The Painted Boy (11 page)

 

 

After that Sunday with Ramon, I take to going out for walks in the neighborhood after work. I like the quiet and the night air, and there’s not much else to do that late, anyway. I’d call my parents, but because of the time difference I can only do it from the restaurant just before we start serving dinner. Otherwise they’re fast asleep. Tío’s usually busy working on the restaurant’s books, making up the deposit, putting together his food orders. Ines is friendly enough, but she’s got a whole other life that only seems to start when the restaurant closes, and she doesn’t come by the house much. The clubs she goes to don’t get happening until around midnight, and that’s not my scene. Not that she’s ever asked me to tag along or anything.

As for Rosalie, if it’s a night off, she spends the evening with Ramon after she’s done her homework. If she’s been in the restaurant that night, she usually hits the books in her trailer.

“I can’t believe you don’t miss school,” she said to me once.

“I can’t believe you like it.”

She shook her head. “In five or ten years, when you get tired of working in a restaurant, you’ll regret not having your diploma to fall back on. Graduates get the good jobs.”

“In five or ten years,” I told her, “I could be a dragon for real, doing whatever the hell it is that dragons do. Then whether or not I have a diploma won’t matter, will it?”

We’ve only known each other for a couple of weeks, but it’s already an old argument.

So she’s got her boyfriend and her studying. Sometimes I hang with them. Sometimes Rosalie and I go to band rehearsals. Sometimes I sit with Tío on the patio and get him to tell me stories of how things used to be in the barrio. But mostly it’s just me and the desert night.

With Tío’s house so close to the national park, all I have to do is walk that long block and I’m at the parking lot by the trailhead. Even sitting on the front porch, I can hear the coyotes. But I like walking along Redondo Drive, which borders the park. I can smell the creosote and dust; the sky is huge above me and filled with stars. Sometimes I catch glimpses of javelinas rooting around in the prickly pear.

The third or fourth time I take a late night walk, I bring the dogs with me. I already walk them sometimes before work. Rosalie just shakes her head because I can take them all off leash and even she can only do that with maybe half of them. She’s got a few rescues that are really skittish and liable to snap—or so she says. She talks about how they’ve been mistreated and they need to regain their trust of people, but they’re cool with me. All of them are. They just flow around me, marking cacti and clumps of dead weeds, checking everything for smells. But they stay close and come as soon as I call them. We’ve got an understanding, I guess.

So I’m a little surprised and freaked out when they take off on me just after midnight one night. I’m even more worried when I see the figure they’ve spotted down the street ahead of us. I yell at the dogs and chase after them, but they don’t listen. The dogs herd what I see is just a kid up against a chain-link fence, then they pen her there in a half circle of bared teeth and fierce growls.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” I cry to the kid as I catch up. I pull dogs away so that I can get to the girl. “Go on, get out of here,” I tell them. “Jeez, Oswaldo, what’re you thinking?” To the girl I quickly add, “They won’t hurt you. I won’t let them hurt you.”

I repeat the words in Spanish.

I’m so pissed off at myself. Why did I have to get so cocky, thinking I could control the dogs just because I’m supposed to have some kind of stupid dragon blood? Rosalie warned me that a few of them aren’t properly socialized yet. I’ve never had a dog in my life, but suddenly I know better? This girl could have been seriously hurt.

She’s maybe fourteen or fifteen, barefoot, in raggedy pink cotton trousers and a lime green T-shirt that hangs down to her knees. Her hair’s a mix of light and dark brown tangles, streaked with blond. Her eyes are large and seem almost luminous in the dark.

I find it odd that she doesn’t seem scared. That she’s out here on her own so late at night.

Odder still is the little
ping
of recognition that tells me she’s from one of the animal clans. Except that can’t be right. I mean, she’s really just a kid.

“I know they won’t hurt me,” she says. She’s got a lower voice than I expected. “Not with you here to protect me.”

Trusting much? I think.

But the dogs are no longer paying attention to her. My pulse starts to slow down and I guess everything’s okay. No harm done. But no more midnight rambles with the dogs, that’s for sure. It’s not fair to anyone we might run across. I mean, this poor girl . . .

