by David Fulk
More and more thoughts like that came into Martin’s head as he hopped on his bike and started for home. But all that thinking took his mind off his steering, and at the edge of the parking lot he ran into a curb and took a wicked header over the handlebars. Luckily he landed on a patch of soft grass and avoided any serious bodily damage. But the bike wasn’t as lucky: the chain had been knocked clean off the gears.
“Oh, no,” he grumbled as he checked it out, worrying more about the delay to Rufus’s breakfast than the needed repair job.
“You okay, Martin?” The voice was familiar, but Martin was still a bit surprised to see his science teacher, Mr. Eckhart, approaching.
“Oh, hi. Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Little mechanical malfunction there?”
“Can it be fixed?”
“Let’s have a look.”
As Mr. Eckhart put down his bag of groceries and got to work on the chain, Martin started thinking again. Maybe this would be a good time to clear up a few nagging questions.
“Mr. Eckhart, do you know a lot about animals?”
“Well, that’s what they told me when they gave me my zoology degree. I guess I’ll take their word for it.”
“Zoology? I thought you were just, like, a general science person.”
“Nah, I just teach you guys science to pay the bills while I work on my master’s degree. Hope that doesn’t disappoint you.”
“No…. So…what kind of lizard has three toes—well, four, counting a little one in the back—and walks on two legs?”
“I give up. What kind?”
“No, it’s a real question.”
Mr. Eckhart looked at him with an arched eyebrow. “Okay, none of the above. Lizards have five toes and walk on four legs.”
Martin spent a moment processing that. “So if a lizard has three toes and walks on two legs, that means he’s a mutant?”
“Could be. Why?”
“Just wondering.”
“Well, what you’re describing sounds more like a bird than a lizard.”
“Bird…?”
“Yep. Or a dinosaur. There y’go. How’s that?” He put the bike upright—chain back on, good as new. Martin hardly noticed.
“But dinosaurs are extinct.”
“That is correct. Well, unless you count Barney.”
He looked to Martin for a reaction, but he didn’t get a chuckle, or even a smile. A thought was forming in Martin’s head, and the joke didn’t get through at all.
“Hello?” Mr. Eckhart said. “Unless you count Barney.”
Martin suddenly got a burst of energy. “Thanks!”
He jumped on the bike and raced off down the street, leaving his teacher standing there, his hands coated with grease, his face a picture of bewilderment.
All the way home, one outlandish thought rattled around in Martin’s head. A dinosaur? The thought had occurred to him before, of course, but he had always dismissed it right off the bat. After all, there had been no dinosaurs for sixty-five million years. But then again…?
When he got to the house he dropped his bike in the front yard and raced up to his bedroom. No need for a trip to the library this time; he remembered a book his mom had given him for his ninth birthday. It took only a short search to find it under some junk in the back of the closet: All Things Dinosaur.
In a flash he was off to the barn, stopping only long enough to throw open the fridge and grab a leftover Ultraburger from Royal Castle. He figured if Rufus was going to be chowing down on hamburger, well, then he would too.
He brought his reptilian friend up from his downstairs lair and lifted him onto the workbench. Even though he was only three days old, he already seemed heavier to Martin, and maybe an inch or two longer. “Don’t eat it all at once,” he said as he tore the plastic off the package of beef. “We have to make it last.” As Martin expected he would, Rufus went right after the meat like a hungry puppy.
Digging into his own cold burger, Martin opened the dinosaur book and got down to business.
But it didn’t take long for him to start thinking this whole project might not have been such a hot idea. The book had pictures and descriptions of all kinds of dinosaurs, but none of them looked at all like Rufus.
HADROSAURUS. Approximately nine feet in height, this dinosaur stood upright on its hind legs and had short forelimbs. Its most distinctive feature was its broad snout, shaped like a duck’s bill…
Short forelimbs, okay. But there was no danger of anyone mistaking Rufus for a duck.
CAMPTOSAURUS. Camptosaurus had a thick body, and the juveniles often walked on two legs. With its sharp, toothless beak, it most likely fed on leaves, small branches, and tall grasses.
