by Lyn Worthen
Her lids felt like dry branches on her eyeballs and she longed to close them and lie down. She felt emotionally drained, which was fine. Empty was better than angry. Through a squint she spotted an eagle gliding on a current of air. Rose extended an arm toward it. Mother, I need you. The eagle kept pace with the truck for several moments before flapping away in another direction.
She turned to look at Jarvis. The shape of his face was different than when they were kids, square where it had been round, his high cheekbones making his smooth face a landscape of angles and valleys.
“Where did you get that gun?” she asked, then remembered to get his attention and repeat the question.
“Klah’s,” he said, and left it at that. She hadn’t seen it since Jarvis had pointed it at her father.
She prayed Grandmother would not be home when her father returned for his things. She looked again for the eagle, but saw only the blanket of blue sky with patches of shirred clouds.
“You shouldn’t stare at clouds,” Jarvis said.
After a while Jarvis slowed the truck and stopped on a small gravel pullout. Rose shot him a questioning look.
“There is a spring,” he said. “We can get water.”
She was thirsty. He came around and opened the door for her. When she pointed at her bare feet he turned his back toward her, arms held out. Piggyback.
Rose and Jarvis had played together as young children whenever she and her mother had come to visit Grandmother. They would look for sticks and pine needles to nestle into the wool of the sheep while their mothers chatted in front of outdoor looms, laughing at the crowns and jewelry adorning the unsuspecting animals. But then Rose’s mother had gotten sick. And then she had died.
Her father had still been a father to her those first few years after Mother died, before he let the grief and stress push him more and more to the bottle. He had tried, for a while.
Rose didn’t see Jarvis much after that. She didn’t know exactly what had gone wrong with him, only that he had almost died, too, and the infection had made him deaf. Jarvis’s deafness had scared her, so even after she moved in with Grandmother they didn’t play. She didn’t know how to be around him, so she stopped. When she passed by his house or saw him at school she would sometimes wave or nod, but mostly tried to avoid eye contact. It wasn’t fair, but it was easier.
Sometimes at night, though, she heard him playing a steady rhythm on his drum, singing a song he couldn’t hear, as though desperate not to forget it, and it brought tears to her eyes.
She put her arms around his shoulders and he scooped her up. His bare skin on her legs was comforting, as was their silence. Being unable to converse erased the awkwardness of not knowing what to say.
He carried her a long way from the road. It was so hot, and she was starting slip.
“Almost there,” he said, as if he could read her thoughts.
The land, mostly flat and covered in prickly shrubs, dipped to reveal a thin creek meandering through the sand, its head a bubbling spring about the diameter of a basketball.
Jarvis set her down in the partial shade of a large rock. They took turns kneeling by the spring and drinking.
A lizard scampered toward them, its front claws dipped into the gurgling stream a few feet away. Rose returned its fixed stare.
She tapped Jarvis and pointed. The lizard’s head was collared in jagged spikes, its orange, black, and tan scales creating a diamond pattern, like one of Grandmother’s woven blankets. Its fat torso was lined with more spikes, as though someone had pulled the skin out along its ribcage and trimmed it with pinking shears. Rose had seen many lizards, but nothing quite like this.
“Grandfather Arrowhead,” Jarvis said, and smiled. She had not realized his teeth were so white.
The sky darkened, and Rose looked up to see the cloud passing over the sun, but there was no cloud. The sun had dimmed, and continued to do so. She stood in alarm as the landscape grew darker, aware that not a mile away the sun still beat brightly onto the sand.
Rose reached out to grasp Jarvis’s hand. The shade deepened and he squeezed. She followed his gaze and startled.
The spiny lizard was growing, slowly at first, then inflating quickly. Its body lengthened out, following the pattern of the stream, no, replacing the stream, transforming into a serpent extending several dozens of feet.
