Jaguar (17 page)

Eddie looked down at his sneakers and jeans. By willing it to be so, he exchanged them for beaded buckskins and white moosehide moccasins, like he had seen at Gene’s grandfather’s house in Montana. His jacket was buckskin, too, with fringe at the elbows and the elaborate beadwork of the ghostdance days. He left his head bare because he liked the feel of the sun on it.

“Is that what you
really
look like,” Eddie asked, “or is this what we make up for the dreamworld?”

“I’m not sure,” Rafferty said. “Maybe we are monsters to the other. Maybe our minds make everything into something we can understand. I know that happens when I dream inside a language I do not speak. I think we just dream the
feeling
of the other person, and our minds fill in the pictures.”

“They sure do a heckuva job.”

“We’re exceptional, you know.”

Eddie laughed.

“Yeah, exceptionally loony. They lock me up for this stuff. Dr. Mark called you my ‘imaginary playmate.’ He said that most people stop seeing them when they start school. I’m abnormal.”

“Be careful,” Rafferty said. “We can make other people abnormal . . . by accident. By taking things out of them. . . .”

“I . . . thought so,” Eddie said. “Have you ever been inside my head? I mean, other places than the dreams?”

“No,” Rafferty said, and his voice held the abrupt tone of honor affronted. “You?”

“No. Sometimes with other people, not with you. It didn’t seem right, you know, like going through your stuff or something.”

“You’ve paid the price for visiting before, haven’t you?”

“Yes,” Eddie nodded. “But only when I’ve made something happen, or tried to. One time I stopped three guys from grabbing you in a dream. It must have worked, but I was sick for a couple of days. Do you know what we can do and what we can’t?”

“No,” Rafferty shook his head and toed the dirt.

He reminded Eddie of himself, waiting for the bus at the roadside in Montana.

“I hoped that if we were both dreaming at the same time . . . that would be how we would meet,” Rafferty said. “But I didn’t know when you’d be dreaming. So I tried to remember all the times I’ve seen you and tried to match up. Today I started extra early. It worked just in time. I was ready to quit.”

“Have you met others?”

Rafferty pulled at his lower lip, checked over his shoulder.

“Not this way. There’s another shadow, a girl from your side. . . .”

“Maryellen Thompkins!” Eddie said. “I just found her. . . .

“Yes, she is a dream of my friend, Afriqua Lee. And there is someone else.”

“Who?”

“The Jaguar,” Rafferty said. “He is a great torment to our side. Old-timers believe he comes from your side, and now I believe it, too. He has to be, because he can’t be found here. Uncle thought it was a game, he’s dreaming and doesn’t know what it’s doing to us. Maybe he doesn’t believe we’re real. . . .”

“Do you think we could find him?”

“We found each other.”

Eddie clapped Rafferty on the shoulder.

“
You
found
me,
friend,” Eddie said, and an urgency prodded at him. “I’ve been playing around with my gradepoint while you’ve been working.”

“We need a sign,” Rafferty said. “Something that is ours alone.”

“I know some great codes,” Eddie said, “we can set up a contact system. I met the girl on my side, I’ll talk to her.”

“Not a code,” Rafferty said. “We need something simple. The Jaguar has his brand. It’s a sign, and the sign is a key. We need our own sign.”

“How about a square?” Eddie asked. “There are four of us, one to a side. . . .”

“Good,” Rafferty agreed, “that’s good. But if the Jaguar finds out, it’s as good as his brand.”

“We’re a step ahead. We have our square and his brand, too. We can unlock his locks, but he can’t get into ours.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Rafferty warned. “He’s been at this longer than we have.”

A chill passed over Eddie, then another. He had the sudden feeling of something . . . sniffing. He saw Rafferty shudder, check the path over his shoulder, and shrug.

“Maybe four of us could track down this Jaguar.”

“If he doesn’t track us down first,” Rafferty said. “Remember, the dream road runs two ways, maybe more. You live on his side, I’m sure of it. He doesn’t want to foul his nest, so he experiments on us. If I’m right, it’s you and the girl he’ll go after.”

“We’ll just have to be careful,” Eddie said.

“Very.”

Rafferty laughed.

“
Are
there other . . . sides?”

“I’m not sure. . . .”

The light around them began its familiar flicker.

