by Eoin Colfer
Which was not what he would have led with in normal circumstances, but luckily for him Elodie caught sight of his bloated hand and knew exactly what was going on. She helped the constable inside the stilt house, getting herself covered in mud in the process.
“Dear Lord, Constable,” she said, “ain’t you right in the head? Walking around bitten like that?”
“Bit,” agreed Hooke, tumbling into the room’s single armchair. “Snake-bit.”
Something thumped in the back room.
“Thump,” said Hooke. “Thump?”
Elodie wrestled with Hooke’s feet, elevating them onto a coffee table. “That’s Everett falling outta bed. He’s wrestling a gator or something in his sleep.”
Everett? thought Hooke. Squib?
And there was something that nagged at him about the boy, but he couldn’t be thinking about that right now because right now the nightmares were coming to him through a tunnel which had opened in the ceiling. In the nightmares his father was wielding a fiery crucifix like a hypodermic and saying, I just gotta administer an antivenom. This will get rid of all the poison inside you.
And Hooke thought, You’re gonna need a bigger crucifix.
VERN TOOK TO the skies, which he rarely did these days because of the prying humans and their surveillance. Those earthbound assholes had managed to all but extinctify dragons back in the day with nothing but crossbows and malignant intent, so Vern had no illusions about just how quickly they could finish the job if given a clean shot. In point of fact, with all the technology humans had nowadays, a clean shot wasn’t even necessary. All Captain Jarhead needed was one second to tag him with a laser; then a surface-to-air missile would chase him around corners forever and a day.
Well, swim then, Highfire. Keep yourself hidden.
No, you ain’t got time for swimming. Times is flying, and so must you.
So Vern did not relish flying as much as he used to, especially at dawn, because a dragon never knew when a warhead was gonna bury itself where the sun don’t shine, and Vern had no doubt that he would not survive that detonation.
Hell, I probably wouldn’t survive a decent-sized armor-piercing round, he thought gloomily.
Still, on a positive note, the sunrise-tinted water did remind him of the time he’d rammed that Confederate submarine. The water had run red that evening.
Happy days, thought Vern now, and spread his wings wide to catch the thermals.
It was a catch-22-type situation: spread the wings and make a bigger target, or flap more and make a louder one. Vern usually opted to glide. A nice glide had a certain dignity about it, and a fella could pretend he was still Lord Highfire surveying his domain.
He followed the river’s lazy meander toward the nearest settlement, Petit Bateau, and soon spotted the foam ribbons of a settling wake. The ribbons led to a hook of switchback, with a little pirogue docked up, still waddling from a fresh disembarkation.
That is quite possibly my boy, thought Vern.
This was about the best result he could have hoped for. Young Squib had the decency to bunk waterside, so the dragon could pluck out this human thorn himself. Any farther inland and he would have had to ask Waxman to make the problem go away, and Waxman had qualms about certain things. Especially kids.
“You’re so in love with humans, you should go marry one,” Vern had told him once, many years ago.
“I did,” was Waxman’s response to that. “Twice. First one was an angel, but the second nearly done me in. Brazilian, very fiery, no offense.”
But out here on the levee, Waxman’s talents would not be called for. That creepy Gladstone bag of his could stay under the floorboards. That bag sure did make an ominous clanking when Waxman hefted it. Even made an old hand like Vern squirm a little.
So, let us see what we can see, Highfire, Vern thought to himself, shifting his haunches forward and wrapping his wings above him in a funnel-type arrangement so he dropped down like he was on a zip line.
If this was indeed the boy’s regular crib, then Vern could simply spirit him away and that would be an end to it. He would still need to keep an eye open in the swamp, see if the explosions would draw a torch-wielding mob or the modern equivalent.
Torch-wielding? thought Vern. I am almost nostalgic for that shit.
No one had the need for torches anymore. Even your basic hillbilly had a set of night-vision goggles in the trunk to go with their constitutional semiautomatic weapon.
Was a time only a talented and determined bunch of humans could take down a dragon. Now any fool with the right load can do it.
