Like driving through those big open gates after Dave.
“Your mechanical friend is inside, looking for family,” my father says. “I should have warned him that family is always a disappointment.”
“That’s funny, coming from you,” I say.
I pat Marty reassuringly on the shoulder. “Wait in the car. I’ll go get Dave,” I tell him.
“Uh-uh-uh, no you don’t,” my father says, and waggles a finger at us. “Private property.”
“I’ve got permission from the owner,” I lie.
“Really? When did I give you that?” my father asks.
“You have to be shitting me,” I say. “You went and bought an entire fucking dinosaur park just so you could lure us here? Why? What the hell do you want?”
“You know what I want,” he says, and it’s true that I do, but now it’s my turn to shrug like I don’t care. He frowns. “I’ll make this easy, no more games. I know about your little secret safety deposit box in Fairham. Give me the key.”
“How the hell do you know about that?” I explode. “You cheating, scheming, murdering son of a bitch—”
“Shut up!” he commands. Oh, he looks so fucking proud of himself, too. “And you know perfectly well I didn’t kill your mother.”
“You didn’t save her, though. You could have. You knew there was a hit out on her.”
“So? Life isn’t fair, Cassie,” he says. “Get over it. I want what’s mine. I want the key.”
“Couldn’t find it when you had Marty’s house tossed, huh?” I ask. “How many times now? Three? Four?”
“Four,” he says, “though how you could tell with that mess I can’t begin to guess. Seriously, how can you live like that? You could have so much more, Cassie, if you just used what you’ve got and started thinking like a winner.”
“So that’s how Dave found out about this park. You left a brochure around for him to find? Or did you just arrange this visit directly?”
“Ask him yourself,” my father says. “The key?”
He holds out his hand.
“It’s hidden back at the house,” I say. “Guess your guys just suck at looking.”
He shakes his head. “It’s not at the house,” he says. “If you knew we’d been inside, there’s no way you’d leave anything valuable there. I know you have it on you, so hand it over and I’ll let you collect your dinosaur head and go on your way.”
“No deal,” I say. “You want me to think like a winner, well here it is: the key is worth a lot more than that, certainly way more than one dumb robot dinosaur head that leaks oil on the carpet and sold me out to you.”
“And what do you want in return? Don’t expect to get much.”
“Never got anything except pain from you anyway,” Marty interjects. He’s still with us, not drifting, and for once I wish he was because the look of grief on his face is like a gut punch.
“I want you to stay out of Marty’s house,” I say. “And I want two hours to go do some parts shopping in the park, after I find Dave.”
“One hour, including finding your dino head,” my father says. “Then you hand me the key before you leave the park. Take the offer: I don’t want to hurt you, but I’ll do whatever I have to. Think of your uncle. Or what’s left of him.”
“I’ll hand you the key at the open gates,” I say.
“Deal.”
“Deal, then,” I answer. “Marty, grab the toolbox out of the trunk and come with me. You coming, Ted?”
“Hell, no,” he says. “I’ll wait here.”
I lock the car and set the three separate alarm systems I’ve got on it, and we head into the park to find Dave. It’s full-on twilight now, and the park’s working lights few and far between, but I have flashlights in the toolbox—a big rolling thing with a handle, one of my better investments—and hand Marty one. “You okay?” I ask him.
“I’m okay,” he says, and flips the light on. “Sometimes, though, it feels like I’m here and then I’m there and I’m not sure where or when, or what’s happened already or not happened or I dreamed it, you know? I thought I gave Ted a black eye.”
“You did, and it was a beaut. But that was three years ago,” I say. “Might need to re-up it on our way out of here.”
“I can do that,” he says.
We walk forward into the park, look at the fading signs. “Sauropods that way,” I say and point.
Marty starts to walk, then meanders to a stop and looks back at me. “How’d you get so big, Cassie?” he asks. “Where’s Jennie? Did she save the world?”
