But then she’s being pulled, hauled along with enough force and urgency that she almost loses her balance to tumble head over heels off the asphalt and into a tangle of blackberry briars.
“Jesus,” the girl says, “are you simple? Are you crazy?”
Dancy looks back over her shoulder just in time to see the dragon swoop low above the road; there can be no doubt that it was coming for her.
“You saw that?” she asks, and the girl tugging her deeper into the woods replies, “Yeah, I saw it. Of course I saw it. What were you doing back there? What did you think you were doing?”
And it’s not that Dancy doesn’t have an answer for her, it’s just that there’s something in the scolding, exasperated tone of the girl’s voice that makes her feel foolish, so she doesn’t reply.
“What the sam hill were you doing out there anyway, strolling down the road with a knapsack and a knife? You a hitchhiker or some sort of hobo?”
I’m going home to see my mother.
I’m going home no more to roam.
I’m just a-going over Jordan,
I’m just a-going over home.
The girl has stopped dragging Dancy, but she hasn’t released the death grip on her wrist and is still leading her through the woods. The girl’s short hair is braided close to her scalp in neat cornrows, and her skin, thinks Dancy, is almost the same deep brown as a Hershey bar. Beads of sweat stand out on the girl’s forehead and upper lip; a bead of sweat hangs from the tip of her nose.
“I’m not a hobo,” Dancy says. “I don’t hitchhike, either. And it’s not a knapsack, it’s a duffel bag. It was my great grandfather’s duffel bag, when he fought in World War II. He fought the Germans in the Argonne Forest in 1918, and this was his duffle bag.”
They’ve come to a small clearing near a stream, a place where the trees and vines have left enough room for the sun to reach the ground. Dancy asks the girl to please let go of her, and the girl does. Once again, Dancy looks back towards the road and the dragon. There’s a mounting sense that all of this is wrong, that she hasn’t done what she was meant to do back there. She doesn’t run from the monsters; she doesn’t ever run.
The air here is hot and still. It smells like pine sap and cicadas. The air here smells hot, and Dancy imagines that, rain or no rain, one careless match would be enough to set the world on fire. She drops her heavy duffel bag onto the ground, slips the knife back into her waistband, and looks about her. “Who are you, anyway?” she asks the girl.
“Who are you?”
“I asked first,” Dancy replies.
The girl who dragged her into the forest, away from the boomerangheaded dragon, shrugs, and alright, she says, whatever. “My name’s Jezzie, Jezzie Lilligraven.”
“Jessie?”
“No, Jezzie,” says the girl. “With z’s. It’s short for Jezebel.”
Dancy turns her attention back to the clearing. There’s a big wooden packing crate near the center, and a door and window has been cut into the side facing her. The wood is emblazoned with MAYTAG, and THIS END UP, and a red arrow pointing heavenward. There’s a piece of pale blue calico cloth tacked over the window and there’s a door made from corrugated tin. There aren’t any hinges; it’s just propped in place.
“That’s sort of an odd name,” Dancy says, glancing up at the sky, because the dragon might have followed them. “Who’d name their daughter after Jezebel? She was an evil woman who worshipped Baal and persecuted the prophets of God and his people. She was thrown from a window and fed to wild dogs by Jehu for her sins. Who would name their daughter after someone like that?”
The girl stares at Dancy a moment, rolls her eyes, then heads for the wooden packing crate.
“Yeah, so what’s your name, Little Miss Sunshine, and, by the way, you’re very welcome.”
“Dancy. My name is Dancy Flammarion. And very welcome for what?”
The girl lifts the corrugated tin and sets it aside, leaning it against the outer wall of the crate. Dancy thinks it looks cool in there, within the arms of those shadows.
“Dancy Flammarion? That’s your name?”
“Yeah. So?”
The girl shakes her head and steps into the packing crate, vanishing from view. Dancy can still hear her, though.
“Just, with a name like that, I wouldn’t be ragging on anyone else’s. Ever heard of throwing rocks in glass houses?”
“It’s a town up in Greene County,” Dancy says. “My grandmother was born in Dancy, so my mother named me Dancy.”
“You gonna stand out there or what?” the girl says from inside the packing crate.
“Well, you haven’t invited me in.”
There’s a pause, and then, with an exaggerated politeness, the girl says “Dancy Flammarion, would you like to come inside?”
