The Painted Boy

  “Except for the ears and the . . . you know . . .” Anna muttered from beside him.

  Lupita nodded. “The way cousins count the years, sure, but what’s that got to do with anything?”

  “We need to speak to one of the desert spirits,” Ramon said. “I guess what you call the big medicines.”

  Lupita’s smile faded. “Ai-yi-yi. Do you think the thunders come at anyone’s beck and call? And do you think you could actually have a conversation with one? That’s like trying to have a conversation with a mountain or a lake.”

  “But—”

  “What you need is a cousin,” she said. “Like me.” She flipped her ears again, then gave a knowing tap to one of her antlers. “Walking around as a five-fingered being. Flesh and bone. Because you’re looking for Jay, right?”

  Rosalie nodded. “Can you help us?”

  “Sure. I could show you where he is, but you can’t go to him right now. He’s kind of busy.”

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Practicing how to be a dragon.”

  “Oh.”

  There was a moment’s silence, broken by the hoot of an owl calling from its perch, high on the top of a saguaro.

  “Why does he have to practice what he’s already supposed to be?” Anna finally had to ask.

  Lupita shrugged. “He’s not very good at being a dragon and he needs to be, because he’s going to go head-to-head with El Tigre.”

  The three teenagers exchanged looks.

  “This is my fault, isn’t it?” Anna said. “It’s because of what I said to him in the parking lot the other night.”

  “Partly, sure,” Lupita told her. “But you’re not the whole story. He’s also really upset about your friend being killed, and I guess he wishes now that he’d just shut the bandas down instead of going for any kind of peaceful negotiation.”

  “He can really do that?” Rosalie asked.

  “What, shut them down?”

  Rosalie nodded. Lupita looked away before answering.

  “He’s got mad skills,” Lupita finally said. “No question there. The problem is, I’m just not sure he really knows how to use them.”

  “What do you mean?” Rosalie said. “He brought down the whole music hall.”

  “Yeah, but he was really angry that night. This is something he has to be able to call up whenever he needs it, not only when he gets really pissed off about something. He needs to get it together, and he needs to do it fast, because if he can’t show that he’s the full, real yellow dragon deal when he goes up against El Tigre, Flores is going to slaughter him.”

  “So he has to kill El Tigre first?” Ramon asked.

  Lupita nodded. “But according to Señora Elena—”

  “Who?” Anna broke in to ask.

  “She’s—” Lupita began, then shook her head. “Never mind. It’s too complicated to explain. All you need to know is that if Jay kills Flores, it’ll make everything a waste of time.”

  “I don’t get it,” Anna said. “El Tigre will be gone. And if Jay can handle him, he can get rid of the gangs, too.”

  Lupita nodded. “Probably. But then every wannabe gangbanger boss will want to take a run at him.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What he needs to do,” Lupita explained, “is take control of things without being a bully about it. If he can pull that off, he’ll have our support—all of the cousins, you know?—and there won’t be any more bandas coming into town because none of us will let them get a foothold. It also means that none of the cousins will make a try for him, either.”

  “You make it sound like some old western movie,” Ramon said.

  “Why don’t the, um, cousins—why don’t they do that now?” Anna broke in.

  “Cousins have trouble agreeing on pretty much everything,” Lupita said.

  “Then why would they support him?” Rosalie asked.

  “Because if he does it right, he’ll be ours. He’ll be so rooted to the land—to this place—that to go against him would be like not breathing anymore, or cutting off your own hand.”

  “He’ll be your spiritual leader,” Ramon said.

  Lupita nodded. “Exactly.”

  “But he’s just a kid,” Rosalie said.

  “No,” Lupita told her. “He’s a yellow dragon.”

  “Not yet,” Anna said. “You told us he was still practicing to be one.”

  Lupita gave her a considering look. Rosalie thought she saw a flicker of worry in the jackalope girl’s eyes, there, then gone.

  “Don’t worry,” Lupita said. “I have faith in him.”

  “But what if he kills El Tigre?” Rosalie had to ask. “What happens then?”

  “Then he has to prove himself to every wannabe who comes along and thinks they can do a better job.”

  “How can we help?” Rosalie asked.

  Ramon nodded. “Is there anything we can do?”

  “You could be more supportive,” Lupita said.

  She spoke to them all, but she looked directly at Anna.

  “What do you expect me to do?” Anna asked.

  “Oh, I’m not saying you have to pretend to be in love with him or anything, but you could be a little less harsh.”

  “Maybe I’ve been hard on him,” Anna said, “but think about what it’s been like for me. From what happened to my brother to—”

  Lupita held up a hand to stop her.

  “Don’t need to know,” the jackalope girl said. “Don’t care. I’m just saying, if you want to help, dial back the heavy vibe.” She paused, then added, “You could even apologize. Otherwise, the best you can do is just make yourself scarce until all of this blows over.”

  “But Jay—”

  “Doesn’t need the distraction that you are unless you’re standing in his corner going, ‘Yay, Jay!’”

  “You don’t—”

  “Yeah, I know. Now I’m the one being harsh. But this is serious business. However it goes down, he can’t afford to be distracted.”

