by Troy Howell
He shouted, “That’ll do them!”
“Don’t we have rights?” I shouted back, trying to ignore the pain.
“The right to shut up! Now what we’re gonna—”
A sudden gust whipped Crane around, and we all saw that the wind was not caused by atmospheric pressure. It was not light to variable.
It was Ye.
He hovered above us, bronzed and glinting. His wings rose like thunderclouds, sweeping the sky. For a dragon who had languished for two hundred years, he was glorious and terrifying.
He smiled at the men, a volcanic fissure in the dark. He blew smoke that peeled like an orange.
He was not made of paper.
The men had turned to lead. One of the leaden figures gasped, “What in hell’s kennel—” One broke rank and fell to his knees, babbling, “Our Father, which art in heaven …”
Something creaked in Crane’s body. He grabbed his shotgun and aimed.
I stared in solid panic, unable to move, while Dillon whammed the back of his head into his captor’s nose, broke loose, and lunged.
Too late. The gun went off.
I screamed.
Ye’s smoky smile continued for a moment, then he rattled his head, swung it around, and frowned at his right wing. In its upper bend, a tattered hole shivered in a dying breeze. A star shone through it.
“Missed!” bawled Crane, and he began to reload.
Ye gave them all another molten grin.
“Fly, Ye!” I screamed. My captor covered my mouth with his sweaty hand, I chomped down, and my gold tooth hit pay dirt. He barked and let go. I screamed, “Fly! Fly!”
Ye’s wings were up, gathering a flurry of new strength. But I heard a thin whistle, and his right wing went slack. He glared again at the hole.
I screamed some more, and no one stopped me.
Ye coughed. His nostrils flared. He glared at the men, his eyes hot ice.
Then a flame sprouted off his tongue. It was a little flame, more of an arrow than a spear, a warm-up exercise, enough to roast a dozen marshmallows or crinkle Crane’s beard. But it was fire—and I wanted to yell Yay! I was yelling something—I don’t know what. It had Ye’s name in it.
Crane was raising the gun.
Dillon was trying to stand; I was scrambling toward Crane’s feet when the gun boomed again. The shot went wild, scattering the leaves above us.
Ye’s molten grin turned perilous. He met the threat with a volley of flames that flew overhead like killer bees.
Some of them found targets. Crane pitched his gun into the air, grabbed Dillon by the arm, and stumbled backward. Flinging mobscenities right and left, the twig-breaking, boot-tromping band reversed itself.
I hugged the ground as Ye fired a third time. The blast spewed from his mouth, lighting up the landscape and sky in naked truth. One man’s hair went up in smoke, and another man’s hat. But more than hair and hat was singed: So was their pride and faith in reality.
That did it. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men fled.
I was laughing and sobbing and crying Ye’s name. Through the falling cinders, he gave me a look of surprise, like a clumsy giant who has knocked over a castle by mistake.
He looked longingly then at the stars, and my heart stopped.
He unfurled his damaged wing, worked it gently, stretched it, withdrew it, stretched it again. As his confidence grew, so did the light in his eyes.
He fanned his wings and worked his tail and hurled himself skyward.
Branches shuddered. My mouth gaped in wonder and yearning. I was desperate to say something great, something good and important, when Ye tipped like a fledgling. He tread the wind his wings had stirred, his tail wagged for balance, his feet raked a branch. With a blow to his belly, he snapped a dead pine, gave a laughing cough, and recovered himself.
He rose once again, up through the aspens, which waved him on, bending and bowing. He rose free and sure, his head to the heavens, his tail making waves.
I leaped up, crying, “Bless you, Ye!” and my cry glanced off him like a little bird, for he swiveled an ear my direction.
He sped higher still, like a swift updraft, his wings singing hosanna in the highest.
Up the mountainside he flew, over Pikes Peak, into the spacious skies. He crossed a jet’s vapor trail, soared higher, and touched a fainting star. Morning lay low and sea green in the east, and he soared so high he flashed golden in the unseen sun.
He banked to face it.
Draco had dissolved with the night.
Ye was gone.
THEY SAY IT’S DARKEST BEFORE DAWN, AND they are right.
