The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

The Dinosaur Tourist ^{Caitlín R. Kiernan}

The South Dakota summer sky is a broken china teacup, and I have the distinct impression that when I finally stop the car and step outside and dare to let go of the handle on the door, I will fall straight up into that broken china sky. And I will not stop falling until the world below me is so small that I can make a circle of my thumb and forefinger and catch it all inside. And hanging there, I will freeze like a rose dripped in liquid nitrogen or my blood will boil, but I’ll have captured the world’s disc in one hand. There’s country music on the radio, George Jones and Tammy Wynette singing “Golden Ring,” and I turn the volume up just a little louder, to help take my mind off the smell. On either side of this seemingly eternal highway, there’s shortgrass prairie and patches of bare earth pressed flat beneath that brutal, hungry blue broken cup, and I rush past a comical sort of billboard, an old prospector and his cartoon mule, and the mule is luxuriating in a horse trough, and the billboard promises Refreshing! Free Ice Water! at the Wall Drug Store if I just keep going straight ahead twenty more miles. The kid in the passenger seat is still sleeping. I picked him up last night just outside Sioux Falls, just after I’d traded 1-29 North for I-90 West and the kid said he’d blow me for a ride to Rapid City. And I said shit get it and I have an empty seat don’t I? You don’t have to blow me, if you don’t mind that I smoke, and if you don’t mind the music. The kid said he’d blow me, anyway, because he didn’t like taking anything for free. Yeah, okay, I said, and so we found a truck stop, and he did it in the stall, and I tangled my fingers in his blond hair while he sucked my cock and fondled my balls and, for no extra charge, slipped a pinkie finger up my asshole. I bought him a burger and fries and told him don’t worry, it wasn’t for free, he could blow me again later on, so we’d be even. But I had to feed the kid. He looked like a stray dog hadn’t been fed in a month. And then I drove, and for a while the kid talked about his boyfriend in Rapid City, and I played the radio, and he finally fell asleep. In his sleep, he looked more like a girl than a boy. I pulled over near Murdo, just before four a.m., and I slept a little myself. I dreamed of the White Sundays. “You ever been to Rapid City?” I ask him, and he says no. I ask how it is his boyfriend is in Rapid City when he’s never been there himself, and he tells me they met on the internet. “You’ve never met him face to face?” I ask, and the kid wants to know what difference that makes. “Does he know you’re coming?” I ask him, and the kid just shrugs. “That means he doesn’t, right?” I ask. “He’ll be glad to see me,” says the kid, and I let it go at that. “What kind of drugs?” he asks me, and I’ve already forgotten the lie. It takes me a second to figure out what he’s talking about. “What kind of drugs got you fired from the college?” he prompts, and now he stops watching the prairie and stares at me, instead. “Heroin,” I tell him. “Heroin and pills. And a little coke, just to sweeten the deal.” And he says, “So you’re a junkie. I gave a junkie professor a blow job. What if you gave me AIDS back there? I didn’t know you were a junkie.” I tell him I don’t have AIDS, and he frowns and sighs and wants to know if he’s just supposed to take my word for that? Don’t I have some sort of papers to prove that I’m clean, and when I say no, I don’t have any fucking papers saying I don’t have AIDS, he turns off the radio and goes back to staring out the window. “Your car smells like road kill,” he says, and I say yeah, I hit a dead skunk back at the state line, just as I was leaving Nebraska. “I pulled over at a truck stop and washed off the tires and underneath the car with one of those high-pressure jet nozzles, but I guess I didn’t get it all. “It doesn’t smell like skunk,” he says. “It just smells like road kill. It just smells like rot.” So I ask him if he wants me to pull over and let him walk, and he doesn’t answer. I turn the radio back on. Hank Williams is crooning “You’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive.” “You catch shit from your parents?” I ask him, and he says, “I caught shit from everyone, okay? I caught shit from the whole fucking town,” and I say fair enough and that I wasn’t trying to pry. “It would be just my luck you gave me AIDS back there,” he mutters. “People back home would