The House of the Scorpion (11 page)

Matt digested that idea for a moment. “Not even if it's very thirsty?” he said at last.

“It was thirsty just now,” said Tam Lin. “If I hadn't told it to drink, it would have stood in front of the trough until it died. Stay,” he told the horse.

Shouldering a backpack, he started up the dry stream. Matt
scrambled after him. At first the way wasn't difficult, but soon it was blocked by boulders they had to climb. Matt wasn't used to exercise, and he quickly found himself out of breath. He didn't stop, though, because he was afraid Tam Lin would leave him behind. Finally the bodyguard heard him gasping and turned back. He hunted through the backpack. “Here. Drink some water. Have a bite of beef jerky too. The salt'll do you good.”

Matt devoured the beef jerky. It tasted wonderful. “Not much farther, laddie. You're doing very well for a hothouse plant.”

They came to a giant boulder that seemed to block the trail until Matt saw a round hole in the middle. It was worn smooth like the hole in a donut. Tam Lin climbed through and reached back to help Matt.

The scene on the other side was completely unexpected. Creosote bushes and paloverde trees framed a small, narrow valley, and in the center of this was a pool of water. At the far end Matt saw an enormous grapevine sprawled over a man-made trellis. In the water itself, Matt saw shoals of little brown fish that darted away from his shadow.

“This is what you call an oasis,” said Tam Lin, throwing down his pack and taking out food for the picnic. “Not bad, eh?”

“Not bad!” agreed Matt, accepting a sandwich.

“I found this place years ago when I first started working for El Patrón. The Alacráns don't know about it. If they did, they'd run a pipe in here and take out all the water. I hope I can count on you to keep the secret.”

Matt nodded, his mouth full of sandwich.

“Don't tell María either. She can't help blabbing.”

“Okay,” said Matt, proud that Tam Lin considered him responsible enough to keep a secret.

“I brought you here for two reasons,” said the bodyguard. “One, because it's nice. And two, because I want to tell you a few things without being spied on.”

Matt looked up, surprised.

“You never know who's listening to you in that house. You're too young to understand much, and I wouldn't say anything if you were a real boy.” Tam Lin tossed bread crumbs into the pool. The little fish rose to the surface to feed. “But you're a clone,” he went on. “You haven't got anyone to explain things to you. You're alone in a way real humans can't understand. Even orphans can look at pictures and say, ‘That's me ma and that's me da.' ”

“Am I a machine?” Matt blurted out.

“Machine? Oh, no.”

“Then how was I made?”

Tam Lin laughed. “If you were a real boy, I'd tell you to ask your big brother that tricky little question. Well, lad, the best way to describe it is this: A long, long time ago some doctors took a piece of skin from El Patrón. They froze it so it would keep. Then, about eight years ago, they took a bit of that skin and grew it into a whole new El Patrón. Only they had to start at the beginning with a baby. That was you.”

“That was me?” asked Matt.

“It was.”

“So I'm just a
piece of skin?
”

“Now I've gone and upset you,” said Tam Lin. “The skin was what you might call a photograph. All the information was there to grow a real copy—skin, hair, bones, and brain—of a real man. You're exactly like El Patrón when he was seven years old.”

Matt looked down at his toes. That's all he was: a photograph.

“They put that piece of skin into a special kind of cow. You grew inside, and when the time came, you were born. Only, of course, you didn't have a father or a mother.”

“Tom said I was puked up by a cow,” said Matt.

“Tom is a filthy little pustule,” said Tam Lin. “And so is the rest of that family. If you quote me, I'll deny it.” He brought out a bag of trail mix and passed it to Matt. “To continue: Being a clone, you're different and a lot of people are afraid of you.”

“They hate me,” Matt said simply.

“Aye. Some do.” Tam Lin stood up and stretched his big muscles. He paced back and forth on the sand where they were having their picnic. He hated to sit still for long. “But some love you. I'm speaking of María and, of course, Celia.”

“And El Patrón.”

“Ah, well. El Patrón's a special case. To be honest, the number of people who love you is small and the number who hate you is large. They can't get around the fact that you're a clone. It makes it hard to send you to school.”

“I know.” Matt thought bitterly of María. If she really loved him, she'd take him with her and not care about how the other kids felt.

“El Patrón insists that you be educated and live, as nearly as possible, a normal life. The problem is, no private teacher wants to teach a clone. And so the Alacráns got an eejit.”

Matt was startled. He'd heard the word so often—mostly from María—he'd thought it was only a swear word, like
dumdum
or
cootie face.

“An eejit is a person or animal with an implant in its head,” said Tam Lin.

“Like the horse?” said Matt as a terrible thought occurred to him.

“Correct. Eejits can do only simple things. They pick fruit or sweep floors or, as you've seen, harvest opium.”

“The Farm workers are eejits!” cried Matt.

“That's why they work without resting until the foreman orders them to stop and why they don't drink water unless someone tells them to.”

Matt's thoughts were whirling. If the horse could stand there and
die
in front of a trough of water, then the man—

“The man,” he said aloud.

“You're bright as a button, lad,” said Tam Lin. “The man we saw on the ground probably lagged behind the other workers and didn't hear the foreman tell them to stop. He might have worked all night, getting thirstier and thirstier—”

“Stop!” shrilled Matt. He covered his ears. This was horrible! He didn't want to know any more.

Tam Lin was at his side at once. “That's enough lessons for one day. We're on a picnic and we haven't had any fun yet. Come on. I'll show you a beehive and a coyote den. Everything lives around water in the desert.”

