Turtle Baby

by Abigail Padgett

  "Come in," Chac sighed. "I will show you."

  The blond boy scowled and hitched faded Levi's an inch higher over his gaunt hips. He must still be growing, Bo thought. He had that awkward late-adolescent gangliness that would one day fill out in the body of a tall, attractive man. Holding aside the curtain, he glowered at Bo and then tossed his long hair in a gesture meant to demonstrate aloof contempt. It succeeded only in demonstrating that he was several years short of voting age.

  "Thank you," Bo said, stepping into a large room created by fastening sheets of plywood to a stucccoed rear wall. The roof was a canvas tarp. The floor, dirt.

  "How'd you get this address?" he asked in a slightly nasal tenor. "Get" was pronounced "git." An American. And a country boy.

  "From the bartender at the place on Revolución where Chac sings," Bo answered. "He seemed afraid ..."

  Chac had been searching through a brightly woven backpack pulled from beneath a cot. "Here," she said, tossing the backpack on the bed and handing Bo an envelope. "This is my marriage certificate. My husband is an American, which makes my baby one, too. You must return our baby."

  Our baby? "Are you Acito's father?" Bo asked the blond boy, who had picked up a guitar and was tuning it with elaborate care. At the question he turned a key too far, bringing a rising whine from the instrument.

  "No, no, Chris Joe is just a friend," Chac answered, pacing. "Read the marriage papers."

  Chris Joe's pale cheeks flushed crimson as he began to play "Midnight in Moscow" at a furious tempo never intended, Bo was certain, by its Russian composer. His guitar strings, she noticed, were of silk-wrapped steel. Chac's words had hurt him. Bo was beginning to get the picture. The boy was in love with the woman, hiding his feelings in a tremulous display of musical virtuosity. It was transparently clear to Bo that Chris Joe wished he were the father. Chac seemed not to notice.

  Bo unfolded the document in her hands slowly, taking time to memorize the room, the people. A sense of urgency pervaded both. An uneasiness Bo associated with the night before leaving on a long journey. Chac's bag, thrown carelessly on the cot, had spilled makeup, a hairbrush, a plastic coin purse, and a rectangular box onto the blanket. Bo's glance doubled back to the box. Clairol aerosol hair coloring. Black. Why would a healthy young woman whose hair was naturally black need dye?

  "Um, yes, I see." Bo nodded at the marriage certificate. It said that someone named Maria Elena Bolon, a citizen of Guatemala, had married someone named Dewayne L. Singleton, a citizen of the State of Louisiana, United States of America, in a Mexican civil ceremony two and a half years ago. Bo copied the information on a deposit slip torn from her wallet. "And are you Maria Elena Bolon?" she asked.

  "Si," Chac answered, leaning to pull something else from the bag. "Here are my papers."

  Beneath the acorn-colored skin of the woman's inner arm Bo saw fading purplish scars that could only mean one thing. Maybe the reason for the hair dye. Bo had seen heroin addicts whose hair turned prematurely gray, and heroin was the most likely explanation for those collapsed veins. Tracks. The reason most addicts wore long sleeves, even in summer.

  On the deposit slip she noted, "Mo IV drug user; check baby for HIV." AIDS. If Chac had shared needles with other drug users before or during her pregnancy, she could have contracted the virus, which could have infected her baby before his birth. The tracks were old, healed. But Chac might have contracted the virus years in the past. Bo thought of the dark-eyed baby in his hospital crib, and sighed. Life was always, she mused, a complete crap shoot.

  The identification papers of Maria Elena Bolon were in order, and included a photograph of the woman now calling herself Chac.

  "Why did you change your name?" Bo asked, noticing a shelf of labeled jars over a battered table holding a hotplate and Chris Joe's guitar case. The labels named various herbs. And scratched white stenciled lettering on the guitar case spelled "C.J. Gavin, Henderson, KY, GHOST PONY RULES!"

  Chris Joe rolled his eyes at the ceiling tarp, and switched from the Russian song to a plaintive melody that sounded folkloric. He was, Bo realized, creating a musical background for Chac.

  "I'm a singer," the young woman said, nodding to the music. "Singers use special names. Mine is a Maya god. What else do you wish to know?"

  Bo could think of several hundred questions, but settled on the obvious. "Where's Acito's father, this Dewayne Singleton?"

