The Painted Boy (6 page)

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Authors: Charles DeLint

BOOK: The Painted Boy
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Jay stood up. He pulled off his shirt and let them look for a long moment before he put it back on. Instead of returning to the couch where Rosalie and Anna were sitting, he stood by the cold hearth so that he could face them all.
“It’s not a tattoo,” he said. “It appeared on my skin when I was eleven years old, marking me as one who’s supposed to take on the responsibilities of the yellow dragon’s heritage. This is something that passes down through families, but not everyone is chosen.”
Anna couldn’t contain herself. “Appeared?” she said. “It just
appeared
?”
“It wasn’t a painless process,” Jay said. “It took a whole day, but yes, it just appeared.”
Rosalie glanced at Anna, then returned her attention to Jay. She tried to school her features, but she was sure that her face showed the same disbelief as the others’.
“What do you mean by the full mantle of your tribe?” she asked.
Jay gave her an embarrassed look. “We become dragons.”
“You mean it’s like getting jumped in by a gang? I know—it’s not a gang. But basically you get to call yourself a dragon then, right?”
Jay shook his head. “No, we
become
dragons.”
“What,
literally
?”
“Oh, come
on
,” Anna said. “That’s—”
“Impossible,” Jay agreed. “Don’t you think I know how it sounds? But my grandmother Paupau is always talking about the shape-shifters that live unknown among us—animal people who walk around in human skins. Some are here to help mankind, others are monsters. I’ve never seen one myself, but you should see the way people act around her. Even the tongs give her respect. She’s supposed to be a dragon and my guide.”
“So we’re supposed to believe you can turn into a dragon?” Anna said.
Jay shook his head. “So far as I know, I can’t. You wanted to know what I know. Well, this is what I know. Or it’s what I’ve been told.”
“But if you prove yourself worthy you become a dragon?”
“I guess. I don’t know.”
“And Flores is
actually
a tiger?”
“Look, I know what it sounds like. I can’t explain the things that Paupau’s told me over the years. All I know for sure is that the dragon image just appeared on my back when I was eleven, but everything else? That there are monsters and secret animal people living among us? That I’ve got this duty to find a people in need and protect them? It sounds just as crazy to me. When I’m with my grandmother, it all seems to make sense. But as I stand here trying to explain this to you guys . . .”
He tried again. “I got a fever. I thought I had the flu. But it hurt so much, and then I woke up with that thing on my back, and Paupau started training me to be ready to accept the responsibilities of my heritage. But I’ve never seen a dragon, except when I look in the mirror at my back. I’ve never seen Paupau’s image and I’ve
sure
never seen her turn into a dragon.”
There was an uncomfortable silence.
“The dragon
really
just appeared on your back?” Rosalie finally asked.
Jay gave a weary nod. He didn’t look like a crazy person. He just looked like a kid, as confused as they were.
“Yeah,” he said. “It really did.”
Rosalie took a breath. She knew what Anna and Tío would think, but she had to play the devil’s advocate.
“So then,” she said, “couldn’t the other stuff maybe be true, too?”
“Jesus!” Anna broke in before Jay could answer. “Would you get real?”
Rosalie gave her a shove, but Anna ignored her.
“So,” Anna asked Jay, “do you have any other superpowers besides being able to make tattoos just appear out of thin air? And by the way, I’d really like a rose, here on my ankle.”
She stretched a leg out in front of him.
“I don’t
have
any superpowers!”
“Okay, okay.”
Another uncomfortable silence fell. Rosalie wished Tío would say something, but he seemed far away, deep in thought.
“Where did you learn to speak Spanish?” she asked, just to talk about something normal for a moment. “Because your accent makes you sound like you grew up around here.”
Jay gave her a surprised look. “I don’t speak Spanish.”
Tío and the girls exchanged puzzled looks.
“” Tío said, switching to Spanish. “”
“” Jay told him, “”
His voice trailed off and he put a hand to his mouth, his eyes widening in surprise.
“Jesus,” he said softly. “What’s happening to me?”
Tío got up. Crossing to where Jay stood, he laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder.
“It’s okay,” he said. “You didn’t remember you could speak Spanish, but some part of you did, and it just kicked in automatically.”
“I guess . . .”
He squeezed Jay’s shoulder, then steered him back to a chair.
“I can’t explain the tattoo,” Tío said, “But as for these other things that your grandmother told you . . . I mean no insult by this, Jay, but you could have been brainwashed. It’s what happens here with the
bandas
. The young men and women are taught the lies of gang life by our culture and from seeing the gangbangers every day on the street and in their schools. They have money and girls and cars. They party and everyone walks carefully around them. What child—unsure of his future, perhaps unhappy in his home—would not yearn for that kind of acceptance?
“I know this because I was one of the boys brainwashed by the music and what I saw on the street—the high life that the gangbangers seemed to live.
“But what you don’t see until it’s too late is the reality of the violence. The beatings and killings. How, even in this so-called family, there are the haves and the have-nots. You do what the lieutenants tell you, or you will suffer. You’ll steal for them. You’ll fight your rivals and kill them if need be. You’ll do jail time and find that the gangs are even stronger inside than they are out on the street.
“But you will do what you’re told, because if you don’t, the next victim will be you. You will be the boy found dead in some gully, or shot down in a drive-by.”
Rosalie shivered. Tío rarely talked so personally about the
bandas
. She knew he’d been a gangbanger. She knew he’d been to jail. But now it seemed to have been only yesterday, not years ago. Her heart went out to him.
“But why?” Jay said. “Why would Paupau fill my head with lies?”
“I can’t answer that. Only she can.”
Jay gave a slow nod. He lifted his head and met Tío’s gaze.
“It would be easier to believe that,” he said. “Horrible, but easier, because it would mean that the world could make sense again and I wouldn’t be a freak. But what if they’re not lies? Neither she nor my family has anything to gain by putting a huge tattoo on my back and then filling my head with weird stories and training me for six years.”
“As I said,” Tío told him, “I don’t have the answer for that.”
“I know one way to find out,” Jay said. “I can go see the tiger and find out what he wants with me.”
“No!” both Rosalie and her uncle said at the same time.
“You can’t simply have a conversation with a man such as El Tigre,” Tío went on. “He has no moral compass. He could kill you with less thought than we would have before stepping on a bug.”
“He’s right,” Rosalie said. “It’s too dangerous for you to just go to him.”
“But what else can I do?” Jay asked. “It’s either that, or I put all of you in danger. I don’t learn anything about myself. I don’t find out why I’m here.”
Tío shook his head. “Please wait. I still have some contacts in
la vida loca
. Let me see if I can find out what Flores wants from you.”
Anna nodded. “Yeah. We can hang tough for a day or so.”
“But why should you have to? I brought this trouble to you. It’s my responsibility to fix it.”
“Let Tío ask around first,” Rosalie said.
Jay gave a reluctant nod.
“So,” he said, “what time do we start work tomorrow?”
Tío shrugged. “Around ten. We only do breakfast on the weekends.”
-
2
-
He who asks is a fool for five minutes .
But he who does not ask remains a fool
forever.
—CHINESE PROVERB
 
