The Painted Boy

  I hesitate a moment, then step away into the other desert. Into el entre. The Aztlán Maria wishes she could go to. I see her face as I leave and she doesn’t even blink. She’s probably seen people disappear a hundred times before.

  I lied to Maria about the funeral. I do go to San Miguel Cemetery for the graveside part of the service. I stand half hidden by a tall cross near the front of the cemetery, too far away to hear what the priest is saying, but close enough that I can see how upset everybody is. I pick out Anna, standing stiff beside Rosalie. The other members of the band are there, too. Ramon. Luis. Hector and Gilbert. I see Margarita’s family. Tío. A lot of people I don’t know, though I recognize some of them from various Malo Malo gigs.

  I think about Margarita as I watch the somber scene. She was so much fun, so full of life, but she didn’t take crap from anybody. Which is what got her killed.

  I start to feel angry all over again. Her death was so pointless. All the camera crews parked along the road like vultures don’t help my mood. Maybe the dragon could toss their vans into a pile—how’d that be for some news? Then I realize Rosalie is looking in my direction, her eyes widening, and I know it’s time to go.

  I don’t worry about anyone seeing me do this. Or maybe I don’t care right now. I just step away into the other desert. Once I’m there—with the cemetery, the cars, the crowds all gone—I stand amid the cacti and mesquite, my hands opening and closing at my sides. Finally, I sit cross-legged in the dirt and tell myself to breathe slowly, to calm down.

  At least here I won’t hurt anyone.

  That’s when a small hand falls on my shoulder and gives me a squeeze. Before I have time to react, Lupita sits down in front of me, her knees touching mine.

  “Rough day?” she says.

  I wait for my pulse to slow down again before I answer.

  “I’ve had better,” I tell her. “Thanks for dropping off breakfast.”

  She waves it off.

  “How’d you know where I was?”

  She touches her nose. “Jackalope superpowers. I followed your scent.”

  “Nice trick.”

  She shrugs. “Little cousins like me might be a joke but we’re not totally useless.”

  “I keep telling you—”

  “Yeah, yeah. I know. And you’re very sweet. But in the big scheme of things, I’m way way down on the list.” She waits a beat, then asks, “So what’s been happening?”

  So I tell her about Rita and meeting Señora Elena and Maria.

  “That was very brave of Maria,” Lupita says.

  I nod. Maria told me not to tell anyone, but who’s Lupita going to tell?

  “Why isn’t Rita welcome at Elena’s?” I ask.

  “That’s an old story,” Lupita says. “The way I heard it, Señora Elena blames Rita for her brother Enrico’s death. Supposedly, Rita filled his head up with how it was wrong that El Tigre was here and convinced him that he was much stronger because he had the weight of right on his side and, you know, he had the whole Gila monster thing going for him. But when Enrico went head-to-head with Flores—”

  She breaks off as she realizes what she’s saying.

  “That’s starting to sound familiar,” I say.

  Then I have a thought. I look around.

  “Can she hear us?” I ask.

  “Can who hear us?”

  “Rita.”

  I feel nervous just saying her name.

  “Why would she hear us?” Lupita asks.

  “Well, when I wanted to talk to her, all I had to was say her name and poof, there she was.”

  “Did you just say her name, or did you call her?”

  I give Lupita a confused look.

  “I mean,” she says, “did you put some intent into wanting to see her?”

  I have to think about that for a moment.

  “Yeah, I guess I did,” I say. “That makes a difference?”

  Lupita nods. “Sure it does. It’s not like she’s one of the big thunders living back up in the mountains who knows what’s going on everywhere at the same time.”

  There’s so much I don’t know.

  “So could I call you to me if I put intent into it?” I ask.

  She smiles and shakes her head. “Little cousin, remember? We don’t know those kinds of tricks.”

  “God, I don’t know what to do.”

  Lupita doesn’t say anything for a long moment. Then she sighs and gives me a sad smile.

  “Yeah, you do,” she says. “You just don’t want to.”

  “Can you blame me?”

  “Are you kidding? If it was me, I’d already be hiding out somewhere down in Mexico or Texas—anywhere far enough from here that still has some desert.”

  “Except I don’t have that option because . . . you know . . .”

  “It’s what you need to do,” she finishes.

  I nod. “Pretty much.”

  Lupita hesitates for a moment, then she says, “Well, if I were you, I guess I’d start with going into the mountains and practicing.”

  “Practicing what?”

  She smiles. “Being a dragon.”

  I just look at her for a long moment.

  “You know,” she goes on. “Out there you can get all big and scary and break stuff without anybody getting hurt.”

  “That’s actually a pretty good idea.”

  “What?” she says. “Like I couldn’t have one?”

  “I don’t know about the big and scary part of it,” I go on as if she didn’t say anything, “because the last time none of that happened. I was just me. But there was definitely breaking stuff involved. I really do need some practice.”

  “Which was my idea.”

  I smile. “Totally.”

  “And maybe you couldn’t see it,” she adds, “but I saw the dragon when you called it up in the dance hall and you definitely got big and scary.”

  “Really?”