  "I don't know. He left me before Acito was born."

  "Do you have any idea where he might be? We need to contact him. Notification of both parents is standard procedure when a child is in custody."

  "No," Chac answered flatly.

  Chris Joe had placed the guitar in its case and picked up a sort of wooden flute. As he played a haunting refrain that Bo found vaguely familiar, Chac began to sing softly in Spanish. Or at least it was partly Spanish. And the voice filling the dingy room, Bo realized, might be that of an angel. A trained voice, molding invisible fire out of vibrating air. At the song's end Bo heard the phrase "Mi Acito."

  "It is the song of my love for my son," Chac whispered. "He is my heart. Do you understand? I cannot lose him!"

  Bo felt tears swimming in her eyes. The song was the one she'd heard on the radio. Live, it was mesmerizing. And so was this team of musicians who had her crying in a Mexican hovel in broad daylight. She felt dizzy, as though she were slipping in and out of differing points of view.

  Get out of here, Bradley. This is too weird!

  "Acito isn't really my case," she stammered, backing toward the door. "You need to contact my co-worker, Estrella Benedict. She'll tell you what to do. Here's the number."

  Handing her own CPS business card to Chac, Bo pushed aside the doorway curtain and bolted into the alleyway. The old man in the basket was gone, and so was the Duroc sow. In the mile hike to the nearest paved street where she could catch a bus, Bo saw only a succession of crumbling walls that seemed to hide peculiar and incomprehensible dangers. She hoped if she looked straight ahead, whatever lay behind those baked adobe walls would ignore her as well.

  Chapter Seven

  Chi Pixab, the Place of Advice

  Madge Aldenhoven was characteristically sullen when Bo returned to the CPS offices at 3:00.

  "Your new case is on your desk, and where's Estrella?" she called from her office without looking up as Bo passed the door. Amid stacks of manila case files piled on the desk, three chairs, and the floor, the supervisor seemed dwarfed by paper. Bo couldn't help thinking of Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado." Of Madge Aldenhoven sealed forever in her office behind thick walls of case files, eventually becoming a cobwebby skeleton with three Bic pens stuck in its spun-sugar hair. The skeleton, Bo fantasized, would be found centuries in the future by archaeologists excavating San Diego after an earthquake separated the city from the continental U.S. The archaeologists would think Madge had been the priestess of a cult that worshipped paper.

  "I don't know, but I'm sure she'll be back soon." Bo smiled at Madge's door frame. "Why?"

  "Dr. LaMarche called an hour ago," Madge said into a box of tissues on her desk. "The Mexican baby poisoning was not accidental. Estrella needs to pick up those lab reports before filing the case."

  "I'll call St. Mary's and have them faxed over." Bo stated the obvious, turning the corner into her own office. Once inside, she pressed her head against the wall for a moment, picturing the little Indian baby in her mind. He was so strong and eloquent in his preverbal way. How could anyone deliberately hurt him?

  The news was sickening, but then so was most of the news useful to San Diego County's Child Protective Services. People sometimes murdered children, who could be an intolerable nuisance, or burden. But why Acito? And who? One of the paid caretakers in the little San Ysidro apartment? Bo thought it unlikely. Acito had been a source of desperately needed income to them, and besides, why would they then have taken him to a hospital?

  Chac said she'd visited Acito only this morning. Had Chris Joe accompanied her?
Could the mother or the strange expatriate hillbilly have wanted a burdensome baby out of the way? Bo didn't like the picture framing itself in her mind. The picture San Diego's police would be sure to see as well. A struggling singer with a history of drug abuse, clawing her way to stardom in the Tijuana music scene. A talented young accompanist, angry at the world and devoted to Chac in a way that could easily become distorted. The police would assume that either one of them could have done it, Bo admitted. The thought made her teeth taste like varnish.

  Pulling a pack of cigarettes out of her purse, she began stacking them individually in a crisscross pattern bordering her desk blotter. From the bulletin board above, fifteen faces looked down in sympathy. William Faulkner frowned. Ernest Hemingway scowled. "Monstrous," Mary Shelley mused into the air over Bo's head.

  "You're all crazy," Bo told the photographs as Estrella opened the door with a swoosh.

