Jaguar (24 page)

I could find that bastard on the dreamways and fry his skull,
Eddie thought. He did not write this thought in his notebook.

Some night on the dreamways he could wander Maryellen’s brain, find out for sure.

No,
he thought,
we don’t snoop on each other.

Her father lived in his bottle these days, thanks to the stepmother. Each time Maryellen skipped a grade and her precious son didn’t, Maryellen’s home life deteriorated. Eddie could tell because her attitude deteriorated, in spite of his best efforts to cheer her up.

Cheer her up!

How ironic. Now he’d landed himself a four-month commitment and Maryellen a stint in day treatment. Now they were supposed to chase down their dreams through the impenetrable fog of their drug therapy. Maryellen complained that she was a photographer, not an artist. Eddie tried to show her the bright side.

“One of us needs to be on the outside,” he explained. “How else are we going to track down the Jaguar? Besides, how do you expect to photograph dreams? Get real.”

“Get real, yourself,” she said. “Look who’s talking.”

She couldn’t help laughing at their situation.

She reminded Eddie of the time last spring when Eddie had taken her picture with the camera from the Journalism department. They had arranged all of their classes together, except PE, in spite of her parents. Teachers harassed them about their absences; students shunned them for their difference.

The greatest crime of adolescence is being different, going against the crowd, appearing weird. Sticking together continued to be their only protection. During a portrait assignment for Sara’s journalism class, Eddie had never seen Maryellen so self-conscious. She used the camera as naturally as she used her eyes, but she hated being the subject, even with him.

He’d wanted her to relax.

“I love you,” he said.

She ducked her head and laughed, brought the knuckle of her forefinger to her upper lip. She wanted to say it back, he could tell.

“I. . . .”

sklick

Maryellen laughed again, and hid her mouth with her hand. In the print, he’d focused on her knuckle. He remembered hearing the
snap
of his film advance.

“Tell me,” he said.

“I love . . .”
sklick
“ . . . you. Oh!”

He cocked and focused as fast as he could. The wind blew some of her long dark hair into the corner of her mouth. She shook her head.

“Say it again,” he said, and hunched down level with her eyes.

“I love . . .”
sklick
“ . . . you. You’re
crazy
. . .”
sklick

“Again.”
sklick

“I love you.”
sklick
She tipped her head back and laughed, trying not to look at the camera, a tear just starting
sklick sklick
at the edge of her eye, and they both doubled over laughing.

She got to go home every day; Eddie had to stay at The Hill. Every afternoon in the day room she told him how, alone in the kitchen each night she ate as much as she could until she gagged. She put nothing away, cleaned nothing up. She did all of this in the dark, noisily.

No one got out of bed or called to her. Only her stepbrother knocked on her bedroom door, and he was the reason for the locks.

This Monday afternoon in July she came to the day room with her sketch pad, nodded self-consciously at him, and dumped her things onto the table—blue purse, school folders with the figures colored in, a red book whose title he couldn’t see.

He thought,
She looks as pale as a dark person can look and still be alive.

The circles under her eyes gave her that haunted look that he knew the dream-killer drugs gave him, too. He’d seen it in her drawings.

Maryellen rustled through her bag for her pencils and sharpener. He stared off.

She began sketching him. In her hands he became lines that crossed shadows, shades of light and dark in a piece of nose, an ear, hair. She spoke absently of fathers and noise, of war and the hardening of fathers. He watched his reflection watch her eyes trace his lips, the instroke curve of his jaw.

Maryellen sharpened her pencil and the shavings tumbled out of the ashtray between them.

“They would have split up except for me,” she said. “Ironic, huh?”

“I never liked her.”

Her hands paused, then she straightened a ripple in her paper. She touched her index finger to her lips and stared down at her pad.

“Pardon?” she asked. “Your eyes—I was having some trouble there.”

Eddie hated repeating things. He hated repeating things word-for-word and especially hated repeating things that were superficial anyway. Clearing his throat helped, so he did that.

“Your stepmother, Olive,” he said. “I never liked her.”

