Jaguar (5 page)

The Jaguar found self-protection a reflex. Like the excellent athlete, he exercised reflex to a hair-trigger. These people were messing with the man who had handed them the bomb on a platter, free, no strings attached. They’d better not prove themselves ungrateful; they’d better not become a nuisance.

If you have not seen the day of revolution in a small town where all know
all in the town and always have known all, you have seen nothing. . . .

—Ernest Hemingway,
For Whom the Bell Tolls

The small, lush valley crowded against the mountain and the monster city downriver. Farmers there built a small town on berries, beans and flower bulbs. Like any small town of any language, nearly everything about anyone was known by everyone. Invisibility, even for a quiet boy like Eddie Reyes, was out of the question.

The clerk in the feed store watched every day as Eddie walked in the front door, past the brooder full of baby chicks, and out the open double doors in the back. Some days Eddie bought small red salt licks for his rabbits, sometimes a bag of oats, but usually he simply walked through. The clerk never asked about his mother, and Eddie never brought it up.

The clerk, Weldon, was one of the few men in town with a beard—blond, broad and bushy. Weldon was so tall that he had to duck a little when he came through the doorway. He was strong, too—he threw feed sacks and hay bales into trucks all day without sweating or slowing down. A few men made the feed store their base for gossip, but Weldon never joined in. He wasn’t sullen, just busy. He ignored them while they drank his coffee at his counter or on his hay bales. Weldon let Eddie have coffee sometimes, if the men weren’t there yet.

Weldon worked hard and kept to himself, especially after he was caught poaching deer out of season with a flintlock. Some of the coffee-men called him “Mountain Man” after that, but not to his face.

When Eddie hurried through the store this morning, Weldon didn’t stare at him. Their glances met, Weldon nodded and smiled, then he handed Eddie a coffee-and-milk. Eddie was sure that Weldon could reach the rusty fire escape that zigzagged behind the ivy up the back wall of the hospital to his mother’s window.

His birthday dawned with the second Friday in June and Eddie waited outside the feed store for Weldon to open up. The morning stayed gray, and the clouds squeezed slow drizzle onto the shoulders of the town. The black rabbit under Eddie’s coat squirmed against his ribs. It wasn’t weaned yet, but it knew Eddie and didn’t struggle when he picked it up. He talked to the rabbit every day because he had nobody else to talk to.

A trickle of rain slipped down the back of his collar. Eddie shrugged and pressed himself farther back into the shallow doorway. The loose fender of Weldon’s pickup rattled as it made the turn.

“He’s coming,” Eddie said.

The rabbit said nothing.

“Morning,” was all Weldon said.

Weldon glanced at Eddie a couple of times while he worked the key into the old lock. He waited for Eddie to step aside, then unlocked the door. The store didn’t open until 7:30, so he left the sign in the door that said “Closed.”

Weldon fussed with his big coffee machine while Eddie leaned against the counter and petted the rabbit under his coat. Eddie was nervous, now, and the rabbit was breathing faster. It poked a busy nose farther under his armpit.

Weldon put the lid on the urn, plugged it in and slid it to the corner of the counter beside Eddie. Then he waited. Eddie felt him waiting and when he finally glanced up, Weldon’s eyebrows rose as if to ask, “Well?”

“I need some help,” Eddie blurted. His bottom front teeth weren’t quite grown back enough to stop a slight lisp.

Weldon smiled, and without lowering his huge, bushy eyebrows he asked, “Help with what?”

“That fire escape,” Eddie said, and he nodded towards the back of the store, towards the hospital. Weldon didn’t seem surprised.

“Now, in the daylight?”

“It’s my birthday.”

The rabbit scrambled a little to turn itself around. Weldon’s glance flicked to the front of Eddie’s coat, back to his eyes.

“If we’re going to do it, let’s do it now,” Weldon said. It came out as a long sigh. Weldon was already headed for the rear doors and Eddie hurried to keep up.

The big man jumped up, grabbed the lowest rung of the rusty ladder, and pulled. He dropped to the ground, but the ladder hadn’t budged. Weldon jumped up again and got a better grip this time. He bounced himself on it twice and let go.

“Jesus,” he said. His cheeks puffed out in his red face as he caught his breath. Weldon looked up and down the alley between the buildings, then patted Eddie on the back.

