by Robert Reed
He nodded once.
“Watch.” She turned and threw overhand. A tall elm tree stood in front of the empty farmhouse, two big branches rising from the trunk; and the snowball moved with a bullet’s trajectory, hitting the Y. I heard the hard, wet splat, and I knew, just knew, that that was the exact point she’d wanted to hit. Then Cody turned to Marshall, saying, “Okay. Let’s fight,” while she pulled up another gob of snow.
Marshall ran. He dropped everything and made a soft crying sound as he tore up the street toward home, his legs working and his empty arms working and me feeling embarrassed for him. I felt sad.
Then Cody touched me. “You’re the kid who remembers, right?”
I nodded.
She said, “I’ve wondered,” and I saw her breath coming out of her smile. It was her mother’s smile; I recognized it. “I’ve got a question,” she said. “Suppose you see a snowflake. Could you remember it later? A long time from now?”
“Yes.”
“How about a mess of snowflakes? They’re all different—”
I blinked and said, “I’d remember them, yes,” with a certain tentative pride. “Sure.”
“What if I showed you every snowflake in this yard? Or all of them in the city? What would happen?”
“That’s too much,” I admitted. I couldn’t even imagine doing such a thing.
“And all the snowflakes in creation? Try that and I bet this happens to your head.” She ground her snowball into icy dust, and the dust fell over the walk and the tops of our feet. I was looking at her feet again. I asked, “Why don’t you have five toes?”
“Who’s got five toes?” she wondered.
“Everyone,” I informed her. “Everyone but you.”
“Not the people I know, they don’t.” She laughed and told me, “I think you’re mistaken.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re sure?”
“I am,” I promised. “Sure I’m sure.” Then I sat on the walk and said, “Look,” and yanked off my right shoe and sock. “One, two, three, four, five. See? Five.”
Cody was laughing at me.
“I’m teasing you, Ryder.” She shook her head and said, “Put those back on. Before you’re down to four, okay?”
“All right,” said Marshall. “I’ve got it set.”
We were above the slabs, sitting straight across the bottoms from our oak and treehouse. Marshall had staked out his rat and hung his net in the tree overhead—a lump of elastic fabric that would spread as it fell, or so he claimed. Moonlight fell over the rat and its stake and the narrow glimmering wire secured to its foot. I heard incisors chewing on the wire. The trigger string was in my hands, but then Marshall took the string from me. He said, “Thanks,” and found a place to sit.
The slabs were pieces of a street that had died. The city, ages ago, had peeled up the tired concrete and dumped it a long way out in the then country. Massive blocks lay at every angle, thick and gray, and tall trees grew on the slope and formed a high, tight canopy overhead. There were snakes and wild rats living in the hollow places. Maybe the snow dragon too, I thought. Maybe it was beneath me now. I shifted my butt on the rough surface and watched the bottoms, spotting someone. Then three someones. They were moving like smoke in the moon’s silvery light, and their voices rose toward me—
“Watch the rat,” Marshall whispered. “Ryder?”
But who were they? I wondered. I listened to their voices and decided they were strangers, more strangers, toting butterfly nets and cloth sacks as they walked toward the south. They carried themselves like brothers, their bodies the same but for size and with the same smoky motions. “Is that it?” asked the smallest brother. “Look here!” he giggled and said, “Here it goes,” and took a swipe at the weeds. They had come from another neighborhood, I realized, and he was teasing his brothers. He was bored. “Look here! Look!” The bored brother attacked a clump of weeds, laughing.
This was the famous ground, all right. I asked Marshall, “Will someone else catch the dragon?”
“What do you mean?” he whispered.
“All these strangers coming through—”
“Forget it, Ryder. No way.” He waved his hand, saying, “They don’t even belong here. They don’t know this place like we know it, so they can’t. Okay? So watch the rat now. Okay?”
The rat chewed on its wire. I didn’t like the sound of the enamel on metal, and I looked away and asked, “How do you know it can be caught? Dr. Florida said it’s too fast and smart—”
“Shush,” he said. “Shush.”
