Excerpt
Allosaurus Burgers
Our teacher Mrs. Strunt said the allosaurus coming to Hudson Falls was the best thing that ever happened to Hudson Falls, but the worst thing that ever happened to the allosaurus. She herded us onto the bus looking mad about it, trying to keep us from seeing she was just as excited as we were. The bus was freezing and we had all the windows fogged up in five minutes. Other boys drew curse words. I wrote F-U-C and then flinched, imagining my mother finding out, so I wiped it away and drew an allosaurus.
"The poor thing," Mrs. Strunt said. "Wherever it came from, it's got to feel terribly lonely and lost and scared."
The roads were all madness on the way to the farm. Barely a day since Mr. Blecher made his big announcement, and everyone in the world was coming to Hudson Falls. Scientists and men with giant cameras, and lots of soldiers with lots of guns, but not the mean soldiers and scientists from movies. Everyone I saw had a smile so big it could have been their birthday. Everyone is coming to Hudson Falls, I thought.
And then: a treacherous, wicked, horrible thought.
Maybe my dad will come.
Where had it come from—dad—that foul, forbidden word? I sucked in my cheeks like making a fish face and closed my teeth on as much flesh as I could, and bit down hard. And then harder. Punishing myself. Until I felt the same hot smothering rage that rises up in my mother every time I say that word.
I thought my mother was God, then. Six-foot-something, all flesh and freckles, she towered over our neighbors in church and at the supermarket. She came home from the slaughterhouse smelling like blood. I was nine then, and she could still pick me up, hoist me into the air. Not even the fathers of the other boys my age could do that. She wasn't afraid of anything.
At breakfast that morning my mother had said, "Day after tomorrow, the army's going to take it away, and I personally think it can't happen soon enough."
I finished my milk and Mom poured me more, which I did not want, which I drank. Mom is certain that the government wants to take our stuff. Mostly our guns. She has a lot of guns and a lot of stickers on her car about them and her cold dead hands. So now I wondered why she wanted them to take the allosaurus.
"Woulda taken it right away, only it'll take 'em forty-eight hours to scrounge up the right equipment."
I nodded. Mom drank from the jug and put it back in the fridge.
"Blecher's going to make out okay, though. Heard he's got a million in TV deals lined up." She likes Mr. Blecher because he's an old, old man, but he can still get over on her once in a while in arm wrestling. "And he's hidden away some of its droppings to sell to the companies."
"What kind of companies?"
Mom frowned. "How the hell would I know something like that?"
I wondered what they would do with dinosaur poop. Could you clone something from its poop? Could something so gone forever come back so easily? And if poop worked, what else would? I thought of my father's baseball cap, the one Mom didn't know I had, the one that still smelled of his sweat when I crawled to the back of my closet late at night and in total darkness buried my nose in it.
Mom never sits at mealtimes. She made anxious circles through the tiny kitchen, moving refrigerator magnets and removing expired coupons and straightening the cat and dog figurines I could never stop forcing to fight each other. It was a Tuesday morning, which is when my sister Sue calls from college. Waiting for the call always made Mom a little tense.
"What?" she said, kicking me lightly. "Why the face, like I just killed a puppy?"
I shrugged.
"You want me to be excited about it. But that thing ain't right. They got scientists out combing that corner of Blecher's farm, but mark my words they won't find nothing. This is something bigger than science."
"At church yesterday, Pastor said it's a creature of God," I spoke carefully, not contradicting, just seeking clarity. I could no longer swing my legs when I sat at the kitchen table. This was a recent development, one I'd been looking forward to that had turned out to be pretty crummy. My feet rested resentfully on the cold tiles. A draft came from under the door.
"Pastor'll say what needs to be said to help Mr. Blecher out and to get people to come and spend their money in town. Creature of God, my foot."
Church was the most important thing in my mother's life, but I don't think she believed in God. The Hudson Falls Evangelical Lutheran Church gave her lots of things, like friends and a full social calendar and a reason not to go to the liquor store. God didn't offer her anything extra. Mostly she just liked what Pastor said: the sermons full of blood, fire, and the devil and impending doom, about a world gone haywire and full of sinners and about to be punished.
She heaped bacon on my plate, five then six then seven slices. "'Fore you know it, there'll be bunches of them things, running riot over all the world. Eating us all up."
"It's locked up, Mom."
"I know you saw King Kong, because I saw you crying at the end of it—" and she thumped me on the arm, not hard, because I saw her cry too when the big ape fell— "so I know you know they had Kong tied up good and proper, and he still got loose."
