The Painted Boy (24 page)

Remembering what Señora Elena told me, I give her a doubtful look.

“How many times do I have to say this?” Lupita says. “We’re not helpless. I’m going to put the word out and when you go face-to-face with him, we’ll be there to bear witness and help out as much as we can. It won’t hurt if the
bandas
see you show up with your own gang in tow.”

“Yeah,” I tell Lupita, “but Rita said it would be pretty impossible to get everyone on the same page. I don’t want anybody else getting hurt. There’s already been enough of that.”

“Showing how strong we are is going to make sure that won’t happen. Instead of them thinking they can just go after some kid and everything gets messy, it’ll stay between you and El Tigre.”

Where it could still get messy, I think. And then I start thinking about how different the cousins are from the human people I’ve befriended since I got to Santo del Vado Viejo—
thought
I’d befriended, since they didn’t exactly stand up for me after what happened to Margarita and the gangbanger.

“People really have trouble with us, don’t they?” I say.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, as soon as they find out what we are they just . . . you know . . .”

“You’re talking about Anna.”

I shrug. “Maybe. Partly. Mostly. I don’t know.”

“Is she your first?”

“First what? Girl I’ve obsessed over? Not really.” I think about the girls at school back in Chicago. “She’s the first I’ve actually talked to. You know, the first where there was the possibility of something. Until she found out about the dragon.”

Lupita nods. “I’ve been there. It seems like there’s always going to be people who don’t handle it very well when they find out about us. But you know, it’s not really their fault.”

“How can you say that?”

“Well, it’s not just the shock of finding out that we exist. The very fact that we do changes how they come to see the world.”

“And people don’t like change.”

“Not most of them.”

I remember what Rita said about Paupau.

“Some cousins are like that, too,” I say.

I look away across the desert. Here on the other side of the cemetery where they’re laying Margarita into the ground, I feel calmer. More sure of myself and what I now know that I am. More comfortable with the cousins and their hidden culture.

“Well,” I say, “I don’t know what the big deal is. I didn’t freak out when I found out about you.”

She gives me a look.

“What?” I ask.

“Of course you didn’t. You’re a great big dragon, aren’t you?”

“Except I thought of myself as a normal kid. I didn’t know animal people were real, or that I was supposed to take all those things Paupau told me literally.”

Her look doesn’t go away.

“And yet,” she says, “as soon as you arrived here you were talking to little lizard cousins, and the cats and dogs in Rosalie’s yard.”

“How do you know that?”

She shrugs. “Word gets around.”

“I was being polite.”

“And what you’re doing now is stalling,” she says. “You need to either go practice the dragon stuff and get this done, or step away from it. Either way, I’ve got your back.” She grins, adding, “Though getting away sounds like it’d be more fun. I know the place where the agave spirits hide their tequila. We could invite a bunch of cousins and have a party.”

She gives me an expectant look, but she already knows my answer.

“Yeah,” she says when I don’t bother replying. “I get it. You have to do this thing. But it was worth a shot.”

We both stand up.

“Be careful,” she says.

“I will.”

I haven’t a clue what I’m going to do once I get into the mountains, but better I figure it out there on my own than when I’m standing in front of El Tigre.

“And we’ll have your back,” she says. “All you have to do is deal with El Tigre. We’ll make sure the
bandas
don’t step in.”

I think of a gang of little cousins standing up to the gangbangers—a ragged collection of jackalopes, cactus wrens, lizards, scorpions, and other small animal people. The gangbangers would walk all over them. Except, maybe not. I’m not sure it’s size that decides where a cousin fits on the scale of importance. Rita’s a snake. She’s not physically big in her animal shape, but apparently she’s still a big deal.

I’m about to ask Lupita how it works, but then I realize that she’s right—what I’m really doing is stalling. So I just thank her and turn to the mountains.

Lupita watched him walk off into the desert, weaving in between the cacti and brush, getting smaller and smaller until finally he was swallowed by the vegetation and she couldn’t see him anymore. She let out a deep sigh. Long after he was gone, she continued to stand there, listening to the birdsong in the cacti and mesquite. After a while she heard footsteps crunching in the dirt behind her. She didn’t turn around, not even when Rita spoke.

“You did well, little cousin.”

“Yeah, well, I feel like crap. He’s my friend and I feel like I betrayed him.”

“He’s our only hope to fix this problem,” Rita said. “Someone needed to give him that little extra push to get him to do the right thing.”

“Maybe.”

“And you were very convincing. The way you would go back and forth between sending him off and reinforcing the idea that he was the one who had to deal with Flores. You almost had me believing you thought he should just turn his back on all of this.”

“I still half think he should.”

Rita didn’t reply. Lupita felt the weight of the other woman’s unblinking gaze and sighed.

“Okay,” she said. “So he needed to be convinced. But why did it have to be me?”

“Because right about now, you’re the only one he really trusts.”

“And see how great that’s turned out for him.”

“He doesn’t ever have to find out.”

“I’ll still know,” Lupita said.

Rita shrugged. “Get over it. And even if he does find out, he’ll be glad you did it. In his heart, it’s what he wants to do. You know that.”

Did she? Lupita wondered.

She finally turned to Rita. “Tell me he’s not going to end up dead like Enrico.”

“Come on,” Rita said. “He’s a dragon. What can hurt him?”

“That’s what you said about Gila monsters and look where it got Enrico.”

“I thought Enrico was stronger than he turned out to be.”