“I’m really sorry about them scaring you like that,” I say, feeling the need to keep apologizing.

“I wasn’t scared.”

So now I’m wondering what kind of drugs she’s using. But I go on. “They’ve never done that before.”

She shrugs. “It’s just their nature.”

She’s way too calm about this.

“You’re out kind of late,” I say.

She nods. “But it’s so nice late at night. I mean, look at the stars. Just
look
at them!”

She twirls in a circle as she speaks, her fingers pointing straight up at the night sky. I know just what she means— it’s one of the reasons I like to go walking this late—but I’m not some little kid who should have been in bed hours ago. And she’s definitely got to be stoned.

“Where do you live?” I ask.

She gives a vague wave of her hand toward the east.

“Let me walk you home,” I say.

“It’s a long way.”

Maybe in her mind it is, but I know there are only a few houses between here and the trailhead, so it can’t be that far. And I’m sure not leaving her out here on her own. I start down the street and she falls in step beside me. The dogs range ahead, except for a little Jack Russell/toy poodle mix named Pepito who growls at the girl until I shoo him away.

“What’s your name?” I ask.

“Lupita.”

“I’m Jay,” I tell her.

She grins. “I know that. Everybody knows about you.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know, how you’re all dragony and everything.”

I stop in my tracks. “Who told you that?”

Lupita’s got a big smile. “Why would someone have to tell me? Ai-yi-yi! If you don’t want people to know you’re a dragon you shouldn’t walk around the way you do, all big and rumbly, with a fire in your belly.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, you’re so cute. Are you still going to walk me home?”

She seems to shimmer under the streetlights. For a moment I think I see small antlers poking up from the tangle of her hair, long droopy rabbit’s ears hanging down on either side of her face. I remember the little inner
ping
I felt when I first saw her. Then the antlers and droopy ears are gone.

“What do you mean by ‘everybody’?” I ask. “Who’s this ‘everybody’ that knows about me?”

She shrugs. “Oh, you know. All the cousins.”

I give a slow nod. “And you’re one, too.”

“Well, duh.”

“How old are you really?”

She cocks her head. “What do you mean by ‘really’?”

“Well, you look fourteen or fifteen—in, um, human years.”

“Oh, that,” she says. “We always look young to the five-fingered beings when we change over.”

“By ‘we’ do you mean all the cousins?”

“I don’t know about all the cousins,” she says, “but that’s how it works with the jackalope clan.”

“Jackalopes aren’t real,” I tell her. “Even I know that. They’re just this joke that somebody started—some taxidermist putting deer horns on a jackrabbit.”

She pulls a face. “That’s gross.” She pokes me with her finger. “Does this feel real?”

And then she does it some more—poke, poke—after which she pouts, crosses her arms across her chest, and turns away.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to be insulting. This is—all of this is just really new to me.”

She looks at me over her shoulder.

“Are you really sorry?” she asks.

“Really.”

“How big is your sorry?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

She’s turned fully around now. “Is it as big as a house? As a mountain? As the moon, moon, moon?”

She does another one of her twirls, arms held straight out. Pepito gives a sharp bark.

“Oh, be quiet,” I tell him.

“That doesn’t sound like you’re very sorry.”

I point at the dog. “I was talking to Pepito.”

“I think you’re bossy.”

I sigh. “I’m not. It’s just that it’s late and I don’t want to wake people up.”

“Why not? It’s a beautiful night. I love the night, don’t you? Or are you like the snake and lizard cousins who are always looking for some stretch of sunlight to loll about in?”

She keeps twirling as she speaks but now she stops and looks at me, hands on her hips, waiting for an answer.

“I like the night,” I assure her.

“I knew you did. I’ve seen you out walking before. We have so much in common, don’t you think? Except you’re not very good at saying you’re sorry and I am. If I was sorry about something, I’d be as sorry as the whole wide world.”

“That’s exactly how sorry I am,” I say, falling into the spirit of things. “I’m as sorry as the whole world and the sky above it, too.”

