Jaguar (37 page)

“I’ll ride in the back with him,” she said.

The crew chief and his two men glanced at each other’s eyes, then down at their boots. Bob cleared his throat and scratched his nose.

“Well, uh, there’s another problem, Miss,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“Well, we just have the one truck, and there’s your father’s . . . your father down there. We need to get him out, too, in case the road on this side goes. And there are animals. . . .”

One of the men cleared his throat.

“I’ll stay,” the man said. “You can call from Ashford for another truck to come get me. You can take these two straight to the clinic at Morton. I’ll stay with her father. If the river comes up anymore, I’ll pull him to high ground. This way, it’ll only take an hour or so.”

So that’s what they did. They stopped once beside a small, crumpled figure under a blue tarp. The crew chief lifted a corner of the plastic for her and placed a hand on her shoulder.

She hadn’t told them about the rifle, the shooting, about the demon that had tormented her father into chasing them. She let them believe that they’d all been in the pickup together, and that she and Eddie had been thrown clear while the truck went over with her father. She wanted to believe it so bad that she cried when she saw him, battered and bloodless, free of dreams. She was glad for the chance to see him dead. It made him her father again, someone she was supposed to love, and did love. The crew chief led her away.

. . .
the handful of pollen
that always waited in ambush
to upset your lives
and the celestial track of the wind
shall rise from pure love
to save the soul of the earth.

—Otto-Rene Castillo, “Prayer for the Soul of My Country”

Eddie was afraid when the blue pulse caught him, afraid in a way that he had never known before. He had thought of death, imagined death, feared death and in that fear simply refused to think of it. Eddie had crawled inside dreams of death, visions of death and witnessed death through other people’s eyes all too often on this side and on the other. He had browsed memories of death; eavesdropped on it, learned to shut it out when he sniffed its telltale stench in the crannies of someone’s mind.

This fear was not of death.

A blue riptide of purest power swept Eddie away with the beastly horror of life without being. Possession was its name, and the Jaguar its handler. The Jaguar had found him at last, and Eddie knew that, if he had a soul, he was in the fight of his life for it now.

The smell of fear excited the Jaguar, made him careless. He pushed Mel Thompkins hard to kill Eddie before he could muster an escape, but interference from the other side spoiled his connection, spoiled everything. Now he didn’t dare jump Eddie’s skull for fear that Thompkins would succeed while he was inside.

Eddie felt this uncertainty and knew what it meant. The Jaguar would rather have him dead than possess him. If Thompkins killed Eddie while the Jaguar was inside . . . Eddie would die, but the dreaming mechanism of the Jaguar would go with him. So Eddie took advantage of the Jaguar’s hesitation. He jumped the dreamways, sidestepped the Jaguar and backtracked the blue pulse into the Jaguar’s brain.

The trip was not pleasant.

The Jaguar had had a busy ten years, and so had the hospital. Drugs dulled the synapses and made travel as tough as a swim through cold molasses. Eddie wanted a crack at anything that would shut down the Jaguar’s access to the dreamways. He didn’t want to kill anyone, he had suffered enough for the incident with his mother, but he would kill the Jaguar if he could.

The activity in the Jaguar’s dream center was so high that it sounded like a surf crashing the shoreline. Eddie decided to scramble everything. He started with the road beneath his feet, the walls of the Jaguar’s mind that loomed around him. He pushed on, towards the power center that pounded out its blue-on-blue waves. This road was crisscrossed with others, some of them curving upwards and into the side canyons of the Jaguar’s mind.

No time,
he thought.

Out of the churning mess of images that surrounded him, Eddie snagged some pieces and concocted a little animal like the whiskbroom dog in Disney’s “Alice in Wonderland.” He set it sweeping along one of the roads and watched the road disappear. One information route was down.

And a hundred million to go,
he thought.

Eddie had swept bad memories from more than one mind when he was younger, thinking he was doing the dreamer a favor. He had acquired a premature maturity along with the information he’d sought, and with this came the unspoken ethic that had guided him since—take nothing, leave nothing.

He could have learned much that would help him now, but at what cost to his innocent dreamers? He’d refused the lessons that transcended observation, lessons that he sorely needed to defuse this Jaguar.

