Hot Pterodactyl Boyfriend

by Alan Cumyn

  “I knew that Pyke would catch the ball. I knew that Manniberg would use the moment to—”

  “What about this dance video?”

  “It’s called a wrangle dance. It was part of the school’s Autumn Whirl festivities. As I said, I am the student-body chair—”

  “That colored nose of yours—isn’t it true it’s only worn by women who have been sexually taken by the pterodactyl-boy in question?”

  Shiels stood suddenly and lurched for the door. “I’m sorry, this is a mistake,” she said. “I don’t believe you’re interested in hearing my actual testimony at all!”

  She gripped the doorknob, but it wouldn’t turn. They were locked in. “Please let me out!” she called, and pounded twice on the metal door.

  Brady did not get up, but he softened his voice. “I have to ask these preliminary questions so your story can be evaluated in the proper light. No one is judging you. But it would make a difference if you were intimate with Mr. Pyke. You’re not the only young woman I’ve had in here in love with this character.”

  Jocelyne Legault. Who had persuaded Pyke to give himself up. Probably she was being held in a room similar to this one, with its soul-sucking gray walls, its dangerous shadows.

  “We’re not intimate,” Shiels said. “We danced at an event. I have spoken with him on fewer than a dozen occasions.”

  Pitiless eyes. “Could you sit down again, please, so I can record your testimony properly?” He leaned toward the device. “Subject has moved away from the microphone.”

  Warily Shiels returned to her seat.

  “You dream about him constantly, don’t you?” Brady said. He flipped back some pages in his yellow-lined notebook. “Just a few days ago you wrote on something called the Leghorn Review . . .”

  “All right, all right, yes!” she said. “I didn’t realize dreaming is a crime. Or that the police have such ready access to Vhub. Are you sure you have enough prisons to hold everyone who ever lusted after somebody else?”

  Blink, blink. “I just want to tack down the nature of your relationship,” Brady said.

  “I am a friend. He is a pterodactyl in my school. I don’t know why my nose has turned purple. But I’m still a virgin. I thought I was pregnant by my boyfriend of the time—” She’d almost started to name Sheldon! “But we didn’t actually . . .”

  Brady wrote furiously. “So would you say that the sexual fantasies you have about Mr. Pyke are so far unfulfilled?”

  “I wouldn’t say any of that!” she declared. Why had she ever agreed to submit to this questioning? She was never going to see Pyke. She knew that now. She had a wild idea that she could gouge out Brady’s eyes—or at least confuse him greatly, somehow, with her short fingernails—then grab the key from inside his pocket and dash for the door. But probably he didn’t have the key in his pocket. Probably he had to knock on the door himself to be let out.

  “This line of questioning will never hold up in court!” she said. Hadn’t she seen something like this sort of blatant harassment on a crime show recently? Sheldon would remember.

  Sheldon—

  “We’re not in court, Ms. Krane,” Brady said in a tired voice. “I’m just trying to figure out who you are, and then we’ll get to what happened.”

  He pressed his eyes shut with his enormous fingers. Part of him seemed exhausted.

  Part of him was taking a prurient interest in the supposed love life of the teenager opposite him.

  “I’m the one who dreamed up the scheme of putting Pyke on the football team for the game against Wallin,” Shiels said. “It came to me quickly, in the heat of a situation. I thought it might even up the game. I should’ve tried harder to prepare him, make sure that he went to practice. I’m responsible. It was my fault that boy hurt his arm so badly.”

  “You told the pterodactyl to slash anyone who came near?”

  “No.”

  “You told him to poison his opponents?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “So he did it on his own?”

  “No. No. He’s just a pterodactyl. He reacted—”

  “He had no such order from you, student-body chair of Vista View High?”

  “I wanted him to win the game for us. But I was blind to what he might do—”

  “Because of your infatuation with him. You and every other girl he seemed to know.”

  “He’s a pterodactyl, he just was himself. It was my duty to know better. I put a lot of people in harm’s way.”

