Turtle Baby (20 page)

Turning onto the old stagecoach road, she followed it in the dark until cutting off at Arroyo Tapiado and heading northwest again, toward the ancient caves and a flickering fire. A hundred yards from the edge of the amphitheater, from which rhythmic drumbeats could now be heard, she eased the Pathfinder into an eroded cleft. Putting Mildred in her backpack infant carrier, and locking the car out of habit, she snapped the keys to the edge of her jeans pocket and crept closer to the scene unfolding a hundred feet down a sandstone wall.

Bo felt her lips pull toward her ears in a broad grin saved from its destiny as a laugh only by decorum. Indelicate to sneak up on people and then laugh aloud, even if they did look like the casting call for Indians in a grade-school Thanksgiving pageant. Martin St. John actually seemed rather svelte in his leather breechcloth, dancing with the others about the fire. And Munson Terrell, his lock of white hair gleaming in firelight, could have won the competition for a Playgirl centerfold. Still, the spectacle of fourteen white men in nothing but breechcloths and ankle bells, chanting and dancing around a fire, gave Bo something that felt like mental hiccups. A need to giggle.

Breathing from the diaphragm, she crawled backward far enough to be unseen, and sat on the ground. There was no point in staying. She couldn't hear anything they might say, and Martin was there to glean any useful information Terrell might drop, anyway. Shaking her head with amusement, Bo had just started back toward the hidden car when she saw it. Something moving beyond a wind-carved window in a mudstone pillar. Something dark, narrow, and perfectly straight. As she watched, the object arced downward from a pivotal point behind the pillar and came to rest gently just above a boulder at the amphitheater's rim. A rifle barrel. Aimed into the group below.

Scuttling back to her vantage point, Bo tried to assess the situation. The men were moving faster now, bobbing and stamping erratically. Only one remained stationary. The drummer. Munson Terrell. If the rifle were equipped with a telescopic sight, any one of them could be picked off easily, but Terrell was a sitting duck. A slight movement of the rifle barrel recalled the message implicit in the snake's tail earlier. "Warning," it said. "Now!" In two seconds, Bo realized, somebody, probably Munson Terrell, would be shot. Would be dead.

Grabbing a chunk of loose sandstone the size of a college dictionary, she tossed it with both hands over the side of the amphitheater wall. It tumbled to a stop fifteen yards down, lodged against an outcropping of metasedimentary schist from the ancient topography below the sandstone. In seconds the scrabbling landslide of smaller rocks in its wake ceased. The dancers had neither seen nor heard it. But someone else had.

Mildred, sensing Bo's fear, began to climb out of her carrier. Bo hooked her left thumb over her shoulder in the dog's collar, and watched as the gun barrel angled silently away from the scene below. It seemed to be following a magnetic tug created by the frenzied drumbeat echoing in Bo's heart. The rifle was now pointing at her!

"Oh, shit," she whispered as the drumming abruptly stopped. In the silence that followed she merely crouched in the ground amid the rubble, and didn't move. The gun barrel swept snakelike back and forth, seeming to smell rather than see her presence. A rifle shot now would alert Terrell's group below, Bo realized. But the drumming might start again at any moment. Better to make a move now than later. But what move?

An open space of about twenty-five feet lay between her and the nearest broken mass of rock in the direction of the car. Even in the dim light of a waning quarter-moon, the flat expanse seemed endless and perfectly deadly. Her blood, she noted without wanting to, would look black, spilled in this eerie light.

The rifle's owner was invisible behind the windowed pillar, and had the additional advantage of being able to stand. Still, there was no indication that Bo was any less invisible among the rocks. Slowly she inched backward from rock-shadow to rock-shadow on her knees and one hand, still holding the trembling dog firmly on her back.

"Don't bark," she hummed through her teeth in a barely audible and patently fake falsetto. The "nice dog" voice. "Don't bark, don't growl, don't whine. Good dog. Good dog, Mildred."

As abruptly as it stopped, the drumming started again. Slower this time, accompanied by a sort of whooping chant in which the men called something that sounded like "kowa key" into the dark, over and over. Their voices seemed dramatically gravelly. It occurred to Bo that she hadn't survived a terrifying brain disorder for forty years only to die to the ludicrous soundtrack of a male-bonding ritual. No, it would be Bach, or nothing.

