Jay just looked at her.
“I know what you’re wondering,” she went on. “Where does she align? East, west? North, south? Well, it’s different here than it was in China. Here the four directions belong to the thunders—the big mysteries—and the animal clans belong only to themselves. But we recognize some clans as kin, and we can make alliances, same as anybody else.”
“Is that what you’re doing?” Jay asked. “Making an alliance with me?”
She gave him another shrug. “Maybe I’m just being friendly.”
Sure, Jay thought. Tall, gorgeous Native American women were always looking to make friends with some kid like him.
“So what’s the deal with you and Flores?” he asked. “Do you have an alliance with him, too?”
Her eyes flashed and she spat in the dirt between them.
“I’ll give you that one,” she said in a tight voice, “because you don’t know any better. But don’t bring it up again.”
“Look,” Jay told her. “I don’t know you and I don’t know him. I don’t care what is or isn’t going on between you because it’s none of my business. I only came by because I want to be left alone.”
He turned to go, but she caught his arm with that strong grip of hers. When he stopped, she let her hand drop.
Jay had to make an effort not to reach up and rub his arm.
“We’re not enemies,” the woman said.
“Yeah, but are we friends? Like I said, I don’t know you and I’d just as soon not get involved in whatever’s going down between you and Flores.”
“Except isn’t that exactly why you’re here? The yellow dragons—isn’t your whole thing about making places safe, fixing what’s wrong?”
“I don’t know why I’m here.”
She nodded. “Okay. Play it that way. But let me know if you change your mind.”
Why did everybody think he was so much more than what he was?
“How would I get hold of you?” he asked. “I don’t even know your name.”
“And I don’t know yours.”
“I’m Jay Li.”
She shook her head. “That’s not your name,” she said. “That’s just what you go by.”
“Excuse me, but isn’t that what a name is?”
“Not in the clans.”
“I don’t have a clan name.”
“My point, exactly. You’re too young to have one. And I’m too old to be giving mine away to just anybody.”
“So when you say I should let you know if I change my mind . . .”
She laughed. “Don’t worry. If you do, I’ll know.”
“But—”
“Later, Jay Li.”
Maybe he blinked. Maybe he had a momentary sensory lapse. But one moment she was standing right in front of him, the next she was half a block away. She lifted her hand, turned, and stepped between a pair of buildings. Then she was lost from sight.
Jay stood where she’d left him, staring down the street to where she’d disappeared. He couldn’t help but feel that he must have dreamed the whole encounter. Never mind all the things Paupau had told him. Never mind the growing list of strange—sometimes impossible—things that he’d already experienced since the bus let him out in Santo del Vado Viejo yesterday.
The dogs’ odd behavior?
Suddenly being able to speak Spanish?
They were nothing compared to what he felt now.
He remembered what she’d said:
The scales you can hear whispering against each other in your mind? I hear them, too.
After everything else—the dragon on his back, Paupau’s endless training stories that left him more confused than prepared—that was the one thing he couldn’t escape. He hadn’t told the Hernandezes and Anna about it last night, because how do you begin to explain the constant sound and feel of some enormous scaled being shifting inside you?
But the woman knew.
She seemed to know exactly who he was and why he was here, even when he didn’t.
This is like some Chinese version of a spirit quest for you, isn’t it? To see if you’re actually worth the mantle of your clan.
What did she expect, that he’d put El Tigre in prison and clean up the barrio? That some kid could accomplish what the whole police department couldn’t, just because he had a dragon on his back and his grandmother told him stories about these heroic men and women who were both human and dragon and went around standing up to injustice?
The yellow dragons—isn’t your whole thing about making places safe, fixing what’s wrong?
His encounter with the woman left him feeling more troubled than talking to Flores had. El Tigre was only an opponent—why, Jay couldn’t begin to figure out—but they’d worked out a truce even if it didn’t make sense why a man like him would listen to, or care about, a kid.
But the woman . . . talking to her made the whole world feel wrong. Like the dirt underfoot was suddenly spongy. That here in the middle of this desert, he was standing underwater.
He needed a couple of deep breaths to steady himself, standing there swaying on the sidewalk. But finally the world settled down again. Everything felt normal, except for the whisper of scales rubbing against scales that he heard somewhere deep in his mind.
Though that was beginning to seem normal now, too.
Or at least familiar.
“You did what?” Rosalie said when Jay got back to Tío’s house.
“Yeah,” Anna added. “Do you have a death wish or something?”
Tío had already gone ahead to the restaurant by the time Jay returned, but the girls were sitting on the back patio, gossiping over coffee. He supposed that he should have expected this reaction.
“I don’t have a death wish,” Jay told them as he sat on the low wall dividing the patio from the backyard. “I just want to be left alone, and I figured the best way to make that happen was to go talk to him. So I did, and now it’s all cleared up.”