  "Oh, great. You're building cigarette fences and talking to those damn pictures again. Did you find out anything about this Indian baby, or have you been sitting here all day conversing with dead people?"

  Estrella's mood, Bo noted, had not measurably improved.

  "He's a Maya baby," Bo answered, "and I've got vast documentation for you, including a baby bottle and Mom's Tijuana address, but none of it points to infanticide, which is what the lab reports are indicating."

  The word hung in the little room, an anachronism.

  "Infanticide," Bo thought, had something to do with European kings. Or with Greek folklore. Oedipus Rex, maybe. Not with Indian babies from cities with dirt streets.

  Estrella's reaction to the word was less cerebral. "Oh, sheet!" she began crying, her fists knotted on Acito's case file Bo had tossed on her desk. "I can't. I just can't do it!"

  "Can't do what?" Bo asked, puzzled. "I'll run the petition over to court for you, if you'll just fill out the forms. No problem."

  Estrella's face seemed composed of fragments, like a mosaic. The friend Bo had known for years was visibly going to pieces.

  "I had decided," Estrella began in a whisper, "that I wasn't going to have this baby. I thought about it all day, sitting at home. No matter what Henry and my family and everybody would think, I decided. But I can't do it." She was sobbing. "I just can't have an abortion."

  Bo opened her mouth and then closed it when she realized that everything she could think to say was either inappropriate or idiotic. Instead she sat on her friend's desk and draped an arm over the heaving shoulders.

  "Walls for the wind," she crooned the first Irish blessing that came to mind into Estrella's upswept coif, and distractedly looked out the window. "And a roof for the rain." A black and white bird dropped from the bright, glassy air and paced in the shade of a peeling eucalyptus. "And tea beside the fire ..." Bo trailed off. The bird couldn't be a magpie, could it? Were there magpies in Southern California? Bridget Mairead O'Reilly had taught her granddaughters well the things the presence of magpies could mean.

  "Do you know," Estrella straightened her back and sobbed at the wall, "that my father's parents raised six kids in a truck, picking crops all over the West? And my mother is deaf in one ear because there was no money for a doctor when she was a child, and her eardrum burst from an infection?"

  "I didn't know," Bo murmured, watching the bird.

  "Do you know that I'm the first person in my entire family to go to college, to have a job like this? I like my job, Bo. It's important; it helps people sometimes. I like helping." Tears were leaving dark splotches on Estrella's wine-red silk blouse. "I don't want to have to quit working."

  The black and white bird cocked its smooth head at the sky.

  "One for sorrow," Bo whispered the first line of the magpie rhyme her grandmother had recited at every piebald bird summering at Cape Cod with Bo's family.

  "Can you believe I really don't want an excuse to quit this underpaid job?" Estrella giggled into a Kleenex, her eyes wild.

  A second magpie locked tiny feet over a low-hanging branch of the eucalyptus. "Two is for mirth."

  "And Henry will make the best father a kid could want ..."

  "Three is for marriage." Bo smiled as a third bird joined the first on the ground and began preening its feathers. If a fourth magpie showed up, this whole conversation would be moot.

  "I just wish ..." Estrella snuffled, toying with Acito's case file, "it wasn't so damned complicated."

  "And four for a birth!" Bo grinned to herself as one more black and white form rustled the menthol-scented leaves. "I know you're gonna work it out," she said to Estrella while shaking a congratulatory fist toward the window. "You're one smart woman; you can cope!"

  Pleased, Estrella opened the case file and pulled a handful of legal forms from her desk drawer. "Why are you waving at the yard?" she asked as though the behavior were perfectly ordinary.

  "Magpies." Bo blushed. "I think they're leaving."

  "There are no magpies in San Diego, Bo."

  "Not usually," Bo agreed.

  An hour later Bo slipped Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D into her dashboard stereo and turned it up. Her new case had been one of the hundreds of crack babies born to mothers who abused the powerfully addictive drug. She'd been to the small, south-county hospital, interviewed the mother, seen the baby. Crack baby cases were all alike. And all sad. A petition filed in juvenile court would remove the child from its mother while she entered a drug treatment program, but nothing could repair the damage already done.

  Crack babies were growing up to demonstrate impaired intellectual functioning even as toddlers and preschoolers. Bo would file the petition tomorrow, but her mind was on Acito and her own behavior in Tijuana.

