The Painted Boy

by Charles de Lint

  “” I have to ask.

  She studies me for a long moment, then she nods toward the door.

  “” she says. “”

  I stand outside, held back by the blue trim on the door. When I look back at Maria she nods.

  “” she says. “

  “”

  She shrugs. “”

  My eyes take a moment to adjust once I’m inside. I’m standing in a kitchen. The furnishing are simple, the colors muted except for some odd flourishes. A tablecloth with a bright Navajo pattern. A bright turquoise mug standing beside the sink.

  “” Maria says from behind me.

  I cross the kitchen, hesitate in the doorway, then step through. Maria follows. It’s like the kitchen in here, too, simple furnishings, everything in subdued desert colors. A foot-high Jesus hangs crucified on one wall. A portrait of Our Lady of Guadalupe regards him from the opposite side of the room.

  The light’s dimmer in here and it takes me a moment to find Señora Elena sitting with her hands folded in her lap. I get that ping of recognition that she’s more than what she seems. I also get the sense that she’s been waiting for me.

  Her house hadn’t been what I expected, and neither was she. I pictured a small, thin woman, gray-haired, wrapped in a shawl—don’t ask me why. From the way people have talked about her, I guess I thought she was all used up. But though she’s not much taller than me, she’s broad—face, shoulders, hips—and she has a glow about her as though she’s filled with a barely contained light. Her skin is the dark hue of the local cousins—more Mexican brown than African—with thick black hair and a smooth complexion that belies her years. Her eyes are deep pools, so dark their brown is almost black.

  All in all, she seems as formidable a woman as Paupau, so I’m not sure why she can’t handle El Tigre. I know Paupau would shred Flores with a single hard stare. But I’m not here to critique how Señora Elena handles barrio business.

  I give her a formal bow, bending from the waist, my gaze on the floor.

  “” I say to her in Mandarin, the ceremonial language of my clan. “”

  I repeat what I’ve said in Spanish. When I lift my gaze to hers, I find her smiling.

  “” she says, looking over my shoulder. “”

  I’m not sure if she’s making fun of me, or if she’s serious. Maria doesn’t say anything. Señora Elena studies me for a moment, then waves me to a chair.

  “” she says. She switches to English, her accent thick. “And tell me why you need the advice of an old woman who the world has left behind.”

  “You don’t seem so old to me,” I say as I sit down.

  She wags a finger at me. “Manners I appreciate, but flattery is annoying. Now talk to me.”

  She’s the kind of person who encourages intimacy just by being who she is, but I feel a little self-conscious around Maria. Even if she claims to hate the gangbangers, do I really want one of the Kings to know everything there is to know about me? Still, having come this far, it doesn’t make much sense to back off now. I take a steadying breath, try to figure out where to start, then decide to just tell her the whole story, from when I first put my finger on the map, to how I came to be sitting here with her. The only thing I gloss over is how I feel about Anna. I also don’t tell her that Rita brought me here.

  There are a lot of places where I’m not exactly welcome, the snake woman had told me before she disappeared. This is one of them.

  If there’s bad blood between them, I can’t see how mentioning her would help.

  Señora Elena nods when I’m done. She smiles at me.

  “So you’ve come to take my place,” she says.

  I quickly shake my head. “No, it’s nothing like that. It’s just I was told I should talk to you before I do anything.”

  She laughs. “You misunderstand. I’m happy to retire from this business of responsibility—a failing business, as I’m sure you’ve discovered. I still have the respect of my people, but I can’t understand why. Everything I’ve held together over the past few hundred years has come unraveled.”

  I glance at Maria, wondering what’s she making of all of this. But she’s sitting in a chair with her knees pulled up to her chin, staring out the window as though she’s not paying any attention to us.

  “Because of El Tigre,” I say.

  She nods. “Flores is like a cancer, slowly eating away at the barrio, and we are helpless to stop him.”

  “I don’t mean this to sound like more flattery,” I say, “but I’ve been told you’re very powerful. Why can’t you do anything?”

  “My strength comes from the land,” she explains. “Not simply this desert, but also the one that lies on the other side of the veil, el entre. What the locals might call fabled Aztlán, if they were able to see it. But Flores has been here long enough that he can draw on the same mysteries that I do. We are too evenly matched now, and any conflict between us will do more damage to the very thing I wish to protect.”

  “And he and I aren’t?”

  She shrugs. “It’s different. You dragons are different. Your strengths come from within.” She pauses, then adds, “As does a portion of El Tigre’s powers, but he also taps into the very blood of the earth that lies under the barrio. He ignores the medicine wheel that underlies everything, taking what he wants but giving nothing back. The desert medicine is like a well, and our respect for it is the spring that replenishes it.”

  “So you’re saying he’s stronger?”

  “Maybe yes, maybe no—it all depends on the will. Do you have the will?”

  “I . . . I’m not sure . . .”

