The Painted Boy (41 page)

But she doesn’t seem to be in any kind of hurry.

“It’s about your grandma,” Berlin says.

I sigh. So all of this is because I didn’t give her the respect she expects from me. But the next thing Berlin says turns everything upside down.

“We’re worried about her,” she goes on.

“You’re worried about Paupau? You’re not here to . . .”

My voice trails off. Berlin’s violet eyes study me for a moment, then she smiles and shakes her head.

“No, no,” she says. “Everybody thinks you’re doing a terrific job. They think you’re already got the maturity of a dragon well into his second century. And I agree.”

“Then what . . . ?”

“You know about dragons going rogue?” she asks.

I nod.

“It usually happens all at once,” she says. “Something sets them off and they just snap.”

Like I did when Margarita was killed.

I don’t know if she can read my mind, or if it’s showing on my face again.

“No, not like you when your friend was killed,” she says. “You shut the rage down and got everybody out before the building collapsed.”

“How do you
know
that?”

“I was here,” she says. “I was with the others when we came to see what had happened.”

“So it was like a cop has to go up in front of the police board if he discharges his weapon. You guys are the dragon equivalent of the police board.”

She nods. “Kind of.”

“Or like the feathered serpents down south.”

“Yeah, more like that.”

She has the decency to look a little embarrassed. She stops playing for a moment, then starts again in a different key.

“So what’s this got to do with my grandmother?” I ask.

She mutes her strings and leans on the small body of her guitar.

“It’s a little more rare,” she says, “but sometimes a dragon starts to go off. It’s a little something here, a little something else there, and the next thing you know you’ve got a rogue on the loose, tearing apart all the things she’s supposed to be protecting.”

“You think Paupau’s going
rogue
?”

We might have had our differences, but the one thing that defines my grandmother is her control. I can’t imagine her without it. For six years, I was witness to it every single day.

“We don’t think it’s gotten that far,” Berlin says. “But the signs . . .”

“What signs?” I ask when she doesn’t go on.

“Your grandma is the last of the Chinese yellow dragons,” she says, then she pauses. “Well, technically, you are. But you know what I mean. Paupau is the last of the old-school ones. She’s big on tradition.”

“Tell me about it.”

“But not so much anymore. She’s made herself completely unavailable to those requesting her help. She spends her days sequestered in her apartment. At night, she wanders the streets waiting for someone to try to take advantage of the little old Chinese lady. And when they do, she . . . deals with them.”

“Oh, crap. She hasn’t killed anybody, has she?”

“Not yet. Until last night, she’d just been roughing them up—laying down the law, dragon style.”

“What happened last night?”

“She put a man in a coma. She’s so angry, but she won’t say why.”

But I know why.

“I think it’s my fault,” I tell Berlin. “I called home yesterday.”

 

 

Both Rosalie and Anna had been after me for days, trying to convince me to call my parents.

“You’re mad at your grandmother,” Rosalie said. “I get it. Don’t forget, I met her and she’s a real piece of work. But your mother and father—”

“
How
can you not have called them since what happened at the dance hall?” Anna said. “They must be worried sick.”

“I know. I’m just afraid that Paupau will pick up. I’m not ready to talk to her yet.”

Anna shook her head. “Superhero,” she said. “You’ve got to bite the bullet on this one and just do it. Take the chance.”

Rosalie nodded in agreement. “You really do, Jay.”

So that night I took my cell to the trailhead and punched the speed dial for my parents’ restaurant. With the time difference, they should have just been closing up.

I was so nervous I actually had to sit down on the bench there. Some big, scary dragon I was. I found myself hoping that no one would pick up. I could tell the girls, hey, I tried but—

“Hello. You’ve reached the Dragon Garden.”

All my nervousness drained away. Just hearing her voice made me feel happy and safe.

“Mom?”

“Jay! We’ve been so worried.” I heard her call to my dad. “Jimmy, pick up the extension. It’s Jay on the phone.”

That’s why my James became Jay. We already had a Jimmy in the family.

I had a good conversation with my parents. Scratch that. I had a
great
conversation with them. At least I did, until my mom said she’d go get Paupau so I could talk to her.

“Don’t, Mom.”

It was so quiet for a moment that I thought I’d lost the connection.

“Hello,” I said.

“We’re still here,” Dad said.

I could hear the thoughtful frown in Mom’s voice.

“Why don’t you want to talk to her?” she asked.

I put it as diplomatically as possible.

“We’re . . . we’re having a difference of opinion. She doesn’t think I should be allowed any free will, and I disagree.”

“Is this dragon business?” Mom asked.

“Um, yeah.”

Mom sighed. “Well, you won’t get any argument from me on that. I never agreed all that ridiculous training.”

When she said that, it made me wonder how much she actually knew about what had been happening between Paupau and me.

“Why didn’t you stop her?” I asked.

“It’s like trying to move a mountain,” Dad said. “Believe me, we tried. But this dragon business . . . it goes back forever—for generations in the Xú family. Your mother and Paupau have been arguing about it for years.”

