We passed two bakeries, each with lines out the door, windows steamed up. A quick glimpse inside: pork buns and custard tarts and piles of other dim sum and desserts, baked or steamed or fried. The smell made my mouth water.
The next shop over almost made me hold my nose. White tiled walls and linoleum floors. Dead fish lying on ice-covered steel tabletops. Live fish swimming in a tank. Crabs and lobsters scuttling around in another, waving their claws and antennas. I stood on the sidewalk, looking in the window. The fish seemed to be looking back with flat, cloudy eyes. “What’s that?” I pointed to the far end of the ice, at a gray animal the size and shape of a football, its skin pebbled and scaly.
Aunt Polly peered over my shoulder. After a minute, she said, “I believe that is an armadillo. It must be imported. Texas or Louisiana. They’re not native to California.”
“People eat them?”
“They’re considered a delicacy in many parts of the world,” Franny said. “I’ve been told they taste like high-end pork, but I have no personal experience.”
A small grocery store with shelves of foreign cans and boxes and cellophane bags in orderly aisles. A takeout restaurant with trays of noodles and meat and vegetables, roasted ducks hanging from steel hooks in the window, shiny and glazed, their bills drooped to one side. Next to them, great slabs of pork, reddish and dripping. Smells drifted out, tangy barbecue and fried grease.
Then another tiled fish market, men in aprons and white paper hats chopping a huge tuna into smaller parts with cleavers, throwing the guts into a white bucket on the floor. Halfway out on the sidewalk was a laundry tub with six inches of water and maybe fifteen huge green bullfrogs crawling over each other. I’d caught bullfrogs in a pond back home, but I had let them go again. I wanted to rescue all of these, save them from being someone’s dinner; the sign above the tub said 34¢/lb. I’d never had that much money in my life.
Another bakery, some offices, a big building with pillars and stone steps. We were almost back to Broadway and the parking garage when I stopped so suddenly that Aunt Polly bumped into me.
“What is it?” she asked.
I pointed to a white shelf, just inside the doorway of a third fish market. On it sat a glass-walled tank with half a dozen lizards, each twice as long as my hand. Three of them seemed to be larger versions of the brown ones in Aunt Polly’s backyard. Another was yellow, with big red eyes and flat, fat-toed feet. But tucked in a corner was a silvery gray one covered with rough, spiky scales, like a horned toad, only long and slender. It had a jagged tail that curled all the way around its body.
It looked exactly how I’d imagined the small dragons in Earthsea, the kind Ged’s friend’s sister had. They don’t grow any bigger. “A harrekki,” I said, touching one finger to the cool surface of the glass.
The sign taped above the tank said 48¢/lb.
I fingered the coins in my pocket. After buying the trick matches, I had forty-eight cents left. If it weighed less than a pound, I could rescue this one.
“I want that one,” I told Aunt Polly. “I want a dragon for my souvenir.”
“Oh. Well. I’m not sure that your mother will—” Aunt Polly started to say.
Franny held up a hand. “I think that’s splendid. Every girl should have a dragon.”
Silence for a minute. Then Aunt Polly said slowly, “Hmm. Nigel does have iguana food. Perhaps he can rummage up another enclosure as well. We could check the basement.”
It took a few minutes to explain to the fish-market man what we wanted, and longer to convince him that we did not want it skinned and cut up and wrapped in butcher paper.
“I prefer to prepare my own,” Franny said. The man shook his head—for the third or fourth time. Then she said something very stern in Chinese and waggled a finger at him. After a moment, he nodded, almost a bow, and went off into a back room.
“I didn’t realize you spoke Chinese,” Aunt Polly said.
“Forty years of business dealings, you pick up a word or two. And a bit of nuance.” Franny said. “I told him ‘you respect grandmother kitchen.’”
The man returned with a small cardboard box. He reached into the glass case with a net, scooped up my silvery purchase, and plunked her inside.
“Let me see,” Franny said. She reached a hand into the box, murmuring strange syllables I didn’t understand.
“Is that Chinese, too?”
“No, dear.”
“Is it Old Speech? The language of dragons?”
She looked surprised. “Something like that.” She whispered for another minute, then removed her hand and deftly tucked the flaps around each other to close the top of the box. “There. That ought to do it.”
The fish-market man put the box on a hanging scale. Fourteen ounces, including the cardboard. “Forty-two cents,” he said.
I handed him four dimes and two pennies.
Only a block back to the car. I carried the box with both hands, as if it were the crown jewels. At the door to the parking garage, we all stopped.
“I’m so glad you called,” Franny said to Aunt Polly, giving her a hug. “It’s been far too long since we had a proper excursion. But now I believe I’ll head home and give my old bones a rest.”
“Are you going to—?” Aunt Polly made a folding motion with her fingers that made no sense to me.
Franny seemed to know what she meant.
“No, I’m tired. I’ll just hail a cab.” She turned to me and rested a hand on my shoulder. “It was a delight meeting you, Ellen. Did you have a good time?”
“This was—it was—the best day of my whole entire life,” I said.
“Excellent!” She smiled so big her whole face pleated. “Then you’ll come back and visit again?”
“You bet. When I’m a grown-up, I’m going to live here.”
“I hope you do.” She gave my shoulder a squeeze and a pat, stepped back onto the sidewalk, and raised her arm to flag a passing taxi.
Late afternoon. The sun was low over the water, and all the light in the world seemed magic. I sat on the wide front seat of the Chevy, next to my favorite aunt, who was humming to herself. I held the box steady in my lap, my right hand bracing it against my shirt when the car jostled over uneven pavement. On the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge, I untucked one of the flaps with my other hand, just enough to get a finger through, and gently stroked her scaly back.
“Until I learn your true name, what should I call you?” I whispered. “Puff, after the song? Hang Ah? Dim Sum? Silver? Pox?”
As I said the last name aloud, I heard a sound from inside the box, like a tiny, growly burp.
I laughed. “Okay, then. Pox it is. Pox the magic dragon.”
Another burp-growl.
The scenery out the window was so beautiful—ocean waves breaking against a sheer rock coast, tendrils of fog sliding down a green hillside as if someone were pouring whipped cream very slowly—that it took my attention away for a minute. Then I noticed a spot on my right palm had started to itch. No, not itching—burning.
I pulled my hand away from the cardboard and leaned over to take a look. Near the bottom of the box was a charred black circle as big around as the tip of one of Dad’s cigars, edges curling, rimmed with a thread-thin, neon-bright orange and yellow light. I moved my hand farther away as the edges flickered and the hole grew a little bigger.