Jaguar (16 page)

She slipped forward to the edge of her seat, folded her arms on the back of the seat in front of her and laid her head on her arms. On the back of her right hand, where he’d seen it in his dreams, she had inked an “8” on its side in the middle. Eddie swallowed hard. He reached over and traced it with his fingertip, but she didn’t move.

The aura of Maryellen’s plaid skirt rippled over his gray cords, the little scratching sounds she made amplified a thousand times over the murmur of engine, tires and waves of gray-faced kids. Eddie stared out the window at the damp pastureland. The ever-rising hum of everything drifted him back to his campsite in Montana, and the time he told Right Hand about Rafferty.

“Yes, you will see them,” Gene had said.

“
Them
?” Eddie asked.

“The other side. Shadow-people.”

Gene stirred the coals and sat back on his heels in a graceful squat that Eddie never mastered. His heart fluttered hard in his throat, and he waited for Gene to go on.

“Others walk beside us. They live and breathe just beside the cloth of this world, but they live in another. Not just one other world, but many others. Like the saddle between you and the horse. My grandfather says they are the worlds that could have been, that we are the world that is. In one of those worlds, Sitting Bull was president, maybe.

“Sometimes, when we’re near worn spots in the cloth, we see the other side, and the other side sees us. Sometimes, they cross over, slip through.”

“Can you talk to them?”

“I have heard that you can, I have heard that you can’t.”

“How do you know it’s not a dream?”

“Because sometimes it happens when you’re awake, right? And you
feel
different. . . .”

“Then you’ve seen it . . . you know what I mean?”

Gene shook his head and tossed a handful of green sticks on the fire. A thick, sweet smoke rose between them.

“I have not seen it, but I know what you mean,” Gene said. “I know it scares the bejeezus out of the old guys. The Cheyenne guys say the first seven people crawled here through a log. The Navajo say we crawled from a hole in the ground. What’s so mysterious about a hole in space?”

That which is fallow will one day be fertile again,
and that which is valueless will grow to be priceless.
Sooner or later you will dream a new dream, and
we will return to have our sport within it.

—Lucius Shepard,
Life During Wartime

When Eddie returned to his care after more than six years in Montana, Mark dug deeper into the boy’s family. Everything that he found pointed to a pattern of neglect that went back several generations. Inquiries about Eddie’s father raised more questions than they answered.

Eddie had been told that a jeep had hit his father. Mark heard this story from Mrs. Desquido, the grandmother, the first time she’d brought Eddie to see him. She hadn’t believed the story, and preferred to believe the rumor that he’d been killed in a tavern brawl in the Philippines. Mark called Eddie’s uncle about it, but Bert said he never saw a body and Marco Reyes was too crooked to die.

“He could con Death out of his robes, if you know what I mean.”

The stone in the valley cemetery divulged his name, rank and serial number without elaboration.

Mark sent to the army for a death certificate and files for one Lieutenant Marco I. Reyes. What he got back was a skeleton of a file that should have been as thick as the Bible. The file was remarkable for lack of information on Lieutenant Reyes, but it did list the cause of death as massive trauma secondary to being struck by an unmanned jeep. The death of Lieutenant Marco I. Reyes under a runaway jeep was dated three months before the war in the Pacific ended, which was, by coincidence, Eddie Reyes’ birthday.

The file, thin though it was, still revealed that the Lieutenant had not been a model soldier. He had received a hasty commission in that early-wartime shuffle that quickly promoted personnel who happened to be on active duty before the war broke out. He had half a hitch in by that time.

Since he spoke Spanish he had been shipped immediately to the Philippines as a member of a hush-hush Strategic Forces Organizational Unit. He was reprimanded eleven times for fraternizing with local women, which Mark inferred from the convoluted reports as the army’s lingo for pimping.

In under two years in the Philippines he had created an empire by trading protection, favors, weapons and supplies. Nothing was too big for Lieutenant Reyes to steal or to have stolen, including two thirty-foot dockside cranes complete with their tracks, trailers and the trucks to pull them. This latter had been accomplished through collusion with a navy requisitions officer who, unfortunately for Lieutenant Reyes, had been under investigation for relatively unimaginative pilfering from supply ships. Reyes pilfered entire ships.

