Turtle Baby Read Online Free PDF Page B

Bo heard the phrase carta verde several times. On the chair beside the man, a woman who appeared to be winding colored yarn around plastic drinking straws nodded, her eyes angry and fearful at once. She was making God's Eyes, Bo realized. The compass-shaped wall decorations
    sold everywhere in Tijuana. Figuring that out did nothing to account for the man's obvious anger.
    Carta verde. Bo thought of Carta Blanca, the Mexican beer she didn't like nearly as well as Dos Equis, which meant "Two Xs." And Carta Blanca meant "white card," so carta verde would mean what? Surfing through root-word associations, Bo hit on "verdant." Green. The guy was yelling about green cards!
    "No INS," she insisted, shaking her head. "CPS is no la migra."
    Estrella talked about la migra all the time—the Mexicans' term for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, which routinely rounded up and dumped migrant workers found in the U.S. without residency permits back across the border in Tijuana. The practice was akin to emptying the ocean by scooping out buckets of seawater and throwing it on the adjacent sand. But la migra was nonetheless a source of continual fear to the thousands of undocumented Latinos who crossed U.S. borders.
    The teenage girl opened the door and pointed to a pile of blankets on the floor of an area adjacent to the apartment's kitchen. The blanketed space was enclosed by upended cement blocks, probably, Bo thought, pilfered from a building site. An effective playpen. Bo nodded approval. The sharp corners of the cement blocks had been padded by towels held in place with duct tape. The needs of an eight-month-old had been thoughtfully met.
    Bo took the county's Polaroid camera from its strap on her shoulder, and walked self-consciously into the apartment's little kitchen to get a shot of Acito's living quarters. A box of disposable diapers sat on the floor, and a blue plastic baby bottle half full of what looked like apple juice lay among the blankets. Beside the bottle was a small statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe, dressed in starched fabric. In the playpen's corner
    a glow-in-the-dark plastic crucifix lay atop a chewed prayer card featuring a tonsured saint Bo didn't recognize. The saint looked ecstatically skyward as a rain of flaming arrows pierced his body. Acito's toys had been the religious paraphernalia of his Mexican caretakers.
    Get the baby bottle, Bradley. That may be Lysol, not apple juice.
    As Bo approached Acito's pen, she noticed that two more people, an elderly woman in a shawl and an expectant mother of indeterminate age, had emerged from a bedroom and were watching her as if she were about to toss them a grenade. Smiling inanely, she hooked a leg over the cement blocks, leaned to grab the blue bottle, and felt something crunch beneath her sandal. At the sound the old woman's eyes grew large and she hurried to Bo's side. From the blankets she pulled a rosary. Several of its red and black beads were smashed.
    "Oh, I'm sorry," Bo began, "I didn't mean to ..."
    But the woman, no longer fearful, was yelling at Bo in nonstop Spanish that, however incomprehensible, left no doubt as to its intent. The man in the straw cowboy hat stood and began to bat at Bo with his hat, creating wafts of hair-oil-scented air. The pregnant woman crossed herself, placed her forehead against the wall, and began to moan. Bo clambered out of Acito's pen and made a dash for the door.
    "What the hell ... ?" she gasped, still clutching the baby bottle.
    "That rosary was a gift from my grandmother's mother," the teenager explained, pushing Bo through the screen door and then locking it. "It was, you know, like ... from her deathbed?"
    In the girl's syntax Bo recognized a universal adolescent contempt for the unfathomable stupidity of adults. Beyond the door the old woman kept screaming a word Bo could have sworn was "Tampa."
    "Did her mother live in Florida?" Bo asked in spite of herself.
    "I dunno," the girl answered. "Her mother's