The Dragon of Cripple Creek

by Troy Howell

  I did know. I remembered seeing it on the door of a truck, on a paint-chipped sign, and stitched on a foreman’s shirt. I knew Dad knew, too. And Dillon.

  For all three of us, the design was unforgettable.

  With the words like pebbles in my throat, I said, “The quarry symbol. True Stone. Where … where …”

  Dillon finished it. “Mom fell.”

  THE GATES WERE WIDE OPEN AT THE QUARRY, as if to invite us in. Dad stopped and studied the entrance for a while. I could tell his curiosity was up—the logo scratched in the tin had obviously shaken him. He might have been picturing Mom driving in. He hadn’t been here since that dreadful day.

  Or he might have been reading the new sign, which stood where the old sign had been.

  It had the builder’s name and an artist’s version of the architect’s flashy dream.

  But, still, Dad resisted. “Kat,” he declared, “I’m doing this to prove you wrong.”

  He drove inside. He found a level place to park that was out of view of the highway, and we got out.

  Looking across the vast, snow-covered rock scape, he said, “This is a big area. There’s no way you could cover a tenth of it.”

  Dillon said matter-of-factly, “We’ll look for tracks.”

  “Tracks! Dragon tracks? You’re talking like Kat!”

  “Dad,” said Dillon patiently, “I saw him, too. With these eyes.”

  “You’ve got blinders on then.”

  We walked in silence. We passed the old office, which had three stories of block walls and broken windows.

  Dad suddenly stopped and turned to me with a pitying look. He reached out and clumsily took my hand. “When you were a little girl …” He looked for a moment at my hand in his—my left hand, fortunately—as if wondering at its firmness or coolness or unfamiliarity. “One summer night, you were at the living room window and you kept pointing and saying something about a face outside. I ignored you as long as I could, thinking you would give it up. But you were persistent. Finally, I went to the window to look. I saw nothing but our reflections. But I took you by the hand and together we went outside. The face you saw was a balloon caught in the dogwood tree. Not a face at all. A child must have lost it.”

  Dillon was frowning hard at Dad, and my hand began to tingle. I couldn’t remember that Dad had ever taken my hand.

  “Dad!” Dillon said sharply. “There was something out there. It wasn’t her imagination. Her little girl eyes were better than yours.”

  Dad’s hand twitched in mine. “I knew you’d say something like that. But there was no face, Dillon. There was something, there may be something, but it’s got to be explainable. Something in the real world. You know what the real world is? See these rocks? You hit your head on a rock—” His face went dead as if his own echo had struck him. He let go of my hand.

  He said quietly, “I’m bringing you out here to show you it’s your imagination. There are … no … dragons.”

  WE SEARCHED FOR ABOUT HALF AN HOUR. We each went our own ways: Dad along the main quarry road, not searching at all, unless it was inside himself, the cracks and cliffs of his life without Mom and money; Dillon in the direction of Mom’s accident, where we had collected the stones; and I toward the excavation pit.

  If I were a dragon, that’s where I’d go.

  • • •

  How do you call a dragon? What kind of words do you use? Big words? Impressive words? Long words? But this wasn’t a dragon. This was Ye.

  Standing on the edge at one end of the pit, which ran like a huge deep gash as far as my eyes could see, I surveyed each hollow in the whiteness, each exposed rock, looking for any movement, even a wisp of smoke. I listened for a cough.

  “Ye!” I called. “It’s me! Kat!” My calls disappeared in the falling snow. After fixing my gaze on one big flake and following it to the ground, I realized that if Ye had left tracks they’d be covered by now.

  “Ye!” I called again as loudly as I could, and heard a responding cry.

  Dillon’s.

  It didn’t sound like a cry for help, so I lingered a long moment, feeling I should not leave. The same feeling you get when someone smiles at you and you walk on by and then wished you hadn’t.

  Ye was somewhere here. I just knew.

  Wondering what lay beneath the overhang at my feet, below the rim of the pit, I scurried away to find Dillon.