“It’s mutual,” she said. “Just the mention of your name in the house infuriates her. Sometimes I find excuses to bring up your name, like on the telephone or something, just to piss her off.”

Eddie recalled the time he’d asked Maryellen to a movie two years back, their one attempt at a real date. Maryellen came to the door, said she was sick and couldn’t go. By her nervous hands he knew that Maryellen’s voice mouthed her stepmother’s words. He pressed her for another time, knowing who stood behind her, freezing her throat, stopping her voice and opening the tears. When she began to cry, he turned away and walked stiffly to the car.

Then
she
came to the door, tucked safely behind the screen.

“I don’t think that you should see Maryellen anymore.”

He glared at her, waiting.

“Looking hateful at me won’t do any good, either. I know you see each other at school, and I can’t do anything about that. But I want her to see other people, other boys.”

Still, he stared.

“Well, if you really want to know . . . if you’d do what you did to your own
mother
. . . .”

“You ignorant pig!” he yelled, and out of some reflex grabbed for the door handle. The screen was locked, and he rattled it nearly off its hinges in his bright rage.

“He’s going to kill me!” she shrieked. “He’s going to kill me! You get him out of here. You
want
him to kill me!”

The humiliation of his own temper worked on him and he kicked the screen door, ripping a hole in it. Eddie gritted his teeth so hard his gums ached, then jumped his bicycle and pedaled across the lawn and onto the highway.

He camped for three days on the river near Alderton, after that, behind his cousin’s place. When he got back the story was all over school, with the usual variations, but he was not arrested. His uncle gave him a token whipping and got him extra work at Ed’s to keep him busy.

Maryellen set her pad aside and rolled a cigarette. Her fingers were sure and quick in spite of the meds. Eddie noticed years ago that most people wrestled the paper around the tobacco and got a tube of empty paper or something that looked like a german shepherd crawling up a hose. Hers looked exactly like a Camel.

She puffed without inhaling and nodded, squinting the smoke out of her eyes. This smoking was new, something she’d picked up from one of the other patients. Dr. Mark didn’t discourage her like Eddie thought he should. Eddie didn’t know what to do when she was not drawing. He leaned his chair back on its hind legs and relaxed.

“Do that again,” she said, and he glanced at her with that same glance he used when she asked him to repeat what he’d just said.

“You were real still there,” she said, “you tend to move a lot.”

“Makes me nervous, somebody looking at me all the time.”

“Back in seventh grade you didn’t mind at all.”

He grunted. It had been a long time since she talked about that.

“You weren’t looking, anyway,” he said. You were staring.”

“I was looking.”

She shifted around in her chair, tapped her cigarette on the ashtray rim. He sat ram-rod still and didn’t turn towards her. She went on.

“I’m drawing you here. I can’t afford staring. Staring’s non-productive. . . .” She broke it off with a sigh and a shrug.

“See?”

“I was
not staring!
”

She jabbed her cigarette into the ashtray, swallowed a long drink of water and picked up her pad.

“You were.” Barely a mumbled under his breath.

Maryellen threw her pad down, her eyes suddenly hard and angry. Then, just as suddenly, they softened and her lips flashed him a smile.

He returned it with a giggle.

“Shit,” she said. “This isn’t very entertaining. We’d better get you out of this place.”

Maryellen cupped her chin in her hand and Eddie brought her some coffee from the pot against the wall. She stared past the wisp of steam into a stand of trees outside. Firs. He watched her pupils widen as her daydream washed between the other world and this one. The steady
clink clink
of her spoon outsang their breath.

We’re old already,
he thought.
Kids don’t go through this crap.

Eddie watched her eyes unfocus as she drifted through some memory. He tried to follow but his meds wouldn’t let him.

Each day he woke up from a regular dream of Maryellen he felt healed. No twisted sheets of sweat, no regrets because drugs kept him off the real dreamways.

Eddie thought that maybe life was
really
a stage. Not a stage like Shakespeare meant, but a phase.

Mine seems to have fixed itself at a sort of cosmic puberty,
he thought.

