Moonbird Boy (Bo Bradley Mysteries, Book Four)

by Abigail Padgett

  "Out where?" she asked.

  "Zach will know of someplace." Mort grinned, gesturing to the lodge's director, Zachary Crooked Owl. "Zach, baby," he'd asked in a flawless mockery of Hollywood patois, "where can Bo and I take some sane people out to dinner around here?"

  There was a diner a couple of miles from the reservation, Zach said, but it was a dump. Bo and Mort had been delighted.

  As Henry perused a handwritten menu in its cracked plastic slipcase, Bo pondered a framed announcement on the restaurant's wall.

  "BEWARE THE DESERT!" it warned in block letters above a black-and-white photo of a dead, mummified body half covered with blown sand. The man's shriveled hands looked like claws emerging from his faded shirt cuffs. Vultures had left only blackened indentations where his eyes had been, and in one sand-filled socket a tiny cholla cactus displayed its murderous spines to the camera. Below a list of desert safety tips was the logo of San Diego County's Back-country Sheriff"s Department.

  Bo sighed and tried to distract Estrella from the poster.

  "I saw it when we came in," Estrella said. "Don't think about it."

  "You shouldn't be looking at it," Bo answered, eyeing Estrella's bulging waistline. "It's not good for the baby."

  Estrella shook her head and grinned. "Three weeks out here and you think like an Indian, old wives' tales and all."

  "Yep," Bo agreed. Zach's wife, Dura, was a fountain of folk wisdom and never tired of telling stories. According to Dura an ancient Kumeyaay woman had spent her entire pregnancy trying not to see anything unpleasant that would mark her baby. "You can't touch guns, either, or the sights will go crooked," Bo went on. "Same for arrows."

  "World peace through pregnancy." Estrella nodded. "If only it were true, we could end all wars just by organizing teams of pregnant women to fondle their heat-seeking missiles. I love it!"

  "So, Mort," Henry interrupted uncomfortably, "Bo has told us you do TV commercials. What's the most recent one?"

  Bo watched Mort Wagman smile his full-lipped smile inside the fashionable stubble of a two-day beard.

  "Athletic shoes," he crooned. "The big bucks. The gig I went off my meds for."

  "You went off your medications to do a commercial?" Estrella gasped. "I thought you had schizophrenia, and—"

  "And nobody in his right mind would risk going back into that hell for anything," Mort finished and then took a pull on his nonalcoholic beer. "Except the Raven here. Except for the right money, the really huge money, the fuckin' mother-money of all time, dig? These guys just love insanity. Their market, teenage boys mostly, gets off on it. I'd already done three commercials just acting crazy. But this time I sold them the real thing, and they paid for it."

  Under the table his right leg was jiggling nervously, a side effect of the medications he was taking again. The side effect would wear off in a few weeks, but meanwhile it gave him a twitchy, Hollywood-killer aura. Bo could see the waitress eyeing him with distaste.

  "The next SnakeEye shoe promotion you see," he finished, twitching his ponytail over a shoulder, "will feature a real psychotic crawling around under the bleachers chewing on the basketball star's sneakers, not the usual half-baked fake. It's so high-concept the competition will wet themselves, I get rich, and nobody with a grain of human decency will ever buy another pair of SnakeEye shoes. This gig is my gift to posterity."

  And a way to assure your son's future, Bo thought, but said nothing. Something in Mort's eyes suggested there might be another reason as well. A look of personal triumph, confidence. She wondered what it meant.

  "My God," Henry breathed, "that's horrible!"

  "Yeah," Mort said, grinning. "Don't ya love it?"

  "That business about the shark was pretty horrible, too," Estrella said, deliberately changing the subject. "It's like Jaws right here in San Diego."

  Bo glanced out the smudged glass door into desert darkness. "Nice to know it doesn't have anything to do with us," she mused aloud. "That shark isn't our problem at all."

  But the words sounded hollow and the blackness against the glass outside seemed to shiver as if it were giggling. Just a spook of the depression, Bo told herself. There could be, after all, no sharks in the desert.