  But I realize that what makes me unsure is not whether or not I’ll try to do what I know I must—what I need—to do. It’s whether or not I have any chance to pull it off. I look at Señora Elena and can see she knows exactly what’s going through my head.

  “So what will you do?” she asks.

  “I don’t know. What I’d like to do is get rid of El Tigre and remove the weight of the bandas from this community.”

  Señora Elena gave a slow nod of her head. “I can certainly support that, but there’s something you should remember. Cousins don’t like bullies. They’re not as concerned when it only affects the five-fingered beings—humans,” she adds at my puzzled look.

  I hold out my hands. I’ve heard this term before and it never quite makes sense.

  “You wear the shape of a five-fingered being,” she says, “but it’s not your true shape, just as this is not mine.”

  Now I get it. I think.

  “I don’t like bullies of any kind,” I tell her.

  She shrugs. “What the five-fingered beings do among themselves doesn’t concern cousins.”

  “But the gangbangers—”

  “I know, I know,” she says. “And not all cousins will ignore what the bandas do. But I tell you this so that you will understand that you can’t simply step in and kill El Tigre. So far as most of the cousins are concerned, that would only be replacing one bully with another. They will not give you their support and without it, you won’t be able to protect the barrio.”

  This is a lot like what Rita was telling me.

  “I don’t want to kill him,” I say.

  “He might not give you a choice.”

  I can’t believe I’m having this conversation. Is this really what Paupau had in mind for me?

  “You must understand something else,” Señora Elena says. �
��The blood that runs under the skin of the desert can be a dark current. You have seen some of the dangers that the five-fingered beings present—the bandas with their guns and knives and drugs. But the world of the cousins can be dangerous, too. They are not all old women such as myself. You know the stories of the old gunslingers? How the young ones would test the speed of those who were already famous?”

  “Sure.”

  “Even if you do everything right,” she says, “some of them might still want to test you.”

  I shake my head. “I don’t want to kill anybody. I’m not a killer.”

  “You killed a man two nights ago.”

  “I . . . that was in self-defense. Sort of.”

  Señora Elena shakes her head. “Be honest with yourself, if with no one else. You killed that man in retribution for what he had done.”

  I want to argue that I’m really not like that, but she’s right. I feel terrible about having done it, but that’s exactly why I killed him.

  “I don’t want to kill anybody else,” I tell her. “He was a bad man, but it shouldn’t have been up to me whether or he lived or died. I just . . . I just saw red . . .”

  “But you will still take the chance and confront El Tigre.”

  I nod. “I can’t let things go on the way they are.”

  Señora Elena smiles. “No, you could. But it’s the mark of your worth that you won’t. And that you can feel regret for causing the death of even such an evil man as the one you killed that night. You will do well in my place, my young dragon, and I give you my blessing.”

  She closes her eyes and we sit there in silence until I hear Maria get up from where she’s been sitting behind me. She touches my shoulder.

  “It’s time to go now,” she says.

  I have a thousand more questions, I want to say. There’s still so much I need to know.

  Still, I get up and start to follow her out of the room. But before we can leave, Señora Elena speaks again.

  “One more thing, young dragon.”

  I turn in the doorway.

  “Be careful who you trust,” she tells me. “Not everyone who offers you help means you well, especially among the cousins.”

  I never mentioned either Lupita or Rita by name and I don’t know any other cousins besides El Tigre and Señora Elena herself.

  “Anyone in particular?” I ask, trying to be cool about it.

  What if she means Paupau? I think. And then I remember how Rita warned me about her as well.

  But Señora Elena has already closed her eyes once more. Maria touches my arm. I hesitate a moment, then follow her into the kitchen.

  Though I feel like we spent hours in that dark room, it’s still early morning when we emerge from the house and step into the dusty alley. But the sun’s higher in the sky than it was when I arrived. I blink in the bright light.

  Maria turns to look at me.

  “So it seems like you really are a good guy, China Boy,” she says.

  “I’m just a guy.”

  “With a dragon inside you.”

  I shrug. What am I supposed to say? I settle for, “You don’t seem surprised by any of this.”

  Now it’s her turn to shrug.

  “I’ve lived with Elena for a couple of years now,” she says. “I’ve seen buffalo men and crow boys. Deer girls and beings that walk like men but have the head of a coyote. I’ve seen the little lizard girls and roadrunner brujos, the javelina boys and the hawks that become men, or maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe they’re men who become hawks. All I know is it’s a big world out here—bigger than most people realize—and sooner or later, most of it seems to drop by and visit Elena.”

  “I’ve only seen a jackalope girl and a woman who’s supposed to also be a rattlesnake. Oh, and that other desert. El entre. What did Señora Elena call it?”

  “Aztlán.” She says the word with longing. “That I’d like to see.”

  “It’s not much different from this world,” I tell her. “There’s just no buildings or roads or people. There’s nothing human.”

  “Like I said, that I’d like to see.”