“Are you
sure
you have to go this way?”

Eddie nodded. “They won’t let me in. You have to be fourteen.”

Weldon mumbled something into his beard.

“What?”

“Nothing. Come on.”

Eddie followed Weldon back to the feed store. Weldon took another key from his fist of keys and opened up the Coke machine. He unclicked the mechanism and a bottle of Coke dropped out. He put the machine back together, like a refrigerator, and opened the bottle. He offered it to Eddie and Eddie took a sip. He couldn’t tip the bottle up without dropping the rabbit out from under his arm, so all he could get was a sip.

Weldon took a swallow, then said, “Watch this.”

He jumped, grabbed the rung with his left hand and held the Coke in his right. He shook up the bottle with his thumb over the top, then sprayed the rest of the Coke into the hinge of the ladder. He tossed the empty to Eddie, got a good grip and bounced it a couple more times. The rusty ramp unkinked itself with a sharp screech, not at all as quiet as Eddie had hoped.

Weldon’s hair stuck to his sweaty forehead. Eddie had seen him work hard in the feed store and this was the first time he’d seen him sweat. Weldon bounced on it again but it wouldn’t come down all the way.

“Can you jump and reach that now?” Weldon asked. He was trying to talk and catch his breath at the same time. Eddie stood underneath and the tips of his right fingers almost touched the rung. He nodded.

“Yes.”

He looked both ways; still no one in the alley. Someone out front of the feed store pounded for Weldon to let him in.

“What about this?” Weldon asked. He patted the bulge in Eddie’s jacket where the rabbit hid. Without waiting for an answer, Weldon picked Eddie up and set him on the fire escape.

“Thanks,” Eddie said.

“Happy birthday,” Weldon said. “Good luck.”

He shook his head and walked back inside the store.

Eddie didn’t like the gratings under the steps of the fire escape. He could see clear through to the ground and it seemed a long way down already. He worked his way up the three floors through the ivy to his mother’s window, trying to keep the rabbit calm against the thrash of his heart in his chest.

He sat a little bit with his eyes closed, catching his breath. When he opened his eyes, he glimpsed the shadow of a boy his own age dodge down the alleyway towards the mill. The lumber mill on the next block was three blocks long and the owner grazed sheep among the stacks of lumber. His glimpse of the boy showed him only someone his own age and size, someone like the boy in his dreams.

Rafferty.

The name from inside his head sounded perfect. This shadow had skirted him for awhile now, and skipped through the fringes of his dreams. In the last dream, Eddie looked down on the shadow-boy from the gnarled branch of a yew. From where he perched, Eddie saw the boy hiding down there, and someone circled towards him in the grass. Eddie looked down from the tree to see himself reflected in brown lake water: he was a crow. He shook his wings out to make sure. His heart was beating awfully fast, and whatever it was nearly had the boy.

Rafferty.

Again, the name had awakened him from a sweaty sleep, but Eddie had barked it in the brusque vernacular of a crow. Now he scanned the sky and treetops. Plenty of crows, but they all stayed put. The trees swayed, and he squinted through a bit of a headache even though it was too cloudy for glare.

When he heard voices in the back of the feed store he raised his mother’s window and stepped through, between the curtains.

Eddie’s mother must have heard the window, because as he slung one leg over the sill she gave out a little cry of surprise. She had already partly covered herself with the sheet she gathered between her stumps. A white patch covered one of her eyes. All he could really see of her the way she huddled into her sheet was her one blue eye surrounded by a swirl of pink scars to the top of her head where some wispy hair began.

Eddie’s rabbit squirmed against his ribs.

His mother made that cry again, and he realized it was his name. She glanced at the blue curtain that separated her bed from the rest of the room.

Eddie heard snoring from somewhere on the other side. His mother’s blanket shifted, and on her patched-eye side her ear looked like a melted flower bud.

He pulled his other leg over and scooted off the sill into the room.

“Eddie,” she whispered, and hunched the blanket higher, “I don’t want you to see.”

She lowered her head and he thought she would tell him to leave.

Then she sighed, and whispered, “But I’ve wanted to see you so
much
.”

She talked through a tight throat, and her shoulders shook. She cleared her throat and lowered the sheet so that Eddie could see her eye.

