The Painted Boy

  “Oh, good.” She takes my hand. “Well, come on and I’ll show you where I live.”

  She leads me to the trailhead. I’ve never actually gone into the park at night, preferring to walk along the edge so that the dogs don’t go running wild. They’re always wanting to go in and I have to call them back, but tonight they settle down in the dirt, as though this is something I’m supposed to do on my own.

  I pause to look back at them. “Don’t get into trouble. And don’t chase anybody!”

  “Bossy, bossy,” Lupita says with a laugh, and tugs on my hand.

  As she pulls me along, I keep catching glimpses of those small deer horns and the long floppy jackrabbit ears. I suppose the weirdest thing is that I don’t find them strange anymore.

  I’m a little nervous at first. We’re moving quickly and I’m thinking of Ramon’s warnings about being careful of the cacti—some of the thorns have barbed ends, and I don’t relish the idea of having to pull them out one by one. But Lupita is sure-footed, steering us easily on a weaving path in between the saguaro and cholla and prickly pear, and I realize that my night sight is much better than I thought, because I can see almost as clearly as if it were day.

  It takes us half the time to get into the foothills that it did when I was last here with Ramon. Instead of following the trail, Lupita leads me up a ravine that soon turns into a small canyon. There isn’t as much vegetation in here. It’s mostly just a jumble of sand and rock with dead weeds and small trees I can’t name growing along and up the sides. Soon the red stone walls tower above us. Lupita lets go of my hand and starts up this vague winding ghost of a trail that I can barely make out even with my night sight.

  “Aren’t you coming?” she asks when she realizes I’m still standing on the canyon floor.

  “Coming to where?”

  “Up here with me. You’ll like where we’re going.”

  “Come on, Lupita. It’s the middle of the night.”

  “I know. Isn’t it great?”

  “I don’t know. . . .”

  “Oh, pooh! What kind of a dragon are you?”

  “The kind that should know better,” I mutter.

  But I start up the faint trail. She darts ahead, nimble as a bighorn, laughter trailing behind her. Eventually I catch up and join her on an enormous slab of rock that sticks out of the side of the mountain. We’re hundreds of feet above the desert, which stretches away from the mountain for as far as the eye can see.

  It takes me a few moments to realize what’s missing.

  “Where’s the city?” I ask. “Shouldn’t Santo del Vado Viejo be out there?”

  She shakes her head. “We’ve kind of taken a step sideways. This is what the world looks like without all that concrete and metal.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  She laces her fingers together. Wiggling the fingers of one hand, she says, “This is the world where we met.” Then she wriggles the fingers of the other hand. “And this is where we are now. They kind of take up the same space except they don’t. It’s simple when you think about it.”

  This is one more thing that Paupau never told me about, but I’m tired of being the gawking tourist, so I just nod like I get it.

  “And this . . . is this where you live?” I ask.

  I’m astonished by the view, how the desert spreads out under the huge velvet expanse of sky thick with stars. So it’s got that totally going for it. But after that? We’re still just standing on this slab of rock sticking out of a cliff.

  She laughs. “Of course not, silly. I live with some deer cousins in a trailer not far from where you do.”

  “But you said—”

  She does that finger-poke thing again. “Oh, you. You take everything so seriously. You can still walk me home. But first we needed to see this. Isn’t it grander than grand?”

  She gets up and starts to dance. I try to grab her. If she falls, it’s a long way down. But she slips out of my reach. I hold my breath as she pirouettes right to the edge, then back. She sinks gracefully into a cross-legged position directly in front of me, takes my hand and pulls me down.

  “Don’t dragons dance?” she asks.

  “I don’t know many dragons. Just Paupau—my grandmother—and I’ve never seen her dance.”

  “Well, that would be just sad—if you couldn’t dance, I mean.”

  “I guess.”

  I catch the glimpse of deer antlers and long ears again—here, then gone.

  “Can I ask you something?” I say.