Rosalie shook her head. “How can it all be cleared up? What did he want from you? What did you say to him?”
Jay looked over his shoulder. The dogs had all gathered nearby, sitting on their haunches, watching him. He was going to have to try talking to them, he thought, as he turned back to the girls.
“I still don’t know for sure what he wanted,” he said. “I get the feeling that he thought I was some kind of threat to him.”
“Yeah, right,” Anna said.
Jay smiled. “That’s what I thought, too. But it was weird, right from the moment I first went through the door of the place.”
He moved from the wall to the table where they were sitting. Pulling up a chair, he leaned his arms on the table and told them everything—even how he’d had that strange ping of recognition when he saw Flores and the woman.
“You’re saying she just disappeared?” Anna said when he was done.
Jay shook his head. “I don’t think so. She’s just, like, really fast or something.”
“It all sounds so bizarre,” Anna said.
“Welcome to my life.”
“Can you trust him?” Rosalie asked. “Flores? I mean, he’s just some gangster, right? How can he be trusted?”
“I know,” Jay said. “That woman sure didn’t trust him. I don’t even know that I do. But I want to if it means I can get the chance to have a normal life.”
“But she thinks you were—what? Sent here to clean up the barrio?”
Anna snorted. “Good luck with that.”
“Right,” Jay said. “It’s stupid to expect that of a kid.”
“Except,” Rosalie said, “if you’ve got these special powers . . .”
Anna laughed, then using a deep, mock-serious voice, she quoted from the Spider-Man movies, “ ‘With great power comes great responsibility.’ As if,” she added in her own voice.
“And I don’t have any powers,” Jay said.
The girls both looked at him.
“Okay, so I’ve got some weird things going on.
But I’m not Superman. I’m not even Spider-Man.”
“But what if the woman’s right?” Rosalie said. “She seems to think you’re here on some kind of spirit quest to, you know, awaken this dragon thing in you.”
“You guys are taking this way more seriously than I do,” Jay said, “and I’m the one who’s been living with a dragon on his back and Paupau’s stories for the last six years.”
Anna shook her head. “Don’t look at me, cowboy. I need more proof than I’ve seen so far. We only have it on your word that you didn’t know Spanish before you got here, and that the tattoo just showed up on your back one day.”
“It’s not a tattoo.”
She waved a hand. “The jury’s still out on that. But Our Lady of the Barrio here is way too trusting.”
“I’m a good judge of character,” Rosalie said.
Anna laughed.
“Well, you’re my friend, aren’t you?”
They locked eyes for a moment, then Anna nodded.
“That’s true,” she said. She turned to Jay. “Don’t get me wrong. I like you. I even sort of believe you—or at least I believe that you believe. But I’m not sure I trust you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I just have this weird feeling that we’ll put all this faith in you, and then you’ll turn around and break our hearts.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
“And I believe that, too,” Anna said. “Or at least that you wouldn’t do it on purpose.”
“I just want an ordinary life,” Jay said. “Can’t we pretend that none of this weird stuff ever happened and start over? I’m just the new guy from out of town who’s started working at the restaurant.”
“I can do that,” Rosalie said.
“So trusting,” Anna said.
“Anna . . .”
“Okay, okay. I can try, but . . .” She pointed a finger at Jay. “Don’t make us regret this. I may look like some sweet rocker chick, but don’t think I can’t seriously mess you up, because I can.”
“Fierce,” Rosalie said.
“Better than trusting.”
“Sometimes.”
Anna nodded. “Sometimes,” she agreed.
When they both turned to Jay he held his hands palms out in front of himself.
“I’ll be good,” he said. “Honest.”
Anna grinned. “I do like a boy who knows his place.”
- 3 -
If the roots are not removed during weeding, the weeds will grow again when the winds of spring blow.
—CHINESE PROVERB
AS THE NEXT couple of weeks went by, Rosalie found it easier than she thought to put aside the mystery that was James Li. It wasn’t that she didn’t think about it from time to time—mostly when she was lying awake waiting for sleep—but he was just so . . . normal. He was a hard worker, a good learner—his peach salsa was to die for—and an easy person to be around, both in the restaurant and out. He got along well with all her friends—even her cousin Ines, who was notoriously picky about whom she liked. Ramon, who never had a lot of time for anyone who wasn’t a music junkie, planned to take Jay hiking in the desert.
He fit in so well she almost forgot that Jay hadn’t always spoken Spanish. That the image on his back had appeared overnight. That the dogs had treated him with such strange reverence at first, although now they simply jumped all over him like any of her friends.
If only Tío and Anna had been able to just let the mysteries go as well.
