Dinosaur Summer Read online

  For the next five days, as the Libertad passed down the coast of the United States, skirted Florida and Cuba, and made its way through the Antilles, Peter worked with Shellabarger from seven in the morning to dinnertime, and for an hour each evening after dinner. Shellabarger found him a pair of gum boots in the circus boxes, a couple of sizes too large, but they kept his shoes from getting ruined. Shellabarger also supplied him with a pair of rubber gloves. "This stuff really does nasty things to your skin," he explained as a bucket of slop was being hauled out of the hold to be dumped overboard. "It's worse than guano. But if your ma keeps a garden, it's fabulous. Shall we ship it to her?"

  Peter smiled wanly, but did not want to explain that his mother and father were divorced. The thought of his mother, immaculately dressed in a cotton gabardine suit, getting a big drum full of this nauseating green and yellow liquid . . .

  "She doesn't garden," he said.

  "The clowns do a little gardening when we spend a few months in Tampa," Shellabarger said. He cleared his throat. "Used to. Flowers and tomatoes and stuff. Dinosaur . . . muck . . . makes them pop right out of the ground, sweet and juicy." He smacked his lips.

  Peter could not figure Shellabarger. Sometimes he was as nasty as could be, as if sitting under a dark cloud. The venator made him nasty. They would glare at each other, and Shellabarger would begin stomping around the hold, shouting orders and getting even more particular about Peter's work.

  The sailors did not come into the hold, but Captain Ippolito ventured down a few times. The captain once saw Shellabarger staring down the venator. Ippolito said to Peter, "Between them both, they have enough evil eyes to kill a city. I would not stand between them, not for a million dollars."

  Peter hated cleaning the slop, but he enjoyed feeding Sammy and tending Sheila. Sammy was "less vicious by far than a rhino," according to Shellabarger, "but you still have to watch him." Sammy took a shine to Peter and was careful not to tread on the boy when he was in the cage. Peter had a chance to wash the centrosaur twice, and the big animal rolled his eyes in sheer delight as the rough bristle brush was pushed, laden with soapy water, over his tough, horny hide. Peter loved to feel the hide, almost hard as rock, and feel the weight of the huge animal as Sammy shifted his feet with the roll of the ship. Shellabarger warned him to keep a watchful eye out in case the ship rolled more than usual, and then, to scramble up on Sammy's back if the big animal missed his step and slammed against the cage.

  In the cage, Sammy could angle himself from corner to corner, but he could not turn around, and if his straw wasn't changed regularly, he would get sores on his hoof pads and between his nails.

  "We're all going to be glad to be on dry land again, aren't we?" Peter asked the centrosaur. Sammy closed his eyes and lifted his broad, heavy shield to be scrubbed on the nape of his neck.

  Peter brought mineral salts from a big steel drum in the circus store room to Sheila. The spiky, heavily armored animal moved very little, usually spending the day lying half on her side, spikes wedged between the plywood deck of the cage and the bars just beyond. She drank the mineral salts mixed with water from a big bucket, sucking the water through her tough, turtle-like beak.

  The ankylosaur's droppings were big as baseballs, and just as round and solid. After evening cleanup on the fourth day out, Shellabarger found a baseball bat and they took a bucket of Sheila's refuse and went to the stern. There, Ray and OBie and Anthony joined them for a game of dungball. The droppings hit the bat with a solid whack and flew out over the rail to vanish into the Libertad's broad wake.

  "Dino dung and the national pastime . . . who'da thunk it?" OBie asked. He grinned as another round ball of dung flew out over the ocean.

  "I'da thunked it," Ray said, handing the bat to Shellabarger. Peter played catcher until he complained about being on the receiving end of so much shit. Anthony made a face and Shellabarger held up his hands and said he was keeping his language clean.

  "Hey," OBie said, "I'm the Irishman here. That should be my line."

  They tried to explain to Peter the joke about the Italian and the Irishman, but they couldn't clean it up and make it funny, so Peter had to piece it together for himself later that evening. Even then, it wasn't very funny.

