The Dragon of Cripple Creek

by Troy Howell

“Ye!” I whispered. “Shoot some fire!”

  He broke mid-rumble to swing his head down to me. “Shoot fire? I am not that kind of dragon.”

  “But you can’t let them steal your gold!”

  He gave me a look that puts an ache in my soul when I recall it—a look of both pity and perplexity—but I had no reason then to understand why.

  Nor any time to try, for an orange spark blossomed in the dark.

  Ye heaved his bulk to shield us from the blast that roared across the hall. I was knocked flat. Dillon cried out like a bird lost in a blizzard, and the room billowed with a sour stench.

  I lay shock-still, blinking the flash from my eyes.

  Then Dillon had me by the arm, shouting, “You all right? You all right?”

  I rose, and Ye began nudging us both, guiding us into the tunnel. We stumbled along, silent except for our panting.

  When we reached the wide bend, Ye, steaming and huffing, reared like a rainbow and pivoted, his eyes glaring golden and dragon-keen into the ugly ruin behind us.

  Dillon and I sank to the ground—two shaken humans, huddling, gritty, damp.

  “It’s too late!” I gasped. “Ye’s cavern …”

  Dillon nodded.

  “The crack,” I blubbered. “Explosives … to widen it.”

  Ye said, “Be still.”

  I tried to be still, but my insides were tumbling, my heart wouldn’t slow, my senses stung.

  Suppressing a rumble beneath his breath, Ye peered at us and asked, “You have not been hurt?”

  “No,” said Dillon.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  We watched him pace. It was not the kind of pace people make, wearing out a stretch of floor or rug until a judgment is made. It was winding and curling the way a dog does for the perfect position, unwilling and restless with every move. It was a sluggish tail-chase of indecision. He wove this way and that, slow and tormented, making groans now and then, while Dillon and I sat unmoving.

  I realized Ye was at a crossroads.

  His cavern was no more. It was no more his cavern. Its beauty had been erased, the delicate with the grand, destroyed. He could no longer barricade his bedroom; it was too late for that. Like a leak in a dam, the break had opened. He’d be overrun with rats. Whoever set the explosives could be gathering up gold this minute.

  I closed my eyes. What was he to do?

  Dragons are creatures of contradiction. They’re either earthbound or airborne, slithering or soaring, swimming or spitting flames. After slumbering for centuries, cloaking himself in darkness, turning his eye, his memory, from the pain of all things lost, could Ye now sail the sky? Could he turn his face to the sun, tip his wings to the clouds, glide above the land instead of burrow beneath it?

  Could he choose waking over dreaming?

  I looked up.

  He had stopped pacing. His eyes were lacquered rust. He reached back his head and licked at something. Frowning, I got up to examine him. But I had no light—I had lost it during the blast.

  His dragonlight was dimming.

  Something was stuck in his side, like a huge splinter.

  “Oh, Ye!” I said tearfully, and put out my hand.

  “Do not touch,” he said grimly. “Let it be. I would rather it stop the hole it made than leak blood over the land for men to trail. For dragon’s blood, too, turns to gold. Gold dust.”

  Resisting the urge to protest, I stepped back, horrified.

  “It will be my thorn in the flesh,” he said.

  “What is it?” asked Dillon.

  “The cursed pick, shrapnel from the blast.”

  “The miner’s pick?”

  “No!” I sobbed.

  “A souvenir to my foolishness.”

  “What do you mean?” I cried, wiping away fresh tears. “It’s not your foolishness! It’s mine! I started this whole disaster! Instead of saving us, I’ve ruined us! Everything’s ruined!”

  He waved my words away. “No. I have been foolish to think I might dwell here forever.”

  What was he saying now? That he would not live in the cave anymore? Or not live forever?

  What about the pearl?

  IN THE DUST-FILLED GLOOM OF THE DRAGON-light, Dillon and I watched as Ye removed the beams and boulders he had shored up earlier in the evening. We were at the far end of the branch opposite the hole that led to the outhouse.

  The branch was the original tunnel. Ye had enlarged it long ago after discovering a natural entry. He had sealed it, he told us, before the Mollie Kathleen had been established.

