Stone Dragons

Erik sat on the broken stone spine of the ridge, the rock burred free of edges by the relentless rasp of the wind, the tiny searching fingers of lichen threading into its pores, widening, straining, secretly breaking down the most solid stuff of the earth. He’d made only the first ridge, but the wind chilled the sweat on his face, snuck in under his vest, shivering his soaked back.
Head low, fighting for breath like a drowning man, he peered through the grassy swales to the next dark exposed spine, and the one after that, knowing he’d never climb so high or far again. Dragons’ backs he’d called them when the kids were little, assuring them the dragons were asleep, that all they had to do to stay safe was to keep quiet, walk softly. In California now, with their mother, they could scream and bang and thump to their hearts’ content, throw whatever teenaged tantrums they’d care to. These dragons would never hear their perfect noise again.

And Erik wasn’t sure how much longer they’d hear him. Maybe this, his labored breathing, his sorry fish-out-of-water gasping, was all it had ever taken to wake the sleeping beasts, make them aware of his trespass.

Resting his gun across his knees, broken at the breech out of habit, though the two empty chambers stared back blank and black, Erik ran his hand down the barrels, one over the other, the gun he’d bought for Leif, that Leif had never once fired, never once stained with his own sweat climbing across the dragons’ backs.
Leif and Erik and Lena, the saddest trio of Vikings he could imagine. Standing in his driveway, he’d watched them load into the van, Leif with his goddamn mp3 ear buds firmly implanted, head down, hiding behind his hair, Lena squinting at him through the tinted glass as if he were already some sepia photo, an ancient ancestor. Monica had sat squared behind the wheel, rigid and determined, nearly aflame in her righteousness. He’d just caught her shoving the rearview mirror toward the ceiling as she’d rolled away, absolutely no looking back at the carnage in her wake. Maybe she, in all her Teutonic glory, was more Viking than the three of them put together, plundering and pillaging, carrying away the children. He felt he should lob a funereal torch, set their bier afire as they edged toward the abyss.
After what seemed geologic ages, the rock blowing away beneath him, Erik finally caught a breath feeling a bit less death rattle. The spots and swirls ebbed behind his eyes. Reaching down, he patted the age-softened folds of canvas hiding the paper in his pocket, the pictures the oncologist had walked him through, pointing out metastases, the dark growths peppering his lungs like lichens, their insidious fingers lacing into him, wreaking their invisible, irreversible harm. He did not need eyes to see it again. He did not need ears to hear his croaking, “But I haven’t smoked in years, decades. It was just an army thing,” or to hear the starchy-lab-coat shift of the doctor’s shrug.
And, like a kid caught at something, hurt while doing the forbidden, Erik had run, grabbing Leif’s gun in his rush rather than his own well-worn 12-gauge. It wasn’t until he’d pulled the truck onto the road edge, unzipped the case, fingers still shaking, and pulled out the over/under, the bluing’s sheen nearly black, the varnish immaculately glossy, that he had realized, made small play out of digging through his vest pockets in the vain hope of finding some 20-gauge shells.
Erik shook his head, tried to laugh, managed a broken slash of a smile. Staggering up this ridge, through the wind-tattered golden pelt of the mountain’s bunch grasses, hoping for the chance of Huns scattering into the endless reach of sky, he’d carried the gun at the ready. A gun as empty as his home. Searing the last working bits of his lungs, for what?
He looked below, scanning country he knew by heart, the height he’d achieved modest but an achievement all the same. As far as he could see, only the grass, bucking and waving to the winds, the tossed yellowed leaves of the cottonwoods tracing the creek course, some tangled thickets of buffalo brush marking the low spots, a spring, a magpie tilting against the gusts. What if he had grabbed his own 12 or had found the odd 20-gauge shell? What, he wondered, would he have done up here with that now? A loaded gun in hand, a death sentence in his pocket. Maybe it had been more luck than curse that had made him pick the wrong case.
When everything between them blew apart, Monica had railed against his refusal to even consider leaving this place. All he’d said was, “Let’s take that off the table,” and a dam burst, years and years of the vilest festering spilling forth, surging over everything he thought he’d managed to protect. He could barely recall the dank pathways leading so steadfastly to the lawyers, the papers, the end. They’d just been talking, hadn’t they? About change? About ways to get things moving again?
Erik closed the gun, the solid click as carefully engineered as the whunk shut of a car door. He lifted it, sighted down the ramp, the world swinging beyond the polished steel ball of the sight. What would she say about this news? He shut his eyes, let his cheek settle in against the stock, picturing himself explaining: If only you could have waited, we could have kept them safe, they never would have known, it could have been tragedy, not disaster. The widowed wife, the fatherless children. Not just another divorce, a man cast off, children broken.
He lowered the gun then, and before he could think not to, he turned it around, tested the fit of muzzles under chin, wondered how anyone could ever manage to pull that trigger. He pictured, for just an instant, a last second’s flinch, a mangled job of it, a jaw maybe, teeth, bits of tongue, and he nearly wretched, unable to get the gun down to his lap fast enough. As harmless as a gun could possibly get, the nearest shell miles and miles removed, and still he found himself gasping again, air a total stranger.