  Ray began teaching him to draw in the evening after what Peter called his "dino-chores" were done. Peter had sketched enough to be able to block out forms and put them together; Ray showed him how to compose a picture, find the lines of action, make sure things in the picture "know about each other." He explained that a picture has its own weight that tugs the eye from one side to the other, or swings it around in a spiral.

  "Understand the animals, the people," Ray said, quickly sketching a man crouching as some dark shadow loomed behind him. The shadow became a huge cave bear. Peter, much more crudely, sketched a man standing with his hands in his pockets. In front of him cowered a little mouse.

  Ray looked at it and shook his head. "Not bad," he said. "Where's the action, though?"

  "The mouse is really afraid," Peter said.

  Ray laughed, then turned the page on his pad and began sketching an ancient Hindu temple.

  "You want to be a writer, like your father?" Ray asked again.

  "Yeah," Peter said.

  "Really?"

  Peter drew some long dark lines with his pencil. "I don't know I'll be as good as he is," he said.

  "I know a writer, back in Los Angeles. Known him since we were boys. Writing is his whole life. All he talks about is writing."

  "Is he good?" Peter asked.

  "Pretty good," Ray said. "He says you have to do what you love, or you're going to end up dead inside, a grotesque, like someone in a Sherwood Anderson story."

  "Hm," Peter said.

  "So, what do you love?" Ray asked.

  "I don't know," Peter said.

  "Better find out," Ray said.

  Peter went to sleep each night dead tired, still a little smelly even after multiple lavings of the ship's brutal hand soap. He did not care. He was ecstatic just to be one of the guys.

  Peter spent the third day with the struthios. Anthony came down to see how his son was progressing with the dinosaurs. Shellabarger patiently explained how the struthios thought.

  "They're dumber than ostriches, but smarter than possums, and what they lose in brains, they more than make up for with body smarts. Watch." Shellabarger picked up a piece of dried cob corn and tossed it through the bars of the cage. Even though the female had her back to them, she sensed the cob coming, turned with lightning speed and grace, and snatched it out of the air. She deftly turned it with her rough tongue and stripped its kernels in a few seconds, then spit the cob back at them.

  "Don't get behind the male or he'll eviscerate you," Shellabarger said. "You know what that means?"

  "He'll gut me," Peter said.

  "Yeah. He won't mean to, it'll just happen. The female's not so touchy, but she's still heavy. She's broken my foot twice in the twenty years we've been together, and believe me, she's much too proud to apologize."

  Anthony got a concerned look. "Hey," he said, "in these cages, are you sure it's safe? With the ship rolling the way it does?"

  "Who said anything about it being safe?" Shellabarger said. "If he watches himself, he'll survive."

  "That's a bit callous, don't you think?" Anthony asked testily. Peter gave a little laugh, but Anthony did not see the humor.

  "He's done everything like a pro without getting hurt. He's a smart kid."

  "I'm okay, Dad," Peter said. "I watch myself."

  Anthony gripped Peter's shoulder. "Make sure you watch everything."

  Peter entered the cage with Casso, the female struthio, and used a wide-toothed curry comb to groom her fine, tiny feathers. He noticed that the feathers rose from the ends of small scales with central ridges; though not as developed as the feathers in birds or avisaurs, they were still recognizably heading in the same evolutionary direction.

  Other than reaching back
with her long arms to make sure where he was, poking him in the thigh with a thick black claw, Casso kept still, eyes wide and black in the darkness of the upper hold.

  "I think she wants to see the sun," Peter called to Shellabarger, who was across the hold, stuffing herbs into the ankylosaur's beak.

  Shellabarger grunted. "It is damned dark down here. I suppose we could open the hatch covers, as long as the weather's good . . . I'll ask the captain."

  Peter finished the grooming and walked on the perimeter of the hold to the ankylosaur's cage, giving a wide berth to the venator. Dagger stood on both legs, tail poking through the bars, and angled his head to watch Peter with heavy-lidded eyes. One claw on his right forelimb—his right manus, Ray called it—rose and fell as if marking time.

  "How's Sheila?" Peter asked, entering the ankylosaur's cage and standing behind Shellabarger.

