The Painted Boy

by Charles de Lint

  “Oh, man, you should have seen it,” Miguelito told his crew.

  They stood bunched in a group just beyond the spotlights of the television cameras and the lights of the police cars, a group of javelina boys, thin as rakes with spiked hair, baggy pants, and oversized sweatshirts.

  “He just filled the whole hall,” Miguelito went on, “this huge freakin’ dragon, bright as gold. He didn’t need no bling—he was bling. He just opened that big dragon mouth of his and fried Alambra.”

  Dino, the youngest of the gang, had stayed inside with Miguelito.

  “It’s true,” he said.

  Carlos elbowed Rico. “And you had us come out for a smoke.”

  Rico shrugged. “Hey, what can I say?”

  “I heard the dragon just turned him to dust,” Javier said. He’d been outside with the others.

  Miguelito shook his head. “No way. He turned him to ash.”

  Carlos sighed. “Aw, man. That’s so awesome. Why couldn’t I have seen it?”

  They all started talking at once.

  “Word.”

  “Totally.”

  “So sick, man.”

  Dino poked Miguelito in the shoulder.

  “Look,” he said, and pointed across the parking lot.

  The boys all turned to see.

  “Holy crap,” Carlos said.

  They didn’t need their enhanced night vision to pierce the shadows where the foursome stood.

  An old Chinese woman. A hot little white woman. And two scary dudes, one black, the other Asian.

  At least that’s what any five-fingered being would see. The javelina boys saw four dragons, auras of their great golden shapes rising behind them to fill the sky.

  Rico shivered. “Oh, man. What are they doing here?”

  “Looks like they’re arguing,” Carlos said.

  Miguelito nodded. “Totally intense.”

  “You know what this is like?” Javier said.

  The others all turned to him.

  “It’s what they say about the feathered serpents down south,” he said. “They watch to make sure no one gets too cocky. I’ll bet they’re here to check out the damage.”

  Miguelito nodded again. “And maybe lay down some of their own damage on our dragon.”

  Because that was how the javelina boys saw it. The dragon that had fried Alambra was one of their own. He’d taken down a King, just like that. The freaking Presidio Kings ruled the barrio and everybody had to stay out of their way, five-fingered beings and cousins. But their dragon, he hadn’t taken any gangbanger crap. He’d just fired up some righteous dragon retribution.

  Javier gave Miguelito a push. “You’ve gotta tell them, man. Tell them our dragon had cause. Alambra knifed that girl—isn’t that what you said?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “You’ve got to set them straight. You know how it goes with the feathered serpents. They figure someone’s gone a little loco and . . . ” He mimed cutting his throat his throat. “They just shut him down. That’s why those dragons are here.”

  “I can’t just walk up to a bunch of big cousins like that and tell them what’s what. Man, they might fry me.”

  “No, it’s on you,” Rico said and the others all nodded in agreement. “We’ll have your back, man.”

  The others didn’t look as happy about that, but they all nodded again.

  So Miguelito hitched up his pants and set off across the parking lot, his homeboys trailing behind him. He licked his lips as he got closer. Man, he was dry. Then one of the dragons noticed them and all four turned.

  When they got close enough to talk, Miguelito stepped out in front of the gang. He tried to meet their gazes, but he couldn’t lift his own from where it was locked on the ground at his feet.

  “Uh . . .”

  “What’s up with you boys?”

  Miguelito stole a quick glance up. The black man had spoken. Miguelito cleared his throat and tried again.

  “Excuse us for the . . . um . . . interruption,” he managed.

  He glanced up again and the white woman was smiling.

  “Don’t be afraid,” she said. “Do you have something to tell us?”

  Miguelito nodded. “I was inside when it happened, you know? I saw everything.”

  “Well,” she said, “we think we’ve figured out what happened, but I’d like to hear what you saw.”

  So he told them about Alambra killing Malo Malo’s drummer and how the dragon took him down. He grew more confident when he saw they were actually listening and probably not going to fry him. He went on to tell them about how the building started to fall apart—“I guess that dragon forgot he was inside when he got so big”—and how the dragon had held up the building until everybody got out and it finally came crashing down.

  “And the dragon?” the Chinese woman asked. “Where did he go?”

  Miguelito shook his head. “He didn’t go anywhere. He was still inside when the building came down.”

  She glanced at the music hall. When she looked back, Miguelito could see the worry in her eyes.

  “You all saw this?” the Asian man asked, looking to the rest of the gang.

  They all shook their heads except for little Dino.

  “Oh—only me—sir,” he said. “I—I saw it, too.”

  “He’s not in there now,” the black man said. “I don’t sense him anywhere.”

  The white woman nodded. “He must have crossed over to the other side.”

  “Yeah,” the black man said. “I’m guessing he banked his dragonfire when he crossed, which is why we didn’t notice him when we came in. We’re never going to find him until he wakes it up again.”

  “I don’t need to hear anymore,” the Asian man said. “Sounds like the boy got a little carried away, but then he took back control and did what had to be done.”

