The Dragon of Cripple Creek

by Troy Howell

  Wait. It had to be given willingly. A gift of the heart. How could I wrench it from my finger and give it to him willingly?

  But if I gave Ye the ring—

  All right, I’ll admit it, because I’ve sworn to tell the truth—no gaps, no embellishments, no attempts at making myself look good.

  If I gave Ye the ring, that would justify keeping his gold.

  There you have it. I was a thief. Not a noble thing.

  Ye was patient.

  I was sure of this: He wasn’t going to devour the ring then and there with me inserted in it, though he could have—in one gulp. No, that would not be willingly, that would be by force. And he wasn’t that kind of beast. He was Ye the Dragon, with his own sense of honor. A noble thing.

  He finally said, “Does it mean that much to you? Is it that valuable?”

  I sighed. “You have no idea.”

  “I can judge that.”

  “It was my mother’s.”

  “Ah,” he said with an approving nod. “Given willingly.”

  “Passionately,” I assured him.

  “Hmm,” he said. “How did she get the ring?”

  “It was her mother’s.”

  “Ancestral,” Ye murmured.

  “Yes.” I turned her ring around. Around and around.

  Ye was silent.

  I still had my dilemma: Die or give up the ring.

  Finally, I said, “Ye?”

  “Yes?”

  “What chance do I have of finding my own way out?”

  He glanced around the cavern. “One in a hundred or so, perhaps.”

  “Hmm,” I said. “It’d take a long time.”

  “By your reckoning.”

  After circling back over my anguished, inner arguments and arriving at the same place, I said, “Ye, our wants are not that different—yours and mine. I’d like to live, so would you.”

  He studied me without a word.

  “If you—” I hesitated under his gaze. “If you show me the way out—” I averted my eyes to the pearl, and imagined Mom smiling with relief. Yes, this would have been her solution. I took a deep breath and exhaled. “I’ll let you have it.”

  He gave a smoky sigh. “That would not work.”

  I frowned. “Why not?”

  “It would not be a gift.”

  “Well … it would be a barter, an exchange. An exchange is not exactly paying for your help.”

  “Neither is it a gift. A gift is given unconditionally, no strings attached.”

  Ye was making this hard—as if it wasn’t already—but it hardly required thought: Of course, he was right.

  I was back to square one. I’d have to find my way out. A near impossibility.

  I hung my head and limped away. It was not an act—I was bone-weary spent, and my knee was starting to swell.

  I was stepping over the turquoise stream for the third time when I heard him call. I stopped without turning and said, “What?”

  He didn’t answer, so I turned to look back.

  He stirred himself, slowly swung his bulk, and lumbered into the dark. Then I heard his echo.

  “Follow me … me … me …”

  I tottered after him.

  CROSSING THE FAR REACHES OF THE CAVERN, Ye strode over stalagmites I had to clamber around. If not for my need to keep up, and my increasing numbness, I would have lingered over the splashes of beauty that appeared in the dancing dragonlight: translucent mineral curtains, thin hollow reeds of pale rock, gnarled formations creeping gnomelike along the walls, rhinestone rubble spilling across the floor, a fluorescent lime-green pool.

  I halted at the pool, stunned by its vapory silence. What mysteries lay here? Did Ye navigate its depths, dive from cave dweller to sea swimmer and back again? Were there fish in it that he ate?

  His muffled cough roused me. I turned in time to see him circle a huge stalagmite that towered like a Grecian column and enter a black mouth in the wall.

  I hobbled as fast as I could, my thoughts bumping around in my head. We might have gone half an hour, but it seemed like half a year. How was he to know that an injured girl of twelve could hardly keep pace with a dragon of, what—three thousand?

  Egypt … Babylon … Halley’s Comet … What had he done all those centuries?

  Where were we going?

  Where would this stop?

  • • •

  We gradually ascended. I followed his tail, which wavered like foam on a moonlit shore and shone violet and green. With nothing else to see but his massive shape beyond, I kept my eyes on that slithery, shimmering wake into the dark unknown.

