Jaguar by Bill Ransom Read Free Book Online Page A

worked its busy nose at his mother.
    She rubbed his back through her bedclothes and nearly hugged him. But he sat still, not knowing where to look, and noticed his mother’s perfect white feet. They barely touched the floor and her toe-knuckles kinked white where she held to her balance. Small feet, delicately veined in a blue very nearly the color of her remaining eye. Wide, she’d told him, because she went barefoot as a girl.
    “I brought this one so you could see him,” Eddie said. “The whole litter is black-and-white, but this one is all black.”
    “Does he have a name?”
    “No,” Eddie said, “I thought you’d want to name him.”
    She started to reach out from under her sheet towards the rabbit, but pulled back.
    “He won’t bite,” Eddie said. “He’s the best one of the bunch.”
    When she moved, Eddie saw that one arm was much shorter than the other. One arm stopped just above the wrist, the other ended at the elbow. He couldn’t stop staring at the dull lumps they formed against the inside of her sheet.
    His mother said, “Put him here, on my lap. I can’t . . . I can’t hold him, so you’ll have to watch out that he doesn’t get away. They wouldn’t care for a rabbit running the halls here, would they?”
    Eddie picked up the rabbit and set it carefully in his mother’s lap. She winced a bit. She shifted to get comfortable and her back, where the gown fell open, looked as smooth and white as her feet. Her backbone stood out like thick knuckles. She hurt her back at work just before he turned five and had to stay home and take medicines for a long time. They ate macaroni and cheese almost every night then, and Eddie would rubbed her back with smelly stuff every morning and night.
    His mom would not take her arms out from the covers to pet the rabbit, but she sort of cuddled it there in her lap. She leaned one shoulder against Eddie and he kissed her beside her good eye. She would not show herself below her eyes, and forming some words seemed hard for her. He realized that she spoke in a whisper because that’s all she had, not because she was afraid he’d be found.
    Suddenly an elevator door slapped open down the hallway, then dishes rattled in a cart.
    “You’d better hide . . . oh, the window!”
    Eddie hurried to the window and pulled it closed. He got up so fast he startled the rabbit and it scrambled off his mother’s lap and under the bed. As the food cart banged the door open, Eddie slid himself under her bed, too. The rabbit was gone; he couldn’t see it anywhere.
    A pair of white shoes filled with white stockings walked around the cart and toed up to the next bed first, then his mother’s.
    Eddie’s rabbit left a scatter of pellets, and he was glad it hadn’t done that in his mother’s lap. Wads of dust-balls hung from the springs at the head of the bed. Eddie’s nose tickled and he rubbed it hard so he wouldn’t sneeze.
    “Morning, Mrs. Reyes,” an elderly voice said. “Jeanie will be up from therapy in a minute to help you out with this. My, you’re doing so much better than Doris, here. We’ve got a full house and I’ve got to run. Is there something I can get you before Jeanie comes in?”
    His mother cleared her throat, and in her hoarse whisper asked, “Would you open the window? I’d like some fresh air.”
    “I’ll have to ask doctor about that,” the voice replied. The shoes squeak-squeaked back to the cart. “Infection is the hobgoblin of burn patients. We don’t want you to come this far just to lose you now, do we? Doctor will be in this morning, too. I hear that he has some news from that burn center in California. You be good for Jeanie, now, and I’ll see you at lunch time.”
    The door slapped shut behind the cart and they were left with the wet snores of Doris across the curtain. Eddie scrambled out from under the bed.
    “That was close,” he said, but before he could say anything else his mother shushed him.
    “Eddie, you’ve got to