Alice Hoffman - The Ice Queen

Ned smiled, unclasped it, and handed it over.

“Tells good time,” Ned said.

“There’s no time like the present,” the Dragon said.

It was a joke, so we laughed appreciatively. We had Coke with ice and sat on uncomfortable stools. It was sweltering. The Dragon pulled up his undershirt and showed us where the lightning had struck first.

“Dead for fourteen minutes and forty-five seconds,” Joe said proudly. “I timed him.”

Then Joe took off his father’s slippers and showed us the Dragon’s feet. They were curled up like hooves. “Arthritis,” Joe said. “Runs in the family.” He showed us the marks on the soles.

“The lightning hit a tree, ricocheted, went along the ground, and struck him dead for fifty-five minutes flat the second time.”

“What was it like?” I asked the Dragon.

“Funny thing. It was just like this,” the Dragon said. “Like sitting here with you. Soon you’ll go away. That’s what it was. One minute it was one thing, the next it was something else.”

“And how did you come back?”

Ned elbowed me. I suppose I was being rude. But there wasn’t much time, was there? That’s why we were here.

“If I knew that, I wouldn’t have bought a plot in the cemetery the very next week. It was just a preview, not the whole show. I’m back because I’m back.” The Dragon took a gulp of soda pop. “Now I’d like to ask you something.

Maybe you know — is there a reason for everything?”

We all looked at my brother, the scientist, for an answer.

“Just because we don’t know it or understand it doesn’t mean there’s not a reason,” Ned said.

“There you go.” The Dragon was pleased with that re­sponse. “My sentiments exactly.”

He held out my brother’s watch. It was an old Rolex. Nina had gotten it for him on their tenth anniversary. It had cost a fortune and she had scoured antiques shops in Orlando till she found the right one.

“Want it back?”

Ned shook his head. “No time like the present,” he said.

“Then I’m going to show you a secret. You paid for it. You deserve it. Just don’t go telling your cronies. I’m not a sideshow.”

It took quite a while to walk down the road a piece. “Down the road a piece” was far, the way things always were in Florida. Ned was tired and the Dragon was slow, espe­cially in the soppy saw grass.

“We’re going to wind up getting ticks,” I said. “Fleas. Poi­son something. Oak or ivy.”

“Do you smell it?” My brother had stopped and took a deep breath. “This is where the salt water meets up with the stream and mixes.”

It was salty and fetid both. Underneath it all was a sweet­ness. Here we were, older than our mother had been, wan­dering through the muck on a day when it was over a hundred degrees, following two old men through the swamp.

“I just want you to know: if I see an alligator, I’m turning around.”

Ned laughed. “But snakes don’t count, right?” My brother nodded, and when I saw a slithery thing in the grass, I grabbed his arm. “Harmless,” he said. “Milk snake.”

I realized then that my brother seemed happy. The place where his watch had been shone, white skin, naked, new. His khaki pants were streaked with mud and saw grass.

“Okay, here we are,” the Dragon said. “I can spit fire, you know that, right?”

Well, I’d seen Lazarus set fire to paper, burn me with a kiss — I thought I was ready. But the Dragon actually spit, and where it landed flames rose out of the saw grass. Joe ran over and stomped them out.

“Well, that’s physiologically impossible,” my brother said. All the same, he sounded excited. He looked wide-awake.

“So I’ve been told,” the Dragon said. “And I figured out how you can stop it.” The Dragon reached into his pocket and brought out something that looked like a tulip bulb. “Straight garlic. Takes the fire right out of a person. But I don’t want to do that now, ’cause I’m going to show you something worth seeing. You didn’t come all this way for me. Now promise you’ll keep this to yourselves.”

My brother crossed his heart. My eyes were burning. I thought of him in New Jersey, watching the bats in the sky. I thought about the colony of ants he’d had to leave behind when we moved in with our grandmother. I didn’t care about the things I couldn’t take with me, but my brother was different; after my grandmother put her foot down, Ned went out behind her house and set the ants free. I watched from the bedroom window. I never mentioned it,

but I’d seen that he was crying.

“Cross your heart,” my brother told me.

I did so. I didn’t wish for anything, want anything, say anything. I was in present time, standing in the muck, my shoes ruined, my skin itchy.

There was a log, no, a tree, the one hit by the same light­ning that had struck the Dragon the second time around. An old moss-draped oak, dead now and pale, pale gray. Ice-colored in all this green, this muck, these leaves, this water, this heat. The Dragon walked toward it. He was knee-high in the water. He took off his undershirt and I saw the tree patterns the lightning had left on his arms and his torso. Like Lazarus. I felt a twinge of something sad. As if every­thing that was happening now had already happened, only to someone else.

The Dragon turned around and nodded. “Watch this.”

He spit at the old log and there was a spark of fire. The Dragon waved his shirt around and smothered the flame, but the smoke had done what he’d expected. Dozens of bats rose from the log. They seemed pure black at first, but in the sunlight they shone, a glinty blue, then purple. It was like seeing the face of the world, like seeing every possibility there had ever been. Out of smoke, out of fire, out of wood, out of ice, they arose in a cloud.

Ned blinked. “Well, what do you know,” he said.

“They’re around all day long, only we never see them. You walk along and you think you’re alone. But they’re here,” the Dragon said. “Along with all the other things we don’t see.”

The bats disappeared into the sky; from underneath they were gray-brown, like leaves falling upward, like time re­versed.

My shoulders were sunburned, I could barely breathe in the heat, there was a tick walking along my shin, but it was worth it. If I hadn’t learned my lesson, I would have wished we could stay there forever. But I knew better now. We’d seen what we’d come to see. The way to trick death. Breathe in. Breathe out. Watch as it all rises upward, black and blue into the even bluer sky.

I called Frances York to apologize for never showing up for work. In my past life, before moving to Florida, I was the dependable one, the great co-worker, the planner of parties. As it was, I hadn’t been to the library in a week. Hadn’t called in once.

“Well, don’t come in now,” Frances told me. “Come to my house at six-thirty. Thirteen Palmetto Street. The house with the big yard.”

“Look, if you want to fire me, I understand. You can do it over the phone. It’s fine. I deserve it.”

“I have never fired anyone in my life, and I am not about to start now. You’re coming for dinner.”

I didn’t quite believe her. I dressed for the occasion of my firing. Somber. My hair combed back, a red headband that I’d picked up at the drugstore, and then, last-minute bribery, a plant from the florist. A Venus flytrap. Useful in Florida. Practical. The old me. The dependable girl. Maybe Frances would see she needed me, although the truth of it was, there was barely work enough for one of us at the library.

I’d never been to Frances’s house; it was on the older side of town, where the yards were bigger and the feel was more rural, less suburban. Her house was old Florida, tin roof, shutters, cabbage palms. I parked and got out, carrying the potted plant, wearing good black shoes that were uncom­fortable. I stopped on the path. There was something that looked like a bear on the front porch. It was growing dark and my vision wasn’t great. I had a moment of panic. Then I realized it was the pup in her desk photos grown to a mon­strous size. A Newfoundland. Not a breed that would do well in Florida, and as it was, I could hear the creature pant­ing. When the creature woofed, Frances came out of the house. She was wearing blue jeans, an old shirt, a scarf around her head. She didn’t resemble her library self.