The Dragon of Cripple Creek

by Troy Howell

  But worse, it could jeopardize Ye. They’d want to go check it out.

  Now what? I should have got down off my high horse and walked right out the door. But all I could do was stammer on.

  “It’s a natural …”

  The crowd had increased—people jammed the lobby, the hotel staff was spotlighted along the desk, servants and diners were silhouetted in the lounge. The double doors swung open and a cluster of senior citizens stepped in and stopped, heels and bangles clacking.

  The camera ran on, its red light glaring. Somewhere in the haze of faces must have been Dillon’s and Dad’s, but I didn’t dare pick them out.

  Think, Kat!

  “It’s a natural thing … to question whose gold it is.”

  “Of course,” Rose said smoothly. “That’s precisely why I’m asking.”

  “When …” I fumbled. “When you consider …”

  Faces curious, expectant.

  That’s when it struck me. Eureka. The ah-ha moment. Something amazingly smart, if not ingenious. Something that would get me off the “stole the gold” hook, now and forever. Why hadn’t I thought of it before?

  Why hadn’t anyone thought of it before?

  I looked down at Rose, then at all the people.

  “Hup,” I said, emitting a hiccup intended to be a short laugh. “When you consider it’s too far down. My goodness, it’s out of their reach! The Mollie Kathleen couldn’t own it!” I shook my head in disgust, and the brass fixture backed me up. I knew I hadn’t said it quite right, to get the full impact of this newfound truth, but my revelation was a work in progress.

  Rose nodded thoughtfully. “I see. It’s too far down for the mine to claim. How astute. So, would you say it was really closer to … hell?”

  “Don’t clown with me.”

  “And the devil himself owns it? But, naturally, since he wasn’t looking …”

  The crowd began to twitter.

  Mockery skittered behind Rose’s Mary Kay face. “Was it warm so far down?”

  “Go there yourself and find out!” I snapped, and from somewhere near the stairs somebody screeched my name. It sounded Dadlike enough that I sweated a little, but the audience was laughing.

  Others threw me remarks.

  “Did you walk on coals?”

  “Did you dance with the devil?”

  “Did you sell him your soul?”

  I was in this thing deep. Way past my head. My heart was flopping around somewhere in the depths, and I couldn’t bring it up to hold it still. I had to do something else, say something else.

  I brandished my spoon and shouted, “What do you know? What do any of you know?”

  A young man at my knees said slyly, “The Old Tempter knows.”

  I glared down at him. He couldn’t have been older than Dillon. His eyes were mean, his cheeks pimply, his mouth was smug. He had no idea what this was about, what I had been through. We glared at each other, each from our own crazy quilt patch of perception.

  I took a deep breath and yelled at the audience, “You don’t get it!”

  That quieted them down.

  “The mine,” I said, steadying my voice, “can own only so much land.” I waited until you could hear a penny drop, or dice, then continued. “Where does it say that people own the land below them? Like, over a thousand feet below them? You have to draw a line somewhere. How far down can you own? All the way to the core of the earth? All the way to Shanghai?”

  More dice dropping.

  Finally, Rose said, “Nice try, Kat.”

  I made a noise like a flabby balloon. I had her this time. “It’s more than a try, Rosie. It’s a legitimate, debatable question. A question that should be asked. And answered.”

  Rose nodded. “A question for scholars, Plato, Socrates, Al Gore, oil barons. But since you have no way of knowing how far down you were—”

  “But she’s right!” A woman spoke up. “The girl’s right!”

  A guy threw me a catcall. Hey, I had never been whistled at before. I was tempted to smile again.

  “That means we can all search for gold!” someone said.

  My inner smile died. My face went all tingly.

  The room exploded in cheers. You couldn’t have heard a torrent of dice.

  Now what had I done? What would this mean for Ye?

  “The gold! The gold! The gold!”

  I looked out across the crowd. These people were more gold-crazed than I had ever been. But it was more than gold for gold’s sake. It was the prospect of Get, the power of Win.

  Gold flashed throughout the room. A woman toying with her splashy necklace. A man checking his swanky watch. The boy below me with a showy stud under his lip. Myriad flames whispering to me from ages past, Dragon gold … dragon gold …

  My frustration suddenly turned to pity. If they only knew. If they only understood.