  As we went, I realized the dragonlight Ye cast was for my sake: to prevent me from stumbling. But stumble I did, several times, and lost sight of him. I had to hurry to catch up, listening for his rambling rumble and occasional coughs, watching for his celestial scales, smelling his scent—for he had a scent. When I smelled it, I thought of fortune and ashes and spices and earth. It hurt me to smell him and soothed me, too.

  At times, I wanted to crawl up his back to be carried and rocked.

  When my feet had exhausted every excuse to plod on, I felt a whirl of air that was not dragon scent, and finally we stopped.

  We had come to the end.

  Ye listed to one side, backed into a nook that looked like another passage, curled his tail up around his chest, and declared, “Haven’t done that in a dragon’s age! A fanciful stroll!”

  I nodded and gasped at him, unable to speak.

  “Here we are,” he said. “From here, you must crawl.” He motioned to a hole in the wall behind me.

  I stooped and peered in. A stone-gray spot of light beckoned to me from beyond.

  This was it.

  We would part.

  I would go my way, back into the electric world of humanity.

  Ye would languish in the dark until death.

  I would see him no more.

  I had a growing sensation this was all just a dream. But what a dream! Would I look back on it in disbelief? I glanced over my shoulder to be sure he was there. He was: gazing at me, expressionless, waiting.

  “Proceed,” he said.

  I detected a wheeze. A golden string of smoke flitted from off his tongue. I looked closely at him, as if seeing him for the first time, believing it was the last. I tried looking into his soul, tried to take in his mystery, his reality.

  I saw a scaly thing with four legs and a tail, wings folded, claws for digging and foraging.

  I saw a fabulous mythical beast, who roamed the Wonder World, whose colors would sing in sunlight—whose wings would, too—whose blood beat with enchantment, whose powers could bind your heart.

  Like a sleepwalker, I went to him.

  I went pulling the ring from my hand.

  “Here,” I heard myself say. “I want you to have it. I want you to live forever.”

  He studied my face as if from far, far away, as if it was his first time to see me, too, and his last.

  “Willingly?” he asked.

  I could say no more. Gripped by a sadness I could not explain, I began to tremble.

  I gave him the ring.

  Then I got down on all fours and found the hole and crept in.

  AS I CRAWLED, I BEGAN TO CRY.

  In this stuffy tunnel of time, I felt the weight of the world on my back. A messy, jabbering, greedy-fingered, snickering world that joggled your head and your heart and left you stranded.

  Why should a world like that care for a daydreaming dragon, lying deep beneath human thought, out of sight and out of reach? Why should it care if the last dragon lived or died or blew pictures in the air and sang lines from “America the Beautiful”?

  I had dragged that world through Ye’s Dark Fantastic, leaving my own little snail trail.

  Or did I have it backward? Was I crawling away from something so real, my own world was a myth? Was Ye the real, and the rest of us, clutching some handhold each in our own way, the unreal?

  Were we
the ones in the dream? And a bad dream at that.

  Like my mother.

  I saw her lying under a veil of gray, her face a blank.

  Her hands empty.

  I suddenly gasped. Mom! Oh, I’m sorry! So sorry! I gave it away! Your pearl! Away! Gone! Gone …

  It had slid off too easily, had slipped away too fast. What was it I gave it to? A golden flight of fancy?

  My finger felt so bare.

  My soul so much more.

  As I crawled molelike through the dirt, I sobbed, “Back! I want it back! It was everything! All I had left! The only real thing!”

  BY THE TIME I REACHED THE END, MY SADness had lifted.

  I wanted to be free of my underground dream, shake it off like a shell. I yearned to be with my family again, feel the sunlight on my face, breathe fresh air.

  The end was not spectacular: There was no flower-scented breeze, no glorious light, no wide opening with the blue sky and the Rockies beyond. There was scarcely any light at all. The air smelled moldy, with a tinge of stink.

  My mole hole emptied into an earthen compartment with a mound of crusty waste on the floor. Propped against the wall was something like a hen roost, posing as a ladder. I peered up. About eight feet up was a wooden boxlike cover with two watermelon-shaped holes that emitted gray light.

