The Painted Boy

  “Maybe he’s one of those savants,” Ramon said. “You know, with Asperger’s or something.”

  Rosalie smiled. “Could be. He’s smart all right. But then . . .”

  “There’s his dragon.”

  Rosalie nodded. “If it’s real . . .” She shook her head. “I think that’s part of the reason Anna’s so confused. With my mama and Paulo getting killed, she can’t imagine anyone having the chance to get rid of the bandas and not taking it.”

  “And do you feel the same way?”

  “Kind of, I have to admit.” She sighed. “If Jay’s dragon power is real, then it’s frustrating and scary. And if it’s not, well, why would he lie about it? Is he delusional?”

  “Confusing.”

  “Like I said.”

  Ramon took her hand. “There’s nothing we can do about it, you know that. It’s not something we can fix.”

  “I know. I wouldn’t even know how it should be fixed. And I totally get how Anna feels. Because if such a thing is real, then what else is?”

  “Like the uncles turning into hawks.”

  Rosalie smiled. “I guess. But I was thinking more along the lines of, what can we trust to be real?”

  “You, me. The street in front of us. Your uncle’s house. They’re all real.” He squeezed her fingers. “But mostly you and me.”

  Rosalie leaned her head against his shoulder. He always managed to say the right thing. It didn’t make matters any clearer, but she felt better all the same.

  Lupita had never figured out how to make herself look older—it was a trick, she explained, that some cousins had and some didn’t. She didn’t, so she was stuck looking as young as she had when she’d first taken human form. She was probably older than anyone who’d be at the show Malo Malo was playing the following weekend, but she didn’t want to go, even though it was all-ages.

  “I don’t like being treated like a little kid,” she had said.

  “But you’re going for the music,” Jay argued, “and you love to dance. Who cares about the other people?”

  She shook her head.“I’ll just listen from outside.”

  The night of the show, Jay looked for Lupita when he arrived with Rosalie, but he couldn’t spot her.

  “Are you coming?” Rosalie asked.

  Jay joined her in the line to get his hand stamped. They were on the guest list so they didn’t have to pay, but they still only got red stamps, which meant they couldn’t order alcohol.

  “Who were you looking for out there?” Rosalie asked.

  “Nobody. I was just wondering if I knew anyone.” He didn’t tell her about Lupita because it was just too complicated. And besides that, the truth was he sort of liked having something here in Santo del Vado Viejo that he’d found on his own.

  As if to bring the point home, Rosalie laughed and said, “Like you know so many people.”

  “Hey, I’m getting there. Didn’t Paco say he was coming?”

  “Paco always says he’s coming, but he never shows up. Haven’t you figured that out yet?”

  What Jay had figured out was that Paco smoked way too much weed, taking every chance he could when he wasn’t washing dishes to go out in the alley and toke up.

  “I guess I should have,” he said. “But I think he’d really like the band.”

  “I think a lot more people would, if they only gave them a chance. But I’m biased.”

  Jay shook his head. “No, they’re really good.”

  “And you’re biased, too.”

  Jay laughed. “Maybe a little.”

  The hall was quickly filling up with people, from young teens to those in their twenties. Though he recognized some of the bandas, Jay didn’t spot any gang colors, which made sense; they wouldn’t have been allowed in if they were wearing them. There were lots of skeleton T-shirts, all kinds of variations on the gangly dancing Day of the Dead skeletons that were the band’s logo. Rosalie told him that they were called catrin, and based on the art of José Guadalupe Posada.

  Most popular was the official Malo Malo merch: black T-shirts showing ribcage bones on the back and front, or long black scarves printed with a twisting line of vertebrae. Some people wore plastic skull masks, while more than a few had actually painted the skull image on their faces. It gave the crowd an eerie look.

  The opening band was nothing special, and people talked through most of their set. Jay felt a little sorry for them, but he was as guilty as anyone else, chatting with Rosalie and her friends at the back of the hall. Then finally after a short break, it was time for Malo Malo.

  Jay pushed to the front of the stage with the others as the intro for the first song began, kick drum and bass combining in a steady heartbeat rhythm that you could feel deep in your chest. Ramon said it was the band’s way of “tuning the audience.” Jay hadn’t understood what he’d meant until he went to his first show and found his pulse adjusting to, and then keeping time with, the beat.

  Hector began a scratching counter rhythm on his turntable, sounding like chickens pecking in a yard, then suddenly a spot came on to capture Ramon and Gilbert at the front of the stage, sharing a mic. They started with a flourish on their trumpets and played some jaunty mariachi tune until Gilbert backed away, switching to long, slow notes, while Ramon started rapping the story of how the band came together.

  The spots weren’t on Anna yet, but her guitar could be heard weaving a delicate harmony to Gilbert’s trumpet. The band hit the chorus with everybody singing, then the music stopped for a moment before it came roaring back in double time, the trumpets high and sharp. The spotlight touched Anna just as she broke into a killer guitar break that sounded like speed-metal flamenco.

  When Ramon started the next verse, strobing lights washed the crowd and they pumped their fists as he sang of everybody needing to find a place for themselves in the world. The pogoing audience flickered in the strobes, the skeleton images rapidly appearing and disappearing, and then a funny thing happened.