Vern touched down on an iron railing, probably originally V-shaped and salvaged from the prow of a fishing boat but now hammered into a right angle to fit the deck. He gave it maybe half his weight, but kept a thrum going with his wings in case rapid liftoff was needed.
And holy crap, if the window wasn’t open: nothing but a bug screen between him and the boy in his bed.
Dragons have the best night vision on earth, and so Vern could easily see that this boy was his boy.
I spy you, Nine Fingers, he thought, and you ain’t sleeping none. Straight into bed and still muck to the eyeballs. Something tells me this slippery character wasn’t supposed to be out screwing around in the swamp.
Vern noticed an orange butane tank on the deck. Looked like it came off the Titanic, old as it was, paint flaked down to the metal and a foot of rubber hose poking out the top.
Like a fuse, thought Vern.
More than likely the tank was empty years since, but if that was where a local fire officer figured the epicenter to be, then that was it, case closed.
Perhaps a fire was cleaner than abduction.
No trace evidence to analyze.
No search party on the river.
Collateral damage, maybe. But Vern’s entire species had been collateral damage as far as he was concerned.
Sorry, kid, he thought for the second time that night, and cracked open his jaws. The glands at the back of his throat spurted sulfur oil onto his molars, and he ignited the oil with a gnash which gave him his pilot light.
Vern drew breath to let fly, but it seemed like this kid Squib was blessed by the gods or some such voodoo because at that moment an ambulance surged into view over the verge maybe half a mile down the shoreline, siren shrieking and dome light flashing. Goddamn siren was so loud Vern couldn’t even hear the engine.
“Well, ain’t this a ding-dong dell?” whispered Vern, which was a twee old saying that he rarely employed in company. Waxman had heard it one time and near to split his corduroy vest with laughing.
“‘Ding-dong dell’? Shit, Vern! We ain’t graduating from finishing school.”
Nevertheless, the saying slotted into this situation neat as pie. “Ding-dong dell,” meaning unexpected commotion, which this approaching ambulance certainly was.
“Balls,” said Vern. “Balls and double balls.”
“Balls and double balls” being a more modern saying.
He hated unfinished business, but that ambulance was bringing more eyeballs than he cared to be looking his way, and the sun was making real strides now against the shadows.
Time to be away, Highfire, he told himself when the ambulance screamed down Squib’s lane.
But first he would mark the house for Waxman. It looked like that creepy old bag would be needed after all.
Vern sucked his thumb for a minute, breathing flame on the claw; then he carved a letter into the metal railing with his nail.
V.
Mark of the dragon.
Sorta like the opposite of lamb’s blood in the Old Testament.
Everyone in this dwelling dies.
“Later, Squib,” he said and launched himself backwards into the river.
Better to swim home.
SQUIB WAS LYING in bed waiting to be killed when a breeze flapped the fly screen and he saw the dragon crouched on the railing, eyes like a cat in the headlights: not angry, exactly. Thoughtful.
Oh,
fuck, I’m an ant to him, Squib thought, closing his eyes against the boogeyman, like a kid, like a child. Oh Jesus Lord, help me.
Like Jesus would give a shit about a slacker like him.
He opened his eyes when he heard the ambulance and was just in time to see Vern do a backflip with a twist into the water. There was hardly a splash. A very clean entry.
Eight point five, thought Squib, and perhaps more pertinently, He knows where I live. And Momma, too.
Squib was marked and he knew it.
I gotta sort this out, he thought. I gotta get out from under that dragon.
Which is not a problem most people have to solve in their lifetimes. In general, most folk who get to meet a dragon only get to think about it that one time for about five seconds.
Chapter 6
SQUIB WOULD HAVE LIKED TO GET ON THE DRAGON SITUATION ASAFP, but there were things to do. Things like cleaning himself up till he was the squeaky-clean epitome of innocence in five-foot-five Cajun form. Things like destroying all evidence of his involvement in the dragon situation, which was an add-on to the first thing, really. And in this respect Squib caught a break, as the whole Hooke-collapsing-on-the-premises episode had more or less trashed the stilt house’s main area. The constable had been all wheeling and splattering, distributing more mess than a group of finger-painting toddlers on a Skittles sugar high.