“Oh, good.” She takes my hand. “Well, come on and I’ll show you where I live.”

She leads me to the trailhead. I’ve never actually gone into the park at night, preferring to walk along the edge so that the dogs don’t go running wild. They’re always wanting to go in and I have to call them back, but tonight they settle down in the dirt, as though this is something I’m supposed to do on my own.

I pause to look back at them. “Don’t get into trouble. And don’t chase
anybody
!”

“Bossy, bossy,” Lupita says with a laugh, and tugs on my hand.

As she pulls me along, I keep catching glimpses of those small deer horns and the long floppy jackrabbit ears. I suppose the weirdest thing is that I don’t find them strange anymore.

I’m a little nervous at first. We’re moving quickly and I’m thinking of Ramon’s warnings about being careful of the cacti—some of the thorns have barbed ends, and I don’t relish the idea of having to pull them out one by one. But Lupita is sure-footed, steering us easily on a weaving path in between the saguaro and cholla and prickly pear, and I realize that my night sight is much better than I thought, because I can see almost as clearly as if it were day.

It takes us half the time to get into the foothills that it did when I was last here with Ramon. Instead of following the trail, Lupita leads me up a ravine that soon turns into a small canyon. There isn’t as much vegetation in here. It’s mostly just a jumble of sand and rock with dead weeds and small trees I can’t name growing along and up the sides. Soon the red stone walls tower above us. Lupita lets go of my hand and starts up this vague winding ghost of a trail that I can barely make out even with my night sight.

“Aren’t you coming?” she asks when she realizes I’m still standing on the canyon floor.

“Coming to where?”

“Up here with me. You’ll like where we’re going.”

“Come on, Lupita. It’s the middle of the night.”

“I know. Isn’t it great?”

“I don’t know. . . .”

“Oh, pooh! What kind of a dragon are you?”

“The kind that should know better,” I mutter.

But I start up the faint trail. She darts ahead, nimble as a bighorn, laughter trailing behind her. Eventually I catch up and join her on an enormous slab of rock that sticks out of the side of the mountain. We’re hundreds of feet above the desert, which stretches away from the mountain for as far as the eye can see.

It takes me a few moments to realize what’s missing.

“Where’s the city?” I ask. “Shouldn’t Santo del Vado Viejo be out there?”

She shakes her head. “We’ve kind of taken a step sideways. This is what the world looks like without all that concrete and metal.”

“I don’t understand.”

She laces her fingers together. Wiggling the fingers of one hand, she says, “This is the world where we met.” Then she wriggles the fingers of the other hand. “And this is where we are now. They kind of take up the same space except they don’t. It’s simple when you think about it.”

This is one more thing that Paupau never told me about, but I’m tired of being the gawking tourist, so I just nod like I get it.

“And this . . . is this where you live?” I ask.

I’m astonished by the view, how the desert spreads out under the huge velvet expanse of sky thick with stars. So it’s got that totally going for it. But after that? We’re still just standing on this slab of rock sticking out of a cliff.

She laughs. “Of course not, silly. I live with some deer cousins in a trailer not far from where you do.”

“But you said—”

She does that finger-poke thing again. “Oh, you. You take everything so seriously. You can still walk me home. But first we needed to see this. Isn’t it grander than grand?”

She gets up and starts to dance. I try to grab her. If she falls, it’s a long way down. But she slips out of my reach. I hold my breath as she pirouettes right to the edge, then back. She sinks gracefully into a cross-legged position directly in front of me, takes my hand and pulls me down.

“Don’t dragons dance?” she asks.

“I don’t know many dragons. Just Paupau—my grandmother—and I’ve never seen her dance.”

“Well, that would be just sad—if you couldn’t dance, I mean.”

“I guess.”

I catch the glimpse of deer antlers and long ears again—here, then gone.

“Can I ask you something?” I say.

“Anything. Fire away.”

“I keep thinking I see little horns poking up out of your hair and sometimes your ears are long and droopy like a . . . um . . .”