Boy's Life Part 37

"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 a.s.s! 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 att.i.tude. 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. Att.i.tude. 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. Att.i.tude'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. Att.i.tude 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 ba.s.soons. 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 s.h.i.+thead!" Mr. Att.i.tude 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. Att.i.tude 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 s.h.i.+t!" Mr. Att.i.tude yelled.

"Are you tryin' to kill it, mister?" Davy Ray asked.

"That sonofab.i.t.c.h don't feel no pain! He's got skin like f.u.c.kin' armor plate! Hey, don't you be tellin' me my business or I'll throw you outta here on your a.s.s!"

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. Att.i.tude 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 p.e.c.k.e.r," 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 appet.i.te vanished.

"Yeah, so what? Gotta smack him some to make him pay attention. h.e.l.l, 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 f.u.c.ker told me. Somethin' about... some professor found him. Either in the Amazon jungle or the Belgian Congo, I forget which. Up on some plateau n.o.body 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. Att.i.tude 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 f.u.c.kers. 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 f.u.c.kin' ax. He just laid there. That's what he does, just lays there and eats and s.h.i.+ts." Mr. Att.i.tude 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 f.u.c.ker 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. Att.i.tude grinned. "Fruit makes him smell better, y'see."

The triceratops's small black eyes slowly blinked. His ma.s.sive 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?"

"h.e.l.l, 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, s.h.i.+thead!" he yelled. "Why don't you do somethin' to earn your f.u.c.kin' keep? Why don't you learn to balance a ball on your snout, or jump through a hoop? Thought I could f.u.c.kin' train you to do some tricks! How come you don't do nothin' but sit there lookin' stupid?" Mr. Att.i.tude'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. Att.i.tude 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. Att.i.tude 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. Att.i.tude 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 f.u.c.kin' headache. You wanna buy him? h.e.l.l, I'll cut you a deal! Get your daddy to bring me five hundred dollars, I'll sure as s.h.i.+t unload him in your front yard and he can sleep in your f.u.c.kin' 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. Att.i.tude sneered. "You don't know s.h.i.+t 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.

"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. Att.i.tude 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. Att.i.tude 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. Att.i.tude 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 sonofab.i.t.c.h! You stupid old f.u.c.ker!" 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. Att.i.tude 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. Att.i.tude 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 Sat.u.r.day 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?"