by David Fulk
Martin stood there for a few seconds, wondering what to do next. Then he noticed that the squad car seemed to be empty. He stepped over and peeked in the back window, then the front. Suddenly, Donald’s head popped up from below.
“Agh!” they both shouted at the same time.
“What are you doing here?” Martin snapped. “What did you tell him?”
“What do you think? You’re a crazy freak with a giant tricycle tops!”
“He’s a tyrann— Never mind…”
His heart sinking fast, Martin looked over at the house. Through the window, he could see Sheriff Grimes trying to explain something to his mom, who was looking back at him as though he had just stepped out of a Martian landing craft. She gestured for him to wait there, and went out into the kitchen.
Martin knew where she was going: out to the barn to look for him.
“I’d run if I were you,” Donald croaked. “You’re in deep doo-doo now, Huckleberry.” He slid back down out of view. Martin had no idea what he was hiding from, but right now he couldn’t dwell on how much of an idiot Donald was.
He saw a pickup truck approaching, and recognized it right away. His dad! Martin ducked behind a tree and peeked around as the truck pulled in the driveway and parked behind his mom’s car. Sheriff Grimes opened the front door of the house and called to Mr. Tinker as he got out and headed up the walk.
“Hey there, Gordo!”
“What’s the rap, Frank? I paid my taxes.” Unlike Mrs. Tinker, he didn’t seem all that concerned to see the sheriff in his house.
“No big deal, my friend. Just checking something out here, eh?”
Once they had gone inside, Martin emerged from behind the tree. But he still had no plan. All the ideas that came into his head were bad ones. He looked over at the police car and saw the top half of Donald’s prickly head peeking nervously out the window toward the house.
Deciding he needed to act now and think it through later, Martin took off around the side of the house, heading straight for the backyard. Maybe, by some miracle, he could still get Rufus out of the barn cellar before they discovered him.
As he was about to pass by an open living room window, he heard his dad and the sheriff talking inside. Ducking down to stay out of view, he stopped to listen.
Mr. Tinker laughed. “You can’t be serious.”
“Yeah, yeah, you know how kids are,” said Sheriff Grimes. “Probably just some goofball prank. I’m just doing my job, eh?”
“Marty’s a bit of a square peg, I’ll give you that. But that’d be way out in left field, even for him.”
He laughed again, which might have bugged Martin at another time, but right now he barely gave it a thought. He continued along the side of the house to the gate leading into the backyard—and froze when he looked across to the far end of the yard and saw his mom coming out of the barn workshop, through the side door.
She didn’t look especially rattled; obviously she hadn’t ventured around to the far end and seen the cinder blocks piled in front of the lower-level doors. So, figuring there was still a shot at keeping her in the dark, he raced toward her.
“Mom! Hi!” he called in a chipper voice. “Looking for me?”
“Martin, what is going on with you and the Grimes boy?”
She didn’t sound the least bit chipper.
“Grimes?”
“He told the sheriff you had—”
With his usual terrible timing, Rufus poked his head right up to a cellar window. Martin’s mom caught a tiny glimpse as he dropped back out of view.
“What have you got down there?” She went over to the window and stooped down, trying to see inside. “Martin, are you keeping an animal in there?” Her face was practically right up against the glass.
“Animal? Well, um…well, if by ‘animal’ you mean, like—”
Suddenly, Rufus appeared again, right on the other side of the glass from Mrs. Tinker’s face. A thick pink tongue shot out between two rows of glistening teeth and slapped right against the pane, just an inch and a half from her nose.
With a monstrous gasp, she launched herself backward, landing flat on her butt.
Martin sucked in a lungful of air, his hands flying to the top of his head. “Ohhhhhhh, wow…”
His mom scrambled back on all fours like a panicked crab, emitting terrified little grunts. She seemed to want to scream, but her vocal cords must have seized up like a twisted garden hose, because nothing came out.
With quick little hops from one foot to the other, Martin started talking, hoping for the best. “Okay, he’s kinda big, he looks scary and all, but he’s really just a big puppy dog, y’know, this big, nice…nice, um…Mom?…Mom, wait!”
