fall.

The thought was energizing. She'd embark on an austerity program, Bo decided, in order to stockpile the airfare. She'd make her own clothes, plant vegetables in pots on the deck, maybe try to sell some of her paintings at craft fairs. And if she didn't start smoking again she could save fifteen dollars a week on cigarettes alone. On that concept she was ambivalent.

Mort Wagman had talked her into quitting shortly after she'd arrived at Ghost Flower. "You're depressed, you don't care about anything, so you won't care about going through withdrawal," he argued while pacing in a tight circle beside Bo's nest in the couch corner. "The misery will give you something concrete to think about."

At the time his weird pacing had been irritating, its pointless energy a criticism of her sluggishness. "Either stand still or go away," Bo had told him. "You're making me dizzy."

"I'm going to tell you a secret," he answered, leaning over the leather arm of the couch. "You know how dogs circle around and around before they curl up to go to sleep?"

"Leave me alone," she said, not relishing a conversation about dogs.

"They do it because their ancestors made nests in tall grass that way, and the memory got wired in."

Bo pulled a length of tan acrylic blanket over her head, but the voice continued.

"I'm not a hundred percent human," Mort Wagman whispered as though revealing a secret thousands were dying to know. "Somebody did this surgery on me, somebody in my family put in pieces of animal brain. See the scar? That's why I circle sometimes. It just feels right."

In spite of herself Bo had emerged from the stifling blanket to look at his scalp beneath his long, ebony hair. There was a small scar, probably from a childhood fall or some other accident. And Mort Wagman was still delusional, she thought bleakly. Crazy. Paranoid. Good thing he was in a safe place until his meds kicked in.

"Not only that, but I've kissed a frog," he went on. "Think maybe I'll marry her."

"I won't smoke around you if you won't pace around me," Bo offered. Anything to shut him up, silence his intense, meaningless stories. And he agreed to the deal. But then he'd been constantly at her side, joking, cajoling, dragging her out for countless walks in the desert. She'd finally quit smoking without really thinking about it. But the change wasn't permanent, she was sure. She felt none of the melodramatic idiocy so evident in nonsmokers. Not a single urge to flap her hands and cough dramatically at the mere sight of a Bic lighter. Nothing. About smoking she just felt nothing. And that, she was sure, wouldn't last.

Slipping a tape of the soundtrack from The Mission into the Pathfinder's tape deck, Bo watched the urban landscape revert to its natural state as she climbed east on Interstate 8. The hilly terrain was pocked with boulders and where the ground was not shadowed by coast live oaks, sycamores, and elderberry trees, an occasional cholla cactus grew, baking in the sun. They looked like the fuzzy arms and legs of dismembered teddy bears. Little forests of teddy bear limbs growing from each other at odd angles, matted with barbed spines that could bury themselves an inch deep in rubber shoe soles. What they could do to flesh did not bear thinking.

In the morning glare Bo felt a growing unease. The closer she got to Ghost Flower Lodge, the more she felt as if she were driving into an old black-and-white movie. The sun had devoured color, leaving nothing but gradations of ecru relieved only occasionally by splotches of shadow. Ennio Morricone's score blaring from her tape deck only reinforced the eerie feeling, but she couldn't bring herself to turn it off. The single oboe, the boy soprano's haunting miserere, the threat audible in a rumbling timpani, brought up an edginess that had nothing to do with depression. Something was wrong in these baking hills; Bo could sense it. Something unholy happening. Something fearful in the white glare.

As she turned off the freeway onto the patched concrete road leading toward the Neji Reservation, Bo noticed a small wooden sign professionally painted in letters reading, "Hadamar Desert Reclamation Project, Site II." Beyond the sign a narrow road wound into the hills, littered with tumbleweeds. A university project of some kind, Bo thought. Geology. "Hadamar" was undoubtedly some academic's pun on an excavation for the fossilized marine life left baking after the retreat of ancient seas. "Mar" meant "sea" in several languages, she remembered, wondering if "had a sea" was typical geologist humor.

Curious, Bo made a mental note to explore the area later. For now, she reminded herself sternly, the goal was to explore the muddy financial situation of the Neji.

Zachary Crooked Owl was standing in the courtyard as Bo pulled up, talking to a man who looked like George Washington with a crew cut. The man had slung his dark suit coat over a shoulder and his black wingtips were covered with a film of dust, but even in the high desert heat he seemed cool, composed. Zach was sweating. Bo could see dark blue arcs under the arms of the big man's blue workshirt, and the leather cord holding the owl's claw at his neck was dark with moisture.

"I've already told you, Henderson..." Zach said as Bo opened the Pathfinder's door to a wall of dry heat.

But the man merely nodded and turned toward a rental car parked under the cottonwood. "We'll be in touch, Crooked Owl," he replied and then paused to perform a smiling appraisal of the lodge's exterior. A satisfied, self-congratulatory look. Like a man who's just purchased an expensive toy. Then he folded himself into the little car and drove away.

Zach stared into the dust cloud trailing the man's exit for minutes before acknowledging Bo's presence. "Good to see you, Bo," he finally said. "But don't stand around in the sun without a hat. Come on in."

"Can't," Bo answered. "I've come to talk about Mort, and I know we have to do that outside. What's going on, Zach? Something's wrong; I can feel it. Who was that man?"