  “So what can we do?” Rosalie asked.

  “Seriously?”

  “Of course, seriously.”

  “Come down to the pool hall when Jay goes up against El Tigre,” Lupita said. “Show that you really do support him. I’ve been out talking to the cousins, but I don’t know how many will actually come and we need a lot of bodies to be there. I want to fill the street if we can.”

  “What for?”

  “As a show of force. And to stand up to the bandas while the big guns go at each other, mano a mano.”

  “We could do that,” Ramon said. “We could put the word out that Malo Malo is playing a free gig. That’ll bring out a few hundred people.”

  “We could play the gig for real,” Anna put in. “In memory of Margarita.”

  “We’d need a drummer.”

  “Chaco Rios could fill in. With Margarita gone, he’s the best drummer we have in town.”

  Ramon nodded. “And Billy’s uncle has a couple of flatbed trucks at the junkyard. We set the gear up on them, power with generators, and then just roll in, ready to play.”

  “It all sounds good,” Lupita told them. “Just make sure everybody stays out of Jay and El Tigre’s way.”

  Ramon nodded.

  “When’s it all going down?” he asked.

  “It looks like tomorrow morning, in front of El Conquistador. Jay just wants to get it over with.”

  Rosalie remembered the last time Jay had gone off to see Flores. He hadn’t had the patience to wait then, either.

  “We’ll have to work fast to get it all organized,” Ramon said.

  “Then let me get you back to your world,” Lupita told them.

  “Our . . . world?” Anna said.

  Lupita grinned. “Where did you think you were? Do you see any city lights? Do you hear any traffic?”

  An echo of Rosalie’s earlier vertigo returned. She steadied herself with a hand on Ramon’s arm. She remembered thinking how bright the moon had
gotten when Lupita appeared, but then the shock of the jackalope girl’s appearance had swallowed her attention. She’d never looked around. When she did now, she saw it was true. The light pollution of Santo del Vado Viejo simply wasn’t there. And the quiet around them was profound.

  “Where—where are we?” she asked.

  “We call it el entre,” the jackalope girl told her. “It’s the place in between your world and the spirit world.”

  “I don’t understand. You brought us here? Why did you bring us here?”

  Lupita pointed to the mountains behind them. When they turned to look, they saw flashes of light rising up behind the range.

  “What’s that?” Rosalie asked.

  “Jay,” Lupita told her. “Practicing.”

  “But—”

  “When I first heard the three of you talking, you said you were looking for Jay, so I brought you here, where he is.”

  “Can we go see him?” Rosalie asked.

  “I’m thinking now is probably not a good idea. Let him stay focused on what he’s doing.” Lupita grinned then. She raised her arms theatrically high. “Here we go.”

  Another flash of vertigo hit Rosalie, here, then gone. This time she wasn’t the only one affected.

  “I think I’m going to hurl,” Anna said.

  “Sorry,” Lupita told them. “Everybody has a different reaction to the transition.” She waited a moment to make sure they were all right, then added, “Stay safe,” and vanished.

  “Okay,” Anna said. “That’s just creepy.”

  Rosalie turned away from the glow of Santo del Vado Viejo that filled the night sky to the east and looked toward the mountains. There were no lights flashing there now.

  “Did all of that just happen?” she said. “For real?”

  Ramon put his arm around her shoulder.

  “Afraid so,” he told her.

  “It was so beautiful there. . . .”

  Ramon nodded.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Anna said, “but right here and now, time’s wasting. We’ve got a gig to get up and running.”

  - vi -

  Lupita stood in el entre feeling guilty all over again. She hadn’t wanted to put Jay’s friends and the band’s fans in danger, but she wasn’t sure how many cousins she could actually gather and she kept going back to what Rita had said about maybe it would take somebody dying to bring out the dragon in Jay. She didn’t want anybody to be hurt except for El Tigre, but if there were going to be casualties, better it be among the five-fingered beings than the cousins. The cousins had never asked humans to take over their land and push the medicine away.

  She knew that wasn’t the right way to look at it. What they had to do, cousins and five-fingered beings, was learn to get along. Except the five-fingered beings didn’t even know that her people existed, and if they did, most of them would just try to find some way to use the cousins the way they used up everything else. So why should she worry about what might happen to any of them?

  Because they weren’t all like that.

  She sighed. Oh, but it made her head hurt. Taking on responsibility was a lot harder than she’d ever thought it would be. Maybe that was why she’d avoided it for as long as she had.

  She waited a little while to see if Rita was going to show up, then finally sat down to face the mountains. She watched the flashes of light that rose up from behind the ridges and hoped it really was Jay practicing. That it wasn’t the thunders ganging up on a yellow dragon.

  - vii -

  Jay didn’t know if he’d ever get used to how different it was in Santo del Vado Viejo. The climate was certainly part of it, but mostly, there was just so much space. There wasn’t a building more than a few stories high anywhere, so the sky felt like it was right on top of you. In the barrios, the alleys running behind the houses were as wide as most Chicago streets. Get out past the city and it was all open desert. No matter where you went, you felt exposed.

