The Dragon of Cripple Creek

by Troy Howell

  Would we be sentenced to life? Or be blindfolded and hanged?

  When we were free of downtown and heading through the residential area, the only other alerts we had were a barking dog and a man smoking on an unlit porch. Cutting my eyes his way, I saw a red tip flare and fade.

  We neared the Warrens. I spotted their place, sleeping in the dark. We rushed down their drive and stepped through trampled weeds, where Dillon nearly tripped.

  “Look at this, Kat!” he whispered, flashing the light across a broken shovel with the sign still attached. how low can they go?

  That accounted for the trampled weeds.

  “It makes sense,” I said, “that people would search the area where I showed up after the accident.”

  We arrived at the outhouse. It looked untouched except by time, which had its handprints all over it.

  “This wouldn’t last another winter,” said Dillon. “It’s the leaning tower of poo-poo.”

  “Dillon—”

  “You sure this is the place to go?”

  “Dillon, stop! My sides ache bad enough.”

  The outhouse door creaked a warning as we clambered inside.

  “Huh,” said Dillon, aiming the light. “A double ringer.”

  Then the beam caught Cotton-Eyed Joe, who glared at us with murderous disapproval. I noted which eye had been damaged—his right.

  After a quick read, Dillon said, “I see.”

  I took his flashlight hand and guided it down the toilet seat hole. “There,” I said. “I’ll go first.”

  “Now who’s telling bad jokes?”

  I descended without a hitch. But Dillon snapped the first rung and down he went, bypassing the rest of the roost and landing at my feet in dried muck.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I should have told you. The first rung’s a doozy.”

  “Not anymore.”

  • • •

  Crawling with the mini-light in my mouth, I led the way through the tunnel. When it emptied into the main passage, we were able to stand. Dillon reproached himself for having pitched the string away, but I explained to him my use of rocks as markers.

  We had a choice of two directions: the branch to our left, or the one straight ahead. I was sure the left-hand one was the one Ye had backed into when we’d said goodbye, so I took the straight one.

  Not questioning my navigational skills—which were as developed as my attempts at public relations—Dillon followed. I had no dragon to lead me, the spotty beam of the flashlight was small, and I hoped there were no confusing branches off the passageway. But it went easier than I expected, and I realized that being rested and well fed, rather than lame and stressed, made a difference. We descended the entire way, and my confidence increased. After a time, I smelled a draft that brought the green pool to mind, and I knew we were drawing close.

  Smiling to myself, I quivered with anticipation. Ye would soon see I was better than a scruffy, dirty, hobbling human. I looked respectable and clean. I would make a good second impression. Plus, I would place the gold at his feet, with sincere apologies, and kiss his royal snout.

  “Watch your step, now,” I cautioned. “It gets a little rough.”

  Crossing the gnarled entrance, we entered the crystal cave. We came to the murky pool. Unlike the warmth of Ye’s dragonlight, the flashlight cast a creepy effect on its surface, one of certain doom. We skirted the pool. We were past it. Formations bobbed in and out of the blackness like balding gnomes. Skeletal columns wandered by.

  My expectations sank. The cavern was cold, the mist evaporated, the magic unmade.

  I flashed the light randomly. The gleam of a bottle, the dust of the game board, the chalk of a stalactite, a few golden glints.

  Dillon gasped at the gold, but I gasped in despair.

  Ye was gone.

  “YE?” I CALLED. “YE?”

  I’d been calling for some time, my voice hoarse and spattered with tears.

  Dillon was quite the opposite: He was enthralled. He sauntered here and there, trying to mask his glee by remarking on ordinary things. “Who played, I wonder? Hmm, black resigned. The pawn would become queen. These explosives: How long are they active, I wonder? Pretty small boot for a man …”

  Finally, he could not hold it in. “This gold! It’s unreal! I cannot believe this gold! Godzillions!”

  I had called myself sick. I slumped to the floor.

