Dinosaur Summer (2 page)

"Yeah," Peter said. "So what do they want?"

"They want me--us--to work with Lotto Gluck and Vince Shellabarger."

Peter knew those names. He tried to remember . . .

"Stick in your mind, don't they?" Anthony asked, his grin bigger than ever. "They used to be famous. Every boy in America knew who they were--hell, maybe the whole world."

Peter wrinkled his brow. He climbed off the bed, and the flashlight slipped from his fingers. As he bent to pick it up, he said, "Circus Lothar!"

"You got it. The last dinosaur circus. They're going to shut 'er down in a few days. Have a final performance. Grosvenor wants pictures and an article. I asked if you could come with me, as an assistant. They said sure, gives the angle some family polish. It's the big time, Peter."

"Jeez," Peter said, at a loss for any other word. His chest felt hollow and his mouth dry. Anthony pulled a chair out from the tiny desk and sat on it, and Peter sat on the edge of the bed, careful not to upset the oilcloth and all the pieces of the Leica spread there.

"Well, are you coming?" Anthony asked.

Peter shot him a quick frown. "When?"

"That means yes?"

"When?"

"First, we get packed. Then we take a train to Boston."

"And then?"

"We see the circus's last performance." "That will take a couple of months?"

Anthony looked away with an odd smile. He was keeping something to himself. "If it all works out, we'll have lots more work. And if it doesn't--well, at least we're likely to get a trip to Florida. That's where Gluck keeps the circus's headquarters.

"One more thing," Anthony said, lightly squeezing Peter's upper arm. "You're going to write it down. They might take your story and print it."

Peter opened and closed his mouth like a fish. "InNational Geographic? "

"Sure, why not?"

Peter swallowed a lump.

"Enough of a prodigy for you?" Anthony asked.

It meant work for his father, who had had no work for six months. It meant regular meals and a place to go this summer-- maybe Florida--rather than staying in the apartment day after day, watching his father try to stay away from the bottle, waiting for a letter from his mother and an invitation to come visit her and Grandma.

It meant a lot.

Peter got off the bed and hugged his father, feeling so many things, all at once, that tears came to his eyes.

"That's fine," Anthony said, letting the hug last as long as it should, between two strong men, father and son. He put his hand on Peter's chest and pushed him gently back, then thumped him lightly. "I told you it would all work out. Your mother just didn't believe in me."

"Can I call her and tell her?"

Anthony frowned. "She'll want money right away," he said.

Peter felt the familiar pang. "I won't mention the money. I'll just say you've got work."

"We'vegot work," Anthony corrected. "The perfect summer job. And it gets us out of town."

"There's something more," Peter said.

Anthony fiddled with the camera parts, eyes down.

"What is it?"

Anthony smiled slyly and said, "I've learned to keep quiet about things that might never happen." His brow furrowed. "You can trust me and go along without asking too many questions, or you can live the kind of life your mother wants you to live: safe and snug and dull as dishwater."

Peter examined his father's eyes. He was painfully serious.

"Are we a team?" Anthony asked.

Peter felt a small shiver creep up his back. He resented this kind of emotional blackmail, but then again, his curiosity had been piqued. Peter had never thought of himself as terribly brave, but he was curious to a fault.

He also wanted to please his father; please this difficult, lean man, who had lived through so much and yet sometimes seemed more of a child than his son. It hurt to feel need for Anthony's approval; there had been times when relying on Anthony was like leaning on the wind. But there it was.

"A team," Peter said.

"My lad," Anthony said solemnly, and they shook hands.

Chapter Two

When his head was clear, free of emotional clouds, as it was now, standing on the platform waiting for the train to Boston, a traveling and uprooted life with his father was better than a rooted life with a mother who, it seemed, had no place for him. "When I get a job and Grandma is feeling better," she had written a year ago, "you can come and live with us. But right now the apartment is just too small, and we don't have much money, Peter."

Peter rubbed his nose. Whenever he thought about these things, his nose itched. Anthony put his hand on Peter's shoulder. "Five minutes," he said, "and you'll be inside a dining car slugging back cocoa and doing real damage to a grilled cheese sandwich."