His momma had ridden with Hooke to the clinic, pausing just long enough for a cursory check on Squib.
“Goddamn that constable,” she whispered at Squib, who was probably in shock, which passably approximated just-woken-up wooziness. “That man is a plague on the parish. I’m no sooner out of that damn place than I gotta go back in again. I’m still in my scrubs. You get some breakfast in the Pearl, okay, cher?”
Squib had mumbled, “Okay, Momma,” and put his head back down like, Here I go off to sleep again like I been doing all night.
But no sooner had the paramedics stretchered Hooke off the Moreau stoop than Squib was up and pacing.
Could be that the dragon wasn’t done with him for the day.
Could be he’d come back and torch the whole place with him inside it.
Squib couldn’t help thinking that he kinda-sorta woulda deserved that. He’d been sticking his oar into other people’s creeks for so long now that he was due some kind of payback. The universe, you know? A person keeps waggling his ass at a shark, then someday that shark’s gonna bite. Especially if the shark’s a dragon.
But not Momma. Momma’s good people. The best. All she does is look out for me. I’m the one waggling my ass.
Miss Ingram would call that a metaphor, he said to himself.
Squib was almost overcome with an adolescent desire to text Charles Jr. over in Riverview Trailers, but he decided that the best thing to do was keep the circle small. The less people who knew, the less people were gonna get hurt.
Should he tell the police?
Oh, sure. Tell ’em that Constable Hooke slit a smuggler’s throat, and then his face got torn off by a flying turtle, shortly after which I was abducted by a gator-overlord dragon.
Even if he bypassed the constable’s office and went direct to the sheriff in St. Tammany, who were they gonna call?
Ghostbusters?
No, sir.
Regence goddamn Hooke, that’s who.
No, Squib, son. Keep this nightmare to your own self. Hooke don’t know shit and Vern can be figured out.
Before nightfall, though.
Squib knew that scaly critter was gonna drag his ass back upriver come dusk to finish what he started.
But Problemo A: clean up the swamp mess, which might take his mind off Problemo B: avoid being a dragon’s dinner.
Squib switched on the boiler and, while he waited on the hot tank, stripped off his own crusted duds and the bedclothes, too, and balled up the whole lot into a trash bag, along with the woven chair cover Hooke had messed all over and the rug the constable had a shit fit on.
He tossed the sack on the porch, then made a decent try at swabbing the Moreau shack down. After that he patted the boiler to test for heat, then showered his own self in the bath stall.
As he scrubbed the bilge from his crannies, he thought on the whole dragon predicament, pinching his flesh from time to time to remind himself that Vern was real and on the hunt. It would be all too easy in the light of day, and in something of a daze, to believe the monster nothing more than a nightmarish figment, but Squib was determined to figure a solution before sunset brought a fiery reckoning.
Waxman had once advised Squib to keep moving, for that’s when answers presented themselves: i.e., when the mind was active.
“Them idlers staring outta windows is just staring outta windows. They ain’t solving shit,” he’d said.
Keep on keeping on, thought Squib. Get the cogs turning.
So he shrugged himself into his second set of clothes, which was jeans and a cut-off black T-shirt, and, throwing his sack of sodden articles over one shoulder, headed off to the Pearl Bar and Grill.
SQUIB MADE THE short hike to the Pearl in less than ten minutes. The entire township of Petit Bateau boasted barely more than five hundred residences, not counting the various shotgun shacks, trailers, and houseboats dotted around the limits like scattered seed. And fully one-fifth of those residences were boarded up. Currently the mayor was lobbying for a name change, as it had long been a source of embarrassment for the townsfolk that the name “Petit Bateau” had risqué connotations, i.e., “petit bateau de pêches,” that being old-timey slang for cooter.
In truth, the town was less of a town and more of a village, and less a village and more of a collection of services sprung up around a landing on the West Pearl River, just off the interstate. Didn’t even have its own ramp, just a two-mile-long service road leading right down through the cypress swamp to the riverside.
