Jaguar (33 page)

“Where you going?”

Eddie, too, whispered even though the car hadn’t stopped yet. He moved with the slow confusion of a sleepwalker.

“No place,” she said. “When he gets here, you wait up here. He’ll come in the door; you go out the window. Step from the roof to the back of the woodpile and you’re down.”

The car lurched its way to the end of the drive.

Eddie wrapped everything of his that he could find into his shirt.

“My coat,” he said. The words were mush in his mouth. “My coat’s down there.”

Maryellen slid down the ladder, raced across the cabin and back up the ladder with his coat.

In the bare sliver of light she closed her eyes for a moment and breathed deep. Eddie rolled his pack, his sleeping bag and his shirtful of odds and ends together and pitched them off the roof, behind the woodpile. He nearly followed them head-first, but caught himself on the window frame.

Maryellen straightened out the bed, and Eddie lifted the springs and mattress while she slid one of the slats towards the head.

The engine shut off; the car door opened and slammed shut.

Maryellen kissed him quick, and Eddie brushed his hand across her cheek. She scooped up the rubber and held it out to him like a dead rat between her fingers. He jammed it into his pocket, squeezed her hand and she hurried down the ladder.

Eddie stepped out onto the roof as her father’s steps reached the porch. At the same time the door opened, Eddie pulled the window down as quietly as he could and crept to the ground.

Mel Thompkins kicked the toes of his muddy boots on the doorsill. Maryellen opened the door for him.

“Hello, Dad.”

She must have startled him. He reeled back against the woodpile, then caught his balance.

“Maryellen. . . .” Her father glanced around, unsteady in the doorway. “Thought I might find you here. Where’s the bastard?”

Mel breathed deep, like he’d been running or stacking wood, and she guessed that he must be drunk. She had no sense of time; it could be seven in the evening or three in the morning. Her heart fluttered too fast, and she took a deep breath to relax the painful tightness in her belly.

She wanted to say,
I’m looking at him,
but bit it back.

“I’m alone, Dad,” she lied. “I came here to get away from all that.”

Mel brushed past her to the stove, holding tight to the unraveled sleeping bag under his arm. He set it down next to the couch and she heard the faint slosh of a bottle from somewhere inside the bag. She turned the lamps up, put the coffee back on the stove and studied him as carefully as possible without making him uneasy.

Wet, black hair strung down his face and his clothes were well-soaked. He must have stopped more than once to walk himself sober enough to drive, or to drink in the rain. He probably checked out the Cispus bridge.

“Why’d you come up?” she asked. She thought that getting on the offensive would be her best protection. “I have to be a criminal to get some privacy for one day. . . .”

Mel shook his head, then he started to cry. He cried quietly at first, barely a sigh in the night over the stove. Then as Maryellen moved toward him the cry became a tight-throated growl that put the hair up on the back of her neck and ran chills along her arms. The last time he cried this way was after he beat Eddie up. He’d spread newspapers over the living-room floor and got out a pistol to shoot himself. Olive had walked in and stopped him, and they’d kept the incident quiet. Maryellen thought that her father hated her stepmother, too, but couldn’t make himself leave her.

Maryellen held him though it scared her, dampening herself on his coat and hair.

“He’s gone, too. I got . . . a call . . . from the hospital.”

“Well, he’s not here. You can see that.”

He continued to cry, his face cradled in the crook of her neck. She started to move to take his coat, but he held her so tight she couldn’t get her arms free. It didn’t feel like love.

“Dad, let me take your coat and build up the fire.”

His crying slowed, but he still held her tight.

“I’ll build up the fire and fix you a drink, ok? Then we can sit and talk.”

He let her go, rubbing her head once like he did that first time when he came home from the war. He took off his coat, then put it back on.

“Chilly. It’s chilly. You feed the fire?”

“I was just doing that, Dad.”

She handed him a towel.

“Why don’t you dry off while I get in some wood, ok?”

He held the towel out and looked at it.

“Dry off your hair, Dad,” she said. She pulled on her coat. “I’ll be right in with some wood.”

She hurried off the porch to the outhouse. Eddie was there, all right. His shadow darkened the weathered planks. He followed her inside.

