Sweat rolls down Dancy’s forehead and into the corner of her left eye. It stings.
“I asked you about the dragon,” she says, squinting, “not for a Latin lesson. And chalk doesn’t come from the sea.”
“Have you ever even seen the inside of schoolhouse?”
Dancy rubs her eye, then stops and stares at Jezzie. The girl’s glaring back at her. She has the look of someone whose accustomed to being patient, the look of someone who frequently suffers fools, even though she isn’t very good at it. It’s a very adult look, and it makes Dancy wish she’d never stepped inside the packing crate.
“In the sky,” Jezzie says again, “there were animals called pterosaurs, huge flying reptiles, and if you were to run into one today – which you did – yeah, you’d likely call it a dragon.” Then she takes the copy of Prehistoric Life, opens it, and thumbs through the pages. She quickly finds what she’s looking for, then turns the book around so Dancy cans see, too. On Page 169, there’s a drawing of a skeleton, the skeleton of a boomerang-headed monster. The skeleton of Dancy’s dragon.
“I’m not in any sorta mood to sit here and argue about scripture and science with you, Dancy Flammarion. But you asked a question, and I answered it as best I can.”
Dancy takes the book from her and sits studying the drawing.
“‘Skeleton of Puhteranodon,’” she reads.
“No. You don’t say the ‘P,’” Jezzie tells her. “The ‘P’ is silent.”
Sweat drips from Dancy’s bangs and spatters the page. “How?” she asks.
“How what?”
“How if these things were around so long ago, and they ain’t around anymore, did one try to eat me not even half an hour ago? You know all this stuff, then you explain, Jezebel, how is it that happened?”
“I don’t know,” Jezzie admits. She leans back against the cot and wipes her face with the dishrag again. “I heard some people say it’s the Devil, and that he’s haunting us cause of wicked things people do. Others say it’s some kind of Indian god the Muskogee Creek used to pray to and make human sacrifices to. The guy runs the Winn-Dixie, he says it came outta a UFO from outer space.”
“But you don’t think any of that’s true.”
Jezzie frowns. She shrugs and takes the book back from Dancy. “No, I don’t suppose I do. It’s all just superstition and tall tales, that’s all it is.”
“So...?”
“You askin’ me what I believe instead? I thought the stuff I believe is against God, and you don’t want to hear my blasphemin’ nonsense.”
“It’s really hot in here,” Dancy says, changing the subject. “I sat out the thunderstorm this morning in an old railroad car, and this place might even be as hot as that.”
“You get used to it. Where you from, anyway?”
Dancy glances out the bright rectangular space leading back to the August day.
“Down near Milligan, Florida,” she says, “Place called Shrove Wood. It’s in Okaloosa County. You won’t have heard of it. No one’s heard of Shrove Wood. But that’s where I grew up, near Wampee Creek.”
“You get homesick?”
Now it’s Dancy’s turn to shrug. The cicadas are so loud she imagines that sound shattering the sky, and she imagines, too, the chunks of sky falling down and bleeding blue all over the earth. She thinks about the cabin off Elenore Road that she shared with her grandmother and mother, until the fire. The house where she was born and raised.
“Sometimes I do,” she says.
“What you doin’ out here on the road, then? Why ain’t you back home with your people? You a runway?”
And Dancy almost tells her about the seraph, almost says, My angel, that’s why. She almost tells the girl about the monsters, all the monsters before the dragon and all the monsters still to come, if the seraph is to be believed, and who in their right mind’s gonna say an angel’s a liar? She’s pretty sure even Jezebel wouldn’t say that. She might be a heathen who’s been led astray from the Word of God by evil books, but Dancy doesn’t think she’s crazy.
“I ain’t no runaway. I didn’t have nothin’ to run away from.”
Which, she knows, isn’t exactly true.
“So, where you headed?”
Dancy doesn’t answer that. Instead, she asks, “If you don’t think all those other people are right about what the dragon is, and you think it’s one of them pterosaurs, then you must have an opinion about how it’s here.”
Jezzie fidgets with the laces of her sneakers.
“I got this notion,” she says, “but it doesn’t make much sense. I mean, I don’t think it’s very scientific. I try to be scientific, when I believe something.”
The cicadas are so loud, Dancy wants to cover her ears.
“Okay, so,” Jezzie says, the book in her lap, the waffle-weave dishrag on the rug next to her, “I’ll tell you what I think. But we ain’t gonna argue about it. I ain’t asking you to believe any of it. I know you won’t, but if I tell you, you don’t get to tell me I’m goin’ to Hell just for thinking it.”
“You don’t even believe in Hell.”
“You don’t know that, Dancy Flammarion. You don’t know me.”
“Fine,” Dancy mutters and takes her eyes off the open door. Orange-white after images dance like ghosts about the inside of the packing crate.
“At the end of the Cretaceous Period, something really bad happened. An asteroid – which is like a meteorite, only a lot bigger – it smashed into the Earth, came down right in the Gulf of Mexico, not even so far from here. And it was a gigantic asteroid, maybe big as New York City –”
“You ever been to New York City?”
“No, but that ain’t the point. This asteroid was enormous, and when it hit, the energy released by the explosion was something like two million times more than the largest atomic bomb ever built. You just think of that much energy. You can’t even, not really. But it almost wiped out everything alive, killed off all those sea monsters and the dinosaurs – and the pterosaurs. And maybe it did something else.”
“Did something else like what?”
“Maybe it was so big an explosion, down there in Yucatan –”
“Where?”
“Yucatan, Mexico.”
“But you just said this happened in the Gulf of Mexico.”
“You know why it’s called the Gulf of Mexico?” Jezzie asks, and Dancy doesn’t know, so she shuts up. “But here’s what I think,” Jezzie goes on. “Maybe that explosion was so big it ripped a hole in time. A wormhole or tesseract. And that’s how the pterosaur gets through. It’s interdimensional or something. It ain’t supposed to be here, and it’s probably confused as all get out, but here it is anyway, because it flew right through that rip in time, maybe at the very instant of the impact, before the blast wave and firestorms and tsunamis got it.
“And, shit, maybe it ain’t nothin’ more than an echo, a ghost.”
For an almost a full minute, neither of them says anything. Finally, Dancy breaks the awkward silence hanging between them.
“You’re really just making all this up,” she says.
Jezzie frowns again. “I warned you it wasn’t very scientific.”
And then the throbbing cicada shriek is pierced by the scream Dancy heard back on the road, the cry of the dragon that Jezzie insists isn’t a dragon at all. Instinctively, Dancy ducks her head and reaches for her knife; she notices that Jezzie ducks, as well. They both sit staring at the ceiling of the packing crate, tense as barbed wire.
“That was right overhead,” Dancy whispers. “Does it do that? Does it follow you back here?”