  Why was he taking so many notes when he was recording the interview anyway?

  “All right,” he said finally. He put down his pen and stopped the recorder.

  “All right, you’re taking me in? You’re letting Pyke go?”

  “No—all right, we’re done. I’ll call you if I need any more.”

  “But—”

  “You’re not the coach of the team, Ms. Krane, or the principal of the school. You didn’t put that ball into the pterodactyl’s hands. And you didn’t cause him to slash the other boy’s arm. I watched the video. You and his other girlfriend were just cheering from the sidelines. He probably couldn’t even hear you because of the wind.”

  “But—”

  “You know what?” Brady said. “I’ve had a really long day. And I promised you you’d be able to see the poor bastard before you go.”

  • • •

  They walked down the hall to a dark and narrow side room. Though Brady seemed to get puffed even in that short distance, he also looked impressively solid. Shield imagined herself bouncing off him like a crow flying into a pile of cannonballs. Brady pulled open a screen, and Shiels was able to see through a two-way mirror into a cheerless, fluorescently lit room with a bunk, a sink, a toilet, and something bundled in the corner, in the darkest spot. At first Shiels could not make out what she was seeing in that corner. It looked flattened, like the contents of a parcel that has fallen off a truck and then been run over several hundred times in the ensuing traffic. There was a wing, oddly pale, stretched at a strange angle over bits of rib and bone; there was a beak, bent back, headed in the wrong direction.

  “You’ve murdered him!” Shiels cried.

  “No, we haven’t.” Brady’s voice was neutral, stony. “He’s perfectly fine. That’s just the way he folded himself when we brought him in.”

  Like a fossil, Shiels realized. Pressed cruelly into the rock wall of the cell.

  “Let me talk to him,” Shiels said. It was hard to tear her eyes from the pitiful sight of her flattened Pyke, but she knew she had to address Brady full on. “You told me I could see him!”

  “And you’re seeing him,” Brady replied. “But I can’t let you get closer than this. He’s a risk to anyone he comes in contact with. Even you.”

  Shiels threw herself at the mirror. “Pyke! Pyke! It’s me!” she screamed. “We’re going to get you out!”

  Her hands did not shake the heavy glass. Her voice echoed off the many hard surfaces, and Pyke did not stir. He didn’t seem to hear.

  “If you kill him, if you kill him in custody—” Shiels yelled. “I swear, I will train the rest of my life in the law and will come back and prosecute you to your grave!”

  Brady’s face folded into a lopsided grin. “Be careful about threatening an officer of the peace, Ms. Krane,” he said quietly. “And are you sure you want to add to the world’s growing surfeit of lawyers? Why don’t you do something worthwhile with your life instead?”

  • • •

  The rally had broken up. Downtown felt deserted. She had not brought her phone. If she had, she could’ve taken a photo of the miserable conditions in which Pyke was being held. She could’ve broadcast to the world how crushed he was in the grip of the state. There would’ve been an outcry, a massive movement from every corner of the wired planet to free him.

  Outside a corner store, in perhaps the last phone booth in the city, she called home. Four rings. Five. The answering service kicked in, her father’s voice, calm, reass
uring. He would get back to the caller as soon as he could.

  “Daddy,” she said, “I need you to come pick me up. I’m sorry for all the trouble I made. But Pyke is dying; he’s being held in barbaric conditions at the police station right now. I’ve seen him—” And then her father was on the line.

  “Baby,” he said, “are you all right?”

  Shiels hadn’t been “baby” to her father since Jonathan had been born. She started to tear up just at the word.

  “No,” she said. “I’m not all right. I’ve screwed up everything a hundred times over. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry!”

  She thought she heard him crying too, and that was disconcerting. He was her father, a surgeon, for God’s sake. He was professionally calm. “Did they charge you with something?” he asked finally. “Is this your one phone call?”

