Jaguar (25 page)

Afriqua Lee helped Rafferty hold the wounded woman down while he taped her arms and legs to her mat. She was a strong woman, pretty in the brown afterglow of the walls. Indian pretty, not skinny and starving like he’d expected. This country had fooled him like that. Rafferty remembered thinking he’d have bought her a drink.

She lay face up on her mat, rigid. Rafferty stretched a length of tape across her forehead and down the sides of the mat to keep her head still. She relaxed and her eyes opened. Now, with the tape and gauze all twisted up, her cuts were bleeding again and the hole in her neck clicked every time she moved.

“Ask her if she wants us to help her,” Rafferty said, and showed Afriqua Lee the injector that Old Cristina had given him for this trip into the highlands.

Afriqua Lee spoke again, in the same rasp.

The woman nodded, in spite of her neck.

Rafferty injected her and she started to cry. Pretty soon the cry faded back and as he emptied the last of their three ampules he brushed her face and her forehead with his hand. The cry subsided to a shudder, like his own. Then there was just the
shuff shuff
of her breath coming faster and shallower and the noise from the trucks loading up outside.

No animal sounds. The only voices were the few children. They had to move.

Her breath took on a gurgle, then a strangle. Her whole chest heaved tight against the tape, her eyelids slid open and she stared ahead, gasping.

Rafferty held her down to keep her from hurting herself. He held her down so she wouldn’t hurt herself dying.

“Go on home,” he told her. “Go home.”

She twisted one arm loose of the tape and hooked it under his armpit, then she pulled. Her brown eyes begged him to come down with her into the dark, and she was gone.

Eddie’s mind whirled with his own dreams, and now he had to fight off Rafferty’s, too.

Today Eddie thought he should’ve stayed in his room and slept. One of those days again when sleep is just the thing.

Eddie was determined that love with Maryellen would be more than a dream. So much of what Eddie saw or heard he wanted to show her, on both sides of the fabric, but the way they had to live made that impossible.

A honeybee sipping from a drop of coffee on his spoon reminded him of her, of those things he’d like her to see. The delicacy of its orange tongue flicked out, sipped, flicked back. Beside it, one grain of rice stuck like an ant’s egg to his chopstick.

Maryellen gave him those chopsticks a year ago, a lifetime before he had come to The Hill.

His hand finished the word “Inevitable” in a scrawl.

As Maryellen was drawing, he remembered the little red-headed ants that bite. A huge hill of them marked

the line between his uncle’s place and her father’s. Eddie’s uncle claimed that you should drill your well where there’s an anthill, that ants build over water. He and Maryellen stirred them up from time to time. Sometimes they’d drop a carpenter ant or two on top, just for the fight. The red ants smelled funny and bit, but at least they didn’t eat holes in the house.

One time when they were thirteen or fourteen, Maryellen’s stepbrother scooped a handful of those red ants and stuffed them down the front of Maryellen’s shirt. She had a really nice figure even then, and the stepbrother was always wanting to get his hands on her. He tried all the usual peeks and taps and touches—a brush of arm
here
, a look over her shoulder
there.
He had graduated to grabs.

This time, though she didn’t push him away or slap him like she usually did. She very calmly took off her shirt, turned her back, unhooked her bra and brushed herself off. Then she put her bra back on, shook out her shirt, and as she slipped back into it she turned to him and said, evenly, “Don’t ever do that again. Don’t ever do
anything
like that again.”

The meds made him wonder a lot, made his mind wander, but all of its raveling seemed to lead to Maryellen.

She explained the differences between them one time. She explained that she grew up being hit and yelled at all the time. She got hit and yelled at less if she picked up certain subtleties in the people around her. He got abandoned for long periods of time, sometimes locked into closets or cars, and he learned to retreat inside, to shut off emotion and go away.

He breathed deep and settled into his chair again, the one overstuffed recliner in the day room. At this moment, during these moments of the experiment, the chair was his and no one challenged him for it.

“You seem so . . . afraid all of a sudden.”

“No,” he said. “I was just remembering, and remembering isn’t always good.”

She pushed her cup aside and picked up her pencil.