  “Anything. Fire away.”

  “I keep thinking I see little horns poking up out of your hair and sometimes your ears are long and droopy like a . . . um . . .”

  “Jackrabbit?”

  I nod. “Anyway, I was wondering . . . why do I see that—I am seeing it, right? And these little horns . . .”

  She nods. “It’s just easier to see deeper when we’re in this in-between place.”

  “Deeper.”

  “Mmm.”

  “What do you see when you look at me?”

  She laughs. “Well, you’re cute—is that what you wanted to hear?”

  “No. Can you see the dragon?”

  She nods again. “Sort of. There’s this . . . big shadowy shape inside you—or I suppose it’s more like the idea of something really big, curled up and sleeping in your chest. It’s confusing, because it fits right there in your chest, but at the same time I can also tell that it’s really like the size of a mountain or something.”

  “I wonder how I’m supposed to wake it up.”

  She gets this alarmed look and grabs my arm.

  “No, no, no,” she says. “You shouldn’t do that!”

  “Why not? Everybody seems to think I’m here on some kind of spirit quest to get in touch with my inner dragon, or prove myself to him or to the clan or something.”

  “Well,” she says, “there’s other ways to do that. You could start by accepting that your animal spirit isn’t separate from you. It’s as much a part of you as your arm or your leg. It’s just one of the things that makes you who you are. Being a dragon, you can’t shift shape because you don’t want the dragon rampaging around and wrecking everything in sight—apparently that’s what happens when cousins first wear their dragon shape, I don’t know why. Or at least it does with the feathered serpents down south. But you can still get in touch with its essence and draw on its power to—you know—do stuff.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  She shrugs. “Cousin stuff. You know, see things as they really are, step in between the worlds. Be faster and stronger. Heal more quickly. Live longer. All kinds of good things.”

  “You make it sound like being a superhero.”

  “Maybe those stories started with us.” She pauses and cocks her head. “Who says you’re on a spirit quest?”

  I tell her about how Paupau sent me away from Chicago, what the strange woman told me outside the pool hall, what Rosalie and Anna and Tío made of it all. How cool Ramon is, though I’m not sure he really believes I’m telling the truth.

  “What did the woman look like?” Lupita asks, then just says, “Hmm,” when I describe her.

  “What?” I say. “Do you know her?”

  “Maybe. She sounds like one of the rattlesnake twins, either Ramona or Rita.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “Depends on how you like your poison,” she says.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. You just don’t want to get on the bad side of either of them is all. You probably met Rita. I don’t go down around South Presidio much—too many bandas—but I’ve heard she’s been hanging around there. I wonder why she’s trying to recruit you.”

  “You and me both.”

  She nods. “I understand exactly why you don’t want to be involved—all it does is make enemies and cause more trouble.”

  “I guess. But if I thought I really could help . . .”

  I’m thinking of
Anna’s brother, Rosalie’s mother, and all the others who have died.

  “But we’re not players,” Lupita says. “We’re not the movers and the shakers—well, at least I’m not. You can go all dragony, but why would you want to because then it’d be all—‘Look out! It’s Japanese monster night!’”

  “If it’s that dangerous,” I say, “why would Paupau just send me off to figure this all out on my own? You’d think she’d want me to stick close, or that she’d at least warn me.”

  “She never told you that waking your dragon could be dangerous?”

  “Not the way you’re telling me. But I guess that explains why El Tigre wanted to work out a truce with me. He must have figured that otherwise I could just stomp him and his whole neighborhood. Except why would he think I’d risk the lives of all the innocent people who live in the area?”

  “Guys like him don’t worry about other people. They only go by what they’ d do.”

  “You’d have to be crazy. And I think the dragon clans are crazy, too, if they just let people like me walk around trying to figure it out on their own.”

  “Oh, somebody’s probably paying attention,” Lupita says. “If it’s anything like the way it works with the feathered serpents, there’s some kind of fail-safe built in. Down there the old clan members show up en masse and shut the rogue down.”