The serpent rested on thin front legs as its skull elongated into a crocodilian shape, and the horned collar transformed into plumes of brightly-colored feathers. The spikes along its torso pulled away to become a set of small, leathery wings. It stared down at them with reptilian intensity.
Rose froze in place, unable to process what she was seeing, though Jarvis jerked her hand. Serpents were the most evil of animals.
“Come on!” Jarvis yelled. The serpent pulled back to strike.
Rose had just long enough to hope her demise would be quick. An image of her father, as he used to be, came unbidden to her mind. What a waste of a last thought.
But then the serpent, its mouth open, fangs sharp as daggers, stopped mid-strike.
“You are protected,” it rasped, the voice reaching her ears as if on the wind. “But he is not. Move aside.”
Rose stepped between her friend and the serpent.
“What are you doing?” Jarvis begged. He had not heard the serpent speak.
Rose mimed a finger gun and Jarvis yelled, “I don’t have it.” She had surmised as much, but had held out some hope.
“We have to run!” he yelled, though he didn’t leave without her. She was afraid that if they ran the serpent would attack him.
She reached behind her and grabbed Jarvis’s wrists.
“What do you want from us?” she asked the serpent.
“A better question would be, what do you want from me?” the serpent replied.
Rose had not expected a question. “We want safe passage,” she said. It seemed the right way to speak to a monster.
The serpent threw back its massive head and laughed, its fangs glowing beneath the diminished sun. “There is no safe passage,” it said. “There is passage, or there is termination, but nothing is ever safe.”
Jarvis had grown still. He couldn’t know what was going on, but he knew they were uneaten, for the time being.
Rose trembled. “Well, we wish for passage.”
“There is a price,” said the wind.
“What price?”
The serpent pulled its long body into thick coils, raising its head high so that it towered above them. The soil around the spring began to crumble and fall into the water, the hole seeming to stretch and collapse simultaneously. The two teenagers jumped back, watching open-mouthed until the small spring had transformed into a gaping maw, its gentle waters now a churning whirlpool leading to depths unseen.
“The price,” said the serpent, “is one of you for the other. You choose.”
Rose wrapped her arms around Jarvis. “You said I am protected.”
“Protected from harm, yes. But you make a pretty pet.”
Terror shot through her like lightning. “And him?”
“He makes a tender meal.”
This couldn’t be real. How was this real? Only minutes before, they had been kneeling in the sunlight drinking from a gentle fountain. She wanted to squeeze her eyes shut, but dared not.
“What’s happening?” Jarvis asked.
She turned his shoulders toward her, enunciating every word carefully. “He says I have to go with him.”
Jarvis’s face contorted in fear. “No!” he yelled.
“Jarvis,” she said, schooling her face into an expression of calm. “He says if I go with him he will let you go.”
“No way!”
She stared up at the serpent. Feathers of cerulean blue and crimson rustled in the faint breeze, the rest of its body still as stone.
“You promise you will not hurt him? That he can go home unharmed?”
“In exchange for you, yes,” the wind answere
d.
Rose began to cry.
The serpent shrank, becoming humanoid. In moments, Rose found herself staring at a replica of the boy whose hand she clung to, down to his dingy white tee-shirt and silver earrings.
“A skinwalker!” Jarvis cried.
“Will it please you if I take this form?” the Jarvis-shaped serpent asked. Its smooth, mocking voice coming from that mouth made her skin crawl.
“Stop. Stop it!” she screamed at the thing.
The figure morphed again, this time into a handsome native boy with a face she did not recognize, his short hair slicked back into a precise wave.
“How about this?” he asked, walking toward her. This new boy wore a tailored suit fitted to his lean frame, black shoes gleaming in the faint light.
Jarvis tried to dart away, tugging her a few steps.
Rose knew they had lost. She stared at the serpent-boy. It felt like staring into her own coffin.
“Just take me quickly and don’t let him follow,” she said to the serpent-boy, and pried her hand free from that of her childhood friend. She could think of no other way to save him.