The bored brother was chucking sticks at our treehouse. Some sticks hit and made a hollow thud, then they fell away. I could see everything in the moonlight. The brother didn’t know us—he didn’t know what Cody would do to him if she found him chucking sticks—and so he kept doing it while the others moved toward the almost-pond, leaving him.
He finally found himself alone, and he turned and ran out of sight. I heard one of them laughing, then nothing. I stared at our oak and the high dark mass of our treehouse and the nearly full moon just high enough to be seen unobscured. The silvery light angled in beneath the canopy and over the slabs. I wished for binoculars—we had several pairs in the treehouse—and if I was flat on the treehouse’s flat roof, I thought, I could watch the moon’s moon swinging around the moon. Dr. Florida owned the moon’s moon. It looked like a bright dot traveling a snug orbit, skating over the barren land and the new farms and the growing cities. The moon’s moon had been a comet, but it had died long ago. Dr. Florida had claimed it and brought it into orbit around the moon. He owned plenty of things in space. There were mines inside asteroids and a science base on Ganymede—I had read about his probes to Jupiter—and there was the moon’s moon too. He was taking it apart. Buried at its core were organics and water, and in fifty or a hundred years it would be gone. That’s what was planned. He was selling its pieces to the lunar cities and farms. “For a tidy profit,” Dad had told me. “A chunk of oily rock, and he’s making even more billions. Imagine!”
I stared at the moon with all of my concentration, letting myself get lost. I couldn’t hear the rat’s chewing for a while. All I sensed was the moon itself, and there wasn’t such a thing as time or any other place in creation. I felt nothing. It was soothing to be so lost. I myself didn’t exist, it seemed, and a long while passed before Marshall was touching me, shaking me, saying, “Ryder? Hey, I need you. Listen to me a minute, okay?”
He wasn’t quite whispering anymore.
My butt was asleep on the concrete. I moved and noticed how the moon had climbed. I said, “Sorry,” without feeling sorry. The rat was silent, curled up and shivering, and Marshall was breathing too much. “You want to hear a secret?” he asked. “Promise not to tell? Not anyone?”
“All right.”
“My folks made me a promise,” he said.
“What about?”
“After they saw me on TV…they had this idea.”
I waited for a moment. Then I asked, “What idea?”
“If I catch the dragon…this dragon…”
“Yeah—?”
“I’ll get a special prize. They’ll give me money.” He breathed and I saw the excitement on his face. His odd mood made sense all of a sudden. Radiant and wearing a huge grin, he wondered, “Do you want to know how much money?”
“How much?”
“I’m not supposed to tell anyone,” he confessed.
I said nothing.
“So you won’t tell, will you?”
“It’s a secret,” I agreed.
“A thousand dollars. Just for me.” He barely had the breath to say the words. He shivered and told me, “That much,” and my first thought was that so much money would be an enormous burden. I wouldn’t know what to do with a thousand dollars, so many things possible and only one choice the best choice. How could someone decide?
“What do you think? Isn’t that something?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“I won’t,” I promised. Then I blinked and imagined Marshall netting the dragon and taking it home. His mother would be thrilled, proud and loud about her pride. A thousand dollars? I watched my friend while he watched the rat, nothing happening, his trap set and nothing slipping out of the shadows to take the bait. This was just the sort of thing his folks would do. Even to Marshall, I thought, that sort of money had to seem huge.
We sat for a little while longer, never talking.
I thought about a tangle of things, and the moon rose higher and began to vanish behind the canopy above us. Then Marshall touched me and asked, “When did we first come here? To the slabs?”
“You and me?”
“Just the two of us. Yeah.”
Remembering wasn’t hard. I blinked and concentrated, and then I saw us as eight-year-olds. I was sitting on the same slab, only it was tilted at a different angle. A shorter, rounder Marshall was sitting beside me, sharing my perch. It was summer, in the afternoon, and the summer bugs were screaming until the blazing air seemed to rip. We were pretending to be soldiers, dressed in our greenest clothes and sweating under our green plastic helmets. We had plastic guns that spit out authentic noises, and this was India in our minds. This was the last great war, the war we knew from TV and textbooks—real battles and ferocious smart bombs, Moslems and Hindus and U.N. troops fighting in the tropical heat.
