The Painted Boy (26 page)

“Mother of God,” Anna said at the same moment, her eyes going wide.

She made the sign of the cross.

Rosalie understood Anna’s shock completely. It was Lupita. But a different Lupita from the young girl Rosalie had seen before. This one had long jackrabbit ears hanging down like a pair of braids, and pushing up out of her hair were two small deer antlers. But she was wearing the same kind of raggedy clothing—baggy black sweatpants and a tight pink sleeveless T-shirt.

Lupita regarded Anna, then turned back to Rosalie.

“She really is a total drama queen,” Lupita said.

Rosalie had almost made the sign of the cross herself.

“You—you’re Lupita,” she said.

The girl nodded.

“Jay’s . . . um . . . cousin.”

“I’m a cousin, but not the way you’re thinking.”

“And you . . . you have antlers and . . .”

“Long ears,” Lupita finished for her.

She flipped them coquettishly, to bring the point home.

Anna looked back and forth between them.

“You
know
this . . . this, uh . . .
spirit
?” she finally asked Rosalie.

Rosalie couldn’t stop staring at the antlers and ears.

“Kind of,” she said. “But she didn’t look like this the last time I saw her.”

“That’s right,” Ramon said. “She’s the girl who was waiting for Jay in front of Tío’s place the other night.” He turned his attention to Lupita. “But looks are always deceiving when it comes to the animal people, isn’t that right?”

Lupita gave him an amused look. “I’m not one of the big medicines, if that’s what you mean. What you see is what you get.”

“So you’re just a kid,” Ramon said.

“Except for the ears and the . . . you know . . .” Anna muttered from beside him.

Lupita nodded. “The way cousins count the years, sure, but what’s that got to do with anything?”

“We need to speak to one of the desert spirits,” Ramon said. “I guess what you call the big medicines.”

Lupita’s smile faded. “Ai-yi-yi. Do you think the thunders come at anyone’s beck and call? And do you think you could actually have a conversation with one? That’s like trying to have a conversation with a mountain or a lake.”

“But—”

“What you need is a cousin,” she said. “Like me.” She flipped her ears again, then gave a knowing tap to one of her antlers. “Walking around as a five-fingered being. Flesh and bone. Because you’re looking for Jay, right?”

Rosalie nodded. “Can you help us?”

“Sure. I could show you where he is, but you can’t go to him right now. He’s kind of busy.”

“What’s he doing?”

“Practicing how to be a dragon.”

“Oh.”

There was a moment’s silence, broken by the hoot of an owl calling from its perch, high on the top of a saguaro.

“Why does he have to practice what he’s already supposed to be?” Anna finally had to ask.

Lupita shrugged. “He’s not very good at being a dragon and he needs to be, because he’s going to go head-to-head with El Tigre.”

The three teenagers exchanged looks.

“This is my fault, isn’t it?” Anna said. “It’s because of what I said to him in the parking lot the other night.”

“Partly, sure,” Lupita told her. “But you’re not the whole story. He’s also really upset about your friend being killed, and I guess he wishes now that he’d just shut the
bandas
down instead of going for any kind of peaceful negotiation.”

“He can really do that?” Rosalie asked.

“What, shut them down?”

Rosalie nodded. Lupita looked away before answering.

“He’s got mad skills,” Lupita finally said. “No question there. The problem is, I’m just not sure he really knows how to use them.”

“What do you mean?” Rosalie said. “He brought down the whole music hall.”

“Yeah, but he was really angry that night. This is something he has to be able to call up whenever he needs it, not only when he gets really pissed off about something. He needs to get it together, and he needs to do it fast, because if he can’t show that he’s the full, real yellow dragon deal when he goes up against El Tigre, Flores is going to slaughter him.”

“So he has to kill El Tigre first?” Ramon asked.

Lupita nodded. “But according to Señora Elena—”

“Who?” Anna broke in to ask.

“She’s—” Lupita began, then shook her head. “Never mind. It’s too complicated to explain. All you need to know is that if Jay kills Flores, it’ll make everything a waste of time.”

“I don’t get it,” Anna said. “El Tigre will be gone. And if Jay can handle him, he can get rid of the gangs, too.”

Lupita nodded. “Probably. But then every wannabe gangbanger boss will want to take a run at him.”

“I don’t understand.”

“What he needs to do,” Lupita explained, “is take control of things without being a bully about it. If he can pull that off, he’ll have our support—all of the cousins, you know?—and there won’t be any more
bandas
coming into town because none of us will let them get a foothold. It also means that none of the cousins will make a try for him, either.”

“You make it sound like some old western movie,” Ramon said.

“Why don’t the, um, cousins—why don’t they do that now?” Anna broke in.

“Cousins have trouble agreeing on pretty much everything,” Lupita said.

“Then why would they support him?” Rosalie asked.

“Because if he does it right, he’ll be
ours
. He’ll be so rooted to the land—to this place—that to go against him would be like not breathing anymore, or cutting off your own hand.”

“He’ll be your spiritual leader,” Ramon said.

Lupita nodded. “Exactly.”

“But he’s just a kid,” Rosalie said.

“No,” Lupita told her. “He’s a yellow dragon.”

“Not yet,” Anna said. “You told us he was still practicing to be one.”

Lupita gave her a considering look. Rosalie thought she saw a flicker of worry in the jackalope girl’s eyes, there, then gone.

“Don’t worry,” Lupita said. “I have faith in him.”

“But what if he kills El Tigre?” Rosalie had to ask. “What happens then?”

“Then he has to prove himself to every wannabe who comes along and thinks they can do a better job.”

“How can we help?” Rosalie asked.

Ramon nodded. “Is there anything we can do?”

“You could be more supportive,” Lupita said.

She spoke to them all, but she looked directly at Anna.

