Jaguar

by Bill Ransom

  As soon as he got to Montana that summer, the dreams came back but they didn’t come as often, and they had blank spots. Montana, where he learned that he could learn through other people’s dreams. He worked hard at learning through dreams, that way when he went back to school he would be really smart and people would like him.

  Eddie quit taking the medicines because he wanted the dreams through the butterfly wings, and he wanted Rafferty back. Regular dreams didn’t have the same people in them, people that you got to know and like. Eddie liked Rafferty a lot, and tried to dream him up whenever he could. Trying didn’t seem to help. He felt like Rafferty dreamed him up, too, and it made Eddie feel like he had a brother somewhere.

  Eddie’s aunt read books on children with imaginary friends, and told Eddie it wasn’t healthy, especially with those headaches. He was afraid they would give him more medicine, so he quit talking about it altogether.

  By the time he left Montana five years later, two girls moved in and out of the dreams with Rafferty. Eddie didn’t focus them as well as he did Rafferty. One was a friend of Rafferty’s who was also the same age as Eddie, Afriqua Lee. The other was a shadow with Afriqua Lee and he never saw her clearly. In sixth grade he found out why.

  Eddie’s grandparents both died while he lived in Montana, so when his uncle sent him back to the valley Eddie moved in with Uncle Bert, his mother’s youngest brother, who was single. He lived in a cabin on the shores of Lake Kapowsin, and wasn’t home very much.

  Eddie liked the lake, the cabin and the privacy. Only a dozen families on the whole six miles of road, but splitting wood for the stove kept him busy, and he fished the lake a lot.

  Eddie waited for his bus on the first day of sixth grade, hoping that the valley had forgotten him. For five years his grandparents had sent him to a Catholic school near his uncle in Montana. He had missed the special dreams that came so easily in the valley, and now he had them back. He found it harder and harder to live outside them. He was afraid that if the dreams stopped, Rafferty would die.

  Sometimes he thought Rafferty made him dream, whether he wanted to or not. Sometimes Rafferty hammered on his sleep like an alarm clock so that Eddie would get him out of some scrape. Like the time with the raiders, when Eddie saw them coming and Rafferty didn’t. But that time Eddie got sick from the dream, sicker than usual. He slept for three days afterward, and he couldn’t concentrate for a week through the splitting headache.

  Eddie was sure he wouldn’t want to live in Rafferty’s world. Theirs was a hard life, harder than Montana, even his dreaming hadn’t changed that. Eddie barely remembered when he used to dream other dreams, the kind that he could change. If he was going to fall off a cliff, he could just dream himself into a parachute and glide down. But these dreams of Rafferty were different, very different.

  When his grandparents died and Eddie was returned to his uncle in the valley, Eddie was afraid of public school. He’d heard stories from the Catholic school kids about how tough it was, and he couldn’t really remember anything from that first-grade year except Dr. Mark and Miss Sara.

  The nuns in Montana warned Eddie about how much trouble there was in public schools because of girls and knives. Eddie liked living in his uncle’s cabin and he didn’t want some public-school trouble to ruin it.

  He and a half-dozen other kids waited beside the gravel road for their bus. The dark-haired girl’s feet crunched the gravel hard, skipping towards him. She seemed skittery, too. Uncle Bert’s early-morning coffee had left Eddie buggy as a bat. Not a familiar face at his bus stop, except there was something about this girl. . . . She’d been in some of his dreams, he was sure of it. Whenever Eddie remembered this day and the girl’s footsteps he knew that she’d walked towards him all his life.

  The two of them stood out of time like the eye of a storm. Their ride on the bus, the school, the ride back were all part of a long white shaft of noiseless space that lifted him and the dark-eyed girl in one slow whirl of light.

  Her hair swirled out from her face as she balanced on the back of the bench. She danced in a crazy circle faster, faster until that split-second between balance and balance lost when she dropped, petal-like, to the gravel right in front of him. The quick lift of her chin and nose dared him to say something. She studied him as closely as he studied her.