There was a time she would’ve picked up my hand.

“I read somewhere that our memory keeps us alive,” she said, and reached for her eraser.

“I’ll bet that’s true,” Eddie said. “Messages take time to get from the body to the brain—I’ll bet we don’t even know when we’re dead because we have nothing to remember it with.”

Her laugh sounded tight and strained, and he really wanted to change the weather in the day room. The
whish
and
scratch
of pencils complemented the rain.

He loved her, and didn’t know what to do about it. He had faith that everything would come clear if they just stuck together. Her focus, the intensity of her attention, attracted him. He trusted insight, not instinct. Insight came from
sight
, a conclusion of the senses—filtrate of the unprotected senses. Insight, the trustable unconscious, helped fill in the detail of her subject.

He glanced down at his notebook, where his hand had been moving by itself.

There is no asymmetry,
he’d printed boldly.
Remember the Butterfly Kiss.

He didn’t remember writing any of it.

Her eraser nibbled at the paper and she brushed the crumblings back without looking down. She was not drawing him, after all. She used him as a model to draw one of his dreams of Rafferty, the one about the man with the blue ointment.

“I can understand dreams like . . . like our dreamways,” she said. “That’s happening while this is happening, it’s parallel. But what about dreaming that happens in the future . . . ?”

He thought she got off track by thinking of it as “the” future, but didn’t want to get into it now.

Eddie always planted distance in the important things, getting close was too frightening. He focused on her drawing, and something tugged at him. Rafferty, who looked like Eddie, crouched behind a rock. The cliff face with the butterfly stain, the mother and daughter, the mysterious man holding his jacket around the mother’s shoulders . . .

“That jacket,” he pointed to her pad, “that looks familiar.”

Her pencil rested on an army jacket with campaign ribbons on the breast and a bar on the shoulders.

“It should,” she said, “it’s just how your notes described what Rafferty saw.”

“But you’ve seen their warriors on the other side,” he said. “They wear old-fashioned stuff—sandals, shin guards, chest protectors. . . .”

“Yes,” she said, “you’re right. This is
our
army. What do you think it means?”

“I think it means that whoever is on our trail is in the army.”

“Are you going to bring up that stuff about my dad again?”

“You made the connection, not me.”

“The Jaguar,” she said, and didn’t look up. “Maybe he was in the army, too.”

She continued drawing.

He didn’t think she was listening now. He knew she needed a line of patter to orchestrate the rhythms of her hand. Her gaze did not meet his. She focused somewhere near his ear and brushed his cheek on her way back to the page.

Eddie tasted the awful power of those eyes and saw how men could drown there. Brown and wide, always wide. He was not uneasy, looking her in the eye, at being seen himself. Nothing that those eyes saw could embarrass him, no matter how deep the vision.

“My leg’s falling asleep,” she said.

She stood and stretched, wiggling the toes of her left foot. She’d kicked off her sneakers under the table.

Eddie leaned back into his chair. He underlined his last scribble on the pad:

If it wasn’t for dreams we wouldn’t see each other at all.

Lovers need blessings. Their rectitude is not enough
to counter the loveless process of the world.
They must depend on the strength of the moment. . . .
What the heart makes, the mind cannot destroy.

—Lucius Shepard,
Life During Wartime

Rafferty watched Afriqua Lee, knee-deep in the stream alongside a half-dozen older women, as she washed their clothes in a sunlit riffle. He knew how much she hated ritual washing, now that the Roam did not have the luxury of a permanent camp. The jaguar priests and their raiders kept the Roam on the move, like a whipped nightstalker. Rafferty’s chest puffed a bit to think that this time she did the ritual washing for him.

Her skirt of the red quetzals was gathered and tucked at her knees, just clearing the water. She washed clothes as the rest of the women did, in the traditional manner, stripped to the waist, slapping out stains on flat rocks. Already the morning sun glared back at him from the water, casting a white veil around Afriqua Lee, accenting her brown skin, her hair, the dark tips of her breasts that wobbled with her work. He knew that she knew that he was there, and so did the rest of the women. Tradition dictated that her gaze not meet his own.