On her feet now, she dashed for the shadow of a boulder to her right. Footsteps from the area of the pillar made it clear that the rifle's owner was moving in the same direction. An acid taste filled Bo's throat. The only safety lay in getting to the car, and that was impossible. Running, she darted between rocks and broken slabs that had once been canyon walls. Overhead a thin cirrus cloud dimmed the moon's light to a uniform gray that almost obscured the immense hole in the canyon wall before her. One of the caves the ranger had mentioned to the Sierra Club group. Dark and featureless as the world behind a mirror. Bo scrambled through the opening and slid twenty feet down a sloped ledge to land on the dry floor of a subterranean wash that angled narrowly upward. Far ahead she could see a lessening of darkness that would mean a sinkhole in the cave's ceiling, and she crept toward it, following the narrow walls carved by floodwater rushing under collapsed desert sandstone. Looking over her shoulder, she saw the dimly lit cave mouth stabbed by a dark, straight line. The rifle barrel.

Fighting panic, she moved steadily toward the break in the ceiling. A shot in here would be muffled by tons of debris. Terrell's group wouldn't hear it. She and Mildred would die. Their bodies wouldn't be found for years, if ever.

"If we survive this, I'm going to buy a gun," she breathed to the dog panting over her shoulder. "I hate guns and nobody with a history of depressive episodes should have one, but at this rate I won't live long enough to commit suicide."

A lick on the neck was sufficient motivation to climb the wash beneath the sinkhole, and emerge in a landscape Bo hadn't imagined in her worst psychosis. Slender ridgelines intersected each other in a maze of blind canyons leading nowhere. Dry falls plummeted fifty to a hundred feet into sheer-walled holes full of broken rock. At her feet Bo saw cannonball-sized concretions, some worn free and movable. One, about five yards ahead on the ridgeline, seemed to be staring at her in the faint light.

"Oh, not now," Bo said angrily to her own brain, prone to symbolic overinterpretation of everything even under normal circumstances. Whatever those were. The round white rock continued to stare as falling pebbles below indicated the presence of a second climber in the wash leading up through the collapsed sinkhole.

It was staring, Bo realized as panic made her head feel as though it were floating. Because it wasn't a rock at all, but a skull.

Moving toward it on feet that felt glassy, she tried to make sense of it. Why would a skull be sitting on a ridgeline in an impassable badland without its skeleton? Beside it on the ground was a single black feather. And halfway down the adjacent valley wall was a scrubby mesquite bush with an abandoned nest in its branches, its roots hanging like pale threads into blackness beneath. Bo ran and fell the fifteen feet to the mesquite, grabbed its trunk with one hand, and slid into the hole beneath it, her knees on the jagged edge of the slumped sandstone slab that had probably collapsed a century after an explorer had first fallen through it. His skull would have been carried to the surface by a coyote or mountain lion exploring the recently accessible tunnel below. Above, someone kicked one of the round, white concretions off the ridgeline. Bo heard it crash over her head and come to rest at the bottom of the blind valley. Then silence.

An eternity of silence in which the pain in her knees became a kaleidoscope of throbbing color, a surgery with no anesthesia. But she couldn't move. Any sound would alert the watcher above, and any movement might dislodge the precarious balance of the slab. The fall below could be five feet and could be two stories. It scarcely mattered.

The footsteps walked to the end of the ridgeline, then back, but no further. Whoever it was knew of the danger in traversing these hidden valleys, Bo thought through the flashes of light her knees were creating behind her tightly clenched eyes. Whoever it was, wasn't stupid. Or patient.

After Bo had counted to sixty twenty times, stroking Mildred's neck with her left hand in time to the count, the footsteps noisily descended the wash into the big cave, and were gone. Bo waited for five more counts of sixty before pulling herself out of the collapsed sinkhole beneath the mesquite, and then lying flat against the valley wall to distribute her weight evenly.

"We're not budging from here until it's light," she whispered to Mildred. "Whoever that is may be sitting down there in that cave, waiting to blow us out of the opening when we go back down."

The dog stirred uncomfortably in the backpack, and then draped herself over Bo's shoulder and went to sleep.