  My pity turned to my second revelation, which canceled out the first. I had found my calling. I would tell the world the truth. The whole truth.

  The truth about gold.

  Rose had said it could go national. Well, it was bigger than that. Universal. The wide world over, people would see gold in a different light.

  And dragons, too.

  I could set the record straight. After all this time, I could clear the dragon name. Fate had led me here and given me a mission: I would be Ye’s errant knight. I would be his mouthpiece.

  And not give him away. Yes—I could do it without betraying him.

  The crowd was going wild, the word gold circulating like funny money.

  I could also put a hurt on greed. If people knew the truth, maybe they’d place their bets on something else.

  I pulled the tobacco tin from my pocket, and, with tin in one hand and teaspoon in the other, I began tapping the ruckus down.

  Tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap.

  Rose pumped the air with her hands to assist me, thorns hidden for now. The hotel staff joined the cause.

  When at last the uproar died, I put away my drum set, made sure of my footing, and placed my hands behind my back. I wanted no distractions. Rather than search hopelessly for one compassionate eye in the lot of them, I looked beyond their faces and into a teeming mass of humanity. I spoke low and distinct. The room leaned forward. The camera honed in.

  “I don’t care where you come from,” I began. “Or how good you are, or how bad, or how greedy. I don’t care how much money you have, how many riches, how much gold. There’s something you all should know. There’s something the world should know. I don’t expect it will change anything—” I said that to challenge them. Reverse psychology.

  Then I halted. I had found a face like Mom’s—her age and coloring, her eyes on soft-focus. My heart began pushing against my chest. It moved to my throat, my eyes.

  I looked away from the woman and into a blur. I said, “But miracles happen sometimes … and some people have honest hearts.”

  I exhaled my next words, rather than spoke them. “All the gold in the world …”

  Eyebrows lifted, lips parted.

  “All the gold in the world …”

  Bodies tensed, ears tingled.

  “… belongs to …”

  Yes? Yes?

  “… dragons.”

  I WISH I COULD TELL YOU I FELL, HIT MY head on the chair, and blacked out—the way you’re supposed to after a scene like that. It would be so easy and anticlimactic. I’d wake up in a quiet place and peer into kind faces with caring voices saying, “It’s all right, Katlin. Here, drink this.” They would calmly relate what had happened, and I’d be spared the agony of it all.

  Nothing doing.

  I was wide-awake conscious, sky-high alert, when the whole house erupted. Laughs, jeers, whistles, snorts, howls, boos, even belches. The rafters rang, the table shook, a biscuit whizzed by my head.

  A young man appeared at the table—not the one with the golden lip-stud, but one with a soulful face.

  Dillon!

  He re
ached up his arms as I went limp, ready to be swept off my soapbox. We swirled past wagging tongues and pointing fingers, past the party of jeweled and perfumed senior citizens, which shuffled out of the way, and through the hotel doors.

  The workhorse brayed at the curb. Dad was at the wheel.

  “Go!” yelled Dillon, as he yanked me inside.

  We went.

  I HUDDLED IN SILENCE AS WE RODE OUT OF town—storefronts, signs, pedestrians, dogs, history, promises, drifting away.

  Goodbye Cripple Creek, Colorado, elevation 9,494, population 1,012.

  And one lone dragon.

  My heart split in two at last, like an eroding cliff that cracks until it falls. The first half I had left with Mom. The remainder was now with Ye. I ached for him as much as I’d ever ached for my mom.

  What was left was a vacancy.

  I couldn’t even cry. I’ve never been much of a crier, but this was one time I wanted the tears to flow. Instead, I was dragging this sack around, stuffing it with all my thoughts and questions and feelings and fears, and they were slipping out a hole in the bottom.

  No wonder I couldn’t keep hold of anything.

  I began counting my losses, and finally gave up, overwhelmed.

  Dillon and Dad were silent, simmering over the calamity I had caused. We each had things to tell, to explain to one another—I in particular—and the time would come soon enough. But I dreaded it.

  It wasn’t the telling I dreaded, but the disbelief.