A beak? Leaves and grasses? Nope…nothing like this thing. Martin thought about it as he absently watched Rufus polish off the last of the raw hamburger.
Every time there was something in a picture or a caption that seemed like a match, there was something else that canceled it out. After twenty minutes of flipping through the book, Martin was starting to lose enthusiasm. “This is stupid,” he grumbled. “Dinosaurs are gone. You’re just a freaky lizard.” He lifted the remaining half of his Ultraburger up to his mouth—and was startled when Rufus suddenly leaped up and chomped down on it, barely missing Martin’s pinky.
“Hey!” he exclaimed as he watched Rufus twitch and tug, trying to tear off a piece of beef while hanging in midair by the grip of his tiny teeth. “That’s mine!”
A corner of the bun gave way and Rufus dropped onto the tabletop with nothing to show for his sudden attack. But now he was all worked up, and he thrashed and squealed so annoyingly that Martin’s resistance quickly wore down.
“Okay, okay! One piece.”
He broke off a chunk of the burger meat and held it out toward Rufus, who snapped it away and dug right in.
“There’s no pigosaurus in here. But I’m thinking that’s you.”
Martin let out a long breath and rubbed his eyes. Maybe later his dad would let him use his computer, and he could do a more thorough search.
Eyes glazing over, he idly leafed through the book again, stopping when he came to a page he vaguely remembered from his birthday two years earlier.
TYRANNOSAURUS REX.
He looked again at Rufus, who was tripping all over his own feet as he wrestled with his piece of the burger. Martin couldn’t help but snicker.
“Right.”
He held the book out next to Rufus, comparing him to the artist’s drawing. Not much to go by, but might as well read on.
TYRANNOSAURUS REX. T. rex was one of the most fearsome carnivores that ever lived. It was characterized by powerful hind legs with three forward toes and one back; tiny forelimbs with two toes…
He took a look at Rufus’s shriveled forelimbs, which he hadn’t really paid that much attention to before: two toes.
and long, sharp teeth. Though it was probably a scavenger of dead animals, it was most likely a powerful hunter as well, with a voracious appetite for meat.
As he watched Rufus tear away at the beef, Martin got an odd feeling. He held the book up next to Rufus again, and suddenly felt a strong tingling in the deepest caverns of his stomach.
“Noooo,” he muttered, barely above a whisper. “It’s crazy. It’s ridiculous. No way!”
But his mind wouldn’t let go of an alarming thought that just kept getting stronger and stronger. The next word that came out of his mouth surprised him and, even though he was the one who said it, actually scared him a bit.
“Way?”
Three eye-blinks later, Rufus finished off the last of the Ultraburger, looked up at his human companion, and emitted a sound that Martin could have sworn was a tiny reptilian belch.
On the twenty-eighth of May, the Trout Palace opened for business.
Martin had talked his dad into getting him a job there, doing odd chores for pay. It wasn’t a real job, of course—the child labor laws wouldn’t allow it. But he knew his dad liked the
idea of him getting out of that barn for a few hours a week and learning to fend for himself in the world. Martin really wanted to make a good impression on that first day, because then there was a good chance they’d let him work more hours when school let out for the summer.
Opening day was always busy, busy, busy, and Martin’s assignment was just to wander the grounds and be available to help the visitors find their way around. This was not his favorite thing to do (talking with strangers—ugh!), but he put on his best face and mingled in with the crowd in his too-big Trout Palace Staff T-shirt, with a big red-and-yellow HOW CAN I HELP YOU? button pinned prominently on his chest.
The Trout Palace was nothing new to Martin, but even he couldn’t help feeling a bit of excitement as the guests eagerly streamed into the park by the hundreds.
In the outdoor area, the Ferris wheel, the merry-go-round, the “Rocket” mini coaster, and all the other rides sprang to life, calling out to the youngest fun seekers like a living toy box. It was a warm, perfect spring day, and the shimmering colors and cheery music blended with the kids’ delighted screams to lend a real sense of excitement to the occasion.
