The Dragon of Cripple Creek

by Troy Howell

  “I’m OK,” I said.

  The skip slowed, rattled through turbulence, and I breathed the gust into my lungs.

  “The first level,” announced the guide.

  We plunged again, another five hundred.

  I hiccupped. It was insane. How many people get to plummet a thousand feet inside a cage crammed with strangers? The guy on my left could be some serial psycho who was sweating from the possibilities. The woman behind me, huffing down my neck whenever the skip shuddered, could be claustrophobic and break out in wild panic, screaming and clawing us to shreds. Or some mechanism could go wrong, and we’d hang like a spider in limbo.

  The gold sample had better be good.

  At last we slowed. Here was the lower level, and here came another gust—cold, damp, archaeological.

  “Watch your step,” said the guide. “No hurry. Wait your turn getting out.” He had a bushy mustache, the type you’d expect in a place called Cripple Creek, and his eyes were clear as diamonds, shining beneath his hard hat. We all wore hard hats—plus jackets for those who wanted them—given to us at ground entrance. My hat was at least a size too big, and I had to look down my nose to see anything above sea level.

  “Stay together,” the guide cautioned. “Stay on the path. The ropes are for your safety. Do not wander off.”

  Good advice—do not wander off.

  I LIKE TO GET TO THE (PUN ALERT) BOTTOM of things. The truth of a matter, or of a place. Things that people think but don’t ever say. Things that lie buried.

  It’s not always easy. You have to watch. You have to ask questions. Sometimes you get answers, sometimes you don’t.

  The important thing is that you get it right. It helps to jot it down, to put it in black and white. Things that you see and hear, besides what you feel and thoughts you have. That’s why I keep journals.

  Do journalists keep journals? Do they really check things out, or just dip their pens into some muddy rumor pool? I’d really like to know. Because most of the reports on this thing have been far from the truth.

  deliriums of disoriented girl

  girl’s desperate dad breaks into mine

  children scheme to claim ownership of gold

  dragon, a chinese kite

  dragon, a stuffed galÁpagos iguana

  Then there’s the fanciful approach. Like US Online calling it a New American Tall Tale. It is not a tall tale, such as Pecos Bill or Paul Bunyan. They grew out of yarn spinning that passed from jaw to jaw in barrooms or around campfires.

  My story’s all true—I swear it on Ye’s golden snout.

  The BBC News dubbed it a Western Fairy Tale. Western it is, but it’s part Eastern, too, and has no fairies. There’s no happily ever after.

  Only a few reports have come close.

  bizarre falsehood rocks wall street

  What happened wasn’t a “falsehood,” but Wall Street did go haywire.

  One headline got it right.

  calamity cat meets reluctant dragon

  But I’m galloping ahead of myself.

  • • •

  We filed into a murky cavern that glistened under strings of lights. Rough-sawn timbers supported the ceiling and, along the floor, iron rails ran from a dump cart and disappeared down a dark, descending tunnel.

  “The Mollie Kathleen was one of the world’s greatest gold-producing mines in the eighteen nineties,” began our guide, and I wiped an unexpected yawn from my mouth.

  The thing about tour guides—you have to prod them a little. I think they know more than the parts they tell, the parts that are hits with the crowds. So between tour stops, as we walked farther in, I pelted him with questions. He paid me no mind. I kept it up until he acknowledged this babbling girl tagalong.

  I learned a few things about Mollie Kathleen, how she’d loaded the family wagon to visit Cripple Creek, and how she discovered gold where men had been searching for years. In fact, they had named it Poverty Gulch because no gold had ever turned up.

  So this was her mine, not just a mine named after her.

  I think the guide thought his answers would hush me, but they only spurred more questions.

  “How deep is the mine?”

  “How many tunnels?”

  “Have they all been explored?”

  It was probably more prodding than he cared to hear.

  “Where does this one go?” I asked, before he gave me the slip. I had stopped to peer into a closed-off place, lit by one dim bulb.

