Jaguar (21 page)

“Maryellen, it’s going to rain.”

Eddie looked up and down the riverbank, and saw no one. Summer fishing on the river didn’t open up for over a month, and even hoboes didn’t wander this far upriver. No one would stumble into their camp by accident, and his uncle was gone for the rest of the month to a job in Yakima.

He attributed his sudden sense of dread to the incoming weather and to his regret at not being able to find Rafferty in his dreams for nearly a year. Dr. Mark explained it as progress. Eddie felt it as a loss. Something was wrong.

“Maryellen?”

He shook her shoulder half-heartedly, not really wanting to wake her.

She was too deeply asleep to be napping.

The square,
he thought.
Maybe she’s arranged a meeting.

He lay down beside her and watched the clouds roll in. They wore the dark underbellies of a storm, but stayed high enough to clear the mountains and pass through. He would carry Maryellen into the fishing shack when the rains came. He didn’t want to disturb her. If she went to the dreamworld, she would probably be out for awhile.

What will we do about her parents?
he wondered. Her father was getting stranger every day. Mel Thompkins had taken to staying awake nights to check on Maryellen, and to keep him company during watch, he had his bottle. Eddie knew that Maryellen’s stepbrother was giving her trouble, too. He knew that more from what she didn’t say than what she did.

Eddie took her hand and kissed it, then relaxed beside her for a quick nap before the weather hit. The last thing he expected was to cross the curtain in a blink to come face-to-face with Maryellen. And Rafferty, and Afriqua Lee.

For the first time, all four of them met in the dreamworld. Eddie felt as though he and Maryellen dreamed now from inside the same body, they were so close.

Sunny and still-winded, the dream sat the four of them inside a cedar grove, its evergreen fragrance

ladened the warm afternoon.

A square of marble columns on a square of marble floor stood high atop a stone structure in the middle of the woods. The fluted columns supported a sill of marble, open at the top. One of the columns was broken. Only a portion of its top and base remained. No debris littered the break.

Inside the square stood a square marble table with four marble chairs. The surface of the table was inlaid with a sundial in brass, contained within a brass square. The back of each chair was carved with one of their names, each name bordered with the same brass square.

They took the appropriate seats.

Like sitting in on a séance without a medium
, Eddie thought.

No medium, no observers, just the four of them in an atrium sitting at a marble table.

Rafferty spoke first, though his image was the weakest the four.

“Someone is after us,” he warned. “I was caught some time ago by a Jaguar priest. He nabbed me coming out of the dreamway. I am sure he knows about Eddie, possibly Maryellen.”

Suddenly, for Eddie, the daily threat that Rafferty faced became real.

“We’re a threat to something big,” Rafferty said. “When they’re sure they’ve found us all, they’ll kill us.”

“But the priests can’t cross into our world,” Eddie said. “They can’t come after me and Maryellen.”

“The Jaguar is there,” Rafferty said, “I’m sure of it. But if he’s like us, he’ll be weaker on your side of the curtain. He uses his priests here as a lens or a coil, to boost his power. Somebody is getting close to me over here. . . .”

Rafferty related his experience with Nabaj and his dream of the child in the canyon.

“The Jaguar is much on my mind, too,” Afriqua Lee said, “and that gives him something to sniff out on the dreamways. We invite him in, follow him to his den…”

Afriqua Lee paused; her green gaze flickered at Eddie.

“…and then we kill him.”

Nearby crow-calls punctuated their silence. Eddie cleared his throat.

“What if we make a mistake, kill the wrong dreamer?”

“Then the Jaguar wins,” Rafferty said, “and we die.”

In their apprehensive silence, Eddie heard only his breathing.

“A dream costs them, too,” Maryellen said. “Even that priest said so. The Jaguar probably pays his price, too.”

“We pay for what we get,” Eddie said. “More time on the dreamways means more pain on the wakeup. If the Jaguar controls as much of your world as you think, he must either be asleep or in pain all of the time.”

Rafferty frowned.

“You’re right. When we conjure something, like this place, we’re down for a day or two. But Jaguar’s done earthquakes, plagues. . . .”

“Yeah,” Eddie said. “He must be down for weeks after that.”

“Maybe months,” Afriqua said. “Or longer.”

“How could you live that long out cold?” Eddie asked. “You’d be helpless, you’d starve.”

