“Wait a minute,” I told him. “Just a minute.”
“Why?”
LOST filled up my vision. “I might want to see what this is.”
“Don’t waste your money on this!” Ben warned. “It’ll be a big snake or
somethin’!”
“Well, it can’t be any dumber than the Death Car!”
They had to agree with that.
“Hey, there’s a two-headed bull over yonder!” Davy Ray pointed to the
painted canvas. “That’s for me!” He started walking off, and Ben took two
steps with him but stopped when he realized Johnny and I weren’t following.
Davy Ray glanced back, scowled, and stopped, too. “It’ll be a gyp!” he said.
“Maybe,” I answered. “But maybe it’ll be—”
Something neat, I was about to say.
But there came the sound of a massive body shifting its weight. The
trailer groaned. Boom! went the noise of bulk hitting wood. The entire trailer
shivered, and the man behind the ticket booth reached down at his side and
picked up something. Then he started banging on the trailer with a baseball
bat studded with nails. I could see where countless nail points had scarred
the huge red T of LOST.
Whatever was inside settled down. The trailer ceased its motions. The man
put the baseball bat away, his face an expressionless blank.
“Whoa,” Ben said quietly. “Mighty big critter in there.”
My curiosity was raging. The swampy smell seemed to be keeping customers
away, but I had to know. I approached the ticket seller.
“One?” He didn’t even look up.
“What is it?” I asked.
“It’s from the lost world,” he answered. Still he stared at the comic
book. His face was gaunt, his cheeks and forehead pitted with acne scars.
“Yes sir, but what is it?”
This time he did look up. I almost had to step back, because simmering in
his eyes was a fierce anger that reminded me of Branlin fury. “If I told you
that,” he said, sucking noisily on his toothpick, “then it wouldn’t be no
surprise, would it?”
“Is it… like… a freak or somethin’?”
“You go in.” He smiled coldly, showing little nubs of chewed-down teeth.
“Then you tell me what you saw.”
“Cory! Come on!” Davy Ray was standing behind me. “This is a gyp, I
said!”
“Oh it is, is it?” The man slapped his comic book down. “What do you
know, kid? You don’t know nothin’ but this little blister of a town, do you?”
“I know a gyp when I see it!” He caught himself. “Sir.”
“Do you? Boy, you don’t know your head from your ass! Get on out of here
and quit botherin’ me!”
“I sure will!” Davy Ray nodded. “You bet I will! Come on, Cory!” He
stalked off, but I stayed. Davy Ray saw I wasn’t coming, and he made a noise
like a fart and went over to a concession stand near the two-headed bull.
“One,” I told the man as I dug a quarter out of my jeans pocket.
“Fifty cents,” he said.
“Everythin’ else is a quarter!” Ben had come up beside me, with Johnny on
my other side.
“This is fifty cents,” the man repeated. “Thing’s gotta eat. Thing’s
always gotta eat.”
I slid the money in front of him. He put the two quarters into a tin can
that sounded all but empty, then he tore a ticket and gave me half. “Go up
through that curtain and wait for me. There’s another curtain on the other
side. Don’t go through that one till I come up. Hear?” I said I did, and I
climbed the steps. The lizardy, swampy odor was terrible, and under that was
the sickly-sweet smell of rotting fruit. Before I reached that curtain, I was
debating the wisdom of my curiosity. But I pushed through it, and I stood in
near darkness. “I’ll go, too,” I heard Johnny say behind me. Then I waited. I
reached out and felt a rough burlap curtain between me and whatever else was
in the trailer.
Something rumbled, like a distant freight train.
“Move on in some,” the ticket man said, speaking to me as he came up the
steps, herding Johnny and Ben. When he pushed the first curtain open, I saw he
was holding the nail-studded baseball bat. I gave the other guys room to stand
between the curtains. Ben pinched his nostrils shut and said, “That smells
sick!”
“Likes ripe fruit,” the man explained. “Sometimes it goes over.”
“What is this thing?” Johnny asked. “And what’s the lost world?”
“The lost world is lost! Just like it says. What’s lost is no more and
can never be again. That get through your skull?”
None of us liked his attitude. Johnny probably could’ve punched his
lights out. But Johnny said, “Yes sir.”
“Hey, I’m comin’ up!” It was Davy Ray. “Where’s everybody?”
The man moved onto the stairs to block his way. “Fifty cents or forget
it.”
