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 toothbrush 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 hved. 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 cunning 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 headlong 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 downtown. 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.
She shrugged, thin shoulders sheathed in stretch jersey glimpsed through thin brown hair. “Save it, okay? I couldn’t tell if you’re making it up or not anyway. I hardly knew anything about the guy. I mean, sure, I knew he was, hke, gay, and he painted. I was scared for awhile after he got killed, but—”
“I really am his nephew,” Ryan insisted, clutching the doorpost until he imagined he must have driven his talons inches deep into the wood.
“Hey, no argument. You got the key.” Another shrug, welcoming him to help himself to the apartment and all found so long as he did not trespass on her well cultivated indifference.
She wasn’t pretty. She was what the fashion world would call a waif. Ryan was more attracted to girls whose breasts were larger than orange pips. Still he invited her in. At first she declined, but she called herself an artist too. She had never had the chance to study Uncle Graham’s work up close before. She might have come downstairs anytime while Uncle Graham was still alive and asked to see his paintings; she never did. She admitted to Ryan that the idea had never crossed her mind.
“Why not?” he asked.
Again that shifting of the shoulders to let a person slide safely out from beneath uncomfortable questions. “I didn’t want to intrude. I thought, you know, what if he’s got someone over?”
He found tea to serve her. She drank in short, dull slurps, her eyes forever darting sideways to keep him under surveillance. She wasn’t pretty and she wasn’t his type and he wasn’t attracted to her at all.
What’samatter, Lundberg, doncha like girls?
He gave her all the charm he had, the way he’d done with Karen Pitt, the way he’d perfected with all the college girls he’d ever sweet-talked into bed, the way that proved to everyone who never asked for proof that he wasn’t like his uncle. Before she left, he got to kiss her and buy back his peace.
Uncle Graham’s bed was made of pale pine with a bowed headboard, the kind you order from L.L. Bean catalogs. One of great-grandma Ruth’s handsewn quilts lay across it, a bearpaw design in red and blue. Ryan lay down on the bed, quilt and all, fully clothed, and rested the little clay dragon on his chest. He gazed into its silvery eyes until he felt the lake waters rolling off his flanks and the alien moons of the dragons’ realm welcomed him home.