  It took a long time for Shiels to set him straight. “I’m outside,” she said. “They aren’t interested in me. But we need to free Pyke as soon as possible. Oh, Daddy, if you’d seen him—”

  She described it all for him, the grim room, the flattened, beaten being lying in the dark corner. “I know . . . I know Mom is going to kill me,” Shiels said. “But I’m glad I went. I had to see him. We have to get him out!”

  “Your mother really is going to kill you, because you broke her foot when you smashed the door on it,” her father said.

  “What?”

  “On your way out of the house. Didn’t you hear us yelling at you? You didn’t even stop. I had to take her to the hospital.”

  Shiels suddenly noticed just where she was—the cracked glass of the booth, the scratchings on the black metallic side of the ancient phone box, the blinking pink and red fluorescent lights of the corner store illuminating her black pant legs, the way her breath seemed to be clogging in her throat.

  “I broke Mom’s foot?”

  She had a glimpse of herself flinging the door open right on her mother’s foot like some Godzilla toppling buildings with every unthinking swish of her tail. It was a heavy door too, and her mother had cried out. Shiels remembered it now. She thought it had been just to keep Shiels from turning herself in.

  The imagined pain of it now crackled through her body.

  “I didn’t . . . I’m so sorry!” Shiels said. “I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Don’t go anywhere!” her father said. “I’m coming to get you.”

  • • •

  She could not call Sheldon from the pay phone. It felt wrong somehow, desperate. But if she had had her phone with her, she would have told him everything. Just out of habit. That was the way they worked. The cement mixer fingers, Pyke flattened against the wall, smashing her mother’s foot.

  That she was fracturing everything she touched. At least they would have talked about it.

  And somehow the sound of Sheldon’s voice would’ve calmed her. What would he say exactly? She couldn’t think—she couldn’t think, except that if she were talking with Sheldon, she wouldn’t have felt so completely alone standing by the ragged phone booth in a sorry part of town in the blinking lights of a convenience store.

  A car approached, a beat-up boxy thing, not her father’s gray Mercedes. She let her eyes drop. She thought: I am all alone standing here without a coat in the cold, and I do not even have my phone.

  The window opened. She saw a narrow face, a balding head. Tell me this isn’t happening, she thought.

  I am just a block away from the police station, she thought.

  Probably they wouldn’t even hear—

  “I thought I recognized those yellow shoes,” the man said. “Are you all right? Do you need a lift?”

  It was the old guy from the running-shoe store. He looked concerned.

  “No. Thank you. My father’s coming to pick me up. He’s on his way. I just called him. Really.”

  He looked like he didn’t believe her. His engine was idling. She could smell the exhaust. And God, it was cold. If she hadn’t just talked with her dad, she would’ve gone with the running-shoe man. He seemed harmless enough.

  She imagined herself in his car saying, “Any ideas how to spring a pterodactyl from prison?”

  “How are the shoes?” he asked finally.

  “Good. Great! I would run home now but I am exhausted. And it’s uphill. I broke my mother’s foot.”

  “How did you do that?” he asked, and she told him a bit of it without going into details.

  “That stockroom you cleaned up is a hundred times better than it was,” he said. “If you ever want to come work at the store, I’ll find a place for you.”

  She thanked him and thought if she didn’t end up studying with Lorraine Miens, if she didn’t become a doctor, if she didn’t go to law school, she could see herself happily stacking running shoes, keeping at least that corner of the world in order.

  “I know a thing or two about running,” the old guy said.

  “I’ll keep it in mind,” Shiels replied.

  • • •

  The ride home with her father was quiet. What could Shiels do about her mother’s foot now? Nothing. Other plans whirred in her head, forming and dissolving and reforming like clouds on a riotous day. They absolutely had to free Pyke. If Melanie Mull now was the one to rally students, then maybe Shiels could rally the crows, and together they could sow confusion amongst the police, and in the meantime . . .

  “Your mother is in a state,” Shiels’s father said quietly from behind the wheel.

  Shiels imagined the crows descending upon the police station like something out of Hitchcock.