  • • •

  Dad had got there before me. They stooped in the lee of a high rock pile that ran along the quarry road, where the snow was not as thick. They were in disagreement.

  “It’s a play of light,” Dad was saying. “A leaf could have made it.”

  “A leaf?” Dillon argued. “In November?”

  “There are leaves in November.”

  Something sounded familiar about this conversation, like the one Dillon and I’d had down in Ye’s cavern, about fossilized starfish.

  I knelt to inspect the track, and a thrill jumped through me.

  “This is Ye’s,” I said. When I placed my hand in the impression without disturbing it, my hand shrank in comparison. “It’s the right size, the right shape.”

  “I looked for more,” said Dillon. “This was all I found.” He pointed the way I had come. “It’s going that direction.”

  Dad said bluntly, “I’m going that direction—to the car. I’ll give you fifteen minutes. That’s it. We’re not coming back. It’s cold.”

  “Fifteen minutes?” muttered Dillon. “In all this wildness?”

  “Fifteen minutes. Then we—”

  We heard the growl of machinery, and two earthmovers rumbled in. They were headed our way, bladed and armed to the teeth. One had a huge metal spike coming out its back like a scorpion’s sting.

  Dillon and I retreated, but Dad stood where he was as if to block them.

  “Dillon!” I said breathlessly. “This is our only chance! I want to check out something, and I need your help!”

  “Wait,” he said, staring. “Do you think they will stop?”

  “They’ll either stop or Dad will move. They wouldn’t run over Dad.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  As I led Dillon toward the pit, we both looked back. Dad still stood there, like the lone man who faced down a tank in Tiananmen Square in that famous photograph.

  “I CAN’T QUITE—” THE BLOOD WAS RUSHING to my head.

  Holding tight to my ankles, Dillon grunted and moved me forward.

  “I can see a ledge below,” I said, stretching. “But I can’t see beyond it.”

  “Kat, I’m losing grip.”

  I arched my back and squinted to my left. “Wait. I think there’s a path … or a road … it’s hard to tell.”

  Dillon pulled me back, I got up, wrapped the quilt around me, and together we slid, scuttled, and slogged our way to a gap in some snowy rocks. The ledge I’d seen was an access road angling down the side of the pit.

  Partway down was a nook, a cavity in the wall.

  “How deep is it, I wonder?” said Dillon, as we made our way there.

  “I don’t know. But it looks dragon-size.”

  We reached the cave, and I slumped in disappointment. The cave was shallow, yet roomy enough for a dragon to lie in.

  There was no dragon.

  “We just wasted our time,” said Dillon, digging snow out of his collar.

  Facing the pit and cupping my hands to my mouth, I shouted, “Ye! Where are you?”

  “Shhh, Kat! They might hear.”

  “So?”

  “They might come looking.”

  “So, what do you suggest?”

  “Well … why don’t you whistle?”

  “Whistle?”

  “Yeah. His hearing might be, you know, on another pitch.”

  “Dillon, he’s not a dog.”

  “Then I’ll whistle.” And he whistled a wobbly wretched something—something that, if anything, would have wilted Ye’s ears. But it gave me an idea.

&n
bsp; “Shush, Dillon! Let me try.”

  I’m not much of a singer, but I can carry a tune in a cup. I took a big breath, hummed a first note, and began to sing.

  O beautiful for spacious skies,

  “What!” blurted Dillon.

  For amber waves of grain,

  For purple mountain majesties

  Above the fruited plain!

  I sang the lines through into the dizzying, downward flight of white. I forgot myself as I sang, spinning the song into a wish that would bring Ye back. And a scene flashed by, like a single frame in a film, where a girl sat singing for her mother to wake up.

  When I got to the part From sea to shining sea, I heard him, like a current of air that melts into your mouth when you’re running. Ye sang along, some octaves lower, or rather, mine being some octaves too high. From the far end of the pit he came, gliding between the two slopes, up its length, bringing snow flurries in his wake.

  We scooted aside for him. The sky grew dim as he landed on the ledge. Before he tucked in his wings, I saw it.

  His tattered hole.

