Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 39, No. 6, June, 1994

Zeke and the Dragon by Jas. R. Petrin

When Zeke came home with the dragon, he told George not to worry about it, he’d have it clear of the house in plenty of time before Ma got back from Fargo, she’d never even know. He let it out of the sack in Louie’s room down in the basement and grinned at it through the crack in the door, going, “You know what this li’l sucker’s worth, bro? I mean, do you?”

George said he had no idea.

The thing belly-down on the floor like it was dead.

Zeke told him, beaming, “A fortune, that’s what. A goddamn fortune. What’ll we call him?”

George didn’t know.

Zeke said, “How about — let’s call him Ed.” Zeke made kissy-kissy sounds at Ed through the partly opened door while George listened.

George then tapped his brother gently on the arm and said, “Zeke, you think maybe we could go upstairs, sit down, and have a little talk about this?”

And they did that.

“First,” George said, hunkered in the middle of the sofa with his knees poking up, trying to remain rational with this idiot brother of his, “I don’t know what that thing is you got down there, some kind of lizard — not a dragon, there’s no such thing — and second, I don’t know what you’re gonna do with it, something I’d like to know since I live here, remember, till my welfare kicks in; and third, when Ma walks through that door with Louie, I don’t know what you think you’ll tell her to keep her from killing you. Okay, you get rid of it. The animal’s gone. But it stinks, Zeke — I mean it stinks. You think Ma won’t say nothing, a smell like that hits her soon as she walks in the door?”

“George... George...” Zeke said smiling, slowly shaking his head. Talking softly as if George was the fool. “George, listen...”

Here it comes.

“You know that redheaded dope Dufault?”

Get ready for it.

“Sure you do. Listen what happened. I drop by Dufault’s, okay? Check and see why he’s past due recycling the stuff I give him, all that copper the phone company didn’t want no more, polluting the back of their truck? Bang on the door of his shop — nothing. He’s got those motorcycles spread around in there, I can see through the dirt on the glass, changing parts the way he does, but no answer. No Dufault. And no copper.”

“Lizard. We’re talking lizard here, Zeke.”

“It’s a dragon. Will you gimme a minute? I don’t hafta tell you nothing, you know.”

“Yeah, you do. You owe me that much, since I’ll probably get killed along with you, soon as Ma gets home, that thing stinking up the place.”

“What you smell is money. Now listen. I go in Dufault’s window, the one at the back that lifts up I keep forgetting to tell him about. Drop into the back room and look around. You should see the stuff he’s recycling: VCR’s, TV’s, micro-waves — a friend of the environment. But no copper. And what I told him, the deal we made, I goes, Dufault, this copper don’t leave here till I get paid. Only it did. It must have. I couldn’t find it in there, could I?”

“Zeke...”

“I’m getting to it, George.”

“The lizard...”

“The dragon. I’m getting to it. So I poke around the shop. Dufault’s. Everything under the sun but no copper. I start feeling p.o.’d at the guy. Feeling I oughtta do something — no copper, no money, nothing. So I’m wandering around, rearranging the place a little, almost sort of a gag, then looking at the motorcycles, the rest of that junk, I get a idea. Hey. I’ll take his van. It’s the best thing he’s got, there in the shop. Park it someplace and make him cough up my dough before I tell him where to find it—”

“The cops’d find it before he would. Anything of Dufault’s, they definitely got a sheet on it.”

“Oh yeah?” Zeke looked sober. “Maybe you’re right. I didn’t think about that. Huh. Anyway, getting back to it, I writes Dufault this little note—”

“A note.”

“Yeah, see—”

“You deliberately provoked that lunatic?”

“That’s right. You know, to get his attention. I plank it down right there on the workbench where he’ll see it. Then I push the button hauls up that big overhead door, and out of the shop I roll in the van, George, down Salter and over the bridge, all the freights down there in the Weston yards like toy trains on a plywood board at the Polo Park mall—”

George folded his arms and said, “By the time we get to the lizard, Ma’ll of killed it with an axe, she’ll of taken care of you, a couple of swings, and be coming at me screaming. Louie’ll be there on his knees, reeling off pages of scripture and praying for our souls while the SWAT teams kicks down the door. Come on. They went to Fargo, Zeke. Shopping. Not to live there.”

“I thought it was a mental health weekend. For Ma. Louie trying to keep her on the wagon.”

“Okay, let’s talk about Louie? He comes home early and there’s a giant lizard in his room, what’s he gonna think?”

“Who cares. He’s a Christian.”

“Zeke...”

“Nothing against him. But they got to turn their other cheek, Christians. It’s God’s rule. I could of brought home two dragons—”

“Finish your story.”

Zeke took a deep breath. “If you’ll let me. So I’m in the van, breezing along, I got the windows open because there’s this smell—”

George nodded.

“—and what happens, I lose track of time. Or I lose track of the mileage, I dunno. Anyway, the van starts to cough. I take a look at the fuel gauge an’ guess what?”

George stared at him. This dope with the three day beard, the beer gut, the T-shirt, the broken boots. George thinking, I dunno, Zeke. You look at the fuel gauge and see that you got — lemme see — a flat tire?

“Can’t guess? Well, I’m outa gas. Running on fumes. Now I think those vans got a reserve tank, somebody told me once at the Westbrook Hotel — they had this stripper marathon, I got talking to this guy had boosted one, or his brother had, but I might’ve knocked back a couple beers that day, I can’t remember for sure, or even how you would switch it, so now I’m stuck, right?”

Sigh.

“What can I do? Get out and start walking? I’m thinking about this, the van’s slowing down, an’ then, Jeez, bro, all of a sudden it happens.”

“Now we come to it.”

“I said we would. Something wet slides down the back of my neck. Big and clammy, like a giant worm glomming down my collar? Man, you know what that feels like? I just about lost it, George. I did. Just about jumped out the window and ran. Glance around quick to see what slimed me, and here’s this tongue, looks like four pounds of raw liver...”

“Jeez.”

