Dinosaurs by Tom Franklin

The Interstate mobile was behind him, Montgomery far ahead, the gas station signs at every exit, colorful smudges in the fog. He drove a company pickup, a big silver Ford F two point fifty with four old wheel drive he rarely had to use. On the back glass, he'd attached green peace decal. He knew the gas guzzling truck and the sticker contradicted each other, but Steedman had been at odds

with himself lately, a bit distracted. He nearly missed his exit, for example, and had to jab his brakes and swerve, And soon he found himself on a quiet, unfamiliar two lane, with the eight o'clock sun hazy over the trees. Where had the miles gone. Lines of barbed wire and redtail hawks on fence posts, cattle licking dark salt blocks. Occasionally he'd pass a rusty harrow kudzu climbing its spikes, and think of his father, a retired geologist who lived refurbishing

antique tractors, now in a nursing home. He called Stedman more and more, but he remembered him less and less. Kilpatrick Claire Station was a flat, gray cinder block lump with a shed against the back and a faded green sign. Beside two antique gas pumps stood the rhinoceros, giant head lowered right, foot lifted as if it were pawing the ground.

Its purpose, Stedman guest, was to attract customers. But from the looks of this dump, the rhino might soon be out of a job, like you, pal Stedman thought, watching old Kilpatrick suck on his unfiltered camel and glower through the drug store reading glasses at the paperwork Stedman had spread across the office desk. Above them, also glowering was a dusty crow nailed to a piece of driftwood. We'll get to it, the old man said, I ain't got

all day. Even his breath smelled like gasoline. Your underground tanks, Stedman began, Where you store your fuel? I know what they are. Steadman unfolded a pamphlet that explained corrosion in simple turns. Did you know they've probably been leaking for years? Kilpatrick stubbed out a cigarette and a clamshell ashtray. He lit another and smoked while Steedman gave his usual pitch.

How the storage tanks needed a leak detection system, or, according to federal regulations, there'd be no choice but to shut down the station. At best, if the tanks were secure, leaked detection wells could be installed for around a grand net. Worst, Kilpatrick's tanks would have to be excavated and replaced with the new EPA approved above ground units, a cost of several thousand dollars. When Steedman finished, there was a long silence, which he finally broke with his usual remark about doing

good for the environment. The environment. Kilpatrick snatched off his class take you a good look out the window yonder at the environment. Steadman gathered his papers politely and closed his briefcase. Outside the hot white sky and the two lane black top, the distant pine trees, no house or building in sight, just the rhinoceros baking in the sun. When Studman returned two days later, he always gave customers time to check his background. Kilpatrick was smoking and leaning

against the rhinoceros with his arms folded. He wore baggy coveralls black with oil. What he would do first, Steadman explained, unloading his hand auger, was dig holes around the underground tanks for soil samples. I'll go down a few feet, he said, and that's where we'll find your contamination. The Augur, stainless steel extendable to twelve feet, was warm from the sunlight. Kilpatrick squinted at the corks screw blades. You planned to

dig with that thing by hand? Steadman shouldered the auger. You want to show me where your tanks are buried? Kilpatrick nodded toward the right side yard of the station and then limped over the concrete and went into the glass office and eased himself into a folding chair. Steedman watched him open the coke machine and fanned the cool air into his collar, and then draw a budweiser from the rack and prow off the lid with a bottle

opener from his coveralls pocket. Round the building was a jungle of grass, bitter weed, and briars, out of which stuck two four inch dimeter pipes with padlock caps. The porch used for measuring and filling the underground tanks. Steedman leaned the auger against the wall, walked over and gave each pipe a solid kick. He knelt and he sniffed him, and then took hold of the left one and started

working it back and forth. After a minute he had the pipe wiggling, and soon it came out of the dirt in his hands, a foot long length, not connected to anything. He tossed it in the air and caught it. Kilpatrick wasn't the first station owner to pull something like this. They do anything to knock him off. The scent and their bullshit usually helps subdue his guilt at closing them down.