  “You mean,” I said, “you haven’t been out since then? You haven’t breathed fresh air?”

  Heaving the biggest timber from its place, he grunted, “Stay back!”

  We stayed back.

  “I have not”—he puffed—“seen the Milky Way for well over a hundred years. Perhaps two hundred.” He started prying a slab of stone.

  “Oh, Ye,” I said, fanning clouds of dust, “it’s fabulous—the Milky Way! You couldn’t guess!”

  Ye said nothing, just wheezed and kept working. After a while he said, “I remember. A dragon’s memory is as good as gold.” He worked the slab loose, stopped, sniffed, peered over at me, and said, “Fresh air?”

  I had no answer—I thought the mountain air was divine.

  “Stand back, now,” he said. “Watch out.” He broke an even larger stone from its roots, the earth shook, rocks and dirt fell, and a hole appeared. He stepped forward, nosing the night.

  Dillon and I joined him in the doorway.

  “Yes,” he said, gently plucking something caught between his claws. It was a wildflower. But he was looking upward. “So there it is. Now I know my dreams are real. I have dreamed this, the dimming of the heavens.” He set the wildflower aside. “Your ways have dimmed more things than just Earth. Like the man who goes a little more blind each day and does not know, until the day he wakens in the night and feels the sun on his face. Now I know.”

  I touched a tender place on his neck, under his jaw, where my mother would place her hand on me. I said, “You dreamed about this?”

  “Sleeping and waking.” He said it as if he were dreaming still.

  “Did the stars go out completely?”

  “Before I went below,” he said, “I witnessed the northern and southern lights on a single night. The aurora. There, on Sun Mountain. That was the Ute people’s name for it—a name that honors its glory—before Pike named it after himself—a name that reveals the pride of man.” His voice went stale. “The dreams are black shadows in my eyes.”

  I knew then that he wept, for starlight glistened on his cheeks. We were quiet awhile, out of respect for his sadness.

  Though the heavens looked brilliant to me, I said sympathetically, “I guess it has lost some of its spangle. Smog and stuff—”

  “Industry,” said Dillon, trying to be helpful. He wiped some grit from around his mouth. “Automobiles. Air pollution.”

  “Yes,” replied Ye. “Fragments of it have trickled into my sanctuary.”

  Suddenly flinging off his grief, Ye turned to the northwest sky, and my hand slid away. With a kind of tipsy reverence he gazed, and in a voice only a dragon could make, which I would later try imitating on sleepless nights, he said, “I am but a spark in time to that.”

  He blew a beautiful smoke ring that glowed lavender in the dark and wandered up, up, beyond the tips of aspens, wavered a long moment, and spread like a halo around a shattered spear of stars.

  Dillon and I watched in dizzy wonder.

  “Draco,” Ye said solemnly. “The Dragon. Thuban, once the polestar, shines in his tail. Five thousand years ago you could see it from Khufu’s burial chamber in the Great Pyramid at Giza.”

  “The Great Pyramid?” I asked. “You were there?”

  “I have been everywhere,” he murmured. Then he added so quietly I thought I must have imagined it, “Except at death’s door.”

  THE WONDERMENT WAS OVER.

/>   Ye was leaving.

  Somewhere on the fringes of town, in dense dark foliage, we made our way. Dillon and I followed as best we could, barging through brambles and branches and stands of aspens, while Ye passed through as cool as moonlight. Only once was he hindered, when an old rusty rod driven into a tree snagged his wing. He had to back away from it to free himself.

  We were headed down a gulch, where a stream sloshed and sighed.

  “That rivulet flows into the creek that gave the town its name,” Ye said. “Watch your step. Beasts have broken their legs on these slopes, coming to drink.”

  “Oh!” I exclaimed as I yanked my shoe from a tangled root. “Is that where they get the Cripple in Creek?”

  “Smart girl.”

  We drank the cold water. Ye remarked how its sweetness was gone, and I rinsed my face.

  Then he pulled the pick from his side and washed out his wound. Darkness ran from it. As we crossed to the other side, I looked over my shoulder.

  Far downstream swirls glittered starlit and golden.

