Jaguar (8 page)

Verna’s brother felt Rafferty’s head, his back, his arms and legs. The boy moved his fingers and toes when asked and noticed, behind the thin man who prodded and pulled at him, that nowhere did he see any grass, any of the new spring leaves. Around them, as far as he could see from the hillside, the leafless and barkless trees shone pale in the afternoon’s glare.

Rafferty woke up in bed, between smooth clean sheets, to cramps in his stomach and visions of those bright bronze bugs just out of reach. He smelled coffee and fried bacon. Bandages itched at his chest, back and shoulder. He had three bandaids on his right shoulder. The bandage between his shoulder blades itched the most.

“Stop scratching.”

The uncle’s voice came from a doorway beside the foot of the bed.

“Come and eat.”

The boy found clothes stacked on a chair and put them on. Everything was blue and a little too big. Rafferty didn’t think he had anything at home that was blue except socks. These blue socks and sweater were especially bulky, but warm. He hadn’t had warm feet since the hatch. Now, sitting the cold grave five years later, Rafferty remembered that as the last time he had had milk from a refrigerator.

“This is the last of the bacon,” Uncle had told him. “Those other pigs won’t be ready to put down yet for another couple months.”

Uncle had been right about the bacon. But this year. . . .

“Bacon this year, buddy,” Uncle said just yesterday, but Rafferty didn’t know how to get the bacon out of the pigs. In the years since that morning at his uncle’s table, he’d learned to eat that meal over and over in his mind. Then he’d learned not to.

Verna’s brother sat across the table from Rafferty and sipped his coffee. He was balding, and when he sipped coffee the furrows in his brow opened and closed above the steadiness of those blue eyes. The design on the back of his hand was a scar, and he wondered how it got there.

Uncle was always grinning. Rafferty knew that pretty soon he was going to have to talk. His plate was almost empty.

“What’s your name?” Uncle asked.

“Rafferty.”

He tried to get his throat to swallow a mouthful of dry fried potatoes. “What’s yours?”

The uncle frowned. “I thought you knew,” he said. “You said, ‘Henry,’ when I found the car. Call me Uncle Henry.”

Rafferty felt himself blush. “I didn’t say ‘Henry,’“ he said. “I said
‘Hungry
.’”

Henry laughed and said, “Well, then call me ‘Uncle Hungry.’ There’s going to be a lot of it going around.”

A week later the first raiders came through. Uncle Hungry woke him up with a hand over his mouth, grabbed up some clothes and blankets and led Rafferty into the dirt basement. He slid something aside that looked like a piece of the furnace and he put Rafferty inside a tunnel.

“Crawl ahead,” he whispered. “Stop when you get to an open space.”

From upstairs came the splintering of cupboards and shelves, the heavy thump of bootheels, curses. Rafferty heard Uncle Hungry close the tunnel behind them, heard him stop several times. The boy picked his way through roots and fallen-in chunks of sharp rock. Suddenly the tunnel opened up on both sides. When the uncle caught up with him he switched on a red flashlight. Rafferty stared at a grotesque mechanical creature that squatted in the middle of the room.

Uncle nudged him out of the way and stepped over a case of bottles on the floor. He set the blankets and clothes on top of a stack of bottles, then he wedged the flashlight into some wing-colored coils rising out of the machine’s head. Uncle jammed a big roll of pink fluff into the opening they’d just crawled through. He slumped into one of two overstuffed chairs and waved Rafferty into the other.

They sat inside a huge underground room full of sacks, bottles, crates and their two chairs.

“It’s a big cooking-pot,” Uncle explained, his voice low. “Called a ‘still.’ It cooks cereal, from those bags.”

He pointed to some sacks stacked on a board beside him. Rafferty tried to imagine how many bowls of cereal you could cook in that still, and where you might find that many people at breakfast.

“Nobody can find us here,” Uncle told him. “We’ll hide out here until they’re gone.”

The room with the still was the quietest place that Rafferty had ever known. He heard all of his own breaths, and all of Uncle Hungry’s. Uncle’s stomach gurgled every few minutes and sounded like a conversation in another room.

“We have plenty of batteries,” Uncle said. “We have a water faucet. Lots of cereal and sugar but no way to cook it without getting caught.”