say I got what I deserve.” I ask him if he’s got any open sores inside his mouth or any bad teeth or anything like that, and he says no (and looks sort of offended at the suggestion), and I tell him fine, then he can stop worrying about catching AIDS from giving someone a blow job. We pass a rusting red Ford pickup truck stranded in the black-eyed Susans at the side of the highway. The front windshield is busted in and all four tires are flat. “Lucas has a red pickup truck,” says the kid, and when I ask if Lucas is his boyfriend in Rapid City, the kid nods and reaches for his pack on the floorboard between his feet. I told him he could toss it in the backseat, but he said no, he’d rather keep it with him. He’d rather keep it close. I didn’t argue. The kid lifts it onto his lap, black polyester bulging at the seams with whatever the kid holds sacred enough that he’s brought it along on his sojourn west. He unzips the pack, digs about for a moment, then takes out a little snub-nosed .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. The sun through the windshield glints dully off stainless steel. My heart does a little dance in my chest, a surprise tarantella, and my mouth goes dry. “That thing loaded?” I ask, trying to sound cool, trying to keep my voice steady, like it’s nothing to me if the kid’s carrying] a gun. I tell myself, shit, if I were hitching in this day and in this age, I’d be carrying a gun, too. “Wouldn’t be much point in my having it if it weren’t loaded, now would there?” And I say no, no I guess there wouldn’t be much point in that at all. He opens up the cylinder to show me there’s a round in all five chambers, and then he snaps it shut again. He aims the pistol out his open window. “You any good with it?” I ask, and the kid shrugs. “I’m good enough,” he replies. “My brother, he was in the Army, over in Iraq or someplace like that. He came back and taught me how to shoot. And then he killed himself.” I glance at myself in the rearview mirror, and then I glance at the kid again, and then I keep my eyes on the road. “Sorry to hear that,” I say, and the kid says, “No, you’re not. You don’t have to pretend you are. I’m sick to death of people pretending shit they don’t really feel.” We pass another billboard for Wall Drug Store, and the kid pantomimes taking a shot at it. Bang, bang, bang, like he’s seven years old, playing cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, with the neighborhood brats. “Baghdad,” says the kid. “That’s in Iraq, ain’t it?” I nod, and I tell him, yeah, that Baghdad is the capital of Iraq. “Then Iraq is where they sent my brother,” the kid tells me. “He saw a buddy of his get blown up by a landmine. He saw another buddy of his kill a woman because just maybe she was carrying a bomb. Something like that. He said everyone was afraid all the time, no matter how many guns they carried, and he came back still scared. He had to take pills to sleep. I guess he just eventually got tired of being fucking scared all the time. I know I would. He couldn’t get into college, so he got into the Army, instead.” I repress that reflexive urge to say I’m sorry again. Instead, I say, “We’re gonna be stopping just a couple of miles up ahead, so you better put that thing away until we’re back on the road again. You never know when there’s gonna be a state trooper or something.” The kid fires off another imaginary shot or three, and then he says, “Dude, South Dakota’s open carry. What the fuck is it to me whether there’s police around.” And I say fine, whatever, suit yourself, kid. He asks, “Does it make you nervous?” And I admit that it does. “Just a little,” I say. “I’ve never much cared for guns. I didn’t grow up around them, that’s all.” And now I’m thinking about three nights ago at a motel outside Lincoln, sitting on the hood of the car in a motel parking lot, and I’m thinking about the oddly comforting smell of cooling asphalt and about staring up at an ivory-white moon only one night past full. I crane my neck and look up through the dirty, bug-specked windshield and wish there were a few clouds this morning to break the tyranny of that broken china blue sky pressing down on me. Or if not to break it—because that would be asking an awful lot of a few clouds—at least to pose a challenge, at least to stand as a counterpoint. The kid opens his backpack again, and he puts the .38 away. I allow myself to relax a little, quietly sighing the proverbial sigh of relief. “This is the farthest west I’ve ever been,” says the kid, and then he asks, “What’s in Wall?” and he sets the backpack down on the floor between his feet. “Not much at all,” I reply. “Less than a thousand people. There’s a deactivated Minuteman missile launch control facility, just outside town.