With a speed beyond that of any real human, the boy snatched Rose up like a groom carrying his bride over the threshold, and together they plummeted into the whirlpool. Rose did not see the sky brighten, or the pool revert instantly into a small spring above her head. She did not see Jarvis pawing at the hole, or hear the way he keened while his tears combined with the crystalline water.
# # #
He hadn’t protected her. Jarvis felt the anguish resonate through his chest, up through his throat, knew he was wailing.
Where was she? Where had the monster taken her? He pictured her buried under his feet, the earth closing in around her, life squeezing from her lungs.
No, he couldn’t allow himself to think that way. Rose had spoken with the monster, somehow diverted its attack. Jarvis had to believe that if the monster meant to harm her, he would have done so already. There had to be a way to get her back. He dug at the soil around the spring, but it was mostly rock, and tore his skin. He willed it to open into the whirlpool to no avail. He had no magic.
This was his fault. He had brought her to this place. If he had only stayed home this morning, Rose would be safe in her hogan. Well, safer than this. He realized he was shaking.
But Jarvis had been to this spring many times without incident. Why had this nightmare happened this time? What had summoned this evil?
John’s face came to mind, smug and taunting as Jarvis struggled to keep his unloaded gun steady. Jarvis’s childhood memories of John were of a good man, like an uncle, who gave him and Rose nickels from his pocket and let them play bucking bronco on his back. Jarvis had loved the rich timbre of John’s voice when he sang the songs of celebration, and had hoped to learn to sing just like him. Those songs still echoed in the vacuous places in his mind.
John was not the same man now. He courted trouble at every turn, teasing luck and breaking taboos. He was a man without respect, and he had certainly lost Jarvis’s. Perhaps he had brought the wrath of the serpent onto his family, and once again, Rose was the one who suffered.
Jarvis stood and surveyed his surroundings, wishing a solution would appear. The desert looked just as it had when he and Rose had hiked to the spring, still and stark. Breathing deeply, he ran to the truck. He hated leaving her, but what could he do? He needed to find help.
The trucks wheels couldn’t spin fast enough. The shocks on Klah’s old truck were shot, and Jarvis slid on the seat as the truck careened back into town. Rivulets of sweat poured down his back like ice water.
He went to the home of the medicine man, but no one answered. Damn. He drove to Rose’s house, Klah shouting about kicking his ass as he zoomed by his own house. The truck was barely in park before he flew into the hogan.
Rose’s grandmother stood in the kitchen with a flyswatter, looking ready for battle. In Navajo, Jarvis let the story spill from his mouth and hoped he spoke in a manner she could understand.
The old grandmother’s hands flew to her chest, though her face remained stern.
“You must find John,” she said. “Find John. Go. Now!”
# # #
The skinwalker, still in the form of a boy in a suit and cradling Rose in his arms, landed lightly on the stone floor of a cavern and set her on her feet. Though Rose was soaked through, the boy remained dry and unruffled. She looked around. The cavern, which was the size of her high school auditorium, had no openings, even in the ceiling, only a solid surface of tangerine stone. Ambient light filled the space from an indiscernible source.
When she looked back at the boy he wore the same face, but stood arrayed in traditional Navajo clothing, a beaded vest with geometric shapes in bright colors, and a squash necklace of silver and turquoise. His hair, now long, was pulled back into a bun, and he wore thick moccasins of deep red.
“Do you mock me?” she asked.
The boy put on an expression of false incredulity. “I have said nothing.”
“You do not deserve to wear the clothing of my people. You are not Diné,” she said, using the old word for her tribe to imbue the depth of her sentiment. She felt a surreal sense of disconnection as she spoke, knowing she might anger the boy. She didn’t care. Just as with her father that morning, she couldn’t resist poking the bear. She was tired of being afraid.
“You are offended because you are so Diné?” His gaze chilled her.