Of course this caused an outburst. I peered through the curtain to watch
Davy Ray wrangle with the man. Davy Ray was chewing on a Zero candy bar, the
white kind with chocolate nougat in the center. “If you don’t shut up,” the
man warned, “I’m gonna charge you seventy-five cents! Pay up or take a walk!”
Two quarters changed possession. Davy Ray squeezed in with us, and then
the man entered muttering sourly. He said to me, “You, boy! Go on through!”
I pushed aside the rough burlap. As I entered, the smell almost knocked
me out. The guys filed in behind me, then Mr. Attitude. Four oil lamps,
hanging from ceiling hooks, afforded the only light and it was murky at best.
In front of me was what appeared to be a big hogpen, enclosed by iron bars the
thickness of pythons. Something lay in that pen that was so huge it made my
legs go wobbly. I heard Ben gasp behind me. Johnny gave a low whistle. In the
pen were piles of rotting, moldy fruit rinds. The fetid decay lay in a soup of
greenish-brown mud and, to be delicate here, the mud was adorned with dozens
of brown chunks as long as my father’s arm and twice as thick. A dark cloud of
flies whirled above the pen like a miniature tornado. The smell of all this at
close range was bad enough to knock the stripes off a skunk. Little wonder Mr.
Attitude’s tin can was empty.
“Step up there and take a look!” he said. “Go on, you paid for it!”
“I’m gonna puke!” Ben wailed, and he had to turn and run out.
“I ain’t givin’ no refunds!” Mr. Attitude hollered after him.
Maybe it was the man’s brawling voice. Maybe it was the way we all
smelled to that thing in the pen. But suddenly it started heaving itself up
from its mud bed, and the huge bulk just kept getting bigger as more of it
shucked free from the liquidy mess. The thing gave a single snort that rumbled
like a hundred bassoons. Then it lumbered over toward the far side of the
trailer, its wet gray flesh glistening with mud and filth, a universe of flies
crawling on its hide. With a shriek of shocks and stressed timbers, the entire
trailer suddenly began tilting to that side, and all three of us yowled and
hollered with the conviction of fear we’d never felt in the haunted house.
“Hold still, you shithead!” Mr. Attitude stood up on a wooden platform.
“I said hold still ’fore you throw us over!” He lifted that baseball bat and
brought it savagely down.
The sound of that bat smacking flesh made my stomach lurch. I almost lost
my carnival feast, but I clenched my teeth together. Mr. Attitude kept hitting
the beast: a second time, a third, and a fourth. The creature made no noise,
but with the fourth blow it staggered away from the trailer’s wall toward the
center of the pen again and the trailer righted itself.
“And stay there, ya dumb shit!” Mr. Attitude yelled.
“Are you tryin’ to kill it, mister?” Davy Ray asked.
“That sonofabitch don’t feel no pain! He’s got skin like fuckin’ armor
plate! Hey, don’t you be tellin’ me my business or I’ll throw you outta here
on your ass!”
I didn’t know if the creature could feel pain or not. All I knew was that
I was looking at a big slab of wrinkled gray flesh with dots of blood welling
up out of it.
The thing was half the height of an elephant and about as big as our
pickup truck. As the thick muscles of its haunches quivered, flies rose lazily
into the air. In the murky lamp-light, as the creature stood motionless in its
mudhole with its stumpy legs mired in rotten fruit rinds and its own
excrement, I could see the stubs of three horns rising up from a neckplate of
bone covered with leathery gray flesh.
I almost fell down, but I feared what might be on that floor.
“This here’s an old thing,” Mr. Attitude said. “You know how some turtles
can live for two hundred, three hundred years? Well, this thing’s so old he
makes them turtles look like teenagers. Older’n Methuselah’s pecker,” he said,
and laughed as if this was funny.
“Where’d you find him?” I heard my voice ask, my mind too stunned to
connect.
“Bought him for seven hundred dollars, cash on the barrel. Fella had him
on the circuit in Louisiana, down in Cajun land. Before that, guy out in Texas
was showin’ him. Before the Texan, fella in Montana trucked him around. I
guess that was in the twenties. Yeah, he’s been around some.”
Davy Ray said, in a quiet and uneasy voice, “He’s bleedin’.” He held half
of the Zero candy bar down at his side, his appetite vanished.
“Yeah, so what? Gotta smack him some to make him pay attention. Hell,
he’s got a brain ’bout the size of a walnut, anyhow.”
“Where’d he come from?” I asked. “I mean… who found him first?”
“It was a long time ago. I don’t remember what that Cajun fucker told me.