  Funny how you can unlock a precious truth, a sacred secret, hold it up high and say, Look, look! And though people look, they don’t see. It’s brushed away like a gnat.

  I could share my thoughts with no one—no one that would believe or understand.

  • • •

  The highway had opened and there was Pikes Peak, basking bare and unconcerned above the tree line. We were back on the course of reality, and Cripple Creek was a small eddy into which I had spiraled for a moment. I and a few others, colors spinning in a whirlpool.

  I looked over my shoulder. The town lay like scattered dice on green felt. In one die were the Warrens, living their day-to-day lives, mourning the loss of their daughter. In another was Rex, peeking through a keyhole or stalking a thief or … or perhaps he was the thief and zoomed around in his slick black beetle with a bigger grin than before. In another were Chief Huffman and company, working their cases, including the Case of the Mollie Kathleen. Rose Robbins and her cameraman—who were they shooting now?

  Underneath it all was Ye, counting the years the way we count days, musing in the mist.

  I had much to write about. Write about … write …

  I lunged for Dad. “My bag! I left it in the lobby!”

  Dad threw back his head and glared at the sagging headliner, while Dillon slithered low with a hiss.

  “My journal! It tells everything! It tells about—” I slapped my hand across my mouth.

  Dillon finished it for me in a raw, ragged voice. “Dragons?”

  AS WE HEADED BACK INTO CRIPPLE CREEK, a shiny black hum pulled up alongside—Rex’s hardshell beetle! Rex looked our way, raised something off the seat, and held it to the window.

  My bag!

  Then the critter took flight, and Dad flew after him. Dad didn’t just follow him, he rode him. You’d have thought we were roped nose to tail. Every turn Rex took, every tap of brakes, every acceleration, Dad was right there. On entering the town, we slowed, passed the Empire Hotel, took a few turns, and ended up somewhere near the Mollie Kathleen. I could see the top of the hoist house, poking above a roofline. We were doing fine until our car sneezed, sputtered, and gave up the ghost. The gas gauge needle, which was reading half full, fell.

  “Vapor lock,” said Dillon.

  Dad, white-knuckled and gripping the wheel, looked grim. His foot was pumping the pedal. We were coasting.

  “Or it’s taking well-earned retirement,” Dillon added, in his usual attempt at humor at times of distress.

  “Quiet!” yelled Dad. He turned the key, the car sneezed again, neighed, and began to hum, back from its near-death experience.

  A block ahead of us, Rex was darting into a driveway between two buildings.

  We did likewise, as Rex swung into a private space in a dusty courtyard.

  We did likewise.

  Rex was out of his car and up some wooden steps, toting my bag, and we all got out and followed, right on his black boot heels.

  His motive for this had better be good, I thought. We still had two and a half days to get to San Francisco, but Dad’s patience for shindigs, scalawags, and other detours was growing skin thin.

  The steps led to a wooden deck, and the three of us caught up with him just as he entered a door. He left it wide open, and that’s where we halted.

  Was it a trap?

  Was Chief Huffman inside, ready to clamp on the handcuffs? Or was Rose Robbins, equipped with lights and camera, waiting for action? Was there some varmint we hadn’t had the pleasure to meet? Dad, breathing hard but first in line, stuck his head inside, not knowing if he’d be lassoed, splashed with whiskey, or yanked by the hair.

  “Well, you gonna come in?” Rex piped from the shadows. “Got somethin’ to show you.”

  In we went.

  REX, BACKLIT BY WINDOWS THAT LOOKED out on the street, was sprawled on a shaggy brown sofa as if it were a favorite dead horse he hadn’t been able to part with. His hat was off and he held a glass of something dark. On one wall, long steer horns stabbed the air above a cluttered rolltop desk, and skewered on their tips were papers large and small, hand-scribbled, typed, or computer-printed. On a coffee table made from an old lacquered door, complete with iron hinges and a mouse hole chewed at one end, was a laptop with a tiny bat fluttering on a midnight blue screen.

  “There’s hardly no room,” said Rex, shaking off his boots. “But you’re welcome.”

  We remained standing.

