by Mike Ashley
The little dragon shuddered in Ryan’s hand, breaking the spell. His mother’s face froze, then crackled into void, the shattering of ice over black water. Bill’s death seized Ryan and roughly shoved him from the haven of his home, sending him lurching forward through the gateway of the hours, bright and dark. Bill’s hand faded from ghostly essence to purest air, a cool breath across hot clay that shivered like an egg about to bring forth monsters, mysteries. Ryan’s eyelids fluttered, but when he shifted his weight again, instead of the rasp of cheap seatcovering against his jeans he heard the genteel creak of fine leather as he settled onto the green couch in Uncle Graham’s apartment.
Bill’s funeral was over. Ryan didn’t remember too much about it. Mostly he recalled the hot, angry eyes of hard-faced strangers in black. They scowled at him and Mom and Uncle Graham where the three of them stood huddled together on the far side of the open grave. He never found out who they were. The minister read through the service for the dead and Uncle Graham cried. Ryan saw one of the hot-eyed people – an old woman with blue-rinsed hair – writhe her red mouth around an ugly word before pressing a wadded lace handkerchief to her wrinkled lips and bursting into tears.
Mom drove Uncle Graham back to his place in Manhattan, a down-town loft in what had once been an old factory. It was like having one big room for everything – eating and sleeping and watching TV. The only fully cut-off spaces were the bathroom and the kitchen.
There was also a space where Uncle Graham worked, a drafting board and an easel, the floor beneath both liberally freckled with paint. Some men left Clayborn on their wits, some on their brawn. Uncle Graham had soared free of the town on dreams of fantastic beings given life by brush and pen. The loft walls were hung with Uncle Graham’s paintings, commissioned illustrations for books – wonderful, terrible, entrancing books, the kind of books that people back in Clayborn pronounced cute and bought, if they bought them at all, for their children.
The couch creaked again.
She’s making tea.
Uncle Graham’s ghost sat at the far end of the couch, head cradled back against the butter-soft upholstery, arms outflung, eyes fixed on the ceiling. He had his feet up on a coffee table that looked as if it had calved from a glacier.
“What?” Ryan’s voice barely scaled above a whisper.
“I said your mother’s in the kitchen, making tea.” And Uncle Graham was suddenly no more a ghost than the twelve-year-old self through whose eyes Ryan now saw everything.
“Oh.” Ryan rested his palms on the couch and felt perspiration seep between flesh and leather. They sat there that way for a long time. Ryan heard the shrilling of the kettle and the sound of traffic from outside and the familiar, comforting clanks and clinks of Mom fumbling about in a kitchen not her own. He knew she would sooner die than ask Uncle Graham where he kept things. Dad called it the female equivalent of how a man refuses to ask directions when he’s lost on the road.
“Ryan?” Uncle Graham’s voice came so loud, so abruptly, that Ryan jumped at the sound of his own name. “Come here, Ryan.” Uncle Graham was sitting slumped forward now, his big hands linked and dangling between his knees. Ryan hesitated, fearing the great grief he saw in his uncle’s eyes. Uncle Graham could see only that Ryan remained where he was. “Don’t worry; I won’t touch you,” he said.
Ryan did not move.
“I’m clean, you know,” Uncle Graham said. “Negative. Bill used to make fun of me, call me paranoid, but—” Some phantom sound escaped his chest, laugh or sob or cough quickly forced back down. “Anyway, like I said, I won’t touch you. I promise. Your father wouldn’t like that.”
Suddenly Ryan wore his father’s absence like horns. “Couldn’t get off work to come up here with us for the fun’ral,” he mumbled.
“Of course not.” Uncle Graham was too done out, too indifferent to challenge the lie.
Ryan . . .
Ryan saw the green glow cupped in Uncle Graham’s palm, the sheen of a perfectly applied glaze, the ripple of tiny, incised scales like feathers lying sleek on a bird’s wing. He sidled nearer on the couch, the cushions squeaking and whispering under his thighs. He craned his neck to see what wonder his uncle held out as an offering.
“It’s a dragon,” Uncle Graham said, letting the small clay figurine tumble from his palm. Ryan’s hands shot out automatically, catching it in midair. Uncle Graham laughed. “Nice fielding. You must be a star with the Little League.”