I don’t mean the color of the sky.
Dillon was gone, and I hadn’t even noticed. Crane had taken him. I guess I’d been too close to Ye to be taken, too.
I was sleepwalking, wandering in a mental night, aimless. A mosquito worried my head. I shuffled through a yard, brushed past a bush, stepped over a curb, down a sidewalk, around a light pole, crossed a street. But I walked in a dream. The dream was part memories, part my own making, part delirium.
I was flying with Ye. The wind whisked the tears off my cheeks. Ye pointed down and I looked. Beneath us were wide fruited plains and amber waves of grain and purple mountain majesties and a vast wandering wilderness. The wilderness flattened into a road-mapped carpet where red and blue lines crossed and crisscrossed and constellations were marked with gold stars for every hotel. Sometimes we flew, and sometimes we ran down an ever-winding hallway with the road map blurring below. The map dropped away, and a shining sea spread out before us. We were airborne. Ye pointed ahead and said something that the wind whipped away. The pearl ring gleamed on his pointing claw and shone a thin silver beam to the distant horizon, and to our journey’s end, which was an alabaster city standing tall like stalagmites or angel’s wings.
The mosquito I’d heard became the sound of sirens.
They were headed my way.
I trudged forward, my arms still handcuffed behind me. I had tried cracking them open against a fallen branch with no success. I’d managed to get the skull back into the pillowcase and dragged it along like a favorite teddy bear.
I began mumbling something about dropping the tobacco tin somewhere in the cavern, or in the outhouse, or while climbing down, or climbing up, or in the tunnel, or outside the tunnel, or in the green pool, or in the woods …
I was talking to myself, talking to the vacancy inside me.
“It’s only an old tobacco tin,” I said in a voice strangely sour, like sickness. I argued back, “It’s the only thing I had of his. It was my kapeseek. It had Ye’s claw mark.”
I was slowing down.
“Keepsake,” I corrected, murmuring. “He’s gone. You have your memories, Kat. They will have to do.”
Had I said goodbye to Ye? Had I given him a kiss, a blessing, a smile? Had I wished him long life and happiness? I couldn’t remember.
“Gone. Lost.”
A few steps more.
“Just like that—they’re gone. Ye, Dillon, Mom. Suddenly, they’re gone and you realize you couldn’t have prevented it. You couldn’t have said goodbye even if you’d tried a thousand times.”
I nearly tripped on a break in the concrete.
The sirens came screaming. Two big red trucks with cripple creek volunteer fire dept. in gold lettering on the sides roared by, screaming me awake from my dream state. Residents came out of their homes to gawk in their pajamas and robes and hairdos gone don’t.
“I just want to go home,” I whispered.
The handcuffs dug into my wrists, my head was back down. I began counting cracks in the sidewalk, careful to step over each one, even if I had to stop. I stepped over a penny, which I normally would have taken, but the thought of doing that did not occur to me.
I started shaking and couldn’t stop. My chin began chattering to itself. My jeans were damp from the stream and the coating of mud and minerals from the cave.
I looked up.
The street sign said bennet. I’d seen that before.
And I’d seen that car before: Rex’s black colt, polished and snorting, went prancing by. I stared after it. The brake lights flared, the car reversed itself, halted, and Rex jumped out.
“Fancy meetin’ you here!” he said, as if we had just met at the Digs. But the look he gave me was far from casual.
I hiccupped and stood swaying with the pillowcase swinging behind me.
“What in the blessed blazes—” He circled me once, pulled off his hat, felt around its inside band, and produced a hairpinlike tool. “Have these off in a jiff.”
It worked—my hands were free.
“Thanks!” I gasped, and gave him the pillowcase, babbling, “I picked this just for you. Collect your thousand dollars without passing Go, dead or alive …”
WE SAT ON THE CURB, IN FRONT OF HIS CAR’S grinning grill, as traffic rolled randomly by. Rex had insisted we sit inside the car, but I didn’t want to ruin his upholstery. As soon as I’d recovered my senses, I told him Dillon had disappeared and might even be hurt.
“We need to do something,” I begged. “Now!”
“He ain’t hurt,” said Rex. “He’s in custody.”