  “You’re going to have to be careful how you handle her,” Shiels’s father said.

  In a state. What did he mean by in a state?

  “It’s not just her foot. She’s really worried about you and your future. She asked me to talk to you—”

  “I am so sorry about her foot. You know I didn’t mean it. But, Dad, a pterodactyl is dying in a jail cell right now because of something else I did. If there were any justice in the world, I would be the one kept in solitary confinement like . . . like a beast in a zoo!”

  “I know, baby. You’re concerned,” her father said. “You get wound up in your causes. It’s admirable. So many adults are past caring, or they have no idea what they can do to help. But I’m giving you a heads-up about your mom.”

  Her father had curly hair, too brown still for a dad his age. And he was doing what he always did—he was taking his wife’s side against his daughter, as if his wife were not the perpetual champion of everything in the family, now and forever.

  “I didn’t know her foot was there,” Shiels said. “I just ran and shoved the door behind me. I will apologize to Mom. But about Stockard—I really have been thinking. I’ve been thinking for a long time now. I’m not—” How to frame it so he would understand? “I’m not doctor material.”

  Her father snorted, the way he did whenever something unbelievable was happening on the television news. His hands were strong and relaxed on the steering wheel, his fingers long and tapered. Like Sheldon’s hands, she thought. “I changed your diapers long before you knew what a doctor was,” he said. “I know all about your force of will, your focus, how smart you are. Believe me, Shiels, you could be a terrific doctor if you wanted to be. But that’s not the issue here. The issue—”

  “That’s just it!” she said. “I don’t want to be a doctor. That’s the whole issue!”

  “The issue is that your mother is in a state,” he said again, slowly and carefully. “I’m fine with you not being a doctor. Really I am. And your mother will be too. But right now she thinks you’re out of your mind in love with a pterodactyl. She thinks that you don’t need her, that you don’t love her. She thinks you broke her foot on purpose.”

  “I didn’t break her foot on purpose,” Shiels said.

  But maybe she had wanted to bring the whole house down?

  “You’re going to have to tell her yourself,” her father said. “Carefully. You know your mother is
a lot more fragile than you are.”

  Now it was Shiels’s turn to snort. Her father glanced at her, his face naked with surprise. “She has always felt threatened by your strength,” he said. “And so you have to be very gentle with her. You know you’re going to win.”

  “I have no such thought in my head!” she blurted. “Win what? I lose every time it comes to Mom!”

  The car hummed ever homeward in the dark.

  “You’re young, just coming up. You don’t know your own strength,” he said.

  • • •

  Her father had tried to warn her, but still Shiels was unprepared when she got home. She tiptoed into her mother’s room ready to say the right words, to ask for forgiveness, to set things as right as she could before turning her attention to the larger problem of saving Pyke. But who was this pale, withdrawn creature propped up on pillows, her foot enormous in a black plastic cast that looked like a ski boot, her eyes pilled-up and dopey?

  Who was this woman who did not seem to see her?

  Shiels approached cautiously. “Mom?” It was her little-girl voice, still living somewhere inside her.

  Her mother stirred. She looked a decade older. Had Shiels really done all this to her just by rushing out the door?

  “Baby.” Her mother’s voice was groggy. She lifted her hand slightly. Shiels took it and squeezed. She had a sudden feeling of someday years from now, decades away surely. The day her mother would die.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” Shiels said. “I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry.”

  Her mother seemed to both see Shiels and not see her at the same time. Obviously she was heavily drugged. Shiels remembered something about foot pain being amongst the worst a body might suffer. Wasn’t that a torture method, beating people’s feet?

  Shiels sat still, holding her mother’s hand, until her mother seemed to be fast asleep. The more Shiels thought about it, the more dreadful the whole thing seemed—the weight of the door (which she could remember now feeling in her hand as she’d fled), what a relief it had been to throw that weight behind her as she’d run. How shocked her mother must’ve been when the heavy metal had swung so hard into her instep.

  Normally Shiels would have stopped to see what was the matter.