Jaguar Read Online Free PDF Page A

her freckled, pale skin and light, close-cropped hair. When she had visitors, other neighbors stayed indoors and locked up. They hired these dark men to fix things or to invent things or to tell them news of the outside, beyond the city’s great walls.
    Sometimes the brown-eyed men brought him presents, like the mechanical parrot that walked and squawked or the wind-up lizard that skittered up the sidewalk. They always stood outside with their presents and waited on the sidewalk because his aunt wouldn’t allow them near the house. The house had been his parents’ house, and he overheard the grown-ups saying that if it weren’t for his parents these people wouldn’t be visiting the city at all. Sometimes they said it like a great thing. Other times, it sounded like a curse.
    When his aunt decided that they’d stood outside long enough, or when she realized that the dark-eyed ones were never going away, she would let him go outside and accept the gift. Each time, the men would say something to him quickly, softly, something kind about his parents whom they clearly had admired very much.
    The jaguar priests had taken them, they said, and he would not know for years that they had died horribly. All he knew at five, going on six, was what his mother’s sister told him, that they had gone to the southern highlands to teach these people and something bad had happened so they couldn’t get back.
    Verna muttered a chant in that sing-song language as she fastened the screen door and the old-fashioned glass door behind it. Rafferty was dazzled by the thousands of bronze wings that glinted in the after-shower sun.
    They pushed up out of gardens and gravel driveways, from grasses and from rocky hillsides. They unfolded their glittering wings and joined the bronze fog rolling across the valley. It was like watching fire disassemble a log. While Verna shrieked into her handset for help, Rafferty knelt at the living-room window and listened to the scrabble of hard little bodies against the walls outside.
    The things that pressed themselves against the glass had bodies bigger than a man’s biggest finger. Orange with yellow underbellies, they unfolded finely veined wings that stretched a half-meter from tip to tip. Each bug had four wings and six bristly legs.
    Rafferty couldn’t think of them one at a time when the walls, the gardens and streets, the air itself were already filled with them and with the dry rattle of their wings. The window was acrawl with them. He remembered for years his fascination with the bob and pulse of the thousands of yellow bellies flattened against the glass.
    Verna yanked him away from the window and activated the blinds. He noticed the inside of her house for the first time while she muttered in a tight voice and threw things into a bag. The house was nothing like he’d imagined.
    One huge room held couches along the walls and a large wooden table near the kitchen. Unlike the outside of the house, the inside was spotless. The walls were not walls, but the same kinds of installations that decorated the sides of the vans: Pictures that could change, jungle pictures, and somewhere in the room a box broadcast jungle sounds.
    Bright-colored blankets with strange designs covered the walls and lots of blankets draped the couches. Rafferty stood on a red, blue and black rug woven with animals and big-nosed people with helmets and spears.
    When she finally took him out of the house he was rolled inside one of these blankets so that he could neither see nor hear. He felt her noiseless car swerve and lurch and slam hard when it hit holes. It stopped, backed up and turned. He couldn’t count how many times this happened and in spite of the wool itching his nose he got sleepy enough inside the blanket to doze.
    Then the car lurched hard his way and tipped, kept tipping, tipped all the way over. When the rolling stopped, Rafferty woke up squashed in place with the blanket over his head. He was pinned so tight his