“I’ve been here too long,” Rafferty said. “I can feel it already. The jaguar’s priests hunt us when we dream on this side, we’re sure of that, now. We can’t spend much time like this, or the Jaguar will find you. I think he knows when we cross the fabric. That’s how he killed Afriqua Lee’s father.”

Eddie was suddenly dead serious. This dream-friendship was real, the bugs were real, the Jaguar might hunt him down, too. . . .

The flicker intensified, and began its fade to blue. Rafferty turned and started down the left-hand fork.

“Wait,” Eddie called, pointing to the right, “go that way. In my dreams, everything turns out ok if I take the
right
path.”

Rafferty flashed him a smile and a wave, and was gone.

Four years passed before they managed to meet again. Eddie had dreamed so hard he missed a day of school and suffered a booming headache. He was so disoriented he couldn’t remember how to make coffee, and his right eye didn’t seem to work right. If it weren’t for his bladder he thought sure he wouldn’t have come around at all.

. . . the dreams of our childhood . . .
vanish from our memory before
we were able to learn their language.

—Henry David Thoreau

When Eddie didn’t show up at school, Maryellen sulked all day. Her dreams had been wild, but not dreamway dreams, though they included the Roam. Jumbled dreams, unfocused and full of fear, kept her tossing all night.

She’d looked for Eddie at the bus stop, and when he wasn’t there nausea got hold of her that she couldn’t shake. The fear that he never existed, that she wanted him in her life so bad that she’d made him up, the way she was afraid she’d made up Afriqua Lee, haunted her until dawn.

Maryellen heard Eddie’s name called with the roll, she knew that their meeting had been real. The icy fear that joined the cramps in her belly didn’t let up. It became a premonitive dread that dragged at her until recess.

She couldn’t bring herself to come in from the playground, though it had been a long time since the games of her classmates had held any interest for her. She liked the tetherball. She could hit it and wind it, hit it and wind it around the pole and never have to talk to anybody.

Her teacher sent the principal out to get her away from the tetherball. By that time, the ball was spattered with blood and Maryellen had no skin on the knuckles of either hand. She couldn’t find words when Mr. Hartung ordered her back to class, and she looked down in surprise at her legs that wouldn’t move on their own. Without knowing why, she began to sob.

Mr. Hartung carried Maryellen to the nurse’s room that adjoined his office. While the nurse took her temperature and looked into her mouth with a light, the principal called her house. Her stepmother would answer the phone—the woman who now slept in her father’s bed, the whiskey woman who dragged her tormentor son into Maryellen’s life.

From where she lay on the nurse’s cot, Maryellen could hear everything. But they weren’t talking about her. It was a bruised apple, a cracked sidewalk, a stray cat.

“Very well,” Mr. Hartung said, “I understand. We will keep her here and let her rest. If you can get out of your meeting . . . Well, yes, but whether it’s a bid for attention or not it’s clear she needs . . . I see. Yes. We’ll keep her here in the nurse’s office, then. I think it would be best if she didn’t ride the bus home today, she needs . . . Well, Mrs. Thompkins, I don’t think today’s the day to force her to do anything. She’s resting well and . . . That’s for you to decide. It is my opinion and the nurse’s opinion that someone should pick her up as soon as possible and see her to a doctor. It is my judgment that she should not ride the bus home. She will be waiting for you in the nurse’s office. Mrs. Thompkins?”

Maryellen closed her eyes to rest and immediately felt the blue flicker of the dreamways wash over her. She fell into the blue butterfly fluttering on the far wall and landed in the orchard hillside of Afriqua Lee’s dreams.

Bitter cold wind whipped the branches around like great skirts. Maryellen shivered from the wind chill, though her own body rested in the nurse’s room.

A small figure that reminded her of Eddie Reyes ducked into the shadows from the edge of the clearing. Maryellen started to call to him but the voice that came out of her mouth was not her own. She knew at once it belonged to Afriqua Lee.

That was fast!
Maryellen thought.

Sunset on the other side, and Maryellen saw Afriqua Lee hiding on the hillside behind the cover of an old stump. The man who stepped out of the shadow of the trees seemed to be a piece of shadow that detached itself and floated forward. Maryellen took him for a raider at first, until she saw his jaguar robe. He had not yet noticed Afriqua Lee.