“Mom’s gone,” I tell him, and I’m glad it’s dark because I don’t want to see his face and I don’t want him to see mine either. We’ve done this too many times before—remembering is a bitch and a half. “Hey, we’re here in Middleton Parkland and we have to find Dave and we can grab some parts, okay? Stay with me, here.”
“Middleton? But the owner—”
“It changed hands. We’ve got an arrangement. But we only have an hour. Look around. Focus, okay? What do we need?”
“Dave is here?” he asks, but he’s walking forward again now without the hesitation of moments before. “All of him?”
“Just his head,” I say.
“All on his own?”
“You built him a motorized cart out of a furniture dolly, remember?”
We’re nearer one of the working lights, so I can see him grin back at me. “Right!” he says. “That was a clever bit of work on my part. Had to make him promise not to get into trouble with it, though.”
“Yeah, well,” I say, and wave my hands around us. “Welcome to trouble.”
The Sauropod Swamp is up ahead, past a collapsed snack hut, and I can see the long, unmoving necks of three of Dave’s model sticking up into the night sky like strange smokestacks. I follow along the low wall, Marty behind me, until around a curve we find Dave, on his dolly, staring up at the nearest sauropod robot.
“They’re all dead,” he says, when we are near enough to hear, and he sounds so sad and heartbroken that just for a second I almost forgive him for walking us into a trap with my father. Almost.
Okay, not really very close at all. But a little tiny bit.
“Marty, you think you can see if we can get a knee motor out of one of them?” I ask, and he’s already pawing through my open toolbox. He’s been centered for longer than I’ve seen in a while, and maybe it’s just all about keeping him with a new challenge in front of him. Or we’re lucky.
“Be right back, Cassie,” he says, and climbs over the wall into the weeds and garbage.
Can a giant animatronic robot dinosaur head avoid looking you in the eye? Yes. Yes, it can. So I went over and gave him a good, solid, totally ineffective kick.
“I’m sorry,” Dave says.
“You knew it was my father?”
“No,” Dave says. He’s still not looking at me. He clacks a few times, then adds, “but I could have guessed, if I’d thought about it. I just wanted to come find another Euhelopus, and when the cable guy said there were some here, dug a brochure out of his truck—”
“We don’t have cable,” I say. “We’ve never had cable. And you said you found the brochure.”
“Yeah. I lied a little bit,” he said.
“And when you saw him? You still came in?”
“I only saw the Luxauto,” he says. “I thought maybe there was a chance it wasn’t his. Look, I’m sorry. I’m just a stupid, selfish head and you’d be right to just leave me behind here.”
“Hell yes I would, and I would have,” I say. “But then Marty would be upset, and I’d have a giant headless dinosaur in the backyard. With my luck raccoons or some shit would take up living in your neck and it would be a goddamned health hazard.”
“That would be terrible,” Dave says.
“Yeah.” I look at the time. Thirty-eight minutes left. “I’m gonna go see if I can help Marty, and you’re going to stay right the fuck here, right?”
“I wil
l,” he promises.
This time he does meet my eyes, so I climb over the fence and head for where I can hear Marty banging around. I find him and he’s chatting with the other guys in the garage, totally lost as to where he is and what’s going on, but he’s got most of the rusting plating off one of the sauropod’s legs and is up to his shoulders inside, working the socket wrench.
“Marty?” I ask.
He pulls his head out of the cavity. “Jennie!” he says. “You came by the shop to help out? And what did you do to your hair?! You better not let Mom see that.”
“I came to help,” I say. Grandma was dead before I was even crawling, and sometimes it feels like everything I know about her is from her guest appearances in Marty’s wandering mind.
“Great,” he says. “The strut on this truck is totally shot, and rusted to boot. Can you hand me the adjustable wrench? The big one.”
I hand it to him, and his head disappears back inside. “Greg and Barry are gonna go on a coffee run; machine is busted again. If you want anything, tell ’em I’ll cover it.”
“I’m good, thanks,” I say.