“I remember that,’” said Marshall. “Sure.”
A couple teenage boys had walked through the bottoms. I saw them again. They seemed huge and full of danger, their hair raggedly long and their arms thick and powerful. They carried pellet rifles equipped with laser sights and compressed air. They fired and I heard a delicate woosh, them swinging their guns this way and that. A couple times the pricks of laser light swept past us, startling us, neither of us moving for fear they might take us for feral pigs.
“They killed something, didn’t they?”
I saw a dead garter snake, thick-bodied and shot through the head. We had found it in the weeds after the boys were gone. The pellet had struck the precise center of its skull, between its lidless eyes, and I had marveled at the exactness of the blow and felt sick to see it so dead. I thought those boys were particularly wicked. I tried comforting myself with the thought that their wickedness would someday catch them and destroy them with the same eerie precision. And all summer long, now and again, I returned to the corpse, fascinated, watching it dissolve with rot and the ants. Stringing my memories together, I saw the dark body wiggle and shrivel and then melt away. Gone. Then Marshall touched me and said, “They shot at us, didn’t they? I thought they shot at us.”
I said, “No.”
“But I remember pellets hitting the slabs. Don’t you?”
“No.” He must have recalled the laser light sweeping past us. I doubted if the boys ever noticed us sitting back in the shade—
“I’m thinking of a different day. With someone else,” he told me. “I can hear the pellets hitting concrete, Ryder. That’s how well I can remember it.”
I said nothing.
He said, “Ping, ping,” as imaginary pellets sprinkled the ground around us. Then we sat for a few more minutes, nothing said. The rat resumed its chewing, and Marshall got bored with the waiting and handed me the damp trigger string. Nothing happened. We waited and sometimes whispered, and I thought about Marshall getting so much money from his folks. I wasn’t exactly jealous, only…what? What? Marshall wouldn’t catch the dragon, not ever. I couldn’t imagine him catching it. I saw the creature in my mind—white fur and those living black eyes, the tiny feet and the working tongue—and its uniqueness endeared it to me. I realized that I didn’t want it caught, not by anyone. Then Marshall stood and said, “That’s enough. Let’s go home.”
He climbed the tree in the darkness to get the net, twice nearly falling. Then he turned on a flashlight and undid the rat’s wire, saying, “Oh, gosh.” The tethered leg was bleeding. Marshall looked at me, embarrassed for having hurt the animal, and he said, “I’ll tell you what,” and let it go free.
We watched the rat limp into the shadows.
Then we were packing, not talking, and we heard a scream in the distance. It came from the north end of the parkland, and it wasn’t any animal I recognized. Marshall turned to me and asked, “What is it?” and I didn’t know. I told him so, and he brightened.
He said, “Listen,” when it screamed a second time. “I bet I know. I bet I do.”
There was a third scream, softer, and I thought of monkeys in a lush jungle. That’s how it sounded. I said, “The dragon—?”
He clamped his hand over my mouth, saying, “Shush!” Then he craned his neck and listened to the night sounds, bugs and a soft wind in the treetops, and I smelled the rat on his hand. I shut my eyes and waited, smelling fur and blood; and there were no more screams, not while we listened, and we finally picked up and began to head home.
Like always, we checked the treehouse’s hatch and lock when we went past. They were sound. Then we pushed our bikes across the pasture, Marshall talking and talking about the dragon. I wore his pack because his back was sore. The empty wire cage rattled on Marshall’s bike rack, and the growing grass caught in our pedals and gears. We came to the short graveled road and passed the Wellses’ house. Marshall was wrestling an imaginary dragon, his free arm extended and his throat making guttural sounds. He never noticed one of Jack’s brothers standing beside the house. The brother was drunk or drugged, or maybe both things, holding himself upright with one arm and peeing with an odd dignity, the urine sparkling in the moonlight. I felt uneasy. Menaced. I looked away and kept quiet, Marshall busy tying the dragon into knots, and then we were across the street, safe, and looking at Cody’s darkened house.