“Maybe he gets other people to dream for him,” Rafferty said. “Like that priest, Nebaj.”

“Maybe he’s different from us altogether,” Afriqua said. “Maybe he’s an alien dreaming from someplace we haven’t imagined.”

“We could be different from you,” Eddie said. “But if he’s from our side, he’s probably not different from us.”

“He wouldn’t show himself,” Maryellen said. “He’d get into the dreams of someone who could keep track of us. . . .”

“Let’s assume he’s more like us than different,” Rafferty said. “He uses the Jaguar priesthood to intensify his power, something we haven’t learned to do. But after a dream like that he’s got to be helpless. So,
where is he
?”

“The priest says he’s in their world,” Afriqua said. “I agree.”

“How do you know the priest wasn’t lying?”

“The Jaguar’s experiments with the butterfly kiss devastate us, not you,” Rafferty said. “When matter from your side meets ours . . .
poof
. A flash of light, and it’s gone. Brain tissue dies when he gets careless.”

“He’s experimenting,” Afriqua Lee said. “He doesn’t want to foul his own nest.”

Rafferty leaned forward and his image intensified. The burn scar on the back of his hand shimmered slightly when he gestured.

“When any of us plucks the fabric,” he said, “we affect both sides of the curtain. Some places are thinner than others, like the stonework in the highlands. But this valley we share is the thinnest.”

“And the Jaguar must share it, too,” Afriqua Lee added. “His influence is strongest here. Passages to the dreamways easiest. He must be near you.”

“‘Near’ meaning how near?” Eddie asked. “Ten feet, ten miles, ten thousand miles . . . ?”

“Probably somewhere in the valley,” Rafferty said. “Someone helps him when he’s . . . sick.”

“The Hill!” Maryellen broke in. “Eddie, he’s got to be on the Hill! Or some place like it. At least when he’s sick.”

“Unless someone cares for him at home, someone professional. . . .”

Ideas are entities
.

The thought rang in Eddie’s head like a messenger barging into a concert. Eddie felt as though someone was watching them from behind the columns. When he looked, he caught a flicker out of the corner of his vision and saw Ruckus ruffle himself on the ledge above him.

“Search for sleep disorders, comas, catatonics…,” Maryellen suggested.

“We could bait him,” Afriqua Lee suggested, “but one of you would have to be the bait.”

“And one of you would have to know how to spring the trap.”

Maryellen’s voice warbled a little. Eddie couldn’t see so well, anymore. A blue wash of light faded the scene, and her voice receded like a train down a tunnel.

Eddie snapped out of the dream to a flash of pain in his head and belly. Cold, rain. Light stabbed at his eyes and someone slapped his face and the sting rushed tears to his eyes. Blurred forms of several men stood over him. One slapped him and shook his shoulders and shouted questions at him. As usual, Eddie was too sick to move, and he couldn’t make sense of their questions. One voice finally came in clear above all the others. Mel Thompkins.

“He’s drugged up my daughter,” Thompkins shouted. “He’s killed her. I want that boy to hang.”

Even though we may, ourselves, have created an “other” in our childhood,
this other has not grown up, has become independent and autonomous,
and like our child may no longer be under our control.

—John Watkins,
We The Divided Self

“So,” Old Cristina said, “your dream is that strong.”

Afriqua Lee lifted her head and was immediately sorry. The intense pain between her eyes flipped her stomach; even the fragrance of fresh coffee from Old Cristina’s light-pocket gagged her. After a flight down the dreamways, coffee had always been the only thing to bring her to her senses.

“I . . .”

No use, words only made things worse.

Cristina closed the curtains and refreshed the cold rag for her forehead. Afriqua Lee wanted to tell her there wasn’t much time, the Jaguar found his way inside, his reach spanned two worlds and his spies were everywhere. She didn’t have the strength.

Besides, where could they hide when their very dreams betrayed them?

“The Roam is moving,” Cristina said. “The stench of Jaguar droppings fills the wind, closer by the hour.”

Afriqua Lee heard the bustlings outside, the rattle of rigging and the cough of old engines coaxed out of their winter sleep.

“We are among the last,” Cristina said. “The rest left last night for the highlands, the seacoast, the sand reaches of the Quetzal. Your Rafferty humiliated a priest and now we are paying for it.”

“The Jaguar . . . we have glimpsed his tail through the curtain.”