  I almost say, “I could take you,” but I don’t know what the protocol is—or if there even are rules. Maybe that’s a place only for cousins. Maybe something bad happens to humans like in the old fairy tales where somebody goes into fairyland for a day and a hundred years pass by in the world they left. What I do know is I didn’t get that ping when I met Maria and I don’t want to take the chance.

  “You never did tell me how you ended up joining the bandas,” I say instead.

  She looks away.

  “Look, I know you don’t have to tell me anything,” I say, “but it would really help me get a handle on how things work down here to know why someone like you, who obviously hates the gangs, still feels like she has to join up.”

  She continues to look away, but she says, “I did it to protect someone.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The gangs are all about respect,” she explains, turning back to me. “I don’t mean they’ve got some kind of bullshit code of honor, because they’ll break their word in a minute if it suits them and they think they won’t get caught. It’s about who’s the toughest, who can take what they want without consequences.” She taps her upper arm, but I don’t really know what that’s supposed to mean. “That’s what they respect. The toughest, the meanest, the smartest. So when they have the chance to pull in somebody who’s against everything they stand for, man, they’ll jump at the chance.”

  I remember Rosalie telling me how Maria’s mother worked for the probation department and her dad was a teacher. I can see how their daughter becoming a King would look good for the bandas. But when I say as much, Maria shakes her head.

  “I made a good substitute, yeah, but I wasn’t the one they had their eyes on.”

  I give her a blank look for a long moment and then it hits me.

  “Rosalie,” I say. “They were after Rosalie because it would totally devastate her uncle.”

  Maria nods. Then she pokes me in the chest, bunching up my T-shirt.

  “You don’t talk to anybody about this, China Boy. Not ever. Comprende? You do and I don’t care how many dragons you’ve got living in your chest, I’ll still come looking for you.”

  “But if Rosalie knew—”

  “She can never know.”

  “Why not?”

  “Come on, use your head. It’d kill her. After what happened to her mother and Anna’s brother—and now Margarita—it’d push her right over the edge. She’d go loco and who knows what she’d do? She’d probably try to go after the bandas on her own and get killed for her trouble.”

  “I guess. . . .”

  Maria puts the palm of her hand on where she’d been poking me. She smooths my T-shirt.

  “Besides,” she says, “you’re going to fix everything, right? There aren’t going to be any more bandas once you’re done with them. So she doesn’t ever have to know.”

  “That’s the plan,” I tell her with more confidence than I actually feel.

  She cocks her head and studies me for a long moment, reminding me of Lupita. Then she nods.

  “You are so screwed, aren’t you?” she says.

  “Yeah, pretty much. But someone’s got to do something, right?”

  “You could walk away. This isn’t your problem.”

  “I could, but I can’t. It’s . . . I guess it’s hardwired into the dragon part of me to see it through.”

  “The dragon . . .” she repeats. “I see you cousins walking around like people so much that I keep forgetting what you really are.”

  I almost say, “I’d like to,” but then I remember my conversation with Rita. She pulled the truth out of me. I don’t really want to be normal. But why couldn’t everything just be a little less complicated?

  “Elena gave you the heads-up about cousins,” Maria goes on, “but there’s something else you should keep in mind before you
step into the war zone.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s not just about Flores and the bandas. Santa del Vado Viejo’s a prime route for the Mexican drug cartels. If you take out El Tigre, they’re going to be looking to replace him.”

  Great. I hadn’t even considered that.

  “I don’t think they normally get a guy like Flores,” she said. “You know, a cousin. But they’ve got enough guns and crazy gangbangers that they don’t really need anything more.”

  I give a slow nod.

  “How do you even live in this world?” I ask.

  “It was hard at first. I got beat up a lot and you don’t want to know about how I got jumped in. But I toughened up quick. It was that or die. And now—”

  I don’t even see the flick knife appear in her hand, but suddenly it’s there, the blade out and pointed right at me.

  “Now they just think I’m a little loco,” she says, “and they give me some space.” The knife disappears as magically as it had appeared. “But you know how it is. Bottom line, when they say spit, I say how far.”

  “It must be hard—”

  Her face goes dark. “Hard doesn’t begin to cover it, China Boy.”

  “My name’s Jay.”

  She nods. “Yeah, sorry. It’s just that’s what the ’bangers call you.”

  She looks away for a moment. When she turns back the dark hardness is gone.

  “Margarita’s funeral is today,” she says. “They’ ll be interring her in San Miguel Cemetery.”

  And that’s like a bucket of cold water in my face. Yeah, I don’t want to be normal. But I don’t want people dying around me, either.

  “Are you going?” she asks.

  I shake my head. “No one there wants to see me.”

  “No one wants to see me there, either, but I’m still going. I’ll just stay in the background, play it low-key.”

  I shake my head again. “Look, thanks for all your help. I need to go figure out a few things.”

  “If I can do anything . . .”

  “It’s cool. I appreciate it, but this is something the dragon needs to—”

  I break off, remembering one of the other things that Rita told me.

  “I mean,” I say, “I’ve got to work out how this is going to go down.”