The Painted Boy (27 page)

Read The Painted Boy Online

Authors: Charles DeLint

BOOK: The Painted Boy
8.19Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
That had been bad enough.
El entre
was worse. Knowing about the animal people, how someone like Rita could simply appear when you called her name, you couldn’t help but think that you were constantly surrounded by invisible spirit presences. And here in
el entre
. . . the spiritlands . . . Aztlán . . . whatever this place was called . . . this was where all the spirits came from.
He kept looking around as he walked, thinking he’d caught movement out of the corner of his eye, but whenever he turned, there was nothing—there was
nobody
—there. Finally, he forced himself to stop worrying about it. If there
were
spirits watching, let them. It wasn’t like he could stop them.
It didn’t take him as long to get up into the mountains as he thought it should have, but he wasn’t surprised. Something about the place—the air, or maybe what Lupita called “medicine”—made it seem as though time moved faster, or sometimes slower—you could never tell which. There were evenings he’d gone rambling with Lupita for what felt like a week, but when he got back to Santo del Vado Viejo only a couple of hours had passed. Other times, he’d be here for no more than a few minutes and an hour would have gone by.
Once he was in the mountains, he followed a switch-back until it finally led him out onto a long ridge. He was high up now—maybe a third of the distance to the peaks, which reared still taller into the sky above him. The ridge took him around the mountain where it opened up onto a small plateau. He stood there for a long time, taking in all the space and trying not to feel too small. Though maybe feeling small was a good thing. Maybe it would help him keep everything in perspective.
“So dragon,” he said aloud. “Are you ready to wake up?”
There was no response, not even the shifting feel of scales deep in his mind. But he remembered what Rita had said:
You don’t have conversations with your arm before you get it to do something, do you?
So he reached into his pocket and pulled out a short length of saguaro rib that he’d collected on his way into the mountains. He held it between his thumb and forefinger. Thinking of fire, he blew on the free end.
Nothing happened.
So where was the fiery dragon breath when you wanted it?
What he needed, he supposed, was to key into that moment in the music hall. Except how was he supposed to do that? He’d been so angry that night. And he shouldn’t need anger. He wasn’t the Incredible Hulk. Both Rita and Lupita had told him that the dragon was a part of him, not something he changed into.
You don’t have conversations with your arm . . .
He tried again, this time just assuming that the piece of cactus would burst into flame.
Still nothing.
This was stupid. The dragon was real. He knew that. Everybody from Paupau to the gangbanger girl living with Señora Elena knew it. So why couldn’t he set just one freakin’ little twig on fire?
He glared at the cactus he held and blew again.
The rib burst into flame.
“Ow, ow!” he cried.
He dropped it, shaking his fingers to try to cool them down.
That
hurt
.
But it had worked.
Okay, that was cool, he thought as he sucked on his fingers. But then he remembered the gangbanger in the music hall, how Jay had burned him to a crisp after the gangbanger stabbed Margarita.
Doing that kind of damage . . . maybe it wasn’t cool. But it was effective. Or at least it would be if he could learn how to call it up whenever he needed it.
His fingers still hurt. You’d think a dragon would be immune to his own flame. Still he had enough time to feel a small flicker of satisfaction that he’d actually done it before a slow clapping started up behind him. Jay didn’t have to turn around to hear the mockery in the sound, but when he did, for a long moment he couldn’t see anyone. Then he realized what he’d initially thought was nothing more than a jumbled spill of red rock actually had a man lounging on the top of it.
The stranger was dressed in jeans, a white T-shirt, and scuffed cowboy boots. His hair was as black as Jay’s own, in a long braid that had fallen forward to hang down his chest. His eyes were dark and the
ping
his presence registered in Jay’s head was deep and resonating.
Great, he thought. This was just what he needed. Some big-deal cousin to hang around and watch him make a fool of himself.
Self-consciously, he stuck his burned fingers in his pocket.
“Who are you?” he asked.