“That’s what I said. Only stronger. Panic city, far as I’m concerned. Slab of raw liver an’ no potatoes. I stomp those brakes, George, I really stomp ’em. Twenny feet of rubber on the street, I’m drifting sideways, I already got one foot out the door, then I turn around for one last look to try and see what the hell has got a tongue like that — and there’s Ed. Then I remember the printing on the side of that vehicle — PARKS AND RECREATION. That van’s some kinda limo they use at the zoo for animals—”

“A limo, huh? To chauffeur around something that smells like a sack of moldy gym shoes? How’d Dufault get ahold of it?”

“I don’t know. But that’s what it is. Like I told you, it stunk. If you think Ed stinks, you should of smelled the van, whatever they carried in it, it wasn’t roses. You mention sack. Well, heaped in the back there’s all kind of sacks, I guess for animals, which I borrowed one of them, ditched the van where it was, and brought Ed home in it.”

“Why?”

Zeke sitting there. Slack-jawed. Gazing back like a dope.

“Why what?”

“Why’d you bring him home?”

“George. That animal. You know what it’s worth?”

“You asked me that already, I think I said I didn’t know. Now I’ll ask you, do you know what it’s worth?”

“I know dragons are rare. Practically extinct. Like the buffalo.”

“If you’d brought home a buffalo, at least we could eat it.”

“You’re not gonna eat Ed. You can forget that idea. No, I’m gonna keep him awhile, let the zoo get hot and bothered, then give somebody a call, the zoo keeper, see what we can arrange between us, him and me.”

“You mean to sit there and tell me you’re gonna ransom that creepy thing?”

“Why not. Isn’t that what Doof was gonna do?”

“Hold a giant lizard prisoner in your mother’s house, in your brother’s bedroom, and ransom it?”

“Why not?”

“Ma’s coming home.”

“She could be gone for days.”

George could only stare at the guy. There was no reasoning with Zeke when he got like this.

“Bro, you’ve outdone yourself.”

“I know it. And it is so a dragon. Reason I’m sure, it said so right there in the van, wrote down on a clipboard. One Komodo dragon. Which is Ed. Now listen. You listening, George?”

“Yeah.”

“You listening to me?”

“I’m listening.”

“What do you think a dragon — an animal like that — would eat for lunch? You think some Kraft Dinner? Or just what?”

Ma was still hot about what happened at the border. She snarled at Louie, who was angling the car out of the yield into the stream of returning cross-border shoppers on Route 75, heading north.

“Couple of criminals, those two.”

“Ma, your own sons...”

“They better not’ve done nothing — screwed up my house!”

“The house’ll be fine, Ma.”

“You think so.”

“Yes.”

“You’re sure.”

“Just as sure as God made little apples.”

She looked at him.

“You saying God made Li’l Abner?”

“Apples, Ma.”

“Apples. Abner. You said God made everything.”

“He did make everything.”

“He couldn’t of made the weasels. The devil must of done that when God wasn’t looking. And I’ll tell you something else. If they’ve tried anything smart in my house these last two days, some criminal activity, they’ll be meeting their maker a whole lot sooner than they think.”

“Please, Ma...”

“Couple of crooks.”

“Don’t say that, Ma. Remember why we came on this trip? To get our negative feelings under control. To learn how to stay calm and not get upset about things.”

“It’s because you don’t want me to drink.”

“Well...”

Rolling north on Route 75.

Louie hated it, Ma being bitter like this. Not so bad here in the car with just the two of them, but she’d blurt that sort of thing out anywhere. Like in the J. C. Penney in Fargo, when the manufacturer’s rep said to Ma — they were walking past a promo in the toy department — “Ma’am, we’re holding a survey. Asking folks if there was anything special they wanted for their kids...” And Ma throwing back at him: “Yeah, something poison. With a nail in it.”

You never knew with Ma.

Crossing the border, though, that was the kicker. Louie not sure what Ma was going to say. Something like, weapons? Sure, we got weapons. Got a missile launcher in the trunk from Colonel Qadhafi, put a hole in the White House the size of the Windsor tunnel. Ma lived to provoke the authorities. But this time she seemed content to sit there while Louie explained to the man that they were under their limit and had nothing to declare, Ma having already given her assurance she wouldn’t smuggle anything — “Heck, why would I? I haven’t even spent my limit, have I?” He’d snuck a peek into her bags at the motel just the same, feeling guilty about it when he didn’t find anything. But he still expected her to open her mouth and get them both tossed into a holding cell.

Which is sort of what happened.

The guard finished with them. He was already stepping back to flag them through when somebody called him away and a female customs officer moved up and took his place.

“God,” Ma hissed, “lookit the face on it!”

If there was anything Ma hated more than male authorities, it was female authorities. Especially females in uniform. Ma said females all wearing the same outfit was a perversion of the natural order.

“Excuse me?” the girl said into the window.

This girl with an official tone in her voice, looking past Louie now at Ma, who was wearing an expression of contempt on her face that summed up the feelings she’d been collecting about officialdom for the past fifty years.

Louie hurriedly said, “Good afternoon, ma’am, we—”

But that was all he got out before Ma interrupted him. Louie couldn’t believe it, the girl right there at the window and Ma flatly ignoring her, going: “Goddamn women are the worst, you know, give ’em some power. Some redneck broad trying to prove herself.”

The female customs officer’s lips pinched together and she told Louie in a snippy way to pull the car over, and then took Ma and her suitcase into the building and kept her there for twenty-five minutes, half an hour, and when Ma finally came back out you could see the heat waves radiating off her as she stalked back to the car across the asphalt, and nearly broke a hinge slamming the door, and opened her mouth and let Louie have it as they drove away. Hollering.

“Well, why didn’t you help me?”

“Ma, I couldn’t—”

“You know what they did to me?”

“No, Ma.”

“You know what they DID to me in there?”

“Well—”

“Dumped my suitcase out on the floor, pawed through my underwear, searching.”

“Oh?”

“Then that... that torturess, she decided to search me!”