“She’s not home yet,” I mentioned. “Are you going to leave that message in her personal?”
“What message?” Marshall wondered.
“About catching the dragon tonight?”
“Oh, no. Thanks.” He handed me his bike and ran to the front door, talking for a moment and then returning. “I told her we heard it, and that’s something.” He nodded and smiled, saying, “Come on.”
We pedaled up the hill, turning north and arriving at Marshall’s house. We put our bikes inside the enormous garage where his father kept old-fashioned cars as a hobby, the air stinking of real gasoline and thick grease. Then we went into the backyard and the bambis and pigs came running toward us. They dipped their heads and demanded to be scratched. I helped scratch them. Then there was a pink dog and a miniature pony, and the dog snarled and shoved the bambis aside. Marshall said, “No,” to the dog. He said, “Quit it,” in a careless, practiced way.
His mother emerged from the house. “The hunters!” She was a small woman, dark and odd. I felt uneasy whenever she laughed. Laughing now, it sounded as if she was teasing us. Other adults called her a stupid and vain woman, a bitch and worse. As I’d grown older, seeing things with older eyes, I’d come to realize that the hard words were true. She was demanding and tactless and difficult to like. Beneath her flaws was a mess of worries and doubts, and she was Marshall’s mother, and he would try almost anything to make her say one halfway positive word—
“How’d the hunt go?” she asked. “Did you get it?”
“We heard it,” Marshall answered.
I bent and scratched a bambi behind its ear.
“You heard it? What’s that mean?”
Marshall told her, “We just couldn’t lure it in—”
“You didn’t even see it then?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Sometimes,” she said, “I do wonder about you, Marshall.” Then she breathed and looked at me for the first time. “Ryder?”
I was scratching a pig. “Yes?” I asked.
“Your mother called. She wants you home, as soon as possible.”
I said, “Thank you.”
Then she turned to Marshall, saying, �
��You didn’t even get close? You told me you were going to catch it tonight.” She was angry in a teasing way. Maybe she thought she was being funny. “You left here with promises, young man. So I told your Aunt Jennie that you’d catch it with that expensive toy net of yours. Was I wrong? What did you tell me right before you left?”
He made a low sound in his throat, his head bowing.
I said, “I have to go,” and set the pack on the ground. Marshall glanced at me. His expression was complex and shifting, pained and embarrassed and angry in a sapless way. His mother told him, “I thought you were clever,” and then she laughed so nobody would think she was mean.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Aren’t you clever?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Anyway,” she said, and she breathed. Her voice was suddenly weary and disinterested. “Good-bye, Ryder. Good to see you.” She paused, then snapped, “Say good-bye to your friend, Marshall.”
“Good-bye, Ryder.”
“Bye.”
I rode down the hill in the darkness. I was ever so glad to be away and alone, feeling the smooth, almost liquid sensation of rolling. Our street was freshly repaved, and the ride seemed perfect. Then I pulled up in front of my house, where only one light was burning in the front window, and Mom was waiting for me beside that light. She was in the living room, and she looked as if she had been in her chair for a very long time. Dad was out showing a house, she told me. “Sit down, Ryder.” She seemed strange, saying, “Please?” I saw and knew in my heart that it was bad news, awful news, and I braced myself and tried to seem brave. She told me, “Something happened while you were out,” and she took a deep breath.
I knew. I had sensed as much.
“You got a call tonight. Just after you left with Marshall.”
She said it sadly, but it wasn’t sadness on her face. It was puzzlement and maybe amazement too, and I wondered, “Who called? Someone called for me?”
“Yes,” she said. “Dr. Florida.”
Four
I was leaving school at lunchtime. I was getting ready in the hallway, and Beth found me and introduced me to a couple of girls. The girls had heard this incredible, impossible story, and they didn’t believe it. I was going to Dr. Florida’s mansion? Today? The prettier girl said, “You mean one of his clinics, right? Not the mansion—!”