“Hey! Don’t you be throwin’ nothin’ in that pen, boy! Both of you just
git!”
I was on my way out.
I heard a great gobbling sound and looked around to see the triceratops
opening its mouth and scooping up the Zero and the surrounding mud like a
living bulldozer. The beast chewed a few times and then he tilted his head
back to let all the muck slide down his throat.
“Go on!” Mr. Attitude told us. “I’m shuttin’ down for the—”
The trailer trembled. The triceratops was standing up, dripping like an
ancient swamp oak. I swear his rust-colored tongue, which was as big as a
dinner plate, emerged to lick his gray, mud-caked mouth. His head with its
three hacked-off horn stumps tilted toward Davy Ray, and he began lumbering
forward.
It was like watching a tank build up to speed. And then he lowered his
head to collide with the iron bars, and the thick plate of bone made a noise
like the popping together of two giants’ football helmets. The triceratops
stepped back three paces and with a snorting grunt he crashed his head against
the iron bars again.
“Hey! Hey!” Mr. Attitude was yelling.
The triceratops shoved forward, his feet or paws or whatever they were
sliding in the mud. His strength was awesome; muscles rippled beneath the
elephantine flesh, and flies fled the quake. The iron bars groaned and began
to bend outward, bolts making a squealing noise as they came loose.
“Hey, quit it! Quit!” Mr. Attitude started beating the triceratops again,
and droplets of blood flew from the nails. The beast paid no attention, but
kept bending the bars in his effort, I realized, to get to Davy Ray. “You
sonofabitch! You stupid old fucker!” the man hollered as the baseball bat rose
and fell. He looked at us, his eyes wild. “Get out! You’ve drivin’ him crazy!”
I grabbed Davy Ray’s arm and pulled at him. He came with me, and we heard
more bolts breaking loose behind us. The trailer started rocking like a
demonic cradle; the triceratops, it seemed to me, was throwing a fit. We got
down the steps, and saw Johnny standing upwind while Ben—a perfect picture of
misery—was sitting on an upturned soft-drink case with his face buried in his
hands.
“He was tryin’ to get out,” Davy Ray said as we watched the trailer
shake, rattle, and roll. “Did you see that?”
“Yeah, I did. He went crazy.”
“Bet he never had a candy bar before,” he said. “Not in his whole life.
He likes Zeros as much as I do, huh? Boy, I’ve got a whole boxful at home he’d
like to get into, I’ll bet!”
I wasn’t sure the taste of a candy bar had done it, but I said, “I think
you’re right.”
The trailer’s rocking subsided. In a few minutes Mr. Attitude came out.
His clothes and face were splattered with gobbets of mud and dookey. Both Davy
Ray and I started shaking trying to hold in our belly laughs. Mr. Attitude
drew the curtain, pulled a door shut, and locked it with a chain and padlock.
Then he looked at us and exploded. “Get outta here, I said! Go on, before I—”
He came at us, waving the nail-studded baseball bat, and we let our laughter
go and ran.
The carnival was closing for the night, the midway’s crowd dwindling, the
rides shutting down and the freak-show barkers hanging up their superlatives.
The lights began to go off, one by one.
We walked to where we’d left our bikes. The air had gotten frosty. Winter
was on the march.
Ben, his load somewhat lightened, had returned to the land of the living
and was chattering happily. Johnny didn’t say much, but he did mention how
neat the motorcycle riders were. I said I could build a haunted house that
would scare the pickles out of people, if I had a mind to. Davy Ray, however,
said nothing.
Until we got to our bikes. Then Davy Ray said, “I wouldn’t like to live
that way.”
“What way?” Ben asked.
“In that pen. You know. Like the thing from the lost world.”
Ben shrugged. “Ahhhhh, he’s probably used to it by now.”
“Bein’ used to somethin’,” Davy Ray answered, “is not the same as likin’
it. Numb nuts.”
“Hey, don’t get mad at me!”
“I ain’t mad at anybody.” Davy Ray sat on his bike, his hands clenching
the grips. “It’s just… I sure would hate to live that way. Could hardly move.
Sure couldn’t see the sun. And every day would be just like the day before,
even if you lived a million days. I can’t stand the thought of that. Can you,
Cory?”
“It would be pretty awful,” I agreed.