  “Dragons can be chameleons when we choose,” Ye said casually, draping his tail across the entrance.

  The hole in his wing was bigger than before. I’d seen a butterfly with a hole like that, after escaping from a spider’s web, only to stumble and die.

  Ye saw that I had seen it. “The ice did not help,” he said, answering my worried look. “Crystals form at high altitudes.”

  “Oh, Ye!” I breathed, and hugged his foreleg. I wanted to say so many things, like, I’ll stay with you forever, Will you ever be well again, but I said instead, “You never told me.”

  “Never told you what?”

  “Who wrote ‘America the Beautiful.’”

  “Katharine Lee Bates,” he said studiously. “After seeing the land from Pikes Peak, during the great gold rush.”

  “There’s another one, you know,” said Dillon.

  “Another what?”

  “Gold rush.”

  “I am not surprised,” said Ye, his teeth gleaming in a grimace. “There is always a rush for something.” He coughed, then he scoffed, “May God thy gold refine, indeed!”

  I was confused. “If you don’t like the song,” I said, “why do you sing it?”

  His eyes softened. “Memories. My visits with Hou and So.” He gazed at a faraway place. “And you must admit, From sea to shining sea is poetic. Especially if you have flown it with the wind in your face and in your feet and wings.”

  I said, “But Ye, the hole—”

  “—is not a problem,” he said quickly. He stretched a wing to prove it—the one without the hole.

  “You weren’t flying just then,” said Dillon. “You were gliding.”

  Ye looked at him respectfully, and with some small surprise. “I love to glide.” He said it with finality, as if to end the talk, but he added, “Time will heal it.”

  I laid my hand on his folded wing, which trembled beneath my touch. “It hasn’t yet.”

  He looked at me with sad amusement. “Is this why you have come? To scold me like a child?”

  “Oh no, Ye. I—” I wanted to say “I love you!” but that would have embarrassed us both. So I said, “Thank you for the tin.”

  He accepted this with a gentle wink.

  “How did you find me?” I asked.

  “Ah,” he said secretively. “Let us say that with the will there comes a way.” He cleared his throat. “Speaking of wills and ways—”

  “Do you hear that?” Dillon interrupted.

  “I have been hearing it,” Ye said calmly. “I have been feeling it.”

  “What?” I asked. “What?”

  Dillon turned to me. “Stay here. I’ll go distract them.” He climbed out of the cave and out of sight.

  “KATLIN, DO NOT BE AFRAID,” YE SAID soothingly.

  “OK,” I said, though I was not OK.

  “Before I was interrupted—” he said. “Twice now have I been interrupted. The first time was below Sun Mountain, when you and I last talked.”

  I knew what it was he meant, but I wanted to keep that thought buried—the thought of saying goodbye.

  “I forgot how time rushes you, Kat. Or I would have returned that day.” Ye looked at the snow collecting on his tail. He looked at me. He extended his claw as he had before.

  “Here. I have loosened it for you this time.”

  The ring.

  I didn’t want to see it.

  I didn’t want to take it.

  I didn’t want to have it.

  “Ye,” I said, my voice quivering, “I’m so happy you’re alive.”

  “The ring is yours, Kat,” he said. “And your mother’s, and her mother’s. It is nianzu.”

  “Ni—” I began to repeat, but stopped. He was drawing me in and I didn’t want to go.

  “Nianzu—something that honors your ancestors.”

  He was making this hard. I tried thinking of all the things a damsel could do for a dragon in distress, and could hardly think at all. I laid my hand on his chest. “How is your cough?”

  “The flight did it good.”

  “Really? You feel better?”

  “Good as any old dragon could feel.”

  “Are you in pain?”

  “What is pain but the anguish of truth?”

  “Oh, Ye! I don’t know what to do!”

  Gently turning his head until his eye looked into mine, until I saw my face peering into it, he spoke a word that went straight to my heart.

  “Promise.”

  I saw my eyes go wide, my face go slack. In a stunned whisper, I said, “Promise?”

  “Promise me, should you find more gold someday, you will take it and use it well.”

