Strawgirl

by Abigail Padgett

  The DSS director inspected his knuckles. "There will be no punitive action." He smiled. "Ms. Bradley is one of our most valued employees."

  Bo had never seen Madge Aldenhoven turn quite this unbecoming a shade of green.

  "All right!" Rombo Perry whooped from the clustered group, clasping his hands over his head like the winner of the fight. "We won!"

  Chapter 30

  Bo lounged comfortably on a sand chair beneath a robust palo verde whose spidery limbs still boasted yellow spring blooms. In the setting Anza-Borrego Desert sun, the little flowers seemed constructed of buttery paper. She divided her time between admiration of the desert's flora and perusal of a book on the Hudson River artists. The California desert light, she decided, was simply not on a par with that of the Hudson Valley. No moisture from which those rainbow refractions might spin. Still, the desert had its own magic. Accessible only in closeup. A verity well documented by one of Bo's favorite artists, Georgia O'Keeffe. Grabbing her sketchbook and pastels, Bo concentrated fiercely on the creation of a single palo verde blossom, borne on shaded, dancing winds.

  "Petals on a wet, black bough?" Andrew LaMarche quoted Ezra Pound interrogatively, flinging himself on the ground beside her after an hour of strenuous Frisbee-chasing with Paul and Hannah. Mildred lay on a blanket in the sparse shade at Bo's head, eyeing the numerous surrounding cholla cactus plants with enmity. The pediatrician had earlier extracted over thirty of the barbed cholla spines from the pads of her right front paw.

  "Something like that," Bo agreed. "Pound spent thirteen years in a psychiatric facility, you know. Privately I think of him as an uncle."

  "My favorite poet," LaMarche insisted. "Are we really going to roast Hershey Bars over a campfire?"

  "Of course! This camping trip is Hannah's party. No camping party is complete without S'mores. Except you roast the marshmallows. The Hershey Bars melt by themselves from the heat of the marshmallows, squashed between graham crackers. It's ambrosia; trust me."

  Andrew LaMarche continued to exude skepticism as he rose to help Estrella and Martin St. John unload firewood from Henry's truck, parked beside the rented jeep that had brought the rest of them through trackless dry washes. The little canyon selected by Paul for their campsite provided shelter from the wind and a spectacular eastern exposure. Already a vanishing sun gilded the layered, rubble-strewn hills with coppery light that quickly spread to lavender, gray-brown, black. Eva Broussard, in a plaid flannel shirt, jeans, and moccasins, stood at the canyon's mouth, looking east. In the shifting light the Indian woman seemed to have sprung up from what lay beneath her feet, like one of the chollas, or catclaws, or silvery smoke trees whose eerie metallic sound in the night wind always reminded Bo of tinsel. Struggling to her feet, Bo hobbled on crutches through the sand to Eva's side.

  "It's only been ten days since Samantha's death," Eva said. "And yet it seems a very long time."

  "The desert does that," Bo responded, watching a particularly purple rock cloak itself in a color like ashes. "Out here things rearrange themselves somehow. It's hard to describe—like a place where the truth is free to walk in your mind. It scares some people."

  "I love it!" Eva smiled and turned to face Bo. "And of course you would put it so aptly." Her gaze grew somber. "You have risked your livelihood and, finally, your life in order to help Hannah. Why did you risk so much, Bo? What makes you do what you do?"

  Bo balanced on one leg and stretched her crutches toward the color-washed hills. "Who knows?" she grinned. "I have risk built into my chemistry. Any day," she braced herself again, "may bring fears beyond anything real life can produce. It provides a somewhat larger perspective, maybe. Or it may merely be a pitiably adolescent need to defy authority."

  "Merde," Eva said with conviction. "You're an exceptional person, 'with a mind that nobleness made simple as a fire.'

  Bo felt every freckle on her face resist the furious blush raging there. "Yeats," she acknowledged the compliment, "describing Maud Gonne." It occurred to her that her friends must have spent the last week holed up at a seminar on poetic imagery.

  "Yes," Eva Broussard said with finality. "An Irish heroine."

  As they strolled toward the ring of stones that would contain the campfire, Bo changed the subject. "I still don't get what made this John Litten the monster he was," she mentioned, making sure that Hannah was out of earshot. "When the police finally identified him through navy records using his fingerprints, his IQ scores turned out to be above average. He excelled in navy training programs. Even though he came from some impoverished South Carolina backwater, he had every chance to make something of himself. Instead he used his mind to destroy the most beautiful—"

  "You've answered your question," Eva interrupted, watching Hannah as the child listened to Rombo Perry tell for the fourth time the story of a wonderful new puppy named Watson who would soon come to live with Rombo and Martin, and who would certainly play Frisbee. "It's difficult for many, especially Americans, to accept, but not every person is born with identical potential. In John Litten's case, something absolutely essential was missing. Not intelligence, but a sense of his own beauty. That inner self that is capable of seeing its own beauty reflected in other living things. Something so basic it defies description, but without it we get John Litten."

  "But isn't there treatment, some training or medication ...?"

  Eva Broussard sighed as the desert valley was lost in darkness. "It's not a psychiatric problem, Bo. It's beyond that. Maybe a century from now we'll know what it is—a mutant chromosome, or specific brain inadequacy. For now such creatures fall by default to the analysis of philosophy. They're simply evil."

  The whispered word drifted and then vanished in desert darkness as Estrella helped Hannah to light the fire with a torch of dried sage. Its pungent odor filled the air like incense.

  "I'm starving!" Paul Massieu bellowed happily. "Do we eat now?

  As Bo pulled her sand chair close to the fire, Paul grabbed Hannah and held her laughing over his head. From a new gray sweatshirt her grieving beads hung, gleaming in the firelight. The third of the set was pinned to Bo's jacket. As Rombo and Henry Benedict showed Andrew LaMarche how properly to load hot dogs on green oak sticks gleaned from the mountains before them, Hannah ran from Paul to Bo's side. A falling star arced faintly across the darkening sky.

  "Did you see that, Bo?" Hannah asked, wide-eyed. "Do you think it's the silver people? Do you think they'll come here? What do you think they are, Bo? Paul says people have seen them here before."

  "I've heard that, too," Bo answered, hugging the little girl. "And what I think they are is something like shadows we see in our mind. They're not real, but then they're not not real. And that's what I think, Hannah, besides thinking you're about the bravest, prettiest, smartest kid in the whole, entire desert!"

  Hannah giggled and glanced at Bo's sketchbook on the ground.

  "Can I see your picture, Bo?" she asked. "What is it? It looks like a flower, but it looks like a straw mask, too, all by itself in the wind. Can I have it, Bo? What is it?"

  "You may have it, Hannah." Bo grinned and ruffled the golden hair. "Because it's us. It's the Last One Left."