The Painted Boy

by Charles de Lint

  I lean back until I’m stretched out on the rock, the back of my head on the rough stone. I stare up into the endless blue for a long time and I let it take me away. When I wake up, the day’s gone and so is most of the night. The dawn pinks the distant horizon and I watch as the sun’s light intensifies and slowly spreads across the landscape.

  I realize I’m thirsty and that’s when I notice the two water bottles and what must be another burrito. I look around.

  “Lupita?”

  I don’t know when she was here, but she’s not now.

  I open one of the water bottles. I plan to just have a couple of sips but I drink almost two-thirds of it in one long gulp. Then I devour the burrito. It’s cold, but it tastes amazing. This one’s full of eggs and bacon with pieces of peppers and squash and that amazing array of spices. My mouth is still tingling long after I’ve finished eating. I wish Lupita were here so that I could thank her.

  The sun’s up over the horizon now. I get up and stretch, then sit down and pull out the notebook again. Rereading what I wrote yesterday doesn’t make my choices any clearer.

  I just don’t know where to go from here.

  No, that’s not true. I know all my choices. I just don’t know that I want to make any of them—especially not the one that I know is the right choice.

  I could be the barrio’s protector. That’s already in me—hardwired into my genes, maybe, but it’s still real. Except, do I really want to stay on in a place where I’ve already burned all my bridges? And whatever else I know or don’t know, I’m sure that taking on this responsibility as a penance isn’t how it should go. Even Lupita says I have to do it out of love. For the place itself—the dusty barrio and the land it stands on.

  The problem is I’m not sure I can separate the two.

  I need better advice—or at least another informed opinion. I remember what Rita said to me outside the pool hall. I’d asked her how I could get in touch with her, and she’d given me one of those enigmatic answers that Paupau treasures. Something along the lines of when I was ready to talk to her again, she’d know.

  I close the notebook with the pen inside to hold my place. I look out at the desert.

  “Okay, Rita,” I say aloud. “If that’s even your name. I’m ready to talk now.”

  “Talk is cheap,” a voice says from behind me. “The real question is, can you walk the walk?”

  Okay, I did call out to her, and whether I like it or not, I really am getting used to people popping in and out of sight. I can even do it myself. But when I hear that voice, I still just about jump out of my skin.

  I turn around and there she is. She’s still wearing her scuffed cowboy boots and her straw hat, its brim cocked low so I can’t see her eyes. The piece of turquoise at her throat gleams in the bright sunlight.

  “Why does everybody think I know more than I do?” I say.

  She pushes the brim of her hat up and smiles, but I don’t get a whole lot of comfort from that smile.

  “I don’t think that,” she says. “Not anymore.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  She shrugs. “This and that. What changed yours?”

  I give her a confused look.

  “About taking a stand,” she says. “You were pretty set on keeping out of all of this the last time we talked.”

  “What makes you think I’ve changed my mind?”

  “You called for me, didn’t you?”

  “So Rita is your name.”

  She gives me another shrug.

  “If you haven’t changed your mind,” she says, “why did you call me?”

  I look away from her. “I need to talk to somebody.”

  “And you called on me because we’re so close?”

  I don’t have to look at her face to hear the smirk in her voice.

  “I kind of already burned all my bridges with anybody else I could talk to,” I tell her. “Except for Lupita.”

  “The jackalope girl.”

  “She’s been a good friend.”

  “Easy,” she says. “I’m not dissing her. Lupita’s a good kid.” She waits a beat, then adds, “What about your grandmother? Why aren’t you talking to her?”

  “How do you know my grandmother?”

  “She came with a bunch of dragons to look at what you did last night. I talked to her this morning before she left town.”

  “I didn’t know the two of you were friends.”

  She smiles. “I wouldn’t call us friends. She doesn’t seem to like me much, and I don’t care about her one way or the other so long as she stays out of my way.”

  “Oh.” Then I have to ask, “Was she mad at me?”

  “Not particularly. Is that why you don’t want to talk to her?”

  “I guess.”

  I find it hard to imagine that Paupau would be so close and not try to find me. That she would come with a bunch of dragons to lay down judgment instead of asking me what happened.

  Rita sits down on a nearby rock and tucks her legs up under herself.

  “Okay,” she says. “What do you need to talk about?”

  I’m not sure where to start.

  “I wish I could just be normal,” I find myself saying instead.

  “You don’t really.”

  I start to protest, but her gaze locks on mine and I can’t lie. It’s true. Everybody wants to have something special about them and I’m not any different. But why did it have to be this?

  “Still,” she goes on, “if you need to feel normal, you could look at it this way: You’re a normal whatever-you-are. I’d say you’re the best whatever-you-are, but there’s always room for improvement, right? Lord knows I could fix a thing or two about myself.”

  “So I’m a normal whatever-I-am,” I say. “But what if the dragon wakes again only, next time, I can’t control it?”