Once the investigation branched out to “the Reyes operation,” nasty things began happening to investigators. They proved remarkably vulnerable to snipers, mines and “disappearance at the hands of person or persons unknown.” Lieutenant Reyes was twice remanded to custody in the states for court-martial, and twice he received a stunning defense and was returned to active duty.

While on leave, pending reassignment after his second trial, he met Eddie’s mother. By Mark’s arithmetic, Eddie had been conceived within the first days of their meeting. Their entire relationship had lasted two weeks; he saw no evidence that they had ever legally married. Letters from Eddie’s mother were not in his chart, but were noted as being on file with other “classified materials.”

Though not married, Eddie’s father listed his mother and Eddie as dependents in his papers, as well as Eddie’s Uncle Bert. Mark knew for a fact that no one had received his insurance, and he saw no provision for disposition in the papers he held.

Marriage doesn’t matter,
he thought.
They send the insurance to the name on the form, regardless.

He noted that the Lieutenant had suffered from a sleep disorder that had been noted early on in basic training. He often talked in his sleep, and had been reprimanded for oversleeping. On five occasions he had been sent to the dispensary for disorientation, headaches and nausea after an oversleeping episode. He was judged fit for duty after each of these incidents.

The chart was a sketch, and Mark felt equal measures of fear and excitement as he read it. Nearly everyone in the psychiatric service had had a crack at Lieutenant Reyes, and no two diagnoses were quite alike. Like Mark’s own assessment of Eddie Reyes, bets were hedged on every page, and a good measure of treatment had actually aggravated the man’s condition.

Depending on which doctor was to be believed, the Lieutenant suffered from severe catatonia, narcolepsy, catalepsy, organic brain syndrome, schizophrenia, atypical seizure disorder or multiple personality disorder. The latter three, Mark knew, had been entered in Eddie’s chart at one time or another in his own hand.

Lieutenant Reyes did not serve as a bombardier in the Army Air Corps with the sixty-two missions that the boy remembered from the photograph. Someone was mistaken. More precisely, someone had lied to give the boy a boost.

New war,
Mark thought,
same old mistakes.

Lieutenant Reyes had been a spoiler all his life. If he couldn’t win a race himself, he tripped others. Mark found himself relieved that the man was dead. He might’ve made an interesting subject, but at what cost?

Meanwhile, Mark was astounded at his reassessment of Eddie’s intellect. The boy who had come to see him six years ago had been a troubled six-year-old with the reading ability of an eight-year-old and an intelligence that tested within the range of high normal. The boy who came back from Montana sent every graph off the scale.

He mulled over the matter aloud while Sara prepared her slide show for the American Association of University Women’s annual banquet.

“Nobody gets
more
intelligent,” he told Sara. “You can learn more information, but that doesn’t make you more intelligent. Intelligence is a measure of the uses you make of information, not its quantity.”

“Maybe there was something wrong with the first tests he took,” she said. “He always seemed bright to me.”

“Bright, yes, but not a genius by a long shot. And he goes to great pains to hide this intelligence, like he’s ashamed of it. . . .”

“You know how kids are,” she said. “He already gets harassed because of that business with his mother. If he’s too bright at school, then he’s
really
a geek.”

“I don’t know,” Mark mulled. “Something feels wrong about this . . . eerie, even.”

Sara set down the stack of slides she was sorting and shut off the viewer.

“What makes it ‘eerie?’“

Mark cleared his throat and rubbed the back of his neck.

“Eddie claims he can learn through dreams,” Mark said.

Sara shrugged.

“What’s so remarkable about that? Those sleep-teaching experiments proved there was something to it. You can buy tapes now that. . . .”

Mark waved off the possibility.

“It’s not like that,” he said. “He claims he learns by dreaming other peoples’ dreams. He goes to sleep, starts to dream and somehow gets onto something he calls ‘the dreamways.’ When he’s there, he contacts other dreams, follows them to the dreamer, and sorts through their brains like they’re a library.”

Sara laughed, then frowned and plucked at her lower lip.

“You’re serious,” she said. “Do you believe this?”

“I believe that he didn’t just
become
more intelligent. I believe the tests were valid and administered correctly. I’m entertaining suggestions. Do you have any?”

After a moment she smiled.

“Yes,” she said. “I get along well with him. He reads voraciously but he tries hard to talk like the rest of the kids . . . to blend in, be normal. Maybe if there were some way he could just . . .
talk.
”

“He talks to me. At least once a week.”

