The Dragon of Cripple Creek

by Troy Howell

  “Dirt, probably,” I said.

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “In a field where my horse used to run.” I’m sure he would have kept it if I’d told him the truth.

  He passed the tin on to the woman, who got it open with her fingernail file and handed it back. He eyed the black bits inside and sniffed. Dirt, probably.

  When he flipped through my journal, I gasped. One look at the last entry and he’d know. “That’s my novel!” I said.

  He squinted at a page on which I’d copied a poem by William Butler Yeats—“The Folly of Being Comforted”—after Mom’s accident. “‘Your well beloved’s hair has threads of grey’?” he read loudly, and handed me the journal.

  I clutched it to my chest and exchanged glances with Dad, who had a momentary slip of grief in his eyes. Dillon was staring at the floor.

  They went on searching: the upholstered chair, unzipping its cushion, prodding every inch of padding; the TV, which was mounted on brackets high in a corner; the space behind the radiator; peering into the tiny closet, which was bare; the tieback curtains on either side of me standing at the window. They went through my travel case, examining each pouch and pocket, and did the same with my clothes. Officer Hance raked her fingers through my underwear, which should have embarrassed me.

  I was feeling anything but. I was beginning to share Dad’s rage, and feel pride, too. Pride for Ye. For it was his gold, not the Mollie Kathleen’s. The fact I had taken it from him was irrelevant.

  They had no right to claim it.

  I was proud of Dillon. He leaned against the wall as though this happened every day. I couldn’t help thinking how I’d be reacting if I knew where the gold was, and again admired his foresight.

  They searched the bathroom: I heard the shower curtain rustle, the toilet tank lid rattle, the cabinet door creak. I think they even removed the plastic light cover.

  The toilet flushed, and Chief Huffman, his face as steely as his voice, came out of the bathroom and said to Dillon, “Now you.”

  Dillon took a casual drink, set the cup on the stand, and raised his arms for a pat down. As though that happened every day, too. I had no idea they’d be so thorough. The chief’s thick hands worked up and down Dillon’s thin body, including places I hadn’t seen Dillon himself touch.

  Before I could think, Officer Hance was doing the same to me. I automatically raised my arms as Dillon had done, my journal in one hand. I was tempted to bop her stubby head with it when she got personal with me.

  “Ha,” she said when she felt the dice in my pocket. “What’s this?”

  “Not gold,” I said.

  “Remove it.”

  I did, explaining I carried the dice for luck, and her face slid into a smirk. When Dad said “I’ll take those,” she examined them, shrugged, and gave him the dice.

  At last, the humiliation was over.

  The officers stood silent in the middle of the room, the chief frowning at Officer Hance, her poker face gazing at him.

  I was bursting with delight.

  The chief then set his eyes on me and cracked a longtime-no-see kind of smile. I realized this was where he belonged, out of the range of microphones and cameras and crowds: He had no stutter and holster slap.

  “Miss Graham—” he began.

  I blurted, “I have the right to remain silent, don’t I?”

  His smile vanished. He jerked his head at Officer Hance, made one last scan of the room, and they left.

  DAD CLOSED THE DOOR BEHIND THEM. “Well,” he said, sighing. “Maybe that’s the last of it.”

  Uh-uh.

  There was a rap on the door and Chief Huffman poked his head inside. “For your information, we’re checking your car.”

  “Our car!” said Dad, looking at Dillon in panic.

  “It’s unlocked,” said Dillon. “Nobody’d steal that junker.”

  “Locked or not,” said the chief. “We’re checking it.” He shut the door.

  “It’s cool, Dad,” said Dillon, and shook his head as if to say, It’s not in the car.

  Dad nodded slowly. “All right. Let’s pack.” He went back to his room.

  I sagged to the floor, exhausted, but pleased.

  Dillon came over and offered me his coffee again. “You might want this.”

  “Dillon, I do not like coffee.”

  “Neither do I.”

  “What?”

  “I hate coffee.”

  “Then why—”

  “Take it. But hold on.”

