The Dragon of Cripple Creek

by Troy Howell

  That part was undeniable—the bottom of a mine—but the rest?

  I began again. “Did you say: Did you say ‘how’?”

  “That is what I thought you said. ‘How’ as in ‘howdy,’ short for ‘how d’ye do.’”

  Still numb, my mind shifted to auto-answer. I said, “Thanks for the English lesson. But the ‘ye’ is outdated. The ‘ye’ should be you.”

  He frowned—a scrunch-eyed, droopy-eared (or were they horns?), smoky-snouted frown. Less mythological. “Who should be me?”

  I shook my head. “Ye. For you.”

  With a note of suspicion, he said, “I knew you were eavesdropping.”

  I was emerging from my dullness. “What do you mean?”

  “You heard me addressing myself. I heard your scream, feeble as it was. I knew you were close. You were eavesdropping. You had to have been: You know my name.”

  See what I mean? Muddled.

  “I know your name?” I asked. “I heard you cough—”

  “You heard my name. Ye. That is me. Or I, Miss English-Lesson.”

  “You are Ye?”

  The dragon nodded, which sent his chin pendants swaying and smoke signals ceiling ward. “I am.”

  “I’m Kat,” I said, strangely relieved this was getting somewhere. “Short for Katlin.”

  “Come here, Kat,” he said. There was no doubt his voice was warming up. “Here, Kitty.”

  I came here, and I didn’t do the Mollie Kathleen. I did the snuffle ’n’ shake. If I’d been a dog, my tail would have been whimpering between my legs.

  But I wasn’t a dog. I was Kat.

  And I hate being called Kitty.

  I stopped. I had come here far enough.

  Ye leaned forward, which brought his head into better focus. Not that it helped my sanity. I was afraid he was going to shake my hand, the one I had buried in my pocket. I saw that his pointed ears were ears, not horns, which he could pivot, like a horse’s, his eyes were honey-deep, and his snout had a smudge of soot under it, like a Charlie Chaplin mustache. I tried not to look at his teeth. I glanced at them once, and though they weren’t as sharp as they could have been, still, they were big.

  “How is stereotypical,” he snorted. “I never heard an Indian say how.”

  “It was ow,” I corrected. “And I’m not an Indian.”

  “I did not say you were. But in the—what do you call them?—the talkies, those moving pictures, the movies, Indians say how.”

  I shook my head at the absurdity. “How do you know that?” I asked. “And how do you know words like stereotypical?”

  “So Long.”

  “What?” I asked, surprised at his bluntness. Did he want me to go?

  “So Long told me,” he said matter-of-factly. He nodded again, sending up more puffs. “I have an abundance of words in my vocabulary, an exorbitant amount. In different tongues, too. Vel caeco appareat. ‘It is obvious.’”

  “Really.”

  “Exorbitant means—”

  “I know,” I said. “I’ve looked it up.”

  “Ah,” he said.

  “I like big words. I collect them.”

  “You collect them?”

  “You know, like some people collect spoons or sea-shells or—”

  “Or gold?” he suggested, making it sound both innocent and condemning.

  “S-sure,” I said, responding to the innocent part and ignoring the other. “I collect big words and store them in my mind.”

  “Hmm,” he said. “Sesquipedality. That’s a big word.”

  “Ses … what?”

  “—quipedality.” He looked pleased with himself. “Know what that means?”

  I shook my head.

  “It means to use big words, long words.”

  “Ses-quipe-dal-ity,” I said slowly, filing it away. “Thank you. I’ll remember that.”

  “If you live long—xué wú zhi jìng, which is Mandarin for ‘learning is eternal’—you can collect a copious, prodigious, an incalculable, inter”—he coughed midword, swallowed, and continued—“minable amount of words! And I have lived longer than you can imagine.”

  “How long?”

  “How Long is a Chinaman.” He gave me a sideways glance.

  “That’s a joke,” I said, raising my eyebrows along with my voice. “Dragons tell jokes?”