Penn Station was not very crowded at one o'clock in the afternoon. Outside, the city was hot and humid, but below ground, surrounded by dirt and concrete, the air was still cool. People waited on concrete platforms for the big, sleek stainless steel train cars to roll in behind their pounding diesel engines, dragging gusts of hot air strong enough to blow your hat off, if you were wearing one. Most of the men and all of the women wore hats. The men wore seersucker suits and panamas, homburgs, and fedoras. The women wore calf-length summer skirts and jackets and felt pillboxes, roundbrims, and toques. Peter's mother had sold hats in Chicago before she met Anthony. Some of the women's hats were decorated with satin ribbon, sweeps of veil, even fake fruit; a few sported long pheasant plumes that made them look like marmosets.

Anthony wore an old rumpled corduroy jacket and wool slacks, too warm for the weather but that was all he had, and no hat.

They had packed up their belongings and moved out of the apartment. Their address, for the next three months, would be a post office box. They were staking everything, it seemed to Peter, on the generosity ofNational Geographic.

He was still puzzling over what he had done the night they had gone out for pizza. They had walked to Nunzio's, a loud and cheerful place with red checked tablecloths. His father had drank a bottle of Chianti, to celebrate, he said, and they had shared a very large pie, almost as big as their table, covered with tomato sauce and cheese. Peter had eaten more than his fill and they had strolled home through the quiet side streets. Anthony was slightly drunk and was telling Peter about his work on oil rigs in 1939. He had hated every minute of it, he said, but still, there was the excitement and the camaraderie of the men all working together, and there had been the regular paycheck.

"I was in a straitjacket," Anthony had said, putting his arm around Peter's shoulders. "Every hour was misery. Best damned thing that ever happened to me. But the war came . . . That was miserable, too. Also the best damned thing that ever happened to me." Peter had helped his father up the stairs and into bed, and then had sat on the threadbare couch in the front room for a while, his head buzzing. About one in the morning, he had clapped his hands down hard on his knees and walked into the kitchen, grinding his molars so loudly he wondered if Anthony could hear. He had looked under the kitchen sink, pulled out a box of empty whiskey bottles, and carried them down the stairs. Then he had hefted the box to his shoulder and walked half a block to the entrance of an alley. And in the alley, surrounded by wooden crates and garbage cans, he had pulled the bottles from the box, one at a time, and flung them against a brick wall. There had been fifteen of them, and on the fourteenth bottle, an old woman had leaned out of a third story window and shouted at him, "All right, all right! You've made your point! Now get on home and let us sleep!"

He had stared up at the lighted window, the last bottle in his hand. Then he had put the bottle gently and silently down on the concrete, wiped his hands on his pant legs, and returned to the apartment.

***

The train arrived, little different from any of the other steel monsters that had hauled Peter and his father all over the Mid-west and the East and the South in search of work. They climbed aboard and found their seats and Anthony slung their luggage into the overhead and strapped it in. Peter sat beside the long high window and examined the station's brick wall through smudges of fingerprints and hair oil.

As the train pulled out of the station and daylight flooded the car, Anthony asked, "Did you say good-bye to Millie Caldwell?" Millie Caldwell was a girl in his class. She and Peter had gone to the movies a couple of times and Peter thought she was more than a little nice to talk to.

Peter nodded. Millie was in love with a varsity football player, a college boy; she liked rugged, adventurous men. She had told him, on their last movie outing, "I really go for men who like to get in trouble." Millie Caldwell's eyes had gleamed at the thought. "I prefer the growl of a tiger to the lick of a lapdog. You're just too tame for me, Peter." Millie Caldwell wanted someone like Anthony, Peter realized . . . not for the first time.

"Did you tell her what you're doing?"

Peter shook his head. "It's a secret, isn't it?"

"Just checking," Anthony said, and for a moment, Peter's stomach soured.

"I don't think I'll ever see her again," he said. "We'll come back and live someplace else, I mean."

"A nicer place, maybe," Anthony said.

"Maybe," Peter said.

