Jonathan Messinger

THE CRASHED DRAGON

            Ed detected a self-satisfied, gleeful glint in his 13-year-old son’s eye when Joseph handed him the pickle jar, a knowingness that his single father would have just as much difficulty prying it open, but have no one else to turn to when he, too, failed. His son, in transitioning from 12 to 13 hadn’t become a mystery to Ed. He knew exactly what he was: A kid alternately brave and frightened for wrong reasons both, just like he was at that age. What troubled Ed was his inability to reach back 30 years to his own self, a complete lack of understanding not of someone else, but of someone he used to be. He sent Joseph—not pudgy, but not winning any track meets—lumbering away to watch TV, and at first he assumed the concussive blast that brought a sharp pain to his temples came from one of Joseph’s sick-in-the-head, shoot-everybody-dead video games, but then he noticed that the loaf of bread Joseph left on the kitchen table had fallen onto the kitchen chair.

             Ed put down the jar, his frustration piqued. This was the one feeling he could recall, for all the good it did him, of being a kid, the vexing way he could never win an argument. He opened the wooden door to his wooden back porch and saw that not only his carless garage and expensive grill, but also the brand new badminton net he’d bought for Joseph had been crushed under the weight of a crashed dragon, lying in a ditch of its own making, a small fire torching the sad tinder that had been his dried backyard grass.

            Ed changed in his frustration for a more welcome sense of fearful wonderment, descending the small staircase from his porch and instinctively, unthinkingly, tamping out the fire by the beast’s snout with his Asics. The dragon lay on its side, its ribs extending almost ten feet above Ed’s crown, and its long body lay at an almost perfect line, running from corner to corner of his backyard lot, as if to demonstrate the mathematical purity of the universe. His backyard was now split into two right triangles, each with a dragon hypotenuse. Its barbed tail gave his flattened garage a mohawk.

             Still too afraid to touch it, Ed surveyed the beast, fore to aft, hind to head. Its great scales reminded him of the shingling on his neighborhood’s older homes, now rendered soft and bread-like. Its muzzle lay pointed into the air and slightly open just enough for Ed to get a sense of its enormous front teeth, stalactite canines that could pierce bedrock. Its eyes were closed. Ed could see no obvious wounds. But he imagined that somewhere in there, somewhere behind the slate scales and ribs like load-bearing beams, some soft part had switched off, gone dark, and the dragon's churning insides had gone inert, sending the beast down into his backyard.

            The first wave of observers arrived within ten minutes, led by the short man from down the street, Oscar, knocking on the wooden fence to the side of Ed’s house and lobbing hellos over the pickets. Joseph came out the back door.

            “Hey dad, there’s a bunch of people in front of the house holy shit what the fuck is that is that a dragon sorry for swearing,” Joseph said, perched on the wooden slats of the porch. Ed, on his way to the fence, turned and set his eyes upon Joseph's, trying to stamp the words “BE QUIET” onto his son’s squishy brain.

            “Dad it looks like it’s dead I bet we could charge people to come in and look at it don’t you think?”

            Ed hissed to his son, who was now rubbing the clean, obsidian curve of the dragon’s claw, “Joseph, for Christ’s sake, don’t you want to process this for a second?” Joseph ignored him.

            Ed told Oscar and the others that there had been some sort of spill in his backyard, not sure what, but that it was toxic, fuming even, and that cancer was just around the corner for all who lingered. He delivered this verdict over the wooden pickets, onto Oscar’s sun-reddened forehead. The neighbors scattered.

            When he turned around, Joseph had already made it to the shoulder of the beast, using the spines along the ridge to climb.

            “I’m all done processing dad and I decided that this is the coolest!”

            The police came, but admitted they were best suited to crowd control. When the three strange, shabbily dressed university scientists, all with various styles of facial hair, spectacles and lisps arrived, Ed found himself playing the role of envoy, meeting them at the front door. The shortest of the three, a man with a goatee and corduroys that ballooned around his legs acted as the team leader. He and Ed shook hands, and he introduced himself as Mondale Shapton, biologist.

            “I heard you’ve had a dragon landing,” Shapton said, noticeably stifling a chuckle.

             Ed led the scientists out back, and the three men nonchalantly snapped photos, marked notes in notebooks, waggled their glasses and squinched their noses. The tallest of the three removed a small black box from his shoulder bag and, almost ceremonially, removed a few swabs as large as dumbbells and ran them along the dragon's crusted gums, and in its enormous nostrils. Joseph joined the man, and peered deep into those twin caverns.