  That was it.

  OK. I was supposed to climb the roost and squeeze through one of those holes.

  Which is what I did.

  Not until I was halfway out, trying to avoid adding splinters to my assorted injuries, did I realize where I was. Vertical planks, a tin roof, a lazy, hinged door with a crescent moon …

  An old two-seater outhouse! And I was climbing out the—

  Grossville! I was free of the hole before you could say Johnny-Boy.

  Later, when I told Dillon about it, he said, “That was a speedy evacuation. But hey, you should’ve been relieved it wasn’t in regular use.” Punny, punny, punny.

  By the looks of the planks in the walls, full of cracks and bullet holes through which daylight leaked, I wondered how it could still be standing. What confounded me most was the double seater. Why would two levelheaded persons want to sit side by side in a privy doing their dirty work?

  Suddenly, I had the urge to go, and this was the place to do it.

  I would have, if it hadn’t been for Joe. Fixed to the back of the door, just below the crescent, was a poster, brown with age. It must have been meant as a joke.

  And there was Joe in a mug shot, glaring at me with one dark eye and one white. Among his listed crimes—some of which were really horrendous—was one that hit me in the gut.

  THEFT.

  I sat down (right where you’re supposed to) and stared at the word. Now I was on the other side of the feelings I’d left behind. Guilt rose in me again.

  “Kat,” I said grimly, “you’re no better than an outlaw. You could be the poster girl for theft.”

  Yep—Cotton-Eyed Joe and Jesse James and Billy the Kid and Li’l Kat Graham. My face burned with shame at the thought.

  I took the gold rock from my jacket.

  It was not too late to cast it off. Like casting off baggage, it would lighten my load. I could drop it down the hole. It wouldn’t be in Ye’s possession, but neither would it be in mine. Back to the earth it would go, where it belonged.

  I gazed at it awhile, blazing its image into my brain. How luscious and warm it felt! Like holding a chunk of the sun.

  Wait … yes …

  Things aren’t always wrong and right, black and white. They can be gray, confusing, unclear. It depends on your motive. It depends on a lot of things. There was my mom, and we needed money.

  I’d be out of my mind not to keep it. Anyone would. Besides, Ye wouldn’t miss it. It’d be like, say, having the complete skeleton of your great-great-grandmother with one of her fingertips gone. Right?

  When I put it in those terms, it didn’t seem so bad.

  It didn’t seem so good.

  Deep down, I felt it. Guilty, guilty, guilty. I had given Ye the ring voluntarily. But he had not given me the gold.

  I had stolen that.

  I sighed a deep sigh. “Well, Kat,” I said, “you may as well get used to the feeling, because you know you’re determined to keep it.”

  I dropped the gold back into my jacket, shook my head in self-contempt, got up, and shoved Joe aside.

  THEIR NAMES WERE MAX AND MARLENE Warren, and they were the kindest old couple I could have stumbled upon.

  Max was sweeping the back porch when I came wading through the grass, and dropped his broom and his jaw when he saw me. I did not see him until that moment, or I would have been more stealthy.

  “Oh dear!” he said. “Where’d you come from?”

  As I tried to think of an answer, something like, “Do you mean, what city and state?” my weariness descended full force and I nearly collapsed.

  “Marlene!” he shouted. “Marlene!”

  Marlene poked her head out the door and exclaimed, “Oh my!”

  “Get the first-aid kit!” said Max. “And draw a bath! She smells like the dickens!” Then he winked at me.

  • • •

  Their faces were the sweetest I had seen in a long, long time, their kitchen smelled delicious, their couch couldn’t have been softer.

  While we exchanged names, I looked at them closely. Max had a round face with an upturned nose that habitually wiggled like a rabbit’s, and a wispy cloud of hair. The undershirt he wore was a faded tie-dyed pink. Marlene’s hair was as pale as corn silk and snipped short along her hairline. Her glasses magnified her slate-blue eyes. When her hands weren’t busy helping me, she would tug in various places at her green-and-white-striped cotton dress.