  "Not good," Shellabarger said. "All this rocking. Damned ship." He held up a fistful of herbs, then poked them at her beak. "She's always been the most delicate." She turned her head aside and the trainer thrust his thumb at the hinge of her jaw. She flinched and involuntarily her jaw opened. Shellabarger quickly stuffed the herbs in and she chewed on them halfheartedly, making small grunting noises.

  Captain Ippolito agreed to open the hatch covers over the forward hold, and for several hours on the fourth day, all the animals enjoyed a peek at the sky and a rolling reacquaintance with the sun. Ray came down into the hold with Anthony. Anthony took quick photographs as the sun shone down on the dinosaurs, and Ray sat on a stool by a bulkhead and sketched his favorites, the venator and Sammy the centrosaur.

  He gave Peter a small sketch pad and a box of No. 2 pencils. When the morning's chores were done, Shellabarger left them in the hold while he climbed topside to smoke a cigarette. Ray showed Peter how to loosen up and draw from the elbow and shoulder, not from the wrist. "Look at things as they are," he said. "Not as you want them to be. And remember . . . everything has its own kind of life. Even a rock." The ship ended its roll to one side and shuddered underneath them. "Even Libertad,," he said with a grin.

  "The animals are going to be a lot happier on land," Peter said.

  "Won't we all," Ray said.

  Peter took a second stool and sat in front of Sheila's cage, drawing a portrait from the front.

  "You'll be home soon, girl," Peter said. She watched him through her small, rheumy eyes, unhappy, understanding nothing. Ray joined him as Anthony came back from photographing the venator, and they all listened to Sheila's labored breathing.

  "Doesn't sound good," Anthony said. "Not that I'm an expert on sick dinosaurs." He looked down at Peter's drawing. It was rough, but it had a strong sense of light and shade, and the animal's dim eye had been captured nicely. "Pretty good, don't you think?" he asked Ray.

  "Ask me in a month," Ray said. Then he allowed, "It's a good start."

  That night, Shellabarger banged on their stateroom door. "Peter, come with me," he said from the other side. Peter had almost been asleep. He dressed quickly and his father asked him if he could tag along. "Sure, I guess," Peter said, not used to giving his father permission.

  Shellabarger led the way to the forward hold. The sea had grown rougher since sunset and the ship was now shuddering strongly at the end of each roll. The animals were very nervous, particularly the struthios, who made loud shrieks and clawed at the bars of their cage. They swung their heads back and forth on snaking necks, eyes wide, jaws gaping, tongues poked out.

  Shellabarger walked around their cage. "Never mind them," he said. "They're just raising hell."

  Anthony and Peter followed him to Sheila's cage. She had fallen over on her side, her back propped against the bars. Rivulets of blood seeped out from under her. "She's torqued some spikes and opened up her hide," Shellabarger said. "But that's not the worst. She has an impacted bowel. Hasn't defecated for a day and a half."

  Peter thought of the large pellets they had used as baseballs. Sheila's eyes were closed and her underside spasmed at the end of each slow breath.

  "I keep telling her we're taking her home," Shellabarger said softly. "But it's no good. She's too dumb and too sick to care."

  "Can we roll her over?" Peter asked.

  "Not without a winch. I could rig some block and tackle . . . We have a harness for that sort of thing, but we'd bust the cage if we fastened it to the upper bars. The captain would have a fit if we asked him to rig a boom at night, with the weather getting worse . . ."

  Sheila craned her neck and gave a gravelly sigh.

  "I hate to lose her, but that's what's happening," Shellabarger said. "And it isn't just the ship rolling and her being on her side . . . She doesn't feel she belongs."

  "Can you blame her?" Anthony asked.

  Ray and OBie and Keller came down into the hold. Shawmut and Osborne followed, eyes big as they looked over the dark, covered cages.

  They stood around Sheila's cage, each offering a different scheme for how to rig a harness and get the old dinosaur upright again, and each idea went down to defeat as a major problem was found.

  They sat up all that night, each taking turns to bring water or herbs. Exhausted and sad, at four in the morning— by the tolling of the ship's bell—Peter wandered off to be by himself. Anthony found him sitting against the aft bulkhead.

  "Blaming yourself?" Anthony asked, sitting beside him.