  The black man nodded. “I sure don’t see any evidence that we’ve got a rogue.”

  The javelina boys stood listening to all of this with big eyes. What a story they had to tell now.

  As though just remembering that they were still there, the Chinese woman turned to them again.

  “Thank you for your help,” she said.

  It was an obvious dismissal and the javelina boys quickly took the hint.

  “I’m going to stay on and look for him,” they heard the Chinese woman say as they walked away.

  “Don’t be too hard on him,” the other woman said.

  “I will be as hard as I need to be.”

  Then the boys were out of range and could hear no more. But once they were a safe distance away, they watched the dragons vanish, one by one, all except for the Chinese woman, who turned and walked away into the crowd.

  The night, Miguelito thought, felt a lot smaller when they were gone.

  “Damn,” Carlo said. “That was totally awesome.”

  The others all nodded in silent agreement.

  Rosalie woke up after only a few hours of sleep because there was someone at the front door.

  Tío will get that, she thought, but she knew he wouldn’t. Tío could sleep with a whole mariachi band playing around his bed.

  When the doorbell rang a second time, she forced herself to go see who it was. Anna started to sit up when she came into the living room.

  “What . . . ?” Anna began, rubbing at her eyes.

  Rosalie shook her head. “It’s nothing. Just go back to sleep.”

  “Can’t,” Anna mumbled, but she was asleep again as soon as her head touched the pillow.

  When Rosalie opened the door and found a short Chinese woman standing on the porch, she knew exactly who it was.

  Jay’s grandmother didn’t look nearly as formidable as Jay had made her out to be, but maybe that was because Rosalie had grown up around gangbangers and wasn’t easily intimidated. Seeing her standing here just awoke Rosalie’s anger. The way this woman had treated her grandson bordered on the criminal. He hadn’t been allowed girlfriends—not any friends at all,
from things he’d said. He hadn’t been allowed gym, or track, or any kind of sports, only a strict regime of endless exercise sessions under this old woman’s watchful eye, which, in the end, hadn’t provided him with anything useful.

  With that kind of life, it was amazing that Jay could still be the guy they’d all grown so fond of these past few weeks.

  “You must be Paupau,” she said.

  The woman didn’t appear surprised to be recognized. Maybe she thought it was her due.

  “I’m here to see my grandson,” she told Rosalie.

  “He’s not in.”

  “Can you tell me where I might find him?”

  Rosalie thought about what she’d read in Jay’s journal, what could happen to him now that he’d let the dragon get out of control. She knew why his grandmother was here.

  “No,” she said.

  Paupau studied her for a moment before she asked, “Because you don’t know where he is, or you don’t want to tell me?”

  “Both. Good-bye.”

  She started to close the door, but Paupau put her hand on it and the door became impossible to move. The old woman was stronger than she looked, but then she had a dragon hidden inside her, too.

  “Let me speak to your parents,” Paupau said.

  “I don’t have parents.”

  “Everyone has parents, child.”

  “Unless they’re dead or they abandoned their family.”

  “I’m sorry,” Paupau said. “I had no idea—”

  Rosalie shook her head. “Don’t lie. How could someone like you feel sympathy?”

  “Now why would you say that?” Paupau asked.

  Although her voice was mild, there was a hardness in her eyes. But Rosalie had grown up in the barrio. She still wasn’t impressed.

  “I know how you treated Jay as a kid,” she said. “I guess it’s different in Chicago, but around here we’d call that abuse.”

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Rosalie shook her head. “Except I do. Let’s start with tattooing a dragon on his back when he’s what? Eleven years old?”

  “That dragon—”

  “Is a symbol of the dragon that lives inside him and it just ‘spontaneously appeared.’ Yeah, yeah. I know that. But it wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t in the picture. And then you went on to steal his childhood from him and all you gave him in return was the chance to kill himself and everybody around him if he wasn’t a hundred percent careful every moment of his life.”

  “You are treading on dangerous ground, girl.”

  “Why? Are you going to bring my uncle’s house tumbling down on my head with a stomp of your own dragony foot?”

  The hardness in Paupau’s eyes flashed with anger.

  “Your rudeness is inexcusable,” she said. “You need to—”

  But Rosalie cut her off. “No, you need to go away. We have our own problems here and we don’t need someone like you around to add to them. So, dragon lady, why don’t you move your hand, get off my porch, and go back to Chicago where you can intimidate people, because it’s not going to work here.”

  Rosalie met the old lady’s gaze without flinching. Finally Paupau nodded.

  “He needs my help,” she said before Rosalie could close the door, “and I will find him. Wherever he is in this world, I will find him.”

  Rosalie thought of Jay vanishing in the middle of the parking lot last night.

  “Good luck with that,” she said.

  She leaned her back against the closed door, anticipating she didn’t know what. Another knock? Maybe a repeat of what had happened last night, except this time the cracks would appear in Tío’s ceiling and it was his house that would come tumbling down.

  “Who was at the door?”

  She looked up to see Tío coming out of his bedroom.