In fact, just a few miles north of where we are right now.” I take my right hand off the steering wheel and point north. “You mean nuclear bombs?” he wants to know, and I say, yeah, I mean nuclear bombs. “But the site was deactivated in 1991, after Bush and Gorbachev signed the START treaty. So, there aren’t any bombs there anymore.” The kid, he just sorta gazes off into the distance, off the way I’ve pointed, out across the prairie. “Jesus,” he says, and then he laughs a nervous, hard laugh, a brittle laugh that would seem more natural coming from someone much older than however old he is, and the kid runs his fingers through his dirty blond hair. “I wasn’t even born yet. There could’a been a war, and those missiles could’a been fired, and I never would have been born. Jesus.” And then, to take his mind off an apocalypse that never happened, I say, “There’s also a dinosaur in Wall.” He stops staring at the prairie and stares at me, instead. “What do you mean? Like a dinosaur skeleton?” he asks, and I say no, not a skeleton. “You’ll see,” I tell him and I manage a smile, just to spite that sky. There’s only an hour left until noon and the day’s getting hot, so I tell him to roll up the window and I’ll turn on the air conditioning. He does, and I do. We pass a billboard that proclaims in crimson letters ten feet tall that abortion is murder. We pass another broken down truck, this one missing all four of its tires. We pass the turnoff for Philip. A few hundred yards to the north, there’s a deeply gullied ridge now, running parallel with the interstate, weathered beds claystone and silt-stone and mudstone laid down thirty million years ago, beds of volcanic ash and layers of sandstone from ancient Oligocene streambeds, a preview of the vast badlands farther south. I recall my dream from the night before, of titanotheres and lumbering tortoises. In the bright sunlight, the rocks are a dazzling shade of gray that’s very nearly white. The kid says he needs to piss. I point at the windshield, and I say, “There it is.” He asks, ‘What? There’s what?’ But then he sees it, the queerly majestic silhouette of the Wall Drug Dinosaur stark against the sky. The kid says, “Wow,” like he really means it, like he’s someone who can still be amazed by an eighty-foot-long concrete dinosaur, even after all he’s been through. That catches me off my guard almost as much as the sight of the Smith & Wesson did. The sun glistens wetly off the brontosaur’s painted Kelly green hide, off its sinuous neck and tiny head. I tell the kid how at night the eyes light up, how at night the eyes glow red, and he says he wishes he could see that. I take Exit 110 off the interstate, rushing past the dinosaur, turning right onto Glenn Street. “Last time I was here,” I say, “I was still in college. That was back in 1985, when there were still missiles in those silos, aimed at China and the Soviet Union.” The kid doesn’t take his eyes off the dinosaur, but he asks me what’s the Soviet Union. “Russia,” I say. “It’s what we used to call Russia.” The kid frowns and says, “I swear to fuck, dude, sometimes I think people change the names of shit just to make the next generation feel stupid.” And I tell him, yeah, that’s exactly why we do it. “I’ll tell you something else that’s changed,” I say. “Last time I was here, all this crap hadn’t been built yet.” And I mean the Day’s Inn and the Exxon station, the Conoco and all the convenience stores and a Motel 6, a Subway and a Dairy Queen, something called the Cactus Cafe and Lounge that promises home cooking and “western hospitality.” I’d meant to head straight for the venerable Wall Drug Store, the time-honored crown jewel of this exit, a gaudy oasis to mark the dead center of nowhere, but suddenly I’m no longer in the mood for tourist traps. Suddenly, I feel ill and lightheaded, and I pull into the Conoco’s parking lot, instead. The kid says, “Hey, ain’t we going to see the dinosaur?” I wipe perspiration off my forehead, because now I’m sweating despite the AC vents blowing in my face, and I reply, “I thought you had to piss.” And he says, “I can piss after,” and I tell him, “You can piss first. That dinosaur’s been there since 1967. It weighs eighty tons, and it isn’t going to run off anytime soon.” There’s an enormous