  “Truly, it is not a joke.” He became solemn. “How, or Hou, actually—spelled with a u—Hou Long was So Long’s grandfather. Hou was the local tobacconist a … ah, a few blinks ago, after Cripple Creek’s boom-town days. We would sit and smoke together. He was one of the small handful of humans who would speak with me. The others either ran, fainted, or died.” Ye motioned toward a trench along the floor in which a complete skeleton lay.

  I was glad I had overlooked it, or I think I would have run, fainted, or died.

  “It had to do with Hou’s culture,” he continued. “Dragons, you see, bring good fortune to the Chinese.” A glaze came over his eyes and I thought his lower lip quivered, but it might have been the light. “I miss Hou Long. So Long, too.”

  Gosh, I didn’t know what to say.

  “Back to your question,” Ye said, snapping out of his mood. “How long have I been here. I do not count time by minutes or hours or days; I hardly count time at all. There was a fire recently. By your reckoning, about a hundred years ago. In the pool—that direction”—he blew an arrow of smoke that slowly wandered off, took a right turn, and dissolved—“nine stalagmites joined their descendants”—he chuckled to himself—“and many others have sprung up.” He chuckled again and coughed. “I have seen Halley’s Comet numerous times, before Halley attached his name to it. That”—he raised a clawed digit—“is how I count time.” He coughed again.

  I was quiet. Due to a wavering state of unbelief, panic, pain, weariness, and exhilaration, my mind was sitting this one out.

  “How long have I been here …” he mused. “It was after Huang Ti’s reign … before Babylon was in full bloom … no, before that. Thutmose. Yes, before Thutmose died, I frequented this continent. I flew in on the northeast tradewinds, rode the westerlies up the eastern coast—”

  “Virginia?” I couldn’t help but ask.

  He pulled on a silver chin-wattle. “Is that where you are from?”

  I nodded eagerly.

  “By then,” he continued, “there was hardly any gold that man had not snatched.” He stopped to scrutinize the nugget I had dropped as if to be sure not a speck of it was missing, while I tried not to fidget with my pocket-bound hand. Apparently satisfied, he went on. “I roamed the Far North and holed up around the Great Lakes for a half century. Eventually, I settled in these warmer climes.” He coughed yet again.

  Was coughing, I wondered, part of his act, like a pet phrase or mannerism? Or did he really have to cough? Did the smoke have something to do with it?

  “This talk about indigenous people,” he said, “who was here first, is pointless.”

  “Indigenous people?”

  “Native Americans. We were here long before any biped walked this land.”

  “You mean dragons?”

  “Dragons. We were the first, the o-r-r-r-iginal” (he rolled the r) “Native Americans.” He began to inhale, expanding his belly like a bellows.

  I stepped back.

  His chest began to brighten from burnished bronze to molten chrome, as if embers inside it were waking, fanned to life. He huffed until it glowed stove-hot, his face turning brick red, his eyes flickering in their sockets.

  I stepped back again, expecting him to burst from the effort, before he could blow it all out.

  Blow it all out he did.

  I sat down hard, not from being overwhelmed, but to avoid extreme smoke inhalation.

  Smoke flew from his nostrils and billowed out his gullet, forming a cloud that swallowed the stalactites. He blew and blew, and as I gazed in growing wonder, the cloud took the shape of America, unfurling like a flag. He added details, including p
atches of blue for the Great Lakes, a streak of olive green for the Mississippi, and a chain of cragged puffs for the Rocky Mountains, chugging from north to south like the Glory Train Express. He ended by puckering his mouth and shooting out a jet of tan for the down-turned horn of Texas.

  I was overwhelmed. “Wow,” I whispered, and started to clap.

  But then the cloud broke apart and fell in ashes, and it gave me a chill.

  “How do you like—” the dragon began, then had a fit of coughing. “How—” he began again, and coughed again. Whenever he tried to speak, he coughed.

  I waited.

  At last, he said, “Well.” His eyes brimmed with golden tears. He held up a hand, hacked, sighed, and said, “I could have saved”—cough, cough—“the cartographers”—cough—“a lot of time. Advantage of”—gulp—“aerial views”—pause, blink, wipe an eye—“Lewis and Clark and so on … you see.”

