Ryan watched, fascinated. Whatever Mom had said about Uncle Graham’s way of life, the reality was infinitely stranger. He sat on the floor, like Uncle Graham and Bill, and felt as if he were peering through an overgrowth of jungle vines at bizarre creatures never before seen by the eyes of civilized man. Bill’s low laugh sent peculiar chills coursing over Ryan’s bones. His mind blew a glass bell jar over Uncle Graham’s lover and held him there, safely sealed away for observation.
Outside there was snow, crusted over, hugging blue shadows to every curve of the slumbering land. It threw back the brilliant sunlight in harsh assaults of dazzling whiteness. Ryan sat at his father’s feet and looked up to see a taut jawline, a gaze fixed and fastened on Uncle Graham and Bill. Ryan felt his father’s hands come to rest on his shoulders many times that morning—more times than felt right, when right means usual. The sunlight struck a wall of darkness cast by the shadow of the wings that Ryan’s father called up out of empty air to mantle over his son. This is mine; you won’t touch him hung across the room like a fortified castle wall that Ryan’s father made and maintained and walked guard on from that moment until the day Uncle Graham and his lover left to go back to the city.
Ryan’s father was not invisible and Uncle Graham was not blind.
There were no letters from Uncle Graham the rest of the winter, no calls, no more news than if New York were really a cloud kingdom full of so many sweet, glorious pastimes and amusements that the souls lucky enough to live there lost all track of time as it was reckoned on the earth. No one said anything, not even when Ryan’s birthday came and went without a card from Uncle Graham, without a word.
And then, in late November, the telephone shrilled. Ryan answered. “Hello?”
“Chessie?” The voice was broken, shattered, and around the shards it sobbed the nickname Uncle Graham had always used for his beloved sister.
“Uncle Graham?” Ryan’s cheeks flamed. His voice was changing. It was a sharp humiliation every time someone mistook him for his mother on the telephone. “It’s me, Ryan.”
“For God’s sakes, Ryan, get your mom!” Uncle Graham’s words stumbled through tears, his breath rags of sound torn out of his chest.
“What’s the matter?”
“Just get her. Please.”
So Ryan did as he was told, and when his mother got over the surprise of hearing from her brother after so long, there was worse to come. “How are you?” was slashed off into, “Oh, my God! Oh, Graham, I’m so sorry! When did he—?”
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 downtown 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 he.
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.”