convenience store attached to the Conoco station, the Wall Auto Livery, and isn’t that smart, isn’t that clever. I pull into an empty space between two other cars, one with Oregon plates, the other from Kansas, and I shift into park and cut the engine. I know now that I’m going to be sick, and I know that I’m going to be sick very soon. I taste hot bile in the back of my throat “You get whatever you want,” I say to the kid. “Go on and get whatever you need.” Then I’m out of the car, and Jesus it’s hot beneath that heavy, heavy sky, and for just a second or two I think maybe I’m gonna wind up on my knees, mired in the soft asphalt like a La Brea mastodon, praying for the mercy of vultures and slow suffocation. But then the door jingles and I’m swallowed by a blast of icy, impossibly cold air, and I realize that I’m inside the store. There are people moving and talking all around me, but I don’t make the mistake of looking anyone in the eye. I don’t care if maybe they’re staring. I just keep walking, past long aisles of snack food and coolers filled with row after row of soft drinks and energy drinks, bottled water and fruit juice. I’m lucky, and there’s no one in the restroom. I lock the door behind me and vomit into the toilet, revisiting my breakfast. I sit down with my back pressed against cool ceramic tiles and try not to think how dirty the floor must be. I can smell urine even over the pungent, antiseptic stink of pink deodorant cakes, even over the stink of my own puke. I shut my eyes for a moment, fighting another wave of nausea. I’ve always hated vomiting, and I don’t want to do it again. What the fuck is happening? I ask myself. What the fuck is wrong with you? Get it together, man. Get up off this filthy fucking floor and get it together before some nosy SOB starts asking questions. I’m trying hard not to think about the weight of the sky endeavoring even now to flatten me, even though I can no longer see it I’m trying harder still not to think about the way the car smells. But you know how that goes, the white bear problem, ironic process theory, fucking Dostoevsky. “Try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.” So, I puke again. And then someone knocks at the door. I look at my watch and wonder how long I’ve been in the restroom, and then I get up and straighten my clothes. I brush off the seat of my jeans, and I go to the sink and wash my hands with mint-green powdered soap from a dispenser. I wash my hands three times. I rinse my mouth with water from the faucet. Again, the knock at the door, and I say, “Yeah, okay. Just give me a second.” I splash water on my face, then realize that I didn’t flush the toilet, so I walk back over to the stall and flush. I jiggle the handle a few times, out of force of habit, because my toilet at home runs if you don’t jiggle the handle. I unlock the bathroom door, only to find there’s no one waiting. I spot the kid perusing at a display of beef jerky, and then I go over to one of the coolers and take out four cans of Coca-Cola. I get a bag of ice for the Coleman chest wedged into the floorboard behind the driver’s seat. The kid walks over to me, and he asks if I’m okay. “I’m fine,” I tell him, because what’s one more lie when all is said and done. “You don’t look fine,” he says. “You got what you need?” I ask him, and I wipe at my lips; my face is rough against the back of my hand. How long has it been since I last shaved? The kid says yeah, he’s got what he needs, but he tells me again how he doesn’t like taking charity. I tell him to shut up, and we walk together to the cashier and wait in line until it’s our turn at the register. The kid has a pack of Starburst fruit chews, a bag of Skittles, some teriyaki-flavored beef jerky, a can of Red Bull. I ask the cashier for a pack of Marlboro Reds, and the girl behind the counter asks to see my license. She’s wearing a tiny gold cross around her neck. “You don’t look so fine,” the kid says to me again, while the cashier stares at my driver’s license like she’s never actually seen one before. “I might have gotten a bad sausage or something at breakfast,” I tell him. “How about you? You feeling all right?” He says, “Yeah, sure. I’m feeling fine,” and I can tell he’s not buying the food poisoning story. “You don’t get car sick, do you?” the kid asks, and the question strikes me as so absurd that I almost laugh. Somehow, I manage only to smile, instead. Finally, the cashier figures out that I’m forty-eight years old, so it’s legal to sell me cigarettes, and