  From the side of his mustache he said, “There are several closed chutes on this level. They’re closed off for a reason. This way!” It’s what Dillon calls a nonswer—an answer that tells you nothing.

  It was the last one he would give me.

  “Why’d they close it off? What could be the reason? Do you mean a single reason for all of them, or does each one have its own reason?”

  “Are they dangerous?”

  “Are they dead ends?”

  “Are they drop-offs?”

  Then I mumbled to emptiness—for the guide was gone and so was the group—“Do they have more gold?”

  GOLD IS MONEY.

  After Mom’s accident, we kept hoping she’d recover. We visited her every day. We took turns. Dad rambled to her about the past, the present, and their future together. I read to her and sang sometimes. I read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, one of her childhood favorites. When I read to her, I pictured her in her very own Wonderland, wondering and dreaming. I refused to picture her in some kind of hell.

  Hours turned to days, days to weeks, weeks to months. Our hopes fell. She was diagnosed with PVS—persistent vegetative state. She stared and stared, but those glossy eyes were not my mom’s; they were some strange dreamer’s.

  When the insurance company rejected the case, things went from terrible to unbearable. We were sued. So on top of medical costs, there were attorney fees. They cashed out our savings. Dad took a second mortgage. He took a loan. Several loans. He accepted personal loans from the few friends we had left. He cleaned the retirement funds, completely. We had nothing left but hope, and not much of that.

  Dad wouldn’t talk about it, but I figured he functioned at work as he had at home, which was more sleepwalking than living, and they dropped him.

  When he lost his job, we lost all hope.

  Money was everything.

  I’d never thought like that before, but there it was, under the surface, running like a crosscut tunnel to what I believed. What I believed came mostly from Mom.

  “The things that really count in life, Kat,” she’d say, her arms open wide for a hug, “are the things that can’t be counted. They have so much value no one can afford them—so they’re free.”

  I still believe those things.

  But your head gets bent when you eat Ramen noodles all week. You shop with your friends and say, “No thanks, not hungry,” while they gobble up frozen yogurt. You say, “What’s wrong with these shoes I’m wearing?” and one of the heels pops off.

  The grass is high and the mower won’t start. You need a decent pair of glasses and develop a silly squint. The goodbye gift you give your best teacher is a book from off your shelf. You’re pulled from private school and put into public, where you hardly know up from down.

  Your beautiful horse is sold.

  Your beautiful house is sold. To people who don’t know its secrets, its good times and its bad, who don’t love it like you do. Like the place on the stairs that always felt warm, or the hoofprint Angel put on the porch.

  Or the smell of Mom’s soap in the bath.

  Now she lies unconscious, needing better care, in a place that is hardly equipped. And hardly affordable.

  And I’d just spent the last of my savings.

  A FLIRTY WINK—THAT’S ALL IT TOOK. A sparkle in the gloom. Was that gold, just a pebble’s toss away? Real gold?

  You could duck right through the barrier. Or squeeze, anyway.

  Which is what I did.

  In t
he Luray Caverns in Virginia, they turn out the lights to show you how dark is the dark. “Put your hand in front of your face,” they say. “Watch—”

  The lights go out.

  You can feel the dark and taste the dark and hear the dark. And I’ll tell you, it feels thick, tastes oily, and sounds like a morgue. Not that I’ve ever been in one.

  Then the lights come on and everything’s cool.

  I figured that’s what happened. The tour group had gathered in the next cramped space, the guide probably said to put their hands in front of their faces, and …

  The moment I stepped beyond the barrier, two things went wrong:

  I saw too late the planks beneath my feet.

  The lights went out.

  My foot broke through the planks, then my leg, then all of me. Fortunately, the chute was not straight down like the elevator shaft, but it sloped enough that I tumbled without stopping.

  Rocks, gravel, debris, and me.

  Rolling, sliding, clutching, flailing in the dark.

  Down, down, down.

  Like Alice.

  “Umph!”

  Only there were no marmalade jars, bookshelves, or maps.

  “Umph!”