  She nods. “Yeah, you weren’t all the way into its skin, but I could see it filling the hall, pushing up against the ceiling.”

  “So maybe I could do this thing.”

  “I’m guessing you could do anything you wanted.” She pauses at the look on my face, then grins. “Big cousin, you know?”

  “I guess.”

  It’s still hard to think of myself in that way.

  “Let me know when you plan to go to El Tigre,” she goes on.

  “It’ll be as soon as I can. Probably tomorrow morning, when the barrio’s quiet and there isn’t as much chance of people getting caught up in the crossfire.”

  “Good thinking.”

  I look at her, then I add, “You can’t come. I don’t want to see you hurt.”

  “I wouldn’t go on my own.”

  “Yeah, but still . . .”

  “Look,” she says. “Little cousins like me, we’re not very powerful, but there are a lot of us and we’re stronger than regular people. Like Rita told you, when you get a bunch of us together we can be pretty formidable. And a lot of us hate El Tigre for how he’s stolen the medicine from Señora Elena and for everything he’s done to the barrio. Cousins are no safer there than five-fingered beings.”

  Remembering what Señora Elena told me, I give her a doubtful look.

  “How many times do I have to say this?” Lupita says. “We’re not helpless. I’m going to put the word out and when you go face-to-face with him, we’ll be there to bear witness and help out as much as we can. It won’t hurt if the bandas see you show up with your own gang in tow.”

  “Yeah,” I tell Lupita, “but Rita said it would be pretty impossible to get everyone on the same page. I don’t want anybody else getting hurt. There’s already been enough of that.”

  “Showing how strong we are is going to make sure that won’t happen. Instead of them thinking they can just go after some kid and everything gets messy, it’ll stay between you and El Tigre.”

  Where it could still get messy, I think. And then I start thinking about how diff
erent the cousins are from the human people I’ve befriended since I got to Santo del Vado Viejo—thought I’d befriended, since they didn’t exactly stand up for me after what happened to Margarita and the gangbanger.

  “People really have trouble with us, don’t they?” I say.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, as soon as they find out what we are they just . . . you know . . .”

  “You’re talking about Anna.”

  I shrug. “Maybe. Partly. Mostly. I don’t know.”

  “Is she your first?”

  “First what? Girl I’ve obsessed over? Not really.” I think about the girls at school back in Chicago. “She’s the first I’ve actually talked to. You know, the first where there was the possibility of something. Until she found out about the dragon.”

  Lupita nods. “I’ve been there. It seems like there’s always going to be people who don’t handle it very well when they find out about us. But you know, it’s not really their fault.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Well, it’s not just the shock of finding out that we exist. The very fact that we do changes how they come to see the world.”

  “And people don’t like change.”

  “Not most of them.”

  I remember what Rita said about Paupau.

  “Some cousins are like that, too,” I say.

  I look away across the desert. Here on the other side of the cemetery where they’re laying Margarita into the ground, I feel calmer. More sure of myself and what I now know that I am. More comfortable with the cousins and their hidden culture.

  “Well,” I say, “I don’t know what the big deal is. I didn’t freak out when I found out about you.”

  She gives me a look.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Of course you didn’t. You’re a great big dragon, aren’t you?”

  “Except I thought of myself as a normal kid. I didn’t know animal people were real, or that I was supposed to take all those things Paupau told me literally.”

  Her look doesn’t go away.

  “And yet,” she says, “as soon as you arrived here you were talking to little lizard cousins, and the cats and dogs in Rosalie’s yard.”

  “How do you know that?”

  She shrugs. “Word gets around.”

  “I was being polite.”

  “And what you’re doing now is stalling,” she says. “You need to either go practice the dragon stuff and get this done, or step away from it. Either way, I’ve got your back.” She grins, adding, “Though getting away sounds like it’d be more fun. I know the place where the agave spirits hide their tequila. We could invite a bunch of cousins and have a party.”

  She gives me an expectant look, but she already knows my answer.

  “Yeah,” she says when I don’t bother replying. “I get it. You have to do this thing. But it was worth a shot.”

  We both stand up.

  “Be careful,” she says.

  “I will.”

  I haven’t a clue what I’m going to do once I get into the mountains, but better I figure it out there on my own than when I’m standing in front of El Tigre.

  “And we’ll have your back,” she says. “All you have to do is deal with El Tigre. We’ll make sure the bandas don’t step in.”

  I think of a gang of little cousins standing up to the gangbangers—a ragged collection of jackalopes, cactus wrens, lizards, scorpions, and other small animal people. The gangbangers would walk all over them. Except, maybe not. I’m not sure it’s size that decides where a cousin fits on the scale of importance. Rita’s a snake. She’s not physically big in her animal shape, but apparently she’s still a big deal.

  I’m about to ask Lupita how it works, but then I realize that she’s right—what I’m really doing is stalling. So I just thank her and turn to the mountains.

  - iii -

  Lupita watched him walk off into the desert, weaving in between the cacti and brush, getting smaller and smaller until finally he was swallowed by the vegetation and she couldn’t see him anymore. She let out a deep sigh. Long after he was gone, she continued to stand there, listening to the birdsong in the cacti and mesquite. After a while she heard footsteps crunching in the dirt behind her. She didn’t turn around, not even when Rita spoke.