Dr. Mark told him he was missing being a teenager the first time around, so he might expect to go through it again sometime later. Eddie agreed that things intruded, he didn’t argue that. Ten years ago he survived the earthquake and the incident with his mother. This year, Mel Thompkins’ beating. He believed now that since he didn’t die he must have been reborn.

Eddie didn’t get to see her much, except for the experiment, even though she lived so close. This week Dr. Mark moved her to a neutral house, away from her parents, only until the end of the experiment. Eddie didn’t trust her father’s anger as much as he used to. The way he drank, it was just a matter of time until he lost it with her the way he had with Eddie. Eddie had seen the results of plenty of that kind of anger on The Hill.

Sometimes, I don’t think she remembers me,
he thought.

The other side of the fabric was different for her, as though the trip back through washed out something, filtered out some of the mesh of her memory. He didn’t want to be lost like that. He hoped that what she lost waited there on the other side for her to pick up later.

Outside, a summer rain kicked up a fuss against the windows. Everything in the valley whispered
rain rain
from early fall to spring. Rain pumped through her blood like it pulsed in his and, like Eddie, a thick press of damp leaves walled her away.

Her flowers, dried and crisp now, nodded from a pop bottle that they let him keep beside his bed. He got so tired anymore, the meds made him tired, but he still liked remembering. The farther from his room, the easier to imagine places. Except the other side. Except for a few glimpses, they blocked him from the other side.

Maryellen brought him flowers when she came out of her . . . trance? coma? . . . and found out what her father had done. One was a tulip, a satin-like purple tulip with a few drops of water flecking its leaves. A blue-blackness dusted its magnificent throat and shimmered on the back of his hand. He didn’t open his eyes much back then, when he explored his own depths eagerly. They couldn’t give him drugs then because of his head injury, so he plunged through the fabric every chance he got.

He worried about war on the other side, but he discovered something even more horrible. It was a game. He always suspected the two were a lot alike because that’s what it looked like in the history books.

He remembered that tulip well because he wanted never to open his eyes. He thought, in the confused logic of a convalescent, that if he just kept his eyes closed for the rest of his life, then people would have to be nice to him. They would let Maryellen care for him because everyone could see he was harmless and he could dream as much as he liked. She tried to talk him out of his darkness that time but he stood his ground for awhile.

“What’s the difference, anyway?” he told her. “It’s all just words. Just funny marks on paper or little waves in the breeze. We love and fight wars over words and they aren’t worth it. We write
war
and the word is a thing that doesn’t look like war, or smell like it. The word
war
doesn’t wake people up at night screaming, their fists a pulp in the window. Words are liars in their very bodies. So are most people. So am I.”

Maryellen sketched across the table from him. If he upset her, the clean, confident lines from her pencil didn’t betray it. He didn’t often upset her, which was why Eddie felt so easy talking in front of her like that.

Eddie didn’t like thinking about war. He’d seen his share on the other side, and to see it meant to share the feelings of those who lived it.

He’d seen what happened to Rafferty. Killing was easy and it settled things, but then it brought up different things. Thanks to Dr. Mark, and in spite of certain people in the valley, he’d learned to think of what happened to his mother as something other than killing. But she was dead, and his part in it tied her to him and tied him to death in a way that he couldn’t explain. But Rafferty knew.

Maryellen was staring at him, then.

Eddie went back, in his mind, and scribbled down as fast as he could what he’d seen happen to Rafferty.

Rafferty had said to Afriqua Lee, “Tell her we put the girl and her kids in the van. We’ll take them out with us. They’ll make it.”

Afriqua Lee translated. Rafferty held the back of the woman’s neck together and pressed a wad of gauze in tight. Part of her skull and her right ear grinned out from under the tape. She blinked as Afriqua Lee shouted at her in some local whine, an Indian dialect he hadn’t heard.

“Bien,” she croaked back, and squeezed her eyes shut.

“We’re down to moments,” Rafferty told Afriqua Lee.

The woman started thrashing all of a sudden, a convulsion. Neither of them could help her, and nobody could help them if they were caught out there. The jaguar priests were making a point of making an impression, and that meant that none of the men or boys would leave alive. The girls might live, but they’d surrender their hands.