Jezzie slowly shakes her head. “Never has before.”
It didn’t follow her, Dancy thinks. It followed me.
And then she sees what’s in Jezzie’s right hand, an old Colt revolver like the one her grandmother kept around to shoot rattlesnakes.
“You know how to use that?” Dancy asks her, as Jezzie thumbs back the hammer. And the sound of the hammer locking into place is so loud that Dancy realizes the bugs in the trees have gone quiet.
“Wouldn’t be holding it like this if I didn’t.”
“Well, how about put it away,” Dancy tells her. “I don’t like guns.”
Again, Jezzie shakes her head, and she keeps her finger on the trigger of the cocked revolver.
“You never did answer my question,” she says. “What you doin’ out here, if you ain’t a runaway and you ain’t a hobo?”
The day has grown so still and silent that Dancy thinks she can almost hear the blood flowing through her veins, can almost hear the grubs and earthworms plowing through the soil beneath the crate. She hasn’t yet drawn her knife, but her hand’s still on the handle, the carved antler cool and smooth against her perspiring palm. She’s been meaning to find some leather to wrap around the handle, because sweat and blood make it slippery, but she hasn’t gotten around to it.
“I’m goin’ someplace,” she tells the girl.
“Yeah, and just where might that be, Dancy Flammarion?”
“I don’t know yet,” Dancy replies. She didn’t even have to think about the answer. Unlike most things, it’s simple and true.
“I sorta had a feeling you were gonna say something like that.”
“I guess I’ll know when I get there,” Dancy says. “You reckon that thing’s still out there? You reckon it’s flying around right over our heads?”
“How the hell am I supposed to know?” Jezzie asks and frowns.
“Well, you say you know it ain’t no dragon, so I thought maybe –”
“Then you thought wrong.”
The silence is broken then by the sound of enormous wings, slowly rising and falling, beating at the sky, and both girls hold their breath as the flapping grows farther and farther away, finally fading into the distance.
Softened almost into melody, Dancy thinks, remembering a line from a book her mother once read her about monsters from Mars trying to take over the world. But God sent germs to stop them.
... slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were unprepared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.
And what’s the pterosaur, if she’s right, but another sort of invader, maybe not from another planet, but from another time, and what’s the difference? Something evil that should have died in the Flood, when God – in his wisdom – wiped so much evil off the face of Creation.
“Thanks for the water,” Dancy says, and she gets to her feet, finally releasing her hold on the handle of the big Bowie knife.
“You ain’t goin’ back out there,” Jezzie says, still whispering. It’s not a question.
“You said it ain’t never come out here before. That’s cause it’s here for me, Jezebel, not for you. It’s my dragon to fight, not yours.”
“You’re really crazy as a damn betsy bug, you know that?”
All men are mad in some way or the other, and inasmuch as you deal discreetly with your madmen, so deal with God’s madmen...
... so deal with God’s madmen...
Dancy’s mother read her so many books, before the demons finally came for Julia Flammarion, and so many of the books had monsters in them. She sometimes imagines that her mother knew the seraph was coming, so she was preparing her daughter.
“I ain’t lettin’ you go out there,” Jezzie says again, a little louder than before.
“This is what I do, Jezebel,” Dancy replies. “I fight dragons.”
Jezebel very slowly eases her thumb off the hammer, decocking the gun.
“It ain’t a dragon. It’s just an animal.”
“Thank you for the water,” Dancys says again, shouldering her duffel bag.
“If you’ll just wait a few hours, it goes away at night. You could wait here with me, and I could read to you, or I could tell you about the big ol’ alligator snapper I found last summer down at Chatham Bend. Or I could tell you more about the chalk seas. I’ve hardly told you anything about the animals. Did you know, they found a dinosaur up at Selma, back in the 1940s? An actual dinosaur. It was a new kind of duck bill. Then they found another one, related to Tyrannosaurus, at –”
“I’ve already stayed too long,” Dancy says, interrupting her. “You never should have brought me here. All that’s done is put you in danger.”
“Jesus,” Jezzie whispers, staring at the gun in her hands. “You really goin’ out there, ain’t you?”
“Don’t you blaspheme,” Dancy says. “Bad enough you believe all this evolution claptrap, without you gotta also take the Lord’s name in vain.
But, truth be told, all Dancy wants to do is sit in the packing crate with this strange, Godless girl, sipping warm water that tastes like a plastic jug and maybe eating some of those graham crackers and pork and beans. She can’t even remember the last time she had a graham cracker. She remembers how they taste smeared with muscadine and blackberry preserves, and her mouth fills with saliva.
“Then here,” says Jezzie, “you take this,” and she offers Dancy the water jug. Dancy doesn’t turn it down. She almost asks for some of the crackers, too, but that would be rude, asking more when you’ve just been given such a gift. “You won’t need it?” she asks.
“Nah, it ain’t that far back home. And here,” says Jezzie, “you take this, too. You need it more’n me.” And she holds the revolver out to Dancy. The barrel and the cylinder glint faintly in the dim light inside the packing crate.
“How old is that thing anyway?” Dancy asks. “Looks like it could’a been used in the Civil War, it looks so old. Gun that old, it’s liable to blow up in your hands.”
Jezzie shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says. “It was my uncle’s. But I don’t know how old it is. But here, you take it. It’s loaded. Six shots, but I ain’t got no extra bullets.”
“I don’t like guns,” Dancy says again. “You keep it. I got my knife.”
And ain’t that how you slay dragons, with sharp blades? Ain’t my knife as good as any sword ever was?
“Dancy, if you’ll just wait until nightfall –”
“Thank you for the water,” Dancy says for the third time. “That’s what I most need, it’s so hot today.”
“What you most need is some goddamn common sense.”
Dancy almost tells her, again, not to take the Lord’s name in vain, but what’s the point. Ain’t no saving this girl, seduced as she is by atheists and evolutionists.
Just be wasting my breath, that’s all.
“It was nice meeting you, Jezebel Lilligraven,” Dancy says, even if she’s not quite sure that’s true.
“Just be careful,” Jezzie says.
And then Dancy steps out into the sunlight, hardly any less bright or scorching than when she stepped inside the crate, at least an hour before. She looks up at the indifferent sky above the clearing, half expecting to see the dragon, but there’s only the white eye of Heaven gazing back down at her. It can’t be later than three o’clock, she thinks. Still hours and hours left until dusk.