“I don’t mean that,” she said. “Talking with you or talking with the other kids, that’s just a matter of coloration for a chameleon. I’d have him do what I make my writing students do. Keep a journal. Write down everything, especially dreams.”

Mark shook his head.

“I don’t think that would work,” he said. “Eddie’s getting so he doesn’t want to talk about dreams anymore.”

“All the more reason to write them,” she said. “Besides, it’s not like you to assume something won’t work without trying it out. What have you or Eddie got to lose?”

Mark felt himself flush, and he smiled.

“You’re right,” he said. “Touché. Whatever’s happening here, Eddie’s the only one who can clear it up.”

II
ADOLESCENCE

As we will never know what it means,
    we will know what it cost.

—Carolyn Forché,
Gathering the Tribes

The lurching of the rattletrap school bus aggravated the waves of cramps tightening Maryellen’s belly. She slipped forward, folded her arms on the back of the seat in front of her and laid her head on her arms. From that angle the pressure on her low back let up and her cramps receded into twinges. Past the new boy, out the windows, the valley’s brown fields ticked by, interspersed with swatches of evergreens.

Maryellen wanted to savor this Eddie Reyes. Not only was he different from other boys, he was different from other
people.
When he traced the Lazy-Eight on the back of her hand, she felt a relief like she’d never known. She felt safe, at home. Maryellen knew he knew about the dream world, how else would he know the Lazy-Eight brand? And why else watch her so intently when he spoke of it?

Maybe I’m not crazy,
Maryellen thought.
Maybe I’m not crazy, after all.

In the first moment she saw him at the bus stop, she recognized him. She didn’t recognize him feature-by-feature; more a connection through the eyes, a feeling that suddenly the two of them were specimens in the same jar.

Maryellen unfocused herself and the bus melted into the up-and-down blur of a merry-go-round. To dull the persistent cramps, she replayed last night’s dream of Afriqua Lee. In the dream it had been early morning, and a fresh trickle of sun sifted through mist, the dusty window and Afriqua Lee’s half-closed eyelids. The girl held them barely open to the light and made prisms out of her lashes. A pair of nightstalkers rattled around on the roof over her head, then screeched off to a nearby limb and gone.

A snore, thick with age, rose from the hammock below her bed in the loft. Afriqua Lee pushed back her bright blankets to feel the refreshing chill of the northern reaches. She whiffed the return of greenery, fresh in the morning and fresh in the deeper shadows of the trees. The girl was surprised that Old Cristina still snored down below.

Sometimes Afriqua Lee startled herself awake out of a sudden dream of the girl Maryellen, and then she would hear Old Cristina and her surreptitious sip of cold coffee from the glass. The old woman always woke at dawn, and after cold coffee she’d walk the kilometer or so down to the river. There she sang the ritual welcome to the sun and smoked her one cigarette of the day. She emptied her ancient fishtraps, a joke among the young men, then lumbered back to fry her catch in meal. Even in the aftermath of the plague of bugs, her traps always caught fish. She cooked flatbreads beside them in the light-pocket, and by this time every morning their tent steamed up with the makings of coffee and hot, fresh fish.

The girl usually woke up when the old woman switched on the heat; it gave off a vibration that she enjoyed against her back. She stayed huddled and warm inside her covers until Old Cristina called her down. She enjoyed the waking part of the day, the threadlike connection to the world of her dreams and her dreamer, this Maryellen Thompkins.

But this morning Afriqua Lee woke first and something pulled her to go somewhere alone. Raiders still plied the scrub woods in these parts; she herself had seen what they could do. A girl her age had been peeled faceless by them in an attempt to find her father. Afriqua Lee shut out the image. She smoothed her bedding and opened the skylight.

She crawled out onto the roof of the van. A damp chill started her skin shivering and she thought of going back inside for a coat. Her coat hung at the head of Old Cristina’s hammock, so she rubbed her arms and hands instead and slid carefully down the cab to the ground.

She slipped behind the morning watch and nullified the alarms the way Rafferty had shown her. She walked up the road, away from the river, and warmed up right away.

The few weeds reclaiming the middle of the road hung their wet heads, heavy with dew, but she walked through them anyway so that she could keep the sun on her back. The years of barrenness after the hatch left her with an appreciation for anything green-growing, even weeds. Old Cristina claimed that now there was no such thing as a weed, anything that grew was a flower.