  She kept her mouth shut. She shook her head and her hands against the early morning chill. This fall day felt more like summer except the air crackled something like the girl’s new leather soles on the pavement. Their bus turned the corner from the levee road and everyone but Eddie and the girl hurried to line up, boys on one side, girls on the other.

  The bus hissed and crunched to a stop in front of the line of boys. Its door flopped open, and the girl elbowed to the head of the line and stepped aboard, smooth as a swan.

  “Maryellen Thompkins,” a boy behind him mumbled, and spat. “What a bitch.”

  She stood in the back of the bus in the center of the aisle.

  Eddie found an empty seat just behind the driver. Before he sat he looked full into her eyes. The bus driver told her, without turning around, “Siddown.”

  Maryellen swayed up the aisle as the bus pulled away and she dropped into the seat next to Eddie. Neither of them spoke. He blushed when she gave the driver the finger behind his head, where everyone but the driver could see. Her slim dark blur faced straight ahead all the way to school, and all the way to school Eddie fought against Rafferty’s pull into dream.

  This presence that was Maryellen Thompkins felt good next to him. She felt familiar, in the same way that his skin felt familiar. She definitely reminded him of someone from his dreams, and the way she assessed him with her sidelong glances made him think that she recognized him, too.

  That’s too weird, he thought. That’s too weird, even for me.

  In class, after roll call, classmates introduced themselves and told what they did last summer. When his turn came, Eddie’s muscles tightened up in fear and he couldn’t turn his neck. Words staggered out of him and he felt like a snowshoe rabbit caught in an early brown thaw.

  “ . . . Lodge Grass, Montana. It’s on the Crow reservation. . . .

  Someone made a cawing noise in the back and Eddie flushed. The teacher shushed the culprit.

  “Go on, Eddie. Class, pay attention.”

  “I helped my uncle work the reservation cattle. A kid named Gene Right Hand showed me how to bring in calves so the men could brand them. They used a Lazy-Eight brand. That’s a figure-eight laying on its side.”

  Maryellen Thompkins’ eyes snapped open suddenly. Her gaze locked on his and she sat way back in her seat, almost like she was pushing her desk between them. It was a test. The reservation brand was a joke, the lazy-C, but the brand he’d seen in his dreams was the Lazy-Eight. Eddie’s mouth was suddenly dry, but he went on, never dropping his gaze from hers.

  “A creek cut through the back country, so we took packs and fish poles and sometimes spent the night. We fished all afternoon while everybody else rode back in. Talked about what we’re going to do. He’s going to ride rodeo.”

  Eddie glanced at the teacher to see whether he’d said enough. When he looked back at Maryellen she was facing the window more than the front of the room, but he caught another glance she threw his way.

  “I hope that I can go back next summer,” he said, and sat down.

  As the next student walked to the front of the room, Eddie watched a pair of robins listen for worms on the lawn. He thought back on summer, on all the things he’d like to have told the class but didn’t—all those things he’d like to tell the girl with the powerful eyes. The familiarity he felt for her scared him. The Lazy-Eight test scared him, too, but he was excited at the same time.

  What if it’s true? he wondered. What if it’s a place we both go?

  He thought then of the shadow girl that he’d seen with Afriqua Lee, and the hair on the back of his neck prickled his collar.

  As a skinny little kid named
Dwight stuttered through his summer, Eddie remembered the day he left his Uncle Elmer’s place on the reservation, when the dull bite of autumn slipped into the morning breeze. Near the road a light coat of dew held the earth firmly to the earth. Haze around the cottonwoods glowed a magic pink when the sun first touched it, then faded slowly into blue as the day opened up.

  The road in front of Right Hand’s place was made a road only by being called one. The two-rut track limped through the low grasslands near the river and reminded the few distant families that there was another world somewhere. Those who left were quick to return, or die. Those who returned did it quietly, and spoke of the outside seldom, and worked very hard in the dirt.

  Some carried things back. Eddie’s Uncle Elmer brought some bright-colored paintings of tigers and matadors, but they cracked under the harsh Montana summer. Right Hand’s uncle brought a car, but without gas stations for nearly a day’s drive it became just another chicken coop in somebody’s field. One brought a case of bourbon and drowned in Right Hand’s cistern.