  That had been bad enough. El entre was worse. Knowing about the animal people, how someone like Rita could simply appear when you called her name, you couldn’t help but think that you were constantly surrounded by invisible spirit presences. And here in el entre . . . the spiritlands . . . Aztlán . . . whatever this place was called . . . this was where all the spirits came from.

  He kept looking around as he walked, thinking he’d caught movement out of the corner of his eye, but whenever he turned, there was nothing—there was nobody—there. Finally, he forced himself to stop worrying about it. If there were spirits watching, let them. It wasn’t like he could stop them.

  It didn’t take him as long to get up into the mountains as he thought it should have, but he wasn’t surprised. Something about the place—the air, or maybe what Lupita called “medicine”—made it seem as though time moved faster, or sometimes slower—you could never tell which. There were evenings he’d gone rambling with Lupita for what felt like a week, but when he got back to Santo del Vado Viejo only a couple of hours had passed. Other times, he’d be here for no more than a few minutes and an hour would have gone by.

  Once he was in the mountains, he followed a switch-back until it finally led him out onto a long ridge. He was high up now—maybe a third of the distance to the peaks, which reared still taller into the sky above him. The ridge took him around the mountain where it opened up onto a small plateau. He stood there for a long time, taking in all the space and trying not to feel too small. Though maybe feeling small was a good thing. Maybe it would help him keep everything in perspective.

  “So dragon,” he said aloud. “Are you ready to wake up?”

  There was no response, not even the shifting feel of scales deep in his mind. But he remembered what Rita had said:

  You don’t have conversations with your arm before you get it to do something, do you?

  So he reached into his pocket and pulled out a short length of saguaro rib that he’d collected on his way into the mountains. He held it between his thumb and forefinger. Thinking of fire, he blew on the free end.

  Nothing happened.

  So where was the fiery dragon breath when you wanted it?

  What he needed, he supposed, was to key into that moment in the music hall. Except how was he supposed to do that? He’d been so angry that night. And he shouldn’t need anger. He wasn’t the Incredible Hulk. Both Rita and Lupita had told him that the dragon was a part of him, not something he changed into.

  You don’t have conversations with your arm . . .

  He tried again, this time just assuming that the piece of cactus would burst into flame.

  Still nothing.

  This was stupid. The dragon was real. He knew that. Everybody from Paupau to the gangbanger girl living with Señora Elena knew it. So why couldn’t he set just one freakin’ little twig on fire?

  He glared at the cactus he held and blew again.

  The rib burst into flame.

  “Ow, ow!” he cried.

  He dropped it, shaking his fingers to try to cool them down.

  That hurt.

  But it had worked.

  Okay, that was cool, he thought as he sucked on his fingers. But then he remembered the gangbanger in the music hall, how Jay had burned him to a crisp after the gangbanger stabbed Margarita.

  Doing that kind of damage . . . maybe it wasn’t cool. But it was effective. Or at least it would be if he could learn how to call it up whenever he needed it.

  His fingers still hurt. You’d think a dragon would be immune to his own flame. Still he had enough time to feel a small flicker of satisfaction that he’d actually done it before a slow clapping started up behind him. Jay didn’t have to turn around to hear the mockery in the sound, but when he did, for a long moment he couldn’t see anyone. Then he realized what he’d initially thought was nothing more than a jumbled spill of red rock actually had a man lounging on the top of it.

  The stranger was dressed in jeans, a white T-shirt, and scuffed cowboy boots. His hair was as black as Jay’s own,
in a long braid that had fallen forward to hang down his chest. His eyes were dark and the ping his presence registered in Jay’s head was deep and resonating.

  Great, he thought. This was just what he needed. Some big-deal cousin to hang around and watch him make a fool of himself.

  Self-consciously, he stuck his burned fingers in his pocket.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  The man raised his eyebrows. “We don’t throw names around as casually as the five-fingered beings do—or didn’t anybody tell you that?”

  Jay shrugged. Did nobody else get tired of all this so-called mystery about names?

  “Like I care,” he said. “A name’s a name.”

  “And filled with medicine.”

  “Whatever. Do you have a reason for following me here?”

  The man smiled. “I didn’t follow you. I was already here. You just didn’t notice me.”

  Jay supposed that was possible—if the man had been hiding behind the rocks. But he didn’t quite buy it. You couldn’t get much more out of the way than this plateau in the middle of el entre, so if the stranger wasn’t here to spy on him, then why was he here?

  Jay decided he didn’t care about that, either.

  “Well, I’m kind of busy here,” he told the stranger.

  “I can see that. Are you going to burn your own toes next?”

  “Look, I—”

  “Because it’s all very entertaining. I’ve never seen a dragon burn himself before.”

  Jay swallowed a sharp retort. He had no idea what kind of cousin or spirit the stranger was, but he didn’t need Lupita here to tell him this man was a big deal. Power crackled in the air and Jay realized there was no point in being rude. The last thing he needed right now was to make another enemy. And who knew? He might even gain himself an ally.

  So he took a deep breath to steady himself before he bowed and offered the stranger the same formal greeting he’d given Señora Elena.

  “” he said in Mandarin. “”

  Before he could repeat what he’d said in Spanish, the stranger held up a hand.