As people came in the front entrance of the main building, the first thing they saw was the giant fish hanging from the ceiling. Just as it had every day for years, it greeted the visitors in a loud, deep voice, its lower jaw bouncing up and down like a marionette’s:
Ho ho ho ho! Welcome to the Trout Palace!
Thirty acres of pure Wisconsin fun.
If you like it, we’ve got it—
so come on in, leave your worries outside,
and get set for the time of your life!
Ho-o-o-o-o-o ho ho ho ho!
By the end of the day, Martin and the other workers would be so sick of hearing that talking trout that they would dream of smashing it to pieces with a heavy stick, like a giant piñata. But the visitors seemed to like it just fine.
Once they were inside, the guests could head in almost any direction and find something fun to do. Straight ahead was the long midway, a busy boulevard of carnival attractions—mainly food stalls and all kinds of games of skill and chance, including, naturally, that goofy U-Bag-Em game. At the far end of the midway, a huge room full of arcade games kept dozens of kids—mostly the older boys—occupied for hours at a time.
Just to the left of the main entrance was the Heart o’ the Woods restaurant, where you really could catch your own dinner. A set of large doors led from the dining room to an outside patio, and the patio jutted out over a big, man-made pond. The pond was kept well stocked with rainbow trout and lake perch—easy game for adventurous diners with fishing poles supplied by the restaurant. Master chef Tim McTavish would then clean, cook, and garnish their catch for a delicious dinner.
A few yards beyond the restaurant entrance was where the “Four Muskrateers,” Daisy, Edna, Walter, and Fritz, delighted all comers by racing down a long, winding wooden track. All they were really interested in were the muskrat treats at the finish line, but the human spectators, who could make bets on the outcome of the race with play money, found the whole thing perfectly charming.
And if muskrats weren’t your cup of tea, well, there were always Zippy and Flippy, the furry stars of the always-popular “Ballet de Beavre.” How they taught those big rodents to dance and prance around that little stage wearing fluffy white tutus, and to do it a dozen times every day, is a mystery only a beaver’s brain can fathom. But their rendition of Swan Lake never failed to entertain and inspire.
Another audience favorite, especially with the kids, took place in the Walleye Theater. The stage was home to magicians, acrobats, jugglers, and novelty acts of all descriptions. The show’s masters of ceremonies were “Curtis and Jake,” a pair of backwoods dimwits who kept ’em laughing with a nonstop barrage of bad puns, slapstick routines, and big, toothless grins. Many of the folks in Menominee Springs didn’t much appreciate being portrayed to the world as dumb country hicks, but as long as visitors kept buying tickets to the shows, Ben Fairfield didn’t concern himself with such things.
By the end of the day, Martin’s feet felt like they had sandbags attached to them, and he leaned against a railing to give them a bit of a break. He could see Mr. Fairfield standing in his usual spot just below the talking fish, greeting the arriving customers with a handshake and a smile. “Hi there, folks! Thanks for coming today.”
He seemed happy enough, but in between groups of guests his expression darkened, and he fidgeted tensely. Martin had sensed his mood all day and kept his distance, but his dad wasn’t afraid to walk up to him. “Little slow for opening day, eh, Ben?”
“Disaster,” Mr. Fairfield snapped. “Worst in twenty years.”
“I wouldn’t sweat it based on one day. Whole season to go yet.”
The words of encouragement didn’t help, and Mr. Fairfield marched away gruffly.
—
For Martin, this job meant some extra dollars in his pocket for spending cash. And as the owner of a rapidly growing pet with a giant appetite, he needed a lot of spending cash. He was amazed at how fast Rufus had grown in just five weeks—and how much food he put away. At first, Martin collected as many dinner scraps and leftovers as he could take without raising suspicions, but pretty soon it just wasn’t enough. So he had to do the one thing he had sworn he never would: he raided the mayonnaise jar holding his life savings—all forty-eight dollars and twenty-six cents of it. He used every penny to buy dozens of cans of a dog food called Fido-Nummy, because it was cheap and Rufus liked it.