A shrug was Ryan’s answer. He was too busy rolling the dragon from hand to hand, feeling its weight, its slick finish, the cold beauty of its eyes.
“Hematite,” Uncle Graham said, pointing out the gleaming shapes like silvered almonds imbedded beneath the creature’s brow ridges. “It’s supposed to center you, keep you calm, let you see all things with tranquility.” He closed his eyes and passed one hand over his forehead, brushing away a flutter of black wings.
“It’s beautiful,” Ryan said. Here, alone with his uncle, he could say such things. At home, with Dad watching – so closely now, so carefully – he would have limited his comments to “Cool.”
“It’s yours. I made it for – I want you to have it.” He opened his eyes and managed a weak smile. “Late birthday gift. Sorry I missed it.”
“’S okay.” Ryan stroked the dragon’s back. The beast was curled in around itself as if for sleep, wings folded back, forepaws demurely resting beneath the barbelled chin. The scaly lips were closed, except where the two most prominent fangs could not possibly be contained. But the eyes were open and saw all.
“Here we are!” Mom burst from the kitchen, triumphant, an assortment of steaming mugs on the tray she carried before her. She sandwiched Ryan in between herself and Uncle Graham, weaving her own spells of strength and militant normalcy from the clatter of teaspoons and the hush of sugar crystals cascading into tea. There were even some cookies on a plate.
“Mom, look what Uncle Graham gave me,” Ryan said, holding out the dragon for inspection. “He made it himself.”
“It’s wonderful, Graham,” Mom said sincerely. “Is this something new for you? Are you branching out from painting?”
“I am definitely making some changes,” Uncle Graham said. They drank their tea. That was the last time Ryan saw his uncle alive.
That year at Christmas time Uncle Graham didn’t come to visit. He never came to visit them again. There were no letters and no telephone calls, although once, on Ryan’s thirteenth birthday, a flat, oblong package arrived for him from New York City.
It was a book, a book enclosed between boards embossed with swirling gold and silver letters that eddied over depths of royal blue and green. “In the Realm of Dragons,” he read aloud, wondering why his uncle had sent him a picture book clearly meant for little kids. Then he saw the artist’s byline and understood: Uncle Graham had done the illustrations. He let the book fall open in his lap.
Page after page of dragons mounted the purple skies of evening, beating wings of gold and green and scarlet. (“The dragon is a nocturnal beast. He loves the hours of darkness.”) Youngling dragons peeped from shattered eggshells, stripling worms engaged in mock battles to establish territory and dominion. (“The dragon when it is grown chooses its company with care.”) Maidens wreathed with flowers were led forth from villages paved with mud and manure to be offered up to the magnificent beasts, only to be spurned, or simply overlooked. (“It is a false tale that claims dragons desire the flesh of fair maidens, for what mere mortal beauty could hope to equal their own?”)
And in the end, there were the pictures of knights – so proud, so arrogant in armor – swords bloodied with the lives of dragons. Here a warrior lurked like the meanest footpad to slay a dragon when it came to drink at a twilight stream. There the severed heads of many worms dangled as obscene trophies from the rafters of a great hall where lords and ladies swilled wine and grew brutish in revelry. The unseeing eyes of the dead were mirrors that hung in silent judgment over their supposed conquerors, ea
ch silvery globe giving back an image of man to make the skin crawl and the soul weep. (“Men slay dragons because they fear them, or do not understand them, or because other men tell them that this is what men do. And some destroy them because of how they see themselves captured in the dragon’s eyes.”)
The last page was an enchantment of art. A single dragon’s eye filled it, infusing mere paper with a silver splendor reflecting Ryan’s awestruck face. The boy reached out, fingers hovering a hairsbreadth above the sheen that pulled him heartfirst into the dragon’s all-knowing gaze.
That night he dreamed dragons.
He woke into dreams, rising naked from a pool of waters silvered by twin moons burning low in a verdant sky. Drops of water fell from his wingtips, trembled at the points of his claws. Far away, over the hills where golden grasses nodded and bent beneath the wind’s kiss, came the sound of hoarse voices mangling music.
