"Finch,_Sheila_-The_Seventh_Dragon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Finch Sheila)

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The Seventh Dragon
by Sheila Finch
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Copyright (c)1985 Sheila Finch
First published in Fantasy Book, 1985

Fictionwise Contemporary
Fantasy


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Thomas saw the first dragon when he was six and on the way to the dentist with his big sister Margaret. It stood at the intersection of Cherry Avenue and Pacific Coast Highway, on the southwest corner of Signal Hill, and it was waiting for the light to change. It had little eyes and twinkly green scales like the sequins on Salome's costume that Margaret wore in the Sunday School play.
Thomas was enchanted. "Look!"
Margaret didn't see it, but she'd spent all ten years of her life on the Hill -- a two square mile town of oil wells and palm trees and drilling supply companies smack in the middle of the city of Long Beach -- which made her an expert on dragons.
"There's _lots_ of dragons on the Hill!" she told him scornfully. "One's nothing. You have to see seven for it to count."
"What happens then?" Thomas asked.
But Margaret seized his hand and dragged him another block -- he was hanging back, looking over his shoulder to see if the dragon got tired of waiting and ran across, the way Gran did sometimes when she forgot she was supposed to be setting an example.
He did his best to be brave when the dentist started poking in his mouth, because his Sunday school teacher read them a story about a special man who made friends with a lion, and Thomas thought dragons couldn't be much different from lions. The only way he knew to be special was not to bite the dentist's fingers when he really wanted to. But he didn't see the dragon again on the way home, even after they passed the sign that said "Welcome to Signal Hill." He felt very sad that he wasn't special enough yet.
Gran's reaction when he got home and told her was rather different. She took him by the ear and led to the kitchen where she washed his mouth out with soap.
"That's what you get for telling lies," she said as his sobs came out in rainbow bubbles.
"I _did_ see a dragon," Thomas bravely insisted. "But only once."
Gran pushed his face back into the sudsy water.
Afterwards she made him sit on a little stool in the corner by the refrigerator that shook the floorboards every time it turned on. He didn't usually mind this, because there was a crack in the wallpaper that went right through the wooden planks of the wall so he could see outside, and if he squinted hard he could even see an oil pump on the Hill riding up and down under the palm trees. Thomas particularly liked watching this pump because it had been painted to look as if it had a face with feeler-things made out of some springy stuff that bobbed about as it moved. It reminded Thomas of the real dragon he'd seen. In fact, it was probably that very oil well that made him decide to work in a gas station when he grew up. But it was hard to concentrate on screwing his eyes up properly when he kept tasting soap.
* * * *
Thomas fidgeted on the hard leather couch in the new glass medical building that now stood where the dentist's office had once been down on Atlantic in Long Beach. He had been very careful to tell the story right and not make a mistake because he knew it was important. But so much concentrating was hard work. Behind his desk, Dr. Sigmund Angstrom made a steeple of his long fingers.
"And your mother?" he prompted.
Thomas thought back over the more than thirty years since he first saw a dragon. "Mom was busy with the twins -- they were about two years old then, and a heap of trouble. And she had to work long hours at the Bide-a-Wee Motel on Pacific Coast Highway after Pa left. Pa was a rigger for Petrolane Oil Company, but he got a better job in Saudi Arabia."
Dr. Angstrom wrote something on the small pad in front of him, and Thomas saw him out of the corner of his eye. Thomas was supposed to be lying with his eyes closed, but they kept on opening.
"Is that part about Pa important?" He raised himself onto one elbow and looked at Dr. Angstrom. "He sent us a postcard once, a real nice one with a camel on it."
"What? No, no. A reminder for myself merely. It's time I had a checkup for these old fangs of mine."
Dr. Angstrom's face folded up in a smile that made him look like Gran's fake Japanese fan that Oil Patch Liquors over on Willow had given away to advertise Japanese beer. Gran hadn't approved of alcohol, but the sign said the fans were free to customers and since she was buying a newspaper Gran felt she should get one. It wasn't a Japanese newspaper either, but the store owner didn't want to argue with Gran. Nobody ever did.
