Boys Life

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