Turtle Baby Page 19

  Chapter Thirty

  Dark House

  It was dark, and Dewayne could feel the damp ocean air chilling his lungs in a sick, clammy way that felt like a fish market smells. Like dead fish on top of crushed ice, their eyes staring at you like they still were afraid of dying. That dim smell of fishiness everywhere, filling his chest with cold.

  He was on a beach. Some guy with three kids in his car had picked up Dewayne and dropped him here. The guy had said this was "Oceanside." From what Dewayne could tell, everything around here could be called that. The ocean stretched off into nothing, with just a little white line of bubbles where it stopped at the land. The line of bubbles looked like a string wrinkling on forever.

  There were some people on the beach, doing something around a fire. The people kept moving back and forth, and the black stripes following them seemed to dance and stretch across the cold sand toward Dewayne. Even when he moved around to the other side the shadows kept reaching at him. They were devils of some kind. And the Angel Jabril had left California already. Left Dewayne Singleton alone here.

  The people were talking about him. He could tell by the way they made patterns like a jumble of dark letters around the orange fire. They thought there was something wrong with him. Maybe they thought he should have stayed in that hospital. Dewayne couldn't put together a reason why they thought that because his mind wouldn't stay still. It was like a picture book when you grab the edge of all the pages and flip them.

  There was a blue heron, he thought, standing beside a trash can on the beach. Or was that the heron Buster shot down on the Teche, and Mama cooked because it was a sin to waste food worse than it was a sin to kill a grosbec. You could go to prison for killing them. Dewayne had gone to prison even though it was Buster that shot the blue bird. But he couldn't remember which prison was the real one, or the last one, the one he'd run off from.

  He did remember getting write-ups for aggravated disobedience a lot of times in one of them. They put him in solitary for ten days at a time, over and over. Sometimes he thought he'd die in solitary, and beat his head against the wall to make the thoughts slow down. And then they took him to another one. Wade, it was called. Dewayne thought Wade was the wrong name for a place where you didn't have wet feet. But he knew what it meant. There was plenty of water here.

  He hurried to the ocean to wade, and splashed and jumped in the bubbles, feeling his feet grow sloshy and cold in new, white tennis shoes that seemed to glow in the water. As long as he ran up and down in the waves he was doing right, and Allah would be praised by this and the people at the fire couldn't hurt him.

  "Bastard's fucking crazy," he heard one of them say. "Better call the cops before he kills somebody."

  That made his heart pull up with fear. One of them was going to kill somebody. One of them was going to kill him!

  Dewayne ran faster up and down the beach, kicking up sheets of water that would be like prayers to Allah, the one, the true God. Allah would protect him from the infidels. This running was necessary to stay alive.

  The people at the fire were moving faster, picking things up and moving away. A car drove into the parking lot, and one of them yelled something at it. Dewayne's side hurt, and he stopped running and walked to the trash can where the blue heron had been. There were no heron tracks in the sand, just some beer cans and a Big Mac box. He looked in the box to see if the sandwich was still there, but it wasn't. Just two pieces of pickle and a little white plastic knife. He didn't see his right hand curl around the little knife when the two demons came toward him shining bright lights in his eyes.

  "What the hell you doing in that trash?" one demon said. "We got a call, said you were havin' some trouble out here. Better come with us, now. Just do like we say and there won't be any trouble."

  "Jabril!" Dewayne screamed as he ran toward the prison, the cement building sitting a block away on the sand. It had a bathroom, he saw. A big bathroom with no roof and sand all over the floor. Behind him he could hear crunching footsteps running so he turned on the water in all three sinks to keep them out, and then he stood on top of one of the toilets with his back against the light blue wall.

  There were things written in there, he noticed. One of the things said, "Eat my pussy," and he wondered if you could go to prison for eating cats like you could for eating herons. Except he was already in a prison. And the demons were there, with guns pointed at him.

  "Get down," one said in a voice that sounded quavery, like it wasn't a human voice, but a demon voice. Then they started toward him.