“Custody?”
“Trespassin’, arson, assault. The ones what’s hurt is five men that was rushed to the CO Springs Memorial ER for second and third dee-gree burns.”
Oh no, I thought. Dillon’s in jail? What would he have told them? Probably not much, if I knew Dillon. So I asked, “Did the men say what happened?”
“But now I’m havin’ second and third thoughts. On account of your handcuffs.” He scowled. “Why not you tell me?”
I had to think that one over. I thought it over and decided to stall. I said agreeably, “I’ll be glad to tell you if their story’s true or not.”
“You’re bein’ catty.” He lowered his head at me and cleared his throat. “All right. I’ll play your dodge for a while. You tell me if their story’s true. They said they found two kids—a he and a her—playin’ with matches in the woods. The her ran, but they caught the he. The men burned theirselves puttin’ out the fire the kids started.”
“So they’re heroes,” I said.
“Just doin’ their duty.”
“You believe that?”
“Is it true?”
I couldn’t stall forever. I said, “Well, obviously the girl escaped and the boy was caught. Right?”
“I’m listenin’.”
“There was a fire. Right?”
“I’m listenin’.”
“Obviously, there was a fire,” I said. Then I shrugged. “It’s true.”
“The matches, Blondie. I don’t think the he and the her is the match-playin’ kind.” He pulled on his ear. “So you tell me. Why matches?”
It was time to change the subject. “Rex,” I said with concern in my voice—and I was concerned. “You haven’t told me where Dad is.”
“I’ll tell you that if you tell me this: Where you been?”
“Please, Rex—”
“If you take a look-see at yourself, Missy Mae, you’d know I’m not askin’ out of ignoramus-ness. You have cavern mud written all over you.”
“Then why are you asking?”
“I want you to explain the what, when, and wheretofore of the matter.”
Maybe I could stall just a little bit longer.
“OK, OK,” I said. “But please tell me where Dad is.”
“Why’re you puttin’ me off?” he said sharply. He removed his hat to run his hand over his head stubble. He sighed. “All right. Your daddy’s finally got the old gray nag to trot, on my recommention. At this momentum, he’s drivin’ to boot quarters—”
“Boot quarters?”
“Headquarters. Po-lease station.” He was getting testy. I was trying his patience. Plus, I think he hated to reduce his lingo to ordinary terms. But most of all I think it was because of the gold he’d missed out on. “We’re gonna get your brotherkin off, but he’s gonna need my help.” He replaced his hat forcefully. “And I see now, due to them handcuffs bein’ on you, that Crane did an underhanded thing, pun intentional. That was his doing’, wasn’t it? And he put ’em on you both, didn’t he?”
I nodded.
“Your turn.”
So far, I had avoided any explanation, but I knew I had to come up with something about the fire. It might even be the truth. Besides being branded a lunatic, what harm would it do? Ye was gone.
But I wasn’t quite there. I felt I had another way out. So I said, “Have you looked in the pillowcase yet?”
“That’s question numeral sumteen!” fumed Rex. “To my singular ones!” He was more agitated than I’d ever seen him. “And it’s my pillowcase, which it used to be laundry-mat clean.”
“I think if you take a look in the pillowcase, you’ll understand.” I said, surprising myself for my challenge.
Rex glared at me sharp-eyed, and I was reminded of our keyhole encounter. Funny how I thought so much differently about him now.
“I’ll take a look,” he huffed. “If I don’t like what I see, you’re over and done with.”
I nodded. “Agreed.”
He took a look. He took a long, attentive look. He said, “This skull’s cracked up to what it ain’t used to be,” and he continued to look, until it became one slow, now-the-truth-dawns look. His eyes began to widen as if Cotton-Eyed Joe’s skull had turned to gold.
Finally, he raised his head. “You just won yourself a silver ribbon around my heart.”
“THE CAPTAIN HAS TURNED ON THE FASTEN seat belt sign.”
I was now a UM—an unaccompanied minor—on the way to D.C. They had plopped a gray-and-gold Denver Nuggets b-ball cap on my head for easy identification. It even had mining picks stitched on it. How ironic could you get? (Ironic being something that makes your inner pain worse in a funny way, not something made of iron, which is what I once thought.)