“That man’ll kill it real soon, the way he’s beatin’ it. Then he can go
dump it on a garbage pile and be done with it.” Davy Ray looked up at the
sickle moon, his breath white. “Thing wasn’t real, anyhow. That man was a
low-down liar. It was a deformed rhinoceros, that’s all it was. So, see? It
was a gyp, like I told you.” And he started pedaling away before I could argue
with him.
That was our visit to the Brandywine Carnival.
Early Saturday morning, sometime around three, the civil defense siren
atop the courthouse began yowling. Dad got dressed so fast he put his
underwear on backward, and he took the pickup to go find out what was
happening. I thought the Russians were bombing us, myself. When Dad returned
near four o’clock, he told us what he’d learned.
One of the carnival’s attractions had escaped. Broken right out of its
trailer and left it in kindling. The man who owned it had been sleeping in
another trailer. I later heard Dad tell Mom it was a trailer occupied by a
red-haired woman who did strange things with light bulbs. Anyway, this thing
had gotten loose and rampaged down the midway like a Patton tank, tearing
through tents like they were heaps of autumn leaves. This thing had evidently
run right down Merchants Street and smashed into several stores, then had
turned a number of parked cars into Mr. Sculley’s fodder. Had to have done ten
thousand dollars’ worth of damage, Dad said Mayor Swope had told him. And they
hadn’t caught the thing yet. It had gotten into the woods and headed for the
hills while everybody was still jumping into their boots. Except Mr. Wynn
Gillie had seen it when it had crashed its head through the bedroom wall of
his house, and Mr. Gillie and his wife were now being treated for shock at the
hospital in Union Town.
The beast from the lost world was free, and the carnival left without
him.
I let it wait until Sunday evening. Then I called the Callan house from
Johnny’s, and we used the telephone in the back room while his folks were
watching TV. Davy Ray’s little brother Andy answered. I asked to speak to Mr.
Callan.
“What can I do for you, Cory?” he asked.
“I was callin’ for my dad,” I told him. “We’re gonna be takin’ Rebel’s
pen down this week, and we were wonderin’ if you might have… oh, a chain
cutter we could use?”
“Well, you’ll probably need wire cutters for that job. There’s a
difference.”
“There’s some chain needs to be cut, too,” I said.
“Okay, then. No problem. I’ll have Davy Ray bring it over tomorrow
afternoon, if that’ll suit you. You know, I bought that chain cutter a few
years ago but I never use it. Down in the basement in a box somewhere.”
“Davy Ray’ll probably know where it is,” I said.
Mr. Attitude had slinked away, most likely because a seven-hundred-dollar
loss was cheaper than a ten-thousand-dollar vacation in jail. Many mighty
hunters went out on the trail of the beast from the lost world, but they
returned with dookey on their boots and their egos busted.
I have a picture in my mind.
I see the park after the carnival has packed up and gone. It is clear
again, except for a few scatters of sawdust, crushed Dixie cups, and ticket
stubs the cleanup crew has left like a dog marking its territory.
But this year the wind blows Zero wrappers before it, and they make a
sound like giggling as they pass.
FOUR
Winter’s Cold Truth
A Solitary Traveler—Faith—Snippets of the Quilt—Mr. Moultry’s Castle—Sixteen
Drops of Blood—The Stranger Among Us
1
A Solitary Traveler
“YOUR FATHER’S LOST HIS JOB,” MOM SAID.
I had just walked in from school, with Thanksgiving four days behind us.
This news hit me like a blow to the belly. Mom’s face was grim, her eyes
already seeing days of hardship ahead. She knew the red-ink realities of her
baking business; Big Paul’s Pantry had an immense section of pies and cakes as
well as milk in disposable plastic jugs.
“They told him when he went in,” she continued. “They gave him two weeks’
pay and a bonus, and they said they couldn’t afford him anymore.”
“Where is he?” I dropped my books on the nearest flat surface.
“Gone somewhere, about an hour ago. He sat around most of the day,
couldn’t eat a bite of lunch or hardly talk. Tried to sleep some, but he
couldn’t. I believe he’s about wrecked, Cory.”
“Do you know where he’s gone?”
“No. He just said he was goin’ somewhere to think.”
“Okay. I’m gonna try to find him.”
“Where’re you goin’?”
“Saxon’s Lake, first,” I told her, and I walked out to Rocket.
She followed me to the porch. “Cory, you be care—” She stopped herself.
It was time to admit that I was on my way to being a man. “I hope you find
him,” she offered.