  "Mama!" he called as he tried to climb over the cement wall, and slipped back down, and turned to try to jump over them from the rim of the toilet. His arms were in the air as he jumped, and he could see the little white plastic knife still in his hand. Except all of a sudden he couldn't hear for the ringing in his ears and the burnt white flashes where he used to see. He was on the floor in something wet, and there was a hole in the front of his plaid shirt. And a hole in his chest underneath.

  "Mama," he tried to say, but his mouth wouldn't work. And then a silence came where his thoughts had been, and he was dead.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  The Blue-Green Bowl

  Andrew was up and moving briskly about the room when the Monday morning light was still hazy and peach-colored. Or else Bo's vision, unaccustomed to purposeful movement at this hour, was hazy and peach-colored. She wasn't sure which. The scent of soap wafting after him alerted her to the fact that he'd already showered. From his carry-on he took a starched shirt wrapped in cellophane and folded over a piece of cardboard with "Li's Laundry" printed on it in red. The sound of cellophane being wadded into a ball seemed to go on interminably.

  "How can you wear a long-sleeved shirt in this weather?" she groaned, admiring the lean physique more than adequately emphasized by his skimpy underwear. Today's low-cut briefs were of bright red cotton knit with black pinstriping.

  "Mmmm," she murmured appreciatively. "Come here."

  In seconds the desired effect was in evidence, causing a distortion in certain pinstripes.

  "I had thought we'd have breakfast at Brennan's," he said huskily, "then a walk in the Garden District before my conference and your trip to Dewayne's prison."

  "We'll skip breakfast," Bo decided, and then watched as a wad of red knit fabric was tossed across the room to land on a rosewood escritoire already littered with magnolia petals blown in from the balcony.

  The Garden District, seen an hour later from beneath a flowered umbrella donated by the hotel for the protection of its delicate female guests from a hazy sun, was lovely. Like a collection of leaded glass jewel boxes preserved in steam. Bo admired what seemed like several miles of cast iron fences, gallery balustrades, doorway capitals, and supports before admitting to herself that she was feeling funny.

  The incessant buzz of cicadas in the air was disturbing. The heat and humidity sickening. And there was something terrible and sad about the old houses. A brave hopelessness in the face of a future that would not see their kind again. They were like the Maya, Bo thought. Still here, but almost gone.

  "At first all the cast iron had to be brought in from New York and Philadelphia," Andrew told her. "But then a foundry was opened in Holly Springs, Mississippi, and ... Bo, are you all right?"

  "I'd like to sit down," she said irritably.

  This could happen. Like a drug flashback, some symptoms could break through the fragile normalcy provided by medication. Stress, exhaustion, emotional excess—any of these could stir up a flurry of weird, intense perceptions out of nowhere. It was embarrassing to realize that an unaccustomed erotic activity had probably been the last straw, following on the heels of a terrifying night being stalked through primordial desert wastes. Bo was less surprised than angry at herself for failing to take precautions. Like getting some sleep.

  "Here," he said, leading her across the street to what looked like a park full of little houses. "I used to play in here as a boy. We can sit i
n the shade until you feel better."

  Bo restrained an urge to tell him she wouldn't feel better until she was no longer carrying an absurdly coquettish umbrella when there was no rain. Sitting on the ground beneath a large magnolia, she leaned against the whitewashed brick wall enclosing the area. The old bricks were cool and smelled of the moss growing in their mortar.

  "The Ellen Lincoln, 1895," she said to herself. "The Hannah E. Schubert, the Ethel Maude ..."

  Atop one of the little houses, Bo noticed, was a draped statue whose head had fallen into the weeds below. Headless, it nevertheless seemed to be staring into the sky where gray clouds were gathering. On the black iron gates guarding the space she noticed iron faces of lions, their mouths open in silent ferocity. From the mouth of one dangled a dead daddy longlegs.

  "Andy," she said quietly, "this is a graveyard."

  "Lafayette Cemetery Number One," he agreed nervously. "At sea level burials must be above ground because the groundwater would float anything ... It doesn't matter. Why don't we go back to the hotel, Bo. I'm not doing well at caring for you, am I?"