The man raised his eyebrows. “We don’t throw names around as casually as the five-fingered beings do—or didn’t anybody tell you that?”
Jay shrugged. Did nobody else get tired of all this so-called mystery about names?
“Like I care,” he said. “A name’s a name.”
“And filled with medicine.”
“Whatever. Do you have a reason for following me here?”
The man smiled. “I didn’t follow you. I was already here. You just didn’t notice me.”
Jay supposed that was possible—if the man had been hiding behind the rocks. But he didn’t quite buy it. You couldn’t get much more out of the way than this plateau in the middle of
el entre
, so if the stranger wasn’t here to spy on him, then why
was
he here?
Jay decided he didn’t care about that, either.
“Well, I’m kind of busy here,” he told the stranger.
“I can see that. Are you going to burn your own toes next?”
“Look, I—”
“Because it’s all very entertaining. I’ve never seen a dragon burn himself before.”
Jay swallowed a sharp retort. He had no idea what kind of cousin or spirit the stranger was, but he didn’t need Lupita here to tell him this man was a big deal. Power crackled in the air and Jay realized there was no point in being rude. The last thing he needed right now was to make another enemy. And who knew? He might even gain himself an ally.
So he took a deep breath to steady himself before he bowed and offered the stranger the same formal greeting he’d given Señora Elena.
“” he said in Mandarin. “”
Before he could repeat what he’d said in Spanish, the stranger held up a hand.
“” he replied in flawless Mandarin, “” He switched to English. “And it explains your casual attitude to the sharing of names.”
“Sir?”
He shrugged. “You dragons can’t be controlled by the use of your name. My people can’t be, either, but that’s mostly because we don’t have names.”
Jay couldn’t stop himself from asking, “Then what do people call you?”
The stranger gave another shrug. “You can call me Abuelo, if you need to call me anything.”
“Grandfather,” Jay repeated.
It seemed like an odd choice. The stranger appeared to be in his late twenties—old enough to have a son, but hardly old enough to be a grandfather already.
“You don’t look very grandfatherly,” Jay said.
“You don’t look like much of a dragon.”
“Half the time I’m not sure what I am.”
“Ah. That explains it.”
“Explains what?”
“How a dragon could burn himself.” He paused and studied Jay for a long moment before adding, “It’s not really fire, you know. You didn’t really burn yourself.”
“What are you talking about?” Jay held up his burned fingers. “Just look at . . .”
His voice trailed off because there was nothing there—the skin wasn’t even red anymore. The blisters and pain were all gone. He’d been so distracted that he’d never noticed.
“Did you—what did you do? How did you make the burns go away?”
Abuelo shook his head. “I didn’t do a thing. I didn’t have to. Dragonfire doesn’t burn like that.”
“I saw a man burned to ash,” Jay said. “
I
burned him to ash by breathing fire on him.”
Abuelo gave him another considering look.
“Have you ever seen a man hit by lightning?” he asked. “And I don’t mean a glancing blow. I’m talking about old-school fire-from-the-heavens lightning that can level a ponderosa pine sixty feet tall and leave nothing but ash.”
Jay shook his head.
“That’s what dragonfire can do. What it can’t do is hurt the dragon who called it up.”
“But I saw . . . I felt . . .”
“It was in your mind. You expected to burn your fingers, so you did. And you don’t breathe dragonfire, though I suppose you can call it up that way. Most people find it easier to just throw it like this.”
Abuelo flung out a fist as though he was throwing a ball. Jay wasn’t sure he actually saw a trail of light, but he certainly saw the explosive flare in the sky above them.
He turned back to the stranger.
“Who
are
you?” he asked.
“Nobody.”
Jay shook his head. “No, you’re from one of the dragon clans.” He remembered something Lupita had told him and added, “Are you a feathered serpent?”
Abuelo shook his head. “I tell you, I’m nobody. Once I lived in the world you come from, but that was a long time ago.”
“What made you leave?” Jay asked.
Abuelo looked away for long enough that Jay wished he hadn’t asked the question, but then the man sighed.
“Did you ever think you could make a difference?” he asked.
Jay nodded. He had—or at least other people had thought it for him. Anna and Rosalie and Tío. Rita and Lupita. Even Maria and Señora Elena. He just wasn’t so sure he could do what they all expected of him.