  In a voice he would use in a harsh wind, Dad said, “What is it, Havick? Why’d you do this?”

  “Have a sit,” Rex said calmly. “Have a drink.” He sipped the dark stuff.

  “Just hand over the bag!” Dad was now leaning into the wind.

  “OK, OK.” Rex jerked his thumb to a stool behind the door. “There it is.”

  I snatched up my bag and checked the side pocket. My journal was safe. I said, “Thank you, Mr.—”

  “Rex,” he said. “Now before you go …” He threw a look at Dad that said, Don’t interrupt. “I got an offer you can’t refute. But first, Girly May, take a look-see inside.”

  “Me?”

  “You.”

  “My bag?”

  “Look inside!” said Dad, his patience now in shreds. He was close to conducting a lynching—I could tell by the way he eyed the ceiling fan, which had only one blade. He was probably wondering if it would hold Rex’s weight. Or mine.

  I unzipped my bag and looked.

  There, on top of my clothes, the gold nugget gleamed.

  • • •

  Rex had persuaded us to sit, and we felt we owed him that much. Dad had never seen the gold, which remained in my open bag on the floor, and could not take his eyes off it. He had settled down considerably and had called off the lynching. From a big leather beanbag chair, I watched the little bat on the screen that was happily chasing stars. Dillon gave his full attention to this man called Rex Havick, who seemed part lunatic, part fox, part buckaroo. We all had glasses of the same dark stuff he drank, which turned out to be cold sweet tea, though oversteeped.

  Rex began by saying, “Little darlin’”—I don’t remember him ever using my name—“you’ve started a stampede, single-handedly. I’ve been speculatin’ on what they’ll call it, and here’s what I think: the new millennium gold rush. How’s that sound? All shiny cap letters. The crime rate’ll jump, of course. Won’t hurt me none.” He chuckled to himself. “So will the stock market. We’ll have a heyday.” As he drained his glass, I wondered who the “we’l
l” was. Then, as though he’d heard my thought, he said, “More on that in a minute.”

  He got up, went to the fridge in the corner kitchenette, retrieved a second pitcher full of syrupy tea, and topped off our glasses.

  “The gold—” he said, taking his place back on the couch.

  “Yes,” said Dad. “Who—?”

  “The maid.”

  “The maid?” Dad and I sang in unison, disturbingly off-key.

  “At the Empire Hotel. Cleanin’ woman. Found her at home, packin’ her bags and her baby. Just wanted a knock-’n’-talk, I told her. Before I could start, she broke down, shakin’ with guilt. So much gold! she says, So much gold! Told me when she dumped the coffee down the sink in your room, there it was, with the words take me sketched on it.”

  “Really?” I said, and joined Dad in studying the gold.

  “That’s what I thought,” said Rex. “Really? You saw them actual words? ‘Yes,’ she said. I think she meant she saw ’em in the little crevices. ‘You takin’ anything?’ I asked. ‘I took the gold! I took the gold!’ she said. ‘Never mind,’ I said.”

  Dad was getting fidgety. “Yes—well then. So, why give the gold back to us? And why the trouble to bring us here? Why not the hotel, or the side of the road?”

  “Good questions all. For one thing, the hotel, right now, is the wrong place you wanna be.”

  “Why’s that?” asked Dillon. Those were the first words he said since this powwow had begun.

  Rex looked like a bee had stung him. “Didn’t you notice? Place is bustin’ with gold seekers. The rooms is maxed out. No vacancy for the next ten months, I figure. Anyways, you’d be mobbed.” He said this to me, but I was busy digging a crater, postrear, in the beanbag chair.

  I stopped digging for a moment. “Me? Mobbed?”

  “’Xactly you, darlin’.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “You, Missy Sue,” said Rex, with a tipsy shake of his head, “got the Midas touch.”

  “I beg your pardon,” I said, digging again. “People are crazy.”

  “That’s right.” He reached down and tapped the nugget. “Gold crazy. See”—his manner changed to schoolboy, and he leaned back on the couch—“history never dies, it pops up now and then for us to take another shot at it. Don’t tell me I don’t know. I was raised on knowin’. My daddy’d tell me what his daddy done—”