  Smoothing the legs of her navy knit slacks, Bo remembered too late that dark colors absorb heat. Good thing the matching top had been at the cleaner's. Her white cotton shell could no longer be described as "crisp," but at least it wouldn't parboil the flesh beneath it. Near a trash can beside one of the little house-graves a faded yellow ribbon hung limply from a wreath of dead flowers thrown there. Bo thought she could smell the flowers, rotting.

  "Yes, the hotel will be fine until my flight to Shreveport for the interview with Dewayne's friend in prison," she answered. "And this is something I hope you'll understand. Sometimes I just feel a little, well, overengaged with things. It crops up when I'm too tired and for a zillion other reasons. When it happens, all I need is to be let alone. This is one of those times. I'll be okay after a while if I just have total peace and quiet, don't have to talk or be polite or even be aware that there's anybody else around. Can you handle that?"

  "Yes," he said with reassuring confidence, and helped her to her feet.

  Bo was glad he hadn't said, "Oh, you don't have to be polite with me," or "Don't worry, you won't even know I'm there." Just being in the same room with somebody else, even if they were perfectly quiet or even asleep, was at times a sort of low-velocity drain on her psychic resources. Bo wondered if the magnetic field generated by bodies was supposed to drain mental energy from everybody who happened to be around, or just from those already weakened by psychiatric stress.

  "Did you say you used to play in here?" Bo asked. "Doesn't seem like a fun place for a kid."

  "It was prettier then," he answered. "My family's house is just around that corner."

  "Oh, I want to see it, Andy. Another fifty yards in this heat isn't going to make any difference."

  Andrew's gray eyes were liquid with concern. "I think we should return to the hotel immediately," he said.

  "We will. We'll just walk by your childhood house on the way. I really want to see it."

  With the crumbling tombs behind her, Bo felt somewhat better. The air felt cooler, too, or at least darker. Peeking from beneath her umbrella, she noted that the sky was uniformly gray now, and a light breeze rattled the stiff, almost plastic magnolia leaves littering the ground. Impossible not to think the sound was like old bones moving. Brittle bones, fragile and forgotten. Like Chac's would be in the Tijuana graveyard. Like everyone's would be, eventually.

  A sign on the cemetery's brick wall announced that the superintendent of cemeteries was someone named Clementine Bean.

  "Oh, my darlin'," Bo sang softly, "Oh my darlin' Clementine, you are lost and gone forever ..."

  "Bo?" Andrew's face bore telltale signs of panic.

  "Sorry." She smiled, pointing to the sign. "Just one of those inappropriate responses to stimuli we of the straitjacket set are prone to. I'm taking my meds, Andy. Nothing major's going to happen. You can relax. Now which one's your house?"

  "There," he said, indicating one of the traditionally galleried facades half hidden by a spreading oak rooted in a small front yard. "Twelve twenty-one. It's been painted, but other than that it's just the same."

  Bo didn't miss the note of resigned bitterness in his voice. The boy who played in a graveyard had not been happy in this house. Behind the cast iron railing of its four-pillared lower gallery, Bo saw two long windows, their deep green louvered shutters closed. Had they been closed thirty-five years ago when a social-climbing Cajun couple lived here with their children, Andrew and Elizabeth? He'd told her he joined the Marines and went to Vietnam to get away from them. Beyond the second-story gallery the shutters remained open, and Bo could see rivulets of condensed water running down the interior faces of the tall, old-fashioned windows. An air-conditioner hummed.

  "What was the worst thing?" she asked.

  "That my sister Elizabeth and I were supposed to be their tickets into a world that didn't even know they existed," he answered quietly. "Just one more piano recital, fencing match, debutante ball, or school award, and they'd be accepted into what they thought was 'society.' Except they never were, and so to them we were failures. Mon dieu," he sighed. "What a waste."

  Deciding that a serious rally was in order, Bo took his hand and looked hard into his eyes. "In my terms you're as far as it gets from failure," she told him. "I think you're wonderful."

  In his smile as he wrapped his arm around her waist Bo felt something breaking, falling away. Like a film of glass.

  "Then I am." He laughed. "And we'd better get to the trolley. Hear that thunder?"

