The Midnight Country

Chapter 8

What happened next is difficult to describe, especially now, some forty years later. Best as I can describe it is that I was moving instantly: fleeing from what I saw by diving into the cold, brisk water and paddling—desperately—for the opposite shore; only in my mind alone, so that my body remained frozen—its beating heart having stopped pumping, its leaden limbs refusing to follow commands—its eyes denying the very evidence of what lay before them.

For what lay before them, there in the gurgling, eddying, golden water, was, plain and simple, a dinosaur—though not, it must be said, one such as Gwangi or the Beast of Hollow Mountain or anything else I’d seen at the drive-in or on TV. No, this was something as real and smelly (it smelled like cow; a whole truckload of cows, in the sweltering heat, after eating Grandma’s homemade chili con queso) and fly-pestered—flies! In November!—as any true-life beast; its white, leathery skin as cracked and yet smooth as the old single-lane road which ran hidden and forgotten along the Mohawk River, its body covered in a film of peach fuzz—tiny feathers, perhaps, or even quills—its eyes twitchy and alert, curious, like an eagle’s, but also pink, soft, vulnerable, like a rabbit’s. And then I was moving—truly moving, not just imagining it—dashing into the frigid water, shaking off its icy shock, kicking as far away from the thing as I could—not stopping until I was fully one quarter across the river, where I seized upon a deaden tree stump and held on tight—terrified of the white dinosaur, but also of the undertow (which Mom had repeatedly warned me about), toe-scissoring crawdads, blood-sucking leeches, flesh-eating piranhas, corpses stuck in the branches and roots—maybe even the gill man. And then I waited, shivering. Waited for the thing which looked like a small tyrannosaur—though still big as a rhinoceros—to go away. Waited for it to slip back through whatever hole in time it had emerged from and to take the dragonflies with it.

But it didn’t go away, at least not right away ... and not in what felt like an hour. Rather, it paced back and forth along the river almost as though it were lost; sniffing at the ground across which Dillon had fled; craning its powerfully-muscled neck to look over its shoulder (if it had had one), shaking off the flies. Until at last it simply collapsed onto its haunches and laid down on its belly, looking around almost nonchalantly, blinking its soft, pink, rabbit’s eyes.

That was the moment, I think. The moment I realized that it wasn’t perhaps the danger I’d assumed, and that I had to get out of the river— before I caught pneumonia or even hypothermia. It was also the moment I realized the fish was still in the bucket—just as still and dead as could be—which was laying on its side at the edge of the water.

Caution was the word as I swam closer to shore and stood up in the shallows, quaking from the cold, my teeth clattering, then slowly approached the bucket—which action caused the dinosaur to struggle to its feet and strike a threatening pose, and to growl from deep within its throat, like a wolf.

“Easy, easy,” I remember saying, holding out a trembling hand, even while stooping—slowly—to pick up the fish; at which the saurian licked its cracked lips—which weren’t really lips at all—and seemed to swallow, then took a step closer, its great, talon-like foot sinking in the silt.

“Easy does it,” I said, and held the fish out by its tail.

And then it lunged slightly and, panicking, I tossed the trout and retreated, but not before I saw it snatch the fish from the air smartly—its jaws snapping shut like a trap and its curved teeth clacking—before rearing its head back like a seagull and swallowing the trout down completely.

After which it only looked at me and I looked back, and we might have stayed that way for, well, who knows how long, if music hadn’t sounded from somewhere in the trees—yes, music, barely perceptible at first but coming closer, growing louder. Coming up the old road.

Why in the world would anybody put chains on me, yeah? I’ve paid my dues to make it ...

At first it only c****d its head, once to each side, blinking, processing.

Everybody wants me to be what they want me to be ... I’m not happy when I try to fake it—no, ooh.

I heard a slight rumble and looked to see the GTO coming up the road.

That’s why I’m easy ...

And then it just fled—pow, like that, dashing across the silt and stones toward the trees, moving like a leopard—or even a cheetah—unbelievably graceful, until it barked once and simply vanished, not into the trees, not behind anything, but just, well, into thin air. Into nothing. Into the twilight, now that the sun had largely gone down. After which I could only look on in disbelief as the GTO grumbled to a stop and Shad approached through the bramble, hollering but sounding relieved, angry and yet not really.

“There you are! I’ve been looking all over for you!”

But I could only stare after the dinosaur, after ‘Ghost,’ which I’d decided to name him on the spot. For I knew, even then, that he wasn’t really gone. That he’d stepped sideways through time and space, perhaps, like a 747 en route to Honolulu from LAX, but that he couldn’t have traveled far; and that, indeed, I could still smell him—just as I could still smell my mother’s Aqua-net hairspray; at least on those days when both Shad and Grandma were gone, and the house—which my mom used to say reminded her of a mausoleum—lay quiet as a tomb.

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