“It’s your birthday and you were born right here, downstairs. . . .”

She shifted herself over on her bed and patted the cover beside her. He listened before he moved for sounds of anybody in the hallway, but it was quiet.

“Six,” she whispered. “You’re six and you’re such a little man already.”

She was shivering but he only noticed after he sat on the bed beside her. A very strong smell hit him, and the rabbit didn’t like it either because it started scrambling under his jacket until it got out and onto the bed. It huddled against Eddie and worked its busy nose at his mother.

She rubbed his back through her bedclothes and nearly hugged him. But he sat still, not knowing where to look, and noticed his mother’s perfect white feet. They barely touched the floor and her toe-knuckles kinked white where she held to her balance. Small feet, delicately veined in a blue very nearly the color of her remaining eye. Wide, she’d told him, because she went barefoot as a girl.

“I brought this one so you could see him,” Eddie said. “The whole litter is black-and-white, but this one is all black.”

“Does he have a name?”

“No,” Eddie said, “I thought you’d want to name him.”

She started to reach out from under her sheet towards the rabbit, but pulled back.

“He won’t bite,” Eddie said. “He’s the best one of the bunch.”

When she moved, Eddie saw that one arm was much shorter than the other. One arm stopped just above the wrist, the other ended at the elbow. He couldn’t stop staring at the dull lumps they formed against the inside of her sheet.

His mother said, “Put him here, on my lap. I can’t . . . I can’t hold him, so you’ll have to watch out that he doesn’t get away. They wouldn’t care for a rabbit running the halls here, would they?”

Eddie picked up the rabbit and set it carefully in his mother’s lap. She winced a bit. She shifted to get comfortable and her back, where the gown fell open, looked as smooth and white as her feet. Her backbone stood out like thick knuckles. She hurt her back at work just before he turned five and had to stay home and take medicines for a long time. They ate macaroni and cheese almost every night then, and Eddie would rubbed her back with smelly stuff every morning and night.

His mom would not take her arms out from the covers to pet the rabbit, but she sort of cuddled it there in her lap. She leaned one shoulder against Eddie and he kissed her beside her good eye. She would not show herself below her eyes, and forming some words seemed hard for her. He realized that she spoke in a whisper because that’s all she had, not because she was afraid he’d be found.

Suddenly an elevator door slapped open down the hallway, then dishes rattled in a cart.

“You’d better hide . . . oh, the window!”

Eddie hurried to the window and pulled it closed. He got up so fast he startled the rabbit and it scrambled off his mother’s lap and under the bed. As the food cart banged the door open, Eddie slid himself under her bed, too. The rabbit was gone; he couldn’t see it anywhere.

A pair of white shoes filled with white stockings walked around the cart and toed up to the next bed first, then his mother’s.

Eddie’s rabbit left a scatter of pellets, and he was glad it hadn’t done that in his mother’s lap. Wads of dust-balls hung from the springs at the head of the bed. Eddie’s nose tickled and he rubbed it hard so he wouldn’t sneeze.

“Morning, Mrs. Reyes,” an elderly voice said. “Jeanie will be up from therapy in a minute to help you out with this. My, you’re doing so much better than Doris, here. We’ve got a full house and I’ve got to run. Is there something I can get you before Jeanie comes in?”

His mother cleared her throat, and in her hoarse whisper asked, “Would you open the window? I’d like some fresh air.”

“I’ll have to ask doctor about that,” the voice replied. The shoes squeak-squeaked back to the cart. “Infection is the hobgoblin of burn patients. We don’t want you to come this far just to lose you now, do we? Doctor will be in this morning, too. I hear that he has some news from that burn center in California. You be good for Jeanie, now, and I’ll see you at lunch time.”

The door slapped shut behind the cart and they were left with the wet snores of Doris across the curtain. Eddie scrambled out from under the bed.

“That was close,” he said, but before he could say anything else his mother shushed him.

“Eddie, you’ve got to get something for me from home and bring it here right away. Can you get home and back in the window again?”

He nodded.

“Yes,” he said, “but the rabbit . . . oh, there he goes!”

The little black thing crept out from under Doris’ bed, testing the air with its quick nose. Eddie started after it and it darted away.