“Well, Ma—”

“I yelled. I hollered. I waited for you to bust down that door and storm in and rescue me, my Rambo. Only you never came. I was on my own. Told the witch I’d have her head and then her job, in that order. Told her I knew cops, half the damn city police — and the broad says — you know what she says? — she goes, ‘Yes. I’m sure you’ve had plenty of dealings with them.’ This snarky little grin on her face. I could of slapped her! I would of slapped her, only these other couple of ones had ahold of me, pinning me down, hurting me, an’ then the first one, the head torturess, starts hitting me—”

“Ma, she didn’t.”

“Beating on me. Took out her gun and pistol-whipped me—”

“Ma—”

“A feeding frenzy, all of ’em beating on me. Kicks. Kidney punches. Slaps. Then the snarky one, the torturess, she pulls this rubber glove thing halfway up her arm, got this sneer on her face would stop a bullet, and then — and then—”

Ma slumped against the headrest with her eyes rolling up white at the memory of it, coughing and pounding herself in the chest.

“I never been that humiliated in my entire life!”

Louie thinking it must have been something, all right — Ma humiliated. He couldn’t imagine it.

Ma snuck a glance at him. “You think I’m lying ’cause you don’t see no marks, but I’m black and blue under this dress, all the things they did to me while you just sat here. Cigarette burns. Electric shocks—”

“Come on, Ma.”

“I’ll never pay taxes again!”

“You don’t pay taxes now—”

“Because of women like her. That’s why I don’t pay!”

Ma was quiet a minute, catching her breath, then suddenly regaining control of herself, she glanced at him quickly.

“Listen. While I was inside that place getting tortured, did any of ’em come back out to the car and say anything?”

“No, Ma.”

“Poke around at all?”

“No. I think they forgot I was there.”

Ma sat back.

“Lucky for them,” she said. And snorted.

Dufault spotted the van while driving back from the flea market in his half-ton truck. He was in a bad mood already, having had a lousy day, nobody much interested in the colored glass insulators he had got with the copper bus bars from that jerk Zeke. What he thought might work, use the insulators as a come-on, the colored glass sparkling in the sun, then give his customers a glimpse of the stuff under the table and tell them it was layaways for somebody else. Thought they’d jump at that. Grab some other chump’s bargain? Do it!

Bargains which were actually the stuff he couldn’t set out in the open in case the cops came sniffing around.

He recognized the van by the scrape mark on the door where his jimmy bar had slipped on the night he’d acquired it, and at the sight he nearly stood the truck on end, stopping. Nearly hopped out and ran over to the van, and would have except for the fact there was a cop car parked not ten feet away, and a Dr. Hook towtruck right there, beginning to winch up the back of it.

Dufault was angry. He’d only grabbed the van last night, hadn’t even had a chance to search through it for anything flea-marketable. And now he was racking his brain over how the van could have got here, the other side of the river, miles from home.

Not the cops. If they’d found it at the shop, they’d have left it where it was and built a case around it. Staked the place out and waited for Dufault to show up. No reason to drag the evidence across town out here to Charleswood.

But if not the cops, who then? Kids? Some punks stole it, went for a joy ride, then discovered they couldn’t handle the smell, pulled the van over and ditched it here? It could have happened like that. Except the kids from his neighborhood, they’d have stripped it first, popped those mags off, all that Goodyear rubber, and rolled the wheels away for sure.

He took one last look at the cop standing at the van’s open window fanning the smell away, the truck driver rattling his chains; then Dufault reluctantly slipped the half-ton into gear and continued on home to the shop. Arriving there, he really got mad. Finding the big front door gaping wide, and the shop in the craziest mess he’d ever seen outside of a comic book.

Not tossed. You couldn’t say the place was tossed. Rearranged is what it was, but in a nasty sort of way. Tool cabinets turned back to front so you couldn’t get at them. Drawers yanked out and put back in the wrong order with the wrong things inside: one drawer was filled with powdered soap. Cabinet doors above the workbench nailed shut. And look at this. VCR’s and microwave ovens stacked up in the front window with a hand-lettered card propped in front of them saying:

He jerked the window curtain down fast.

And then Dufault saw the note on the bench, scrawled in the same grease pencil characters, composed on the back of an invoice.

Zeke Boyer.

Who else?

Dufault rolled the door down and went back out to his truck and hauled himself up into the driver’s seat feeling put upon and ornery and just plain mean.

The blurb about Ed came at the end of forty minutes of uninterrupted music the radio announcer kept interrupting to say how he wasn’t going to interrupt anything. The blurb telling how a Komodo dragon on loan from Indonesia had gone missing outside a veterinary clinic where it had been waiting to get an X-ray after it leaped off a table at the zoo onto a summer student, the student falling into the zoo’s X-ray machine and breaking his head, and the machine.

“Hear that?” George asked. “Doof robbed a zoo.”

“And the place really is a zoo, ain’t it.” Zeke, nursing a beer, was talking with his nose buried in Ma’s old Funk and Wag-nail’s, one each week at the supermarket twenty-five years ago. “You know, according to this, it says our pal Ed is pretty amazing.”

“He’s amazing, all right,” George said. “Any animal that won’t eat and still dumps all over the place.”

George stuck the aluminum snow shovel in the closet and washed his hands in the sink. What had happened was Zeke had found a way to get Ed moving. You just clapped your hands together, a sharp whack! and he crawled towards you. Easy. He’d clapped Ed up the basement stairs, grinning, to show George, and the first thing Ed did when he got to the top was mess the hall. Like making some sort of a comment.

“What’s even more amazing is how dumb some humans are,” George said, “bringing lizards inside a house. Even Dufault wasn’t that stupid.”

“What else we gonna do with him? We got to keep him somewhere, don’t we?” Thumping the book. “Like it says here. Ed’s coldblooded. He gets cold, he could go dormant on us. Another thing — listen! — Ed could grow to be three hundred pounds if you took and you fed him on wild pigs and deer.”

“Wild pigs and deer, huh? That’s what you’re bringing home next, wild pigs and deer. I draw the line there, bro. At pigs and deer.”

Zeke scowled.