“What do you expect me to do?” Anna asked.

“Oh, I’m not saying you have to pretend to be in love with him or anything, but you could be a little less harsh.”

“Maybe I’ve been hard on him,” Anna said, “but think about what it’s been like for me. From what happened to my brother to—”

Lupita held up a hand to stop her.

“Don’t need to know,” the jackalope girl said. “Don’t care. I’m just saying, if you want to help, dial back the heavy vibe.” She paused, then added, “You could even apologize. Otherwise, the best you can do is just make yourself scarce until all of this blows over.”

“But Jay—”

“Doesn’t need the distraction that you are unless you’re standing in his corner going, ‘Yay, Jay!’”

“You don’t—”

“Yeah, I know. Now I’m the one being harsh. But this is serious business. However it goes down, he can’t afford to be distracted.”

“So what
can
we do?” Rosalie asked.

“Seriously?”

“Of course, seriously.”

“Come down to the pool hall when Jay goes up against El Tigre,” Lupita said. “Show that you really do support him. I’ve been out talking to the cousins, but I don’t know how many will actually come and we need a lot of bodies to be there. I want to fill the street if we can.”

“What for?”

“As a show of force. And to stand up to the
bandas
while the big guns go at each other, mano a mano.”

“We could do that,” Ramon said. “We could put the word out that Malo Malo is playing a free gig. That’ll bring out a few hundred people.”

“We could play the gig for real,” Anna put in. “In memory of Margarita.”

“We’d need a drummer.”

“Chaco Rios could fill in. With Margarita gone, he’s the best drummer we have in town.”

Ramon nodded. “And Billy’s uncle has a couple of flatbed trucks at the junkyard. We set the gear up on them, power with generators, and then just roll in, ready to play.”

“It all sounds good,” Lupita told them. “Just make sure everybody stays out of Jay and El Tigre’s way.”

Ramon nodded.

“When’s it all going down?” he asked.

“It looks like tomorrow morning, in front of El Conquistador. Jay just wants to get it over with.”

Rosalie remembered the last time Jay had gone off to see Flores. He hadn’t had the patience to wait then, either.

“We’ll have to work fast to get it all organized,” Ramon said.

“Then let me get you back to your world,” Lupita told them.

“Our . . .
world
?” Anna said.

Lupita grinned. “Where did you think you were? Do you see any city lights? Do you hear any traffic?”

An echo of Rosalie’s earlier vertigo returned. She steadied herself with a hand on Ramon’s arm. She remembered thinking how bright the moon had gotten when Lupita appeared, but then the shock of the jackalope girl’s appearance had swallowed her attention. She’d never looked around. When she did now, she saw it was true. The light pollution of Santo del Vado Viejo simply wasn’t there. And the quiet around them was profound.

“Where—where are we?” she asked.

“We call it
el entre
,” the jackalope girl told her. “It’s the place in between your world and the spirit world.”

“I don’t understand. You brought us here?
Why
did you bring us here?”

Lupita pointed to the mountains behind them. When they turned to look, they saw flashes of light rising up behind the range.

“What’s that?” Rosalie asked.

“Jay,” Lupita told her. “Practicing.”

“But—”

“When I first heard the three of you talking, you said you were looking for Jay, so I brought you here, where he is.”

“Can we go see him?” Rosalie asked.

“I’m thinking now is probably not a good idea. Let him stay focused on what he’s doing.” Lupita grinned then. She raised her arms theatrically high. “Here we go.”

Another flash of vertigo hit Rosalie, here, then gone. This time she wasn’t the only one affected.

“I think I’m going to hurl,” Anna said.

“Sorry,” Lupita told them. “Everybody has a different reaction to the transition.” She waited a moment to make sure they were all right, then added, “Stay safe,” and vanished.

“Okay,” Anna said. “That’s just creepy.”

Rosalie turned away from the glow of Santo del Vado Viejo that filled the night sky to the east and looked toward the mountains. There were no lights flashing there now.

“Did all of that just happen?” she said. “For real?”

Ramon put his arm around her shoulder.

“Afraid so,” he told her.

“It was so beautiful there. . . .”

Ramon nodded.

“Yeah, yeah,” Anna said, “but right here and now, time’s wasting. We’ve got a gig to get up and running.”

Lupita stood in
el entre
feeling guilty all over again. She hadn’t wanted to put Jay’s friends and the band’s fans in danger, but she wasn’t sure how many cousins she could actually gather and she kept going back to what Rita had said about maybe it would take somebody dying to bring out the dragon in Jay. She didn’t want anybody to be hurt except for El Tigre, but if there were going to be casualties, better it be among the five-fingered beings than the cousins. The cousins had never asked humans to take over their land and push the medicine away.

She knew that wasn’t the right way to look at it. What they had to do, cousins and five-fingered beings, was learn to get along. Except the five-fingered beings didn’t even know that her people existed, and if they did, most of them would just try to find some way to use the cousins the way they used up everything else. So why should she worry about what might happen to any of them?

Because they weren’t all like that.

She sighed. Oh, but it made her head hurt. Taking on responsibility was a lot harder than she’d ever thought it would be. Maybe that was why she’d avoided it for as long as she had.

She waited a little while to see if Rita was going to show up, then finally sat down to face the mountains. She watched the flashes of light that rose up from behind the ridges and hoped it really was Jay practicing. That it wasn’t the thunders ganging up on a yellow dragon.

Jay didn’t know if he’d ever get used to how different it was in Santo del Vado Viejo. The climate was certainly part of it, but mostly, there was just so much space. There wasn’t a building more than a few stories high anywhere, so the sky felt like it was right on top of you. In the barrios, the alleys running behind the houses were as wide as most Chicago streets. Get out past the city and it was all open desert. No matter where you went, you felt exposed.