  “When you say shut down . . .”

  “I mean they kill him.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “Oh, don’t be such a worrywart. All you have to do is make sure you don’t get really mad about anything.”

  “How am I supposed to do that?”

  “Well, we could go tease the javelina boys. That’s always fun.”

  “Maybe so,” I tell her. “But right now I just want to collect the dogs and go home. I’ve got a lot to think about.”

  And a phone call to make, I add to myself.

  Lupita takes me back to the trailhead where the dogs are waiting, and we walk her home. On the way back to Tío’s, I call Paupau. I don’t care how late it is.

  But of course, all she does is turn my questions into Zen riddles that I’m supposed to figure out on my own or the answers won’t have any worth. I begin the conversation full of righteous indignation and end it as ignorant as when I got on the bus in Chicago in the first place.

  I spend some time with Lupita almost every night after that. I usually take the dogs for a short ramble after work; by the time we return, Lupita’s waiting in front of Tío’s house and we walk down to the trailhead. Sometimes we walk in the desert here, sometimes she takes me to that in-between place where the desert is the same but there’s no trace of civilization. We talk long into the night and kick up dust underfoot. Sometimes I swear I can hear the tide of the ancient seas that were once here.

  And a funny thing happens. The more time I spend with her, the more comfortable I get with being able to talk about my secret. She’s not like the other friends I’ve made here in Santo del Vado Viejo. Maybe it’s because she’s not entirely human.

  Anna doesn’t want to know about it, and I haven’t been alone with Ramon since our hike. Rosalie and Tío, God bless them, really think I should be using whatever it is that I’ve got to take down El Tigre and clean up the barrio, so, pressure much? But Lupita is just easygoing and matter-of-fact about the whole thing. There are no Zen riddles. No unanswered questions. If I ask her something and she knows the answer, she just tells me; if she doesn’t know, she says so. Sometimes she asks one of the other cousins and tells me what they said the next time we meet. Sometimes we just don’t figure it out.

  But if Lupita takes the mystery out of one part of the equation, she puts it back through just being who she is. She looks like an ordinary girl—like the little kid I first thought she was—but then I’ll catch a glimpse of the small three-tined antlers poking up through her tangled hair, or the droop of her hare ears, like long braids.

  And while we talk about everyday things—what bands we like, or how building a wall between properties doesn’t do a whole lot to promote friendly interchange—our conversations can just as easily be about things that ordinary people would never talk about.

  Like the other day. We’re sitting on a limestone outcrop and she’s kicking her heels against the stone while trying to explain how being a jackalope makes it hard to get respect from some of the other cousins.

  “Because I’m not a dragon,” she says. “I’m not like a unicorn, or the cadejos, either, with all kinds of cool stories floating around about me. Jackalopes are just a joke.”

  “I don’t think you’re a joke.”

  “That’s nice of you to say, except that’s exactly what you thought jackalopes were when we first met.”

  “I didn’t know any better.”

  “Like that’s an excuse.”

  “What’s a kad-ey-ho?” I ask to change the subject.

  “It’s kind of a rainbow-colored dog with cloven hooves. They’re born in the heart of a volcano.”

  I smile. “Really.”

  “Really.”

  “That’s very cool.”

  She sighs. “You see what I mean?”

  “That doesn’t mean you’re not cool, too.”

  “Except I’m not cadejo cool.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Or even dragon cool.”

  “If dragons are so cool,” I say, “why does it take a jackalope to show them how to relax?”

  Lupita grins and taps her fist against my shoulder.

  “That’s because we’re very relaxing cousins to be around,” she says.

  She lies back on the stone. After a moment, I do, too, and we’re quiet, staring up into the night sky that goes on just a few light-years beyond forever.

  Paupau can talk all she wants about clan responsibilities and nebulous dragon gifts, but sometimes all a guy wants to do is chill out with a friend and not have to think about anything.

