Moonbird Boy by Abigail Padgett Page B

private homes where the owners get paid to keep mentally ill people. Most of them are pits. But Ghost Flower has that fabulous building with the thick walls. It must have cost a fortune to build."
    "The walls are made out of dirt," Bo answered, thinking. "And there's plenty of that on the reservation. But the Neji had an architectural firm from Los Angeles do the building, so it couldn't have been cheap. You're right. Wonder where they got the money?"
    "Why don't you ask them?" Estrella said, wiping lipstick from the corner of her mouth with her little finger. "I've got to go, try to make sure these kids get sent to the same foster home."
    "Maybe I will," Bo answered as the door closed behind her officemate. The other bands of Kumeyaay left in San Diego County after sequential displacement by Spanish, Mexican, and then American invaders, had all lived in grueling poverty until casino interests and waste-management entrepreneurs discovered them. Only the Neji Reservation had avoided becoming either a hazardous waste dump or a gambling mecca.
    The Neji history was interesting, Bo thought. But it couldn't have anything to do with the death of a stand-up comic. Or could it? Zachary Crooked Owl would know. And she was going to ask him.

Chapter 8

    Hiking her long skirt with one hand, Bo climbed into the four-wheel-drive Pathfinder she'd bought at a police auction four months earlier, and sighed. The CPS parking lot looked exactly the same as it had for three years. Her office building, a rambling two-story structure of colorless brick, also looked the same. In the yard overlooked by rows of gray windows, an unchanging eucalyptus tree wore the same mantle of dust it wore every October. What was lacking, she realized as she guided the Pathfinder carefully past Madge's immaculately clean beige coupe, was autumn. Just one red leaf anywhere on the horizon would provide a focus. But there would be no red leaf. San Diego's autumns brought nothing but dust and a nearly unendurable glare.
    Sunlight's good for depression, Bradley. Enjoy it and save some money so you can fly to New Zealand in the spring, where it will be fall.
    The thought was energizing. She'd embark on an austerity program, Bo decided, in order to stockpile the airfare. She'd make her own clothes, plant vegetables in pots on the deck, maybe try to sell some of her paintings at craft fairs. And if she didn't start smoking again she could save fifteen dollars a week on cigarettes alone. On that concept she was ambivalent.
    Mort Wagman had talked her into quitting shortly after she'd arrived at Ghost Flower. "You're depressed, you don't care about anything, so you won't care about going through withdrawal," he argued while pacing in a tight circle beside Bo's nest in the couch corner. "The misery will give you something concrete to think about."
    At the time his weird pacing had been irritating, its pointless energy a criticism of her sluggishness. "Either stand still or go away," Bo had told him. "You're making me dizzy."
    "I'm going to tell you a secret," he answered, leaning over the leather arm of the couch. "You know how dogs circle around and around before they curl up to go to sleep?"
    "Leave me alone," she said, not relishing a conversation about dogs.
    "They do it because their ancestors made nests in tall grass that way, and the memory got wired in."
    Bo pulled a length of tan acrylic blanket over her head, but the voice continued.
    "I'm not a hundred percent human," Mort Wagman whispered as though revealing a secret thousands were dying to know. "Somebody did this surgery on me, somebody in my family put in pieces of animal brain. See the scar? That's why I circle sometimes. It just feels right."
    In spite of herself Bo had emerged from the stifling blanket to look at his scalp beneath his long, ebony hair. There was a small scar, probably from a childhood fall or some other accident. And Mort Wagman was still delusional, she thought bleakly. Crazy. Paranoid. Good