Moonbird Boy Read Free

hair that had prompted the Indians to nickname him Raven, and hugged his son. The wiry little boy pulled away and rolled like a hedgehog under the pool table as his father replied.
    "Keeping Bird with me here, where there were several other adults to care for him when I couldn't, isn't child abuse," he said quietly. "What does your system want parents who have psychiatric illness to do, give their kids away?"
    "It isn't my system," Bo had answered. "I don't have systems. But if Estrella eats dinner here she'll see Bird and find out he's yours. Red flags will go up. A sick parent can't take care of a kid, and besides, when most people hear 'psychiatric rehab facility' they imagine gaunt, wild-eyed people in rags, chained to stone walls while screaming obscenities. Not exactly something a kid should see."
    "There isn't a serviceable stone wall anywhere in Southern California and besides, Bird sees worse things every night on television." Mort laughed without humor. "Some of them are commercials I do. And this isn't a hospital emergency room. Everybody except Old Ayma is mellow, just recuperating. But why don't we duck the whole thing by inviting your friends to go out?"
    Bo had glanced at the two-foot-thick rammed-earth walls of Ghost Flower Lodge, beyond which lay nothing but five thousand acres of unpopulated high desert—the Neji Indian Reservation.
    "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 Backcountry 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,