  As I lay on the couch, to where they had led me, Max held my hand and Marlene dabbed my face with a moist washcloth.

  “Gracious!” she said. “Look at that!”

  “It’s all right,” Max said soothingly, as if to counteract her comments. “You’ll be fine.”

  “She’s probably dry as a bone,” said Marlene. “Look at her lips.” She peered at me from behind her glasses. “Would you like a drink, honey?”

  “Please,” I said, realizing how parched I was and hoarse I sounded. “Water.”

  Max got up to fetch it.

  “I’ll get the bath going,” said Marlene. “You need a good soak.” She lightly stroked my arm. “How do you feel?”

  “Not … too … bad,” I said. Now that my ordeal was over, I could barely move or think.

  Max came in with a big glass of water, which Marlene helped me hold. I drank it down nonstop, water running around the rim. It was heavenly.

  “More?” said Max.

  I gasped and nodded.

  Max went to get more, and Marlene said, “We’ll clean you up and check your hurts, and you can tell us what happened.”

  I was too exhausted to think of what I would say.

  After I drained the second glass, Marlene said, “Now—can you stand? I’ll help you to the tub.”

  “Wait.” The water had revived me enough for me to think more clearly. “I need to make a call. Can I use your phone?”

  “Of course,” said Max, and got me a cordless.

  I dialed Dad’s cell—which was really Mom’s cell—expecting Dillon to answer, since he’s the one who carries it. No one answered. I got a recording saying something about being unable to process the entry. “Goodbye,” the automated female voice said.

  I stared at the phone. “I need to talk to them,” I said. “They’ll be so worried.”

  “Calm down, hon,” said Max. “No need to panic.”

  Marlene asked, “Who?”

  “My family. My dad and my brother.” I sat blinking at her while she blinked back.

  She patted my knee, then pulled her hand away. Her fingers were bloody. “We’d better take a look,” she said.

  I had to think, and thinking was hard. “All right,” I said. “I’ll t
ry again later. I really need to—”

  Marlene had gingerly lifted the torn denim around my knee and was shaking her head. “We should close up this cut.”

  “All right.”

  I thought I could stand on my own, but found it easier to give in to her help. As we made our way to the bathroom, Max spoke up. “You were in the mine, weren’t you?”

  I stopped. “Did you hear that on the news?”

  “News? What news?”

  “How’d you know I was in the mine?”

  “Your jacket, sugar,” he said. “It’s the kind they use on the tours.”

  My jacket! Where was it? Marlene had helped me take it off as I lay on the couch. It wasn’t there. I made some sort of sniffly snort, and Marlene smoothed back a strand of my hair.

  “It’s all right, sweetheart,” she said. “It’s in the wash.”

  THAT’S ME? I THOUGHT, WIPING AWAY THE mist and squinting into the bathroom mirror. Without my glasses, I was spared the sharp details, but still I was startled.

  Except for the spots on my forehead and cheeks where Marlene had dabbed with a washcloth, my face was grimier than Ye’s sooty snout. Dirt had collected around my eyes; dirt was even in my nose. My lower lip was cracked. And my hair—now I knew what the proverbial rat’s nest looked like. I inspected the bumps on my head and found another at the back of my skull, squishy and sore.

  As I glared at this shabby version of myself, I hardly cared what Max and Marlene thought. All I could think of was Ye, as if I was caught in his spell. Under the grime I blushed: I had appeared to him like this, representing the human race!

  • • •

  Marlene had added therapeutic salts to the bathwater that foamed up around me. I kept my injured knee, now covered in butterfly bandages, above the water. My cuts and scrapes stung at first, but the pains grew less the more I soaked. The suds felt so good I wanted to stay there forever, but worries and questions were bursting like the bubbles around my head.

  Did Marlene find the gold in my pocket? Wouldn’t she have heard a clunk when she dropped the jacket in the wash?

  Where were Dillon and Dad? Back at the hotel, or still at the mine?

  How could I get in touch with them?

  What time was it? How long had I been gone?