“Proprietor, Rock and Bone?”
“Yes. And you are-?”
“Ely Stern. Attorney-at-law. Once upon a time.”
“What do you want, Ely Stern?”
“We’ll start,” the dragon said, “with a look at your shop.”
Arnie Sproule, an old friend of Mama Diamond’s, dead since ’92, used to tell this joke:
What’s the difference between a dead lawyer in the middle of the road and a dead snake in the middle of the road?
And before you could answer, Arnie would grin and say: There are skid marks in front of the snake.
An old groaner, and not a particularly funny one. But now here was Ely Stern, combining perhaps the worst aspects of the two, lawyer and serpent. Any skid marks in front of Ely Stern would surely have represented a fevered attempt to brake and flee.
The worst part, Mama Diamond thought as she slow-walked with the dragon down the main street of Burnt Stick, was how calming his presence was. Not reassuring-oh no, definitely not-but calming the way an oil slick calms a wind-whipped sea; calming the way a dose of Thorazine calms a lunatic. The energy, the madness, is intact, but it can’t be expressed. Something about Ely Stern slowed the heartbeat and thickened the tongue. One was not permitted to panic in his grand and overweening presence.
Mama Diamond walked in the dragon’s shadow.
“How ’bout you tell me,” Stern asked in a conversational tone, “just why you’re called Mama Diamond?”
“The native kids call me that.” She was startled by the sound of her own voice, insanely chatty. “Called me that. They’d bring in dusty old quartzite now and again. I’d clean and tumble it for ’em. Making diamonds, they called it.”
“But that wasn’t your stock-in-trade-quartz.”
“Surely not. No, I’m a rock hound and a purveyor of semiprecious stones.” Her good eye glanced sidelong at his pebbled hide and vast muscles, the rough protrusions along his frame proclaiming the brute skeleton beneath. “And also bones…”
They turned off Parkhill onto Vaughan, and Stern halted abruptly. They had reached her shop now, and he peered at it, surprised-yes, he could actually be surprised-and impressed.
“The thing I so love about travel,” Stern said, “is there’s a wonderment around every corner….”
No zoning commissioner in his right mind would ever have allowed Mama Diamond to build it, of course. Nor would the Geographic Society nor the Paleontological Research Institute nor Friends of the Earth nor the Sierra Club. Everyone from Robert Bakker to Jack Horner would have pitched a fit. And the press-at least, in the old, pre-Change days-would have had a field day.
But then, she hadn’t built it. Old Esperanza Piller, grandmother of Mildred Cummings Fielding, from whom Mama Diamond herself had bought the place in ’81, had hired the working men and former slaves who had quarried and assembled this structure ninety years back and more, before anyone had the least notion to raise an objection.
Back when farmers round here were still turning up triceratops skulls in their potato beds.
The Rock and Bone, Mama Diamond’s fossil and lapidary shop, was a house built of dinosaur bones.
It had weathered the Storm-also called the Change, the Upheaval and the Big Friggin’ Mess-without so much as a quiver.
In truth, the house wasn’t wholly made of dinosaur bones; no, they were still held in their rock matrixes, the big blocks mortared into place. But it didn’t take one whit off their grandeur, and Mama Diamond loved the place as much now as when she had first glimpsed it tooling down the blue highway of U.S. 30 in the dwindling light of that long-ago spring day.
Her Fortress, her Sanctuary, her Palace of Delights. Or, as the native kids only half-jokingly called it way back when, her Treasure Chest.
The chill sun glinted on Stern’s gold-coin eyes as he canted his head and appraised the diplodocus bones flanking the doorway, the ribs of the house actual iguanodon and al-losaur ribs. Bones not too different from the dragon’s own, Mama Diamond reflected-at least, the therapods. And she realized, looking at Stern in his terrible saurian beauty, that he was as close as she would ever come to seeing an actual dinosaur walking. But then, they hadn’t flown or talked or breathed smoke.
Not that anyone could really say.
As if the dragon had somehow caught the sound of her thought and completed it, Stern said, “I wonder what energies ruled their world…the old or the new?”
Mama Diamond said nothing-there was no answer-but she pondered, in the distant part of her mind held separate from the fear, if the Change might indeed be cyclical, like the great ice sheets that had once covered this land.
Another gust of wind flared up, stiffening the seams of her face. The handmade wooden sign with the words STONE AND BONE suspended off the overhang of roof creaked on its chains.
Mama Diamond opened her door and stepped inside.
“Come in,” she said against her own better judgment, judgment reduced to a wheedling screech at the back of her skull, and she thought of Dracula inviting Renfield to step over the threshold of his castle. Only, the tables were turned in this case, she was inviting the monster into her lair, and she wondered how many before her had done this, and to what terrible consequence. She looked up at the molten-eyed, big-shouldered dragon. “If you can.”
“I still know how to negotiate doorways,” Stern said in his dry furnace voice.
The store was dim, but Stern blocked her when she reached for an oil lamp. Maybe dragons could see a little better in the dark than in the light, Mama Diamond considered. Or maybe they were just wary of fire.
He put out a razored hand to stay her motion, casually; it barely brushed her shoulder. But a sudden snap of blue lightning spit from his fingertip, passing into Mama Diamond’s skin and bones, diffusing through her like smoke. There was a brief instant of her feeling like her insides were lit up, spectacularly energized and alive, then it was gone.
She and Stern looked at each other with an identical expression, and Mama Diamond realized that he was as surprised as she. For the first time since he had arrived, something had happened that he had not intended.
Stern blinked, dismissing it, then cast his gaze over the shop, taking it all in, not pausing at the oreodont skulls, the smilodons with their saber fangs, the hadrosaur eggs spirited out of China.
His gaze came to the faded photograph taped to the register, the snapshot of the blond child smiling by a riverside, her college chum Katy’s daughter back when Carter was President. Stern studied the girl closely, his eyes lingering.
“She remind you of someone?” Mama Diamond asked.
“Yes.” The dragon’s voice was oddly softened, as close to human as it might ever sound.
“She safe?” Mama Diamond was surprised at her question; she hadn’t thought to ask it. But it had been sparked by the sudden awareness there might be something, someone, this thunder lizard actually cared about.
The image came to her of the rough-hewn illustration from The Hobbit in her ratty thrift-store copy, the drawing old Tolkien himself had done, of the dragon Smaug wrapped around his treasure trove of gold.
What might Stern hold as his treasure?
For a long time, he said nothing, and Mama Diamond thought he wasn’t going to speak. But then the words came, as muted as the wind held outside the bone-thick walls.
“In safekeeping…” the dragon murmured.
Stern said it as in a dream, and he said it to himself, Mama Diamond felt sure. But still it had been an answer, if one she herself didn’t have the key to decipher.
Then, as if a switch had been thrown, Stern was again scanning the cases and shelves with that nuclear-reactor gaze of his. Mama Diamond knew somehow that on his walk from the station, and his ruminations on her house and the weathered photograph, Stern had been on his own time, taking a break for reflection and diversion. But now he was back on the clock.