  Puzzled, I took it. “Hey,” I said, nearly dropping it. “It’s heavy. Really heavy.”

  “Yep,” he said. “Heavier than the others. Smoother, too, and warmer.”

  “Dillon!”

  He left me grinning like a Cheshire cat.

  AS I REPACKED THE UNPACKING THE COPS had done, Dillon came back in. He traveled light, with his knapsack slung across his back.

  “Still in there,” he said, lifting the cup of coffee, which I had set on the stand.

  I nodded, smiling. “It’s an awesome hiding place. Right smack in the open.” I tucked my journal into a side pocket and zipped it up.

  “Dad’s on the phone with the Home,” Dillon said. (The Home was what we called the place where Mom stayed.)

  Anxious to hear some news about her, I said, “Anything … different?”

  “I don’t think so. The usual catching up. How about a bite to eat?”

  “When’s checkout?”

  “Noon.”

  I picked up the travel clock—10:07—and snapped the lid shut. “You know, Dillon,” I said, eager to forget the stranger, the cops, the drama. Everything, that is, but Ye. “We can still make it. Last night, I figured the miles and the time—three days—to get to San Francisco.”

  “Yeah, we can make it, Kat.” He paused for emphasis. “If we don’t have any more detours.”

  • • •

  Bypassing the hotel restaurant, we went into the street. Casinos, antique and gift shops, jewelry stores, a small museum, trinkets in storefront displays—everything was geared toward tourism. We found a local-yokel café, ordered pastries and juice at the counter, and cozied up to a table at the front window, where a cat was dozing on a sunny ledge and a newspaper lay scattered.

  Dillon devoured half his apple pie before he started up again. “Kat, why are you holding out on me? Did you or did you not steal the—” He glanced at the patrons nearby and left it unfinished.

  I took a long drink of my cranberry juice, set it down, and said, “Yes … and no.”

  He blew out his breath in exasperation. “Yes and no. That’s like saying you’re lying and telling the truth.”

  “Isn’t that what we usually do?”

  “That would be a half-truth. Which would also be a half-lie.”

  “I mean, without realizing it. We don’t one hundred percent of the time tell one hundred percent of the truth, do we? We’re not one hundred percent knowledgeable about everything in order to always, one hundred percent of the time, tell it exactly—”

  “One hundred percent,” he said smartly, raising his index finger.

  “—one hundred percent the way it is. Take that newspaper, for instance—”

  He began gathering the pages.

  “I don’t mean literally, Dillon.”

  “I do.” He started putting the pages in order.

  “Do you think everything written in there is one hundred percent true? No way. Reporters are notorious for getting things wrong.”

  “That’s the truth,” he said with an extreme head nod.

  I knew he was mocking me, but I wanted to make a point that was becoming clearer in my mind as I spoke. “They usually get quite a bit wrong. Remember when—”

  “Kat—” he said. His eyes had got big, but I thought he was still jeering me.

  “Remember when that—”

  “Kat—”

  OK, maybe he’d found an example to prove my point, so I allowed him the inter
ruption. He folded the paper with the front page up and slid it over.

  Little Girl Lost Finds Gold

  CRIPPLE CREEK—A twelve-year-old girl was lost for more than two hours yesterday after falling down an abandoned chute in the Mollie Kathleen Mine, causing the mine to be shut down indefinitely. The girl suffered only minor injuries and miraculously found her way out. It is not clear how the incident happened, but a spokesperson for the mine said they believe she strayed from her tour group, which included her family, and entered a sealed area some distance from the trail. “We have reason to think this may not have been accidental,” the spokesperson said, but did not expound.

  After the girl was located in a neighboring home, several witnesses claim to have seen her pass a large gold nugget to her brother, who then sped away. The father of the girl, Howard Graham of Richmond, Virginia, was heard to have said he was in financial difficulty. He argued with the police over liability issues. “These people are gold-crazed,” one witness said. “The girl even has a gold front tooth.”

  The current price of gold is at $835 an ounce.