“Yeah,” Dancy says, checking the sky one last time.
It isn’t as cool inside the crate as she’d hoped, but it’s cooler than it had been inside the abandoned Western Railway of Alabama boxcar. There’s a threadbare rug covering the floor, a rug the color of green apples; there’s a cot set up at one end of the crate and a folding aluminum card table at the other. There’s a blue blanket at the foot bed, neatly folded, and a pillow. Books are stacked under the cot and along the walls. On the table, there’s a box of graham crackers and another box of chocolate moon pies. There are also two cans of pork and beans. Beneath the table is a styrofoam cooler and a plastic jug of water.
“You live here?” Dancy asks, eyeing the water jug, aware now just how parched her mouth and throat is.
“No,” the girl replies. “I’m not a hobo. I live down on Parish Road, close to Fort Rucker. That’s an Army base.”
“I’m not a hobo. I done told you that already.”
“Says you. You’re the one out hitchhiking with a knapsack.”
Dancy frowns and looks around the crate again.
“All these books yours?”
“Yeah,” the girl says. “They were my granddad’s, and now they’re mine. My daddy was gonna throw ’em all out, but I saved them. You can have a seat on the cot there, if your britches ain’t too wet and if they ain’t muddy.”
Dancy pats the butt of her jeans, decides they probably are too damp to be sitting on anyone’s bed, and so she settles for a place on the rug, instead.
“It’s nice in here,” Dancy says.
“Thank you,” says Jezzie Lilligraven. “This is where I come to be alone and think, to get away from my brothers and just be by myself.”
“Well, it’s nice,” Dancy says again. Then she notices something else on the floor, something else spaced out here and there along the walls of the packing crate, between the stacks of books – there are pint Mason jars and big two and three big quart jars that might once have held dill pickles or pickled eggs or pickled pig’s feet, but now they’re filled with clear liquid and dead things. Dancy looks at Jezzie and then back at the jars. The one nearest Dancy has a big king snake, black coils and links of cream-colored scales, and the one next to it holds a baby alligator.
“That’s my herpetology collection,” Jezzie says, before Dancy has a chance to ask, and then the girl picks up a yellow and pink waffle-weave dishrag and wipes the sweat off her face.
Dancy looks up at her. “Your what?” she asks.
“It’s the study of reptiles and amphibians. Herpetology.”
“You keep dead things in jars?”
“So I can study them. I caught them myself, and I used rubbing alcohol to preserve them. It ain’t so good as formalin, but where am I gonna get that?”
Dancy rubs at her eyes, which feel at least as dry as her throat.
“You want something to drink?” Jezzie asks, like maybe the girl can read her mind. “I got water, and I got water. But it’s good sweet water, right from our well.”
“Yes, please,” Dancy replies, and Jezzie opens the plastic jug and fills a jelly glass halfway full.
“Now, don’t drink it too fast,” she say
s. “You’ll get cramps. You might throw up, if you drink it too fast.”
You think I don’t know not to gulp water when I’m this hot and thirsty? she wants to say. You think I don’t know no better? But she keeps the thoughts to herself and sips the water in the jelly glass.
“I like to think one day I’m gonna go away to college,” Jezzie tells her. “I won’t, cause we don’t have the money, and my grades ain’t good enough for no scholarship. But I like to think it, anyway. I have my granddad’s books – like you’ve got your great granddad’s knapsack – and I teach myself everything I can. I don’t have to be ignorant, just cause my family can’t afford college. I might just wind up working at the Wal-Mart or my auntie’s BBQ place, but I don’t have to be ignorant.”
“Keeping snakes in jars, you think that makes you smart?” Dancy asks, and she leans a little nearer the jar with the king snake. Its dead eyes are a milky white. She sets her glass down, picks up one of the books, and she reads the cover aloud – Prehistoric Life by Percy E. Raymond, Third Printing, Harvard University Press.
See? Dancy thinks. I ain’t ignorant, neither. I can read.
“That’s one of my favorites, that one is,” Jezzie tells her. “It’s kinda outta date, cause it was published in 1950, and we know lots more now. I mean, scientists know lots more. But it’s still one of my favorites. It taught me about evolution and geologic time. My teacher wouldn’t teach that, skipped over that part of the textbook so parents wouldn’t complain about –”
“Evolution?” Dancy asks, flipping through the yellowing pages. There are photographs of fossils and dinosaurs and skeletons. “You believe in that, in evolution?”