she rings us up. I tell her to add a bag of ice. I pay for everything with my Visa card, because that one’s still good, and I tell her I don’t need the receipt. She bags the candy and beef jerky, the drinks and my smokes, and I ask the kid, wait, didn’t he need to take a leak. “I used the women’s room,” he tells me. The cashier sort of glares at him. He glares back at her twice as hard. The name printed on her name tag is Brooklyn, and I wonder who the fuck in Wall, South Dakota goes and names her daughter Brooklyn? I tell the kid to grab the ice, and then I go back outside into the broiling day and stand by the dented left front fender of my car, staring westward, back towards the highway. Towards Rapid City and the Black Hills and the Rocky Mountains, towards the goddamn Pacific Ocean, and I wonder how I’ve gotten this far. The kid comes back with ten pounds of ice, and I see that there’s a polar bear wearing a toboggan cap printed on the plastic bag. I think again about Dostoevsky. I contemplate synchronicity and meaningful coincidence. “I was thinking, maybe I’ll get a room,” I say to the kid, and he sets the bag of ice down on the hood of the car. “I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in a couple of days now. It would do me good to sleep in an actual bed. You’re welcome to join me, if you want” The kid stares at the bag of ice, and he shrugs. “You still going all the way to Rapid City, or should I start looking for another ride?” I ask myself how far I’m gonna go this time, if I’m in for a penny, in for a pound, or if I should let this one walk. “Sure,” I say. “I just need to catch a few hours shuteye, that’s all. If you want to hang around, we can get dinner tonight, and then you can see the eyes of the dinosaur.” I fish out my keys and open the back door on the driver’s side. The cooler is a third full with chilly water, and I pour that out onto the hot asphalt. It pools beneath the car with Oregon plates. “Yeah,” he says, “I don’t know. Maybe I should keep moving. I’m late, as it is.” He hands me the bag of ice, and I slam it on the blacktop a couple of times to break it up, and then I rip open the plastic bag and fill the cooler halfway. I dump the rest out on the pavement, and it begins to melt instantly. I put the cans of Coke into the cooler, and I tell the kid, “Whichever. No pressure. I just thought I’d offer. I don’t want you to feel like I’m going back on my word. I just gotta get some sleep.” He asks if I really think I have food poisoning, and I tell him maybe, I don’t either,” I say. “Two beds?” he wants to know. “Sure,” reply. “Of course. Two beds.” The kid sighs and gets back in the car, so it’s decided. Just like that. I drive back across Glenn Street to the Day’s Inn and get a room with twin beds. The clerk looks at me, and then she looks past me out the sheets of dusty plate-glass fronting the lobby. The kid is waiting in the car, sipping a Red Bull. “Is he your son?” she wants to know, and I can hear the suspicion in her voice, coiled like a rattlesnake, waiting to strike if I give the wrong answer, waiting to say, sorry Mister, but turns out there’s no room at the inn, but maybe next door at the Motel 6 they have a vacancy. It’s just down the way, and they don’t ask so many questions. “No,” I say, too tired and hot and queasy to lie. “I picked him up yesterday, hitchhiking. We’re both headed the same way, and, you know, there are bad people on the road. Homos and perverts looking to take advantage of unsuspecting innocents. You know how it is.” I’m wondering if maybe I laid it on too thick with the bit about perverts and homos, but apparently not, because then she asks, “How old is he?” I reply, “I honestly haven’t asked. But he said something about graduating high school back in May, so I’m guessing he’s not a minor. Look, I really don’t want to cause you any grief. If you’re not comfortable with this, that’s okay. That’s totally understandable. I just couldn’t keep driving when I saw him. It’s not safe out on the road, hitching.” The clerk stares out at the kid just a little while longer, and then she says, “Nah, it’s fine.” She apologizes for being a snoop. That’s the way she put it; her words, not mine. I tell her no problem. These days, the way things are, it pays to be on the alert. See something, say something, right? She gives me a keycard for a room on the first floor. She asks if I mind that it faces the interstate, and I say no, not at all. The sound of traffic helps me sleep. “Almost as good as train