  At first Jay didn’t realize what was going on when a desert landscape appeared in between the strobe flashes. He was dancing in the hall, then in the desert, then in the hall, the switches keeping time to the lights. And it wasn’t only visual. Sound stuttered between the silence of the impossible landscape and the pounding throb of the band’s music. He could smell the clean night air of the desert against the hot, sweaty crowd by the stage. The desert was cool and dry, the hall steamy.

  He stumbled and might have lost his balance, but the jostling press of the crowd kept him on his feet. Then he stood motionless, eyes wide, trying to understand what was happening. A wave of panic tightened his chest until he suddenly understood:

  The music and lights were breaking down the barrier between this world and the in-between place.

  Ever since Lupita had brought him there he’d been trying to return on his own. It was simple when he was with her, a sideways shift, but he couldn’t seem to manage to cross over without her.

  “You can’t think about it,” Lupita tried to explain. “You have to relax and just do it. Then when you make the step across, do it like you’re expecting it to work, not like you’re hoping it will.”

  He tried it now, just told himself that he was in that desert, and the strobing effect stopped. He stood in the dirt, a vault of stars above him, his ears ringing from the music a world away.

  Then he allowed himself to return and he was back in the thick of the dancers, the lights still strobing, nobody apparently having noticed either his disappearance or his sudden reappearance. He threw back his head and laughed.

  He’d never tried any drugs—Paupau had drilled that into him: It was too dangerous with the dragon sleeping inside—but he thought this was what it must be like, as though the world was bigger than you thought it was, making you feel tall and a little reckless.

  Anna took another solo, playing louder and twice as fast. Her head was tilted back, hair flowing, fingers dancing on her guitar neck as she spun like a dervish across the s
tage. Jay grinned, thinking she was the very picture of the rock goddess.

  The crowd went wild and never quieted down until the third and last encore.

  Later, everybody on the guest list helped tear down the equipment and lights, or made themselves useful in other ways. Jay found himself at the merch table with Margarita and Hector, bagging T-shirts and CDs. Jay liked them both, though he didn’t know either well. Hector, tall and rangy with his long dark hair in a ponytail, was shy offstage. Margarita looked tiny next to him—a short, dark bundle of energy. She had so many friends that Jay’d never had the chance to just hang with her on her own.

  They were doing a brisk business until a guy Jay recognized as a local gangbanger stepped up to the table. The King’s crown symbol was tattooed on the back of either hand. Another tattoo made it look as though he had a strand of barbed wire wrapped around his neck.

  Jay knew he was one to talk, with the image of a dragon taking up his entire back, but the gangbanger’s tattoos left him with an unpleasant feeling—even the one of Our Lady of Guadalupe on his forearm. But that was probably the point.

  As the gangbanger leaned on the merch table, bringing his face in close to Hector’s, a few more Kings pushed through the line to stand behind him.

  “You got all these barrio songs,” the gangbanger said, “talking about making good, getting the girls, and collecting the ching ching.”

  Hector nodded. “Yeah, I guess we do.”

  “So when are you going to write a song about the real success story we got happening down here?”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  The guy looked at his fellow gang members, eyebrows raised as if to ask, “Can you believe this guy?” then turned back to Hector.

  “I’m talking about El Tigre, man,” he said.

  The other bandas nodded in agreement.

  “Word,” one of them said.

  “Yo, you tell ’em, Alambra.”

  “ Yeah,” Alambra went on. “ You’re singing about Malverde and all these other banditos been dead a hundred years. It’s time you tell some new stories, man.”

  “We write the stories we want to write,” Hector said.

  “Yeah? So maybe you should want to write one about El Tigre. We’ll make sure it gets lots of play.”

  Jay remembered the day he met Rosalie and her telling him how the gangbangers would sometimes take young bands in under their wing. They’d give them support, make sure their music got played, and provide all the dope and partying anybody might want. But the downside was that you were in their pocket. You played the music they wanted you to play, where they wanted you to play it, and if they decided they didn’t like you anymore, you could end up beaten or dead.

  The sweet deal could turn bad before you knew it.

  So he wasn’t surprised at Hector’s reluctance to even talk to the gangbanger.

  “It’s not like that,” Hector was saying.

  “You can’t write about our main man?” Alambra asked. “Why can’t you give us a rockin’ narcocorrido about El Tigre? Put that Malo Malo spin on it, man.”

  “Because we don’t write about shit,” Margarita said before Hector could answer.

  Alambra didn’t even look at her as he said, “Shut up, bitch. Was I talking to you?”

  Margarita stood up from behind the table.

  “You need to leave,” she said. She pointed at Alambra. “You and all your asshole loser friends. Don’t make me call security.”

  It was like dropping a pebble into a pool, Jay thought. A stillness arose on the heels of her words, expanding from where she stood and spreading throughout the hall. Ramon and the others who were still on the stage turned to look in the direction of the merch table. Hector and Jay started to stand up. Alambra’s gaze slowly found Margarita’s face.