A pang of guilt cowed her. Of course she was Diné, by virtue of being Navajo, but she understood what he meant. It was like he saw to the core of her, read her resentments through her eyes, her secret wish to be anyone else.
“Really, I thought you’d let me have him, save yourself. That’s what I would have done. Ah, well, maybe you will teach me to dance.” He shimmied close to her and blew a kiss in her face, his breath tangy and rancid.
“Wh-why can’t you hurt me?” she asked.
“You carry the protection of Hasteoltoi.”
She did not know that name, though he clearly expected her to.
The boy sighed. “The goddess of the hunt. One of your ancestors must have done something pretty special to please her. You can’t be harmed by serpents, including me, though I like to think I’m quite evolved.”
But those things are just stories. Just superstitions. Yet here she was, staring a story in the face.
Lying down on his side, the boy propped his head in one hand, grinned, and transformed once more. In moments he was again the massive feathered serpent, his scaly body lining the circumference of the floor.
“Are you a man who changes his shape, or something else?”
“I have been called many things, but your people call me Ná’áshó’iitsoh.”
“Dragon,” Rose whispered, then looked up. “How is it you speak English?”
“It is the language you choose to hear.”
It sounded like an insult.
“So I’m your prisoner forever now?”
The dragon’s voice spilled over her ears like hot corn oil. “Have you not always been a prisoner?”
And with those words, a crack in her heart wrenched open, pain gushing forth in a deluge. She lost her breath, drowning in the familiar emotions, the desperation for escape from a life in which nothing ever happened, the fear of a father who only took and never gave, the lack of opportunity for girls like her. The walls of her prison had been made not of stone but of miles and miles of open air.
Rose sobbed, gulping. “There is no good luck for me. Maybe it doesn’t matter if I find a way out of this room or off the reservation. I’ll never be smart enough, or talented enough, or, I don’t know, something enough to become anything. I don’t belong anywhere.”
“Well, there you have it,” the dragon said. “You imprison yourself, little lamb.” His voice was pandering, like he was sympathizing with baby who had dropped her bottle.
The dragon rested his head on the stone floor and closed hi
s eyes. “If you don’t belong anywhere, then you belong nowhere, and how lucky for you that’s just where you are.” He wriggled himself around until his giant snout faced the ceiling, both sets of puny legs poking in the air like a dog waiting for a belly rub. “You’re welcome.” Then he began to snore.
While the dragon slept, or pretended to, Rose cried until the tears ran out. Had she brought her bad luck on herself? Had the ancestors sent the dragon to her as punishment? Though she had said otherwise, it actually did matter to her if she found a way out of the room. It mattered very much, even if she didn’t know where her life would go from there.
It felt like years ago she had woken up in the hogan thinking her biggest problem of the day would be trying to keep cool. What was to become of her? Grandmother would worry herself sick. Her friends from school would be devastated. At least, she hoped they would.
She thought of Jarvis. When she closed her eyes she could see a perfect portrait of his terrified face on her eyelids. I dragged you into my bad luck. I’m so sorry. You should have stayed away from me.
What was he doing now?
Her stomach growled loudly and the dragon popped open one slitted eye.
“You will have to feed me at some point,” she said.
A giant hole in the rock opened above them, spilling sand onto the floor like a giant hourglass.
As well as spiders. Lots and lots of spiders.
The dragon’s lips pulled away from its razor-like teeth. “Bon appètit.”
# # #
Rose had chosen starvation. Hours passed as she huddled against the rock wall watching spiders scurry across the floor and up the walls. Many of them were what she called “big butt spiders,” the distinctive shape of black widows and their ilk that often signified a venomous species. A few times she had felt the tickle of one on her back, or in her hair, and screeched until she could shake it off. The dragon watched from the other side of the cavern, which had taken on the rangy scent of reptile.
“You have to protect me from the poisonous ones,” she said. “You’re not allowed to let me get harmed.”