            After a short while, the three men joined Ed and Joseph by the tip of the right wing, which lay on the ground like a kind of antique drapery. Shapton spoke.

            "Well, it's certainly not a dragon."

            "What is it then?" Ed asked.

              “A rare species of alligator, by the looks of it.”

            “But what about the wings?”

            “Mutation, I'd guess, just like the size.”

            “It doesn't look like an alligator.”

            Shapton assured Ed that it was.

            Joseph howled. “So it's one of those gigantic alligators with gigantic teeth and huge spikes all over its body and like a mace for a tale and it breathes fire, except I'm pretty sure those are called fucking dragons.” The scientists squiggled among themselves as if they'd been jostled.

            “Calm down, Joseph,” Ed said.

            “So we have a young biologist, do we?” said Shapton.

            “Tell 'em it's a dragon, dad.”

            “I don't know what it is, Joseph. These men are actual scientists, and you and I, we can't be so sure that we're right about everything.”

            Joseph stormed off, and Ed looked at the scientists with a shrug. The scientists looked down at their shoes. A minute later, 75 people were in Ed's backyard, led by a defiant 12-year-old.

            “Gaze upon my dragon! Ignore the non-believers!” Joseph yelled. The crowd swarmed the dragon, forming a ring around the beast, and guffawing in a chorus of admiration and disbelief.

             Ed worked out a deal with the university. He would keep the dragon in his yard for three weeks, at the end of which they could have it for research purposes. Over the next few days, hundreds came to see the dragon. Ed kept the side gate open, and watched as children ran up the dragon's short arm and sat inside its bottom lip. Newspapers and TV cameras couldn't stay away. Joseph gave interviews, battling the scientists in the press, furious at his father for striking a deal.

            After 10 days, the media attention waned, and the stream of people trickled. The dragon began to show the wear of both fame and death. Scales had fallen off along its back. Its left eyelid had begun to curl back, to reveal a cornea as opaque as an opal. By two weeks' end, the dragon had entered the quick and degrading decline of decomposition. Few visitors came anymore, and both Joseph and Ed took it hard. They'd grown attached to the beast, and Joseph only resented even more. He could see it in his son's eyes, the way he viewed the dragon as something pure—a kind of essential being that was so unalloyed against the known universe's cheap fabrege that it had existed for centuries only in the imagination. And then it was here, a further perfection now that it was real, and somehow the adults, and death, were conspiring to take it away from him.

            Vandals, too. Ed knew they came at night, while he slept. They treated the decomposing dragon like a sports stadium in its final season, breaking off what pieces they could and hauling them home. Every morning Ed awoke to see more of the dragon gone. Joseph hardly spoke to him.

            On the evening before the university was to drag off the beast, Ed pulled out an old hunting rifle, given to him by a clueless and slightly menacing uncle when he was 16, and sat in the silty dark of his back porch. The dragon had begun to stink, a high reek that reached long into his nose and stung the backs of his eyes. The scales were nearly all gone, leaving a skin that was almost soft, the texture of cool, young grass. Though the evening sloughed into the early morning hours, the stench wouldn't allow Ed to fall asleep. Sometime around 2:30 in the morning, he detected movement at the dragon's deflated, shortened tail (the barb had been hauled off some nights ago). He saw three small, shadowy figures huddling together as they climbed what was left of the tail. They moved quietly, seeming to chant or hum as they crawled along the desiccated landscape of the dragon's hind quarters. The three paused, and a small light shone down on the joint where the wing met the dragon's back. He could hear them singing, now. Three dissonant male voices. He didn't recognize the language. He stood. He decided not to raise the gun just yet.

            “Hey, off the dragon!”

            One of the figures shot upright and tumbled down the front of the beast, letting out a high-pitched squeal. The two still standing turned in his direction, but they couldn't see him. Hoods draped over their heads. One held the other by the bicep.

            “Who goes there?” shouted the one on the right, and he lifted a lantern. Ed raised the rifle just in case the blue-white light spread over to the porch.

            “It's Ed. I own this property that you're trespassing on.”

            “Well,” said the shorter hooded figure on the left, cinching the rope around what Ed could now see was a heavy robe. “We are the Servants of the Astroth, followers of the Serene One and the rightful watchers of Culdreth.”