We,
Rafferty thought.
He said that
we
have plenty of batteries.

He didn’t know how long he slept that first night in the still, but he remembered being so hungry when he woke up that his stomach cramped when he took a drink of cold water. They couldn’t leave yet; the raiders were camped in the house.

“We can get out if we have to,” Uncle said. “This other tunnel comes up between the manure pile and the barn. But then we’d just have to hide, so we might as well hide here.” He stirred a couple of spoonfuls of sugar into the water.

“Here,” Uncle said. “Drink it now. It’ll stop the cramps.”

Uncle Hungry figured later that they hid in the still for fifty-one days, living on that sugar and water and grain. Another party of raiders killed the first bunch, stripped them, carried off all of the rest of the food topside. They came out of the ground to summer, and Rafferty couldn’t tell where the sky and the earth left off because of the dust.

In fifty-one days in the still Uncle Hungry taught Rafferty letters and spelling, reading, numbers and counting money. And he taught him something of the Roam, the nomadic people who had been his teachers. Rafferty taught him the rope-skipping song, the song about stars and a trick for getting gum out of his hair. Uncle showed him the scar on the back of his hand.

“You see, I wear the brand of the Jaguar. That’s because someone else has been dreaming in my head. The Roam can tell you all about it. We always let them stay here; they bring their caravan through twice a year. They put up in that flat spot down by the creek. That’s how come I got this. The Jaguar’s priests found me when I was asleep. I don’t know how they did it. I had a dream where a bunch of fellas held me down and this fat, dark guy branded me. Verna had the same dream. Sure enough. . . .” He held up the hand again, for emphasis.

“Why did they do that?”

“To keep track of me. They say I’ll go crazy, or burn up from a flash of light in my skull. But I think that’s just talk.”

“Who is the Jaguar?”

“Nobody really knows. Lots of old stories, of course, but
that
Jaguar was a god, and a good one. This one causes trouble, no doubt of that. But these plagues, earthquakes, floods—it’s just handy to blame everything on him. He has it in for the people of the Roam, for some reason. With the brands and whatnot, he’s turned whole cities against them—against
us
—but nobody knows why. It’s against the accords, and we’ve lived by the accords for a lot of generations. Townspeople, where you lived, just want it to go away. They figure if they drive the Roam out, then the trouble will stop.”

“But, the Jaguar. . . .”

“Is a man,” Uncle said, “I’m sure of it. But he’s not from around here. Nobody has seen him except in a lot of nightmares, including mine.”

Rafferty thought of his dreams of Eddie, then, and he wondered whether Eddie worked for the Jaguar.

Someday I’ll talk to him in a dream,
he thought.
Then I’ll find out.

This sounded brave enough in his head, but not so brave to the pit of his stomach.

A couple of times a day Rafferty or Uncle would pull the insulation aside and crawl halfway back up the tunnel to listen through a pipe that led to the kitchen. Farther up the tunnel, a few meters from the house, Uncle set a trap that would collapse the tunnel on top of anybody who touched it. Uncle told him how to unhook it, but Rafferty didn’t ever go up any farther than the pipe.

They traded stories and, finally, secrets. Rafferty told Uncle about eating the bugs. The uncle laughed and said, “You won’t be the last one that eats bugs, you’ll see.”

Uncle didn’t make fun of him for it. He asked a lot of questions about them, including how they tasted.

“Like corn-dogs,” Rafferty said. But it wasn’t really true. He couldn’t remember how they tasted, he just remembered trying to think they were corn-dogs.

Then the uncle told a story that made him cry. Rafferty didn’t know what to do when a man cried so he sat still, curled up in his damp chair.

“Verna and I, we had a brother,” Uncle said. “He was the oldest. Floyd, then me, then Verna. We were three years apart.”

Uncle talked in the low whisper that they had learned down there in the still. He cleared his throat and coughed.

“Floyd worked in the city for sixteen years. He started drinking. I told you about drinking, and what this still’s for.”

Rafferty nodded.

“My father’s father built this still, kind of a family tradition. Well, when Floyd disappeared the first time, this is where I found him. I run the still when I can’t get work, the Roam trades it for me. I won’t drink it myself. The last time I found my brother, I found him here.

