by Bill Ransom
“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.
When it was Uncle’s turn to cycle he daydreamed, too, Rafferty could tell. He never knew where Uncle went, and he never asked.
After two years, raids on the place pretty much stopped but the uncle was careful with smoke and fires. He showed Rafferty how to make fires, how to tell what animal left tracks and where it was headed, where it had been and why. He taught him about weapons, and how to fight. Many of the Roam stayed on instead of following their usual seasonal meander, and they taught him what they knew about machines and about the jaguar priests.
Rafferty and Uncle Hungry never moved back into the house. They salvaged what they could from the broken walls and they built up the underground room. The uncle piped in spring water beside the well water, and they hid down there two more times. Both times they nearly got caught, but Rafferty didn’t want to think about those times right now.
The sun slipped a shoulder through the clouds and Ruckus, his crow, chattered to himself. Rafferty and the uncle could go days without saying anything more than “Morning.” “Catch anything?” “Yep.” “Nope.”
With just a hint of wind and mutters of his r
estless crow in his ears, Rafferty felt something cold flip-flop inside his stomach, like that certain point in hunger, the point of reflex that made him gnash down that first bug, the juicy one that tormented his face. His mind kept replaying the shake in Uncle’s voice that time underground when he said, “I was so scared. . . .”
Rafferty looked up at the loft window near the top of the barn wall. Uncle Hungry’s green stocking cap perched the sill.
What was he doing in that window? Rafferty asked himself. The sound of the thought was a shout, not a wonder. He tried to swallow around the strangle in his throat, and for some reason his thoughts kept turning to the Jaguar.
“Didn’t he know he could fall?” he asked Ruckus.
A shift of cloud shut out the sun and Ruckus ruffled his feathers. The boy Rafferty eyed both horizons of the road: sunrise and sunset. He spoke to the one yellow crocus beside the barn.
“Didn’t he know he could fall?”
Rafferty was sure, by the shake in his voice, that he was scared.
We find a little of everything in our memory; it is a kind of
pharmacy or chemical laboratory in which chance guides our hand
now to a calming drug and now to a dangerous poison.
—Marcel Proust, Maxims
In her dream, Afriqua Lee met the brown-eyed girl in a huge open field undulating with thousands of tiny blue flowers. Their fragrance made her think of death, but these days so soon after her mother’s wake all flowers made her think of death. The girl wore a pink robe, a vibrant pink that shimmered among the flowers. Her robe was stitched with a peculiar glyph and two plumed serpents, guardians of the holy martyr.
She must be a spirit from the underworld, Afriqua thought. All she could muster to answer the girl’s wave of greeting was a nod.
“You’re Afriqua Lee,” the girl said, and beamed a smile that seemed very happy to see her. A tray appeared in her hands and she placed it onto a low table that also appeared between them. The tray was gold, and the gold tabletop levitated, feather-light, a hand’s breadth above the flowers. A white tea set rested in the tray.
Afriqua Lee’s heart double-timed against the fabric of her nightgown. The idea of an angel of the holy martyr speaking to her, even in a dream, was a truly powerful thing. Even Old Cristina would not take it lightly.
“Yes,” she answered, “I am Afriqua Lee. And who are you?”
A comfortable breeze rippled the blue blossoms and fluttered the floppy sleeves of the girl’s pink robe. The serpents on the robe did not have feathers, but large, leathery wings that seemed to fly with the flutter of the fabric.
“Maryellen Thompkins,” the girl said, and plunked herself down among the flowers. “We’re having tea.”
“Tea?”
“Yes,” Maryellen said. “Do they have tea where you’re from?”
“Of course,” she said, and plopped down beside her. A cradle of sky-blue flowers caught her in their petals and held her while they leaned with the breeze. She studied this Maryellen Thompkins who was now pouring green tea into fragile white cups.
Maryellen had the same long, straight hair that Afriqua remembered her own mother having, except that Maryellen’s hair was brown and her mother’s was black, black as obsidian from that crater at Wind Mountain. Maryellen’s eyes glittered a deep brown, and kept Afriqua’s gaze without prying.
“Are you real?” she asked Maryellen.
“Yes,” Maryellen said. “I’m real. The tea is pretend, though.”
The thin cup tilted in her perfect hand, and Afriqua Lee sipped the green, aromatic brew. She felt her lungs hold that breath an extra beat to savor the freshness of the tea.
“It’s my favorite,” Maryellen said. “Do you have mint where you’re from?”
“Yes,” Afriqua said. “The familiyi drinks coffee. I do, too. But we get tea when we’re sick.”
“My mom gives me tea when I’m sick, too,” Maryellen said. “Tea and toast. That’s what I got this morning. I’m sick.”
Afriqua felt herself frown, and the chill of a cloud-shadow slithered her spine.
“My mother . . . the earthquake. . . .”
Maryellen’s eyes widened and she set down her cup.