Somethin’ about… some professor found him. Either in the Amazon jungle or the
Belgian Congo, I forget which. Up on some plateau nobody can get to or find
again. His name was… Professor Chandler… no…” He frowned. “Callander… no, that
ain’t it.” He snapped his fingers. “Professor Challenger! He’s the one found
it and brung it back! Know what it is? It’s a tri… a tri—”
“—ceratops,” I finished for him. I knew my dinosaurs, and that’s no lie.
“Yeah, a tricereytopalis,” Mr. Attitude said. “That’s just what it is.”
“Somebody cut his horns off,” Johnny said. He, too, had recognized it,
and he walked past me and clamped his hands to the iron bars. “Who cut his
horns off, mister?”
“Me, myself, and I. Had to. You shoulda seen them fuckers. Like spears
they were. He kept bustin’ through the trailer’s walls with ’em. Tore right
through sheet metal. My chain saw broke all to pieces ’fore I was even half
through, had to use a fuckin’ ax. He just laid there. That’s what he does,
just lays there and eats and shits.” Mr. Attitude kicked at a white-molded
watermelon rind that had somehow been shoved out of the mudhole. “Know how
much it costs to keep that old fucker in fruit this time of year? Man, that
was the dumbest seven hundred dollars I ever spent!”
Davy Ray stepped up to the bars beside Johnny. “How come he only eats
fruit?”
“Oh, he can eat most anythin’. Once carnival season’s over, I feed him
garbage and tree bark.” Mr. Attitude grinned. “Fruit makes him smell better,
y’see.”
The triceratops’s small black eyes slowly blinked. His massive head moved
from one side to the other, searching for a thought. The pen was hardly large
enough for him to turn around in. Then he exhaled a long breath and eased down
into the mud again, and he stared at nothing with tendrils of blood creeping
down his flank.
“Awful tight in there, ain’t it?” Davy Ray asked. “I mean… don’t you ever
let him out?”
“Hell, no! How would I get him back in again, genius?” He leaned over the
iron bars, which came to his waist when he was standing on the wooden
platform. “Hey, shithead!” he yelled. “Why don’t you do somethin’ to earn your
fuckin’ keep? Why don’t you learn to balance a ball on your snout, or jump
through a hoop? Thought I could fuckin’ train you to do some tricks! How come
you don’t do nothin’ but sit there lookin’ stupid?” Mr. Attitude’s face
contorted, and its anger was ugly. “Hey, I’m talkin’ to you!” He smacked the
beast’s back with the baseball bat once and then again, the nails drawing
blood. The triceratops’s watery eyes closed in what might have been mute
suffering. Mr. Attitude lifted the bat for a third blow, his nubby teeth
clenched.
“Don’t do that, mister,” Davy Ray said.
And something in his voice meant it.
The bat paused in its descent. “What’d you say, boy?”
“I said… don’t do that. Please,” he added. “It’s not right.”
“Might not be right,” Mr. Attitude agreed, “but it is fun.” And he
whacked the triceratops across the back a third time with all his strength.
I saw Davy Ray’s hand clench as he mashed the remaining half of the Zero
candy bar.
“I’ve had enough,” Johnny said. He turned away from the pen and walked
past me and out of the trailer.
“Let’s go, Davy Ray,” I told him.
“It’s not right,” Davy Ray repeated. Mr. Attitude had stopped beating the
beast, and the nails were slicked with red. “Somethin’ like this shouldn’t be
caged up in a mudhole.”
“You had your fifty cents’ worth,” the man said. He sounded drained,
sweat glistening on his forehead. I guess it was hard work, whacking those
nails in and pulling them out. The act of violence seemed to have sapped some
of his anger. “Go on home, country boys,” he said.
Davy Ray didn’t budge. His eyes reminded me of smoldering coals. “Mister,
don’t you know what you’ve got?”
“Yep. One big fuckin’ headache. You wanna buy him? Hell, I’ll cut you a
deal! Get your daddy to bring me five hundred dollars, I’ll sure as shit
unload him in your front yard and he can sleep in your fuckin’ bed with you.”
Davy Ray was not suckered by this spiel. “It’s not right,” he said, “to
hate somethin’ just for bein’ alive.”
“What do you know?” Mr. Attitude sneered. “You don’t know shit about
nothin’, kid! You live twenty more years and see what I seen of this stinkin’
world and then you come tell me what to do and what not to do!”
Then Davy Ray did a strange thing. He threw the mashed-up Zero candy bar
into the mud right under the triceratops’s beaky snout. It made a little plop
as it went into the liquid. The triceratops just sat there, its eyes
heavy-lidded.