“I did, too,” Abuelo said. “I thought I could make the world a better place. I thought I had all the answers. But in the end I was as bad as Cody. Everything I touched went the wrong way.”
“Cody?”
“You know the stories, how he brought death and illness and fire and who knows what else into the world.”
Jay shook his head.
“They call him Coyote in the stories.”
Jay remembered those, from Lupita.
“My mistakes weren’t ever quite on the scale of Cody’s,” Abuelo went on, “but they still caused problems. People still got hurt. Finally, I had enough and I retreated to these mountains. It’s good here. You can spend a whole day watching the sky change and nobody gets hurt.”
Jay thought about what he was planning to do, this confrontation with El Tigre.
“What kinds of things did you try to do?” he asked.
Abuelo shrugged. “Oh, the usual. Mostly it boiled down to trying to get people to stop pissing on each other. But you can’t change everybody’s way of looking at the world. You can only change things if there’s someone in charge who makes people do the right thing, but you know how it goes. The ones that want to be in charge shouldn’t be, and the people who fall into the job, or get pushed into it . . . sooner or later they get corrupted. Or screw up. Or both.”
“Crap.”
“You said it.”
“No,” Jay told him. “I mean, yeah, what you’re saying is probably true. I’m sure it’s true. But it just means I’m really screwed.”
Abuelo didn’t say anything, but his eyebrows went up in a question. Jay hesitated for a moment, then went ahead and gave Abuelo the CliffsNotes version of his story.
Abuelo seemed to be a good listener, but when the story was done and he still didn’t say anything, Jay began to wonder if he’d even been listening. Finally, the man stirred.
“So people are guilting you into doing this?” he said. “It’s not something you think should be doing?”
“Yes, no. I don’t know. It’s all so confusing. I’m just a kid.”
Abuelo smiled. “You kept saying that while you told me your story, but what does it mean?”
“That I’m too young to have to be making decisions like this.”
“You’re never too young to do the right thing,” Abuelo said.
Jay nodded, but he had to ask, “Or too old? Because here you are.”
Something flickered in the man’s eyes, but then he shrugged.
“That’s true,” he said. “So I’m probably the last person you should listen to.”
“I’m sorr y,” Jay told him. “That was rude of me. If you have any advice for me, I’d really like to hear it.”
Abuelo made another fist and tossed lightning into the sky above them once more. He turned back to Jay and gave him a thin smile.
“I suggest you should at least learn to control your fire,” he said.
“Can you show me how?”
Abuelo nodded. He came down from the rocks, landing lightly on his feet. Standing, he was a little taller than Jay. He tapped a finger on Jay’s chest, on his breastbone.
“We call this the heart of the medicine,” he said.
“You mean my
qi
?”
“If that’s the dragon name for it. But whatever you call it, everything comes from that place inside us. Our medicine. Our identity. Our understanding of how everything we are connects under, not only our skin, but under the skin of the world around us.”
Paupau had told Jay as much.
Qi
was the life force, she said. When enough of it accumulated in one place, a being was born. When it was depleted, the being died.
“But it’s hard to always remain centered in that place,” Abuelo went on. “The simple act of living is filled with too many distractions. So what I need to do is show you how to settle into the heart of your medicine whenever you need to. And at a moment’s notice.”
Without any further preamble, Abuelo ran Jay through a series of exercises that were similar to Paupau’s endless practice sessions. He had no trouble following them, but there were subtle differences. For one thing, under Abuelo’s direction Jay could physically feel his
qi
as it woke in his chest, the energy flowing throughout him. For another, whenever Jay had a question, Abuelo would give him the answer, if he knew it. If he didn’t, he would speculate with Jay about what the answer might logically be. There was none of Paupau’s, “This is just the way it is.” Or her enigmatic, “Someday you will understand why we do this.”

Other books

The Officer and the Secret by Murray, Jeanette
The Evil Beneath by A.J. Waines
Background to Danger by Eric Ambler
Fire on the Water by Joe Dever
Stryker by Jordan Silver
Brooke by V.C. Andrews
Forever Friends by Lynne Hinton
Level 2 (Memory Chronicles) by Appelhans, Lenore
The Reformed by Tod Goldberg