He emerges again, a giant smudge of grease across his nose, and hands me a sauropod knee motor. “No wonder this is all messed up,” he says, “you ever see a wheel strut like that?”
“Couple of times,” I say. “It’s a knee. We’re in the Middleton Prehistoric Playland, looking for parts to fix Dave. I need you here now, okay?”
Marty blinks at me, then looks around, looking for Greg and Barry and Linda and Scoops, the garage dog. Then he seems to deflate, his arms hanging down by his side, wrench dangling from his hand. “We were happy then,” he says.
“It’s okay.” I take the wrench from his hand, put it back in the toolbox, bungee the salvaged joint motor across the top. “We’re happy now too, just a different kind of happy. But we’ve got about fifteen minutes to get out of here, and it’s almost that long a walk back to the entrance. Anything else you want to grab, do it quick.”
“Nothing,” he says. “That’s all we need.”
We climb back over the wall to where Dave is still waiting. “We gotta go,” I say. “Keep up as best you can.”
We run for the entrance. Marty is not any slower than me while I’m hauling the toolbox along with me, and Dave has the control lead for the dolly in his mouth and is zooming along behind us. We are most of the way there when Marty swerves off to one side and around a big, fake, graffiti-covered rock into the Precambrian Picnic Place. I’m trying to stop without running myself over with the toolbox or getting crushed by Dave when Marty comes running out past the far side of the rock, smiling his best smile, and his pockets and shirt are bulging.
“Trilobites!” he exclaims. “I can program them for all kinds of things!”
Sure, whatever. If it keeps him busy and present, I can handle some creepy-ass robot bugs around the house. Maybe he can program them to clean.
We reach the entrance with about a minute and a half to spare. My father watches, still leaning against his armored car, as I load Dave, Marty—who I swear dropped at least a dozen hockey-puck-sized trilobites on the seat around him—and the dolly, toolbox, and knee back in the car.
“We have a deal,” he says, when I’m done.
“Safety deposit box key and then you leave us alone,” I say. “You gave your word.”
“To be specific, the key to your Fairham First box,” he says. “Number 131. No switching it up. I don’t trust you to not play me on the details.”
I take a deep breath. I always knew, eventually, he’d get ahead of me, and I always thought I’d be able to play it cool, but my hands are shaking as I reach over my shoulder and down the back of my T-shirt, and break the tiny stitches where the little flat key has sat snug along my bra strap for years now. I hold it out in the palm of my hand.
My father reaches for it, and I close my first. “First, open the gates,” I say. Dammit, I am not going to cry, not in front of him. “I know better than to trust you, either.”
He signals to someone I can’t see, and a moment later the gates at the end of the parking lot open. I make a show of getting in my car, and backing it out and turning around, and he walks over to stand in front of me. He knows, despite everything, that I won’t kill him. Mostly because I’ve had better opportunities than this.
I roll down the window, and I hold the key out. He steps out from in front of the car and takes it, and the moment the key is out of my hand I floor it, my good ol’ grease-V8-cruiser, and we’re out of there like a fucking cannonball. We swerve out onto the street hard, which we’re lucky as hell is empty, and I can just see the woman in the store across the street peering out the window as we tear away from there, back toward the highway and away from Middleton as fast as we can go.
Damned fucking yes/no machine ought to have a color just for proximity to my father.
“I hate him,” Marty says quietly in the back seat.
“He didn’t give us a choice not to,” I answer. “But he’ll leave us alone, at least for a little while. Bastard likes being a man of his word, the magnanimous leader, until he figures out the loopholes in whatever he promised.”
“At least we got away,” Dave says.
“At what cost?” Marty asks. “What is it that he wants from you so badly as to go through all of this?”
“Something of Mom’s,” I say. Something she left for me, to save it from him, save me from him.
“And now he’ll have it,” Marty says. He leans forward and whacks Dave’s head, although not hard. “This is your fault.”
“I know. I said I was sorry!” Dave complains.