Thomas lay back. He couldn't afford more than the one visit. It was up to him to tell Dr. Angstrom the right things so he could figure out was what wrong with him and cure it. There _must_ be something wrong with him (even though he felt all right) because it wasn't natural for a grown man to keep expecting to see dragons on Signal Hill. His boss had told him that just last Monday. His boss was from Armenia or Arabia, some place where they knew all about oil, but he didn't understand about dragons. He'd said if Thomas kept looking for dragons when he was supposed to be pumping gas, he was going to have to look for some other job. Thomas didn't want another job. He liked this one very much; he enjoyed filling the cars up with gas. _This is all good oil from under our very own Hill!_ he'd tell the motorists -- though of course he was smart enough to know that some of the gas came in by tanker truck from Texas and Oklahoma.
He realized his hands were rubbing each other worriedly and made them lie one on each side of his body on the couch where they couldn't touch.
"Well, go on."
Thomas had known early that he'd never be as smart as Margaret, so he'd decided not to be as naughty as the twins; that way, he could be better than somebody in the family. But it hadn't really worked because the twins were so cute growing up in their pink dresses with big bows in their blond curls that even Gran pretended not to notice when they were bad. And Mom kept asking when he was going to be the man around the house now that Pa was gone. Only no matter how hard he tried he was never as good as Margaret at figuring out how to do things -- like stop the washing machine from peeing foam all over the floor when he did the laundry. Or how to cook hot dogs for the twins when Gran was resting so the water didn't boil away and burn the hot dogs on the bottom of the pan.
Even his Sunday School teacher slapped him when he couldn't learn to recite Scripture with the other kids: "Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see -- " He could never remember what he was supposed to say they would see. She wrote on his report card, _Thomas should pay more attention_. And when he got home, Gran slapped him all over again, just for good measure, she said.
Then he grew up and got the job pumping gas at the station on the corner of Willow and Cherry. Nothing to tell there but work. He had few friends because most of his old school mates had either moved away to Los Angeles or they spent all their spare time in the poker parlors of Hawaiian Gardens, and both places were too far for Thomas to go on his bicycle.
He spent Sundays when the station was closed on top of the Hill where the oil wells were clustered thick. Each summer, some of them would be all shiny with their new coats of paint. It was pretty up there; lots of little wildflowers came poking up through the big clumps of dirt under the palm trees. He used to be able to walk all over the top, looking for dragons. His mutt, Snoopy, chased rabbits and barked because she couldn't catch them. And he could look down into Long Beach and see the oil tankers from Saudi Arabia coming into the harbor. Thomas liked to think that perhaps his Pa had helped pump some of the oil -- it made him feel closer. Then they started taking the oil pumps out and putting condos in, and Signal Hill wasn't the same. Snoopy died about then, too, and Gran wouldn't put up with another dog at her age.
"That's all there is really," Thomas said. He made his eyes stay closed this time so he could think better. "Except that I couldn't stop looking for dragons."
"Most children live in a fantasy world part of the time -- even those who don't live on Signal Hill," Dr. Angstrom said. He was reaching for his pipe and ashtray. Thomas had seen them on his desk, and he recognized the sound the pipe made when Dr. Angstrom knocked it against the ashtray to get the cold ashes out.
It made Thomas feel kind of funny to have to go down to Long Beach to be cured, but he didn't think there even were any of _that_ kind of doctor on the Hill. The foreign name had sounded very fine too, when his boss read it to him out of the yellow pages.
"This is one time when it's an advantage to be perfectly ordinary." Dr. Angstrom made a noise that Thomas knew was supposed to be laughing. "I don't really think you need to be concerned about seeing one dragon!"
"I saw my second dragon when I was nine."
"Ah."