Turtle Baby (19 page)

"I may be in over my head this time," she told Mildred. "I don't want to hurt him, but eventually, just because I'm the way I am, I will."

The dog nodded somberly, sniffing the air from the open window.

On the canyon floor Bo experimented with the four-wheel's capability in sand, then rock. Numerous fresh tire tracks snaked along the jeep trail, indicating the presence of what seemed like hordes of other people somewhere in the craggy silence. Bo crossed a vestige of an old stagecoach track, and tried to remember what the ranger had told the Sierra Club group. Something about a particularly dangerous area at the end of Arroyo Tapiado. An area of twisting caves and blind valleys ending in swallow holes. The caves, the ranger said, were safe in dry weather. But the tortuous, water-cut valleys accessible only through sinkholes in the cave ceilings were an invitation to lonely death. Other sinkholes had formed in the impassable valleys above the caves, covered only with fragile plates of worn sandstone. A fall through one of these would leave the victim trapped in an uncharted cave under a blind desert gorge where no human had been since the 1800s when scouts for the stage line went into the area searching for shortcuts, and never came out.

Shuddering, Bo stayed widely east of the area, and selected a slot canyon off the Arroyo Seco del Diablo creek bed, now dry and glistening in the sun. Parking on firm, rocky ground, she let Mildred run on the clear creek bed for a while, and then lifted the dog into a modified infant carrier strapped to her back. Desert canyons were no place for domestic animals to run free. And the temperature in the parked car would soon surpass tolerable limits for a small, old dog. Over her shoulder Bo gave Mildred some water in a paper cup, drank some herself from a canteen clipped to her belt, and hiked into the canyon.

Its walls, one hundred fifty feet high in places, cast layers of shade on a floor littered with the bulbous, connected concretions that were like strings of stone pearls. Softball-sized and valueless, they formed themselves of minerals around a nucleus in sedimentary rock, and then merely sat there for millennia. Bo thought of them as a discarded first attempt at pearls, formed by nature in its childhood and then forgotten. Like the lumpen clay pot made by small hands that would later shape a Ming vase. The canyon ended a half mile later in a dry fall that captivated Bo's eye with its play of subtle color. Only a deep growl emanating from the backpack alerted her to a coiled form in one of the wind-carved grottoes in the canyon wall twelve feet from her right shoulder. A rattlesnake. Its tail, hanging languorously from the ledge, snapped upward at Mildred's growl, the rattles vibrating with a sound at once unobtrusive and absolutely bone-chilling.

"Oh, shit," Bo whispered. Frost seemed to be crawling up the back of her neck, under her skin. The ancient enmity between snake and woman. "We were just leaving," she said politely, and meant it. The rattler didn't look, but flicked its tongue, tasting their intrusion on the air. In its niche, it might have been some holy sentinel, Bo thought. Placed there as a warning. Its image seemed carved on the backs of her eyes.

Back at the creek bed Bo ate lunch, spritzed a wide arc of straight ammonia on surrounding rocks from a spray bottle, and unfolded a cot in the shade cast by the Pathfinder. She'd read about the ammonia trick somewhere, but doubted its efficacy in defining territory as an animal would do with urine. It might at least momentarily confuse a predatory mammal, she thought. But mostly it allowed her an illusion of shrewd outdoorsiness, like a pioneer woman or somebody in an ad for thermal underwear.

Grabbing the book on Maya hieroglyphics and settling with Mildred on the cot, Bo shifted her attention to the problem at hand. A dead singer and an orphaned baby with too many fathers.

In 1492, the book began, there were eighty million indigenous people in the Americas. A century later only ten million remained, thanks to diseases brought by European invaders. In Guatemala there were less than four million Maya left today, working as near-slaves on plantations or being absorbed into the predominant culture as ladinos, acculturated Maya who no longer observed the old ways. Locked between the past and future, ladinos were shunned by the traditional Maya as traitors and ignored by the dominant, Spanish-speaking culture. Chac, Bo assumed, would have been one of these. Acito, as an American baby of Maya birth, would have no standing in his mother's homeland at all.