  The opposite bank was not as steep, and eventually leveled out. Civilization crept forward through the patches of brush: a pile of trash, a stray croquet ball, a barking dog, the distant drone of a truck. It was long past night, but too early to be called morning.

  The trees thinned and Ye stopped. Something flew past us, a black shadow on a silent wind, and I cried out.

  “Only an owl,” said Ye, laughing softly to himself.

  Dillon, still walking ahead, was busy plucking twigs from his fleece jacket. Then he knelt to tie his shoe, lost in the shadows.

  Like a butterfly emerging from its sleepy wraps, Ye opened his wings and closed them again.

  I couldn’t let him go without a proper farewell, though I knew I would crumble at a mere whisper. I went to him and gazed, trying to recall the smoldering, subterranean creature I had first met. His shimmering scales were like autumn locked in ice, his wings like parchment stained purple. His pupil was huge and his thin golden iris broke around it like a sun in eclipse. The patch along his throat, the colors of ivory and nutmeg, raced with his pulse. That’s where I had laid my hand.

  I wanted to cup this moment like water in my palms, already thirsting for it.

  With no warning, Ye spread his wings and the wind blew me back.

  I fell to my knees and dropped my pillowcase. I covered my face and wailed. I had wanted to kiss him and bless him, the way my mother would have done. But I knew I did not matter. He lived and dreamed outside the window of my world, drifting on a wide universal tide.

  I lowered my wail to a whimper and looked up—he was still there.

  He yawned, released a spiral of smoke from off his tongue, and folded his wings. He coughed once, and said, “Rise, Kat.”

  Weakly and meekly, I rose.

  He held out a hand—all satin and leather and claws—for me to grasp. “Forever is a long, long time,” he said sadly.

  I nodded, my eyelids beating like birds caught in a rain.

  “Too long a time,” he said, “to run from hole to hole in this hostile world—to run until all the holes are filled or cleared or taken. Do you understand?”

  I nodded, thinking I understood, wanting to understand.

  “Who knows what the world will become?” he said.

  I nodded again; all I could do was nod—it was the least painful thing for me in that moment—nod and gaze. His pupil had got so big his eye was a mirror of the softening sky, a blend of mystery and recognition. I saw myself in it, miniature and wide-eyed.

  “What is your mother’s name?” he asked abruptly.

  “My … my mother?” I whispered, startled by the question.

  “The pearl was your mother’s, you said.”

  “Oh. Yes. Yes, it was.” My thoughts went topsy-turvy.

  “Her name?” Ye repeated.

  “Oh! Pearl. Her name is Pearl.”

  “Ahhh.” He sighed a ripple of smoke that lapped along the leaves, and he studied me with an aching, satisfied gleam in his eye. “How beautiful, how tragic.”

  When he lifted the claw on the warm finger I was clutching, I frowned at it stupidly. This was not goodbye: On the point of his claw was the ring, with the pearl glowing moist as a November moon.

  “Take it, Katlin.”

  “I … But I thought … Don’t … don’t you want to live forever?”

  “There is more that shines in this pearl than a dragon’s forever dream.”

  I hardly knew what to do. I started to tremble. “Ye?” I squeaked.

  “Go on.”

  I touched the pearl, my fingers cold and quivering. The ring was wedged tight. I could do nothing but stare at it. I could not see my mother’s face, or Grandma Chance’s, or my own.

  I could see only the death of Ye.

  He would not live forever.

  He would die.

  I buried my face in my hand.

  “Hush,” he said, and nudged my ear with his snout, like a clumsy first kiss.

  I turned my wet face to him.

  “And, Kat,” he said knowingly, “keep the gold nugget.”

  His eye swam in my vision, and I tried to blink it still. “The gold nugget?”

  “Take care how you use it.”

  “You knew! You knew all along!”

  “A dragon’s senses are keen. His mind more so.”

  “Ye, I’m so ashamed! I stole it from you, yet you treated me so nice!” Then I gave a silly laugh. “I put it back!”

  His dragonlight flickered. “You put it back? The gold?”

  “Yes! When I returned to your cavern.”

  He blinked—a slow pink veil over an evening sun—and he laughed, only it wasn’t a silly laugh like mine, but serious and kind. “True to your name you are, katharos—pure.”