“Fine. Don’t help. I’ll do everything myself. Feed the little guy, change his water, follow him around with the snow scoop. Only listen. Later, when those bucks come rolling in, don’t come sucking up to me like you’re some kind of a buddy, okay?”

George dried his hands and went over to stand next to Zeke. Maybe it would be a good idea to talk nice to this dope, this grown man like a kid that had brought home a frog. A giant frog. Maybe get him going about the book.

“What else does it say there?”

Zeke brightened. “It tells all the things Ed likes to eat. Another snack he likes, one of his favorites, he’ll eat carrion.” Looking up puzzled. “What’s carrion?”

“Dead meat.”

Zeke thought a moment. “That’s dumb. I mean, you don’t see a lot of live meat around, do you, down at the butcher’s behind the glass.”

“Zeke, try and understand. I’m talking dead. Real dead. Stuff that’s been lying in the sun a couple days? Like that hamburger you tried to force-feed me one time when we were kids, you found in the back window of Uncle’s car...”

“Still mad about that, huh?”

“There were things moving in that hamburger, Zeke.”

“See? It was fresher than you thought. But no. Getting back to Ed. We gotta feed him now. No telling if Doof fed him, or when. I’m not taking a chance he could croak on us just when they’re getting set to hand us over the dough.”

“What about Dufault? He could come looking for Ed, you know. That note you left.”

“I can take care of Dufault.” Zeke thought for a moment. Then he snapped his fingers. “Hey. We could drive out to Shaker’s. You know Shaker? Guard I met out at Stony, likes to hunt? Guy like Shaker must have something for Ed lying around. Something ripe...”

“Stony Mountain? We got no car...”

“We’ll take Louie’s.”

Like they weren’t in enough trouble with Louie already.

Going out the door, Zeke said, “I was thinking. To get rich? You could invent a pet food, nice lumps of carrion in it, be a major hit with the pet shops. What do you think?”

Ma stood at the side of the road as the cars zoomed by.

“Mean to tell me you brought us all the way out here into the wilderness, thousands of miles, and you didn’t even bring no tire pump?”

There at the front of the car, looking down at the flat with a frown on her face and the prairie wind snapping her cotton skirt around her thick legs.

Louie tried to calm her, tried to explain to her that a pump wouldn’t be any help — hey, the tire had exploded at sixty miles an hour, it was ripped wide open, look at it. What they needed was a spare.

“Well, thank God you finally figured that out. A real Mr. Fix-it, ain’t you? Put the damn thing on and let’s go!”

Louie gave her the rest of the bad news gently. The big problem being that they didn’t have a spare tire with them, either. Then, seeing the expression on her face turn even uglier, he hastened to add that one way to look at things, it was simply God’s will this had happened. God must want them to wait here awhile.

“What for? Is He having a problem keeping up, or just what?”

“Ma—”

“He better show up quick. Before the massive coronary I get from beating you to death with the tire iron.”

“It’ll work out, Ma. It’s just we don’t always understand God’s ways.”

Ma kicked the shredded tire hard. A thick ankle, a wool sock, a scuffed Sonics gym shoe.

“You got to blame God, don’t you? Everything that happens, you blame God. Six billion people trying to put something over on him, and He’s just got to take time out of His busy day to give us a flat. Listen, I understand God’s ways. It’s your ways I got a problem with, dragging me the hell and gone out here—”

“Ma, you wanted to come—”

“Listen! Will you listen? Telling me I wanted to come! You dragged me out here — I was happy to stay home, no way I wanted to leave the weasels alone in the house — but no, you pretty near threw a hammer-lock on and dragged me!”

“To help you with your problem, Ma. You know... drinking.”

“I don’t have no problem drinking.”

“Hiding bottles around the house.”

“That ain’t no problem. It’s easy. You bring this up ’cause you’re not getting nowhere blaming God so you want to blame me. You’re the one didn’t bring the spare tire—”

“It’s your car, Ma.”

“This is something the weasels would pull. All I can say, you better flag somebody down and get me home, and don’t stop!”

She got back in the car and slammed the door.

Louie waved his arms at twenty-three vehicles — he counted them — and just when his arms felt as though they were about to fall out of their sockets, a car roared by, slackened speed, and backed up. This car, also a Dodge, was similar to Ma’s. Its driver fetched a hand-pump out of his trunk before Louie could tell him not to bother and approached with a friendly grin. Told Louie he’d stopped when he spotted the Steel Workers for Christ sticker on the back window. Wanting to know what church Louie belonged to.

Louie started telling him about the Church of the Loving Lambs; then Ma interrupted, cranking her window down and yelling.

“Hey. You just stop by to talk? Get that tire pumped and hurry the hell up.”

The man watched Ma out of the corners of his eyes. When he spoke again, his voice had tightened a little. “Maybe... uh... this pump isn’t going to help. You got a spare?”

Louie said he didn’t.

“What’s the holdup?” Ma yelled. “I got to get home quick and kill a couple of weasels.”

She opened the passenger’s door — they heard her feet hit the gravel shoulder on the far side of the car, then stomp around to the back of the vehicles, drawn up nearly side by side on a farmer’s road allowance. Ma mumbling something about maybe having to kill a few other things while she was at it. Rummaging in the trunk.

The man shifted uneasily.

“Tell you what.” A little nervous as he tucked his pump under his arm. “Looks like I can’t do anything here. But I’ll stop at the next town and send back a service truck...”

He moved quickly, keeping a safe distance from Ma, tossing his pump back into his trunk and then jumping in behind the wheel and getting out of there quick, throwing a spume of loose gravel with his right rear tire. The sound of his engine faded while Louie gazed ruefully after him. Traffic had slacked off entirely now, and the prairie was a large and lonesome place with no other vehicles on the road.

Ma said, “Well, you just gonna stand there? Or are you gonna put the spare tire on the car?”

Jabbing her thumb at the trunk.

Louie stepped cautiously forward and peered in, and saw the spare lying on top of the suitcases. He studied it nearly a full minute, trying to understand where it could have come from.