I’d been through Denver airport with Dad and an airline attendant, hustling through thousands of travelers—gold rushers—who were arriving. As we raced to the gates, all the news headlines said gold was the rage and Cripple Creek was the place.
I had been through security, which was nearly as bad as a police pat-down. Though my leaded die was in Dad’s keeping and my tobacco tin was gone, I triggered the detectors again and again. The security team made a long thorough search of my scant belongings and of me.
Finding nothing, they eventually gave up.
Dad had seen me off. I’d given him the “I love you” sign just before losing his face in the blur of the crowd, where he’d stood like a wax figure, the kind on display in the Mollie Kathleen. After all we’d been through, by the seat of our pants and the skin of our teeth, California or Bust, with Nellie breaking down then getting her second wind, he was not flying to San Francisco.
He was not driving to San Francisco.
He was driving home.
There was no way he could do what was necessary to get Dillon released and still make it to SF in time. He had given up on that. Except for the unfinished business, he had given up on everything. At this point, he just put one foot in front of the other and said whatever had to be said.
When I thought of the reasons I was flying, I got lightheaded.
Rex had promised he’d fly me somewhere, as a reward for telling him about the back entrance. Now that Ye was gone and his cavern plundered, I didn’t see any point in turning Rex down. The mine was now watched night and day, and it was close to impossible he’d get any gold. Dad spoke of gold no more, but Rex raved about it. He had checked the police archives, and the case against Cotton-Eyed Joe had never been closed. Technically, he was entitled to the reward money. That’s what I intended, I told him. He said there was hardly a chance he’d see the reward, but the gold bits were “awesomous.”
“Gold bits?” I asked.
“Them ones stuck inside the skull.”
I gaped at him.
“You di
dn’t know?”
I could only shake my head.
“Stuck in the crevices and teeth. Must be worth a few thousands. Thanks, sister!”
So his delight over the skull had been due to the gold, not in seeing his grandfather’s killer. Or maybe both.
What amazed me more was that Crane’s gang had failed to notice. I hadn’t noticed because gold was the farthest thing from my mind. I suppose they hadn’t noticed because a skull was the farthest thing from their minds.
The second reason I flew was serious: Mom. Dad had lost touch with the Home and feared for her condition. If the staff were neglecting the phones, he said, how were they handling the patients? He wanted someone to see her as soon as possible, and I was that someone.
“When you arrive,” he instructed, “go straight to the Home. Ms. Morro will pick you up at the airport; she has all the information and your number, just in case.” Ms. Morro was our old neighbor and the “just in case” meant I had the cell phone in case something went wrong. “You’ll stay with her until I figure out what to do.”
The third reason I flew was phenomenal.
Two talk show scouts had hunted me down (via Rose Robbins, who found me via Rex), both from separate networks. As they made their proposals, a call-in show rep joined the quest.
Lights, cameras, action. I was looking at celebrity status. It looked godzillion times better than calamity class. I knew it wouldn’t be a hotel lounge scene with flying biscuits and jeers.
But more important, I thought there’d be money to be made—legitimately for a change.
While Rex worked on the Dillon defense, Dad drove me to the airport.
Leaving Cripple Creek was easy. Once a magical place, without Ye its magic was just a card trick, as in Fifty-two Pickup. All the traffic was rushing, often creeping, upstream. Every kind of vehicle—luxury, terrain, truck, van, wagon, sport, mini, motor home, motorcycle. A converted school bus chugged by with cripple creek or bust painted on its side in big black letters.
Since Dad was in a slump, I switched on the radio. After flipping through the usual—country, golden oldies, hip-hop and cosmic noise, that weird static you get between AM stations—I got Rocky Mountain news. Due to “growing unrest” from “various interest groups,” particularly gold seekers, and an “unauthorized explosion” deep in the Mollie Kathleen, the National Guard was called in. I found a talk show that was all about gold. Among the discussions were the limits of mining claims. An engineer was saying that a lode claim could be only so many feet long and so many feet wide, and I concluded Ye’s cavern was outside the range. Better, it wasn’t a lode, it was loose.