  “Jay’s creepy grandmother,” she said. “But I think she’s gone now.”

  Tío frowned. “You weren’t rude, were you? Why didn’t you at least invite her in?”

  Rosalie rolled her eyes. “Considering the things she did to her own grandkid, you’d actually want her in your house?”

  “No, you’re right. Did she say what she wanted?”

  Rosalie shook her head. “Just that she was wanted to talk to Jay.”

  “Strange.” He looked to the kitchen. “You didn’t put the coffee on?”

  “I just got up to answer the door.”

  She continued to lean against it as she watched Tío head for the kitchen. Paupau hadn’t said what she wanted, but she’d already known from reading Jay’s journal. What was it that his friend Lupita had told him?

  If it’s anything like the way it works with the feathered serpents, there’s some kind of fail-safe built in. Down there the old clan members show up en masse and shut the rogue down.

  That was what Paupau was doing here. She’d come to shut Jay down.

  To kill him, Rosalie supposed. Her own grandson.

  And she’d thought the bandas were heartless.

  Rita squatted in the shade of a mesquite tree, a still figure in a straw cowboy hat and dark clothes. She was a long way from the bandas’ pool room, but she appeared as comfortable in her current surroundings as she had been in a corner booth watching Jay and El Tigre take each other’s measure.

  She’d been drawn here last night after sensing the dragon rearing up inside the boy—a great golden shape that lifted above him, blinking into awareness and tall enough, it seemed, to brush the stars. It had stayed awake long enough to kill one of El Tigre’s gangbangers and then bring down the music hall, but by the time she’d arrived, it was already gone. She was tempted to follow Jay when he disappeared into el entre, then realized she could find him there whenever she wished. Instead, she decided to await the arrival of what his actions would bring.

  Across the parking lot she could see the ruin of the dance hall. Yellow police tape cordoned off the area, but that hadn’t stopped the endless parade of onlookers. As the night faded and the dawn crept over the horizon, she’d remained under the mesquite, motionless and unnoticed by all: gawkers and media, police and firemen, and even a handful of beings like herself, who weren’t strictly human.

  Rita lifted her head when one of the latter reappeared at the far edge of the parking lot. She had the appearance of an old Chinese woman, but Rita could see the dragon curled up inside her as clearly now as she had last night. She tracked the woman’s progress until she was standing by the yellow tape. Though power radiated from her like light from the sun, the onlookers on either side of her gave no indication that they felt it. But Rita did. Around the cousins, that potent an aura was impossible to ignore.

  Rita watched her for a few moments longer, waiting to see if any of the old woman’s earlier companions would rejoin her. When the woman remained by herself, Rita finally stood up and crossed the parking lot herself.

  Paupau was deep in thought, staring through the ruin of the building on the other side of the flimsy tape barrier, when a woman spoke.

  “” the newcomer said in flawless Mandarin.

  Paupau turned slowly and regarded the Indian woman—or at least what appeared to be an Indian woman; she might be Mexican—but Paupau could smell an old snake tribe in the deeps of the stranger’s blood.

  “” she asked.

  The woman shrugged. “”

  Paupau’s eyes narrowed. “”

  “”

  “”

  Rita shook her head. “He wasn’t a man,” she said, switching to English. “He was a pie
ce of crap that got what it deserved.”

  “James still needs to explain”—she made a motion with her hand that took in the ruined dance hall—“all of this.”

  “You dragons have a funny way of bringing up your young. You might consider adding a little hands-on knowledge and kindness into the mix.”

  “How is any of this your business?”

  “It’s not. But I like the kid and I’d hate to see him have to turn on you to protect himself.”

  “I can protect myself,” Paupau said, “but I thank you for your concern for an elderly stranger.”

  Rita laughed. “You’ve got that all mixed up. I don’t care what happens to you, dragon lady. I just don’t want to have to see the boy live with the guilt of having had to defend himself against his own grandmother.”

  Paupau remained silent for a long moment.

  “Regardless of what you would like,” she said finally, “I will still find my grandson. And he will still explain what he has done here.”

  “Then let me help you with that,” Rita said. “The boy’s dragon woke when his friend was murdered. Before he got it back under control, he’d killed the murderer and inadvertently weakened the structure of the dance hall. When he realized what he’d done, he used the dragon to hold up the building until everyone had escaped, then he let the whole thing fall in on itself. But I’m sure you and the other dragons already figured that out or they’d still be hanging around here with you.”

  “Yes, we are quite capable of reading sign. And we spoke to those who witnessed the event.”

  “So now your compadres are gone and you should be, too.”

  “You are treading on thin ground, snake woman.”

  “Why? Are you going to turn dragon on me now? That’s a nice example to set for your grandson. But then, you haven’t really given him anything clear to work with, have you? You just sent him out into the world on his own and if he makes it, fine. If he doesn’t, you and your friends step in to deal with him and clear up the mess. It’s all ‘better luck next time.’”

  “How we do our business is not your concern.”

  “Oh, but it is,” Rita told her. “You’re on my turf now and I say neither you nor your business are welcome here.”