Boys Life

what? Gotta smack him some to make him pay attention. Hell, 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 fucker told me. Somethin’ about… some professor found him. Either in the Amazon jungle or the Belgian Congo, I forget which. Up on some plateau nobody 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. Attitude 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 fuckers. 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 fuckin’ ax. He just laid there. That’s what he does, just lays there and eats and shits.” Mr. Attitude 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 fucker 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. Attitude grinned. “Fruit makes him smell better, y’see.”
    The triceratops’s small black eyes slowly blinked. His massive 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?”
    “Hell, 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, shithead!” he yelled. “Why don’t you do somethin’ to earn your fuckin’ keep? Why don’t you learn to balance a ball on your snout, or jump through a hoop? Thought I could fuckin’ train you to do some tricks! How come you don’t do nothin’ but sit there lookin’ stupid?” Mr. Attitude’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. Attitude 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. Attitude 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. Attitude 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 fuckin’ headache. You wanna buy him? Hell, I’ll cut you a deal! Get your daddy to bring me five hundred dollars, I’ll sure as shit unload him in your front yard and he can sleep