I rode away, under a low gray sky threatening sleet.
It was a good haul out there from my house. The wind was blowing against
me. As I pedaled on Route Ten, my head thrust forward over the handlebars, I
looked cautiously from side to side at the wind-stripped woods. The beast from
the lost world was still at large. That in itself wasn’t a fearful thing,
since I doubted the triceratops wanted to have much to do with the entrapping
mudhole of civilization. What made me cautious was the fact that two days
before Thanksgiving Marty Barklee, who brought the newspapers in from
Birmingham before the sun, had been driving along this very road when a
massive bulk had come out of the woods and slammed into his car so hard that
its tires left the pavement. I’d seen Mr. Barklee’s car. The passenger side
was crushed in as if kicked by a giant steel boot, the window smashed all to
pieces. Mr. Barklee had said the monster had literally hit and run. I believed
the triceratops had staked out his claim in these dense and swampy woods
around Saxon’s Lake, and any vehicles on Route Ten were in jeopardy because
the triceratops thought they were rival dinosaurs. Whether he would think
Rocket was worth a snort and charge, I didn’t know. I just knew to keep
pedaling and looking. Evidently, Mr. Attitude had not realized that instead of
a big gray lump that sat snoozing in the mud, he owned a Patton tank that
could outrun a car. Freedom will sure speed your legs, that’s for sure. And
for all its age and size, the triceratops was at heart a boy.
Other than having Davy Ray show up at my front door with a chain cutter,
I never let on what I suspected. Johnny didn’t either, and we never told Ben
because sometimes Ben had a runaway mouth. Davy Ray didn’t speak a word about
it other than to remark he hoped they just let the creature live out its days
in peace. I was never exactly sure, but it seemed like the kind of thing Davy
Ray might have done. How was he to know the triceratops was going to do ten
thousand dollars’ worth of damage? Well, glass could be replaced and metal
hammered out. Mr. Wynn Gillie and his wife moved to Florida like they’d been
wanting to do for five or six years. Before Mr. Gillie left, Mr. Dollar told
him the swamps of Florida were full of dinosaurs, that they came to your back
door begging for table scraps. Mr. Gillie turned paste-white and started
shaking until “Jazzman” Jackson told him Mr. Dollar was only pulling his leg.
As I turned the curve that would take me past Saxon’s Lake, I saw Dad’s
pickup truck parked over near the red rock cliff. I coasted, trying to figure
out what I was going to say. Suddenly I had run out of words. This was not
going to be like feeding the magic box; this was real life, and it was going
to be very, very hard.
I didn’t see him anywhere around the truck as I eased Rocket onto the
kickstand. And then I did see him: a small figure, sitting on a granite
boulder halfway around the lake. He was staring out across the black,
wind-rippled water. As I watched him, I saw him lift a bottle to his lips and
drink deeply. Then he lowered the bottle, and sat there staring.
I began walking to him through a morass of reeds and stickerbushes. The
red mud squished under my shoes, and I saw my father’s footprints in it. He
had come this way many times before, because he’d trampled down a narrow trail
through the worst of the undergrowth. In doing this he had unconsciously
continued his work as a father, by making the path just a little easier for
the son.
When I got nearer, he saw me coming. He didn’t wave. He lowered his head,
and I knew he, too, had run out of words.
I stood ten feet away from him on the boulder, which at one time had been
part of the lip of Saxon’s Quarry. He sat with his head bowed and his eyes
closed, and beside him was a plastic jug half-full of grape juice. I realized
he had gone shopping at Big Paul’s Pantry.
The wind shrilled around me and made the trees’ bare branches clatter.
“You all right?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
“Mom told me.”
“Figured.”
I dug my hands into the pockets of my fleece-lined denim jacket, and I
gazed out over the dark, dark water. Dad didn’t say anything for a long time,
and neither did I. Then he cleared his throat. “Want some grape juice?”
“No sir.”
“Got plenty left.”
“No sir, I’m not thirsty.”
He lifted his face to me. In the hard, cold light he looked terribly old.
I thought I could see his skull beneath the thin flesh, and this sight
frightened me. It was like looking at someone you loved very much, slowly
dying. His emotions had already been balanced on the raw edge. I remembered
his desperately scribbled questions in the middle of the night, and his
unspoken fears that he was about to suffer a breakdown. I saw all too clearly