  Jay was so mesmerized by the dark anger flooding the gangbanger’s features that he never saw the knife appear. He wasn’t even aware that anyone was in danger until Alambra’s arm shot across the table and he buried the blade in Margarita’s chest.

  “No!” he heard Anna scream from the stage.

  Cries of shock and alarm rose up all around them.

  Alambra pulled the knife free and blood flowered on Margarita’s T-shirt.

  Margarita’s eyes went wide from shock. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out and her legs gave way. As she began to crumple, Hector lunged for her.

  “Who’s the piece of shit now, bitch?” Alambra asked.

  Margarita slumped in Hector’s arms. Her blood was all over him now, too. Jay clenched his fists, so tightly his nails dug half-moons into his palms. He turned back to find the gangbanger grinning, and the controlled calm he’d developed from years of training with Paupau disappeared as though it had never been.

  He didn’t fight it. Instead, he let that enormous something he always felt shifting inside him grow, rising up to fill not only himself, but the entire hall. No—it was more like he was filling the hall, because as the secret behemoth grew inside him, he merged with it. He could feel the weight of enormous wings on his shoulders pushing against the roof high above. His lungs were hot with raging coals and fire. There was a roaring in his ears, like a long continuous rumble of immediate thunder.

  The fire, when it burst from his mouth, could have erupted from a flamethrower: an awful, blistering tongue of heat that enveloped the gangbanger. Jay stomped his enormous hind foot—ten times the size of an elephant’s—and the ground shook, the building trembled. He stomped again, claiming his victory over his foe and marking his territory. Cracks streaked up the walls. Dust and plaster flaked and fell. A second blast of flame and the gangbanger was briefly outlined before he was entirely consumed and collapsed into ash.

  Jubilant with the death of his enemy, the monster that held Jay stomped its hind foot a third time. More dust and plaster fell. The cracks widened. The roof supports began to groan.

  But then the part of the behemoth that was Jay realized what he had done.

  The building was collapsing.

  A building full of people.

  The band, his friends, the staff, the members of the audience that hadn’t left yet—

  A panicked fear for their safety gave him the strength of will he might not otherwise have been able to muster. Using all those years of training, he focused and fought to contain the beast until he finally had it under control.

  Barely.

  “Out!” he cried. To his ears, his voice was the thunderous roar of the dragon. “Everybody out!”

  He let his wings expand until they pressed up against every portion of the roof. He held the structure up, straining under its massive weight, as the people fled. The giant shape he held was starting to falter—the dragon returning to its slumber in his chest—and he didn’t know how long he could keep the building from collapsing.

  But he couldn’t let them die.

  He wouldn’t.

  Not Rosalie and Anna.

  Not any of them.

  He didn’t care about the gangbanger, but Margarita was already one too many.

  Rosalie was up on the stage, coiling guitar and microphone cords with Anna, when the commotion began at the merch table. She looked over just in time to see Margarita rise to her feet, yelling something at a guy that she recognized as one of the local gangbangers, a guy they called Alambra. She didn’t actually see Margarita get stabbed, but she immediately knew something bad was happening when Alambra pulled back from the table and the front of Margarita’s T-shirt went red. Anna shouted something from beside her and the two of them ran for the end of the stage.

  And that’s when things got really weird.

  She saw Jay raise his arms, all his attention focused on Margarita’s assailant, and felt a sudden pressure in the air as though a thunderstorm had come up out of nowhere. The small hairs on her arms rose up and her skin prickled. Jay opened his mouth—impossibly wide, it seemed—and Alambra twitched as though something had struck him. She knew he was considered a re
al tough guy—so she was surprised when his eyes went wide with shock and fear.

  What was going on?

  Jay stamped his foot on the floor and Rosalie could swear she felt reverberations shake the stage where she was standing. A second stomp on the floor and Rosalie saw cracks running across the floor and up the walls. Plaster dust floated down from the ceiling. And then . . . and then . . .

  Alambra was briefly outlined as though he stood in the middle of a blazing inferno before he went black, then gray, then . . . the only way to describe it was that he seemed to disintegrate. He turned to ashes.

  Rosalie’s heart pumped far too fast. What she’d just seen was impossible.

  “What the f—?” she heard Anna start to say.

  But a rumbling roar shook the hall. Rosalie could see the cracks expanding on the walls, reaching up and crisscrossing the ceiling. More dust and plaster fell down on the crowd.

  “Out!” a voice that was like a deep roar cried. “Everybody out!”

  It took Rosalie a moment to realize that it had come from Jay.

  Move, she told herself.

  The building was going to come down around them.

  “Come on!” she yelled at Anna.

  But Anna was already heading back to where the band had left their gear.

  “Anna!” she called after her. “We need to get out of here.”

  The exits were choked with people pushing and shoving in a panic to get out. She hoped no one would get hurt in the press.

  “Screw that!” Anna said. “I’m not leaving without my guitars.”

  Rosalie ran over to where the rest of the band was frantically grabbing what gear they could. She picked up a couple of trumpets, then herded Anna and the others to the exit at the back of the stage. Before she went down the stairs, she looked back to see Jay standing alone, arms still raised, back bent as though he thought he was supporting the whole weight of the building.