Not liking the answer.

“Ma, you didn’t—”

Ma said, “God sent it.”

“But, Ma, that man was a good Samaritan, you can’t just—”

“God sent the tire. You don’t know his ways. Now put it on, will you? I got a feeling if I don’t get home quick those weasels’ll sell the place out from under me, sure as God made Li’l Abner.”

Dufault decided, Okay, let’s do it.

Checked his West Coast mirrors. Then took one more look at the house, saw no signs of life, and swung his long legs out of the cab.

Boyers. Always trying to stick it to you. Like that Zeke. Big dumb dork with his gut and his grin. And those boots! Get him down a lonely road one night and show him what God gave us boots for. Stomp on him until the stars came out, the guy thinking he was tough, not knowing what the word was about. Show him sometime.

No sign of the van, either.

Why in hell would anybody want to steal a van that stunk like that?

Okay. He had stolen it. But that was different.

Dufault glanced around carefully to make sure there were no Boyers lying in ambush in the shadows under the carport, none strolling up the front street, then walked up the empty drive to the back of the house and stooped down to pop a basement window.

The window was a tight squeeze and took a patch of skin off your ribs the size of a Checker cab, but you managed to wriggle through feet first and drop inside. The first thing that hit you was the stink. The same stink as the van, it rose up at your nose and walloped you. Dufault knew this had to be Zeke’s room, the smell must have got in his clothes.

Dark in here. You couldn’t see. Dufault stumbled over something bulky in the middle of the room, and cursed. Trust a dope like Zeke to leave a thing where you’d trip over it, lying here heavy as a rolled-up rug. Dufault gave it a kick, feeling his foot thud into the thing, hearing a kind of a hiss as he moved on.

His mind already working out what he was going to do.

Fix Zeke the freak. The guy had a taste for parlor games, huh? Okay. See how he liked it when he came home and found his own parlor all warped over. And a nice little note of his own there to welcome him, seeing he liked poetry so much. Something like:

At least it rhymed.

Dufault moved into a short hallway, some light here filtering down the staircase, then went softly up the basement stairs on his tippy-toes to the main floor of the house.

Silence.

Not a soul in the place.

Which was pretty much fine with him. Just the way he wanted it. Make this a quick visit. Do what he had to do, in and out before the big dork knew what hit him.

Dufault brought his hands together in a smack, savoring the moment. Get to it, now. Then his nostrils twitched. That smell again. Whew! It sure did stink like the devil in here.

“Now what?” Ma yelled.

They’d got the tire changed, drove on another thirty miles, and now, would you believe it? the car had stalled. The engine letting out a terrific gasp and giving up.

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s a vapor lock.” Louie spoke loud so Ma could hear him. She was still inside the car, he was here under the hood. He had the air cleaner off and was poking at the choke valve with a screwdriver when Ma squirmed in behind the wheel.

He heard her say, “I’ll start this thing!” and he said, “No, not yet—”

But that was as far as he got.

Ma turned the key, the starter engaged, and a ten inch spike of blue flame shot out the top of the carburetor, scorching Louie’s eyebrows, causing him to throw himself backwards in a reflex action and bash the crown of his head on the lip of the uplifted hood.

“Wow! Oh, Ma — wow!” Louie walked around in circles, all stooped over, touching his shriveled eyebrows with one hand and cupping the rising lump on the top of his head with the other. “Oh, that hurt, Ma! Oh, wow!”

Ma said: “Can’t nothing go right on this trip, now we got to go and get a vapor lock? Jesus. What is a vapor lock?” She looked at him out the window. “What are you wandering around for? You gonna get this car going so we can get home some time this year, or what?”

“Oh, wow, Ma!”

Ma got out of the car.

“Stand up straight, I can’t talk to you when you’re hunched over staring at the ground like that. Like some kinda — I don’t know — elephant man. Listen. I got an idea. Your dad used to have this old car, it wouldn’t start. What he used to do is push it, get the thing rolling, and when he’d holler, I’d pop the clutch for him—”

“Ma. This car’s an automatic.”

“So?”

“It doesn’t have a clutch — oh, wow, that hurts. We’d have to get it going fifteen, twenty miles an hour...”

“You can’t run that fast?”

“Not pushing a car, Ma!”

“Well, what are you gonna do then?”

“I don’t know. Maybe if we had some methyl hydrate—”

“What’s that?”

“You spray it into the carburetor, it’s really volatile—”

“What’s that mean?”

“It means it burns really good, and it—”

“Why’n’t you say so.” Ma leaned back into the car and dipped into her purse. “Okay,” she said, “let me get under that hood this time, and you turn the key.”

She bent over the fender, her broad backside jutting out, the tips of her toes just meeting the road. No use arguing. Louie got in behind the wheel. When Ma hollered, he gave the ignition one more try, and this time there was a blast like a shotgun, white smoke boiled up, and the engine caught, growled, and roared. Ma stepped back and slammed the hood. Stood there in front of the car like an apparition, with thin tendrils of white smoke clinging to her head. She walked around to the passenger’s side, got into the car, and shoved something back in her purse.

“Holy cow, Ma,” Louie said, impressed. “What was that stuff?”

“Hair spray,” Ma said. “Very volatile. See, I know about that. There was this woman once, she turned a can of lit hair spray on a man was trying to mug her.”

“Really? What happened?”

“The fence broke.”

“What fence?”

“The one he took off and galloped through with his clothes on fire.”

“Ma, that’s terrible. Was he hurt?”

“I don’t know. But he got hurt later. When I took an’ beat the flames out of him with one of the fence boards, I think he might of got a busted rib outa that. Saving his life. Would you drive the car?”

Dufault worked quickly and methodically. He’d never done anything like this before, what he had in mind. Tossed a room or two sure. You had to sometimes. Like when you broke into a place, you knew they had something small and valuable stashed away and you had to find it and get the hell out in a hurry; but never anything like this — deliberate.

He began uncertainly by turning things upside-down.