  The Mollie Kathleen was once one of the world’s greatest-producing gold mines. Production stopped in 1961, and in the last several decades the mine has been one of Cripple Creek’s unique tourist attractions, taking as many as 400 visitors a day a thousand feet down to explore its depths.

  “Kat,” said Dillon. “Your mouth’s wide open.”

  I promptly shut it.

  I was the girl with the gold tooth. I was the girl with the gold nugget. I was the little girl.

  “Front page news,” said Dillon. “Sunday edition. Congratulations.”

  I really should not have been stunned. After all, this was obviously big news for a small town. Still, I never dreamed I’d be in the papers.

  “You’ve had your fifteen minutes of fame.”

  “More,” I said meekly.

  “Much more. And I bet—this is a betting town, isn’t it? I bet you’ll have more than you can stand before it’s over.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look at the story. They’re questioning motives: People are putting one and one and one together.” He picked up a sizable crumb from his plate and placed it on the table. “One. You just happen to fall down a chute and emerge, on your own, with a huge hunk of gold.” He put another crumb alongside the first. “One. Your dad is overheard saying how cashed out we are.” Another crumb. “One. We’re ‘gold-crazy.’” He gazed outside for a minute. “It’s serious.”

  “Dillon,” I said, rising from my chair, trying to make it unserious. “The time. We’d better go. Dad—”

  He reached over and took the paper from me, folded it carefully, and set it between us. “Kat, not yet. Sit down. It’s ten to eleven. Dad can wait.”

  “But we need to get on the road. Checkout time doesn’t mean we should—”

  “The dark cowboy,” he said quietly, as though he was reading a sign outside the window. “Eye-to-Eye.”

  I turned my head to look.

  “Look at me, Kat,” he said.

  I looked at Dillon.

  “Did you see him?”

  I nodded.

  “OK. Like I said, Dad can wait.”

  HE MADE HIMSELF COMFORTABLE BY stretching his scarecrow legs and propping his feet on the ledge, which gave him the advantage of facing the window naturally. The cat slept on, though her tail twitched. I took another look as I adjusted my chair, and wondered how our spy—or whoever he was and whatever he was up to—could keep his hat from smothering his face in that low little car.

  “The rock,” said Dillon, in his getting-down-to-business voice. “Tell me.”

  “I picked it up. As I said.”

  “Stole it.”

  I shrugged.

  “And didn’t steal it.”

  I shrugged.

  He said nothing, just tried stacking the crumbs on top of one another. I knew he was waiting for an explanation. Maybe if I said just enough, just a little more, he’d stop bugging me.

  So, in a monotone, not wishing to call attention to any potential eavesdroppers, I said, “When I picked up the … hmm, you know, I wasn’t thinking in terms of stealing. I mean, I was how far under the earth? And here was this hmm.” True, so far.

  I stopped, trying to replace the real picture in my mind with a pretend one.

  “Here was this hmm,” Dillon echoed. “As though you knew ex-act-ly what it was—”

  All I could do was shrug.

  “—in the dark.” He grabbed the newspaper and snapped the table with it. “I’m beginning to think this article is true after all. You knew just what you were doing. Robbed the Mollie Kathleen reserve for all I know.”

  “Dillon! It was an accident! I fell! See?” A bit of saliva came out on “see,” and I shoved my hurt hands in front of his face. Then I glanced around.

  People were staring at us, amused, curious, puzzled.

  But Dillon was staring at my hands. His face went pale. He said hoarsely, “I knew I had missed something.”

  I took one look at my hands, gasped, and plunged them into my lap. “I … I …”

  The sadness in his eyes darkened.

  “I … lost Mom’s ring.”

  He whispered, “How could you?”

  “Dillon, I feel bad enough already. You don’t have to—”

  He was shaking his head in disbelief.

  “Dillon, stop it.”

  He kept shaking his head.

  People were still staring.

  I calmed myself and tried to smile at him, but he’d gone rigid, staring at me, just staring, along with everyone else in the room and in the whole world.

  “Well,” I said lightly, scooting back my chair. My feet felt like lead. “See you later.”

  His stare was infuriating.