They spent the rest of the day exploring the burrows, the crevices, the hidden lairs of the secret valley. Tam Lin might not have gone to school for too long, but he knew a great deal about nature. He taught Matt to sit still and wait for things to come to him. He told him how to tell the mood of a beehive by its hum. He pointed out droppings and tracks and bone fragments.

Finally, as shadows began to fill up the oasis, Tam Lin helped Matt climb through the hole in the rock and return to the horse. It was waiting exactly where they'd left it. Tam Lin ordered it to take another drink before they set off.

The fields were empty, and the long shadows of hills flowed
across the land. Where they ended, the late-afternoon sun made the poppies glow with a golden light. They passed the dry field where the man's body had lain, but it was gone.

“Teacher was an eejit,” said Matt, breaking the silence.

“She was one of the brighter ones,” said Tam Lin. “Even so, she could do only one lesson over and over.”

“Will she come back?”

“No.” The bodyguard sighed. “They'll put her to work mending curtains or peeling potatoes. Let's talk about something more cheerful.”

“Could
you
teach me?” asked Matt.

Tam Lin let out a bellow of genuine laughter. “I could if you wanted to learn how to break desks with karate chops. I reckon you'll do your schooling off the TV. I'll be around to hang you out the window by your ankles if you don't study.”

O
n the surface Matt's life settled into a pleasant rhythm. He studied via distance learning over the TV, Tam Lin sent off the homework, it came back with excellent grades, and Celia praised Matt lavishly. María praised him too when she visited. It didn't hurt either that Tom had lousy grades and managed to stay in boarding school only because Mr. Alacrán sent the headmaster a large donation.

But underneath Matt felt a hollowness. He understood he was only a photograph of a human, and that meant he wasn't really important. Photographs could lie forgotten in drawers for years. They could be thrown away.

At least once a week Matt dreamed of the dead man in the field. The man's eyes were open and staring up at the sun. He was terribly, horribly thirsty. Matt could see how dusty his mouth was, but there was no water anywhere, only the dry, rattling poppies. It got so bad that Matt demanded a pitcher of
water by his bed. If only he could take that pitcher into his dreams. If only he could
dream
it there and pour water into the man's dusty lips, but he couldn't. And when he woke up, he drank glass after glass to get rid of the dry, dead feel of the poppy fields. Then, of course, he had to go to the bathroom.

On such occasions Matt would tiptoe past Celia's bedroom. He could hear her snores and, across the hall, Tam Lin's thunderous reply. This should have made him feel safe. But Matt never knew, just before he opened the bathroom door, whether the dead man might be lying on the other side, staring up at the big light in the middle of the ceiling.

María started bringing Furball on her visits. He was a shrill, rat-sized dog that forgot his house training when he got excited. Tam Lin often threatened to suck him—and the mess he deposited—up the vacuum cleaner. “He'd fit,” he growled over María's horrified protests. “Trust me, he'd fit.”

What Matt hated about the creature was everyone's assumption that he and Furball were the same. It didn't matter that Matt had excellent grades and good manners. They were both animals and thus unimportant.

During Easter vacation Tom said good manners were no harder to learn than rolling over or playing dead. Matt threw himself at him, and María ran shrieking for Tam Lin. Tom was sent to his room without dinner. Matt wasn't punished at all.

Which was okay with Matt, except that Furball wasn't punished for his crimes either. He couldn't understand the difference between right and wrong. He was a dumb beast and so, apparently, was Matt.

When María wasn't visiting, Matt amused himself by exploring the house. He pretended he was El Látigo Negro scouting out an enemy fortress. He had a black cape and a long,
thin leather belt for a whip. He skulked behind curtains and furniture, and he hid if he saw one of the Alacráns in the distance.

Felicia—Benito's, Steven's, and Tom's mother—played the piano in the afternoons. Her crashing chords echoed from the music room. She attacked the piano with a fervor completely different from her usual, sluggish self, and Matt liked to hide behind the potted plants to listen.

Her fingers flew from one end of the keyboard to the other. Her eyes were closed and her mouth was pulled back in a grimace that wasn't pain, but something close to it. The music was wonderful, though.

After a while Felicia would run out of energy. Trembling and pale, she would hunch over the keys, and this was the signal for a servant to bring her a brown liquid in a beautiful, cut-glass bottle. The servant would mix a drink—Matt loved the clink of ice—and place it in Felicia's hand.

She would drink until the trembling stopped. Then she would wilt over the piano like one of Celia's spinaches when Tam Lin forgot to water the garden. Maids had to carry her away to her apartment.

One day Felicia didn't come at her usual time, and Matt hovered behind the potted plants as he worked up his courage to approach the piano. If she caught him, he knew he'd be banished from the room forever. His fingers tingled with the desire to play. It looked so easy. He could even hear the music in his head.

Matt crept out of his hiding place. He reached out to touch the keys—and heard Felicia's listless voice in the hallway. She was telling a servant to bring her a drink. Matt panicked. He darted into a closet behind the piano and shut the door an instant before Felicia came into the room. She immediately
started playing. Matt sneezed from all the dust in the closet, but Felicia was making too much noise to hear him. Matt felt around until he found a light switch.

It was a disappointing place. Sheet music was stacked against the walls. A heap of folding chairs filled up one corner. And it was so covered with dust and spiderwebs that Matt sneezed again. He rolled up a sheet of music and began sweeping off the inner wall, more for something to do than from any real curiosity.

On the inner wall, under a knot of webs that would have made Dracula happy, Matt found another light switch. He flipped it on.