“I’m scared,” she said. “He acts really drunk, but he doesn’t smell like it. He’s sure you’re here.”

Eddie kissed the top of her head and ruffled her hair, like her father had done.

“Maybe I’d better head out,” he said. His tongue felt thick, his speech slurred. “Get to the highway, hitchhike back. If I show up, then. . . .”

“He can track anything, anytime,” she said. “Besides, you’ve got one foot in the dreamways. If he starts looking he’s bound to find something . . . then he’ll find you on the road. . . .”

“What, then?”

“Stay out here. I’ll try to get him to leave, but he’s too messed up to go tonight. Maybe the rain’ll cover our tracks. . . .”

“Maybe isn’t good enough,” he said.

“It’s too late to cover them, now,” she said. “Chances are he’d hear you out here. I’ve got to get back inside.”

Eddie’s throat ached from the tight anxiety that he held there, and Maryellen stuck her head under his coat so that her father wouldn’t hear her brief, frustrated cry. She hugged Eddie tight and laid her face against his bare chest. Her sudden weeping died as quickly as it had come.

“My father’s crying. He
never
cries. He’s in really bad shape, but he doesn’t smell like booze. I’m afraid.”

“You think . . . the Jaguar . . . ?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Eddie held her tight, the way her father had. She ducked her head outside but couldn’t see into the cabin from there. He felt her nipples, hard in her cold shirt, nose against his belly.

“I love you, Maryellen.”

His hands wandered up and down her back.

“I’ve loved you for a long time.”

She stood tiptoe and kissed him, her hands warm under his coat.

“I know,” she said.

“You can count on me,” he said, and slipped outside.

Maryellen ran to the porch and piled wood high in her arms. She kicked the cabin door open, closed, and hurried, off-balance, all the way to the stove.

Her father sat on the floor in front of the couch picking at the ties on his sleeping bag.

“Do you want me to get that, Dad?”

No answer.

“Dad?”

“I’m not deaf. No. Can get. I . . . can get it.”

She opened the stove and bunched the few remaining coals together with a stick of kindling. She watched her father while she worked. Something about his disorientation seemed familiar. She blew on the coals until they caught, closed the door and opened the draft.

Mel had his sleeping bag untangled and his bottle of bourbon stood on the floor in front of him—full, unopened.

“Get you a drink, Dad?”

She hoped now that he’d go to sleep and not feel like staying up all night.

He nodded at her, staring at the bit of fire reflected on the floor.

She poured some bourbon into a cup, then filled it with water from the jug.

“Water’s getting low, we should save some for coffee in the morning.”

He nodded again, and didn’t look up when she handed him the cup.

“What’s wrong?”

He shook his head, and spilled part of his drink on his bag.

“Is it me, Dad?”

He looked up but not to her eyes. He talked to her mouth or throat.

“It’s just . . . don’t know.”

He set his drink down and started to cry again. “I have these nightmares. And all I want is to love somebody.”

She kissed the top of his head still wet with rain and smelling strong of cigar smoke and sweat. He was not old. His black hair was just beginning to gray and it was as thick and smooth as her own. The only age he wore, he wore in his eyes.

The talk about dreams hit home. She thought maybe Eddie was right, the Jaguar had found him on the dreamways. Maybe Eddie could find out, he was already halfway there.

“Dad, I’ll fill up the stove and turn down the lamp. I think I’d better go up to bed.”

He wiped his eyes and nose on his shirtsleeve and didn’t answer.

“Don’t forget, there’s not much water.”

She waited for him to say something. When he didn’t, she climbed the ladder and started to undress.

“Night.”

It was a whisper and she barely heard it above the hiss of the stove.

“Good-night, Dad.”

The bed was pretty shaky but she drifted off to a fitful sleep, dreaming of Afriqua Lee and a long run up a dark hillside.

When Maryellen woke she was immediately afraid and knew it wasn’t the dream. Her father stood over her, his darkness exaggerated by the dim light from the downstairs lamp. He stood, unsteady, staring down at her. In his right hand he held his rifle from the pickup. In his left, the opened box of rubbers.

He threw the box at her face.

“Where is he?
Where is he?
”

She sat up and pulled the covers with her. Maryellen knew that denial would only infuriate him more. The sight of the rifle in his hand frightened her too much to move.