  “I don’t have to tell you everything,” I said, keeping my voice low and maintaining an awkward smile. “You’re not my conscience. You’re my poor, skinny brother.”

  I stood up—not hastily, though I kicked his shin in the process—and acted as if I were making a friendly departure.

  He stood up, too, taller than I, gripping the newspaper as if to beat me with it. “OK.” He was trying to keep from breathing hard. “You can pay your own way from now on, with the stolen hmm I hid, that would no longer be yours if I hadn’t. They’ll probably take you in for questioning anyway. Kicking and spitting.” He leered at me. “And be a nice rich sister and buy more food to put on your poor, skinny brother’s bones.”

  He walked out before I could move.

  GOLD HAS DEATH IN IT. IT’S IN ALL THE stories. The death of saints, sinners, pirates, Pony Express riders.

  It’s also the death of dragons.

  What would people think if they knew that? Would they build special cemeteries? Shrines? Mausoleums? Would they construct gold dragons? Worship them with sacrifices, burn incense, chant prayers?

  Holy, holy, holy! Lord Gold Almighty!

  Would all the stories be retold? Midas and Scrooge and Long John Silver?

  Or would it make any difference at all?

  I had these thoughts as I walked back alone.

  What I was really doing was trying to ignore Mom’s pearl. But there it was, floating before my face. You shouldn’t have, shouldn’t have, shouldn’t have. You care more for a dragon than you do your own mother. She means that little to you.

  I don’t know what had come over me, there in the tunnel. I had been in a trance. I don’t even remember Ye taking the pearl. I think I shut my eyes. When I looked, it wasn’t there. He must have swallowed it that quick.

  How could I explain that to Dillon? Mom meant everything to him. He couldn’t even say the word Mom, he hurt so much.

  Mom meant everything to me.

  So, how does that work? How could I care that much for her and that much for a dragon at the same time? Did I give half my heart to each? Or did my heart swell bigger to make room for both? I also thought the world o
f Dillon and Dad. Does your heart keep swelling to make room for all the loves you have through life, until it swells so big it bursts, and you die?

  When I passed Eye-to-Eye’s car, he was gone—he may have followed Dillon for all I knew. Dangling from his mirror was a chain with a gold cross.

  Because of Ye, wherever I go, wherever I look, I notice gold. Gold catches my eye like flames. Flames flashing from a woman’s ears. Flashing from a man’s neck. Flashing from the lettering on a loan office window.

  All these little fires. It’s like living with a horrible secret you can’t put out.

  Whether or not people change their view of gold, I am sure of one thing: Greed will never change.

  I picture greed as a devouring beast, like the one I conjured up in the mine, the one that scared the scream out of me. Greed is the opposite of Ye. It has so many arms, groping about like tentacles, you can’t count them; its bulk is covered in a hairy black gloom; it stinks to high heaven and creeps across the land like a shadow or a disease.

  It is a disease: It burrows into your blood and creeps down your fingers and dilates your pupils.

  Greed or need, I made up my mind: I would take the gold back to Ye. Whether he lived a day or an eternity, the gold was his. The cops wouldn’t get it. The mine wouldn’t get it.

  No one would get it.

  As I neared the hotel, I plotted my plan. I would persuade Dad to take me to the Warrens before leaving Cripple Creek. We’d stand in the yard and I’d say my goodbyes, then I’d excuse myself and run to the outhouse before anyone could stop me. I’d crawl through the hole and through the tunnel and toss the gold in. I’d call Ye’s name. He may hear me, he may not—but he’d eventually find it.

  I felt better already. I’d thrown worry to the wind.

  WORRY BLEW RIGHT BACK.

  My door was open at the end of the hall. Open just enough for a snake to slip through.

  Dillon and Dad’s was shut.

  Fingering the key in my pocket, I distinctly remembered locking my door on the way out.

  Could it be the dark stranger?

  Chief Huffman?

  The gold! I had left it submerged in the coffee. Dillon and I had gone out together, and since it didn’t seem to worry him, I hadn’t given it a thought.