"Let's go eat," Anthony said, and they walked toward the rear of the train, where the dining car was. The food was pretty good and Anthony bought him all he could eat. After sipping steaming cocoa from a thick, heavy cup, he ate three grilled cheese sandwiches with fried tomatoes on the side and drank two glasses of cold, rich milk. Anthony ate a BLT and drank a glass of beer, then two cups of coffee. He took out his Leica and aimed through the window, snapping a few pictures of hilly suburban neighborhoods where all the returned vets lived in long lines of cookie-cutter brown and gray and white houses. Finally they reached the countryside, gray under June's overcast skies. Thick green elm trees raced past the windows. "We'll get into Boston late this evening," Anthony said. "We'll stay in a big, fancy hotel, and then tomorrow, we'll shop for traveling gear and go see the circus and meet Gluck and Shellabarger."

Peter wondered why they would need traveling gear. He swallowed his last gulp of milk, wiped his mouth on the napkin, and said, "Dad, what if they decide they don't want the article? What will happen to us?"

Anthony gave him a stern look.

"Mom would say it was practical to worry about such things," Peter said primly.

"Your mother never lived a peaceful day in her life," Anthony said. His face reddened. "She worries all the time."

Peter stared back at him, biting his lip.

"Sorry," Anthony said.

"What will we do if it doesn't work out?"

"I'll get a job in a camera store in Boston," Anthony said. "You can help me sell cheap Japanese cameras to folks who don't know any better. All right?"

Things were getting off to a mixed start. Peter realized this was his fault--in part, at least. He tried to think of something to say that would put things right again. "It was right not to tell Mom. She would have worried. She would think the circus was a dangerous place to work."

Anthony said, "Mm hmm." He was studying a woman sitting two tables behind Peter, on the other side of the train.

"Dad . . ."

"Mm hmm?"

"Do you think I worry too much--like Mom?"

Anthony curled his lip casually and squinted out the window. "Sometimes it's best to look an adventure right in the eye and not back down, not even blink. Never let life see you're afraid."

That sounded like someone in a book talking. Much of his father's life could have come straight out of a book. A veteran of the campaigns in Italy, wounded twice, assigned to help motion picture director John Huston make documentaries of the fighting, Anthony Belzoni had survived the war with a scarred arm and chest, two Purple Hearts, a broken marriage, and his beloved Leica, "Not made in Canada. Made in Germany."

Peter could hardly imagine what his father had been through and survived.

"I'm with you, Dad," Peter said. The words sounded forced and a little awkward, but they seemed to do the trick.

"I never doubted that, Peter," Anthony said with a big smile. "How about starting that journal?"

Peter loved words. He had read his mother's oldMerriam Webster's Dictionary almost from cover to cover. It was one of the few things he had of hers. She never used it and so had given it to him when she left Chicago to go to Grandmother's and live. But when it came to stringing one word after another . . . With a sigh, he took out his new black notebook and a fountain pen. He spent more time than was strictly necessary filling the pen from a bottle of Quink. Then he tapped his chin and hummed until Anthony gave him a stern look, and finally applied nib to paper.

Today we left New York for Boston. My father saw the Lothar Gluck Dinosaur Circus before the war, but I've never seen it. I am really very excited, but sometimes I think too much and don't know how to feel.

My father thinks on his feet, and he's smarter than almost anyone, but sometimes he leaps before he looks. I'll have to watch out for both of us.

Writing this took Peter half an hour.

***

They arrived in Boston after seven o'clock at night and took a taxi to the hotel. A smiling, wizened porter carried their bags up to the room. After giving the old man a whole dollar for a tip, Anthony fell onto the bed and began snoring. Anthony could fall asleep instantly wherever he was; he had learned that trick in the Army. Peter had to settle down and get used to his surroundings first.

The hotel room was a marvel. Peter had never slept in such a fancy bed. Even with his father sprawled across half, there was more than enough room. The furniture was dark maple. Original works of art hung on all the walls--mostly paintings of flowers, but pretty. The bathroom was a radiance of white marble, with a huge clawfoot tub and glittering brass faucets and shower head.

Peter tried the shower. The stinging spray of steaming hot water felt wonderful. He rubbed himself vigorously with a soft white towel that seemed as big as a bedsheet. He had neglected to place the cloth curtain inside the tub, however, and got water all over the floor. He wiped it up with the big towel and then settled into bed beside his father to read the book they had bought at the Strand the day before.