“While you pinched the tail the paw struck down the Roam. The Jaguar priesthood has put a bounty out on every branded hand delivered to them, alive or dead, attached or not.”

Afriqua sucked in a sharp breath and let it out slowly to ease the pounding in her head.

“But why . . . ?”

“To shame us into turning the two of you over to them.”

Afriqua Lee was shocked at the horror of it.

Hands cut off . . . and it’s our fault.

“Your father tailed the Jaguar and the Jaguar had him killed. How will you and your gaje Rafferty fare any better?”

“My father . . . tailed the Jaguar . . . alone. He was a fool.”

“Who’s going to help you? Rafferty? He disappeared. And what’s to become of us in the meantime?”

“Disappeared?”

Afriqua lifted her head and dropped back to the pillow.

“How long . . . this dream?”

“You have slept now four days. We thought you were lost to us. After the attacks on the Roam, some would hand you to the priesthood. They demand a kris romani when we stakedown safe in the highlands. Well or not, you move with us tonight. Spies are everywhere. Do you understand the danger?”

Afriqua nodded and croaked, “Yes.”

“Oh, girl, I don’t think you have any idea. Maybe you
will
skin this Jaguar. You will be safe while there is a Roam to protect you. That is my word as Romni Bari, as Old Cristina.”

There are visual errors in time as well as in space.

—Marcel Proust,
Maxims

The tyrant sun puddled a few weak mirages off the rocks ahead, and Rafferty glimpsed a shadow zigzagging towards him—a rabbit, plump enough for these parts. Rafferty stayed put.

He carried only his snake-stick and his knife, and he wore the heavy black cottons of a Roam technician. He walked the vision walk that every boy of the Roam walked who would become a man. He had been on the walk, in and out of dream, for over a month.

The rabbit darted his way, dodging from shadow to shadow up the draw. Rabbit was a powerful figure in the history of the Roam. Many leaders had taken the name Rabbit, and Rabbit had fooled the gods and allowed the Roam to win the ballgame of fate. Rafferty took this rabbit as a sign, and he thumped it with his stick when it got to the bush at his feet. After the scrabble of dying paws on sand he was left with the stillness of a late sun on rock. The call of his crow buried itself in the sand and sky. Rafferty thought of storms, words and lives swallowed whole out here and imagined the ragged edge of an owl’s wing spread for strike. The image snapped.

The right side of the rabbit’s head was crushed; a lone left eye stared hard at him, blue glaze flecked with bits of dust and gravel. The warm, live skin quivered under his fingers. He looked up and down the valley. Not a sound.

“Well, Rabbit, what do you see?”

His dead voice bounced nowhere and sank into the walls of his own ears. He recalled the time years ago when he saw through the curtain to the other side, when he saw Eddie Reyes drop his black rabbit into the bushes.

“Tell them ‘hello’ for me,” Rafferty told the rabbit.

Rafferty still wasn’t sure what the other side was all about. That might be where people went when they died as well as when they dreamed. Only special dreams took him to the other side, and he couldn’t always send himself there when he wanted.

Just as well
, he thought. He didn’t know how much pain his body could stand. The pain was real, but Eddie needed his help with the Jaguar, and that was enough.

His folding knife opened stiffly in his hand and he cut the rabbit’s head from its body. He pinched the head tight under the jaw and carried it to the largest flat rock in the draw. He faced it east and sprinkled a handful of dirt over it. His body told him what to do. A mutter from his crow came to him on the breeze.

His knife moved in an old rhythm across the inside back legs, across the belly. He cut the front feet off and tossed them to the scrabblers in the rocks. He slipped the hot glove of hide off the body, and a wisp of steam curled from the back of the rabbit where the scant fat lay between the shoulder blades like small, yellow ears.

A red butte loomed out of the flatlands about a kilometer to the south. Rafferty rolled the carcass up in its skin and set out in a slow run. His feet kicked up sand behind him and his body worked smooth time itself. Sweat came on, his temples tightened and he remembered all the long, lean seasons, all the years of hunger that tracked him like wolves.

When he reached the butte he was barely out of breath but sweating heavily, a danger in the drylands. He hoped the exertion would bring on his vision to take back to the Roam. They would decide, then, to admit him or to drive him out for good. He did not want to think about what that might mean for Afriqua Lee.