tracks,” I say, and I smile, and she smiles back at me. She’s missing a front tooth, a lower incisor. She asks me for the kid’s name, and I tell her his first name’s Lucas, but I don’t know his last name. She tells me when she was a kid she had an uncle named Lucas, died in the Gulf War, and I say how that’s a shame. Then I walk back out into the heat and find a place to park, and me and the kid retire to Room 107. It’s dingy and smells of pine-scented disinfectant and stale tobacco smoke. But the beds are clean and the bathroom’s clean. The kid brings in the cooler, puts his remaining Red Bull in with my four cans of Coke, and then he switches on the television set. He waits until after it’s already on and tuned to ESPN to ask if I mind, if the noise is going to annoy me. I say no, just keep the volume down, please. There’s a baseball game, the Yankees against the Detroit Tigers in Yankee Stadium. I pull the drapes closed, drink one of the Cokes, and watch the game for a few minutes. I unbutton my shirt and lay down on the bed nearest to the door, not bothering to turn down the comforter or the sheets. I’d like to brush my teeth, maybe even have a shower, but it can wait. I don’t feel like going back out to the car for my suitcase, and speaking of luggage, the kid’s backpack is sitting across from me on the other bed. I think about the loaded .38 revolver, about the kid aiming out the car window, firing pretend bullets at invisible targets. I wonder if he’s ever killed anything, and I wonder if he has the nerve. I ask myself, if I got up and opened the bag and took the gun, would he try to stop me. Would he dare? Then I tell him, “I’m just gonna nod off, okay?” The kid says, yeah, okay, fine, and he tears open the bag of beef jerky. The salty-sweet odor of teriyaki seasoning immediately fills the room, and my stomach rolls. “So, you know all about dinosaurs and stuff?” the kid asks around a mouthful of dehydrated meat. “Yeah,” I answer, and I close my eyes. On TV, there’s the sharp crack of a baseball bat making contact, and the crowd cheers. “Is that what you do, dig up dinosaur bones?” he asks. “Not exactly,” I say, then open my eyes again and stare at the cottage cheese ceiling. There’s a dark stain above the bed, and I figure that’s where the mildew smell’s coming from. “I study animals that lived at the same time as dinosaurs.” He wants to know what sorts of animals, and I sit up again. I reach for my cigarettes, open the fresh pack, light a Marlboro, and belatedly wonder about smoke detectors. I stare at the TV and explain about plesiosaurs and mosasaurs and extinct species of sea turtles, about marine reptiles and secondarily aquatic tetrapods, animals that have given up on land and gone back to the sea. I tell him about my work in the Niobrara Chalk of Kansas, the Pierre Shale of Wyoming, and the Mooreville Chalk of Alabama. “Were you telling the truth about getting fired over drugs?” he asks, and I say yeah, but I’m clean now. Well, mostly clean. He asks where it is I’m headed, and I tell him I’m headed nowhere in particular, that after a stint in rehab I just needed to get out on the road and clear my head, figure out my next move. “I thought I’d take a road trip, visit some places out West that I’ve never actually seen or haven’t seen since I was in college.” The sort of places that are of interest to geologists and paleontologists, the South Dakota Badlands, Dinosaur National Monument, the Florrisant Fossil Beds in Colorado and Como Bluff in Wyoming, a bunch of quarries and museums, and so on and so forth. I tap ash into the palm of my hand. No smoke alarms have gone off, so I guess I’m in the clear. The kid asks, “What’s there in Rapid City you want to see,” and I tell him about the museum at the School of Mines. “You’re gay?” he asks. “Yeah,” I reply, and he sort of grins and says how he could tell right off, how he wouldn’t have offered me the blowjob if he hadn’t been sure. He tells me he’ll be nineteen the week before Christmas. I didn’t ask. He volunteered as though it were the next most natural thing to say. “Lucas,” says the kid, “he’s a lot older than me, too. Maybe I just have a thing for older men.” And I reply, “Maybe so, but you should be careful about that. There are people who will take advantage of that predilection in a young man. Out in the big wide world, out on the road, there are men whose appetites get the better of the better angels of their nature.” He says I talk like a college professor, like someone who’s read a lot of