“Did she die?”
Afriqua Lee nodded, then looked up, hopeful.
“Have you seen her? Have you seen my father?”
“No,” Maryellen said, “just you.”
“I thought . . . if you were from the underworld, maybe you’ve seen them.”
“The underworld? Where’s that?”
“It’s where you go after you die. Everybody knows that.”
“Well, I’m alive,” Maryellen said. “I’m still in the world. We call that place ‘Heaven.’ The underworld, that’s a bad place and we call that ‘Hell.’“
“Well, my mother wouldn’t be in the bad place. Do you dream of other people?”
“Not like this,” Maryellen said. “It’s more like I’m dreaming with you. Like I’m really with you but I know it’s a dream.”
Suddenly, the girl began to fade. They reached for one another but it was too late. The girl, the pink robe, the tea set were gone.
Afriqua Lee shuddered again. The shadow that played around her from the gathering cloud roiled, indistinct, across the blue meadow. Once she thought it formed the silhouette of a jaguar, then a butterfly. How strange that a sign so fortuitous would bring her such a chill.
Some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
—Albert Camus
Because Eddie couldn’t stop crying, they took him to Dr. Jacobs, whose office was next to the library downtown. After listening to their story and trying unsuccessfully to calm Eddie’s hysteria, Dr. Jacobs made a call and had them take Eddie to the hospital on the hill. Everyone in town joked about that hospital and, because they feared mental illness and the building that held it, called it, simply, “The Hill.”
Eddie, for his six years known as the invisible boy, the quiet boy, turned over end-tables and scattered magazines across the office floor. He hid under the desk when they said he was going to a hospital and three of them had to pry his fingers loose to get him out.
Eddie Reyes had seen his mother, and listened to her pitiful, painful cries from outside her window. He knew what kinds of things they did to people in hospitals and he didn’t want them to get their hands on him.
But they did.
The hospital was a huddle of buildings inside a cyclone fence, in the middle of a large lawn. The hospital itself was a five-storey structure backed against the hillside, with the two-storey buildings spread out like hatchlings from its skirts. A few very big trees broke up the expanse of grass. Outside the fence was a road, and thick woods across the road. A lot of flowers bloomed around the buildings, and Eddie’s grandmother said she thought it was a pretty place.
“We don’t get people your age very often,” the doctor said. “The windows in here are for taller people, but if you stand on this little table you can see the whole valley.”
The doctor seemed to want him to go ahead and stand on the table, but Eddie couldn’t do that. If he put his feet on the furniture at home his grandparents would lock him in the closet all day, so he couldn’t get his feet on anything. They would lock him in the closet if they heard that he’d put his feet on the furniture at the doctor’s, that’s for sure. They locked him in the closet almost every day for something. Eddie knew that the doctor didn’t know that, but he didn’t want to tell him, either.
The doctor cleared his throat.
“It’s all right,” he said, “you can come in without standing on the furniture.”
The doctor found him a stool that rolled, except when it was stepped on, then it stopped. He told Eddie to call him Dr. Mark. They stood at the window and Dr. Mark showed him the river, the school, the wreckage that used to be downtown and his mother’s hospital.
“Most of the youngsters that we have here can’t read or write like you can. You’re a
very intelligent boy. Your grandma says you’re the best artist in kindergarten.”
Eddie was not crying when Dr. Mark talked to him; he was too tired to cry. His eyes and his throat hurt and what he wanted most was a drink of water. They sat down side-by-side on a couch in Dr. Mark’s office. Eddie balanced a box of blue Kleenex on his knees and twisted a wad of tissues in his hands. He couldn’t make himself look up because he didn’t want to talk and as long as he didn’t look up they couldn’t make him talk.
Dr. Mark opened his office window and let in a breeze. Along with the fresh air came the cacklings of a pair of crows. He returned to the drab green couch and sat next to Eddie again, close, but without touching.
“Do you like baseball, Eddie?”
Eddie shook his head.
“Everybody likes to do something outside. What do you like to do outside, on a nice day like today?”
“Nothing.”
“Do you play outside at all?”
“Sometimes.”
“When you play outside on a day like today, where do you go? Where would you rather be than here?”
Eddie sniffed, then coughed a little cough.
“I like to go down to the river.”
“Do you go fishing down there?”
“Sometimes.”
“What else do you do at the river?”
Eddie shrugged.
“Sit.”
“Do you sit and think, or do you just sit?”
“I think.”
“What do you think about when you sit by the river?”
“Stuff. My friends.”
“Tell me about your friends. Who’s your best friend?”
“Rafferty,” Eddie said, and saying it made him smile a little bit.
“Is Rafferty the same age as you?”
Eddie nodded.
“Do you play with him every day?”
“We don’t exactly play,” Eddie said.
“Is he in kindergarten with you?”
Eddie shook his head.
“Where do you see him, if you don’t see him in school?”