Free Jaguar by Bill Ransom Page B

that?”
    “To keep track of me. They say I’ll go crazy, or burn up from a flash of light in my skull. But I think that’s just talk.”
    “Who is the Jaguar?”
    “Nobody really knows. Lots of old stories, of course, but that Jaguar was a god, and a good one. This one causes trouble, no doubt of that. But these plagues, earthquakes, floods—it’s just handy to blame everything on him. He has it in for the people of the Roam, for some reason. With the brands and whatnot, he’s turned whole cities against them—against us —but nobody knows why. It’s against the accords, and we’ve lived by the accords for a lot of generations. Townspeople, where you lived, just want it to go away. They figure if they drive the Roam out, then the trouble will stop.”
    “But, the Jaguar. . . .”
    “Is a man,” Uncle said, “I’m sure of it. But he’s not from around here. Nobody has seen him except in a lot of nightmares, including mine.”
    Rafferty thought of his dreams of Eddie, then, and he wondered whether Eddie worked for the Jaguar.
    Someday I’ll talk to him in a dream, he thought. Then I’ll find out.
    This sounded brave enough in his head, but not so brave to the pit of his stomach.
    A couple of times a day Rafferty or Uncle would pull the insulation aside and crawl halfway back up the tunnel to listen through a pipe that led to the kitchen. Farther up the tunnel, a few meters from the house, Uncle set a trap that would collapse the tunnel on top of anybody who touched it. Uncle told him how to unhook it, but Rafferty didn’t ever go up any farther than the pipe.
    They traded stories and, finally, secrets. Rafferty told Uncle about eating the bugs. The uncle laughed and said, “You won’t be the last one that eats bugs, you’ll see.”
    Uncle didn’t make fun of him for it. He asked a lot of questions about them, including how they tasted.
    “Like corn-dogs,” Rafferty said. But it wasn’t really true. He couldn’t remember how they tasted, he just remembered trying to think they were corn-dogs.
    Then the uncle told a story that made him cry. Rafferty didn’t know what to do when a man cried so he sat still, curled up in his damp chair.
    “Verna and I, we had a brother,” Uncle said. “He was the oldest. Floyd, then me, then Verna. We were three years apart.”
    Uncle talked in the low whisper that they had learned down there in the still. He cleared his throat and coughed.
    “Floyd worked in the city for sixteen years. He started drinking. I told you about drinking, and what this still’s for.”
    Rafferty nodded.
    “My father’s father built this still, kind of a family tradition. Well, when Floyd disappeared the first time, this is where I found him. I run the still when I can’t get work, the Roam trades it for me. I won’t drink it myself. The last time I found my brother, I found him here.
    “He was drunk and had a rifle with him. That’s the old-fashioned kind of gun with a long barrel. I figured he might be down here if he was on a toot, and I was right. He had these terrible dreams for years, and the only way he could stop them was to drink himself to sleep. Sometimes he had them anyway, and sometimes they came when he was awake. That was the worst part. And he would be sick afterwards. He said it was the dreams made him sick, but we all knew it was the juice.
    “He sat here up against the still, holding the rifle across his chest and when I saw that, I was scared. I thought if he was drunk he might shoot me, and I could see he was drunk. I was so scared . . . .”
    The uncle was a little shaky and his voice squeaked when he started to talk again.
    “I said to him, ‘Floyd, let me take that rifle back up to the house for you.’ He wouldn’t look at me. Kept looking off at the ground, batting at things that weren’t there. Finally, he said, ‘Henry, you go back to the house now.’ Then I knew what he was going to do. I didn’t know about the Roam yet, or the Jaguar.
    “I