  "They're supposed to be going homer Peter said. "I didn't think any of them would die."

  From across the hold, they heard a gunshot, and then Shellabarger cursing. OBie and Ray found them and told them the news. The trainer had put Sheila out of her misery. She was still dying—it took ankylosaurs a long time to know that their time was up.

  OBie had tears on his cheeks. Ray shook his head, his sketch pad tucked under one arm.

  "Keller bought another bottle of whiskey from the crew," OBie said, sitting beside them. He wiped his eyes on a handkerchief. "He gave it to Vince and Vince took it back to his room."

  Ray slumped against the bulkhead last and they all sat in silence, thinking about the big animal's death.

  "What'll they do with the body?" Peter asked. "Will they dump it at sea?"

  "I'll call the society in the morning," Anthony said. "I'm sure the Smithsonian or some other institution will want it . . . There aren't that many dinosaurs that we can just dump poor Sheila at sea."

  After a few minutes, they stood up together. OBie said, "I'm going to Vince's cabin and share a drink, talk him through it . . ." He looked around the group. "Anybody coming with me?"

  They all said they would. Then they shook hands. It was a funny response, Peter thought, but it made them all feel better. It made them feel less like a bunch of people sharing a ship with some animals and more like a team with a single, real goal.

  Peter and Anthony passed the venator's cage. Shellabarger had lowered the tarps for the night, but they heard Dagger scrape his claws on the bottom of the cage as they passed. Peter could almost feel the venator's attention.

  "Do you think he blames us?" Peter asked his father, nodding at the covered cage.

  "Odd idea," Anthony said. "I don't see how he can."

  Peter was not so sure.

  Chapter Seven

  The coast of Venezuela appeared the next day, a line of dark green on the horizon, mounted by towering white thunderheads. The sun beat down on the deck, making the white surfaces unbearably brilliant, but a cooling wind blew and it was pleasant in shade. The ship rolled less than usual and OBie and Ray and Anthony prevailed upon the captain to let a few of the smaller animals run around in the sun. An enclosure was built around the number two hatch from the lumber of scrap pallets. The ship's crew then rigged a small boom and brought up the struthios and avisaurs. The avisaurs stayed in their cages, but spread their wings at the touch of sun and preened themselves. Peter had established quite a rapport with the four bird-lizards, and he scratched their necks through the bars of the cage, all the time keeping an eye out
for their toothy jaws, which could draw blood with even a friendly nip.

  The struthios pranced about on the deck, dipping their necks and investigating all the nooks and crannies available to them. They walked very much like ostriches, lifting their legs delicately, three clawed toes curled under on the lifted foot and splayed flat on the grounded foot.

  Shellabarger walked with the struthios for a while, wearing dark aviator glasses and a cloth cap. To Peter he seemed older, most of the enthusiasm gone out of him. But as the afternoon wore on and they had to gather up the dinosaurs, the chase seemed to enliven the trainer. They managed to guide each struthio back into its cage and the boom delivered them safely back into the hold, where Keller and his men tied them down again.

  That evening, Peter fed the avisaurs seeds and scraps of ground meat and helped Shellabarger and Ray inspect the Aepyornis's claws for fungus. Shellabarger painted the claws with a smelly purple concoction.

  "I didn't know keeping animals was so much work," Peter said, watching from outside the cage.

  Mrs. Birdqueen jerked her foot vigorously. Shellabarger grunted and continued painting.

  "I thought dinosaurs were really tough . . . You know, monsters." He didn't really think that, but he wanted to give Shellabarger something to react against. He hated to see Shellabarger gloomy. The trainer shrugged but took his bait.

  "In their own place, they're a lot tougher than we are. In Chicago or New York, I might feel tough, but on El Grande, none of us is going to be very tough. These beasts will be back in their element. Then we'll see them shine."

  "Dad says we'll be in port tomorrow evening."

  The Aepyornis stared down at them with her beady black eyes, then pushed Shellabarger away with a casual flip of her leg. He came out of her cage with the brush and bottle, rubbing his back where he had bumped against the bars. "Had enough, eh, Mrs. Birdqueen?"

  She shook her head vigorously. A cloud of neck feathers swirled through the air.