Jaguar (3 page)

The rain can make all places strange, even the place where you live.

—Ernest Hemingway, “The Porter”

Maryellen Thompkins met her father a week after the earthquake churned the valley, the day he came home from the army. Her first memory was the strength of his hands as he picked her up and hugged her to him. He held her much too tight but he was her father and she didn’t know what she was supposed to say so she hugged him like her mother told her and he set her down.

“You’re a strong little muffin,” he said, ruffling her hair.

“My name’s Maryellen.”

“So it is.”

His eyes were a deep brown, like her own, his breath smelled like cigarettes and the whiskey that her grandfather drank.

Her father opened one of his drab canvas dufflebags and pulled out a pink silk robe with red birds and blue dragons all over it. On the left side in the front, stitched in small green letters, it said,
Maryln.

“Do you like it?”

He sort of giggled and that surprised her. He was nervous, too.

When she didn’t move to take the robe, he draped it over her shoulder and ruffled her hair again. Her mother took two glasses down from the cupboard and said to Maryellen, “Why don’t you take it into the bedroom and try it on, honey? It’s late and you should be getting to bed pretty quick.”

Maryellen parted the blanket that separated the kitchen from their bedroom. Just then her mother slammed the cupboard door with a
bang
and screamed, “Oh God!”

Her father started at her scream and he hit Maryellen with his elbow as he jumped to help her mother. Her nose started bleeding and a couple of spots got on her pink nightie, but she moved the robe in time to save it. The blood in her nose had a funny, salty smell.

“What?” her father asked, “What is it?”

His face had paled and his eyes were strangely wild. He jerked the cupboard door open and glared inside.

Her mother leaned back against the wall with her hand to her chest and started to laugh.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It was something . . . we have mice. It was a mouse or something, it jumped right at me. Maryellen, are you all right?”

Maryellen looked up from the linoleum floor and the tears from the sting in her nose made everything swim in haloes from the bright bulb over the sink. Her light mother, laughing against the wall, reached out a hand to her dark father, beginning a laugh. He put his arm around her mother and held her tight to him. She remembered that she was afraid but she didn’t want to say so.

Her mother wet a dishrag and cleaned up the little dribble of blood from her nose and her best nightie. Maryellen picked up her new robe and took it to the bedroom to try it on.

When she saw the new bed that her mother put up, and the blanket that hung between the beds, she realized that she would not be sleeping with her mother.

Maryellen listened as she undressed to the
clink
of ice in glasses and the low drone of this stranger that was her father talking quietly in the kitchen. Sometimes a laugh barked out, or an equally disruptive silence. She slipped the robe on over the pink nightie with the blood spots then sat on the edge of her mother’s bed listening as the low drone grew to long explosions of laughter.

Her mother laughed her tiny laugh with him and Maryellen felt for the first time that this room, that the little kitchen and even the bathroom were not hers and she felt for the first time that she didn’t belong where she was but she had nowhere else to go.

The laughter in the kitchen stopped. Just the occasional running of water and
clink clink
of the ice in their drinks broke the quiet. Maryellen laid down on her mother’s bed and was just beginning to drift off to dream when her father sat heavily and suddenly beside her, startling her awake. As he leaned down to kiss her forehead she smelled the sweet taste of whiskey on his breath, the same taste that her grandpa had when he kissed her goodnight.

“You look pretty in that robe,” he said. His strong hand stroked her hair.

“Thank you. It feels nice.”

“Were you afraid of that mouse in the cupboard? When I looked, there was nothing there.”

“No.”

She shook her head and wanted to sit up, but she didn’t want to stop his hand that brushed at her forehead and her hair.

“We have mice all the time,” she said, “but not usually in the cupboard. Usually they’re under the sink.”

His eyes were brown, like her grandfather’s, like her own. His weren’t open very wide, and the white parts around the brown center looked red and sore. Those sore eyes looked straight into her own and he asked, “Are you afraid of me?”

