"Slowly we all realized we hadn't lost the plot, there was something else going on, besides trying to save Smokehill. It wasn't just we'd made something up because we wanted it so badly. We all knew by the time you went off to Westcamp, I think. But saying it out loud might make it true somehow the assholes could catch us at. We saw it in each other's faces — and jerked our eyes away.
"It's funny now. But the thing — the only clue — that something was going on besides major damage control and the likelihood that we would lose Smokehill — the one thing anyone could actually point to, that didn't look like desperate wish-fulfillment — was the way you were behaving. You weren't even on the planet — which in your case, Jake, is saying a lot. There was this crazy wired intensity about you — but what could be more important than the havoc over the dead dragon, the havoc that might cost us Smokehill? And the way you'd always hated the poor damn lizards in the zoo and the poor stupid fools who wanted to believe they were dragons because at least they were there and you could look at them jeez, chill out — and suddenly all that went away? What else could it be but that you had got yourself a real dragon? And if you could hide it in a Ranger's cabin, it had to be a very small dragon. Baby dragon. So the one that got killed was a mom dragon. Simple. Simple when we knew you."
I took a deep breath and said firmly, "Eric, I always thought you were pretty arrogant."
Eric really did smile at that, a long, slow, glinty-eyed smile, like nothing I'd ever seen on his face before. "Takes one to know one, kiddo," he said. "And I dare you to put that in your story."
So I have.
Eric still cleans odorata's cage, if nobody volunteers. What head zookeeper cleans his own cages? Eric's even got staff now. Mind you, I don't think — Dan or no Dan — Eric's doing it to spare anyone. He just doesn't want anyone being mean to odorata. So I suppose I have to say he's not only not the kind of bully who likes to assign the worst jobs to the people he hates most, that he let me clean odorata means that even if he did think I was a pain in the ass, I was a responsible, conscientious pain in the ass. I suppose this should make me feel better.
But a tremendous lot has happened in these five years, besides most of us lifers being able to start to forget. And if you've got this far in my dragon adventures and have learned to survive (or skip over) my philosophical blather and general rant you might like to hear about some more of it. Help make up for the five years you've been waiting. Ha ha. And if you have been waiting, the first thing on your last-five-years list is the story about how Bud almost flew through the front gate — at least according to the mail we, especially me, gets, that's the first thing on your list. (I get a lot of lists. People seem to think I'm going to find them helpful.) But if this is all really a soap opera with dragons — as it is, according to the mail — you might want to hear some of the rest of it too.
Like how I asked Martha to marry me. At Dragon Central with Bud watching us. Not that he knew that I was asking her to marry me (although I never know what he knows really). I didn't know I was going to ask her to marry me. I was doing my famous dragon headache skull squeeze. I've got pretty good at this; I can temporarily ease about 75 percent of human dragon headaches in about 75 percent of humans who get them (which is to say all humans who spend any time at Nearcamp). Although unfortunately it seems more to do with my hands than with the squeeze, which means I haven't been able to teach anybody else to do it, which is bad news for at least two reasons, the first being the obvious one and the second being that this contributes to the Great Jake Myth and while five million acres is plenty to hide in most of the time there's no escape from the mailbags they bring every day and I've begun to wonder if I'd better never go out the gate again myself ever either. Just like the dragons. (I did finally learn to do TV, but only because the public was so weirdly eager to love me that they turned my deer-in-headlights mental and physical paralysis into becoming modesty, and after that it was like, oh, well, okay, if it's going to be that hard to do anything wrong I suppose I might as well relax and go with the flow.) At least we had our honeymoon in Paris.
So that evening at Dragon Central, it had kind of been in the back of my mind for a while, I'm a retro kind of guy in a lot of ways and I'd begun to feel I was getting (even) less normal with every arriving mailbag and/or TV interview and I wanted to do this normal thing of marrying my sweetheart, okay? I was kneeling behind her and she was half lying with her legs stretched out in front of her, but she'd leaned back so her forearms and elbows were braced on my thighs and her face tipped up toward me with her eyes closed and even upside down she was so beautiful, so Martha, that I heard my voice say, "If you married me, you could get this on demand."
Martha's eyes opened and she smiled an upside-down smile. "I can get it on demand now." She closed her eyes again, and probably my grip on her skull faltered a little, because she opened her eyes and said, "That doesn't mean I won't marry you."
"But does it mean you will marry me," I said, pathetically, and she pulled herself up and out of my hands and turned around and said, "Yes, of course I'll marry you, YOU silly man, and I won't even tease YOU about it being for your hands," and then she kissed my hands, one after the other, and then she kissed me.
Bud was lying there with us — or some of the end of his nose was (the loooong hot rising and falling gust of his breathing politely angled past us), the rest of him going on and on to Wyoming or so the way the rest of Bud always does — and his eyes were half open, watching us, although it's interesting, there's no voyeur thing about it when he watches us, which he does a lot, although I'm pretty sure he has a pretty good idea what kissing is about. So after this kiss had gone on for a while and I started to get it through to myself that I'd just asked Martha to marry me and she'd just said yes, I wanted to jump around and shout and the only person [sic] available was Bud so I said, "Let's tell Bud."
It's a good example of the Marthaness of Martha that she didn't say, "What do you mean, tell Bud? We've spent five years trying to learn to tell dragons anything, or they us, and even you can't do it." She just said, "Sure," and got up out of my lap and we both went the few steps to Bud's nose and touched it with our hands. One of the things we have learned is that the getting-something-through — and I'm not going to call it "telling" or "communication" because that's a lot more grand than it mostly is — usually works better if the human has a hand on the dragon's nose, slightly depending on what the message is. (There may be other bits of both dragon and human that would work as well, but they'd probably be more embarrassing.) I sort of instinctively guessed that, that day I "told" Gulp that the bad guys were coming for us, and she got Lois and me away — but you tend to grab the other party when you're really urgent about something, and the reflex remains even if it's a dragon's nose rather than a human arm or shoulder. (And for those of us addicted to hand gestures, you still have a hand left over for flapping around.)
The refinement Bud has come up with is that it works better yet if the dragon curls its lip very slightly so the human can put his or her hand on the softer skin there just inside the tough horny outside. It's just about not too hot to bear, although I've begun to suspect that Bud anyway has pretty good temperature control. The first time Bud curled his lip at me of course I thought I was going to die — but he could have eaten me any time for months by then so why now? And if I was going to do something so offensive to dragon culture that I'd get munched in some kind of involuntary reflex (I've told you dragons are amazingly pacific; I doubt they've got any execution laws about anything) I'd probably already done it and hadn't been munched, so this new lip-curling must be something else. I figured it out eventually.