Steedman dropped the pipe and collected the auger and walked behind the building, past the rusty trailer in the rickety shed. The dirt back here was stained with oil. Kilpatrick could be fined if Steedman chose to report him. Greasy shapes lay scattered about transmission housings caked with grime, torque converters, leaky oil filters, and stacks of cracked car batteries. There was an old bathtob full of greenish water, and an anvil with a dog skull on it on the other

side of the station. Steedman kicked away way a milk crake to reveal two rusty ports, the real ones locked with combination locks. He chose a spot a few feet east and took hold of the auger's T shaped handle, and he began twisting. The ground was hard and rocky, but Stedman's arms were hard, his skin browned from digging hundreds of holes through the miles of gravel in the hot sun hell. With the gas powered jackhammer in his toolbox, not even concrete would stop him. His smart ass coworkers

called him the lust leaky underground storage tanks Man. Steadman couldn't imagine a less suited acronym. He found nothing lusty about gasoline contaminating the groundwater, and he hadn't lusted for anybody or anything in a long long time. He'd been given this nomadic grunt work as punishment for his behavior on his last project at the Civil Engineering firm, which specialized in hazardous waist clean up. He'd been he geologist

in the remediation of a large chemical plant. On his first day, he learned that for years the plant had been dumping blood red chemical byproducts into the Alabama River. Now this was no surprise, but what pissed him off was that each morning, two clueless black workers without safety gear had been sent out in a motor boat to net the dead fish floating on the surface. Steedman, before several laborers restrained him, had nearly shoved the plant engineer

into the river. He was three feet into his fourth hole, the dry dirt growing softer farther down, when the cellular phone in his truck chirp, Happy birthday to me. His father's dry voice sang off key. After two choruses, Steedman interrupted him, It's not your birthday yet. Hell, I know that, boy, It's tomorrow. Tried December, Steedman said, five more months. Well, knock off the bull crap and give me a hint squirt. Steedman sat on the tailgate, remembering that two days ago

had been his mother's birthday. She'd been dead six years, and this wasn't the first year he'd forgot Dad. He said, are you okay? Do the nurses know you're on the phone? A to hell with them? It's not their fiftieth, it's not yours either. Steeddman thought his father was seventy eight. This was the first year in the home. Bigger than a shoebox. I hope his father said, what is my present? That goddamn dog you gave me last year must have

run off. The dog was a black lab, a gift from Steedman's mother had died of old age a decade ago. Steedman moved the phone to his other ear. He recalled that on trips into the country, his father had always picked up hitchhikers, but made them right in the back of the truck with the dog. Dad. Steedman said, now listen, I've got one for you. Crows easy a murder. This

was a childhood road game. His father used to name an animal, and Stedman was supposed to give its group's title an army of frogs, a parliament of owls, like that turtles. Steedman said, Let's see, his father would do this all day, like a dog who never tired of fetching a bell. How about Stedman looked over by the gas pumps rhinoceroses a pause, and Steedman pictured his father, who still wore the safety glasses required by his last job.

He'd be standing at the payphone in his blue jump suit, right hand tapping his ample belly, probably wearing his steel toe work shoes too. A pride, he said, pride of rhinos. Behind Stedman. The door slammed, and kill Patrick came limping around the building, carrying his folding chair in a six pack. He suddenly looked smaller. Stedman stood up, Dad, I'm gonna

call you later. Kill Patrick opened the chair and sat in a narrow strip of shade the building offered and watched and drank as Steedman resumed digging, twisting the augur deeper into the ground. He thought he could smell gas already, regular divining ride. Ain't you, kill Patrick said, crossing his legs. He didn't have socks, which bothered Steedman, like the smelly bastard was on vacation. I do declare, he said, You plumb determined to shut me down, ain't you? Stedman wiped

the sweat from his eyes. You know what, if you want the truth, I'd rather not the hell, kilk Patrick said, you so goddamn eager to rearin a fellow's living. You'll find some gas in the ground. If you have to pump it in their young damn self, that'll be my last sale, he said to the sky. Three gallons for this here, smart alect to pour in the dirt. You try it on over here, Steedman said, Stick your snout

in this hole and see what you smell. Kil Patrick stubbed out his half smoked cigarette and put it behind his ear. Stedman stepped aside and rubbed his biceps. As the old man came over and squatted. He steadied himself on the auger handle, which stood upright like a detonator. He made a loud sniffing noise. What do you smell there, Steedman asked, not a thing? How about that? Steedman stooped beside Killpatrick. I declare, if I don't smell gas, well shit,