Mom added, “The only reason I agreed to your moving away without even finishing high school is that at least it would get you away from her for a while. Everything is always so serious with Paupau. I thought you should have a chance to be a seventeen-year-old, to find your own way, even if it meant my baby boy was moving so far away.”

Even over the phone I felt embarrassed.

“I’m not a baby anymore, Mom.”

She laughed. “You’re my youngest. You’ll always be my baby.”

“I’m going to school here,” I said to change the subject. “It’s tough catching up this late in the year but I’ve got friends helping me.”

“Good for you, son,” Dad said.

We talked some more and it was all good until Mom finished with, “You know I’ll have to tell Paupau you called.”

Which meant I was giving her even more disrespect by not speaking to her.

“Yeah, I know,” I said.

“I talked to my parents,” I tell Berlin, “but I refused to talk to Paupau. We already had an argument the last time I saw her, so this was just going to make it worse. But I thought she’d only be mad at me. I never thought it would affect anybody else.”

“So what
is
going on with the two of you?” Berlin asked.

“You have to ask? For six years she puts me through this insane exercise and meditation program, but she won’t tell me why. At least not in any way that makes sense. She gives me riddles, not explanations. Then she just sends me out into the world where I’m supposed to find my destiny, but if I screw it up—and how do I not screw it up when I don’t have a clue what’s really what?—she and a bunch of her friends are going to come and kill me.”

Berlin’s quiet for a long moment.

“Yeah,” she finally says. “That’s been a source of disagreement for a lot of people in the clan. But you have to remember that she went through the same process herself. It’s how the Chinese dragons have always done it.”

“Tradition.”

She gives me a humorless smile. “Pretty much.”

“So did you have to go through that?”

She shakes her head. “But I wasn’t any happier with the seven years I studied with a sensei in Japan learning meditation techniques, martial arts, kendo, and that kind of thing.”

“Kendo?”

“Kind of the Japanese version of fencing.”

“You don’t look Japanese.”

She shrugs. “I’m not. That’s just the branch of the clan I hooked up with. They pulled me out of an orphanage—my parents were both dead. Dad was a junked-out musician, Mom a hooker. Not much life expectancy in either profession.”

She says it like it’s no big deal, but now I know why she chose the “emperor” she did.

“Anyway,” she goes on, “life was tough in the dojo, but we always knew what we were doing and why, and we sure as hell didn’t get sent out solo to wake up our dragons.”

“So you see why I’ve got issues,” I say.

She nods. “But I’m going to have to ask you to man up and try to make things right with her. Show her a little respect.”

“Why should I?”

“Because you’re a good kid and she needs it. Look, you don’t have to kowtow to her like everything’s okay and you don’t have your issues, but surely you’ve got some good memories of her? Was it six years of hell, or just a tough boot camp that went on for way too long?”

“No, there were good times.”

“Try to focus on them and not the crap that winds you up.”

“But she was going to
kill
me.”

Berlin shakes her head. “We’d have had to do something if you gone completely rogue, but killing you wasn’t nearly the first option.”

“I don’t know. . . .”

“You don’t have to go live with her or anything. You couldn’t, anyway. You’ve got your own responsibilities now. But go talk to her.”

“Or you guys are going to come down on her.”

“We’re just trying to stop this before it gets worse.”

“The guy in the coma—what happens if he dies?”

She shrugs. “Then he dies. Look, these guys she’s taking out, they’re not exactly the cream of society, but she’s hitting them way too harsh. She shouldn’t even be dealing with that kind of thing. Our job is focusing on the big picture. We only deal with the little stuff if somebody specifically asks us to get involved, and even then it’s our call.”

For days now, I’ve been wrestling with questions about where I’m supposed to draw the line in terms of my responsibilities. I guess I couldn’t get a clearer answer than that.

“So I talk to her and then I can go?” I say.

“That’ll be up to you.”

“But if I’m done with her, won’t she just keep doing what she’s doing?”

“I don’t know,” Berlin says. “Maybe it’ll give her closure. At some point the sensei always has to let the student go.”

“I guess.”

“You won’t know until you talk to her.”

So I let her take me to Chicago. The cool thing is that she shows me how
el entre
can be used to bridge great distances. Like we only walked for an hour or so through an ever-changing landscape, but after that hour we were already on the outskirts of Chicago. The only bad moment was when we got a certain distance from the barrio and I felt the medicine wheel fade away.

I would have fallen if Berlin hadn’t caught my arm.

“It’s okay,” she says. “It’ll still be there waiting for you when you get back. It’s always tough the first time.”

I nodded, but as the emptiness filled me I finally really understood how Señora Elena must have felt.

“Can Paupau travel like this?” I ask now. “Because the last time she came to see me, she came by plane.”

“She was showing you respect,” Berlin says.

“I don’t understand.”

“Instead of just taking a walk through the otherworld and reaching you in an hour or so, she took the time to take the long way to see you. The way everybody else has to travel.”