  Chapter 2

  By nine o'clock Bo was glad to see the reassuring outlines of Ghost Flower Lodge silhouetted against the mountains as the group returned from dinner. Behaving normally, tracking and joining a conversation shared by four people, had been exhausting. So had the effort to disguise the fact that canned-chicken tacos and greasy refried beans held about as much appeal as a plate of pond scum. A serious depressive episode, she acknowledged, could be an effective weight-loss program. Nothing tasted good and what was the point in eating anyway? It only prolonged the inevitable. After hugging Estrella and Henry good-bye she headed for the solace of her room, only to find Zachary Crooked Owl waiting for her.

  As was the way with all the Indians who ran the lodge, Zach said nothing but merely sat on the thick window ledge fingering the owl's claw he wore on a leather thong around his neck. His massive body filled the arched opening like a buffalo seen through a keyhole, and his dark skin seemed to absorb the dim light.

  "Zach," Bo said. "I'm tired."

  He merely nodded without noticeable movement of the wiry braid resting on the back of his denim shirt. He'd say whatever he had to say when it felt right, Bo knew. The Kumeyaay who owned and ran the lodge all did that, a practice eminently suited to the needs of their frazzled guests. Leaving the door open, she settled into the room's only chair to wait.

  It was a requirement that doors remain ajar when a man and a woman were alone in a room at Ghost Flower Lodge. One of the many old-fashioned Indian rules designed in a more realistic past when it wasn't politically correct to ignore the danger inherent in the nature of things. Zachary Crooked Owl wasn't dangerous, but Bo approved of the rule. Like the rammed-earth building with its massive walls and courtyard fountain, the rule made her feel safe.

  "Ahh," Zach exhaled sadly, apparently lost in his own thoughts. Then he continued to sit in silence.

  She'd been a little surprised when Eva Broussard first introduced her to Ghost Flower's Kumeyaay Indian director, who was also black, but at the time her depression had precluded any interest in the anomaly. Later she'd learned that the anomaly existed only in her mind.

  "The poor living in city streets aren't so poor that a woman can't trade sex for the protection of a man from other men," Dura explained after Bo had been at Ghost Flower Lodge for a few days. "That's always there when she hasn't got anything else left to sell. Lots of street people are black, lots are Indian. The children they make are black Indians. And no tribe will refuse a home to a child whose mother can claim membership, whether that child has red hair and freckles like you or black skin like my husband. Except that it was his father who was Indian, not his mother. And that is why Zach has his own story."

  That afternoon this tag line had pulled children from all over the lodge to Dura as if she'd blown a whistle. Sun-bronzed Indian children of the Neji Band of Kumeyaay, Dura and Zach's darker brood with their curly hair, who were also members of the band, and Mort's pale little boy, Bird, all ran to fling themselves on the floor at Dura's feet. Bo had been reminded of Pavlov's experiments with dogs. Except these weren't dogs, she noted, but people. And the reward for their response would be the ultimate human treat—a story.

  "John Crooked Owl," Dura had begun that day many weeks ago, pointing to an amateurish oil painting of an old but bright-eyed Indian man over the lodge's stone fireplace, "once had a brother named Catomka. But something happened to Catomka. Something sad. In the old days the people believed in witches, and they said a witch had put a special stone in a spring that is in our mountains. A very terrible stone."

  In the dramatic pause the children's eyes grew somber.

  "This stone could hurt people's minds if they drank the water. This stone could make people hear voices that nobody else could hear, and see things tha
t nobody else could see. This stone could make it so people couldn't think!"

  Bo had thought she was just listening to a children's story, but her eyes filled with tears as she realized what was really being taught. The children, who had obviously heard the story many times, shook their heads sadly.

  "But John Crooked Owl's brother, Catomka, drank from that spring," Dura continued. "Which is just a story-way of saying he got an illness in his brain. And Catomka heard voices that nobody else could hear, and saw things that nobody else could see, and couldn't think right anymore. And so his brother, John Crooked Owl, took care of Catomka for a long time until Catomka died. He took care of Catomka right here on his own land, the Neji land. John Crooked Owl cared for his brother, Catomka, until Catomka died and John was very old. Do you want to know what happened next?"

  Embarrassed, Bo had caught herself answering, "Yes," along with the children.