Sofa, chairs, coffee table, end tables, television, stereo — all this junk the Boyers had. Look at it. A shelf of old Funk and Wagnall’s encyclopedias that, Jeez, weighed half a ton. Turn ’em over. Ornaments, kitchen appliances — the ones he could lift. Dishes. Pictures on the wall: a black velvet painting of Elvis and a calendar of a horse’s head hanging over a fence. Upside-down. After a while he was really getting into it, beginning to feel creative. Like with the thick candles he found in the cupboard when he was doing the kitchen, and got an idea, and went around to the upside-down lamps on their upside-down tables, and unscrewed the bulbs and jammed the candles into their place.

The light bulbs, let’s see... Put them in the refrigerator.

And an armload of clothing out of the clothes closet — stuff that stuff in the oven.

If you used your head a bit, there were all sorts of gags you could play on a dork like Zeke the freak.

Then he came to the bathroom.

He pointed the shower head straight up — a nice touch — and was down on his haunches eyeing the bolts that held the toilet to the floor, thinking what a great effect it would make if he could somehow turn the commode over, too, when he caught a sudden, sharp whiff of that smell again. Whew! Like a dead body here in the room with him. A second later he felt something slap the bare skin at the small of his back, something damp and heavy, and he twisted around and saw the giant lizard staring back at him with its tongue hanging out...

George insisted they keep the car windows rolled down on their drive back from Shaker’s at Stony Mountain. Let the wind flow through the car, he said, and blow the stink off. This meat the guy had sold them — man! A large slab of something he’d cut down off a hook in his shed after he beat the flies away with a pick handle. An aroma to the stuff that sucked the breath out of your lungs. He’d lopped off a hunk with his chain saw, and now they had it with them, wrapped in newspapers back there in the trunk of Louie’s car.

“You hadda buy the guy out, sixty pounds of the stuff? I mean, you get one lizard, you got to corner the world market on putrescent meat? Louie’ll never get the smell out of this car.”

“He’ll never get it outa his room, neither, so what I think could happen, the guy’ll get used to it,” Zeke said.

“That’s the problem. You think too much.”

“Listen. Thinking’s a sign of intelligence.”

“Not the way you do it.”

The sun was settling low, now only a glowing arc where the prairie met the sky. Ma rode along in stony silence. She hadn’t said a word for half an hour, just watched the city skyline loom up at them out of the dusk. The Perimeter Highway interchange flashed by. Louie said, “Well, Ma, looks like we’re actually going to make it. What a trip, huh? I was starting to wonder. I didn’t want to say anything, worry you, but I’ve been a bit concerned the last few miles. This oil light blinking on and off, red.”

“So?”

“Well. No oil in your engine. It could seize up on you, self-destruct.”

“That’d be God, I guess, huh?”

“Oh, Ma.” She was sinking into one of her moods again. Best to change the subject quick and cheer her up. “I was wondering what the guys are doing right now...”

“Lemme guess,” Ma said. “Let’s see. They’re back-filling the hole where the house used to be, hoping I’ll come home and not notice. It wouldn’t surprise me they’ve sold it for scrap lumber by now, those crooks.”

“Ma, remember what I told you, try and think of them as lambs that’ve strayed. If you’re patient with them, if you’re understanding, they’ll scramble back onto the path. They’re your children, Ma. Your own offspring.” Louie cast about for something from scripture he could say about the weasels. “They’re the fruits of your womb.”

Ma watching him.

“Calling Zeke a fruit?”

Like they couldn’t communicate, no matter what. Louie wished he could have managed to have a few intimate moments with Ma. That had been his plan. There in Fargo, reclining by the pool, Ma asking questions and Louie answering them by referring to scripture. Showing her the power of the Word. But it hadn’t worked out that way. Ma had her own ideas. All she’d wanted was to be driven around to every bottle shop they could find. She never bought anything. Practicing abstinence, she said.

That much at least was a promising sign. Louie was sure one day it would happen, the moment would come, he would get through to Ma. She’d see the light in one blinding flash of realization and undergo a miraculous conversion right there on the spot. He had to admit it was hard to imagine, though. Ma rolling around on the floor having an experience.

The street lights were gleaming now, the last of the sunlight trickling away. In twenty minutes they’d see the dark pitch of rooftops on Ma’s street among the trees.

“Well,” Louie said cheerily, “it was a fun trip, even with all the car trouble, and even though you didn’t find much to bring back with you, huh, Ma?”

“I don’t take nothing unless it’s a bargain.”

“You mean you don’t buy it.”

She looked at him.

At first Dufault thought it was an alligator, but then he thought, no, it can’t be. It didn’t look like one. Not that he’d ever actually seen an alligator, a real live one, but this thing didn’t look right. It didn’t have those bulbous eyes, or those smiling, toothy jaws. This mouth was smaller, more grim and businesslike. The mouth of a snake. One of those big anacondas you saw on TV, could unhinge its jaws and gulp down a sumo wrestler an inch at a time.

The head was slightly turned, one stony eye staring at him. A thin yellow line where the eyelid met that dull, watchful orb.

Dufault’s mouth was dry, his heart was hammering to beat hell, and there was a cold sweat oozing out of him under his shirt. Dufault had a phobia about reptiles, amphibians, whatever the hell this thing was. Alien creatures from science fiction. Animals that crawled out of eggs like maggots.

The way another man might get scared of a spider and stomp it, that’s how Dufault felt about this animal on the bathroom floor in front of him. Only the thing was too damn big. Hell, its tail went out the door into the hall. Try and stomp this monster, you better have a wooden leg handy or you’d be running for your life in one great big circle, your leg chomped off at the knee.

The scaly face two feet away.

And now — Jesus — the tongue sliding out again.

Dufault clapped his hands to try and scare the thing off. It perked up immediately and came at him.

They pulled up in front of Ma’s with the slab of meat back there in the trunk and stopped. It was Zeke who said not to go all the way in under the carport. Zeke who’d spotted the red Ford truck at the end of the street, tucked up tight behind the car ahead of it like its owner had been trying to hide it.

Hide a half-ton truck behind a Chevette. Man.