books, and then he goes back to watching the ballgame. I return to staring at the water stain on the cottage cheese ceiling. I lie there thinking about wolves and Red Riding Hood, the road of needles and the road of pins, about foolhardy children straying from the paths set out before them, about Lincoln, Nebraska, and before that, the inky shadows beneath a highway overpass just outside Sioux City, Iowa. And then I drift off to sleep, and I dream of a sky above the prairie that isn’t any sort of sky at all, a sky that is, in fact, the waters of an inland sea, and I drive and I drive and I drive. Gigantic white worms have plowed the winding, switchback trails that I follow, and I anxiously check the rearview mirror, again and again, to be sure that I haven’t been followed. I roll along between cathedrals that once were the skeletons of leviathans, bare ribs for flying buttresses, an arching line of vertebrae to support the vaulted dome of Heaven. Monstrous reptiles and fish and sharks the size of whales swim and fly and sail the mesopelagic liquid sky laid out above my car, and their shadows move silent across the land, sirens leading me on. Behind the wheel, I recite a protective zoological mantra, Greek and Latin binomena for an infidel’s blasphemous benediction, an atheist’s string of prehistoric saints and petrified rosary beads—Tylosaurus, Archelon, Dolichorhynchops, Xiphactinus, Thalassomedon, Cretoxyrhina mantelli, Good Lord deliver us. I take a wrong turn and stop at a deserted gas station, but all the pumps are out of order. The flyblown windows of the gas station are filled with jackalopes and pyramids made of empty oil cans. A sign nailed to the door reads “We’re Open!” but all the doors have been locked against me. I peer inside, and there’s an antique Bell & Howell 8 mm. home projector throwing images on a sheetrock wall. Angry men on horseback riding the hills of a rough and wooded country, hunting a wolf, a ruthless murderer of lambs and babes in cribs and travelers caught unawares. The flanks of the horses are encrusted with barnacles. The wolf turns out to be something else altogether, not a proper wolf at all. And then, on the way back to my car, passing the useless, broken down pumps, I watch a solar eclipse that is really only the circumference of an enormous ammonite’s shell passing between me and the sun shining down on the ocean. Placenticeras, Hoploscaphites, Oxybeloceras, Sphenodiscus pleurisepta, Our Father who art forsaken, hossannah, amen, amen. I get back in the car, wishing that I could stop smelling that terrible, terrible stench, wishing it were only from having hit a dead skunk, wishing it were only the funk of road—though, in a sense, is it not? I drive, wandering out to where the deeps get deeper, and the sky grows darker, and the roof of the car begins to groan and buckle from the weight of all that water pushing down on me. And then the kid is shaking me awake, and he says that I was talking in my sleep. “Sounded like you were having one hell of a nightmare,” he says. I say it wasn’t as bad as all that, but sure, I have bad dreams. He’s opened the drapes, and I see that the sun is down. The kid sits down on his bed, which doesn’t look as if it’s been slept in. I glance at the clock on the table between the beds and see it’s almost midnight. The TV’s been switched off, and the only light is coming from the open bathroom door. I smell soap and shampoo and steam, and I ask the kid if he had a shower. He says yeah, he took a shower, and then, he says, he found my keys and went outside and looked in the trunk. His hair’s still wet I sit up and rub my eyes, and now I see that he’s holding the revolver from his backpack. Quel courage. I see that it’s aimed at me. “What I want to know,” he says, “I mean, what I most wanna know, is whether or not you’re afraid of dying, whether you’re afraid of going to Hell for what you’ve done?” And I reply, “Or maybe just for being a faggot? That would be transgression enough, right?” And I ask him if I can get one of the Cokes from the cooler, and if he minds if I light a cigarette. Isn’t that how it works? The condemned man is at least accorded a final cigarette? He tells me to sit still, and he goes to the Coleman icebox and takes out one of the cans of Coca-Cola and drops it on the bed beside me. He lights one of the Marlboros, and passes it to me, and I sit smoking and trying to wake up. But the dream still feels more real and less improbable than sitting in a motel room in Wall, South