Hours later Bo felt the personality of the sky shift in that way only discernible to those who have been awake all night for reasons not related to work. The ill, the grieving, the manic, and the terrified. A sudden absence of weight, felt in the ears, followed swiftly by murky grayness where before there was only black. Dawn. Often employed as a symbol for the slow crawl of the human race out of an evolutionary darkness in which reason was not an option. Standing again on the ridgeline of a lost desert escarpment, Bo wondered exactly how far that race had come. From the east radials of pale orange light spilled over a tattered horizon and through the eye sockets of a human skull lying on the ground at her feet.

"Thank you," she addressed the empty, protective shell of someone who had died here alone and long ago. "You saved my life." Turning the skull to face a sunrise that seemed symphonic, she adjusted Mildred in the carrier and started toward the open sinkhole. The little dog's eyes were somewhat filmy, Bo noticed, and the skin beneath her fur was slack. Dehydration. To be expected in a frail, old mammal unaccustomed to eight-hour spans in zero-humidity desert warmth.

"Don't worry, we've got five gallons of water strapped to the car," she told the dog. "Hang in."

At the lip of the sinkhole Bo threw down a rock, then waited to hear responsive movement in the cave. There was nothing. No sense of anything alive in the stony silence below. Carefully Bo descended the wash and hurried through the vaulted chamber at whose end a round opening now seemed to pulse with light.

Terrell's group was still asleep, mere rumpled forms in sleeping bags surrounding a dead fire. Bo tried to identify Martin among them, but failed.

In minutes she was at the Pathfinder with its needed water jug. But as she reached to unclip the bungees holding it in its wire frame, she noticed something anomalous. She was sure she'd succeeded in fastening the troublesome cap on the plastic jug correctly. She remembered standing in the alley behind her apartment, struggling with the damn thing after she filled the jug. It had taken several tries to get the cap on straight. But now it was crooked. Someone had opened the water jug, but hadn't removed it, then carelessly replaced the defective cap. The water level was the same as it had been yesterday. Bo remembered a poisoned baby, a shot of tequila laced with almond-scented death. The memory made her back away from the plastic jug as if it were radioactive.

Unlocking the car, she gave Mildred the last two ounces of water left in the canteen, and backed out into Arroyo Tapiado. If she were right, someone had just come close to killing the closest thing to unconditional love Bo had ever known. An animal, but nonetheless there when the symptoms of a brain disorder drove everyone else away. Bo felt threads of ice shoot along a thousand neural pathways and pool in her hands. She could kill, she realized as the veins in her hands stood out, throbbing. She could actually kill anybody who would poison her dog.

Dewayne Singleton sat upright and carefully shook the sand from his shoes again. The shoes were important. He couldn't have left the hospital like he did if he'd still been wearing those thin slippers. But the big man, the nice one who kept getting Tylenol whenever Dewayne complained about the pain in his legs, that one had said shoes might help the pain. He'd gone and got a pair of tennis shoes for Dewayne even though it was time to go to bed. He'd said he wouldn't be there in the morning because his shift would be over at 11:00, and he wanted Dewayne to have the right shoes. They would play volleyball on Saturday morning outside, he told Dewayne. Important to have the right shoes, especially with the Haldol giving him those muscle cramps. Dewayne just nodded and decided not to tell the man he didn't know how to play volleyball.

And then on Saturday morning, when he was outside in the courtyard wearing those shoes with that red plastic visitor's badge still in his pocket, Allah sent a miracle. Or something did. A big group of black people came. They didn't come all at once, but in groups of three or four pretty close together. Dewayne didn't know why they were there, but he knew they didn't know each other. Something about the way their bodies

moved around inside the group, leaving spaces that said they were strangers. Something about the way they cut their eyes when they were watching each other do their thing, which was about talking about God.

Without really meaning to do it, Dewayne watched one of them in a nice shirt and shiny brown shoes go up to a woman and start talking. It was so easy to start letting his body move just like that man talking, sort of pick up on him and his little gestures. Mama always said it was some kind of gift, the way Dewayne could do that.

After a while he rolled down the sleeves of his plaid shirt over the plastic hospital bracelet on his wrist, and went up to a white boy who kept pacing up and down, staring at the ground.