  “I see.”

  His nostrils flared, his chest swelled, and I was afraid he was going to do the up-in-smoke thing all over again.

  Instead he said, “I know this land—how does it go?” And in a trembling childlike voice, with a touch of Chinese, he sang, “From sea to shi-ning sea.”

  I was charmed, picturing Hou, the Chinese man, sitting before him, teaching him the song.

  “Do you know who wrote that?” he asked. “‘America—”

  “—the Beautiful’?” I said. “Um … Elvis?”

  “Elvis? Is that anything like elves?”

  “I don’t think so. But he had sparkly pants.”

  “Hmm. You know elves are not real.”

  “I know. But not so long ago I thought dragons weren’t, either.”

  He settled back down, whether to get comfy or from sheer exhaustion, I couldn’t tell. His head was back to its normal burnished bronze, and his body looked considerably cooler.

  I was about to ask who did write “America the Beautiful” when he said, “Absurd, how a vast geographical paradise can slumber in the sun and rain and snow for millennia on millennia, until someone comes and plants a name on it and declares ownership and writes songs about it”—his voice was past warming up now and into well done, with a spicy edge—“and cuts it up like a cow and says this is yours and this is yours and this and this—”

  He glared at whatever scene he saw in his mind, and I began to understand him. This was one lonely dragon, a dragon who’d had no one to talk to for a long, long time.

  “They have stacked cities and bureaucracies and mediocrities across this land like it is a game board, and linked them all with wires and rails and roads, like a child’s dot-to-dot. But the land will take it back. It always does.” He sighed and murmured, “We were the first.”

  I felt I had to say something, to keep the conversation alive. I said, “But you weren’t born here.” It came out rude and bold, though it wasn’t meant to, so I added, “If you came from the East, across the ocean.”

  That stirred him again. “Neither were the so-called early Americans, who also migrated from the East and arctic regions. When the Adena people saw me—my first personal encounter with immigrants—they built me a monument. Though I am no snake”—he spat the word—“as it suggested. Curvy and curled it was. Insulting.” His voice dropped to a murmur, and smoke strayed from his lips. “I have wondered whether it is still there.”

  I made a quick connection in my mind. A snake monument … early Americans … It sounded like something I’d learned in history. “Do you mean the Serpent Mound in Ohio? It’s still there!”

  “I suppose they never saw all of me, it being dusk. But they got the legend right.” He halted and blinked at me quizzically.

  “Legend?” I asked.

  He looked away and mumbled something. Something like, No … no … not a chance.

  “Legend?” I persisted.

  “It is of no significance,” he said with a wave of his hand. Then he picked at one of his claws the way you’d inspect a broken nail. He seemed distracted, so I gave him a little space and distracted myself.

  It was easy, with all of this gold. I could hardly comprehend it. It was as hard to comprehend as Ye himself. It was hard to ignore. The more I stared at it, the more golden it became.

  What would I do with all this gold? Or even a wheelbarrow full?

  My eyes started dreamily wandering. I could see us back in our house … wait—in a bigger house, big as a castle … it was a castle, with a turret for my bedroom … I’d peer down and see Angel, my beautiful white horse, galloping freely over the hills … a servant would bring iced tea on a platter, and french fries, and cranberry sauce … my hair would blow in a breeze … I’d invite one good friend, maybe two … we’d swim in our indoor pool, surrounded by glass walls and a glass roof and palm trees … afterward, we’d watch a movie, or play a game …

  A game. That was an interesting thought, if not a little berserk. Should I try it?

  Would Ye play toss the dice?

  I had the two dollars I’d won last night. That may be enough for starters—if I lost a round or two.

  Yes, it could put gold in my pocket. More gold in my pocket. Because I realized one nugget would not make us rich. It might get us out of debt, but not rich.

  Surely, Ye would part with some of this gold. For the thrill of the game, won fair and square. I’d have to play fair—I mean fair rules, since he’d be too clever to fool—but still I’d have a good chance with my trick die.

  Would he catch on? He knew lots of things, and lots of big words, but was that the same as being smart?

