And then there were the dogs. Jay counted eight. They were mongrels of all sizes, from something he thought was a terrier mix to a big, long-legged mastiff. The rest were various combinations of shepherd, lab, and some kind of yellow dog that he couldn’t place.
“I could’ve walked here, easy,” he said, turning back to Anna.
She shook her head. “Not with the Kings looking for you. You wouldn’t have gotten half a block. What do they want with you, anyway?”
“Haven’t a clue.”
She gave him a look.
“Seriously,” he said. He nodded toward the yard, adding, “What’s with all the dogs?”
“Oh, that’s our Rosie for you. We call her Our Lady of the Barrio because she’s always taking in strays. She finds homes for most of them, but there’s always a bunch hanging around.” She smiled. “That goes for people, too. She puts in time at the soup kitchen and homeless shelter and takes all kinds of loser kids at school under her wing.”
“I hope I’m not too much of a loser.”
Anna gave him a light punch on the shoulder. “I’m kidding. But Rosie’s pretty much a freakin’ saint, no lie. I don’t know how she juggles it all and still keeps up her grades. How’re you with dogs?” she added as they got out of the car.
“I’m cool.”
Anna opened the gate and the pack came running. Anna stepped forward, like she was going to calm them down, but they all stopped within a few yards and sat in the dirt, staring at them. No, Jay realized. Staring at him.
“That’s weird,” Anna said.
“What is?”
“Well, usually they’re all over visitors, yapping and carrying on.”
She gave Jay a puzzled look.
He shrugged. “I’m good with animals. We understand each other.”
She looked back at the dogs, a little frown furrowing her brow.
“Obviously,” she finally said and led the way to the trailer.
Jay paused at the door even though Anna had already gone in. She turned to look at him.
“What’s the holdup?” she asked.
“Nothing. It’s just . . .”
He didn’t know what to say. He felt the presence of some kind of protective barrier keeping him out as effectively as if Anna had closed the door in his face. It took him a moment to realize it was the blue paint on the door and door frame. It seemed to vibrate when he looked at it closely and gave off a spicy scent that attracted him as much as it repelled.
“We have this, um, superstition in my family,” he finally said. “About blue trim on doors.”
Anna raised her eyebrows.
“It’s just,” he went on, “we think it’s bad luck to go in unless someone actually invites us in.”
“You’re shitting me. What are you, a vampire?”
“Walking around in the day?”
“Okay,” she said, “I’ll give you that. But do you know why so many houses in this part of the country have blue on the windowsills and doors?”
He shook his head.
“It’s to keep out the evil spirits.” She waited a moment, then added, “Are you trying to tell me you’re an evil spirit?”
He laughed. “Hardly. And who says the spirits have to be evil?”
“What would be the point of keeping out good spirits?”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“So, are you coming in, or what?”
“Are you inviting me?”
She rolled her eyes. “Come in, come in, already. You’re one weird dude, you know that?”
“So I’ve been told.”
But as soon as she spoke the words, he could cross the invisible barrier. He dropped his knapsack by the door and looked around. The trailer wasn’t much on the outside, but inside it felt bigger than he thought it would and it was tidy. The furniture was all mismatched thrift store finds, but Rosalie obviously had a good eye and managed to bring harmony into what might have been chaos.
“And here come the cats,” Anna said.
Jay turned to see a gray tabby and a slinky black cat coming down a short hall. They stopped when they saw him, hissed, and fled to the room at the far end.
“Good with animals?” Anna asked.
“Not so much with cats, I guess.”
“The shower’s through there,” Anna said, pointing to a door down the narrow hall. “She keeps her spare towels on the shelves behind the door. Use whatever you need.”
“Thanks.”
“I’ll go play with the dogs. Unless you need me to invite you into the bathroom before you can use the shower.”
He smiled. “No, I’m good.”
He waited until the door closed behind her before he went into the bedroom. Staying in the doorway, he knelt down on the carpet. The two cats were under the bed. A third, a striped orange-and-white tom, glared at him from the windowsill.
“Okay, tiger brothers,” he said. “Can we have a truce here? I promise not to hurt you or Rosalie. I’m just staying for a couple of days and then I’ll be out of your lives again. What do you say?”
The cat on the sill continued to ignore him, but the gray tabby came out from under the bed. It sat and regarded Jay for a long moment, then began to groom itself. The second one emerged as well and jumped onto the bed. They weren’t friendly, but at least they appeared to be willing to keep the peace while he was here.
“Thanks, guys,” Jay said.
He stood back up and went into the bathroom.
It felt great to be clean again. He let the water pour down, relaxing under its spray until he started thinking about the gangbangers who’d been chasing him. There were gangs in Chicago. Crips and Bloods, the Latin Kings. The Chinese and Vietnamese kids had their gangs, too. But it wasn’t hard to stay out of their way. Jay had always found it easy to stay off anyone’s radar. Like the little lizards back at La Maravilla’s patio, he just faded into the background. It was only when he spent time with people who didn’t know his secret that they usually got uncomfortable.