 
 
JAY WOKE UP
early the next morning. He lay there in the bed in Tío’s spare room, staring up at the ceiling, listening to the strange sounds the local birds made. Anna had pointed some of them out to him yesterday—Gambel’s quail and doves and this punky little black-and-gray bird with a Mohawk crest and a name he still couldn’t pronounce, but he could see in his head because Rosalie had written it down for him: phainopepla.
He’d been dreaming about Paupau, remembering one of her talks. This had been the one about responsibility. How people like the two of them didn’t let others do the hard things. They took responsibility and went out and got it done themselves.
So he knew what he was supposed to do, but he lay there a little longer, wishing, and not for the first time, that he could have been born into a normal family. The rest of them—his parents, his sisters, his brother—they all looked normal. They couldn’t do the kinds of things that Paupau said she could and he would do. But they still listened to her like she was some old Chinese lady mash-up of the Dalai Lama and the Godfather.
Not that he didn’t love them. Not that he didn’t love Paupau. But he just wished she had told him what he was supposed to do with his life instead of filling him with old stories and vague promises that made him both eager and uneasy.
Still, if he didn’t know what to do with his life, he knew what to do with his morning.
After washing up and dressing, he went online using Tío’s old, clunky computer. He found a map of the area, fixed the names of the main streets in his head, then left a note on the kitchen table:
Running a few errands. See you at the restaurant
.
He went out the front door, avoiding the backyard with its strange pack of too-attentive dogs. The morning air still held the cool of the evening and he could hear doves in the palo verde trees at the front of the house. When he got as far as the corner, he stopped for a moment just to take it all in. Standing on these dusty streets with their adobe houses and cacti and dirt gardens, it was hard to believe he’d been fighting his way through some three feet of snow a few days ago.
And what was up with Rosalie’s dogs, anyway? he wondered, looking back at Tío’s house.
Old Mrs. Chen back home had a pair of Yorkshire terriers that were never shy about letting him know just how little they liked him. The two of them drove him crazy, yapping and straining at their leashes whenever he met them on the street, but that was almost better than Rosalie’s dogs, who simply stood there staring at him like he was about to lay down some great doggie wisdom.
He hadn’t even talked to Rosalie’s dogs the way he had to her cats. That was showing respect, as Paupau would say, so he’d done it, feeling stupid the whole time, though oddly enough, it had worked. Considering he’d never done it before, he was surprised that it actually had.
All these things together . . .
The dogs, the cats, suddenly being able to speak Spanish like a native.
Some drug lord sending out his tattooed gangbangers after him.
That made even less sense, but at least there was an easy way to find out the answer:
All he had to do was go see the tiger.
According to Anna and the Hernandez family, he was being an idiot, but Paupau had told him that when one arrived in a new city, it was good manners—not to mention, expedient—to introduce oneself to the local powers that be. She didn’t mean the mayor and city council, or even the police department. Instead, she’d talk about how every neighborhood had a person, or persons, who were the heart—the
soul
—of its streets and alleys. They weren’t always necessarily recognized as such, but they were there all the same. Those who people looked to with respect and sometimes even a little fear.
Which, he supposed, described Paupau herself as much as any drug lord.
Was he an idiot? Supposedly, all Flores had to do was take a dislike to him and he could have him killed.
Last night, he’d agreed with the others. He’d gone to sleep in Tío’s guest room with the expectation that it was best to let Tío try to ask around in his own safer way. The problem was, thanks to dreaming about Paupau, this morning he’d woken up not with confidence but with the sure knowledge that presenting himself to Flores was the right thing to do.
After a few moments, he set off again. Wearing his hoodie up so that he just looked like one more barrio kid, he got to Camino Presidio after only a few false turns. A quick look around told him that there was no pool hall in sight, so he asked directions from a man waiting at a nearby bus stop.
“” he said, pointing south. “”
“” Jay told him. “” At the man’s puzzled look, he added, “”
“Ai-yi-yi.”
“” Jay asked.
The man nodded. He looked as though he had more to say, but then his bus pulled up with a hiss of brakes.
“Thanks!” Jay called to the man.
The man turned back to look at him from the top step of the bus.
“” he said. “”

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