Maryellen glanced down at her small hands, dark, twisting her new robe into knots. She didn’t know what to tell him. No one that she’d been afraid of had ever asked her that before.

“Well,” he said, “join the club—.”

He caught himself with a breathtaking reflex as he nearly fell off the edge of the bed. She recognized that giggle of his, then, because they were doing it together.

“I don’t want you to be afraid of me.”

She couldn’t think of anything to say, and she couldn’t meet his eyes yet.

“Those teeth are coming in . . . look.”

He fished in a shirt pocket and held out one of her front teeth in his palm.

“Your mother sent this to me, it nearly chewed its way out of the envelope.”

“I thought the tooth fairy had it. She left me a quarter.”

“Well,” he chuckled, “wasn’t it great that the tooth fairy gave it to your mom to send to me? Looks like you’ve got another one ready to go.”

He picked up her chin with one finger and wiggled a tooth with another. His finger smelled like cigarettes, too, and was kind of yellow. She pulled away.

“Why don’t you come out to the kitchen and show your mother your new robe? I’ll set out a couple of traps for those mice.”

She didn’t remember that they put her to bed, but she remembered being afraid in the dark at the thrash and cries from her mother’s bed across the hanging blanket.

“When you touch me there,” her mother said once, “I feel a glow all the way out the ends of my fingers.”

Echoes of her mother’s whispers came to her many years later, in the mountains with a boy named Eddie Reyes.

Then a
snap
from the kitchen popped her eyelids open, and the three of them in that tiny room held their breaths and listened to a low hoarse
hiss
. Then, someone or something hammered at the kitchen cabinets.

“What the hell is that?”

Her father, whom she’d just met, jumped out of bed and dazzled them all with a sudden burst of light and his nakedness. His dark body thrust aside the saddle blanket that divided the two rooms, a sheen of sweat glistened on his bare shoulders.

Her mother rustled through bedding for her nightie and her father snatched something from the top of their dresser.

The
thump-thump
of cabinet doors and
crash
of garbage bucket continued from the kitchen, punctuated with that low
hiss
.

Maryellen’s eyes adjusted to the glare and her father grasped an empty beer bottle by its neck. He pushed the blanket aside and steadied himself against the doorframe as he stepped across the threshold.

Her mother missed a grab for Maryellen as she ran to the doorway behind her father. The sudden flare of the kitchen bulb illuminated a huge rat, brown and snarling, standing on its hind legs in the corner. It shook the mousetrap on its foreleg like a curse at her and at her father.

At first she thought he would throw the bottle at it. But her father dropped to both knees and snarled back at the rat. The bottle in her father’s hand thumped the linoleum twice. Then he hit the rat so hard he broke the bottle. The top half of the rat exploded with the bottle into a dark mess against the cabinet. The rest of it twitched and spilled itself slowly over the linoleum. Her mother scooped her close inside her warm robe and she heard her father throwing up beside her. Someone banged at the front door. What she remembered best was the hot softness of her mother under her robe, the now-sour smell of whiskey from the floor and the metallic taste of fear far back on her tongue.

Morning lit up the shade by the time they all got to sleep, and in her dream Maryellen saw for the second time the girl Afriqua Lee. She remembered the lingering dream was all mixed up with her memory of the earthquake: at the grocery store behind their house a wall split open with a ripping sound, like someone tore a huge skirt. Sand poured through the top of the wall to cover the vegetable display. Maryellen stood in the frozen stillness that nightmares bring while the sand dissolved in blue light at the tips of her new shoes. Blue sky shone through the crack in the wall and, high overhead, a pair of green eyes framed by curly dark hair peered back at her. Those eyes seemed very frightened, very wild.

A name was called behind the girl, an older woman’s voice called her twice before the eyes disappeared and Maryellen woke with a start. The old woman called: “Afriqua! Afriqua Lee!”

What frightened Maryellen a little, and what she didn’t tell her mother about, was the handful of sand at the foot of her bed. The air around it vibrated, flapped like a pair of wings and without a sound the sand and the dream vanished in a flash of blue light.