This very stream had killed her mother and brother, and Rafferty knew this made her ritual task more than physically painful. The Roam staked down at a new site, about a kilometer south of the south pasture of Uncle’s place. This year, Rafferty’s special year, Old Cristina had led him to sites that he had never found as a youngster, that he was sure had been unknown even to Uncle. She prepared him as best a woman could for this auspicious day.

Rafferty stood across the stream from the women, facing the encampment of the Roam and, farther back, the old settlement of Uncle’s family. Behind him, what he had thought was hillside Old Cristina had shown him to be a stone temple, covered with dirt and overgrown, but intact. Last night, when he stood atop the crumbling temple under the near-full moon with the old Romni wheezing beside him, he realized the awful antiquity of the Roam.

Because he had come of age in the past year, Rafferty wore, for the first time, the red slash across the thigh of his dress trousers. The slash marked him an eligible bachelor of the Romni Bari’s tent. Cristina gifted him with the honor, and warned him that this was a first. No gaje had ever carried such status to a Roam wedding. This clothing, this ritual validated his standing within the kumpania, with the familiyi of the Romni Bari, and stated his intent to marry within the Roam. Objections could be fatal. The Roam did not consider shedding the blood of a gaje to be taboo.

The scrub brush that grew back from the plague of bugs offered good cover. He could not let it offer excellent cover. The women were supposed to see him, to mock him and comment loudly on his prowess, his clothing, his lineage. Only silence would indicate disapproval. He had only silence to fear.

“What lurks across the stream?” a woman’s voice prompted the others. “A bear in the bushes?”

“A blue-eyed bear,” another cried, “Holy Martyr, save us from a devil-eye bear!”

Rafferty was encouraged; a fierce image was a good sign. Afriqua Lee did not look up from her wash, but pursed her lips and slapped his trousers against her rock. He knew all of the women at the stream, but he only had eyes for Afriqua Lee. One by one, he recognized their voices as, one by one, they validated his pursuit.

Silence would not stop him, after all.

“What is that between his legs?” this shriek from the thrice-married Sultana, “Does it furrow the trail when he walks?”

The women laughed themselves breathless at this, and Rafferty stepped out of the brush and onto the gravel bar across from Afriqua Lee. While they cackled themselves breathless, she worked on, unperturbed.

Some of the clothes were his own, and he recalled how Afriqua Lee had defied tradition that first night he had showered at Old Cristina’s. Though just a youngster like himself, she had washed the clothes of a gaje, an unclean male. Even as a child she’d known her own mind. She never defended herself against the mutterings, never swayed, and proceeded to do the traditional things for him that a woman of the familiyi would do: wash, sewing, a stack of tortillas beside his door with morning coffee. He, tinkerer of the kumpania, returned her gifts with repairs, devices and clever inventions of his own. He had never so much as touched her hand.

“He has the heart of a jaguar, but trembles like a deer.”

Pride welled in him at their acceptance of his suit. The formidable jaguar and the sensitive deer meant that he was the finest husband material.

“Perhaps it’s a quetzal, look at the plumage!”

Indeed, he had woven the most iridescent feathers into his hair, thanks to the sharp eye of his faithful Ruckus.

Afriqua Lee washed his dress trousers as his heart pounded just meters away. Her hands had removed ten centimeters of red slash from the side of his trousers and moved it to a diagonal across the thigh, just above the knee. When he married, this slash would be replaced with blue, and thereafter each child would be represented above it with a red slash cut from the stripe at the side.

A suitor of the Romni Bari’s familiyi would propose by offering his love a cloth braid of blue and red, and she would accept by unraveling the strands and weaving it into her hair. They would then take evening walks together in front of all the tents of the kumpania, and the children of the Roam would follow nearby, giggling and teasing.

Rafferty stepped into the stream.

A pebble plopped at his feet, then another. If Afriqua Lee had another suitor, then a dart would block his path. The stones were more of the women’s foolishness, a mock protection of the girl being stalked. No dart plunged the waters at his feet.

“Run, girl, run!” they cried.

Afriqua Lee looked up at the skyline and around the treetops, carefully avoiding Rafferty, and inclined her head as though listening to a birdcall.