Jaguar

by Bill Ransom

  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.

  Afriqua Lee helped Rafferty hold the wounded woman down while he taped her arms and legs to her mat. She was a strong woman, pretty in the brown afterglow of the walls. Indian pretty, not skinny and starving like he’d expected. This country had fooled him like that. Rafferty remembered thinking he’d have bought her a drink.

  She lay face up on her mat, rigid. Rafferty stretched a length of tape across her forehead and down the sides of the mat to keep her head still. She relaxed and her eyes opened. Now, with the tape and gauze all twisted up, her cuts were bleeding again and the hole in her neck clicked every time she moved.

  “Ask her if she wants us to help her,” Rafferty said, and showed Afriqua Lee the injector that Old Cristina had given him for this trip into the highlands.

  Afriqua Lee spoke again, in the same rasp.

  The woman nodded, in spite of her neck.

  Rafferty injected her and she started to cry. Pretty soon the cry faded back and as he emptied the last of their three ampules he brushed her face and her forehead with his hand. The cry subsided to a shudder, like his own. Then there was just the shuff shuff of her breath coming faster and shallower and the noise from the trucks loading up outside.

  No animal sounds. The only voices were the few children. They had to move.

  Her breath took on a gurgle, then a strangle. Her whole chest heaved tight against the tape, her eyelids slid open and she stared ahead, gasping.

  Rafferty held her down to keep her from hurting herself. He held her down so she wouldn’t hurt herself dying.

  “Go on home,” he told her. “Go home.”

  She twisted one arm loose of the tape and hooked it under his armpit, then she pulled. Her brown eyes begged him to come down with her into the dark, and she was gone.

  Eddie’s mind whirled with his own dreams, and now he had to fight off Rafferty’s, too.

  Today Eddie thought he should’ve stayed in his room and slept. One of those days again when sleep is just the thing.

  Eddie was determined that love with Maryellen would be more than a dream. So much of what Eddie saw or heard he wanted to show her, on both sides of the fabric, but the way they had to live made that impossible.

  A honeybee sipping from a drop of coffee on his spoon reminded him of her, of those things he’d like her to see. The delicacy of its orange tongue flicked out, sipped, flicked back. Beside it, one grain of rice stuck like an ant’s egg to his chopstick.

  Maryellen gave him those chopsticks a year ago, a lifetime before he had come to The Hill.

  His hand finished the word “Inevitable” in a scrawl.

  As Maryellen was drawing, he remembered the little red-headed ants that bite. A huge hill of them marked

  the line between his uncle’s place and her father’s. Eddie’s uncle claimed that you should drill your well where there’s an anthill, that ants build over water. He and Maryellen stirred them up from time to time. Sometimes they’d drop a carpenter ant or two on top, just for the fight. The red ants smelled funny and bit, but at least they didn’t eat holes in the house.

  One time when they were thirteen or fourteen, Maryellen’s stepbrother scooped a handful of those red ants and stuffed them down the front of Maryellen’s shirt. She had a really nice figure even then, and the stepbrother was always wanting to get his hands on her. He tried all the usual peeks and taps and touches—a brush of arm here, a look over her shoulder there. He had graduated to grabs.

  This time, though she didn’t push him away or slap him like she usually did. She very calmly took off her shirt, turned her back, unhooked her bra and brushed herself off. Then she put her bra back on, shook out her shirt, and as she slipped back into it she turned to him and said, evenly, “Don’t ever do that again. Don’t ever do anything like that again.”

  The meds made him wonder a lot, made his mind wander, but all of its raveling seemed to lead to Maryellen.

  She explained the differences between them one time. She explained that she grew up being hit and yelled at all the time. She got hit and yelled at less if she picked up certain subtleties in the people around her. He got abandoned for long periods of time, sometimes locked into closets or cars, and he learned to retreat inside, to shut off emotion and go away.

  He breathed deep and settled into his chair again, the one overstuffed recliner in the day room. At this moment, during these moments of the experiment, the chair was his and no one challenged him for it.

  “You seem so . . . afraid all of a sudden.”

  “No,” he said. “I was just remembering, and remembering isn’t always good.”

  She pushed her cup aside and picked up her pencil.

  There was a time she would’ve picked up my hand.

  “I read somewhere that our memory keeps us alive,” she said, and reached for her eraser.

  “I’ll bet that’s true,” Eddie said. “Messages take time to get from the body to the brain—I’ll bet we don’t even know when we’re dead because we have nothing to remember it with.”

  Her laugh sounded tight and strained, and he really wanted to change the weather in the day room. The whish and scratch of pencils complemented the
rain.

  He loved her, and didn’t know what to do about it. He had faith that everything would come clear if they just stuck together. Her focus, the intensity of her attention, attracted him. He trusted insight, not instinct. Insight came from sight, a conclusion of the senses—filtrate of the unprotected senses. Insight, the trustable unconscious, helped fill in the detail of her subject.

  He glanced down at his notebook, where his hand had been moving by itself.

  There is no asymmetry, he’d printed boldly. Remember the Butterfly Kiss.

  He didn’t remember writing any of it.

  Her eraser nibbled at the paper and she brushed the crumblings back without looking down. She was not drawing him, after all. She used him as a model to draw one of his dreams of Rafferty, the one about the man with the blue ointment.

  “I can understand dreams like . . . like our dreamways,” she said. “That’s happening while this is happening, it’s parallel. But what about dreaming that happens in the future . . . ?”

  He thought she got off track by thinking of it as “the” future, but didn’t want to get into it now.

  Eddie always planted distance in the important things, getting close was too frightening. He focused on her drawing, and something tugged at him. Rafferty, who looked like Eddie, crouched behind a rock. The cliff face with the butterfly stain, the mother and daughter, the mysterious man holding his jacket around the mother’s shoulders . . .

  “That jacket,” he pointed to her pad, “that looks familiar.”

  Her pencil rested on an army jacket with campaign ribbons on the breast and a bar on the shoulders.

  “It should,” she said, “it’s just how your notes described what Rafferty saw.”

  “But you’ve seen their warriors on the other side,” he said. “They wear old-fashioned stuff—sandals, shin guards, chest protectors. . . .”

  “Yes,” she said, “you’re right. This is our army. What do you think it means?”

  “I think it means that whoever is on our trail is in the army.”

  “Are you going to bring up that stuff about my dad again?”

  “You made the connection, not me.”