A trail cut off the road and wound back through the trees to a large, clump-grass clearing. Someone, years ago, planted apple trees in the clearing, most of them on top of a small rise that rolled up from the scrub alder at the bottom to a stand of young fir at the top. When she was younger she came to this place to climb the apple trees while her mother picked berries in the thicket at the bottom of the hill. In the fall, for many years, old-timers of the Roam hunted what game they could find in that old orchard, the only orchard for a hundred klicks to survive the plague of wings, though it suffered mightily.

Afriqua Lee came out of the scrub at the end of the trail where the sun had already lifted the dampness from the sparse grass. It would be a hot afternoon, hot enough that the idea of ritual laundry in the creek sounded good to her. She preferred fishing, but that was the old women’s specialty.

The shady walk down the trail and through the wet brush exaggerated the heat of the morning sun. She slipped her heavy blouse and undershirt off over her head and stepped out of her layers of cotton skirts. She stood there, beside the alders at the foot of the hill, bare except for her cotton underwear. Women of the Roam exposed their breasts at the streamside laundry, but it was the most extreme prikasha to expose their legs. Afriqua Lee’s had not tested the air in a good, long time.

She felt the beginnings of a warm breeze curl up from the tops of the grasses, up the insides of her legs, up her belly and back and under her arms, tugging at her
here
and
there
until she dropped her underwear and walked most of the way up the rise. She lay back, spread-eagle, on a tiny patch of grass.

Sweat and sweet-grass prickled her skin and set waves of goosebumps rippling out from her clumped nipples, her small breasts, down her belly and thighs and into the summer morning. She slowed her breath and felt her body drip cell by cell into the scraggly comeback of fresh green that hugged the hillside. The deep blur of sky washed into white under her long, eye-watering stare.

She looked backwards, up the hill, at the apple trees above her. Upside-down they looked like roots and clumps of brush growing out of the sky. She imagined herself there as a child, even last summer, climbing in and out of branches, careful not to knock down the tiny apples just starting to swell at the tips of things.

For six years after the hatch bad got worse and that thick perfume death wears graced everybody’s noses. They tried to outrun the plagues south, chasing rumors of food and dodging shadows when rumors of food weren’t enough for a few thousand bellies. Six years after the hatch the girl Afriqua Lee was twelve, more lithe than skinny, nearly black from the blaze of the southern sun.

What was once grass was trying to be grass again. Mist enrobed and softened the thin, spikey growth. Somewhere a distant bell marked the march of the sun now beginning in the mountains to the east.

Afriqua Lee held her breath again, heard the hollow rattle of an easy breeze through the weeds, the rustle of some small thing making its way through the tangle of sticks and rushes just below her feet, the deep aching pressure of the near side of silence. She thought she heard her name, a girl calling her name, and she sat up quickly, looked around.

Nothing.

She let her breath out slowly, noiselessly, and turned over. She stretched herself full-length on the hillside, arms flung out and her legs spread wide. The momentary tickle of the breeze over her damp back became a sudden, flashing itch that she shuddered off.

She pressed herself into the hill, into grass under grass. Pressed harder. Breasts, belly, thighs, knees, shins, arches of feet, toes. Tufts of grass flicked and burst as they unbent between the insides of her legs, small spears of new grass poked into her straggly triangle of hair. She breathed deep the grass and dirt, hugged the hillside tight, tighter. She felt the small red field ants discover her. One on the back of her left thigh. One, up her armpit, across her shoulder then down the middle of her back towards her waist.

She turned and sat up. Familiar tensions began their slow seep from somewhere and she rolled down the hillside to the crumpled pile of clothes under the alders.

Maryellen Thompkins woke up in a start with a lurch of the bus. She leaned forward and pressed her forehead against the seat in front, not wanting Eddie to see the pain in her eyes. Though his eyes were closed she had memorized their color, a deep, deep blue.

The bus was nearly empty now. The half-dozen older kids were quiet for a change. Just a few second- and third-graders jabbered in the back. Her eyelids slipped closed again.

“You all right?”

She squinched them tight and didn’t answer.

“You want me to walk you home?”

A tear filled the corner of one eye, then dripped across her nose. Another. She leaned against him slowly as the bus eased into their stop. Face down on his shoulder, she cried one hard, reluctant sob. As the doors slapped open she brushed a quick kiss against his neck.

“Meet you at the Lazy-Eight,” she whispered.

To enter into the fabulous times, it is necessary
to be serious like a dreaming child.

