The Painted Boy (31 page)

“That’s good,” the woman in the cowboy hat said. “Now bring down the volume, too.”

Like Rosalie, her attention was also on Jay. She had her back to the musicians so they didn’t hear what she said, but with the flat of her hand, she kept motioning for them to continue to reduce the volume. They followed her direction until the sound coming from the stage was no more than a muted echo of the original thundering heartbeat.

In front of the stage, and up and down the street, the Malo Malo fans and cousins were caught in the spell. The monotonous rhythm the band now played in unison should have been boring. Instead, it filled an empty place inside them that they hadn’t even known was there, connecting them to each other through its pulsing heartbeat. They bobbed their heads in time and smiles filled their faces. Here and there, some of the cousins began shuffling dances, stirring up the dust on the street. Up on the rooftops, the crow boys followed suit and happy cries of “Hey-ya, hey-ya!” came drifting down.

But whatever this connection was, it didn’t have the same effect on the gangbangers. As Jay drew the fury of the dragon back into himself, their courage rose in direct proportion. They collected themselves from where they’d been scattered by Jay’s fireballs. Picking up dropped weapons, they started toward him, Cruz in the lead.

“No,” Jay said. “This stops here.”

His voice was quiet, but it carried throughout the street. Everything stopped. The band, the movement of the kids and cousins. They all turned to where Jay stood over the body of El Tigre, facing the gangbangers. Even the crow boys fell still, standing on the edges of the rooftops, looking down.

Cruz shook his head. “The only thing you’re going to stop is the blade of my knife.”

Jay didn’t say anything. The tiny lights began to flicker around his fingers again. The
bandas
shifted nervously, all except for Cruz.

“Throwing fireworks only works once, kid,” Cruz said. “I know what’s up. You can’t pull the same scam twice and expect to get away with it.”

Jay still didn’t respond. That big presence Rosalie could sense in him swelled larger once more. She hoped he wasn’t losing himself to the dragon again and gave the woman with the cowboy hat a nervous look. But the woman only smiled.

Before he’d allowed the dragon’s red anger to swallow him, Jay had been pretty sure he was going to die. El Tigre had already killed Maria and it was pretty obvious he would be next. So he might as well make his own death count for something.

He no longer cared how much force he used or how many of El Tigre’s men he took out before he died. El Tigre should have been finished when Maria had cut his throat. Instead, he’d changed into his animal shape as though the wound meant nothing, then simply swatted her aside, shattering her chest with one bone-crushing blow.

When El Tigre had turned to him, Jay had trouble focusing on anything except Maria. She’d probably known going in that she would fail. But she’d still been willing to try. That was true bravery. And even dying, even unable to use her voice, she’d mouthed her message to him.

Guard her well
.

He wasn’t sure if Maria had meant Rosalie, Señora Elena, or the desert itself from which the barrio had grown. That didn’t matter, either. He’d have done his best for all of them. But he wasn’t going to get the chance. The monstrous panther man that El Tigre had become was going to kill him first.

Knowing he didn’t have a chance brought Jay an odd calm. He wouldn’t call it bravery so much as an acceptance of the inevitable. He’d take his cue from Maria and go down fighting. Let the dragon level the pool hall and kill as many of the gangbangers as he could before El Tigre got him, too.

Except then the panther man pitched forward to lie still on the street, blood pooling on the dusty asphalt around the body.

And everything changed.

Whatever it had been that held him apart from the spirit of the land disappeared as suddenly as though someone had reached into his head and thrown a switch. The medicine flooded him, and he felt connected to everything in these small acres of desert. He knew every being that stood among the adobe buildings and cacti, every bird that flew its skies, every mesquite and saguaro and prickly pear, every stretch of dry dirt and scrub. And the connection kept expanding and deepening until it was all a huge noise in his head.

He knew everything, and nothing. From the Hierro Madera Mountains, through the barrio, to the far desert beyond. From the dry bed of the San Pedro River south to the border of Mexico. He could see and hear and smell it all at the same time and the barrage on his senses left him unable to pick out individual detail. It was one enormous rush of input.

He knew something was wrong.

He remembered the threat of El Tigre.

But El Tigre was dead, so what was the threat now?

He could remember letting the dragon wake up, but he had no idea if it had, or what it was doing.

He knew what Rita and Abuelo and even Lupita had said, but the dragon still seemed separate from him. He tried to find it in the overwhelming barrage of stimuli but it was hopeless.

He could remember Maria. He could almost see her body lying crumpled against the wall of the pool hall, chest crushed in, her T-shirt blossoming with blood. Or was he thinking of Margarita, murdered in the pool hall, the blood on
her
shirt? A thousand other images flickered through his mind in a headlong rush and he couldn’t hold on to only one.

But he could see the blood.

Margarita’s—no, Maria’s. El Tigre had killed Maria.

The blood . . .

Like the red haze of anger that had loosed the dragon.

He could feel himself falling deeper into the bewildering, spinning morass of sensory input.

The dragon.

What was the dragon doing?

You know that you and the dragon are one and the same, right?
he could hear Rita say in his memory.
It’s part of who you are
.

Okay. Then what was
he
doing?

But it was too late to figure that out. He could no longer separate himself from everything else in the barrio. Every human, every cousin, every creature that
wasn’t
a cousin, every plant, rock, arroyo, and dry riverbed—he was one and the same with them all now. He couldn’t get away from the overwhelming press of them for long enough to focus on who he was, or what the dragon was doing. There was only the long fall into otherness.