  “You did well, little cousin.”

  “Yeah, well, I feel like crap. He’s my friend and I feel like I betrayed him.”

  “He’s our only hope to fix this problem,” Rita said. “Someone needed to give him that little extra push to get him to do the right thing.”

  “Maybe.”

  “And you were very convincing. The way you would go back and forth between sending him off and reinforcing the idea that he was the one who had to deal with Flores. You almost had me believing you thought he should just turn his back on all of this.”

  “I still half think he should.”

  Rita didn’t reply. Lupita felt the weight of the other woman’s unblinking gaze and sighed.

  “Okay,” she said. “So he needed to be convinced. But why did it have to be me?”

  “Because right about now, you’re the only one he really trusts.”

  “And see how great that’s turned out for him.”

  “He doesn’t ever have to find out.”

  “I’ll still know,” Lupita said.

  Rita shrugged. “Get over it. And even if he does find out, he’ll be glad you did it. In his heart, it’s what he wants to do. You know that.”

  Did she? Lupita wondered.

  She finally turned to Rita. “Tell me he’s not going to end up dead like Enrico.”

  “Come on,” Rita said. “He’s a dragon. What can hurt him?”

  “That’s what you said about Gila monsters and look where it got Enrico.”

  “I thought Enrico was stronger than he turned out to be.”

  Lupita shook her head. “You don’t see the start of a pattern here?”

  “What else can we do?” Rita asked. “Do you really want things to go on the way they are now? It’s not just humans who are getting killed in the crossfire of what the gangs are doing, and it’s only going to get worse.”

  Lupita gave a reluctant nod. The number of cousins who’d died because of the bandas wasn’t high, but it was rising. Javelina boys who’d “disrespected” gang colors. A deer girl run down in a car race out on the highway. Two old quail aunts, cut down for target practice.

  “I know,” she said. “But I like Jay, and I’m worried about him. He’s so new to the dragon.”

  “Trust me,” Rita said. “If I didn’t believe he could handle it, I’d never let him go up against Flores.”

  Which was what she’d said about Enrico, Lupita thought again. But this time she held her tongue.

  “Don’t worry so much,” Rita said. “I know he’s strong. I just hope we don’t need a repeat of what happened at the music hall for the dragon to get up to speed.”

  It took Lupita a moment to understand.

  “You mean somebody might have to die for this to work?” she said.

  Rita looked away to where Jay had walked off into the desert, her gaze ranging far, as though she could pierce the distance and see him.

  “Somebody always ends up dying,” she finally said.

  There was a story that went around among the cousins about how the snake women like Rita and her sister, Ramona, could see into the future. If that was true, Lupita thought, what did Rita see? And for that matter, if it was true, why hadn’t she foreseen Enrico’s death? Or Margarita’s?

  Though maybe she had and she’d only kept quiet because it was all part of some plan of hers.

  Ay-yi-yi, Lupita’s head was starting to hurt. She wished she could roll back the weeks to the time before she’d met Jay. Back then, all she had to think about were things like teasing the javelina boys, racing with her jackrabbit cousins down the dry washes, or maybe playing chase with the hummingbird girls in the gardens of the five-fingered bei
ngs. But now . . .

  No, she realized, that wasn’t true. She was happy to have met Jay. She liked him, but more important, she knew she was better for knowing him. Being with him had woken something up inside her that she never knew she had. Issues and causes had always seemed like a waste of time and energy because who cared what a little cousin had to say about anything? Now she realized that helping other people lent weight to your life. At least it did to hers.

  “It used to all be like this,” Rita said.

  Lupita looked up to see that Rita was still gazing out across the desert.

  “What did?” she asked. “Do you mean the desert?”

  Rita shrugged. “The desert. The spiritlands. The land on both sides of the border.” She turned to look at Lupita. “Once—back in the days before the five-fingered beings came—there was no border. There was no difference between spirit and dream and the world Raven pulled out of that pot of his.”

  “You were there at the beginning?” Lupita asked.

  Rita laughed. “I’m not that old, darling. But I was here when the humans first came, and I’ve watched them bleed the medicine right out of the world.” She shook her head. “Year by year, they’ve pushed it across the border and now they stand around and scratch their heads, wondering where it’s all gone.”

  “They’re not all bad,” Lupita said.

  “And neither are all rainstorms. Some nourish the earth, and some tear it apart with their fury.”

  “But—”

  “Oh, I know,” Rita said. “We can’t turn time back to the days that were, and Cody’s showed us often enough what happens when we meddle with the fabric of the world. Remember the time he took the whole world of the five-fingered beings and rolled it up like a carpet?”

  Lupita nodded. “I’ve heard the story.”

  “Well, it sure didn’t work out like he thought it would,” Rita said. “All he managed to do was split the world in two so that now we have their world and the spiritlands.”

  “I thought that was just a story.”

  “It is. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. You get to sharing Coyote tales and it all sounds like something you’d tell around a campfire.”

  “So that’s what you meant about how it all used to be one.”