He climbed the hills, his wings dragging the ground behind him. The air was sweet, heavy as honey. He shook away the last vestiges of human thought and opened his dragon mind to a universe unfolding its most secret mysteries. That was when he knew at last that he could fly.
The air was his realm; he laid claim to it with the first surge of his emerald-keeled breastbone against the sky. Its warmth bore him up from beneath with the steady love of his father’s hands. His great head swerved slowly from left to right, his breath glittering with frost in the higher atmospheres, showering the bosom of the land with diamonds.
Below him he saw them, the villagers with their mockery of musical instruments, their faces upturned like so many oxen startled by lightning. The maiden was among them. They had dressed her in white, though even from this height he could see the thin cloth of her gown dappled brown with mud at the hem. Her arms were smooth and bare, her golden hair almost obscured by roses.
He felt hunger burn the pit of his cavernous belly. He stooped to the earth, wings artfully angled to ride the edges of only those air currents that would bring him spiraling down to his waiting prize. His mouth gaped, and licks of flame caressed his scaly cheeks like the kiss of mist off the sea.
And then air before him turned from native element and ally to enemy. The crystalline road solidified, a giant’s hands molding themselves from emptiness. He slammed into the immobile lattice of their interlaced fingers, and the impact exploded into a sheet of dazzling pain, an echoing wave of light that hurled him back down the sky, back into the waters of the lake, back into the shuddering boy’s body waking in its bed to the dark and loneliness and loss.
All that was left was a whisper: Not yet. I give you this power, but you must earn its reward.
Ryan hugged the sheet and blanket to his chest, cold with sweat, and asked the shadows for meaning. Then he became aware of something more than sweat making his pajamas cling to the skin between his legs. In silence, face burning, he stripped them off and stuffed them down the laundry chute, some part of his mind pretending that the gaping black slide into the basement would really send them falling into oblivion.
He did not like to think of the dream after that. He took the book from Uncle Graham and put it away in the attic.
The pulldown ladder to the attic’s trove of dust and willfully forgotten memory was springloaded tight. The dangling rope that raised and lowered the hatch, improperly released, closed with a bang to jerk Ryan awake in time to bark his shins against the packing-crate coffee table in a friend’s dorm room. He was waiting for someone. He had nothing to do while he waited. He glanced down at the table and picked up a magazine.
He didn’t notice that it was a gay men’s magazine at first. It was folded open to a beer ad. He picked it up out of boredom and thumbed through it out of curiosity. Uncle Graham’s name leaped to his eyes from a photo spread covering the most recent Gay Pride march in Manhattan.
It was not Uncle Graham. Not with that face paint, not with that gaunt, ferocious grin like a wolf’s skull. He wore clothing that was ill-considered plumage, meant to startle. It only put Ryan in mind of how old whores were typed in older movies: spotty, papery, raddled skin beneath the monster’s pathetic mask of carnival. Uncle Graham marched with arms around two other men, one in amateurish drag, the other sheathed in neon pink hotpants and a T-shirt cropped to leave his midriff bare. Across his forehead he had painted the letters H.I.V.
When Ryan went home for Christmas, he told Mom about the photograph. All she said was, “I know.” She showed him the letters she’d written to her brother, every one returned unopened, refused. Only once had he sent her words back accompanied by his own, a piece of lined paper torn from a spiral-bound notebook and stuffed into a manila envelope with the rejected letter. You never liked cemeteries, Chessie, it said. Why hang on the gate pretending you understand the business of the dead? You need magic to look through my eyes, and you were born fettered to the world. But there is magic, Chessie. It lives and walks at our backs, beautiful and deadly, and when it gets hungry it takes its sacrifice. If one of us had to make that payment, to have our heart betrayed, I’m glad it was me. Leave it so.
Mom asked Ryan if he remembered Bill; he nodded. “He’s trying to die,” she said. “He’s running after his own death. Even after what Bill did to him – How the hell do you argue with that kind of proof you’ve been cheated on? – even now he still loves him.” Mom sighed. “If he finds what he’s looking for, do you think he’d call to let us know? I can’t bear the thought of him dying like that, without—” She began to cry.
Her tears were for nothing and for everything.
