Jaguar (13 page)

That first autumn that Rafferty had returned with the Roam they had staked down the rendezvous as usual, but first the old woman had sprinkled dried petals on Uncle’s grave. The toolbox lid was still there, and one tattered cluster of wings.

The Roam were a fastidious, secretive lot, and Rafferty didn’t understand the nature of their true product, the depth of their mystery, for years.
Information
was their product, as well as misinformation, and in these desperate times nothing was more valuable.

Their fastidiousness required access to a lot of water, and their intricate structure required large open ground for meetings. Uncle Hungry’s place was one of about two dozen that Rafferty was to visit over his next ten years with the Roam. They deferred to his ownership of it after Henry’s death, though ownership was a very fluid concept in their culture.

The official language of the Roam was a trading language they had concocted hundreds of years ago. But the Roam had a speaker for every language of every city in the world. Rafferty was good at gadgets, and Afriqua Lee mastered language. Only Rafferty knew how she’d done it.

Finally, they told Old Cristina. She made the sign of the noose behind her back and ordered them to stop. She ticked off the casualties they had caused, all ending in madness or death. This secret even the Romni Bari couldn’t keep forever.

The Roam brought music to the farm, and tents, and colorful wonders of the world. They stored wind power in air compressors. Large Barnard wind valves popped up all around the community. They sold components, power adapters or compressor drives for storage and for their marvelous devices. The Roam lived well without ever plugging in to power generators in the cities, but their thrifty nature demanded that they take advantage of someone else’s power wherever they could.

That first fall when Rafferty was six, Old Cristina handed him a black basket. Two bone catches fastened the lid.

“Careful,” she said.

The basket wobbled when he took it, and whatever was inside moved by itself.

He set the basket down on the stoop and squatted next to it. A little bit of red ribbon decorated one side of the basket, and something inside pecked at the red ribbon. Rafferty undid the pins and eased the lid off.

A sorry little rag of a fledgling crow stared back at him; he could see himself reflected in the glossy eye. It opened its beak wide and squalled, demanding food. When Rafferty made no move to feed it, the little crow made a stab at his fingers. He dropped the lid back down and heard it
thump
the little crow’s head.

Rafferty snatched the lid off again and those little black eyes glared at him. The crow ruffed its feathers and fetched a half-hearted peck at the ribbon.

“Remember,” his Uncle had said, “don’t be too good to him. If something happens to you, he’s got to know how to take care of himself. Don’t let him forget how to be a crow.”

Old Cristina gave the crow to Rafferty, and Old Cristina introduced him to Afriqua Lee.

By the time his uncle died, Rafferty had learned that no one truly owns a crow. He had learned as well that the uncle gave him roots, and the sickly young crow gave him something to care for. And Old Cristina had given him the crow. Between Uncle and Old Cristina he pieced together the series of disasters that led to their secret lives on the mud flats in this small mountain valley.

Not many talked of family, even then, the first plagues had seen to that. Rafferty and his uncle had netted the birds that swarmed around their drying tables and cooked them, mindful to let the crows go free because of Ruckus, who kept watch from the barn roof. Sometimes he lured birds in by imitating their calls. He also learned that the boy would feed him his fill if he waited until the business was done. Ruckus was a patient bird. Now the telltale crows flocked around him in twos and threes. The first took to traditional perches in the scraggly snags that surrounded the barn. Others balanced on what remained of the house. Rafferty’s crow, Ruckus, called out rank as the gentry appeared and reassured Rafferty with sidelong mutterings and pointed glances. The elder crows gathered with Ruckus along the sagging ridge of the barn, and Rafferty knew old Cristina couldn’t be far behind.

A lot of crows flocked in this year, and, like himself and some young men of the Roam, they were early. Raferty studied the skyline.

Nearly two months early.

The birds luffed the breeze, tucked their wings in tight and spiraled down to the dirt around him, unusually quiet for crows.

Thanks to Ruckus, Rafferty had caught up to the migrating Roam a month after Uncle Hungry’s death and Old Cristina took him in. He was ten, and technically a gaje, but the Roam respected Henry too much to leave the boy on a stone. Besides, the boy displayed the same skill with gadgets that Henry had, and he made himself useful from the start.