  There was no light.

  “Umph!”

  Were there bats?

  Do bats eat Kats?

  Thump! The fall was over.

  At least for now.

  DILLON SAYS, “CURIOSITY KILLED THE CAT.” I should have known that someday curiosity would kill me, or make an attempt on my life.

  “Well, Katlin Graham,” I said out loud. “You can forget your free gold sample.”

  I said it to be sure I could speak and hear and know I was alive. My eyes were wide open, trying to stare a hole in the dark. A dark that beat on my eardrums.

  Or was that my heart?

  I thought of the dawn, clear and clean, that I had woke to a few hours before. I’d raised the tall window in my room at the Empire Hotel to breathe in the day, and the mountains had lit up like gems as morning washed over the town.

  If I had just a sliver of that light! I’d see how banged up I was, and if I could return the way I’d come, or how deep was the drop. I’d see the seriousness of this nightmare, how mis this adventure would be.

  I dared not move. When I moved—

  More rocks tumbled into the blackness below.

  So much for my lucky-charm dice.

  I turned Mom’s ring, realizing my luck not to have lost it. Mom, I said, here I am, precariously perched between the roots of the Rockies and the Great Wall of China. What should I do?

  My glasses were gone, but they’d be no use now. Something poked my right knee, which I reached out to touch. Rough-hewn timber: a brace, most likely. That’s what had halted my hair-raising, tumbleweed roll. My left knee was torn and bleeding; I pulled the denim back where it stuck to the blood. My right arm from shoulder to elbow was buzzing with pain. I found two lumps on my head—one above my right ear, the other on my left cheekbone—and a dozen squishy spots up and down my limbs. Gravel was embedded in my palms.

  Fortunately, no broken bones. At least I didn’t feel any.

  Well, Kat, it could have been worse. Much worse. You could have—

  MY MOTHER HAD FALLEN.

  Only it wasn’t from curiosity, and it didn’t happen in the dark. It happened in broad daylight on an autumn afternoon.

  When everything was normal. Uncalamitous.

  Dad had got a promotion, a raise, a big bonus; we were moving up in the world. I think it went straight to our heads. Except Mom’s. While we each wanted things extravagant, Mom remained her simple self. She hung wind chimes along the front porch, put lattice between the windows to grow her roses on, bought birdhouses.

  I wanted to upgrade the stable, add heat and AC, put paving stones down.

  That’s why it happened.

  It happened five miles from home, at a rock quarry that had gone out of business. Mom said, “Why get what they have at Whole House when we can get real paving stones there?” She just drove around the barrier. It took three trips using our Volvo station wagon, which Dillon calls the workhorse—we’d used it for everything from hauling straw bales to storing books while we painted the living room.

  We never completed the paving stone project.

  While Mom was lifting the heaviest one of all, which was big as a gravestone, I ran to give her a hand. My foot caught on a half-buried pry bar, and I stumbled against her. She pulled back to keep the rock from crushing me, fell sideways, and rammed her head hard into a jutting boulder.

  I’ll never forget that sight. How I wish I could just hit delete.

  While we waited for the ambulance—Dillon had dialed 911—I sang to her. I sat in the dirt with her head in my lap and sang “You Are My Sunshine.” It was the song she sang to me every night when I was little. I sat real still and sang it over and over.

  You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.

  You make me happy, when skies are gray.

  You’ll never know, dear, how much I love you.

  Please don’t take my sunshine away.

  It was silly, I guess, but I thought it might wake her up.

  It did. Her eyelids fluttered, opened, and that’s when she gave me her ring. Her hands had been fumbling with it, and I didn’t realize what she’d done until I felt it in my palm. During that brief window of consciousness, she must have sensed her trouble. She tried to speak—her lips trembled—but she said nothing.

  Her eyes said everything. To remember me by. I’m going.

  Gripping the ring in one hand and stroking her hair with the other, I nodded, blinking in total shock. Then she spoke the ghost of a word, and I leaned in close.