“It’s all done now,” I say. I can see a drive-through ahead, one of the more reputable chains, and I’m tired enough that I swing into the lane and get food for everyone. If we have the shits tomorrow, well, we’ll suck it up. I don’t want to stop again until we’re home, even if I have to drive all night.
• • • •
It’s close to noon before I get out of bed and find Marty aimlessly wandering around the living room, and I’m not sure if he’s here or not, but he’s not talking to anyone else, so maybe? “Morning, Uncle,” I say.
“Cassie,” he says. He points to where I dumped all our crap on our way in at four AM. “The fellows at the garage dropped off a new knee for Dave.” He holds up a trilobite. “Also they brought me a bunch of these! I think I can reprogram them . . .”
“I bet you can,” I say. “What are you going to have them do?”
“I don’t know. I’ll need to dig into their code set. I haven’t had a project this fun in a long time.” His face falls. “But I should fix Dave’s knee, first. He’s been so very patient.”
I don’t comment on that. Instead, I pick up the knee motor. “I’ll do it,” I say.
“Thanks, Cassie! You’re the best. I wish the guys would get back here with the coffee, though. Machine is busted again . . .”
“It’s okay, I’m sure they’ll be along soon,” I say. Greg died of stomach cancer four years ago, and is buried only a few rows over from my mom. I don’t know where the others are. The garage itself is now a dry cleaner.
Dave has put his head back on his neck, and is looking out over the neighborhood. “Hey, Cassie,” he says.
“Hey, Dave. I’m going to put that joint motor in. I need you to not move, because if you think I’m mad about the road trip, you have no idea how pissed I’ll be if you squash me,” I say.
“I didn’t want to be alone,” he says.
“We don’t count? Thanks a lot,” I say, as I pull off the leg plate. There’s a little bit of rust on the edges, and I’ll have to get out here with a wire brush and some touch-up paint in the next month or two.
“That’s not what I meant,” Dave says.
And I know what Dave meant, but I also know sometimes you gotta adjust your expectation of what counts as alone and what doesn’t, because nobody has a perfect picture life, or not for very long.
Dave still has his neck craned all the way up. “What are you looking for?” I ask.
“Beige cars,” he says.
“Not today,” I say. “My father will be on the road to Fairham by now, if he’s not there already. Gonna go personally, too; can’t delegate that to any of his flunkies. Now hold still.” I grab the floor jack designed for house joists and I wedge it up under Dave’s butt crack to keep him steady, just in case.
Dave doesn’t really have a butt crack, of course, but there’s a plate up under the base of his tail where there’s the vague, diplomatic suggestion of something of the sort, and up inside above that plate there’s a small box wrapped in brown paper and tied with green ribbon, with my mother’s handwriting on it: just my name, the words you will know when to use it, and a heart. If I close my eyes I can picture it exactly, and feel the weight of it in my hands, remember the paper cut I got when I wrapped it back up too fast after I realized what the vials inside held, and what my father would do to get them.
Like buy an entire falling-down park so he could weasel a key out of me. Fucking ridiculous, this long game of ours.
When I was eight, he came to our house where I was playing in the backyard, and gave me a little plastic pony with rainbow hair and told me how much he loved me and what a smart girl I was, and then asked me if I knew where Mommy’s secret hiding place was. I showed him a recently-dug spot in the garden, where I had insisted my mother help me bury a roadkill skunk a few weeks earlier. Didn’t tell him that part, though. I was a smart girl even back then.
I wonder if he’ll recognize the pony toy, when he finally gets my safety deposit box open. He may have left Dave a Playland brochure, but I left a receipt for the box rent for him to find, ’cause I knew eventually he’d search the house. Girl’s gotta have lots of extra cards up her sleeve, right?
Or right in the palm of her hands.
The hand sanitizer bottle I keep at my porter station at the airport is getting low, and by fall I’ll need to refill it. For now, though, my mom’s package can stay safely where it is, as her work, little by little, goes bon voyage around the world.
The Long List Anthology Volume 6 Page 29