The little clay dragon sighed in dreams, rumbled with ill-banked fires. The rumbling rose up, but by the time it reached Ryan’s ears it had become the urgent ringing of a telephone.
He was only half awake when he answered it, a towel swaddling his waist, up at a godawful-hour of the morning because he’d had to sign up for godawful-hour courses in this, his second year of study. The tooth-brush was still dripping in his hand while he heard his father’s voice telling him that Uncle Graham was dead. Uncle Graham’s head was shattered on the pavement in front of the old factory where he lived. The cops had called Mom even earlier that morning with the news. There was more that the police had told Ryan’s father because they didn’t think Mom could stand to know the other things that had been done to her brother. He shared it all willingly with Ryan because he thought his son was man enough to know, and because it was too much horror for one man to bear knowing alone.
And maybe too he shared it as a warning.
The closed casket under its blanket of roses blocked most of the aisle on the bus. Everyone from church was there, saying over and over again how talented Graham was and how wonderful his paintings were and how sad, how very sad that he was dead so young. Mrs. Baumann from the drugstore perched on the armrest of the black kid’s seat and told Mom that at least Graham was at peace now. Comfort cloyed the air worse than the mingled reek of all the flower arrangements people had sent. Everyone was there, saying all the right things, leaving all mention of murder outside, with the dogs.
The black kid finally managed to jimmy the window enough so that it dragged in its track but slid open. The inrush of fresh air blew away Mrs. Baumann, the roses, the closed black box, blew Ryan all the way back into his old bed at home, the night after the funeral.
He lay there unsleeping, painting the ceiling with endless fantasies of should-have-told-thems. Drowsing at last, he rolled over onto his side and felt something jab him in the hip. He reached between the mattress and the box spring and pulled out Uncle Graham’s book.
“I thought I put this away, up in the attic,” he said aloud. The silver and gold letters on the cover glowed with their own light. Ryan licked his lips and tasted lake water. He opened the book and read it again, after all the years.
There was a page he found that might have slipped from memory, if memory could ever lose hold of images that clamored to be recalled. Two young men – squires, not knights – laid up a snare of marvelous cu
nning and cruelty outside a dragon’s vine-hung lair. One peered from ambush, knotted club in hand, while the other stood at the cave mouth holding out a sapphire of untellable purity and fire. He was fair, the one who played the lure, his eyes the rival of the sapphire meant to cozen the venerable worm from sanctuary. Already a single green-scaled paw crept into the dappled sunlight. The lure smiled, cold and exquisite as a lord of elven. Behind a fall of rocks, his confederate readied the dragon’s death.
Both their faces were plain to see. Not a line could be forgotten. Ryan closed his eyes, and still their faces were outlined against his sightlessness as if with wires burning white-hot. He threw the book across the room and bolted for his bedroom door.
He stepped from bare wood onto naked air. His wings snapped open without the need for any conscious command to reach them. His head-long fall became a naturally graceful glide that carried him down, down to the vast sea of forest and the piteous, defiant roars of a dying dragon and the face of a maiden, lovelier than any girl he had ever known, wreathed with roses.
I give you this power, but you must earn its reward.
He awoke knowing what he must do.
He awoke half choked by the stink of exhaust fumes as the bus pulled into the Port Authority terminal in New York.
Ryan did not have enough money for a cab so he took the bus down-town. He got off at the wrong stop, got lost, wandered in sullen pilgrimage through streets where crumpled newspapers blew like tumbleweeds. Finally he broke down and asked directions.
It was sunset when he found Uncle Graham’s address. A flimsy strip of black-and-yellow tape flapped wearily from the hinges of the big entry door to Uncle Graham’s building. Ryan’s taloned paws moved grandly, daintily overstepping the dull red-brown stains spattering the threshold and the sidewalk before it. Silence sang a hymn of welcome as he entered the loft, the last of the sunlight adding its own wash of color to the row of paintings Uncle Graham had left behind.
The girl from upstairs came down to see what was going on, alerted by the noise of a slamming door. Ryan told her, “I’m here to dispose of my uncle’s things.” He showed her the key and told her enough about Uncle Graham to convince her of his legitimate right to be there.