But here he seemed to be the focus of everybody’s attention. The gangbangers. Rosalie. Anna.
He turned off the shower and toweled himself dry.
He liked both girls, but the gangbangers worried him. Maybe they were the reason Paupau thought he should be here, but this whole gang business seemed much too big for him to deal with.
“We can’t protect everything,” Paupau told him once, “so we must make our choices count.”
She kept the peace in Chinatown, but it wasn’t through confrontation. He wasn’t entirely sure how she did it.
A finger on a map had brought him here, but now that he was here, he had no idea what to do next. One of Paupau’s proverbs popped into his head:
To know the road ahead, ask those coming back.
It was sensible advice, except how did you know who’d already gone ahead, and who was to say they would even be coming back?
He sighed and went to get dressed, then realized he’d left his knapsack by the door. He wrapped the towel around his waist and poked his head out to check. Good. Anna was still outside. He went and got the knapsack and was on his way back to the bathroom when the front door suddenly opened. He tried to turn around, but he was too late.
“Are you about done?” Anna was saying as she came in, then her eyes went wide. “Holy crap! That is some serious ink.”
The dragon image took up most of his back, a complex pattern of swirling golds and yellows, the dragon outlined in black: limbs, head, horns, tail. The detail was so intricate that you could almost think you saw each individual scale. The head lay across his shoulder blades with the curling tail disappearing under the towel at the small of his back. It had grown in size as he’d grown, always taking up the same space on his back.
This was the secret he couldn’t share.
When he was eleven, it would have brought Children’s Services in to investigate, because what kind of parents would tattoo their child like this? Keeping it hidden meant he co
uldn’t go to gym, couldn’t go swimming, couldn’t get naked with a girl—though that had been more his frustration than anything his parents or Paupau would have sympathized with.
Six years of keeping it hidden like he had some kind of stupid, secret identity—can we say Dragon Boy, anybody?—and now, because he’d let down his guard for just a moment, all the alienation he’d had to suffer was for nothing.
Oddly, the only thing he felt was relief.
“It’s not a tattoo,” Jay found himself saying before he could stop himself.
“Yeah, right. And I’m so brown-skinned only because I take the sun so well.”
“No . . . I mean . . .” Jay let the words trail off.
“So what are you? Some kind of painted boy?”
Jay didn’t know what to say.
“That is so freaky,” Anna went on, then her eyes narrowed. “You’re not one of those ninja Yakuza guys, are you? Because I saw a movie about them.”
Jay shook his head. “Yakuza and ninjas aren’t the same thing, and they’re both Japanese. I’m Chinese.”
“So it’s some kind of Chinese gang thing. That’s why the bandas are after you, isn’t it? You’re part of the Asian invasion into their turf.”
“How do you even know about that kind of thing?” he asked.
She shrugged. “You have to be informed. How else do you know who to avoid?”
When she put it like that, he understood. It had been the same back in Chicago. But here the necessary knowledge didn’t appear to just let you survive high school. Here, apparently, you lived or died by it. Literally.
“Well, I’m not in a gang,” he said, “and it’s not a gang tattoo. It’s an image of a dragon, nothing less, nothing more.”
Anna studied him for a long moment.
“I don’t know why,” she finally said, “but I find myself wanting to believe you.”
“That’s good, because I’m telling you the truth. All I am is another kid—just like you.”
When Anna grinned, he knew that she was going to let it go. For now, anyway.
“I’m no kid,” she shot back with some of her earlier friendliness. “I’m a rock goddess. Or I could maybe be if we can ever get this band off the ground. We’ve got a zillion MySpace friends but it’s still hard to get a decent gig.”
Jay imagined her onstage. If she played half as good as she looked, she was probably right.
“I should get dressed,” he said.
“Don’t feel like you have to on my account.”
He raised his eyebrows, but she only smiled and waved him off to the bathroom.
Don’t get too excited, he thought when he closed the door behind him. She was only flirting—like she had when they first met. Though now he could sense a reserve that he was pretty sure hadn’t been there earlier. Or maybe he just hadn’t noticed. Rosalie, he realized, was naturally cheerful, but Anna had to work at it. There could be any reason for the melancholy under her jokes and flirting—from distrusting a stranger to having to deal with the loss of her brother on an ongoing basis—but this wasn’t the time, nor was it his place, to talk to her about it.
Everybody had secrets—some bigger than others. Like the image of a dragon he carried on his skin.
He considered asking her not to tell anyone else about it, but that would only feed her suspicions. Besides, he was seventeen now. Lots of kids his age had tattoos. It was no big deal, unless he made a big deal out of it.