Human beings are free except when humanity needs them.

—Orson Scott Card,
Ender’s Game

Rafferty was five years old and playing with a circle of stones in the sun. He sat inside the circle of shiny riverstones when a spring shower caught him and he heard the first dry rattle of wings rise with the heavy wet spatter of the drops. Thousands of huge, bronze-colored bugs seethed out of the ground and unfolded their brittle wings.

None of the
things
attacked him, but they rasped out an unpleasant scrape against the air when they flew, and when they landed on Rafferty their stiff, stiltlike legs scratched his neck and hands. The neighbor lady screamed, and other screams echoed down the avenue of high, bright buildings.

Verna Tekel, the neighbor, scooped him into the heavy folds of her body and grunted him to her house, praying under her breath all the way in all three of the languages that she spoke. Hers was the dark house of mystery, forbidden to him and to the other children. Dark-eyed strangers came and went at odd hours, happy people for such a dark house. They parked colorful trucks and huge house-vans right in the yard that separated her house from Rafferty’s place, right where the bugs now swarmed.

They lived inside the vans, and the walls of the outsides rippled with colored pictures, advertisements and news. Strange music rode the breezes from Verna’s house at night, music that stirred something in Rafferty like the language she spoke stirred something. Other people made fun of it, always behind her back, but to Rafferty it sounded familiar. He usually knew what she meant.

A design had been burned into the back of her freckled hand, the number “8” lying on its side. He had seen it on some of the people who visited her, people whose darkness contrasted her freckled, pale skin and light, close-cropped hair. When she had visitors, other neighbors stayed indoors and locked up. They hired these dark men to fix things or to invent things or to tell them news of the outside, beyond the city’s great walls.

Sometimes the brown-eyed men brought him presents, like the mechanical parrot that walked and squawked or the wind-up lizard that skittered up the sidewalk. They always stood outside with their presents and waited on the sidewalk because his aunt wouldn’t allow them near the house. The house had been his parents’ house, and he overheard the grown-ups saying that if it weren’t for his parents these people wouldn’t be visiting the city at all. Sometimes they said it like a great thing. Other times, it sounded like a curse.

When his aunt decided that they’d stood outside long enough, or when she realized that the dark-eyed ones were never going away, she would let him go outside and accept the gift. Each time, the men would say something to him quickly, softly, something kind about his parents whom they clearly had admired very much.

The jaguar priests had taken them, they said, and he would not know for years that they had died horribly. All he knew at five, going on six, was what his mother’s sister told him, that they had gone to the southern highlands to teach these people and something bad had happened so they couldn’t get back.

Verna muttered a chant in that sing-song language as she fastened the screen door and the old-fashioned glass door behind it. Rafferty was dazzled by the thousands of bronze wings that glinted in the after-shower sun.

They pushed up out of gardens and gravel driveways, from grasses and from rocky hillsides. They unfolded their glittering wings and joined the bronze fog rolling across the valley. It was like watching fire disassemble a log. While Verna shrieked into her handset for help, Rafferty knelt at the living-room window and listened to the scrabble of hard little bodies against the walls outside.

The things that pressed themselves against the glass had bodies bigger than a man’s biggest finger. Orange with yellow underbellies, they unfolded finely veined wings that stretched a half-meter from tip to tip. Each bug had four wings and six bristly legs.

Rafferty couldn’t think of them one at a time when the walls, the gardens and streets, the air itself were already filled with them and with the dry rattle of their wings. The window was acrawl with them. He remembered for years his fascination with the bob and pulse of the thousands of yellow bellies flattened against the glass.

Verna yanked him away from the window and activated the blinds. He noticed the inside of her house for the first time while she muttered in a tight voice and threw things into a bag. The house was nothing like he’d imagined.

One huge room held couches along the walls and a large wooden table near the kitchen. Unlike the outside of the house, the inside was spotless. The walls were not walls, but the same kinds of installations that decorated the sides of the vans: Pictures that could change, jungle pictures, and somewhere in the room a box broadcast jungle sounds.