Kilpatrick said, and he belched. You smell what you want to smell. If you were lonely enough, you'd smell a girl down in that hole. I don't guess you'd strike your lighter and hold it there, Steedman said, taking the old man's to help him up. Kilpatrick yanked his arm away. Got me a boy, he said, played ball for Auburn. If he was here today, he'd knock your dick in the dirt and we'd let that goddamn handle there be your grave marker, he stalked off, stopping to collect his

chair and his beer. The whole Stedman had been digging was four inches across in three feet deep. The goods, that's what his father had called, the petroleum deposits that he'd found. Steedman knelt and took a handful of soil and let it fall through his fingers. He longed to touch something undeveloped and uncontaminated. His father used to come

home excited about a pocket of crude they'd hit. He would kiss Mom on the lips, and then Scooper and Steedman into his lap and tell them how the dinosaurs had died mysteriously, how after millions of years fermenting in the earth, they had become oil. As he fell asleep those night, Stedman imagined himself a famous archaeologist in a field jacket and a miner's light on his pith helmet

and a brush in his hand. Whisking away old dust to uncover the prehistoric bones of an unknown species, a rib cage the size of a ship's skull, a skull big enough to sleep in. He got to his feet, went to the truck after soil sample jars. Soon he had them filled and neatly labeled. He brushed himself off, and then got in the truck and pulled to the pumps to buy a gas. If it hadn't all leaked out, the phone rang. It was his father again, with the

right answer. A crash, God, damn it, a crash of rhinos. Steedman said he'd called him back later. The unleaded pump was slower than kilpatrick four cents, six cents, eight cents. Steedman thought he'd been staring at the rhinoceros all day. He's seen such thing as a kid on tractory excursions, when he and his father stopped for gas each station as they drove deeper and deeper into the country, stranger than the one before. In those days, owners often tried

to attract customers with gimmicks. A two headed pig preserved in a vat of alcohol, an albine old rattlesnake that swallowed live possums, free choke taw airheads. Kilpatrick's rhino, though, seemed more impressive, stretching past the regular gas pump on one end and the unleted on the other. It was almost as long as Steadman's truck, and nearly its breadth with the pump running. He approached the rhino and touched its flank, as gray and dry and rough as the

side of a mountain. He brought his fingers to his nose. They smelled musty and leathery, a little oily, like an old saddle. Clumps of stiff hair stuck out of the rhinoceros leg joints and hung from its slung belly. Its eyes were marble and sad and bovine, and Stedman imagined it chewing grass in an African field. Egrets and wrens across its broad shoulders and back. The lion or water buffalo wandered too close, the rhino would toss its great tank of a head, horns slicing through the air like

a scimitar. He slid his fingers down the slope of its neck and along its stiff ears and the bony eye ridges and the snout. The smaller lump like horn and the larger, more formidable, curved horn. Something rose in Stedman's chest and his fingertips tingled. It felt like he was touching his own past. My boy done that, Kilpatrick said. He stood in the office door with his hands in

his pockets. Got him a job in a carnival after he tore up his knee playing ball at rhino died in him and some of his friends clowns and midgets and shit. They tied it on a trailer and stole it before anybody could burn it, or whatever the hell you do with a dead rhino. Kil Patrick chuckled that crazy boy skinned it and mounted it. He weren't too smart, but he was a swift running back and held on wheels and taxidermy. Stedman pressed his shoulder against the rhinoceros's flank.

He could barely move it. It had small, delicate legs in its feet except for the one lifted, were nailed to wooden planks with inlets for a fork lift. What is the way? Steedman asked, she the old man said, joining him three point fifty. I reckon. My boy was a strong one. He could lift half of anything. Stedman whistled, a wolf spider had laced a web between the rhino's horns. He flicked the spotter off and pulled away the web. Would you sell her, he asked, Kilpatrick snorted, reckon, I'm fixing.

I have to sell everything. He wiped his lips with a black rag. Well, these folks pay a heap for that big horn by itself. Then poachers overseas said, if you grind it up with powder, it's like giving a woman a bucket of damn oysters. What if Steedman said, I could let you keep your station, Kilpatrick regarded him, I could rig something. Steedman said, you got to have a leak detection. That's all there is to it. If

you don't, we'll both get caught. He studied the ground at his feet, dirt he knew deep down was contaminated. You couldn't guess what might happen below the top soil when you mix things up. He'd work one project where several tons of buried in secticide ways had been accidentally discovered by a baiko. The sludge had eaten through the metal barrels it had been stored in and mixed with each other, and the minerals and the and they formed

a strange new chemical combination. The unlucky backo driver had died instantly from the murky green cloud that belched out of the ground. Stedman walked into the road, hazy with heat as far as he could see, and for a moment he thought a truck was coming, an eighteen wheeler, but it was only a mirage. Shading his eyes dizzy with heat, he barely heard the gas pump click off. I guess you were right the first time, he told Killpatrick.