  "John Crooked Owl was the last of the Neji Band, the last of the Kumeyaay people who lived on this land. He never married because he had to care for his brother, and so he had no children. If he died, there would be no one to inherit the land, and the United States government would take the land and own it. It wouldn't be Kumeyaay land anymore."

  "Nooo," the children whispered.

  "So John Crooked Owl walked down into San Diego and looked and looked for a wife to love and have his baby even though he was an old man. But the people there just thought he was a stupid old Indian, too silly to talk to."

  "Hah!" came a chorus of small voices.

  "Finally John Crooked Owl was ready to give up and go home alone, when he found a lovely black lady who was running from a bad man and had no food and no place to sleep. Her name was Bea and she came here with John Crooked Owl to hide from the bad man and they began to take care of other people who were like Catomka. People who had no one to care for them. After a while Bea had a baby boy with John Crooked Owl, and they named him Zachary. He grew up and Bea went away and John Crooked Owl died, but Zachary Crooked Owl stayed. And that is how the Neji Band and the Kumeyaay land were saved. And that is why we care for people who are like Catomka at Ghost Flower Lodge to this very day."

  "Wow," Bo breathed as the children whooped and ran back to whatever they'd been doing. She'd enjoyed the story. Now she thought of it again as the man sitting in her window turned to face her.

  "What are your thoughts?" Zach asked softly, his words breaking the silence like stones slipping into water.

  "I was thinking about your parents, the story Dura tells the children."

  "Is there something you want to know?"

  Bo stretched in the darkness, no longer quite so tired.

  "Who was the bad man Bea was hiding from?" she asked.

  "Her pimp," Zach answered, pronouncing the word in a way that made it sound like a balloon full of poison. "He was also her brother."

  "Where did she go?"

  The big man placed one hand gently against the horizontally banded earthen wall as if touching a face. Then he nodded.

  "My father told me she went 'down the hill' as we say, back into San Diego. She had become very strong inside herself after many years in these hills, but there was still a bitterness. My father heard that my mother's brother had been released from prison and had come back to San Diego. He heard that my mother found her brother and killed him with a knife, but no one really knows if that's true or not. We never saw her again."

  Bo felt another question leap unexpectedly from the darkness inside her.

  "Was it hard for you when she left?" she asked.

  "I was ten years old, nearly a man. But I still remember her voice, the way she held me all night in her arms when I had whooping cough, the songs she'd sing. I'm forty now, only a year younger than you are. I still remember. There's no way to stop missing love that's gone, Bo. Which is why I'm here."

  "I don't want to talk about it," Bo said, tight-lipped. "I'm doing fine on the meds; I'm almost ready to go back to work. It's a depressive episode. I have to expect that when... when these things happen."

  Soundlessly the big man slid from the window and placed a hand in Bo's long, tousled hair. "I'm not talking about the part your meds can control," he said. "I'm talking about your heart."

  Bo felt a familiar convulsion of grief. What was Zach trying to do, send her over the edge again?

  "I've lost my best friend and I have to go on living," she pronounced in a voice that wavered like the bands of earth that comprised the walls. "What else is there to say?"

  "That you must grieve or you can't go on living in the right way," Zach answered. "The Kumeyaay, the Yuma, the Cahuilla, the Chemehuevi—all the peoples of this region— have known this and made special ceremonies for grieving. The details have been lost over the years when we were not allowed to speak our languages or perform our ceremonies, but enough has been passed down. We can do a kind of Kurok, a Kumeyaay grieving ceremony, for you tonight if you will permit it. I decided on tonight so that your friend Raven could be with you before he leaves tomorrow. And your psychiatrist, Blindhawk, is also here."

  Bo had no idea how her shrink, a half-Iroquois French-Canadian transplant to Southern California, had learned about Ghost Flower Lodge. But it wasn't surprising. Eva Blindhawk Broussard and Zach Crooked Owl had similar ideas about the proper care and treatment of people with brain disorders. That they continually called each other "Blindhawk" and "Owl" rather than their usual names was a source of amusement to everyone at the lodge.

  "So Eva thinks I should do this grieving ceremony?" Bo asked.