  "My best friend is a Latina, and yet Mexico feels like a house of horrors to me," she remarked to the vinyl sun visor shielding her eyes from the late afternoon glare. "Nonetheless I manage to burst into tears over a tune by some bar singer who may have tried to poison her own baby only this morning. Is it safe to say that my response to this situation leaves something to be desired?"

  On the passenger's seat Mildred, Bo's aging fox terrier, chewed on a slab of rawhide cut to resemble a gingerbread man, and said nothing. Bo had gone home to pick up the dog before heading by the hospital and then out eastbound 94 toward the little high-desert community called Jamul. "Hah-mool," she sang the Spanish syllables over blasting organ chords, and wondered what the word meant. Maybe Dr. Broussard would know. The transplanted French-Canadian psychiatrist had settled into San Diego's melting-pot culture with a verve, and at sixty was learning both Spanish and rock-carving while continuing her research with a community of people who believed in extraterrestrial landings.

  Compared to Eva Broussard's life, Bo mused, her own was an encyclopedia of boredom. On the other hand, for a manic-depressive, boredom was probably okay. Sort of.

  Only twenty-five miles from downtown San Diego, Jamul rose dramatically from the spaghetti-tangle of freeways below, a sparsely populated backcountry of hilly dirt roads and bleached boulders not one of which was smaller than a single-engine Cessna. Bo could understand why Eva and her group had chosen to buy a hundred and sixty acres of mountaintop privacy up here. The views were spectacular, the air cool and clean.

  Turning off 94 to begin the climb toward the shrink's airy compound, Bo slowed to admire the late afternoon sun gilding a thousand white boulders in a color like lemonade. Beside the road leaves of scrub oak and chamise reflected the light in flashes, while on the hillsides yuccas stretched creamy blooms skyward. Nothing moved but a red-tailed hawk circling on the horizon.

  Bo sighed and replaced the Bach tape with Vivaldi's Concerto for Two Flutes, Strings and Basso in C Major. The music, ecstatic in its major key, spoke of landscapes in which no rheumy-eyed children begged, no raven-haired babies lay poisoned and lonely in hospital cribs.

  "It isn't right!" Bo remarked to Mildred, surprised at her own outburst. "Everything about this case, and everything that goes on at this border isn't right. I don't understand i
t, but it's out of balance. It's wrong."

  Mildred looked up in concern and nudged the rawhide gingerbread man toward Bo with her nose. One leathery arm had been reduced to slick white pulp.

  "Ycchh," Bo said. "Thanks anyway."

  On a dirt road named Mother Grundy by nineteenth-century settlers who couldn't pronounce "Madre Grande," Bo engaged the four-wheel drive and revved the little vehicle uphill with abandon. A gate halfway to the first ridge stood open to a rocky jeep trail leading further upward through boulders and chaparral.

  Bo turned the flute duet even louder and imagined the delicate notes rising like liquid crystal over lemon-colored hills. The jeep trail would lead to a half-Iroquois psychiatrist whom many would write off as eccentric, Bo smiled, but whom she trusted more than anyone since her first doctor, the long-dead Lois Bittner.

  "Happiness for some of us," she told Mildred, "involves finding a decent shrink."

  The dog merely nodded.

  "I heard you coming," Eva Blindhawk Broussard called from the porch of a crumbling adobe hacienda. "So did everyone for twenty miles. What lovely music!"

  In moccasins and jeans the older woman looked as lithe as a greyhound despite the halo of stiff white hair framing her copper-colored face. She might have been thirty instead of sixty. Bo made a mental vow to get to the gym more often than twice a year.

  "The place is shaping up!" Bo noted after a long hug from a woman she regarded more as a sister than a doctor. "The floor looks terrific."

  "Mexican quarry tile," Eva Broussard explained. "It's quite inexpensive over the border in Tecate, and I enjoy driving down there. What's truly amazing, though, is that I have a steady supply of craftsmen walking through the property every day."

  The hills, Bo knew, were laced with pathways created by thousands of undocumented laborers walking to destinations that might be hundreds of miles away.

  "A group of Guatemalan refugees did most of this tile work," Eva went on. "But I know you didn't come to talk about tile. You said on the phone that you're having some concern about the new medication?"