  “Just think what you could do with all this gold! You could go private jet! Sail the world! Own an island! You could—”

  “Dillon!” I cried. “Stop! It isn’t yours! It’s not what you think it is!”

  “It’s gold … looks like gold to me …”

  His voice became fainter and fainter. As I moaned in my anguish, I sounded like someone else. Either the flashlight went out, or my vision did.

  • • •

  I must have dozed or fainted, for I realized I’d been hearing my name. Echoes rose from my subconscious. Even then, I didn’t answer. What was there to say?

  “Kat.”

  Dillon was nearby.

  “You OK?”

  I shook my head.

  “Kat.” He came close and squatted down. He touched my shoulder. He touched my hair. “Have you ever—” He halted.

  “What,” I said absently. “Ever what.”

  “Don’t get upset.” Again he touched my shoulder. “Come on. Get up.”

  I could not move. Feeling the flashlight in my hand, I shone it on the crevice I had wiggled through, so long ago now, though really only days, when I first saw the last of the dragons, the beautiful, ancient dragons.

  Could Ye have squeezed through there?

  “Kat, have you ever—”

  “Ever what.”

  “Doubted.”

  “Doubted what.”

  “The reality of Ye.”

  DILLON WAS BABBLING ON AND ON ABOUT whether dragons existed or not, and if they did, turned to gold or not, but that one thing was sure, that gold was rare, and rare things were precious and therefore valuable, and since society valued rare and precious things, whoever owned rare and precious things could live any way they wanted.

  Babble, babble, babble.

  I had given up on arguing that not all rare and precious things were something you could plop into your pocket or onto the betting table or into a bank account, blast it all, and that dragons were rare and precious things and that was why gold was rare and precious, bless it all, and since dragons turned to gold, and since Ye was a dragon, the gold was his.

  Why bother?

  I shone the flashlight on an impression in the dirt. “That’s his footprint,” I said. “You can believe me or not.”

  “It could be a fossilized leaf.”

  “A leaf. Down here. You idiot.”

  “Or a starfish.”

  “A starfish. Ha.”

  “They’ve found seashells in the desert.”

  “This is not the desert!” I shone the light rudely into his face, to see what he looked like to make such stupid remarks. His face looked just like Dad’s. I shone it back on the four-point impression, which was shaped like a playing card club and spade combined. “That’s his footprint. Ye was here. I can smell him.”

  The debate left me cold, the kind of cold you’d feel if you were stuck on the moon.

  “I’m leaving,” said Dillon abruptly. “Print or no print, smell or no smell, dragon or no dragon.” He walked away, muttering, “There is no dragon, but there’s all this gold.”

  I let him go. Into the blackness. Without a light of his own.

  I got up and went over to the ditch where the skeleton lay.

  Let Dillon stumble. Let him whack his head on a rock.

  I shone the light on the bones. The old rotten bones.

  Let him know what it’s like to stumble in the dark.

  The old rotten bones that had died, when flesh hung on them, with blood on their hands.

  Let him slip into the pool like a stone. He asked for it. />
  The old rotten bones of Cotton-Eyed Joe. Yep—there it was. His eye socket, his right, bashed in. I took out the pillowcase and shook it open. I took out my spoon and hooked it into the good socket and dangled the skull.

  It comes down to this, I thought. A grinning globe of calcium and dirt. The tongue no longer cursing, the eye empty of greed.

  I plopped it into the bag.

  I pulled the gold from my pocket and gave it a sad kiss—the kiss I had saved for Ye.

  I gave it a benediction. “May this gold, Ye’s ancestry, lie here long after these blasphemous bones have turned to dust. Long after the town of Cripple Creek cracks, withers, and fades. Long after I’m grown and gone and my kids have kids and their kids have kids, and so on and so forth, time without end, amen.” I dropped the gold into the ditch. It broke through Joe’s ribs, rolled an inch or two, and lay still.

  But it would be stolen before the night was out.

  DILLON WAS NOT THERE.

  I stood at the pool, shining the light onto its ghastly surface.

  “Dillon?” I said feebly.