  I smiled dumbly at his words and touched my ear where it tingled from his nudge.

  “That is all I could ever want from anyone,” he murmured. “A pure, honest heart. Keep your gold tooth, too, with my regards. It makes you xiao long”—he gave a dramatic growl—“a little dragon.”

  Then his mirth melted away and he raised his head. Dillon, who was crouched near some high-standing brush, had called out a warning.

  There were voices nearby, movements in the leaves.

  I grabbed my pillowcase, but I could not move.

  Snapping twigs, trampling boots.

  Dillon said, “Hide, Kat!”

  I didn’t care about me, as long as Ye was safe. I looked around.

  He had slipped away, silent as the fading stars.

  A GROUP OF MEN EMERGED.

  One of them grabbed Dillon, another blinded me with a strong flashlight.

  “Wal, looky what we caught,” said a voice behind the light. “Greedy varmints.”

  A squat man with bulgy eyes came forward, inspecting me in the glare. He twisted his mouth into a liquor-laced whistle, and said, “What doooo you know.” He grabbed my face and turned it. “Who do we got here?”

  A tall, bearded man with a shotgun stepped forward. “Don’t hurt them, Haddock,” he said. “They’re children.”

  “’Course they are, Crane,” said Haddock, the man who gripped my jaw. “But more’n just children, they’re the cream of the crop! See this here face? This is thee girl! Lemme see your tooth, honey.”

  I tightened my lips as Crane came close. “You sure?” he said. And with disgusting fingers, he pried open my lips. Then he stepped back and stared. “Well. Would you believe it.”

  Haddock was practically drooling. “We’re out here lookin’ for the hidden hole, and we find the key to it all. Killer luck!”

  To distract myself from fear, I started a slow swing with the pillowcase, imagining what sort of collision a dead skull would make against a live one. Would the teeth still have bite? Would a brain make a difference?

  “She knows what she’s doin’,” Haddock gurgled. “She got more gold.”

  “Right there in that bag!” calle
d one.

  Haddock’s breath was definitely stronger than beer. “Don’t you, sugar?”

  “Open it up!” called another.

  They hovered buzzard-busy around me now. The man who held Dillon marched him over. Dillon had made no attempt to escape or rescue me—he must have thought the same as I: What mattered most was Ye’s safety.

  Where was Ye? Had he flown away? I couldn’t sneak a look for the pinching of my face, and decided that if Haddock let go, I would literally give him the sack.

  Glory days, he did let go! And lucky strike, I smacked his ear, the red-hot fat one, before Crane could stop me. Yelping and slapping the side of his head, he played hopscotch on the grass. Someone pinned my arms from behind me as Crane grabbed the sack.

  “Don’t touch her!” yelled Dillon, his voice catching in the middle.

  “Go fly a kite, Dragon Boy,” said Crane.

  They all laughed at Dillon and made a few remarks about paper dragons owning all the gold in the world. The man with the flashlight went up to him and said, “Ain’t this sweet.” He raised the middle finger of his left hand. It was mushroom white, wrapped in gauze and tape. I knew that finger, having seen it up close, treated in the ambulance. “Every girl oughta have a big bad brother,” the man said.

  The guy holding Dillon made a movement, and Dillon winced.

  Crane silently gave his shotgun to another to hold. He held the pillowcase up in momentary suspense.

  Everyone leaned forward.

  He jerked the pillowcase open.

  Everyone was trying to look, their heads in a jumbled circle, saying, “Gold! Gold! Gold!”

  Crane said, “Get back!”

  “Just empty it!”

  “Pour it out! It’s gold!”

  He turned it upside down. Out wobbled the crackled remains of Cotton-Eyed Joe’s quietly howling skull.

  A WIND WAS UP. THE ASPENS WERE BLOWING, and Crane was raising his voice.

  “You’re in big trouble now!”

  I was sure he’d haul us in for trespassing, humiliating grown-ups, possession of a loaded pillowcase, assault and battery, and disturbing Chief Huffman’s beauty rest.

  He produced two pairs of handcuffs. After clapping one set on Dillon, he jerked my arms behind my back and clapped the other on me.