Falling . . . falling . . . falling . . .

He tried to grab on to something—
anything
—that would allow him to get back into himself, but the spinning pressure of the thousand thousand others inside him ran rampant, all connected and there was no way to tell one from the other. No way to tell who he was, or where he was, or what he—

No,
the dragon
.

—was doing.

But it wouldn’t be anything good. He remembered letting it wake up. And it—

No,
he
.

—had been seriously pissed. Right now it was probably destroying the barrio. And that meant
they
were going to show up soon—Paupau and the other dragons that had come with her after the dance hall was destroyed. They’d know he was out of control this time. They’d come to shut him down the way Lupita said the feathered serpents did.

He wasn’t sure he even cared anymore. Because he couldn’t live like this. If this was what it meant to be connected to everything in the barrio, he couldn’t deal with it. He didn’t see how anybody could.

But others had, hadn’t they? Señora Elena had done it. Even El Tigre, who shouldn’t have been allowed to call himself that, since he wasn’t even a tiger.

He supposed they were just stronger than him.

Because he was lost now and there was no way back.

Except . . . except . . .

The whisper of something pure crept through the chaos.

It was a singular sound and he knew he’d heard it before, but he couldn’t remember where, or what it was. He focused hard on it, trying to hold on to its elusive sound. And then he recognized what it was.

An electric guitar . . . and trumpets?

Yes, trumpets.

Bass and drums, pounding a beat that the guitar and trumpets fought with for a moment, then joined.

A needle scratching on vinyl.

Malo Malo, he thought. This was one of Ramon’s songs. The band must be playing somewhere.

Then he remembered seeing them on Camino Presidio, set up on the flatbeds of a couple of big trucks.

The music pulled him out of the morass. The quickened pulse of the music slowed and slowed until it was the same heartbeat that he’d first heard when he stepped out of
el entre
.

And as suddenly as he’d been lost, he was himself again.

Himself, but
more
. Still connected to it all, still a part of everything within this stretch of desert, but himself. He could keep it as a background hum—the way he used to keep the rustle of scales in the back of his mind—or he could zoom in on one cacti, one adobe building, one person. . . .

He didn’t know how he could have been so lost. Everything was in its place and he stood at the hub of the great wheel made of all their multiple presences. The medicine came up out of the ground right under him, from the wheel’s hub, and filled him—not so much with power as with energy. The guardian of the barrio wasn’t supposed to destroy things. He or she was here to keep everything connected. But he could destroy something if he needed to.

His eyes snapped open.

There was El Tigre. Still in the shape of some kind of panther man. Still dead.

There was the pool hall, its adobe cracked, the windows popped, shattered glass scattered on the pavement.

And there was Maria . . .

Movement distracted him. He saw the
bandas
gathering their courage. They were picking up weapons that the dragon must have knocked from their hands. Cruz was in front, the morning sun shining bright on the crown and devil’s horns tattooed on his forehead. They were ready to start the cycle of violence all over again.

“No,” Jay told them. “This stops here.”

Cruz shook his head. “The only thing you’re going to stop is the blade of my knife.”

The morning chorus of birds could be heard from the next street over, oblivious to the drama playing out here. A block away, a young mother was nursing her newborn daughter. On the edge of town, a man paused as he opened his garage to take in the beauty of the sun coming over the mountains. At the lip of an arroyo, a roadrunner spread out its wings to capture the warmth.

Jay sighed. The morning was perfect. How could the
bandas
be so focused on shedding blood? It was so frustrating that they couldn’t be made to see that their time here was done. Jay’s annoyance with them made dragonfire flicker around his fingers.

Cruz wasn’t impressed. “Throwing fireworks only works once, kid. I know what’s up. You can’t pull the same scam twice and expect to get away with it.”

Jay met the gangbanger’s gaze and held it for a long moment.

“You misunderstood me,” he said. “I wasn’t asking for the violence to stop. I’m telling you it
has
stopped. You’re alone in your lust for it.”

“What the hell are—”

“You think that knife of yours is thirsty for blood?” Jay broke in before Cruz could finish. “It’s as tired of the violence as I am.”

Jay remembered Abuelo telling him,
Dragons are rare creatures, Jay. Your elemental spirit embraces all the elements. Fire and water, rock and air
.

He called on air now. A wind, narrow and focused, plucked the knife from Cruz’s hand and sent it clattering down the pavement.

Cruz took a step forward, stopping when Jay held up his hand.

“This is the way it’s going to be,” Jay said. “No more gangs. No more drugs. No more violence. If you want something to occupy your time . . .”

He made a sweeping motion with both arms and the long row of motorcycles and low riders parked in front of the pool hall literally fell to pieces. Metal crashed and clanged as it banged against other pieces and hit the pavement. Bolts and screws and nuts went rolling in all directions. The vehicles in the parking lot weren’t spared.

“You can play with your rides,” Jay said.

The other
bandas
started to edge away, but Cruz held his ground.

“You think you can clean up the barrio, man?” he said. “You think you’re the first to try? They all try. The
policía
. The do-gooders. Nothing takes. You can’t get rid of us. This is
our
place.
Our
home.”

Jay shook his head. “I’m not cleaning it up. This place is already all it should be. It’s just that somebody forgot to take out the trash.”

Cruz snarled and lunged forward, taking a swing at Jay. But before his fist could connect, Jay called on a wind that picked the gangbanger up and flung him hard against the cracked adobe of the pool hall.