Fighting the folds of his old canvas pants, wriggling his fingers in until he felt the edge of paper, wriggled and tore it free, Erik spread it open across his thigh, smoothing the wrinkles, the photos of his insides now only a distraction, something to wipe away the cold touch of the barrels against the sagging flesh beneath his chin. Really, the pictures weren’t all that different than the ultrasound shots of first Lena, then Leif, growing inside Monica’s body. All that growth. Just a question of degree, of intent.
Erik tore the paper in half, then in half again, following the fold creases he’d made hiding the pictures away. He aligned the strips and tore them lengthwise, and then again, and again. But it was just like the growth, nothing getting smaller, only dividing. One cell to two, two to four, eight, 16, 32, a hundred million million. Growth gone wild.
The first time Leif had made the climb here with him, the birds bursting up, his eyes had gone so wide at the sound of his shot, or maybe only at the sight of the partridge caught up in mid-flight, tumbling back down, Erik had wondered about explaining death to his boy, a nagging twinge of unease, how it would go, what he could possibly say, but Leif’s mouth had opened, his feet already turning to dash back down the mountain as he whispered, “The dragons.”
“What?” Erik had said, busy marking the bird, off that boulder, beyond the burnt ends of the buffalo brush.
“Dad!” Leif had said, his voice etched with panic. “They’ll wake up!”
It had been years since he’d told them about the dragons’ backs, long before they could reach even the first ridge. He’d laughed, taken Leif’s hand, started after the fallen bird. “They’ve slept so long, they’ve turned to stone. Did I leave that part out? Do you think I’d ever take you anywhere there were real dragons?”
And this 9-year-old, who somehow still believed in Santa, in stone dragons waiting to be awoken, accepted this as well. Same as he’d then believed in happily ever after.
Erik kept shredding his death sentence, piece by piece, making it smaller and smaller, more and more, until the wind plucked away a loose scrap, sent it scattering across the blackened stone. Erik started after it, almost spilling Leif’s shotgun onto the rock. Clutching it at his knees, he leaned back and watched the paper disappear into the grass. And although he had never once littered in his life, not a wrapper, not even a single cigarette butt back in those days, Erik lifted his hand into the wind and opened it, the fragments of paper taking flight as if winged, as if they were already his own ashes, that he’d somehow been given dispensation, allowed to scatter himself up here, the dragons aware there was no one now left to make the trip.
Leif would, he wanted to cry, to bellow into the wind. Instead he stood up, turned his back to the wind, let it moil his sleeves around his arms as he shouted, “I’m not yet even 50!”
His words vanished more quickly than the last bits of paper, white glints dodging between grass blades as if hunted by hawks. He looked down to where his hand gripped his son’s unused gun. “Not yet even?” he said. Where in the world had that come from? It sounded as if he was already a foreigner here. Someone from a time past.
A couple of bits of the paper stuck to the sweat of his palm, and he rubbed them against his thigh, only white bits, just borders, nothing colored, no fatally wronged parts of him there on display. When they too whisked away, Erik surveyed the country a moment more before stepping forward. Angling down, sidehilling, he might make it all the way to the cottonwoods of the creek where it dropped out of the cold canyon. He’d have to take his time, keep his breath within possibilities, but he could follow the road back from there, only the gentlest of rises, even the chance of a ride, a hop over a tailgate, a balance on a wheel well back to his truck. It made sense.
But Erik couldn’t keep from looking up, where he and Leif had finally stood that day, a little boy afraid of dragons, so proud of having made it all the way to the top, so surprised to find an entire world opened out before him. They’d collected three birds on the way up and two more on the way down, a full limit, and Leif hadn’t worried about death, more instead about the ones that had gotten away, and Erik had told him that those were the most important birds of all, that they were the ones that would make sure there’d always be birds here for them to find, just like he’d been doing for 30 years, like Leif himself could do for a lot longer than that.
At the clinic, the foreign doctor had kept shaking his head, murmuring about lost chances, saying, “A quarter only left of your lungs’ capacities. How could you have pretended?”
He hadn’t known how to explain. That he had noticed but just assumed it was possible he’d forgotten how to breathe. That Monica could have stolen away the very air along with everything else. That she might as well have.
Hearing again the chatter and babble of the doctor’s warnings, the pros and cons of radiation and chemo this late, his description of the end, the need to hoard his reserves, Erik turned his first step up the hill, then the next, climbing toward the rest of the dragons awaiting him. He hoisted Leif’s empty gun, as if the Huns might swarm any second into the air, that some might fall only to his wishes, the rest winging off to safety, to return after he was gone, making sure there’d always be more.

Pete Fromm, a four-time winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, is the author of three novels and five story collections, including a collection of hunting stories, King of the Mountain, and one of fishing stories, Blood Knot, as well as the memoir of his winter alone in the Selway Bitterroot Wilderness, Indian Creek Chronicles. He lives with his family in Great Falls, Montana.