  Eddie stood still that last morning watching a colony of red ants, then the hunting spiral of a young hawk. The dew lifted from the roadside and a slight northerly breeze kept the ants busy opening and reopening their hole.

  Maybe they burrow down to the other world, he thought, though he knew it wasn’t true.

  Eddie worried about the other world, about Rafferty. He’d begun to think of the dark boy in his dreams as his twin and looked forward to meeting him there. Eddie was sure that Rafferty couldn’t see him all that well, but he seemed to know when Eddie was around

  It works both ways, he thought. I see him clear when I’m dreaming, but he’s just a shadow when I’m awake.

  But it was a shadow he always recognized.

  Eddie shuddered when he thought of the brands that he’d seen on the people in his dreams—on Verna, Henry and the others. A brand in Montana meant something, it meant the cow belonged to somebody.

  Who thinks they own those people? he wondered. Why would somebody let themselves be branded?

  Eddie had seen his share of branding in the past few months. He would not miss branding calves, but he would miss the excitement of it and the teamwork with the men. Castrated, inoculated and branded, the calves wobbled to their mothers smelling of shit and burned hair. The laughing and swearing men had already wrestled the next one down. At the end of the day they drank and played cards, and sometimes they let Eddie and Gene play, too.

  Sometimes when they branded rangeland cattle they carried several brands, one for each owner. They marked the calves with the brand of the mother, and Eddie’s uncle, the foreman, kept a tally. His Uncle Elmer didn’t like this kind of work because there was the inevitable argument with ranchers over his honesty. Eddie’s uncle made it a point to have at least one hand from each ranch hired on, but always one rancher thought he was being rustled.

  Eddie wondered about the men who owned the brands, who had other men burn their signatures into the flanks of bawling calves with red-hot iron. He only saw the men whose muscle did the job; he never met the ranchers. He decided early that, given the choice, he’d own the brand rather than do the branding.

  Later, enlightened by his dreams of Rafferty, the Roam and the Lazy-Eight, the thought of any kind of branding disgusted him. He toed a little more dirt over the ant-hole while he waited for the bus that would take him back to the coast, back to the valley and public school.

  The store further down the road stood on the hill like a shoebox on a boulder. Onion-white and peeling, the front of the store was cluttered with hand-lettered ads and rodeo flyers. He and Gene walked up to it one day with their packsack full of empty bottles to trade for some sodas. The owner, a fat man with fishbelly skin pooching out from under his t-shirt, made them wait outside until he finished his newspaper. Then, until he finished his lunch.

  This summer he was to learn how to wait, how to hold time like his breath and focus on ants or hawks or a thin swirl of dust covering his boot grain by grain. This summer he learned how to learn through dreams. He could visit the dreamways just about anytime, though in Montana images were spotty and blurry. If he wanted to pay the headache price, Eddie could make changes in Rafferty’s world. He wondered if that worked both ways.

  When the wait at the store was over, Gene bought a creme soda and Eddie got a strawberry pop. He remembered that the owner brought the sodas out from inside the store, and they were warm.

  “If you want, you can sit at our table.”

  The small, thin voice brought Eddie back to the classroom. The introductions were over. Either he’d missed Maryellen’s or she hadn’t given one.

  “We usually sit by the window. My name’s Larry.”

  Larry shook his hand formally and Eddie noticed that he had warts on his fingers. While they waited the last few minutes for the bell, Larry picked at his warts and stared across the room at Maryellen. She didn’t look back, and for some reason this made Eddie feel better.

  The cafeteria was the usual clatter of kids and food. Eddie unwrapped his lunch, the others filed slowly through the line.

  “I hear you ride the same bus as Maryellen Thompkins.”

  The name was a branded calf bawling through his daydream.

  “So?”

  Larry frowned and picked at his warts. Then he asked quickly, “You ever been in a fight? I mean a real fight where one guy gets the other guy down and don’t let him up, and keeps kicking him in the back and ribs.”