“He was drunk and had a rifle with him. That’s the old-fashioned kind of gun with a long barrel. I figured he might be down here if he was on a toot, and I was right. He had these terrible dreams for years, and the only way he could stop them was to drink himself to sleep. Sometimes he had them anyway, and sometimes they came when he was awake. That was the worst part. And he would be sick afterwards. He said it was the dreams made him sick, but we all knew it was the juice.

“He sat here up against the still, holding the rifle across his chest and when I saw that, I was scared. I thought if he was drunk he might shoot me, and I could see he was drunk. I was so
scared
. . . .”

The uncle was a little shaky and his voice squeaked when he started to talk again.

“I said to him, ‘Floyd, let me take that rifle back up to the house for you.’ He wouldn’t look at me. Kept looking off at the ground, batting at things that weren’t there. Finally, he said, ‘Henry, you go back to the house now.’ Then I knew what he was going to do. I didn’t know about the Roam yet, or the Jaguar.

“I waited there where the tunnel opens in, I don’t know how long, just feeling my knees shake. Then I backed up the tunnel and was dusting myself off when I heard the shot. He was dead before I got back in there. And something about that really made me mad. I was thirty-two years old. He should’ve given me the rifle and done it another time. Or shot himself while I was looking. But this way I was a part of it because I didn’t stop him. I
couldn’t
stop him, I was
scared
. . . .”

Their twentieth day the raiders shot at each other in a fight. Seven raiders, then five, then the priests who killed the five and stole the food.

When he and the uncle finally surfaced that hot summer day, when they quit blinking back the insistent sting of the sun, the uncle and Rafferty pointed out to each other the local variations on death.

No vegetation colored the landscape. The animals that lived were nearly dead. Starved and spooky, two thin Angus stumbled across the driveway, most of the hair missing from their hides. Featherless chicken carcasses littered the yard, stinking up the afternoon. Some had been eaten by something else. The bugs were still around, but not so many. Uncle pointed to a dead calf seething with the things.

“They ate all the greenery,” he said. “Now they’ve got a taste for hair and hooves. Looks like they’re fond of paint.”

Uncle nodded towards the house and barn, the outbuildings and the fence around the pigpen; they all wore the same gray expression.

The uncle stood in the middle of the dusty drive, hand shading his eyes. He had fifty-one days of dirt packed into his shirt, pants, hair and skin. His beard grew out mostly gray, like the outbuildings. Later, Uncle showed Rafferty a picture of some stunned miners rescued after a cave-in, and they looked just the same. Blinking in blackface, white around the eyeballs and lips too pink, the uncle brought his hand down and settled it on Rafferty’s head.

“Let’s wash up,” he said. “If the pump’s not working there’s always the spring. Then we better figure out a couple of recipes for those goddam bugs.”

Figuring out recipes was easy. The hard part was figuring out how to catch and keep a couple of tons of dead bugs. They dried the bugs under screens in the yard, then ground them into a meal that made, “Soup, cakes or steaks,” as Uncle Hungry put it. The chickens and pigs thrived on the mash. The cattle preferred the bristly legs and crisp bronze wings.

Everything became a container. They electrocuted barrelsful of the things while the power held out. Uncle put up a chicken-wire fence on stilts and covered the top with more chicken-wire. He hooked this up to a wire that went inside the house. Whenever a cloud of the pretty bronze things came through on the wind he flipped a switch. Bugs dropped by the thousands as they were zapped on the wire.

Rafferty and the uncle shoveled the catch out onto the drying tables they’d made out of screens. Rafferty turn over the trays of bugs and caught any birds that came in after them.

The Roam ghosted through in their odd gallery of trailers and vans, winding up the devastated road inside their wizardry and their bond. The bug-cakes fed everyone, since the bugs weren’t officially
mirame
. Dawn enlightened the storytellers and thawed the musicians’ fingers. Rafferty, though an outsider in language and custom, felt like part of the Roam. He could see why Uncle liked them.

The power finally failed for good, so Uncle rigged up the wires to some van parts and put the parts on a bicycle. If Rafferty rode at a good, fast pace he could generate enough power to zap the bugs. Even though the bicycle had no wheels and never left the kitchen of the house, Rafferty dreamed himself cycling to the sea beside his friend Eddie. On these trips, he got to know Eddie, and something of the other world that was so similar, yet so very strange.