They had been amused that Rafferty had loaded one change of clothing, some dried bug meal, a water jug and twenty kilos of Henry’s best hand tools into Uncle’s old backpack. His first day in camp Rafferty repaired the refrigeration unit on the kumpania’s grain van and saved what food stores they had. Besides, Cristina liked him, with that alone no one could turn him away.

The night he caught them on the high road south was a starry night, typically cool for the highlands. The kumpania had been bogged down for days restructuring a bridge across a deep, bare ravine. The kumpania threw itself into frantic preparation for a night of music and dance, of hot food, bright skirts and bracelets flashing in the firelight.

The pump on the refrigeration van had been an easy repair, one that he recognized right away as a gasket problem by the whistling sound it made on the upstroke. The men of the Roam had concentrated on clearing the lines that held the refrigerant. They saw that the pump was pumping, but they couldn’t tell it was sucking air and fouling the system. Rafferty made a gasket out of a piece of old shoe leather and, since he had such small hands, managed to replace it without dismounting and dismantling the entire pump.

“Clean up in my tent, youngster,” Old Cristina said, “then have some coffee. We will be all night celebrating stakedown.”

Old Cristina’s furrowed brow furrowed further.

“Afriqua Lee dreams as you do.”

“I know . . . we know.”

“Do not endanger the Roam.”

“I won’t.”

He fidgeted from one foot to the other, keeping her gaze.

“How’d you know?”

“Henry. He was worried, he say you get headaches, sick, dream funny. My Afriqua Lee, she is the same thing.”

She made the sign of the noose.

“‘The big zero,’“ he said, quoting Uncle, the fervent non-believer.

“You sound just like your . . . just like Henry.” She turned her head for a moment, and sighed. “Go clean up,” she told him, and didn’t look back. “The kumpania will think you’re a gaje.”

Rafferty luxuriated in the first hot shower since Uncle died. He lathered on the foamy fragrance of their strange soap and scrubbed his scalp until it tingled.

He toweled down and, when he reached for his clothes, saw that they had been replaced by fresh trousers, shirt and jacket all embroidered with the bright complexity of the Romni Bari familiyi.

The black, mid-calf trousers had a red stripe sewn down the outer right leg and his cap draped two cloth braids of red, black and blue halfway down his back. He rubbed the steam from the mirror and checked his appearance.

Everything fit him well except the jacket, which was a little tight in the forearms. Rafferty was not a tall boy, but working with Uncle had made him strong for his age. His skin was pale next to theirs, and his nose narrow, but he found he could flare his nostrils acceptably with practice. His steady gaze, though blue-eyed, would also mark him a person of honor in the Roam. He squared his shoulders and the jacket sleeves slid above his wrists. People of the Roam were small, and Rafferty already outsized many men.

Rafferty was unaccustomed to the effects of the suppressors, so he barely heard the tap on the bathroom door.

Theo’s replacement, Stephan, wore the colors of The Network, which Rafferty didn’t know much about, but he knew that it represented a lot of power.

“I’m your sponsor,” Stephan announced, and pulled him into the hallway. “It was Theo’s wish. Nice suit. There’ll be some ritual stuff, some language stuff and a vision thing. Not for awhile, don’t twitch. You’re a shoo-in.”

The being we do not know is an infinite being; he may arrive,
and turn our anguish and our burden to dawn in our arteries.

—Rene Char

Mark White worked with Eddie Reyes twice a week throughout the summer of his sixth year. When school started, Mark hoped that Eddie would be taken up in the normal life of a six-year-old and that the dreams, the imaginary friends, would disappear as they generally did. But the small-town school was unwilling to let go its favorite gossip. The gossip, and the absolute unwillingness of his grandparents to relate to him, kept Eddie visiting Mark at least once a week throughout the winter.

His work with the boy felt different from the start, and Mark had to admit that Eddie had caught him up in two ways—sympathy for the pitiful home life he led, and curiosity about the rich fantasy life that he willingly displayed. That winter Dr. White fell in love. He would not regret the love, but he someday would regret the blur that it made of his work on The Hill and in the Veteran’s Hospital in the city.

