Speaker 1: Dinosaurs by Tom Franklin. On the day he saw the rhinoceros,
Steadman woke in an hour before dawn in the living
room and in the dark, he stared at the fish
tank for so long as coffee grew cold. Something the
end of a dream. Maybe it nagged him and left
him uncertain and pensive. The house seemed too small, so
he loaded his equipment and he left early. Soon, the
knobby buckshot tires of his truck were humming comfortably along.
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,