Jezzie is silent a moment. She sits down on the floor by the table.
“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, I do. It’s science. It’s how everything alive –”
“It’s against the Bible,” Dancy interrupts, setting the book back down. “The Book of Genesis tells how the world was made.”
“In six days,” Jezzie says.
“Yes, in six days. And if that book says any different it’s against God and Jesus, and it’s blasphemous.”
Jezzie is frowning and looking at her hands. “You sound like my Daddy and Mama and the parson down at First Testament Baptist. You ever read a book like that? You ever read about Charles Darwin and natural selection? You know about Mendel and genetics?”
Dancy puts the book down and picks up her glass again. She takes another swallow, wishing the water were at least a little bit cooler.
“No. I don’t read books that go against God.”
“What you’ve got is a closed mind, Dancy Flammarion. You think you know what’s what, and so you won’t let nothin’ else in.”
“I know I didn’t come from no dirty ol’ monkey,” Dancy mutters.
“Oh, but it don’t bother you to think you came from a fistful of mud?”
Outside, the cicadas have begun singing, and it sounds to Dancy like the trees are in pain, the bugs giving voice to the aching of bark and loblolly pine needles.
Jezzie says, “And you probably think the whole wide world is only ten thousand years old. I bet that’s what you think.”
“No, I don’t know how old the world is, Jezebel” – and Dancy says her name like it’s an accusation – “but I know how long it took to make it.”
Jezzie sighs and shakes her head. “That’s just a sad thing, someone with a mind that ain’t got no room for anythin’ but what some preacher says.”
“This water ain’t sweet,” Dancy says, after she’s emptied the glass. “It’s warm, and it tastes like that plastic jug.”
Jezzie reaches over and takes the glass from Dancy. “Closed minded and ungrateful,” she sighs. “You don’t look like someone in a position to be picky about the water she’s drinking.”
“I ain’t ungrateful. But you said –”
“You want more, or is my water not good enough for a close-mind, Biblethumpin’, holy-roller hobo?”
“I’m fine, thank you,” Dancy says, though she isn’t. She could easily drink another half glass of the water. But the girl’s right. It was ungrateful, saying what she did, and she’s too ashamed to ask for more.
I shouldn’t even be here. I should be out there on the road. I don’t run. I don’t get to run.
“That thing in the sky, you seen that before?” Dancy asks.
Jezzie nods and pours more water into the glass, even though Dancy hasn’t asked for it. She sets the glass down on the rug, take it or leave it, and then she looks up at the ceiling of the packing crate.
“Yeah,” Jezzie answers, “I’ve seen it lots. People around here been seein’ it on and off since I was little. They call it a thunderbird, and a demon, but that ain’t what it is.”
“It’s a dragon,” Dancy says.
Jezzie laughs and shakes her head again. “It ain’t no damn dragon, girl. There’s no such thing as dragons.”
Dancy feels her face flush, and she wants to get up and walk out, leave this heathen girl alone with her dead snakes and Godless books. Instead, she picks up the glass and takes another sip. Instead, she asks, “Then what is it, if it ain’t no dragon? You’re so smart, Jezebel, you tell me what I saw out there.”
“Long time ago,” Jezzie says, finally taking her eyes off the ceiling of the crate. “Back about seventy million years ago –”
“The world ain’t nearly that old,” Dancy says.
“– all these parts round here were covered over by a shallow tropical ocean, like the sea down around the Florida Keys. And there were strange animals in the ocean back then, animals that went extinct, and if we were to see them today, we’d call them sea monsters – the mosasaurs, plesiosaurs, giant turtles. And in the sky –”
“But,” Dancy interrupts, “when the Flood came, Noah’s Flood, everything was under water, the whole world, for forty days and forty nights.”
“Dancy, you want to hear my answer, or you want to talk?” Jezzie asks and crosses her arms. “You asked me a question, and now I’m tryin’ to answer it.”
Dancy just shrugs and takes another sip of water. After a moment or two, Jezzie continues.
“That was during what’s called the Cretaceous Period,” she says, “because of how these shallow seas laid down layers of chalk. In Latin, chalk is creta.”
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 anymor
e, 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.
The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume Ten Page 27