  “No,” Eddie lied, “guess I never have.”

  “I have,” Larry said. “The day I came to this town Maryellen Thompkins kicked me around on the playground at first recess. There’s always fights when she’s around. We were only in the fourth grade then, but she was a lot bigger’n me.”

  Eddie turned his head slowly away, towards the bank of windows facing the tetherball court. Maryellen was alone out there, snapping the ball high and quick around the pole. The more Larry talked, the more Eddie could see why she did it.

  “She’s crazier’n a shithouse rat,” Larry said. “You could whip her, I know you could.”

  “You don’t know anything about me.”

  “I know she didn’t shove you around at the bus-stop. I have friends. I know she sat next to a boy instead of by herself for the first time since I been to this place. I know you lived on Loony Hill and you lied to me about fighting.”

  Larry snatched up his tray and took it back to the kitchen. The bell rang.

  A gray sky pressed down on the playground until the pavement, the squat and squinty classrooms and the sky flowed together in one smooth sweep of low clouds and dust. The rest of the day circled tighter towards center, a slow-moving tetherball in a chill gray dream.

  Larry took Eddie through the boiler room and into a small closet-like room in the back. Inside the closet three folding chairs leaned against a makeshift table that dropped out from the wall like the bed that he shared with his cousin in Montana, a one-burner hotplate and a janitor. The janitor’s back was to them as they walked up to the room, and he was emptying the last of the coffee from a camp-sized pot.

  Without looking up the old man said, “Who’s your friend?”

  “New kid. Eddie, this here’s my grandpa.”

  “Get the boy a cup.”

  It smelled strong and thick, so Eddie filled his coffee half full of cream and sugar, sipped it carefully.

  “You boys supposed to be in class.”

  “We got out. I’m showing him the school.”

  The old man leaned in his chair and farted, poured most of his coffee into his saucer and drank off the top with a shrug.

  The tetherball of the day wound tight against the pole and Maryellen Thompkins sat next to him again all the way home. Bounces and rattles slewed the bus past tenements, cheap ranch-style developments and finally into the grid of barbed wire that marked, one by one, the straggly farms of the riverbottom.

  The only sound Maryellen made was clearing her th
roat occasionally and she grunted once as the bus passed a labrador on the back of a german shepherd. He saw no spark or excitement in the shepherd’s eyes, only the dull luster of fatigue and need. Just as the bus passed with its forty cheering children, the lab lunged once and dropped off.

  Maryellen looked away as she grunted. Her face, dark and smooth and still, shone clearly against the blurred background of the bus. Eddie turned to look at her and caught a tinge of red that shadowed her high, tight cheeks. She faced him quietly, eyes wide with the sharp sting of fall or confusion. Above the crunch of gravel and rattle of loose sheet metal they heard the tiny singing of the driver’s transistor radio and realized that he and the kids and they themselves were waiting to hear what they had to say.

  She slipped forward to the edge of her seat, folded her arms on the back of the seat in front of her and laid her head on her arms. On the back of her right hand, where he’d seen it in his dreams, she had inked an “8” on its side in the middle. Eddie swallowed hard. He reached over and traced it with his fingertip, but she didn’t move.

  The aura of Maryellen’s plaid skirt rippled over his gray cords, the little scratching sounds she made amplified a thousand times over the murmur of engine, tires and waves of gray-faced kids. Eddie stared out the window at the damp pastureland. The ever-rising hum of everything drifted him back to his campsite in Montana, and the time he told Right Hand about Rafferty.

  “Yes, you will see them,” Gene had said.

  “Them?” Eddie asked.

  “The other side. Shadow-people.”

  Gene stirred the coals and sat back on his heels in a graceful squat that Eddie never mastered. His heart fluttered hard in his throat, and he waited for Gene to go on.

  “Others walk beside us. They live and breathe just beside the cloth of this world, but they live in another. Not just one other world, but many others. Like the saddle between you and the horse. My grandfather says they are the worlds that could have been, that we are the world that is. In one of those worlds, Sitting Bull was president, maybe.