—Gaston Bachelard,
The Poetics of Reverie

As Maryellen stumbled down the steps and across the road, a dab of tear cooled under Eddie’s jaw.

“Hey, Romeo, this your stop, too?”

Eddie looked at the driver for sign of an insult. No, the man only wanted to get home. So did Maryellen. And so did he.

The walk home, skirting the woods, felt a lot lighter than his walk to school.

I’m not crazy!
he thought.
There’s really another side!

What excited him most was Maryellen herself, someone from the dreamways who actually had flesh and blood. One of Larry’s rumors had been that both Maryellen and Eddie had tested so high that the school was considering moving them up at least one grade before the year got too far along. Whatever they did, he knew he didn’t ever want to lose sight of her again.

During the walk home, Eddie felt as afraid as he felt excited. He didn’t want to talk with his uncle, or with anyone but Maryellen Thompkins. His uncle didn’t have a phone at the cabin, so talking would have to wait. And it would have to be very private. He was glad that his uncle’s truck was gone from the driveway.

Eddie read his uncle’s scrawl across the bag on the kitchen table: “Driving the Bakersfield run, back Thursday.”

Eddie flopped atop his mattress and, after the usual dive through the flickering wings of the blue butterfly, he launched into his first face-to-face dream of Rafferty.

Eddie met Rafferty standing in the fork in a dirt road. The blue dreamway light was fading and the black spots cleared from Eddie’s vision. Behind Rafferty, the left fork of the road led into the rockiest reaches of the mountain Roam. The right fork wound down to a lush valley, warmer than Eddie’s, greener.

The landscape down the left fork had been stripped barren and blown clean to the surface of the stone. The hardiest, straggly clumps of grass and a few gnarls of brush survived.

Upon the stone were the hook-nosed, large-lipped carvings of the priests of the ancient Roam. Hieroglyphs and finely etched renderings of animals surrounded them. Most prominent of these, and most often repeated, was the unmistakable snarl of a jaguar.

A barely discernable track led back to Rafferty’s home. His faint footprints whisked off in a gust of wind.

We must be dreaming at the same time
, Eddie reasoned.
Cool!

Eddie heard the low chatter of Ruckus somewhere nearby giving Rafferty the “all clear.”

“We’re both going to be sick tomorrow, you know,” Rafferty said. He wore his best ceremonial regalia, complete with braided hat, jade earlobe plugs and embroidered tunic. His black trousers reached just below the knee, and a matching strip of bright embroidery decorated the outside of each leg. Eddie knew that each embroidery had significance to the Roam, but he didn’t know what that significance was.

He did know that the outfit, and the dignity with which Rafferty wore it, made the boy look much older than his twelve years. Without the hat, Rafferty would be slightly shorter than Eddie, but the hat and his proud posture raised him up.

“It’s worth it,” Eddie said, “I’ve been sick for a lot less—like my algebra test.”

Eddie reached out to shake hands with Rafferty.

He froze when he saw the pistol in Rafferty’s hand, but Rafferty just laughed and gave it a spin. It flopped to the ground at their feet, a shuddering, silver fish. Rafferty tossed it to Eddie and it became a black rabbit that scrambled into the roadside brush. They both laughed.

“If we can do that in dreams,” Rafferty said, “I believe we can learn how to do it for real.”

“You’re a freak on your side, too, huh?”

Rafferty laughed.

“Yes,” he said, “a freak. There’s talk about a trial, a kris romani. Some of the elders are afraid of us. We have had to take great care with the dreaming.” He shrugged. “What matters is, we found each other!”

Rafferty silenced himself and stepped up to Eddie. This time Rafferty offered the hand.

“I hoped to find you, someday,” he announced. “To be sure that you’re real.”

Eddie shook it. A white shimmer pulsed from their grip, but the grip was warm.

“And you’re real,” Eddie said, “it’s true. You’re alive over there.”

“Barely,” Rafferty said, and laughed. “It’s that kind of time.”

“Isn’t it amazing how much we look alike?” Eddie asked.

The two boys stood in the roadway for a moment and studied each other.

They shared the same dark hair and dark skin, but Rafferty’s eyes were brown and Eddie’s bright blue. They had mirror-image, lopsided smiles. Eddie’s hair was shorter but as he watched Rafferty’s shoulder-length hair it shrank back to match his own. With a wink, he grew it back.