Boys Life

her baking business; Big Paul’s Pantry had an immense section of pies and cakes as well as milk in disposable plastic jugs.
    “They told him when he went in,” she continued. “They gave him two weeks’ pay and a bonus, and they said they couldn’t afford him anymore.”
    “Where is he?” I dropped my books on the nearest flat surface.
    “Gone somewhere, about an hour ago. He sat around most of the day, couldn’t eat a bite of lunch or hardly talk. Tried to sleep some, but he couldn’t. I believe he’s about wrecked, Cory.”
    “Do you know where he’s gone?”
    “No. He just said he was goin’ somewhere to think.”
    “Okay. I’m gonna try to find him.”
    “Where’re you goin’?”
    “Saxon’s Lake, first,” I told her, and I walked out to Rocket.
    She followed me to the porch. “Cory, you be care-” She stopped herself. It was time to admit that I was on my way to being a man. “I hope you find him,” she offered.
    I rode away, under a low gray sky threatening sleet.
    It was a good haul out there from my house. The wind was blowing against me. As I pedaled on Route Ten, my head thrust forward over the handlebars, I looked cautiously from side to side at the wind-stripped woods. The beast from the lost world was still at large. That in itself wasn’t a fearful thing, since I doubted the triceratops wanted to have much to do with the entrapping mudhole of civilization. What made me cautious was the fact that two days before Thanksgiving Marty Barklee, who brought the newspapers in from Birmingham before the sun, had been driving along this very road when a massive bulk had come out of the woods and slammed into his car so hard that its tires left the pavement. I’d seen Mr. Barklee’s car. The passenger side was crushed in as if kicked by a giant steel boot, the window smashed all to pieces. Mr. Barklee had said the monster had literally hit and run. I believed the triceratops had staked out his claim in these dense and swampy woods around Saxon’s Lake, and any vehicles on Route Ten were in jeopardy because the triceratops thought they were rival dinosaurs. Whether he would think Rocket was worth a snort and charge, I didn’t know. I just knew to keep pedaling and looking. Evidently, Mr. Attitude had not realized that instead of a big gray lump that sat snoozing in the mud, he owned a Patton tank that could outrun a car. Freedom will sure speed your legs, that’s for sure. And for all its age and size, the triceratops was at heart a boy.
    Other than having Davy Ray show up at my front door with a chain cutter, I never let on what I suspected. Johnny didn’t either, and we never told Ben because sometimes Ben had a runaway mouth. Davy Ray didn’t speak a word about it other than to remark he hoped they just let the creature live out its days in peace. I was never exactly sure, but it seemed like the kind of thing Davy Ray might have done. How was he to know the triceratops was going to do ten thousand dollars’ worth of damage? Well, glass could be replaced and metal hammered out. Mr. Wynn Gillie and his wife moved to Florida like they’d been wanting to do for five or six years. Before Mr. Gillie left, Mr. Dollar told him the swamps of Florida were full of dinosaurs, that they came to your back door begging for table scraps. Mr. Gillie turned paste-white and started shaking until “Jazzman” Jackson told him Mr. Dollar was only pulling his leg.
    As I turned the curve that would take me past Saxon’s Lake, I saw Dad’s pickup truck parked over near the red rock cliff. I coasted, trying to figure out what I was going to say. Suddenly I had run out of words. This was not going to be like feeding the magic box; this was real life, and it was going to be very, very hard.
    I didn’t see him anywhere around the truck as I eased Rocket onto the kickstand. And then I did see him: a small figure, sitting on a granite boulder halfway around the lake. He was staring out across the black, wind-rippled water. As I watched him, I saw him lift a bottle to his lips and drink deeply. Then he lowered the bottle, and sat there staring.
    I began walking to him through a morass of reeds and stickerbushes. The red mud squished under my shoes, and I saw my father’s footprints in it. He had come this way many times before, because he’d trampled down a narrow trail through the worst of the undergrowth. In doing this he had unconsciously continued his work as a father, by making the path just a