  I cut my eyes over to him—he was doing the same to me. His eye showed a glint I hadn’t noticed before. Hmm. I fingered the dice in one pocket, turned the ring with my thumb in the other.

  Well—gulp—here was to luck …

  “Ye?” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. “Before I go, how about a little game?”

  “You are going?”

  “I think I should. My family—”

  “A little game,” he said.

  “OK,” I said agreeably, pulling out the dice. I gave him my best grin. “See—”

  He frowned. A dire dragon frown, the kind I had dreaded might come. His eyes narrowed to golden slits, and the golden turned dark as his pupils filled them; his ears lay back, and an exclamation point shot out from his tongue.

  Uh-oh. Was gambling a sin to him, too? Was he as much dad as he was dragon? Now would come the threats, roars, flames.

  But his voice remained calm. An insurance-salesman calm. And that was worse. “Do that again,” he said.

  “Do … do what?” I stammered. “The … the dice?”

  “Your teeth. Show them. Smile.”

  Though the corners of my mouth quivered, I was too afraid not to show my—

  “Ah, now,” he said. “A gold tooth.”

  THE DICE WERE BACK IN MY POCKET, MY mouth was sealed shut, my golden dream had burst.

  Ye was giving me the look again—the honey-deep, insect-in-amber look. Back to being a dragon.

  “You like words,” he said slyly. “You like games. Here is a word game for you.”

  “Um … all right.”

  “Tell me this. What is wrong with the world?”

  Some questions are like lariats circling your head, waiting to catch you. I had heard some; I had asked some.

  “One word,” he said.

  The lariat was spinning and so was my mind. I was dragon-weary, cavern-weary. I ached. I was thirsty. I really did want to go home.

  I wanted to climb onto my mother’s lap.

  I put my hands behind my back and fingered her ring. I pictured her face. She was saying something.

  Think, Kat, think!

  Think. What is wrong with the world? One word.

  Hate? Race? Politics? Injustice?

  Simple. One word. Right. There were lots of one words.

  Hunger? Famine? Disease?

  Would it be a small word or a big word? A word I might not even know?
A word like … sesquipedality.

  “Is it a long word?” I asked.

  “It is ever so short,” he said briskly. “But the problem is ever so long.”

  Gosh, now it was a riddle. I put my hands in my pockets and fingered the not-so-lucky dice.

  Think, Kat!

  I fingered the gold nugget.

  Think!

  Wait. Gold nugget. Gold tooth. He asked me the question after seeing my gold tooth.

  Poverty … economics … money …

  Money. That was a short word. Was it a long problem? You bet it was. What was that saying about money? Money is the root of all evil.

  That was it, surely.

  I licked my lips with a dry tongue, ready to say money, when I saw Mom shaking her head. “It’s not money that’s evil, Kat,” she told me one day after some self-righteous classmate called me a snobby rich girl. “There’s nothing wrong with money. It’s the love of money …”

  That was it! I opened my gold-toothed mouth and said the one word.

  “Greed!“

  I could tell by his eyes I had passed the test. The lariat was tucked away.

  “Now,” he said, as if my answer had taken no effort at all. “Do you know why they call it a mine?”

  There he went again. Yet I felt it was not a game this time, but a lesson.

  “Uh,” I said. “Not really.”

  “They call it a mine, child, because the first people who found gold, or gems, or whatever they thought was precious enough to grab, shouted ‘Mine!’” He blew out a stream of steam.

  The gold in my pocket suddenly grew heavier. I swallowed, not that I had anything to swallow. Then I made my defense. Just as the lawyer did at our trial.

  “Well,” I said, throwing caution to the smoke, “look at you. Look at all this gold you hoard.”

  He slinked toward me.

  I stepped back.

  The gravel had left his voice some time ago. Now it was brandy-smooth.

  He said, “I am a dragon. This is dragon gold. I am entitled to it. All of it.”

  It made me want to run, but it also made me bold. Entitled, really. I would have laughed, like the trial lawyer had done, but I didn’t want to show him my tooth again. I didn’t want him ripping it from my mouth.