"Just business," he answered, hunching massive shoulders as if battling a chill. His eyelids were swollen and with the graying stubble on his cheeks his long, braided hair looked less Indian than derelict. Zach, Bo noted with alarm, was at this moment scarcely the pillar of strength she knew and respected. "What do you want to know about Mort?" he asked. "I haven't heard anything from the sheriff's people since they were here yesterday."

"You mean you haven't called? And what about Bird? Doesn't anybody care what's happened to Bird?"

"Bo, we've got eleven sick people here to manage. Until yesterday you were one of them, so you understand what I'm saying. Why'd you drive all the way up here? What do you want?"

The words drove a wedge between them that Bo felt in her stomach. She wasn't a guest anymore, wasn't going to be treated with the easy patience demanded by illness. She'd left; now she was an outsider. Hard to take. And Zach's count was off. There had been fourteen guests at Ghost Flower until yesterday. Mort's death and her return to San Diego would not leave eleven.

"You mean twelve sick people," she corrected. "And what I want to know is..."

Zach stared into his hands, stretched palm-side up at his waist. Then he folded each into a brown fist. "Old Ayma walked off," he said quietly, not looking up. "Nobody noticed in the mess about Mort. We searched all night. Nobody found her."

Bo felt her heart beat faster as she looked past Zachary Crooked Owl into the bleached landscape bequeathed a gentle, mystical people by the United States government. To the west lay the Campo Reservation, and north of that, the La Posta, Manzanita, and Cuyapaipe Reservations. All Kumeyaay. All desert lands now called home by the last remnants of a once-large tribe so private and unassuming it had nearly perished without a trace. Also out there, Bo remembered, were lost emerald and gold mines, a mysterious Viking ship jutting from the side of a desert wash until buried by an earthquake in 1933, and a ghostly mule-drawn stagecoach complete with its driver murdered in 1860, still seen barreling through desert canyons. A shape-shifting, dangerous place. Deadly for an old woman already hallucinating. An old woman who spit out the pills that might have enabled her to survive.

"You've informed the Sheriff’s Department," Bo thought aloud. "What about the search-and-rescue teams, the trained dogs?"

"They've been out there since first light. They haven't found her." Zach's barrel chest expanded with a shuddering breath and then shrank as he exhaled. "They're bringing in cadaver dogs this afternoon."

"Cadaver dogs?"

"Specially trained. They can find a fresh body within eight to ten miles, less for one that's been dead longer. Ayma couldn't have gone far. They'll find her."

"My God," Bo breathed. "I'm sorry, Zach. This must be hell for you and Dura, everybody."

"Been doing this all my life, Old John before me, all the way back to my uncle, Catomka. Never lost anybody. Then two at once." His wide nostrils flared with some emotion Bo couldn't define. Anger. Or maybe despair. "It feels like a curse."

On the ground beside the lodge driveway a darkling beetle emerged from beneath a rock and moved, its rump characteristically elevated, into a clump of Mormon tea. Bo watched the bug's stiff movement and wondered what had inspired it to change locations. There was no way to know.

The universe, she thought, was comprised of such inexplicable movements. Black beetles, psychotic old women, cosmic debris hurtling through space—all intent on journeys for which explanation was simply absent. No one would ever know why Old Ayma walked into the autumn desert. Or why Mort Wagman was shot in the middle of the night on a California Indian reservation. The tyranny of not knowing made Bo feel abandoned and angry.

"How did the Neji fund the construction of this place?" she blurted. The question was completely inappropriate. "I mean, it must have been expensive."

Zach seemed to welcome a question he could answer. "A private underwriter," he answered. "That and our licensed facility status with MediCal and then some of the big insurance companies. Took us nearly twenty years to get where we are, and now..." He stopped and jammed his fists into the pockets of dirt-encrusted Levi's.

"And now what, Zach? Can the county pull your license because of what's happened?"

"Maybe. But it's not your problem. Look, I've got things to do and—"

"It is my problem," Bo interrupted, tears forming and then drying behind her sunglasses in the warm air. "This place is a miracle! There's nothing like it anywhere west of Massachusetts. For that matter there's nothing like it anywhere. Let me do something to help, Zach. Tell me what's going on."

The look in his eyes was one Bo hated. The professional look. The one separating those with psychiatric disorders from everyone else on the planet. An impenetrable wall.

"Too much stress right now can land you back in a hospital," he said. "But I'll keep Dr. Broussard informed about the investigation into Mort's death and about what happens to Ghost Flower. She'll fill you in." With that he turned and walked into the lodge.

Bo felt a tear spill from her right eye and evaporate on her cheek as she stood beside her car. Zachary Crooked Owl never called Eva Broussard anything but "Blindhawk," and was never rude. Until now. For a moment she felt a crush of responsibility for Zach's behavior that made her nose ache. The depression bogey again, insisting that everything wrong in the world was ultimately the fault of Bo Bradley, rotten person. It said she was unworthy of Zach's confidence, a failure. It said everything she did was wrong, clumsy, inadequate. It sneered that even her dog had left her. At that the downward spiral of her thoughts slammed to a halt.

Not Mildred, Bradley. No way! Drown in your damn depression if you have to, but leave Mildred out of it.

The words had an edge that made her feel better. A boundary. She might not be able to control these eruptions of self-loathing that could override the antidepressant medication, but their content was controllable. Striding to the clump of Mormon tea, Bo addressed the beetle hiding inside. "Depression sucks," she hissed the Ss, "but it's not going to keep me from finding out what's going on around here, understand?"