Bodi Irwin was the town’s lifeblood: a benevolent mogul who somehow managed to run Petit Bateau’s bar, boatyard, swamp tours, and shooting range. The campsite was presided over by his sister Eleanora, and he employed most of the town, even attracting labor out from the city at the height of tourist season.
Squib could have made the journey in five minutes easy, as he usually walked double time, eager to make a dollar one way or another, but today, post-dragon-encounter, he took himself round back of the trio of Creole cottages that served as town hall, constable’s office, and car lot, just in case Hooke had somehow crawled out of his hospital bed and was spying through the slats of his office blinds, watching out for some kid with a bag of swamp laundry.
Also, Squib wanted to make a silent entry via the Pearl’s back door so he could load up the bar’s industrial washing machine, and maybe grab himself a grilled cheese with hot sauce before Bodi noticed he was present and correct.
He was two bites into the sandwich when Bodi appeared in the kitchen doorway, looking like a refugee from a Grateful Dead tribute act, long graying hair tied up in a Stars and Stripes bandanna.
“How you eat that shit I don’t know, son,” said Bodi. “That hot sauce will tear the lining right out of your stomach, and that amount of cheese will back up your plumbing big time.”
“Thanks, Mister Irwin,” said Squib. “Appreciate the culinary advice.”
Bodi snorted. “Culinary, my ass. We don’t do culinary here, boy. We do whatever the tourists want. Gumbo, crawfish, po’boys. Four different kinds of fries. Chicken wings at a push. Ain’t no ‘culinary’ on the menu.”
Squib crammed a triangle of grilled cheese into his mouth. “Whatever you say, Mister Irwin. What you got on the list for me?” Thinking, Don’t send me out on the river, not today.
And it was like Bodi reached into his mind and plucked out the thought.
“Today,” said the bar owner, “I got to send you out on the river. Waxman’s vodka came in, and you gotta run a crate down to him.”
And what had been fresh bread in Squib’s mouth tasted suddenly like swamp sludge.
“Take thirty,” said Bodi. “First run a rinse cycle on my machine, clean out all that shit you left in the drum.”
“That was Constable Hooke made the mess,” said Squib. “He showed up this morning snake-bit. Momma rode with him to Slidell.”
“I heard,” said Bodi. “Your momma done more than I would have. All we can pray for is that no-account asshole don’t make it till nightfall.”
“Amen,” said Squib, with feeling.
VERN SWAM DIRECTLY from Petit Bateau, or specifically the Moreau landing, to Waxman’s houseboat on the east side of the West Pearl, maybe a mile diagonally across the river. The houseboat was of the shotgun variety, and sat ten feet wide, set half in the river on cypress stumps. The houseboat must have been something other than swamp-colored at some point in its history, but now looked like it had been camouflaged by experts, when in fact it was simply assimilated. Vern often commented that it looked like “the goddamn Borg gotta hold of this craft,” to which Waxman always responded, “The goddamn who you say?”
Waxman didn’t appreciate modern media as much as Vern. He was more of a reader.
“I just lolls around,” he’d say. “Toot some weed, then see what the fuckin’ demon lizard wants this time. Pain-in-the-ass dragon be the bane of my existence.”
To which Vern usually responded with something along the lines of, “You just remember where I found you, Waxman. I am your liberator.”
Waxman generally chose not to stir from his deck hammock till late afternoon, preferring the hours of dusking sky for business, but Vern considered this Squib situation a full-blown emergency and wanted to engage Waxman’s expertise tout de suite.
The swim across wasn’t nothing special. Vern dodged a tour boat and scythed through a fishing net, punching a cheeky gator just to burn off some of his irritation, but within minutes was shucking off river water at Waxman’s deck.
The houseboat had a fairground candy-striped awning out back that Waxman kept to remind him of the bad times. The awning seemed impervious to even the enswampening of the dwelling itself, shining with a reasonable luminescence while simultaneously throwing the area beneath into deep shadow, which suited Vern on the rare occasion he felt it necessary to show up in person and not send a WhatsApp.