Defuse!

The consciousness that was Eddie inside the Jaguar ridiculed the euphemism. His alternate targets: the medulla and its life-support center, or the link to the higher brain that allowed the Jaguar to dream, to reason, to be human.

But the Jaguar had spent ten years looting the cortex of every subject he’d ever entered, and Eddie had never seen anything like the clutter of the Jaguar’s brain.

He had expected darkness because he thought of the Jaguar as dark, but the incredible power lit everything. Light did not diminish the confusion, the helplessness that Eddie felt amidst it all. Perhaps he would rather stumble through a dark labyrinth among monsters than face the real thing, bathed in light.

If I can duplicate the puzzle, I can take it apart,
he thought.

Dissolving images was a lot harder than putting them together. The bonds, once formed, did not intend to part. They linked up with others, which changed them as an additional ion changed a molecule. Not only did they change, but they gained weight, bulk, and became unwieldy. What the mind couldn’t lift, it couldn’t use.

Eddie raced along, praying that his route carried him deeper towards center, and as he sped through the Jaguar’s brain he linked together the thousands of puzzle ends that he passed. He didn’t know what changes he was forcing on the man’s brain, but change was guaranteed.

It couldn’t be worse,
Eddie thought, and prayed he was right.

Eddie had to concentrate hard to remember his mission. The Jaguar’s mind was the richest onslaught he had ever experienced. Eddie’s uncle had trouble building a fire because he had to read every sheet of newsprint that he crumpled. Eddie knew, now, something of what that meant.

He entered a section of the Jaguar’s brain that felt . . . strange. Not frightening, Eddie had learned years ago that the constant barrage of images was no danger. The strangeness didn’t frighten him, but its incredible familiarity did.

Elsewhere, he let the constant stream of faces, chatter, objects, smells and places flow through him. Sensual images tempted him even outside his body. But these images from the Jaguar’s memory were not stolen, not polished and new-looking in a way that he could never explain to Dr. Mark. These memories were the real thing, memories of the Jaguar himself, pieces from his life.

What stopped Eddie, what frightened him, was the image of the bomber with the hard-eyed young men jostling each other under the wing. The name on the side, he could read it clearly: “Sweetheart.” Behind the name, in four neat rows, the bombs. He snagged the image in

spite of himself and heard a gravelly voice call his name.

“Reyes,” it said. “Reyes! Get yer ass over here. We ain’t got all goddam day and yer face ain’t that pretty.”

Eddie felt himself inhale a thick belt of raw cigarette smoke, felt the acidic churn of a quart of cold coffee in his gut as he walked under the wing of the plane. One of the men poked his ribs.

“You’ll be a daddy by the time you get home, yeah? Don’t see how any woman could sleep with the likes of you. Christ, you kept me up all goddam night again last night with that talking and screaming.”

“Army’s going to take care of it,” he heard his thick voice say. “They got me in a special program when I hit stateside.”

“Hold still, you yahoos,” someone said. The Jaguar tilted his hat back, drug on his cigarette one more time and the shutter snapped.

Eddie unplugged himself from the image, stunned.

It’s a trick,
he thought.
How did he . . . he must’ve got inside, I didn’t know. . . .

But he knew better. If the Jaguar had found Eddie once, he would not need to send Mel Thompkins with his fancy rifle. The memory was real, not a copy from his father’s mind.

The Jaguar
was
his father.

Eddie reached out for another memory, further back in the line, and found himself looking through a bombsight at a railroad bridge. The sudden barrage of noise that came with it hurt his ears, and when he jammed his thumb down on the release the sudden upward lurch of the plane emptied his stomach.

“Bombs away!” he heard himself wail, then the plane veered right, pivoted for a moment on one wing and somewhere they took two hits that tumbled them over. He vomited again and gripped the bombsight in both arms as though it would save him when really it was Hugo’s mastery at the controls that got them right. Eddie backed out of there, moved down the rack, pulled out another memory.