His hair hung loose, almost to his waist. She had never seen such hair on a man before. A fringed pouch and a long reed hung at his hip. His bowed head was uncovered and his robe tied with a crisscross of leather strips. When he lifted his head Maryellen saw his beard, almost to mid-chest. She had never seen anyone in the Roam wear a beard.

The only sound was the shuff-shuff of his wrapped feet through dirt and scrub grass. He tilted his head back like an animal listening or whiffing the wind. He turned a full circle there in the clearing, nodding once at each quarter. When he stopped he faced west, looking directly at the stump that hid Afriqua Lee.

Maryellen trembled on the nurse’s cot and drew her knees to her chest.

He knelt, removed the pouch from his waist and emptied it out in front of him. He brushed a flat spot in the grass and sorted out a flat board, an arrow shaft, a pile of small sticks, some dried moss and a black knife. The blade was black, but it glinted on the last of the light like glass.

Obsidian,
she thought. Old Cristina had shown Afriqua Lee some obsidian spear-points that looked just like his knife.

He began to make a fire. He caught the first sparks with his tinder. Behind the shadows he found a pile of dried, twisted branches. He scooped them into his arms and fed his fire, forming a flat-topped pyramid. Light was gone except for the fire.

The priest unhooked his reed. A cat, black as his knife, stepped into the firelight at the edge of the clearing, barely a spit from Afriqua Lee. The stranger’s hand raised the reed to his lips, pointed it towards the cat, and puffed. It leapt sideways once, shuddered, then crumpled in its tracks.

He skinned the cat and rolled the hide off the carcass like a stocking, then put it into his pouch. He sectioned the cat into quarters, his knife moving almost by itself. Piece by piece he heated the meat and ate it, arranging the head and innards among the coals. Maryellen was surprised at how good it smelled cooking.

When he was done all she could see were the bones neatly stacked, the skull and the softly glowing coals sputtering out in the clearing. He stood, still facing west, the day nearly too dark to see him now. He picked up his pouch, his weapon and his fireboard and walked back into the shadows at the edge of the trees.

A door slammed, and Maryellen woke to the palsied anger of Olive, her stepmother. She yanked Maryellen from the nurse’s cot and pulled her up until their faces met. Olive’s breath stank of coffee, stale wine and cigarettes.

“You’re doing your best to ruin this marriage, you little shit,” she hissed. “You want attention? I’ll give you attention.”

Maryellen stumbled down the hallway, trying to keep up with Olive who drug her by the arm. From the door to the car Olive pushed and slapped her all the way. From somewhere deep inside her head, Maryellen heard a snarl.

You can’t knit smoke.

The voice was Afriqua Lee’s. It sounded more like advice than a warning.

. . . wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.

—
Love in the Time of Cholera,
Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Rafferty woke from his dream of Eddie Reyes to find himself bound and blindfolded. White flashes of some inner electricity coursed through his brain in time with his pulse, and his pulse hammered a tremendous spike of pain right between his eyes. He’d seen these flashes before, and felt the spike. Pain was the price he paid for treading the dreamways—pain, weakness, disorientation. . . .

Rafferty tested his bonds to make sure they were real. A blistering pain shot through his right hand. He was bent nearly backwards, his wrists roped to his ankles. The bonds were real.

Who . . . ?

“The little dream-ferret tests our work, Nebaj.”

The voice, near Rafferty’s head, spoke quietly, slowly, with the thick tongue of a spleef-whiffer. Pungent woodsmoke aggravated Rafferty’s post-dream nausea. When he tried to wriggle away from it a kick between his shoulder blades paralyzed him and turned the pulse of flashes inside his head into one blinding burst of light.

This time, when he woke up, he remembered the bonds and remembered not to move. This time the air smelled clean and a breeze warmed his exposed skin. Cramps in his back and chest tormented every breath. This was what was intended by tying him up the way they did. Soon he would cramp enough to stop breathing altogether.

Nebaj,
he thought.
Who is Nebaj?

Someone of the Roam had spoken about a village called Nabaj, back in the days when Uncle was alive, one of those evenings around the fire in what had once been the south pasture. The men of the Roam told their stories to ready themselves for sleep. Rafferty, an insatiable listener even as a youngster, sat in rapture every night until Uncle carried the limp child back to the bunks.