  Nothing.

  “Dillon!” I said loudly.

  Nothing.

  “Dillon!” I screamed.

  Echo … echo … echo …

  How could I have been that cruel, that harsh, that … murderous? After preaching on things rare and precious, things you can’t buy—for example, sisterly love—how could I have let him wander away?

  It wasn’t his fault Ye was gone. He had never seen Ye’s magic, heard his voice, touched his shimmery scales. What else was Dillon to do?

  What good was preaching if you didn’t practice what you preached?

  Well, Kat, what good was preaching when you have a brother to find?

  I turned to run, skidded in cavern clay, pitched forward, splashed through split pea soup, righted myself, kept going. It was all uphill. I tried not to think. I only breathed—that was enough. I supposed I cried, because I tasted salt.

  Then I smelled smoke. Smoke!

  Ye!

  I quickened my pace, hope skittering inside me. Ye would help me find Dillon. He would know what to do. Now I was crying from relief.

  But the smell of the smoke was not as I remembered. It was not dragon smoke.

  A spark flared up ahead.

  An orange mask.

  A face in the light of a match.

  “I was worried,” said Dillon, approaching. “I came to find you.”

  • • •

  In case the flashlight should go dead, he explained, he had brought a box of matches he’d picked up from the Empire Hotel.

  My crying hiccupped into a laugh. I had my brother back.

  “Look at you, Kat,” he said. “You’re a mess.”

  I straightened my glasses and turned the flashlight on myself. He was right. Several times, I had fallen and now had a generous coating of subterranean browns, on top of the soaking I had got from the green goo near the pool. Several times, I had shed tears and smeared my face—I felt the clay caking up on my cheeks. Also, I listed to the left: My knee injury had opened.

  I looked no different than when I had met Ye. Probably worse.

  But what did it matter?

  I looked glumly into Dillon’s face. “Plan Downward has failed, too,” I said. “And it’s no good trying to persuade you—”

  He lit another match, illuminating his face. The illumination went beyond a mere kitchen flame: He shone like the gift of the magi. And I knew. I knew it was the glow of enchantment. I knew he was under the spell. It wasn’t fantasy. It was reality, history, prehistory, stretching its strange beauty across the millennia and into our pitiful, scrambled-up world.

  I knew he had seen a dragon face-to-face.

  Dillon had met Ye.

  WE WALKED HAND IN HAND. HE HAD PUT away the matches and carried the flashlight. I had my pillowcase.

  As we walked, he told me. Burning match after match, he had made good progress and was rounding a bend when he heard me scream his name. It had to have been a scream, he thought, at that distance. She’s in trouble, he concluded, and immediately turned. As he did, something shoved him from behind. The mass behind the force was so tremendous, he knew it could have ended his life if it had wished. But there was grace in the act. Dillon had rolled, heels over head, his match extinguished, and lain at the mercy of the presence looming above him in the dark. Then the eyes, golden and deep, surfaced in his blindness, burning from their own inner source, like light from a well of wisdom. “I smell girl,” the dragon breathed. “Someone I know.” “That would be my sister,” Dillon gasped. “Ah,” breathed the dragon. “I also smell gold, something I know intimately well.” “That would be this,” Dillon confessed, and emptied out his pockets. (“Dillon!” I interjected.) After that, Ye had let him up.

  “Isn’t he marvelous!” I said.

  Dillon didn’t answer. We had rounded the bend. And there he glowed, like a cumulus cloud after a storm.

  “Hello, Kat,” Ye said cordially.

  “How,” I said, and pushed back a strand of my hair.

  THE MOMENT IS PRESSED IN MY MIND LIKE the forget-me-nots in my first journal, that stain the page with blue and gold and bittersweetness. I peer from another time and place into that little scene lit by dragon glow and battery-operated beam, and see the three of us, contemplating fate and one another. It’s Dillon and Ye poking along the edges of philosophies and dreams, while I probe translucent wings with a flashlight.

  It’s both of us telling Ye about the trouble that brews above.

