Jaguar by Bill Ransom Read Free Book Online

the tips of his right fingers almost touched the rung. He nodded.
    “Yes.”
    He looked both ways; still no one in the alley. Someone out front of the feed store pounded for Weldon to let him in.
    “What about this?” Weldon asked. He patted the bulge in Eddie’s jacket where the rabbit hid. Without waiting for an answer, Weldon picked Eddie up and set him on the fire escape.
    “Thanks,” Eddie said.
    “Happy birthday,” Weldon said. “Good luck.”
    He shook his head and walked back inside the store.
    Eddie didn’t like the gratings under the steps of the fire escape. He could see clear through to the ground and it seemed a long way down already. He worked his way up the three floors through the ivy to his mother’s window, trying to keep the rabbit calm against the thrash of his heart in his chest.
    He sat a little bit with his eyes closed, catching his breath. When he opened his eyes, he glimpsed the shadow of a boy his own age dodge down the alleyway towards the mill. The lumber mill on the next block was three blocks long and the owner grazed sheep among the stacks of lumber. His glimpse of the boy showed him only someone his own age and size, someone like the boy in his dreams.
    Rafferty.
    The name from inside his head sounded perfect. This shadow had skirted him for awhile now, and skipped through the fringes of his dreams. In the last dream, Eddie looked down on the shadow-boy from the gnarled branch of a yew. From where he perched, Eddie saw the boy hiding down there, and someone circled towards him in the grass. Eddie looked down from the tree to see himself reflected in brown lake water: he was a crow. He shook his wings out to make sure. His heart was beating awfully fast, and whatever it was nearly had the boy.
    Rafferty.
    Again, the name had awakened him from a sweaty sleep, but Eddie had barked it in the brusque vernacular of a crow. Now he scanned the sky and treetops. Plenty of crows, but they all stayed put. The trees swayed, and he squinted through a bit of a headache even though it was too cloudy for glare.
    When he heard voices in the back of the feed store he raised his mother’s window and stepped through, between the curtains.
    Eddie’s mother must have heard the window, because as he slung one leg over the sill she gave out a little cry of surprise. She had already partly covered herself with the sheet she gathered between her stumps. A white patch covered one of her eyes. All he could really see of her the way she huddled into her sheet was her one blue eye surrounded by a swirl of pink scars to the top of her head where some wispy hair began.
    Eddie’s rabbit squirmed against his ribs.
    His mother made that cry again, and he realized it was his name. She glanced at the blue curtain that separated her bed from the rest of the room.
    Eddie heard snoring from somewhere on the other side. His mother’s blanket shifted, and on her patched-eye side her ear looked like a melted flower bud.
    He pulled his other leg over and scooted off the sill into the room.
    “Eddie,” she whispered, and hunched the blanket higher, “I don’t want you to see.”
    She lowered her head and he thought she would tell him to leave.
    Then she sighed, and whispered, “But I’ve wanted to see you so much .”
    She talked through a tight throat, and her shoulders shook. She cleared her throat and lowered the sheet so that Eddie could see her eye.
    “It’s your birthday and you were born right here, downstairs. . . .”
    She shifted herself over on her bed and patted the cover beside her. He listened before he moved for sounds of anybody in the hallway, but it was quiet.
    “Six,” she whispered. “You’re six and you’re such a little man already.”
    She was shivering but he only noticed after he sat on the bed beside her. A very strong smell hit him, and the rabbit didn’t like it either because it started scrambling under his jacket until it got out and onto the bed. It huddled against Eddie and