But inevitably Tío would take her aside and start in on some repetition of the conversation they’d been having ever since he learned about Jay’s visit to the pool hall.
“
“
“
“”
Tío would nod. “
With Anna, it wasn’t as much what she said as what she didn’t. It was clear that Jay wanted to be more than friends, but Anna would joke and flirt with him, pretending to be completely oblivious to what he was really trying to tell her.
Rosalie knew better. She knew that Anna was actually charmed by his attempts, but she was freaked about his past. About what he might be. She wasn’t sure that any of it was true, but what if it was?
Since there wasn’t anything more Rosalie could do, she talked to Jay about how hopeless he was at furthering his own cause instead. That was when she found out that not only had he never slept with a girl, he’d never actually been on a date.
“You can’t be serious,” she said.
The two of them were sitting in lawn chairs in front of her trailer one night after work. She had school the next day, but she was still wound up from the evening shift. The dogs lay sprawled in the dirt around them. There was no moon, but the stars were so bright in the clear sky that not even the light pollution from downtown was able to dim them.
“How can you never have been on a date?” she asked.
He shrugged. “For the same reason that I didn’t take gym or do any sports.”
He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the dragon on his back.
“Okay, that’s just weird,” she said. “What were your parents thinking?”
“It wasn’t my parents. It was Paupau.”
“Didn’t she realize how it would make you a magnet at school? The guy who ignores girls. And I know the girls would have talked about it because they had to have been interested in you. At least they sure would have been in my school.”
“Better that than their finding out the real reason I was different.”
“You don’t believe that.”
He shook his head. “But Paupau did—you’d have to meet her to understand how you just don’t argue with her. When you try, it’s like you’re not even speaking.”
“She sounds horrible.”
“No,” Jay said. “It’s just a different culture. And then there’s that whole dragon business.”
Rosalie nodded. “Godfather meets the Grinch.”
Jay laughed.
“I’m sorry,” Rosalie went on, “but how could she not know that all these things would guarantee that you couldn’t have a normal life?”
“She knew. I think she felt bad about it, too. But the way she sees it, I can’t have a normal life. Not with what I’m supposed to have sleeping inside me.”
“Well, what about the other people in your family that were dragons? What did they do?”
“She never talked about them except in vague terms. And remember, I’ve never even seen the dragon on her back. Maybe Tío is right. Maybe it’s all some weird scam.”
“But what would be the point?”
Jay sighed. “I have no idea.”
They didn’t say anything for a while. Rosalie patted Oswaldo. As the oldest and most dominant of her little pack, the big dog always had the place of honor next to her. Jay stared up into the starry sky.
“Can you really feel it inside you?” Rosalie asked. “This dragon thing?”
Jay took so long to answer that she didn’t think he was going to.
“Yeah, I do,” he finally said. “I hear the whisper of its scales and . . . I feel something under my skin—like there’s something enormous sleeping inside me and if it ever wakes up, it’ll burst right out of me.” He smiled. “I feel like a puddle that’s hiding an ocean under its surface. An ocean t
hat’s huge and . . . unfathomable. And really scary.”
“That’s so creepy.”
He nodded. “And the thing is, I can’t figure out if it’s real, or only my imagination. You know, because I’ve been brainwashed into believing it’s there.”
“Tío didn’t mean anything by that.”
“We both know that’s not true,” Jay said. “And just because something’s horrible, that doesn’t mean it isn’t also true.”
“You shouldn’t have to suspect your own family.”
“I know. And I don’t, I guess. But I think about it every once in a while. What makes me believe that I haven’t been brainwashed into believing all of this is how El Tigre really wanted to cut a deal with me. Why would he do that if I was just an ordinary kid? And then there was the woman who came up to me after I left the pool hall. I can either believe there’s this big conspiracy that includes my family and people I can’t imagine them knowing, or . . . you know.”
“You’ve got a dragon sleeping inside you.”
He nodded.
“Which seems just as impossible,” she said.
“If not more.” He sighed. “And that’s why I want a break. Why I want to pretend I’m just this kid from Chicago who’s working in your uncle’s restaurant and maybe making a few friends.”
“You’re doing that.”
“I know.” He smiled. “And it feels really good. It’d feel even better if Anna didn’t see a lunatic every time she looked at me.”
“She makes up her own mind about things,” Rosalie said, “so you never know. She could still come around.”
“You really think so?”
Rosalie shrugged.
“So how far is it to the desert?” Jay asked.
He was obviously as ready as she was to change the subject.
Rosalie made a lazy wave with her hand. “This is all the desert.”
“You know what I mean.”
Rosalie nodded and smiled. “We’re right on the edge of town here.” She pointed east. “The national park is about a mile or so in that direction. If you follow our street, you’ll find a trailhead right where it ends.”
The Painted Boy Page 6