On the clean side of the station, where the tanks weren't buried, Stedman placed the fake pipe he'd pulled out of the ground. He used a sledge hammer to drive it deep, and then tamped the dirt tight with the handle. He resumed with the augur and began digging the first of four holes around the fake ports and then the widening strip of shade. Kill Patrick watched and drank beer and smoked, and crossed and uncrossed his legs. His shirt off, Steedman augured into the night. At about six feet down

groundwater started seeping into the holes. He saw it with his flashlight, clear uncontaminated the goods. He kept digging. Kill Patrick rose once and leaped toward him and handed him a beer. The old man turned and walked several feet away and took a leak while Stedman drank. Then he came back for the empty bottle and returned to his chair. In the distance, a coode began to howl, and kill Patrick yelled shut up, and the howling stopped. Stedman finished

digging just after nine thirty in the bright moonlight. A car had passed a few minutes earlier, and only now did he comprehend it. It had slowed, and a black face peered out the open passenger window, and a black hand had waved. Had Stedman waved back at his truck, He slid four eight foot long PVC pipes from the side rack. Kilpatrick, who'd been napping, woke and said, what are you up to now? These are your monitoring wells.

Stedman grunted, twisting the pipe into the first hole. The way they work is when I stick them in the ground, they fill up with water, and if the water is contaminated, like it probably is on the other side, it have an oly sheen on the top. But over here, you shine your flashlight in there, you'll just see clean water. And if the EPA comes to check on you, these ones will be clear. Stedman forced the last pipe in the ground until all but eight inches showed there, he said,

strewing on the cap. Now tomorrow I'll come pour seamen around here so nobody will be inclined to check your authenticity. Kilpatrick's camel glowed. A strange sound came from the darkness. It's a fart maybe, or a grunt of approval. One more thing, Stedman said, disassembling the auger. Tomorrow that rhino comes with me clean her up tonight. Kill Patrick said, you can borrow my trailer. After a moment, the two

men shook hands. The next morning at the office, Steedman fed ex the jars of soil from a jar to the lab in Savannah. The results would be back in a week. He popped his head into his secretary's office and told her that kill Patrick Sinclair's station had been a bust, that the old man already had a leak detection. Then he told her it was his father's birthday and he was taking the day off. Ignoring her raised eyebrows, Steadman walked down the hall and went outside to his

truck and with eight bags of quick dry cement. He drove to kill Patrick's. The old man sat smoking in his office beside an open coke machine. The unleaded gas pump still showed the eighteen dollars Stedman had bought yesterday. Kill Patrick jerked his thumb toward the back of the station. The rhinoceros stood on the trailer, held tight by chains, and come along. Kill Patrick walked out from under the shed, hands in his pockets. He directed Stedman in backing the

truck to the trailer. The rhino's skin was clean, its eyes polished and smelled of lice on. It looked ready to stalk those feet and break loose from the puny chains, and come along and charge. Well, you say, kill Patrick said. Steedman paused the bag of seaman on each shoulder. It's cooler today, the old man squinted at the sky. Yeah, Mike, rain, Mike, said Steedman. Steedman poured seamen around the wells, adding water from a leaky garden hose, while Kilpatrick hitched the trailer.

Cigarette dangle from his lips now and again. He coughed. When he'd finished, Steadman walked to the trailer. Kil Patrick was wiring the trailer lights. How come your son gave you that rhino, Stedman asked. Kil Patrick didn't look up. I don't remember, he said. Together they threw a tarp across the rhinoceros, and then stepped back to inspect the job.

It seemed illegal and transporting something so large and so threatening, But that worry was soon shrieking in Steedman's mirror as the truck kicked up dust enough to blot out kill Patrick from sight. Hell of a lot bigger than a shoe box, Steedman thought, picturing the rhino beside the azaleahs, surrounded by old people at the nursing home, his father among them, touching and stroking the dangerous beast with lust

in their fingertips. A birthday gift, ancient, faithful and unforgettable birds to collect on the rhino's back, and Stedman knew his father would impress everyone by identifying the birds. As he drove away from Kilpatrick's Steedman pretended the rhino chased him, and, like a child running at night, he went faster and faster, but the rhinoceros stayed close behind, its eyes tiny and clear, and its nose low, and its horn inches away from Stedman's gas tank,