Boys Life

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