  • • •

  We painted the bleakest picture for him, describing the magnitude of it—the involvement of media, the mine, the general public.

  “It won’t be long,” I fretted, “before they come. They’ll penetrate your world with picks and shovels—”

  “With drilling machines,” said Dillon.

  “They’re going to expand the mine, Ye. They’ll find you. Maybe you’ll live forever, or”—I looked away—“or maybe not.”

  He was studying me intently.

  “And if they can’t hurt you,” said Dillon, “they might try to capture you.”

  Ye mulled over our words, puffing out a pillow of smoke now and then, wheezing a little. “I have heard scratchings,” he said. “They are rats, human rats. I have heard them before, over the centuries.”

  “Things are more sophisticated now,” said Dillon.

  Ye gave him a look of disgust. “More sophisticated? How can that be? Man has not changed since he first set a rude blade into this soil. He is a common knave.”

  “I don’t mean—”

  “There are a few exceptions, as a matter of course,” Ye added, and gave us a contented growl.

  “I don’t mean man himself,” said Dillon, “but his inventions.”

  “These people are determined,” I said. “Desperate. Please, Ye, find yourself a new home. The Andes … or the Himalayas … or … the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia! They’re nice.” I smiled to confirm it.

  “The Blue Ridge,” Ye murmured. “Quaint and homely … a pleasant place …” He coughed somberly, shook off his reverie, and said, “No. I was younger then. Now I am old. This is my home. This is where I have settled. And—” He swung his head in the direction we had come. “I have made precautions. I was shoring up beams and boulders at the far end when I detected you.”

  “What about your cavern?” I interrupted. “The crevice. That’s how I first got in.”

  He eyed me patiently. “That is my squint.” When he saw this didn’t register with either of us, he explained, “Castles have squints. You would call it a peephole.”

  “I call it a weakness,” Dillon said bluntly. “If a girl could slip in—”

  Something rumbled inside of Ye, like thunder preparing for a storm. Dillon took a step back, but Ye only coughed.

  “I am a dragon,” he proclaimed. “I was here when mammoths roamed free. I have witnessed great sweeps of nature, the
polestar shifting from Thuban to Polaris, glaciers gulping mountainsides like snakes swallowing toads. I have seen civilizations rise and fall. Battles come and go—”

  “And dragons,” I had the boldness to remind him. “They’ve come and gone, too.”

  He stopped and stared at me thoughtfully, as if I’d made a strategic move in chess.

  “Mammoths,” said Dillon, “are no more.”

  Ye’s eyes wavered. He sighed smokily and cleared his throat.

  Then a change rippled through him, like a shift in the wind. His head lifted, his nostrils flared. “Rats,” he said, and blew a stream of smoke that started to make a fist but curled instead like a fiddlehead fern.

  I held still, testing the void with my senses, and only imagined what Ye must have heard or smelled or felt.

  “These rats will stop at nothing,” said Dillon.

  “Oh?” said Ye. He prodded the air with his nose, as if rooting out the threat, and the rumble inside him rolled again. He blew more smoke and sidestepped like a swordsman, swiping the air with practice. Then he growled, expanded his chest, coughed and spat more smoke, and lumbered away in the dark.

  We hurried after.

  DILLON SAYS IT WAS DESTINY. I SAY IT WAS the huge stalagmite, the Grecian column. Whatever it was that spared him, Ye survived the explosion.

  And Ye saved us.

  Once again we entered his chamber. I was trudging alongside his right flank, Dillon strode near his right foreleg, when Ye halted and studied the gloom of the hall.

  Scrapings came from the crevice—his squint—across the way. A thin blue beam flashed into the cavern.

  Someone was trying to squeeze through, just as I had.

  We heard a man say, “Can’t get it,” and another man say, “Get back.”

  “Ye!” I whispered.

  Ye was as still as stone, though his rumbling continued to roll. For a fractured moment, the blue beam spotlighted Ye’s nose, showing two simmering coils of smoke.

  More mutterings from the intruders.