            Ed waited. He didn't want to have to ask what that meant. The one who had fallen stood and brushed off his robes.

            “We are wizards, Ed,” said the one on the ground. “We here to reclaim the dragon’s body.”

            Ed could see, in the pale light of the lantern, that the wizard on the left held a long blade, a curling bit of steel that forked at the end.

            “Are you going to cut him up?”

            “We are going to perform the ritual of the passing,” said the one with the knife. “I am Camroth the Great. With me here is Visildore the Wise. And down there is another of our Order.”

            Ed looked at the short figure standing at the desiccated claw's edge.

            “What's your name?” he asked.

            The figure began to speak, but Camroth interrupted. “His name is not important. What is important is that you back away and let us do the universe's work. If you don't, I'm afraid we will have to use our magic on you. It's something we've sworn never to do, except in cases when Culdreth the Serene is endangered.”

             Ed thought about this for a moment, and then looked down at the unnamed wizard.

            “I want to know his name.”

            Ed turned and flicked on the outdoor spotlight, illuminating the three thin figures in their burgundy robes. They all flinched, but the hoods hung low enough to obscure their faces.

            “I have a magic rifle, that magically shoots bullets into people on my property,” Ed said.

            “Jesus Christ,” Visildore muttered, and dropped the lantern so that it tumbled down the dragon's side. It didn't break. It was plastic. Made for camping.

            “What's your name, pal?”

            “I,” said the figure on the ground, attempting to muster up some bravado. “Am called Asskicker General.”

            Ed couldn't help but laugh. Asskicker General crossed his arms.

            “It's an awesome, not-stupid name,” said AG.

            “Lower your hoods, wizards,” Ed said, motioning with his rifle. Visildore was the first, and when his hood dropped back to his shoulder blades with a soft thud, Ed saw that he had a flattop and acne. He was probably only about 16. Asskicker General's fell next, and he looked even younger, like a kid out of a Mark Twain novel. Camroth just pulled his hood back to his crown, enough so that his narrow, pubescent face peaked out, enough to show the red of his embarrassment.

            Camroth and Visildore joined Asskicker General on the ground, and Ed motioned them over to stand in front of him on the porch.

            “You guys playing some sort of game?”

            They said Yes, No, and Sorta all at once. Ed opened the door to his house, and ushered the three boys inside.

            “Please don't call the police.”

            “Don't worry, Asskicker,” said Ed.

            The three sat down at the kitchen table, as Ed roused Joseph from his sleep. His son, in dirty sweatpants and an old T-shirt, stumbled into the kitchen, rubbing his eyes and swiping long streaks of drool onto his forearms.

            “Why did you wake me up dad, who are these guys and what's with the robes, wait a second are you guys wizards?” Joseph woke up over the course of his question. The Servants of the Astroth looked at Ed. Ed nodded, and the wizards told Joseph about Caldreth the Serene, the peaceful dragon who had been prophesied to die a public death. It was bullshit. Total bullshit. But he sat with Joseph and listened to what the Servants had to say, and he knew he'd finally found something to understand, a recollection of his own teenage years, that persistent desire to write oneself into the story. It wasn't escapism, it was the opposite, the idea that nothing was more or less real than you were. He watched as Joseph mouthed the various names of the visitors. Ed got up from his chair. He grabbed a few items from the kitchen drawer, and motioned for the boys to follow him outside. The wizards looked to Joseph for the okay, and Ed watched his son pridefully nod.

            Outside, he asked the boys to stand off to the side of the deck. For the first time, he climbed. He crawled up the shoulder, shuffled down onto the neck, and then ascended to the snout. He looked out over the carcass. It was in even worse shape than he thought. It seemed now just an invention coming apart at the seams, not long after it had risen from its blueprints. He stood on the withdrawn lip of the dragon, trying not to inhale the stench. He knew what it was. He pulled out a kitchen towel and his lighter, and he waited patiently for the oil-laden rag to catch fire, and then Ed dropped it down the hole, where one of the dragon's teeth had been stolen.

            He leapt to the ground and hustled to the porch. The wizards were doing their off-key chanting, and Joseph had joined in. The fire spread from the dragon's mouth down into its throat, and carried through to its belly by the beast's last gasp, illuminating the wrecked backyard. The membrane of its stomach lit up in the wizened rib cage like some ruined, magical dirigible, and Ed joined the boys, humming their dirge.

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