This time the Jaguar rode on a bus, pulling into a station, and all around him the men on the bus were out of their seats, yelling, stomping their feet, hanging out the windows. The Jaguar sat, watching his hands tremble. Deep scratches marred his wedding ring. His nails were bitten back to their angry red beds, and he had chewed the skin away from them, too. Out the window a small woman jumped up and down in the front of the crowd and waved her shiny black pocketbook. Eddie knew that it smelled like Juicy Fruit gum, like her breath. Under her little gray hat with the stylish chunk of blue veil, he saw the woman who had no idea who he’d become.

Five days,
Eddie heard the Jaguar’s thoughts on that day,
five days and we ship out.

Eddie had to pull the plug on that one; he couldn’t stand any more. He couldn’t stand the beauty of his mother in her youth, of what the Jaguar had made of her, of him. He couldn’t tolerate the Jaguar’s beautiful memory of her, so he shattered the pieces.

Against his better judgment, Eddie memorized the puzzle that held his mother’s image for replay later. That would make up in part for all the pictures of her that nobody had saved for him.

Eddie wanted to scrawl, “You’re my father!” all over the walls of the Jaguar’s brain. His father wasn’t buried in the valley, after all. Mark White had approximated a father, though Eddie thought of him more as an older brother.

But he was inside the Jaguar’s brain, and the truth was clear—the Jaguar was his father. Then he realized the greater truth, the one that broke his heart.

He knows.

For a moment Eddie was paralyzed with the enormity of that fact—the Jaguar knew Eddie for his son, and set out to destroy him, anyway. Eddie saw the magnitude of his danger, and his responsibility. Eddie knew that no matter who the Jaguar was, he had to stop destroying lives in two worlds—maybe even the worlds themselves. Maryellen was a part of that world, and now, for that alone, he would not let it go.

The pulse beat faster, harder, and stuttered into an irregular pounding that unleashed the stench of fear around him. Eddie’s little scrambler was starting to work, the whiskbroom program must have found the corpus colossum and followed it to the medulla. The house of the Jaguar was coming down. Eddie raced nerve pathways to keep ahead of shutdown, and all around him those pathways were sputtering out.

What happens if I can’t get out?

He scrambled through the sandy-floored warehouse of the Jaguar’s brain and unlocked bins, unplugged cables, switched switches and signs. He linked the tails of as many puzzle pieces as he could as fast as he could and got the hell out of that place. He was barreling full-steam towards the deafening roar of the blue waves when a searing white flash ripped into his own head. He saw nothing, felt nothing, heard Maryellen calling him as if from across loud water, but he couldn’t answer.

The Jaguar was an addictive-obsessive. Like a chemical or sexual addiction, the power of the dreamways, the power over thousands of lives had him hooked, stronger than any drug. And the Jaguar had had the best drugs, the finest brandies, before he flew those dreamways, and they made up the sand drifting shut the back streets and suburbs of his mind.

Eddie remembered little of his descent into the Jaguar’s maelstrom. Now, in surgery, he got a taste for what invasion felt like. They went down into the bone of his head. Even asleep there, limp and cold on the steel table, Eddie heard them grinding away, sawing. The whine of the steel brush and steel drill ripped inside way far down and took chunks of him out.

He wasn’t afraid, alone in the dark.
Alone
was something familiar to him.

One good thing about being left alone,
he thought.
You learn to take good care of yourself because you know you’re all you’ve got.

Eddie felt himself lighten, as if a burden lifted, as if someone flung wide the drapes in a dark room. He remembered that his grandparents had locked him up many times in the closet, and sometimes in the pantry. They couldn’t afford a sitter. They had done the same to his mother, and now Eddie understood something of why she had fallen for the Jaguar. Even after the longest day and night in the closet, the sound of his grandfather’s key in the lock always made Eddie’s heart leap, always made him feel
lighter.
He forgot the jailer, and welcomed liberation.

Needles pricked his face and forehead and his skull. The tail of the thread that closed him in tickled his nose and his cheek as the doctor pulled it across, knotted it and tied the rest of him down good and tight. He was good and tight in there, running and re-running in an endless loop of grainy movie, jerky in spots but continuous and demanding as the tides, as his bladder or the faint harmonics of dying stars.