“As if he thought I wouldn’t spot the dingle-balls,” Zeke said. “Doofy the Newfie. The only guy’s still got dingle-balls on his headliner. I guess the dope’s in there, all right. I wonder if he’s met our houseguest by now?”

George said he didn’t know. Zeke said, Okay, maybe wait a few minutes sitting out here on the steps. Then go in and see for themselves. Why wait? George asked. Zeke said, Why not try a little experiment, see what else old Ed liked to eat?

When the thing made a feint at his leg, Dufault screamed and threw himself backwards. He was a big man, and when his butt slammed into the toilet bowl sideways, the bolts broke clean through the porcelain flange at the base and the fixture tilted over, the tank coming with it, water spraying up the wall. The lid of the tank fell off, and he glimpsed the neck of a gin bottle, booze hidden in there. Dufault backed into the tub dragging the shower curtain down. Cold water spattering his face.

The thing ignored the water. It seemed to have just one thing on its mind — Dufault. It humped forward, jaws gaping as if it were bent on engulfing Dufault’s foot. Dufault back-pedaled, pressing his back against the wall, trying to climb the slippery tile with his heels.

Zeke being ready, they went on into the house, but right away Zeke, walking a little ahead of George, halted so abruptly George almost ran into him.

“Judas in a jumpsuit!”

George looked past him. What he saw was a mess. A shambles. The place had been trashed. Zeke moaned low in his throat, and George knew just what he was thinking: what were they going to tell Ma?

They heard water running. The sound coming from the bathroom, getting louder as they went down the hall, like there was a babbling brook pouring through the house at that spot. They poked their heads in the bathroom door.

The smell was overpowering. Ed, all right.

And also Dufault.

The toilet was knocked over, the tank skewed to one side and ripped away from the wall, a jet of water shooting out the stub of a snapped-off pipe. Dufault was in the tub clutching a near-empty bottle of Beefeater gin, the man soaked to the skin, his red hair plastered to his skull and his eyes staring fixedly at Ed, who lay half in and half out of the tub with his leathery elbows jutting out and his blunt saurian head looking like it was carved out of a wet rock, frozen.

Zeke blew up.

“Doof! You scumbag! You wrecked this place, you—”

“Never mind that. What’s this — this thing?” Dufault’s voice was a croak, his words slurred, his lips blue and trembling.

“What’s what?”

“This... this thing!”

“It’s a dragon!” Zeke snapped, puzzled. “You don’t know your own dragon when you see it?”

Dufault’s gaze went from Ed, to Zeke, to George, and then back to Ed again. Bleary eyes taking them in with an alcoholic sweep. He took another slug from the bottle and whispered, “Dragon...”

“That’s right, Doof. You didn’t know? That’s why he’s miffed at you. I believe he’s gonna have you for lunch. Part of you, at least.”

One of Dufault’s rubber heels left another long vertical smear down the tile.

Zeke said, “Don’t run away. It’d rather eat dead things, which means it’ll probably kill you first. Or I will. What’ve you done to the house, Doof?”

“Me? What about you? You trashed my shop... stole my car...”

“So you come to get even, that it? Except you got caught. By Ed. Now Ed kills you, my ma comes home and kills George and me. You idiot. What’re we gonna do?”

“Have you ever wanted one thing more than anything else, Ma?”

“Right now I want to go to the toilet.”

“Ma, listen. Do you know what I want?”

“No.”

“I want us to be a happier family.”

“What? You saying we’re not happy?”

“Oh, Ma. I’m saying, well... I wish we could be more content. More gentle with each other. Do you know what I’m trying to say?”

“No.”

Louie sighed, tightening his hands on the wheel and driving on towards home.

At the house Dufault’s eyes were locked on Ed.

“Call this thing off.”

“Why should I?”

“You owe me, Boyer.”

“I owe you? Doof, lemme tell you something. Here’s the plan. You’re gonna go back through this house, tidy up every bit of mess you made, then we’ll sit down and tote up the damages. My guess is you’ll owe us money. Jeez, just look at this toilet!”

“I’m not tidying nothing.”

Ed’s tongue lolled out then and lapped Dufault’s toes. Dufault cringed. Ed heaved forward, and Dufault dropped the bottle in the tub, the glass exploding, Dufault taking a drunken leap over Ed’s scaly back. He slammed into Zeke and George, taking both men down, then scrambled over them, trying to keep on going, but Zeke got a grip on his ankle.

“Home sweet home, huh, Ma?” Louie pulled in under the carport and switched off the car. Wondering why his own car was parked out on the street but not wanting to stir Ma up over it.

“If they haven’t trashed the place,” Ma said sourly, “those weasels.”

Broodingly eyeing the house.

“It’s still here,” Louie pointed out cheerfully. “They didn’t sell it off after all.”

“Maybe. Or else the customer’s coming tomorrow.”

Dufault’s face hit the floor with a dull thud. Zeke crawled over George to get at him, his pointy boots digging painfully into George’s body. Zeke got hold of Dufault by the collar and the seat of the pants.

“George,” he grunted, “the door.”

They were sprawled halfway into the hall. The door to the living room moved on a spring-loaded hinge, and George stretched out and shoved it while Zeke hauled up on Dufault and tried to heave him along. Only he slipped in the wet and went down on his elbows hard. Zeke winced.

“Man...”

And here came the door swinging back, picking up speed, whacking Zeke sharp on the top of the head.

“Ahrrr,” Zeke said.

Zeke lost his concentration then, and Dufault broke free. He got in a lucky lick, a roundhouse to the side of the Zeke’s head, and Zeke sat down. George dived at Dufault, but Dufault kicked him and made a shambling break for freedom. Zeke, coming in again, brought his fist up from the floor in a haymaker blow that felled the guy.

Going up the steps, Ma’s nose wrinkled.

“Gah! What’s that smell?”

“You go on in, Ma. I’ll bring the suitcases.”

“You hear me? I said I smell something,” Ma said. “Like a cat crawled in someplace an’ then died.”

“I don’t smell nothing, Ma.”