  She gives me a funny look.

  “You know that you and the dragon are one and the same, right?” she finally says. “It’s not some big dangerous thing sleeping inside of you. It’s part of who you are. It goes right down to your genes the way the rattlesnake is in me. You can’t separate the one from the other.”

  It’s my turn to just look at her. I don’t really understand what she’s saying. I mean, I understand, but it doesn’t make sense. Paupau always talked about the dragons like they were these spirits that chose to live inside us. But then I remember Lupita telling me pretty much the same thing.

  “Your grandmother never told you, did she?” Rita says.

  I shake my head. She doesn’t have to say the next thing: what else hasn’t Paupau told me?

  “So I shouldn’t be worried about it?” I ask.

  “Oh, I’d be cautious, darling. That’s a big piece of power to have sitting there inside you. But the thing to remember is, you control it, just like you control where you walk or how far you throw a rock.” She smiles. “You don’t have conversations with your arm before you get it to do something, do you?”

  “No . . .”

  “But you know enough not to squeeze a raw egg too hard . . . unless you’re making an omelet. It’s the same thing. The dragon’s just another part of you that you can choose to use, or not. Which brings me back to my first question. Are you ready to take a stand and get rid of El Tigre and his gangbangers?”

  “I don’t know what I can do besides waking up the dragon and burning them all like I did last night, and I don’t think I’m ready for that.”

  “That’s not exactly the optimum solution any way,” Rita tells me. “For a lot of reasons. I suppose it could happen—depending on how badly El Tigre wants to stay here—but before you even think about stepping up to deal with that little drama, you have to get Señora Elena on your side. Without her backing, you won’t have the other cousins ready to stand behind you once El Tigre is gone.”

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

  “You know what cousins are?”

  “Of course. And Lupita mentioned Señora
Elena, but she said I had to ask you about her.”

  “She’s comes from the old Gila monster clans—sort of Santo del Vado Viejo’s version of you dragons. The cousins will back whoever she approves and if you’ve got them on your side, it’ll be a lot easier to handle all of this without a lot of bloodshed.”

  “Why doesn’t one of them do it? For that matter, why don’t you?”

  She shrugs. “One of the other cousins might be able to pull it off, but without the rep of something like one of the dragon clans behind them, they’d spend rest of their life here fighting off every other lowlife predator who might come along and want to take a shot at being in charge. Nobody wants that. But if a dragon was the big gun? Oh, yeah. That’s a whole different story. Nobody wants to piss off a dragon by making a play for his turf. The smart wannabe is going to take a wide detour around this place and look for easier pickings.”

  “And what about you?”

  She smiles. “I don’t have those kind of ambitions.”

  “But you still want the barrio cleaned up.”

  “It’s not just the barrio. The ugliness El Tigre brings with him bleeds all the way into el entre—this desert. Rosa made the land for us to cherish, not to piss away. You can’t see El Tigre’s influence here as easily as you can in the barrios, but it’s still here. He’s chasing away all the good spirits. Give it a few years and all those dark places in his heart will start manifesting here, and then we’ll really be in trouble.”

  “Rosa . . . is that, like, some cousin name for God?”

  “We don’t believe in gods,” she says. “Not when we know that Raven pulled the world out of that big old pot of his, and Rosa made a garden out of the desert.”

  I start to say something about how it isn’t much of a garden, but that’s the kind of thing I would have said before I left Chicago. Now I realize there’s stuff growing everywhere. It’s not a garden like we’d think of back home, but it’s full of life and growing things all the same.

  “Look,” Rita goes on, “it was bad enough when it was just Julio running the bandas, but he was only a five-fingered being. How much trouble could he really cause us? He made the barrio an ugly place, sure, but his influence never crossed over here. El Tigre, he’s a whole other assful of thorns.”

  “So I talk to Señora Elena,” I say.

  I’m trying to picture what she’ll look like. What’s a Gila monster, anyway? Some kind of lizard? But who says she’ll look like one? I don’t look like the dragon that Paupau tells me I carry and Rita says is a part of me. And she doesn’t look like a rattlesnake, unless you look into her eyes and realize that she doesn’t seem to blink. There’s no room for a rattle in those tight jeans she’s wearing, either. Yeah, I looked. What guy wouldn’t?

  “And then what?” I go on. “I have some kind of confrontation with El Tigre?”

  “First worry about getting Señora Elena’s approval,” Rita says.

  “Why? Will it be that hard?”

  “Normally,” she says, “a nice kid like you, with the weight of the Yellow Dragon Clan behind him? You’d be a shoo-in. The problem is, El Tigre got her approval, too, and now she’s not so trusting.”

  “She gave her approval to him?”

  I’d assumed that he’d just shown up one day and taken over.

  Rita shrugs. “He showed her a different face from the one we know now. He can be very charming.”

  “Yeah, like a viper—uh, no offense.”