Lupita shook her head. “You don’t see the start of a pattern here?”

“What else can we do?” Rita asked. “Do you really want things to go on the way they are now? It’s not just humans who are getting killed in the crossfire of what the gangs are doing, and it’s only going to get worse.”

Lupita gave a reluctant nod. The number of cousins who’d died because of the
bandas
wasn’t high, but it was rising. Javelina boys who’d “disrespected” gang colors. A deer girl run down in a car race out on the highway. Two old quail aunts, cut down for target practice.

“I know,” she said. “But I like Jay, and I’m worried about him. He’s so new to the dragon.”

“Trust me,” Rita said. “If I didn’t believe he could handle it, I’d never let him go up against Flores.”

Which was what she’d said about Enrico, Lupita thought again. But this time she held her tongue.

“Don’t worry so much,” Rita said. “I know he’s strong. I just hope we don’t need a repeat of what happened at the music hall for the dragon to get up to speed.”

It took Lupita a moment to understand.

“You mean somebody might have to die for this to work?” she said.

Rita looked away to where Jay had walked off into the desert, her gaze ranging far, as though she could pierce the distance and see him.

“Somebody always ends up dying,” she finally said.

There was a story that went around among the cousins about how the snake women like Rita and her sister, Ramona, could see into the future. If that was true, Lupita thought, what did Rita see? And for that matter, if it
was
true, why hadn’t she foreseen Enrico’s death? Or Margarita’s?

Though maybe she had and she’d only kept quiet because it was all part of some plan of hers.

Ay-yi-yi, Lupita’s head was starting to hurt. She wished she could roll back the weeks to the time before she’d met Jay. Back then, all she had to think about were things like teasing the javelina boys, racing with her jackrabbit cousins down the dry washes, or maybe playing chase with the hummingbird girls in the gardens of the five-fingered beings. But now . . .

No, she realized, that wasn’t true. She was happy to have met Jay. She liked him, but more important, she knew she was better for knowing him. Being with him had woken something up inside her that she never knew she had. Issues and causes had always seemed like a waste of time and energy because who cared what a little cousin had to say about anything? Now she realized that helping other people lent weight to your life. At least it did to hers.

“It used to all be like this,” Rita said.

Lupita looked up to see that Rita was still gazing out across the desert.

“What did?” she asked. “Do you mean the desert?”

Rita shrugged. “The desert. The spiritlands. The land on both sides of the border.” She turned to look at Lupita. “Once—back in the days before the five-fingered beings came—there was no border. There was no difference between spirit and dream and the world Raven pulled out of that pot of his.”

“You were there at the beginning?” Lupita asked.

Rita laughed. “I’m not that old, darling. But I was here when the humans first came, and I’ve watched them bleed the medicine right out of the world.” She shook her head. “Year by year, they’ve pushed it across the border and now they stand around and scratch their heads, wondering where it’s all gone.”

“They’re not all bad,” Lupita said.

“And neither are all rainstorms. Some nourish the earth, and some tear it apart with their fury.”

“But—”

“Oh, I know,” Rita said. “We can’t turn time back to the days that were, and Cody’s showed us often enough what happens when we meddle with the fabric of the world. Remember the time he took the whole world of the five-fingered beings and rolled it up like a carpet?”

Lupita nodded. “I’ve heard the story.”

“Well, it sure didn’t work out like he thought it would,” Rita said. “All he managed to do was split the world in two so that now we have their world
and
the spiritlands.”

“I thought that was just a story.”

“It is. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. You get to sharing Coyote tales and it all sounds like something you’d tell around a campfire.”

“So that’s what you meant about how it all used to be one.”

Rita nodded. “We can walk between the two, but humans—well, they’re a mix of those who don’t even remember the medicine, those who still yearn for it, and the very few who are like us and can cross back and forth.”

“So what does any of that have to do with Jay taking down El Tigre?”

“Nothing. I was just remembering. But maybe indulging in a little bit of wishful thinking, too. I look at Flores and the
bandas
and I see in them all the things that are wrong with the world of the five-fingered beings. Get a yellow dragon in there running the show and maybe, just maybe, we could have one little corner of the world as close to the way it should be as we’re going to get, all things considered.”

“And if Jay fails?”

“Then I find somebody else. I’m not giving up on this.”

“I’m going to get the cousins together,” Lupita said. “For when he goes up against El Tigre.”

“Yeah, well, good luck with that.”

“Maybe we’ll surprise you.”

“I hope you do,” Rita said.

Lupita searched the snake woman’s face, but she couldn’t read anything in her impassive features. Then she thought of something she’d meant to ask Rita earlier.

“Why did you want me to get Jay to go practice in those particular mountains?” she asked. “He could just as easily have done it here.”

Rita smiled. “Because the thunders live there. With any luck, he’ll run into one of them and then we’ll see his dragon wake up for sure.”

“You think old spirits like that would help him?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they’ll help him, maybe they’ll take offense at him showing up in their territory and he’ll have to defend himself. One way or the other, by the time he comes back, he’s going to have learned how to access his dragon side. If he hasn’t, Flores won’t ever have to worry about him showing up.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that?”

“Would you have sent him if I had?”

Lupita glared at her. “You’re going to pay for it if anything happens to him up there. I’ll make sure you regret it.”

“What’s to regret?” Rita said. “Whatever happens, at least one of you little cousins has grown herself some backbone. That’s a step in the right direction.”