  “Ye!” I moaned. “I couldn’t! I can’t!”

  “Your world, the human race, spins on a golden axis.”

  “But, Ye—”

  “Promise.”

  “I promise! I’ll do anything—”

  “Open your hand.”

  I opened my hand. He touched his claw into my palm so lightly, it could have been a snowflake.

  The ring was on its tip.

  “Listen to me. There comes a time when nothing can be done. Some things cannot be controlled, no matter how strong the desire to overcome them. But fear, Kat, you can control.”

  “Do … do you know what I’m afraid of?”

  He nudged my chin with his mighty snout, and said simply, “Yes.”

  The heat trickling down my cheeks turned cold.

  “Everything dies in its time, Kat.”

  “But I don’t want you to!” I gasped. “You don’t have to!”

  “You have taught me to think of now, and now is sweet.”

  His face was a beautiful blur.

  “Take it, Kat. Close your hand.”

  “No, Ye!”

  “I must go. So must you. The pearl will not go with me.”

  I tried blinking my vision clear. “Where are you going? Someplace warm?”

  “Someplace warm.”

  “Tell me where! So I can—”

  “It is too far away, dear one. Be still. Take the ring and leave.”

  I began crying again. “Can’t I watch you go?”

  “I dislike goodbyes,” he said tenderly. “I will say good day, fare ye well.”

  “Ye!” I laughed through my tears. “The ‘ye’ should be you.”

  The smile that shimmered in his eyes I will never forget.

  I closed my hand.

  THE FOUR OF THEM WERE ON THEIR KNEES inside the abandoned building. It was Dillon and Dad against the earthmover men. They were throwing my dice. Dad had figured it out—a pile of dollar bills lay by his side.

  I stood in the broken doorway. Snow spattered the windows; snow drifted through the missing panes.

  I could have turned around and gone back to Ye. But I respected him too much for that. I respected his wish to fly away unseen. It could be he wanted to spare me fr
om seeing his damaged wing again.

  We needed to go. I was too sad to think, too dumb to speak. I turned Mom’s ring.

  I’d have to say something …

  I didn’t have to. The earthmover men were suddenly up and out the front door.

  A vehicle was entering the quarry. Two vehicles. The first was a big, gold, luxury all-terrain, the kind a commander in chief would drive. The next was a white work truck.

  The driver of the gold tank got out. It was a woman. She shouted, and the earth machines began growling.

  Dad was counting his money.

  Dillon stood gazing at me. He said, “He’s gone, isn’t he?”

  “No, he’s not. He’s waiting for us to go.”

  “Twenty-two dollars,” said Dad, his hand in his pocket and a grin on his face. “Not bad.”

  I was watching the earthmovers.

  They were moving in the wrong direction.

  THEY WERE MOVING THE WAY I HAD COME, rumbling toward the road.

  The road that went into the pit.

  “No,” I said. “They can’t.”

  Dillon understood. He looked urgently around, as if a solution would appear out of snowy air, as if he could save the day.

  Dad said, “Dillon, Kat, let’s go. We’re trespassing.” Brushing past us he headed for the car.

  “Dad. Wait. Stop,” I said.

  “Dad,” said Dillon. “We left something over there.”

  Dad stopped and frowned. “Over where?”

  “Over there. Where the dozers are going.”

  Dad studied our faces. “What did you leave? If it’s that stupid tobacco tin—”

  “No,” I said, pulling it out of my pocket. “See?”

  “What, then? It can’t be so important that—”

  “But it is!” I yelled. “I’ve got to go find it!” I turned and ran.

  I scrambled, stumbled, tripped, recovered myself, cast off my quilt, and kept running. There were shouts behind me. I did not look back.

  The earth machines flung mud and snow without a care in the world, and nothing could keep them from it. In this terrain, they made better sense than a girl of twelve wearing snow-packed shoes.

  They made better time.

  I expected Ye to take flight, to shake off this nightmarish mess. I expected to see him rise up on wings. Any minute now. No way could he fend them off. His fire would not stop them. He might not even try.