  “Promise—”

  “Promise what, Mom? Don’t go! Promise what?”

  She was gone again, cocoonlike with invisible wraps, before the ambulance came.

  “MOVE,” I SAID. “I’VE GOT TO MOVE. I CAN’T stay here forever.”

  Well, I could, but I’d rot.

  Facing the slope, with my feet on the brace that had stopped me, I slowly stood. I reached up high, stretched to the limit, and put my hand on a ledgelike rock. I tested it, tugged it.

  It broke off and went flying past my face. It struck the tunnel walls—wham, bang, farther, fainter …

  Silence.

  I shivered. Had it fallen down a wider, deeper hole? A bottomless pit?

  I tried again, feeling for a handhold, something solid, stable, or a crack to wedge my fingers into. The layers were loose, their surfaces pitched downward. More rocks rolled past, adding another lump to my head and a greater sense of doom.

  I tried again and again, reaching this way and that, high into the blackness, and found nothing to depend on.

  So. Returning the way I had come was out of the question. Even if I did make progress, one wrong move, one loose stone, and the outcome could be worse, far worse.

  Deadly.

  My fingers went back to Mom’s ring. I turned it around.

  Her ring is like a portrait—a double portrait, even triple. The design is simple: a silver band with a mounted pearl. The pearl is big, bigger than most pearls I’ve seen. Sometimes when the child inside me has wanted to curl in Mom’s lap, I’ve gazed into the pearl and seen the smallness of myself, outlined in the haze. When I’ve gazed long enough, sometimes I’ve seen Mom’s face, gazing back, saying, I love you, Kat. Be still.

  Sometimes, after staring myself into a mist, I’ve seen Grandma Chance, Mom’s mom, staring back at me through layers of years.

  Grandma Chance traded a mule for the pearl when she was a teen, and though the deal was not in her favor—since the mule was useful and the pearl was not—she had no regrets. She kept the pearl as a prized possession, a seal of her independence, her take on life. She kept it through courtship and marriage, three miscarriages and a multitude of trials, including a fire, a flood, and a chain of complications resulting from a copperhead bite.

  T
hen when Mom was born right out of the blue, Grandpa Chance had the pearl set in silver, put the ring on Grandma’s hand, and said, “There she is. The pearl we’ve been waiting for.”

  That’s how Mom got her name.

  When Grandma Chance died, Mom inherited the ring.

  Now it’s mine.

  Promise.

  Ever since that dreadful day, I’ve asked myself, Promise what?

  Whatever the answer, the ring connects me to Mom. I wear it with a hope that someday I’ll put it back on her hand, look into her eyes, and know she really sees me, with no darkness in between.

  • • •

  I stroked the silky pearl, wondering what to do.

  “Down?” I asked.

  Darkness plays tricks with your sight. You can’t see a thing, yet patterns appear, black on black. Shapes move like jellyfish or shadows. Stars float by on the edge of nothing. In my mind, I saw Grandma Chance nodding. Just a nod on a faraway face, but a nod it was. I saw my mother’s eyes. They seemed to be hiding a smile.

  “All right,” I breathed. “Down I go.”

  I inched over the brace and extended my right leg, testing the darkness beyond. More rubble, more rock. Reluctantly, I eased myself down as you would on a slide.

  Slide it was and slide I did. Postrear, as Dillon would say. But it was better than tumbling heels over head, limbs like lunatics. I controlled my slide by braking now and then with my feet. But getting used to the motion, I went a little too casual, a little too fast.

  I tried to stop a little too late …

  And flew into space.

  Determined to land feetfirst, even if I were about to die, I arched my back, tried to right myself, and—

  “Umph!”

  —grunted for the umph-teenth time.

  I had landed in muck.

  I STOOD UP, STUNNED TO BE ON LEVEL, though slippery, ground.

  Mom, which way now?

  Straight ahead, I felt an earthen wall, so it was right or left. Again I thought of Alice. That way lives the Hatter, said the cat with a grin, that way lives the Hare. Visit either you like—they’re both mad.