Dakota, staring at the muzzle of the kid’s dead brother’s gun. I take a long drag on the cigarette, and then I answer his question. “Yeah,” I say, “I’m scared of dying. I probably would have stopped a long time ago, if I weren’t afraid to just lie down and fucking die.” He asks, “You were gonna do for me what you done for them?” and he nods towards the door to Room 107 and towards the car outside and towards the broken things he found in the trunk. “I hadn’t yet decided,” I tell him, and that’s the truth, for whatever the truth might be worth. “Did you fuck them?” he wants to know. “Did you fuck them, and if you did, was it before or after they were dead?” I ask, “Are you going to ask me questions all night long? Is that how this is gonna go? You sitting there, holding that gun on me, satisfying your morbid curiosity.” And he tells me, “Yeah, Mister, maybe that’s how it’s gonna go. Or maybe I already called the cops. Or maybe I’ll take the gun and the car and be on my way. Maybe I’ll even leave you alive.” I laugh and smoke my Marlboro. “Well,” I say, “that’s an awful lot of choices. How are you ever going to decide which it’s going to be?” He says, “You don’t sound scared.” I shake my head or I shrug or something of the sort. “Kid, I’ve been afraid so long I don’t know anything else. I’ve been afraid so long I got tired, and I got sloppy, and I’m starting to think it was all on purpose. Maybe you’ve been sent by the gods to hand down my sentence and be my salvation, both at the selfsame time, doom and deliverance wielding a suicide’s revolver. “ The kid looks a little taken aback, either by so many words or by the sentiment I open the Coke and take a drink, then set the can down beside the clock on the table between the beds. “I’m not afraid of you,” he says, and he only almost sounds as if he means it “Fear isn’t anything to be ashamed of,” I tell the kid. “Fear isn’t cowardice. Fear isn’t weakness. Maybe you’ll figure that out one day, a little farther down the road.” And then I ask him if he really has a boyfriend in Rapid City or if Lucas is nothing more than a useful fiction, a convenient lie. “That ain’t really none of your business,” he replies, and I agree, but he’s not the only one with questions. “Why do you do it?” he asks, and I tell him I don’t know. “That’s a lie,” he says, and I suggest that if he’d called the cops, they’d be here by now. And he tells me that he doesn’t believe I was ever really a college professor, and I say fair enough, you believe what you want to believe. “But it’s getting late,” I say. “And you’re holding all the cards.” I imagine that I can hear the hooves of the horses from my nightmare, the horses bearing Wild West wolf slayers charged with a holy task of vengeance and retribution. “How do I know, if I leave you alive, if I leave you free, how do I know you won’t come after me? How do I know you won’t follow me?” I taste tinfoil and copper and a dozen poisons hiding in the cigarette smoke. Then I glance past him at the window, at the night waiting out there, at the headlights and taillights of cars and trucks racing by out on the interstate. “Kid, you don’t know shit, and however I were to answer that question, you still wouldn’t know shit. Whatever course you choose,” I say, “it’s a gamble. Just do me a favor and don’t take all goddamn night about it.” And he sits there watching me, and the clock strikes twelve midnight without making a sound. I think about the concrete Wall Drug dinosaur gazing out across the plains with its incandescent scarlet eyes, standing guard just as surely as any gargoyle, a sentinel watching for the evil that sometimes comes rolling along on steel belts, padding up to the off-ramp on four rubber paws, inevitable as rain and taxes and death. Then the kid asks me if next time I’ll let him tag along and let him watch, if maybe that’s one of the choices laid out before him. “If I don’t call the cops,” he says. “If I don’t pull the trigger. If we could come to some sort of understanding.” I have to admit, he catches me entirely off my guard. I don’t answer right away. I tell the kid with broken china-blue eyes and dirty blond hair how I have to think on it a little while, that it’s no simple proposition he making. And he says that’s fine by him, that he figures neither of us is in a hurry, that neither of us has anywhere else to be. Then he lights a cigarette for himself, and he waits for whatever I’m going to decide, and the indifferent, all-powerful, unknowing clock starts counting down another day.