“I don’t know.” Her voice was barely a squeak. “I sent him out when you came in.”

He jerked at her covers but lost his balance and fell across her. The bed snapped again and collapsed. She held his chest at arm’s length but his knee pressed harder into her belly until she let go. His body pinned her down and he pushed his face into hers. His whiskey breath nearly gagged her but she was so scared she went rigid and couldn’t turn away.

“I want him. You call him.”

The bed settled again and he slapped her bare hip with the rifle as he caught his balance. The chill sting of the barrel froze every muscle in her body tight as ice. She strained to say
No No
but the cramps in her neck paralyzed her throat into a tight whine.

She shook her head
No
, wrestled him off-balance and slammed her knee into his crotch. He fell back off the bed and rolled slowly over to one side, then to his knees. Finally, he drew himself up until he knelt on the floor and rested his forehead against the stock of his rifle.

In the hot breath after anger she shook so bad her fingers barely worked. They clawed her bedding to her chest and she backed herself against the wall. She watched her father uncurl without a word and struggle his way down the ladder, the barrel of his .30-.30
tap-tapping
the rungs after him.

Though in many of its aspects the visible world seems formed
in love, the invisible spheres were formed in fright.

—Herman Melville,
Moby Dick

In the aftermath of the dream and the rain, the silent landscape took on an alien quality that helped Eddie to pull himself together. His body didn’t want to work well, yet, and the blue afterglow of the dreamway still pressed into his consciousness.

Eddie gathered up his gear and picked his way through the mud along the tree line behind the cabin. He made out the silhouette of a low structure about fifty feet back and headed for it.

He found an old lean-to woodshed, nearly empty and fairly dry inside. He spread his bag out on the dirt floor among the bark chips and lay down, half-falling into dream, half-jumpy from the danger just across the clearing. Mel Thompkins was a gunsmith and the best shot in the valley. Eddie had no illusions about the man’s intent, but running out would leave Maryellen to take whatever was meant for him, and that was something that Eddie could not abide.

Besides, he had to face the ugly fact that he couldn’t run. He had already been hit too hard by the dream.

Tonight’s dream had barely got its hold on him when Maryellen jarred him out of it. This dream was different; the danger wasn’t on the other side, it was right here.

Was Rafferty trying to warn me about this?
he wondered.

He wrung out every scrap of memory that he could, but the whole thing was a jumble of broken images. In the dream the landscape kept jumping around, flashing between Rafferty’s country and the valley. In both cases Eddie floated up high, a soaring dream, following the roadways of both worlds on the wings of a guiding wind. He circled a temple of the priesthood and saw six young jaguar priests whose dreams had aged the innocents of the Roam. He remembered what Maryellen had said about looking into a mirror.

This is what happened to us,
Eddie thought.
The dreams made us smarter, but they stole our years.

The priests had chanted themselves into dream, and as Eddie gyred high above them he saw that an aura pulsed outward from their group like a powerful blue ripple in a dark pond. It moved like something electric, but looked like a piece of rainbow.

When the blue wave hit him he tumbled end-over-end in the sky, and when he righted himself he leveled off over his own valley. He recognized the hospital and the town straggling out like a hem torn from the skirts of the hill.

The city sprawled at the mouth of the river ten miles past the town, and another series of blue waves pulsed skyward from there.

The Jaguar,
he thought.
It’s got to be.

Maryellen woke him into the netherlands, a detachment from both the dream and from the real world. He stretched out on his sleeping bag, not wanting to give in to the dream, important as it felt. He was sure that Maryellen’s father would kill him this time, doing the bidding of the Jaguar.

He’s running scared,
Eddie thought.
I must be getting close.

The night edged itself into a gray dawn in the smokehouse. A few crows muttered to each other in a nearby tree, and one of them squawked the morning rally. Eddie lay back on his bedroll and closed his eyes. He crashed through the blue butterfly and soared the dreamways again. The valley spread out below him, misty from the river and the recent rain. As the blue pulse caught up with him he wheeled about and rode it like a kite. Beneath him he watched the network of roads and streams unravel, and he was carried up the mountain, past the bridge which was now washed out, to the cabin.