  Zach was already in the hall before he answered.

  "No," he said. "She's just here to offer support in case you think you should do it. We'll be outside."

  Zach was right, Bo acknowledged with a nod to her own reflection in a mirror over the bureau. The death of Mildred, her companion and closest friend, however predictable, had so shocked Bo's precarious neurochemical balance that she'd plummeted into a clinical depression. That nasty chemical trick that turns joy to loathing and makes daily activity into a marathon of exhausting tasks that can't be done. And while the antidepressant medication had corralled her symptoms, the precipitating reality was still there.

  Bo wondered if the Kumeyaay, who'd lived on San Diego County's beaches, deserts, and mountains for thousands of years until their near-disappearance by the end of the early twentieth century, had ever performed a grieving ceremony for a dog. Probably not, she thought. This would be a first.

  Squaring her shoulders, she walked through the silent lodge and made her way along a boulder-lined path to an arbor of cottonwoods over a dry creekbed. A natural gathering place, people seemed to gravitate to it at all hours. And a few of the Kumeyaay were always there, telling stories in a traditional allegorical mode that their guests could internalize and ponder without feeling vulnerable. Always easier to hear about a crow who betrays a tortoise than to admit that a trusted co-worker got you fired from your job. Bo had decided that every psychiatric treatment program should employ Indian storytellers and skip group therapy altogether. She hated group therapy.

  "Since long ago," Dura said as though continuing a narrative begun before Bo's arrival at the creekbed, "the Kumeyaay knew that any spirit on earth may honor any other spirit with friendship. When this happens, it is important. Once Lizard and Butterfly were friends, and as Butterfly grew weak with the coming of autumn, Lizard would carry him from place to place on her back. One day ..."

  Bo found a seat on the ground near Mort Wagman and fixed her gaze on a granite outcropping half a mile in the distance. No one looked up, but continued to listen as Dura told a story Bo already knew would end in Butterfly's death. Most of the staff and the other guests were present, including Old Ayma in her shawls and veil. Bo wrapped her arms around her knees and let herself cry as the story went on and on, punctuated occasionally by the howl of a distant coyote. One of the Dog People, she thought. A dog singing. Mort Wagman nodded as if he'd thought the same thing.

&n
bsp; Ten feet away Eva Broussard's cropped white hair shone in the faint moonlight like something metallic glimpsed under sand. She was humming, keeping time with Dura's voice. But her moccasined feet, Bo noticed, were flat on the ground as if she expected to move. The fact was reassuring to Bo as pictures from the seventeen years she'd shared with a small fox terrier rose in her mind and then were gone.

  A young husband named Mark Bradley giving her a puppy for her birthday. The sadness later when they'd known the marriage couldn't work and they'd parted. But Mildred had stayed with Bo and been a link to that other life which was gone, no longer an option. Then the suicide of Bo's sister, Laurie, and shortly after, the accidental deaths of their parents. And the illness, the hospitalizations, the wretched old-fashioned medications, the shame when people whispered "crazy" and tapped their temples. Somehow the loyal little dog had made the losses bearable by providing a sort of continuity. Mildred had simply been there and had loved Bo, no matter what.

  Now that continuity and that love were gone, leaving an absence that spiraled from Bo's past into nothingness. It wasn't fair, and it hurt. She sobbed and let herself rock back and forth, her hands knotted in her hair. Zach rose and threw a basket of sage leaves on a small fire in the creekbed, fanning the smoke toward Bo with something that looked like a white pillowcase knotted in four corners. Bo could hear the wooden rattles tied around his feet and wrists, and noticed that the white fabric he was holding had black-circle eyes and painted brown spots.

  "A Kurok is a ceremony to tell the spirit that has gone we will never, never forget," Dura explained. "A Kurok says we remember the spirit's image here, how it appeared in life, but know it is now free. We release the spirit to its freedom, even though it hurts to do this."

  The rattling sound from Zach's ankles and wrists was like sand blowing in Bo's mind, abrasive and relentless. She didn't want to release Mildred's spirit, she wanted Mildred back, wanted her whole life back, wanted to start over and do everything right. But that wasn't possible. She felt like tearing her hair out.