  Turning left onto Camp Street, Bo stumbled on the uneven brick sidewalk, set in a herringbone pattern now outlined in moss. In the odd, prerain light everything seemed bathed in grayish gold, like a faded daguerreotype. Set in the rumpled brick design was a gleaming circle the size of a dinner plate, embossed with a moon and nine shooting stars. It seemed incongruous, even magical there beneath a delicately overhanging crape myrtle hedge.

  "Andy, look at this," she said.

  "I know. When we moved here I was only about five, and I thought they were giant's coins stuck in the sidewalk. It was a real blow when I found out they were only water meter covers."

  "They're not; they're giant's coins," Bo insisted. "And we're going to get wet."

  A filament of lightning threaded the eastern sky, followed by distant thunder. No birds could be heard, and in the dimming light the pink petals of a huge crape myrtle in the lawn of a tattered Greek Revival mansion appeared magenta, then charcoal gray. Bo allowed the deliciously moody imagery to flood her mind. Why not? Hadn't Dr. Broussard suggested that she should respect her own experience? This experience was suffocatingly hot, lush, and fantastical. Bo memorized the details in case she wanted to paint them someday. But how did you paint air that seemed made of transparent mercury?

  The streetcar still named Desire rumbled beneath the dense canopy of oaks shadowing St. Charles Avenue, its headlight feebly yellow in the gloom. As Bo and Andrew climbed aboard, the first dime-sized drops of rain made whispery thuds against the windows.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Cornmeal Woman

  On the bus ride from the tiny Shreveport airport to Wade Correctional Center in the middle of nowhere, Bo sifted images of New Orleans and wondered why the city was so appealing. It must be an innate artistry, she thought. A blatant celebration of mood, facade, presentation.

  In the hotel room after Andrew had left for his conference, she'd listened to cracking thunder and watched the city deluged with rain. An umbrellaed woman in a beautiful long skirt striding the length of a brick wall had been a painting. Everything in New Orleans was a painting, a scene, a play of style and texture. Its doorways, courtyards, balconies—all iron-laced and dripping with rain—suggested secrets, slow corruption, a sad, accepting wisdom. These lay beneath the perennial gaiety, she mused. It was a distinctly European atmosphere, and one that had resonance in her mind. The same could not be s
aid of her feeling for Tijuana, and in that moment she'd understood why.

  The world south of the U.S. border, while influenced by its Spanish invaders, had retained a distinctly un-European mythos. Its gated courtyards and baking, lizard-scratched walls hid something quite different from the world-weary sophistication of New Orleans. Something unknown to minds nurtured by Western European ideas, and therefore frightening.

  As the bus pulled through two cyclone fences topped and lined with razor wire, Bo wondered how much that disparity would inhibit her ability to understand what had happened to a Maya singer in a Mexican bar. She would have to try harder, she decided. Really breach the barrier between her reality and the one in which Chac and Acito had lived. She would start now.

  Climbing down from the bus, she took note of where she was. A prison. Dewayne Singleton had been sent here after bombing out in two others closer to home. His prison master record sheet and conduct report, faxed to San Diego from the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections in Baton Rouge, had said he was a discipline problem. Not surprising.

  What was surprising was that he'd been judged criminal, when the cause of his troubling behavior was an illness. Bo wondered where the defense attorney's head had been during Dewayne's most recent trial. Who wouldn't suspect a psychiatric disorder in somebody who stole insects and then sold them as vitamins? Louisiana, Bo remembered, wasn't exactly on the cutting edge of psychiatric care or public defense.

  In a cement tower overhead, two guards watched the razor wire. One carried a riot gun, the other an M-14 rifle. On a path between the stacked spirals of shrapnel a row of men in jeans and white Tshirts filed noisily into a side door. Names and numbers were stenciled down the sides of their pants legs and across the backs of their shirts. The bright red stenciling, Bo observed, matched almost exactly the red-orange vincas planted in tidy, geometric arrangements beside the battleship gray cinder block buildings. She wondered if they'd hired a decorator to coordinate the color scheme.