And the bigger Rufus got, the more Fido-Nummy he ate. Martin was keeping a log of his growth, and he could hardly believe how fast the numbers went up:
The weight measurements weren’t quite exact, because Martin had a hard time holding Rufus on his mom’s bathroom scale, which he would occasionally borrow while she was at work. But he figured his numbers were pretty close.
—
By the time the Trout Palace had been open for a week, Martin’s money supply was about gone, and the Fido-Nummy was dwindling fast. He had put in a good ten hours of work there, and he needed to get paid, and soon. At the end of that warm Friday, he spotted his dad replacing a lightbulb on the U-Bag-Em and briskly walked up to him.
“Hi, Dad. I finished washing those tools.”
“Huh?…Oh. Yeah.”
“So…is that it?”
“Um…did you sweep up the theater like I said?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Sanded the splinters off the thing…?”
“Yep.”
Martin stood there, nervously scratching his shoulder, as Mr. Tinker kept wrestling with the hard-to-reach bulb, grunting under his breath.
“Okay,” Martin finally said. “Guess that’s it.” He trotted off toward Ben Fairfield’s office.
“Where’re you going?”
“Mr. Fairfield said I’d get paid on Fridays.”
“No, don’t bother him. I’ll get it from him later. Here.” He took out his wallet and extracted a few bills. But he didn’t hand them to Martin right away; instead he just stood there, studying him.
Martin figured he was about to get a lecture or something, and he was not incorrect.
“Y’know, Marty…maybe you’re right. Maybe football isn’t your forty-ay.”
“Forte.”
“Not everybody can be Aaron Rodgers. Now, hunting…” He took hold of the mounted rifle and aimed it into the fake woods. “There’s a sport where you don’t have to be big, or even that coordinated. Maybe I’ll take you up to Collin Cove next fall. Bag yourself a duck or two.”
“Okay. Could you please pay me now? I’m in kind of a hurry.”
Martin could tell from his dad’s narrow squint that he was hoping for a better answer than that. Luckily, though, he didn’t press the issue, and grudgingly handed the bills to Martin.
“Don’t spend it all on bug nets.”
“I won’t. Bye.”
—
Martin knew
his parents’ expectation that the Trout Palace job would get him out of the barn and into the world didn’t work out as they had hoped. One night he overheard them talking about how he seemed even more withdrawn than before, and was spending even more time by himself in the barn. It worried them.
But of course, he was not by himself. Being with his rapidly growing dinosaur quickly became the thing Martin cared most about in life. Unlike the humans he knew (except his mom), Rufus was always excited to see him when he got home from school or work. And he seemed to thrive down in that big cellar, always gobbling down the scavenged scraps and Fido-Nummy that Martin brought. Martin didn’t even mind shoveling up the increasingly large piles of dino poop and hauling them out to the woods.
In the back of his head, he knew there was a chance that this could turn into another Orville-the-hamster situation. But as Rufus grew, it seemed pretty obvious that no hawk would be foolish enough to come after him. Not only was he getting too big for that, but his teeth were becoming quite prominent, and his reflexes were as quick as a cheetah’s. And Martin didn’t want to risk taking him out of the barn anyway—not only might Rufus get discovered, but he might like it too much. Either way, Martin didn’t spend a lot of time worrying that he might be getting too attached to his secret pet.
—
Ms. Olerud spoke the words aloud as she wrote them on the board.
“Although today is the last day of school…we have to finish our English lesson.”
She turned to the class. Everybody already had their minds on summer vacation, so feet were shuffling, eyes were wandering, and lips were whispering. Even Martin had to concentrate to keep from fidgeting.
“Okay, settle down, now, settle. This is what kind of sentence?…Brianna?”
“Complex,” Brianna Hogan replied.
“Very good,” said Ms. Olerud as she turned and wrote “complex” on the board.
It was a good thing she didn’t call on Donald Grimes, because he wasn’t paying attention at all. He was idly spinning a thumbtack around on his desktop, mouth hanging open, no doubt daydreaming about all the fun he was going to have starting in less than an hour.