“Right. No sense, no feeling.”

Ma opened the door.

At first they didn’t know what they were seeing. It was Ma’s house, all right. And yet — it wasn’t. They’d expected a mess: beer bottles, pizza cartons, plates with fossilized junk food cemented to them. But this?

Things turned upside-down?

Candles in the lamp sockets?

A snow scoop on the floor?

Why?

And the smell. What Ma had got a whiff of outside. The overpowering smell of the place.

Louie heard a dull, scraping sound. Ma grinding her teeth. A bad sign, always. She was looking at George sprawled on top of the kitchen table with one of its snapped-off chrome legs in his hands, and Zeke down in the middle of the room with the toes of his broken-heeled boots turned out, his gut bulging.

And a third man. Somebody Louie had never seen before, this guy on his hands and knees, trying to get up on his feet, drunk as a lord.

Ma charged.

Grabbed up the snow scoop as she went, raised it over the redheaded man, and beaned him with it. Reshaping its thin aluminum blade into something that looked like a very large fortune cookie, which settled the man back down again. Then she turned on Zeke, and he scuttled for safety, the snow scoop glancing off his rump.

“Ma! Ouch! Listen!”

Zeke trying to burrow under the up-ended couch.

Ma beat on the underside of the couch in a fury, the scoop making loud pinging noises against the wood frame.

“I can’t go away for two days, you take and turn my house into something the bull ran through?”

“Ma, listen—”

“I knew you’d do this to me!” Pounding the couch. “I told Louie you would, sure as God made Li’l Abner, I said!” Another whack with the scoop, then she rounded on George. “What’s that sound? Water running! What’s going on around here?” She stormed down the hall to look into the bathroom.

“MY GOD!”

Zeke was staring at Louie. “What happened to your eyebrows?”

Ma was backing out of the bathroom holding onto something with both hands and dragging it. Louie saw what she had hold of, some kind of animal by the tail. A sort of alligator. Stubby, clawed feet scrabbling as she dragged it past them, out the door and onto the step. When she let go, it dived into the flower garden, lumbering for the cucumber patch at the foot of the yard.

Ma came back inside, her face beet-red with fury, little white lines around her eyes. She closed her eyes, then opened them.

“Louie says be calm. Okay, let’s try. Lemme count to ten...” Her lips moved. “Now, that alligator. Fine. I heard of alligators in the plumbing, it’s happened before, this one they had in the Enquirer that tried to drag a lady under New York, she had to whack it with a plunger to shake it off. But alligators don’t rearrange furniture. So somebody better start talking. And make it good.”

Zeke spoke up. You had to admire the guy. His face showed complete bewilderment.

“We don’t know ourselves, Ma. We come home, this guy is in the house, climbed in a window, been rearranging the place. I guess the dragon must of showed up then and went for him.”

“Dragon?”

“I mean alligator.”

Ma thought about that.

“A loony, huh? This guy?”

All of them now looking at the redheaded guy out cold on the floor.

“That’s it, Ma. Must be. Some nut escaped from a institution, drove here in a truck, dingle-balls in it, broke into our house and started doing his thing.”

“If I’d caught him,” Ma said, “I’d of done his thing for him.”

Ma began issuing orders. First, turn the water off. Then pull the alligator out of the cucumbers and stuff it in a sack — hey, Zeke grinned, I just happen to have one here. Fine, Ma said. Stuff that thing inside, then put it in the dingle-ball truck with the redheaded loony.

She had them drive the truck a couple of blocks down Logan and leave it with the loony propped up behind the wheel. Zeke taking a moment to add a touch of his own, placing a call from a pay phone to the police. Anything to land poor Dufault in more trouble.

An anonymous tip.

“Hey. You looking for a dragon?”

Back at the house, Ma sent Zeke and George into the bathroom to patch up the plumbing. Telling them to hurry up about it, that she was a woman had been beaten up, hauled around in a car that broke down every five minutes, and now all this excitement, she really had to go.

Louie gave Ma’s arm a squeeze.

“Ma, I’m proud of you.”

“Say what?”

Suspicious. Deep ridges in her brow.

“Proud of you, Ma. Going all weekend without, you know, taking a drink. Proving you could walk through those liquor stores and not be tempted. And now the way you’re handling this situation, going easy on Zeke and George, the fruits of your—”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Ma, I was worried our trip was a waste of time. Now I believe that it was a success.”

“Yeah. Listen. You want to get your butt in gear and go out and get us some pizza? I’m starved.”

“I love you, Ma.”

“Yeah.”

Louie left happy and smiling. The car backfired under the carport, then pulled away. When Zeke and George reappeared, the sound of running water had stopped; a calm had settled over the house.

“What’s that about fruits?” Zeke asked.

“Never mind,” Ma told him. “Got that toilet working?”

“Sort of.”

“Thank God. Now listen. We got to move fast before Louie gets back. George, get Louie’s suitcase and bring it here.”

She undid the buckles. Reached in among the socks and underwear, groping, and dragged out a mickey of gin, then several handfuls of liquor miniatures, a couple more mickeys, another bunch of miniatures. A mound of little bottles piling up there on the carpet.

“Jeez,” George said, disbelieving. “Louie brought this?”

“I did,” Ma said. “I used Louie’s bag ’cause... there wasn’t room in my own. Or something. Don’t say nothing or I’ll kill you.”

“I won’t say nothing, Ma.” Zeke already opening a tiny bottle of Kahlua, sniffing it, then tipping it to his lips. “Hey, this is good.”

Ma shoved another five bottles at him.

“Here. Have some more. And George, lookit, I got amaretto, Grand Marnier, Drambuie... Those liquor stores down there, they leave these lying out all over the place. Zeke, try a snort of this green stuff...”

The rest of the week was hot. The sun sloped over the roofs of the houses during the long afternoons, beating on the trunk lid of Louie’s car so you could hardly touch the paint. On Friday Louie opened the trunk to find out where the smell was coming from, and found the meat. He showed restraint, though, meaning to set a good example, pleased at how Ma and the boys were coming along.