The Maya glyphs, carved over centuries in cities now lost beneath jungle overgrowth, were fascinating. Bo studied the strange faces, bird heads, and dismembered hands. Arcane and puzzling, they told of a world in which time was the reason for being. In which time was measured, honored, and symbolically carried by the ritualized behavior of its people, the Maya. Even contemporary Maya, Bo read, are self-effacing and modest, preferring to allow time itself to order events. The concept was difficult. Bo felt her eyelids drooping as a pleasant breeze swept the image of the snake and its warning from her mind.

"We'll just take a little nap," she told the already-sleeping dog beside her, and sighed into the vast and nurturing desert silence.

On Saturdays the Torrey Pines State Reserve was crowded with joggers, cyclists, hikers, birders, and, it seemed to Andrew LaMarche, everyone else in San Diego who could claim any interest whatever in fresh air. Trails that on fogbound weekday mornings were home only to wood rats and mule deer now resounded with shrieking children and keen-eyed senior citizens yelling, "It's a brown towhee, Marvin! Fourth one today."

He had just wanted to be alone. To revisit the scene of that first lovemaking and search for Bo's earring. After a quarter century of monklike emotional austerity, he thought, it was time to permit himself the luxury of some fanciful behavior. To celebrate the first step in his claiming for his own the most spirited, courageous, warmhearted, and stubborn woman he had ever met. Hard to accomplish amid hordes of weekend nature buffs.

On a sturdy lookout platform below the trail a wedding was in progress, the bride and groom in traditional attire, the clergyman's robe billowing in Pacific sea winds banking off the eroded cliffs. Andrew followed the sandy path to its curve near the grove of pines that had survived drought and bark-beetles, waited to see if the cleric would be borne aloft in his black gown, and smiled. He would marry Bo there, he decided. The unorthodox setting would please her with its wildness. Her hair would catch the wind and glow like copper...

"Have you noticed that some of the sea dahlias are still in bloom?" a brisk voice asked. "And I'm afraid you really can't go off the trail here, tempting as that may be." The speaker was a tiny woman with short gray hair and a tan suggesting much time spent outdoors. Her khaki sunhat was adorned with pins and badges from nature preserves on three continents, and her green polo shirt bore a cloth badge saying, "Torrey Pines Docent Society."

"Ummm," Andrew replied, sharing with the docent a view of his left foot damningly placed beyond the trail edge in a patch of what must be, he feared, sea dahlias. "My, uh, mother lost an earring up here yesterday, in that grove. She was, uh ..."

"Collecting pine needles?" The woman's sparkling blue eyes left no doubt as to the failure of his schoolboy alibi. "I'm sure she'd be interested in our Native American basketry seminar at the lodge. The Torrey pine needles, as you probably know, are long and attached in bundles of five. The Kumeyaay Indians may have used them for decorative baskets, but we aren't sure. In any event, your mother should not have gone off the trail."

From beyond a sandy mound to his left, Andrew heard something call "Chi-ca-go" in a reedy alto voice. His foot seemed frozen in the dahlias.

"California quail," the docent stated with enthusiasm. "Nests on the ground in grass-lined hollows. You can see what damage tramping around might do."

"Of course," he conceded, pulling the offending foot back onto the trail. "I suppose there's no way of retrieving the earring. I probably couldn't have found it, anyway."

A kind, if knowing smile lit the docent's face. "It's irregular," she nodded, "but if we go in from the northeast loop of the trail near the birdbath, I think it will be all right. But only for a few minutes. How fortunate your 'mother' is to have such a devoted son."

Unaccustomed to blushing, Andrew's first reaction to the tingling rush of blood into his neck and facial capillaries was to suspect the presence of a rare tumor somewhere in his body, suddenly secreting gallons of serotonin. The substance, he remembered aimlessly, not only caused blushing but was believed to figure largely in the mood swings of manic depression. He wondered how often Bo felt as uncomfortable as he did at the moment. "Thank you," he said to the docent. "I appreciate your help."

There was nothing to do but follow the sprightly woman up the trail and into a now sun-dappled grove of Torrey pines. It wasn't difficult to find the sandy hollow he'd shared with Bo in romantic circumstances now blasted by sunlight and the good-natured docent's running narrative on sandstone formations and the medicinal uses of a plant called yerba buena. Its leaves, she remarked as Andrew sifted quartz sand between his fingers, contained acetylsalicylic acid.

"Aspirin?" he asked in a stab of courtesy.