  - 5 -

  Even those who work to prevent some - thing can be hurt or damaged by it.

  —CHINESE PROVERB

  IT HAD BEEN a long day for Rosalie. She took care of her menagerie of cats and dogs, then headed off to school, where she tutored some kids during lunch. After school, Ramon picked her up so they could help at the local soup kitchen until it was time for Rosalie’s shift at La Maravilla. It was a slow night, so she got most of her homework done in the moments she could snatch between orders. Now, back home, she’d just finished the last of it and could finally spend a little downtime with Ramon.

  They were sitting on the front porch when Jay came outside. He’d taken the dogs for a walk, then gone to take a shower. Rosalie was looking across the street when Jay opened the front door, and she blinked in surprise when a small figure sitting by the curb rose to her feet. Rosalie could have sworn there hadn’t been anyone there a moment ago. The girl gave Jay an enthusiastic wave.

  “So who’s your new girlfriend?” Rosalie asked.

  “Yeah, and what happened to Anna?” Ramon added.

  “Anna’s not interested in me,” Jay said.

  “That’s not true,” Rosalie said. “She just confused about stuff.”

  “The big question,” Ramon said, “is did you ask her out yet?”

  Jay shook his head.

  Ramon held his hands out in front of him. “So you don’t know for sure.”

  “Maybe not,” Jay said. “But it seems pretty obvious to me.”

  “You shouldn’t have given up on her,” Rosalie said.

  “You just needed to give her a little more time to get used to all of . . . you know.”

  “I haven’t given up. I’m just trying not to think about it.”

  Rosalie nodded. Her gaze went to the girl waiting for Jay across the street. “Your new girlfriend seems a little young,” she said.

  “Lupita’s not my girlfriend. She’s a cousin.”

  “I didn’t know you had relatives in the area,” Rosalie said.

  “She’s not tha
t kind of cousin,” he told her.

  “I don’t get it.”

  He smiled. “Ask your boyfriend what I mean.” He lifted a hand. “I’ve got to run.”

  Rosalie watched the two of them head off down Calle Esmeralda toward the trailhead. Jay seemed positively sedate next to his companion. The girl skipped around him, sometimes walking backward so that she could face him, then twirling around in dizzying pirouettes.

  When they were too far away to make out clearly, Rosalie turned to Ramon.

  “What did he mean by that?” she asked.

  “You know the uncles?”

  “The ones always sitting around drinking mescal tea to get high?”

  He shrugged. “That’s one way of looking at it. Another might be that they’re freeing their spirit so that they become hawks and fly out over the desert.”

  Rosalie was used to what she thought of as Ramon’s poetic flights of fancy. She supposed it was why he was such a good songwriter.

  “So another word for your mescaleros is ‘cousins’?” she said.

  “No, the cousins aren’t shape changers—they’re the animal people.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “The animal people were here even before the Yaqui, or the Kikimi, or any of the Pueblo peoples. They aren’t men who can become animals, or animals who can become men. They’re both animals and men at the same time. In fact, sometimes they walk around like a mash-up of both. Men with coyote or deer heads—that kind of thing.”

  Rosalie couldn’t hide her disbelief.

  “I’m just telling you what the stories say,” Ramon said. “I’ve never met one myself.”

  “And Jay’s new girlfriend is one of them?”

  Ramon smiled. “You’re so ready to deny the possibility, but you still believe that Jay has a dragon sleeping inside him.”

  “I’m not sure I believe that’s true, either—or at least not literally. But there’s something weird going on. You know he says he never learned Spanish?”

  Ramon nodded.

  “And yet he speaks it fluently—with the same accent as everybody else living down here. But we had some tourists in from Mexico City and I heard his accent just shift to theirs. I’ve even heard him talk to customers in German and Japanese, but he doesn’t even know he’s doing it. It’s like whatever language somebody uses, that’s what he answers in.”