He dressed quickly, stowed his dirty clothes in his knapsack until he could get to a Laundromat, and rejoined Anna in the living room.
“All set?” she asked.
He nodded. He dropped his knapsack by the door again and followed her outside where the dogs were waiting quietly—almost in deference—for them. For him.
It was a weird feeling, and one he hadn’t experienced before.
It was one of those nights at La Maravilla. The middle of the week, but between the steady flow of touristas and their own regulars, they’d been nonstop busy ever since five. They had to close the patio because with every inside table occupied, they didn’t have the staff to deal with the overflow.
Jay waited on tables with Rosalie because Tío had no time to show him around the kitchen where he and the dishwasher Paco dealt with the steady stream of meals going out and dirty plates coming back in. It wasn’t until almost ten o’clock that Tío was able to leave the kitchen and lean on the counter beside where Rosalie was making out a bill.
“
“” She looked over at her uncle. “
“
“
“”
“
Working with Jay had made the night go quickly. He always had some little joke or funny observation that he’d share as they passed each other, going from table to kitchen and back again.
Tío pushed away from the bar and stretched.
“
Anna came back around eleven when they were getting ready to close up. She sat on a stool by the bar, drying the glasses that Rosalie washed, her body turned so that she could watch Jay as he cleaned tables.
“I think you like him,” Rosalie said.
“I do, but . . .”
“He asked me if you have a boyfriend.”
“Really?”
Rosalie nodded. She could see that Anna liked the idea, but she could also tell that something was bothering her.
“Okay,” she said. “I know that look. What’s up?”
“I don’t know that I want to like him.”
“If that’s supposed to make sense to me, I have to tell you that it doesn’t.”
Anna sighed. “What do we really know about him?”
“This from the girl who’s always telling people not to judge anything unless you know something about it?”
“This is different,” Anna said. “He’s different.”
“You mean because he’s Chinese?”
“God, no. It’s just . . . did you know that he’s got this tattoo of a dragon that covers his whole back?”
“How would I know that?” Rosalie gave her friend a considering look, then added, “How do you know that?”
Anna waved a hand. “I just happened to come into the trailer when he was getting clean clothes out of his backpack, and there he was wearing nothing but a towel. It doesn’t matter. The point is, you know who has ink like that, right?”
Rosalie shook her head.
“Come on, girl. The Asian gangs are all into dragon tattoos.”
Disappointment rose in Rosalie. “You think he’s in a gang?”
“I don’t know. But you know how they say at school that they’re trying to move in, and then there’s the fact that the bandas are all interested in him. So he could be a spy. He says he isn’t—a spy or in a gang. But that’s not the weirdest thing. When I first asked him about the dragon, he said it wasn’t a tattoo. I may only have my brother’s name inked on my shoulder—so I’m no expert—but I know a tattoo when I see one.”
Rosalie looked over at Jay. He was now putting chairs up on the tables.
“He doesn’t look like the kind of kid that’d have a big tattoo,” she said.
“Well, he does. And then there’s how he had to be invited into your trailer like some kind of vampire.”
“What do yo
u mean?”
“He wouldn’t go in until I invited him.”
“That’s weird.”
“Tell me about it,” Anna said. “And I haven’t even told you the whole business with your dogs.”
She turned back to Anna, her pulse quickening. “What happened with the dogs?”
“Nothing happened to them. It’s the way they were around him. No barking and trying to jump up. Nothing. I didn’t have to say a word to them. They just all sat in a half circle, looking at him, like he was their pack leader or a saint or something.”
“Even Oswaldo?”
That was her mastiff who wasn’t mean, just enthusiastic, but because of his size most people couldn’t tell the difference when he came charging across the yard toward them.
“All of them,” Anna said. “The cats were different. They hated him, though now that I think of it, they didn’t seem so hissy when I came back into the trailer to see if he was done with his shower.”
“And were hoping to catch him naked.”
Anna gave her a light punch on the arm.
Rosalie grinned, but changed the subject. “So what does it all mean?”
“I have no idea. I just know I’m spending the night with you and I’m going to have a baseball bat under my side of the bed in case he tries something funny.”
“Don’t you think you’re overreacting?”
“You weren’t there, Rosie. It was all really weird.”
“Okay. But you don’t have to come over. I’ll bring Oswaldo into my bedroom tonight.”
“Weren’t you listening to me?” Anna said. “The dogs treat him like he’s a saint.”
“Oh, come on.”
Anna crossed her heart with a finger. “I swear.”
Rosalie realized that her friend was completely serious.
“Fine,” she said. “You know you’re always welcome. But this better not be an excuse to go crawling into his bed in the middle of the night.”
She danced back before Anna could punch her again, but Anna didn’t move.
The Painted Boy Page 3