Late-night soul-searchings in his spartan apartment reassured him that city life for the sake of career advancement was not acceptable. The tradeoff was too great. His frugal ways had allowed him to build up enough savings to put a down payment on a house in the coming year, and he’d decided to buy in the valley for its beauty and for his piece of mind. He could dismiss, once and for all, whatever Mindy might think.

Mark White was the new promising young professional in the valley. The town’s patriarchs paraded their eligible daughters past him at the various obligatory socials. Mark remained polite, charmed, flattered but alone.

He was merely alone during that time; not the least bit lonely. He became painfully alone only after he met Sara Lipko. Sara had received an arts council grant to work with disturbed patients in facilities throughout the state. She came loaded with books and loaded for bear and wasted no time on the likes of Mark White.

“Most people in institutions aren’t sick,” she declared when they first met. She blew a lock of brown hair out of her browner eyes. “They’re victimized by a system that’s trying to perpetuate itself. If you didn’t have any patients you wouldn’t have a job, right? They’re drugged by people like you until they’re confused, then led into hearings where it’s proven that they’re confused, and they’re sent back to the lockup so the state can keep you in Porsches.”

Hostile to authority figures,
Mark noted.
Typical knee-jerk, low-grade liberal paranoia. Assessment: pain in the ass.

That Monday in the day room at The Hill. Mark walked away in frustration and disgust, comforted by the administrator’s assurance that she’d be gone in a few weeks.

“I’ve got a Porsche oil cooler in my Volkswagen,” Mark confided to a colleague in the cafeteria. “It cost me thirty-five dollars at the wrecking yard. Does that count?”

Still, he was as troubled at the thought that she’d be gone as he was comforted. She was, after all, interesting. And outspoken. And there was no question that she was beautiful.

Thick, shoulder-length dark hair haloed her Slavic face and high cheekbones. Her large brown eyes looked into his own the whole time they talked, and Mark noted that she wore contacts. Eye contact with patients was an important part of his life, but it took tremendous will to hold his own with this woman.

He guessed her at five-eight or five-nine against his five-ten. His peripheral vision took in her bejangled, gypsy-type dress that dipped just enough at the neckline to pique his curiosity. She stood very close to him when she talked; no ring on her left hand.

Mark found himself doing something that surprised him. In spite of her brashness, and his uneasiness in her presence, he borrowed her records from the office.

“I want to see who’s going to be meddling with my patients,” he mumbled to Sherry at the desk.

“When you read the records, you’ll see that ‘meddling’ is not quite the word,” Sherry said. She watched him over the tops of her spectacles as he tapped the folder in his palm, then turned to go.

“Will you be offering private therapy to the visiting meddler?” she asked.

“Fat chance,” he said, and heard her chuckle as he closed the door.

On Thursday, Sara showed up for his volunteer day at the Soldiers’ Home and he knew he couldn’t ignore her. Her records had revealed a Guggenheim Foundation grant to write in two wars in Latin America. Her most recent book,
Daughters of Fire,
had won awards from five countries and was up for this year’s Pulitzer prize. If he’d had any doubts about avoiding Sara Lipko, the Colonel dispelled them when he ordered Mark to escort her on his rounds.

“You’re here on Thursdays, she’s here on Thursdays,” the sad-faced Colonel told him. “She’s a goddam liberal pain in the ass. She can’t be running around here loose and you’ve got the light work load.”

“How long will she be here?”

“Eight weeks. Make her happy. If the state won’t send us money, at least they can send some entertainment. That’s all.”

That cold Thursday in February he might’ve walked away from her in the Soldiers’ Home anyway, except that he’d just spotted an EEG that got his attention, one very much like Eddie Reyes’ aberrant tracing. Eddie’s dreaming event that Mark couldn’t duplicate revealed a rhythmic rise and fall—more like a respiration record than brain-wave activity. This EEG was coded for the fifth floor of the Soldiers’ Home, the high-security floor. No accompanying chart.

He’d conferred with several older colleagues about Eddie, and the consensus on the EEG was “atypical, unidentified seizure activity.” Clinical diagnoses ranged between multiple personality disorder and psychosis induced by sleep deprivation.