"Yes," the docent answered. "Most people don't know that's what aspirin is."

"I'm a doctor," he mumbled, wishing the earring would turn up and offer an avenue of escape.

"You'd be surprised at the variety of medicinal plants growing in the chaparral. Why there's conchalagua for fever, poppy root for toothache, and of course the poisonous ones." She appeared to be looking for a particular specimen. "Don't see one in here in the grove, but there's plenty of jimsonweed about. Contains datura. Quite deadly. Did you know that during the French Revolution some of the more foresighted among the aristocracy carried an extract made of this plant so they could commit suicide if they were captured?"

LaMarche couldn't remember when he'd heard such grim information presented so lightheartedly. "No," he answered. "I didn't know that. And I'm afraid the earring is a lost cause. Again, thank you so much ..."

"Here," the docent said, taking a flier from a canvas bag slung over her shoulder as they walked back to the trail, "let me give you one of our brochures on 'Dangerous Plants of the Chaparral.' I think you'll find it quite interesting."

"Thank you. I'm sure I will." He smiled as the woman headed vivaciously toward a group of German college students watching the conclusion of the nuptials over the sea.

"Guten Tag," she called to them as Andrew LaMarche hurried around a wind-carved sandstone hill and then sprinted past a hundred yards of sagebrush to his waiting car.

At home he tossed the flier on the coffee table and glanced at the empty spot near the hearth where last night Mildred's bed had created a sense of messy hominess. In the shadow of a smooth knot of driftwood he'd placed there because he liked it and didn't know what else to do with it, something gleamed in the bright afternoon sunlight. A gold hoop earring, half buried in the carpet's pile.

"Great," he sighed, shaking his head and wondering how long he should wait before calling Bo.

Bo awakened to a comfortable coolness and noticed that shadows cast by the canyon's western rim had stretched nearly across its floor. The sun was no longer visible, although its pulse still lit the sky and dripped washes of white gold, copper, and silver smoke over the tilted rubble and smooth canyon walls to the east. Nothing moved but the light. She stretched on the cot and watched it fade, breathing deeply and stroking the dog at her side. Throughout her body an unaccustomed sense of peace shimmered palpably, as if beneath her skin she were nothing more than a river of quicksilver, smooth and gleaming.

"It doesn't get any better than this," she sighed as Mildred sat up and yawned. The portrait of Chac she would do for Acito seemed to have formed in her mind like a dream. The singer in her huipil, striding through a moonlit desert landscape. From a Maya tumpline across the figure's forehead would fall a sling at her back, cradling a turtle whose shell would be a swirl of stars. The picture felt oddly real, as though Bo had actually seen it in her sleep and was remembering rather than imagining it.

Reluctant to leave the silent, darkened desert, Bo gave Mildred more water, drank some herself from the canteen, and found a bag of trail mix in the car. Raisin-peanut with carob chips. An acceptable dinner, she thought, even though the carob chips had melted. Lacking only an appropriate wine.

"Next best thing," she smiled at Mildred, taking a fat pink pill from her pocket and swallowing it with warm water. "Ycchh." The Depakote, lacking not only bouquet but social elegance, would nonetheless contribute to a chemical equilibrium in which Bo could continue to function. But for how long? Eventually, she knew, the mania would come rushing again like debris-laden floodwater in the neural ditches of her brain. Or worse, the depression. Lighting a cigarette, she inhaled deeply and then blew smoke against the night sky. For the moment, it didn't matter.

When this case is over you'll quit smoking, Bradley. You'll take up figure-skating or tai chi as a replacement, and lose ten pounds in a month by living on tofu and exotic grains. Just find Chac's killer, and everything will fall into place.

Watching the smoke dissipate, she noticed another column of smoke rising from the valley floor to the northwest. A campfire, she realized. Just south of West Mesa in one of several rock-strewn amphitheaters formed by a million years of flash floods and earthquakes that were not recorded because there was not yet anyone around to take notice. Curious, Bo loaded the cot and Mildred into her car and drove south along Arroyo Seco del Diablo to its barely discernible intersection with the old overland stage route. She didn't turn her lights on. Why alert the distant camping party to her presence? They might be a bunch of gun-happy drunks. They also might be, she grinned in the dark, Munson Terrell and his macho workshop. Too tempting.