  I spoke without thinking. It’s easy to forget that while she looks like a beautiful Native American woman, she’s from the snake clan. She holds me with a hard gaze for a long moment, then shrugs again.

  “None taken,” she says.

  I know we should be getting ready to go see Señora Elena, but I can’t stop thinking that Paupau could have strung me along the way Rita says she did. If it wasn’t Paupau, I’d be mad, but come on, she’s my grandmother. And it’s hard not to want to win her approval. Back home, everybody walks carefully around her.

  I still can’t believe she didn’t try to find me.

  “She was really here?” I find myself saying. “My grandmother?”

  Rita nods. “But I wouldn’t be getting all misty-eyed about it. She was strictly here on business. Dragon business.”

  “Yeah, she gets like that. Did she try to pull rank on you?”

  “She’s got no rank over me. The older dragons forget that they’re not in China anymore—hell, these days half of them aren’t even Asian. There are no more emperors and empires, and all they are is homeless protectors looking for a place that they can watch over in a land that doesn’t care about them, or even believe they exist. What’s hardest for them to get is that it’s not all about them anymore. No one reveres them now just because they’re dragons. Any respect they get, they have to earn.

  “Mind you, some of them do get it. Others, like your grandmother—it’s much easier for someone like her to pretend that nothing’s changed and she’s still at the top of the food chain.”

  “Well, I don’t think that,” I tell her, “but when I think of Paupau—my grandmother—and what the dragon did at the dance hall the other night—”

  “What you did,” she corrects me.

  “Okay. What I did. I mean, there’s a lot of power there.”

  Rita nods. “But the difference between this world and how it once was for the old dragons is that we’re not afraid to gang up to take them down.”

  “Oh.”

  She laughs. “Don’t look so worried. That wasn’t a threat or a warning for you personally. Do you have any idea how long it takes a bunch of mixed-clan cousins to agree on anything? If the situation came up, you could be long gone before we reached a consensus on what to do.”

  “Why don’t you deal with El Tigre in the same way you would with a dragon?”

  “Weren’t you listening? The cousins talk about it, but nobody can agree on how it should be done. Most of the time hardly anybody even bothers to show up for the discussion.” She looks up at the sky, reading something I can’t see. “We should get you over to Señora Elena’s place. Are you ready?”

  “No.”

  But I stand up and brush the dirt from my jeans.

  I wasn’t sure what kind of place Señora Elena would have. A cave in the mountains? A shack in the desert? A hacienda overlooking some hidden green valley?

  Turns out she lives in the barrio, too, in an old adobe building just a few blocks from the trailer park where Lupita shares a double-wide with some deer cousins. A pretty Mexican girl around my age is sitting in a plastic lawn chair in front of the building, reading what looks like a school textbook. She seems familiar, but I can’t place her. She also has a red-and-green scarf tied around her wrist. Kings’ colors.

  Rita stops as soon as we turn the corner.

  “The girl’s name is Maria,” she says, “and don’t worry about her being a gangbanger. Some of them still know enough to show respect to the old powers.”

  As soon as she says the girl’s name I remember. She’s got the kind of look that you don’t quickly forget. Not exactly my style, but totally hot.

  “She’s the girl who used to be Rosalie’s friend,” I say.

  Rita takes my comment for a question.

  “How would I know?” she says. “Just go and tell her you’re here to see Señora Elena and she’ll show you inside.”

  I turn to her. “Aren’t you coming with me?”

  “There are a lot of places where I’m not exactly welcome,” she says. “This is one of them.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You don’t have to. You either go talk to Señora Elena, or you don’t. I’ll see you around.”

  Then she steps away into that other desert, and I’m left on my own. I wish she hadn’t taken off. For all of Rita’s attitude, it feels like I have someone in my corner when she’s around. I don’t even know what I’m going to say to Señora Elena. But I suppose talking to her can’t hurt. Maybe
she can actually help me figure a few things out, though if she’s anything like Paupau or Rita, I’m probably just going to end up feeling more confused.

  I start down the quiet street and Maria looks up as I get closer. Her eyes go wide. I don’t know how she recognizes me, but it’s obvious she knows who I am. Or maybe it’s just what I am. She stands up and holds the textbook against her chest. I can read the title. Adventures in English Literature. There’s something so mundane about her being here, doing her homework, except knowing what she is, it all seems wrong.

  “” she says in Spanish.

  “”

  “”

  “”

  “”

  “”

  “”

  “” I ask.

  “”

  “”

  She looks like she isn’t going to tell me. There’s no reason why she should, really. But then she shrugs.

  “” she says. “”

  “”

  I point to the scarf tied around her wrist.

  Maria nods. “”

  At first I’m not really sure what that means. But then I think about it. A gangbanger, sitting here doing her homework. Living with the old lady who’s the spiritual heart of the barrio, which is about as far as you can get from the gangbanger mentality.

  “” I say.

  Her only answer is to spit in the dirt.