She had managed to find her feet and was running toward the house.
Martin looked over at the cellar window. “Rufus!” he growled through gritted teeth.
With nothing to guide him now but desperation, he ran around the corner to the back of the barn, slipping and sliding down the slope to the lower-level doors, and yanked away a cinder block. Maybe they could just make a break for it into the woods. But before he could pick up a second block, he heard the agitated voices of his dad, his mom, and the sheriff approaching fast from the house.
Ditching the quick-escape plan, Martin clambered back up the slope and raced around to the side door leading into his lab. As he rushed in and sprinted across the barn floor toward the trapdoor, he could hear the three of them arriving outside.
“Annie, what is going on?” said the sheriff.
“In there!” she rasped. “In there in there!”
“What!” said Mr. Tinker.
Martin threw open the trapdoor and dropped down to the cellar floor in three quick bounds, skipping over most of the steps. He spotted Rufus in a corner and rushed over, throwing his arms protectively around as much of the big guy as he could hold.
Just above them, Sheriff Grimes’s face appeared in a recessed window. He squinted. “What am I looking for?”
“Just look!” Mrs. Tinker squawked from behind him.
Rufus tensed up, and Martin held on tight, whispering urgently but reassuringly.
“We’re gonna keep calm now, okay? It might get a little crazy, but we’ll make it through if you just stay cool, all right? You can do that, right?”
“Ah geez, who put these…” It was his dad’s voice, and it sounded somehow closer than the others. Martin froze, listening, trying to figure out what was going on out there.
It was strangely silent—all he could hear was the deep huffing of Rufus’s breath. Then there was a faint thunk outside. Then came another, then another. The cinder blocks! His dad was tossing them away from the lower doors.
Martin jumped up.
His mom had apparently heard the same sound. “Oh, no…. Oh, no!” he heard her yell, running around from the side to the back of the barn. “No, Gordy! Don’t open it!”
“Huh?”
A crack of light appeared between the doors, and in a flash, Rufus bounded across the room.
“Rufus, no!” Martin exclaimed in a whisper-shout.
Bam! The burly dino crashed into the doors, knocking them partway open.
“Jumping catfish!” Sheriff Grimes blurted out, and through the narrow opening Martin could see his parents and the sheriff leap back from the doors like startled house cats. Mrs. Tinker let out a terrified howl and ran in the other direction.
“What in the bloody blazes is that?” Martin’s dad shouted as Rufus kept banging against the doors, trying to bull his way through the crack, teeth-first.
There were just a few cinder blocks left at the base of the doors keeping him from pushing all the way through to freedom. But they were inching forward under his repeated charges. Bam!…Bam!
Martin leaped over and wrapped himself around Rufus’s tail, trying to pull him back. But Rufus was too big, too strong, and too determined to get out to pay any attention to him at all.
The doors kept inching open.
Martin could see his dad through the crack, standing there with an otherworldly expression on his face, while his mom watched from way back, her eyes like full moons. “Stay back, Ann,” he said urgently. “Go in the house.”
“Right, let’s go,” she said, edging away. “Gordy, Frank, come on!”
The two men just stood there, frozen, like they had no clue which way to go.
Then, suddenly, Mr. Tinker lowered his shoulder and hurled himself right at the double doors. Wham! He pushed against Rufus with everything he had, trying to get the door shut again.
The shock of being abruptly knocked back set something off in Rufus, and he pushed back angrily, teeth snapping and claws slashing through the opening, growling like a junkyard Rottweiler.
Mrs. Tinker was aghast. “Gordy, no! Just run!”
“You gonna help me out here, Frank?” Mr. Tinker barked at the sheriff, who snapped out of his stupor and jumped in to help. The two of them pushed as hard as they could, while doing their best to avoid those flying claws and teeth.
In the scuffle, Rufus’s tail jerked hard and Martin got tossed into a pile of cardboard boxes. As he watched the struggle, he realized he hadn’t ever seen his big pet quite so riled up, and for the first time he wondered if maybe there was something more to Rufus—something more dangerous—than he’d realized before. He had never felt so helpless in his life.
Finally, Mr. Tinker and the sheriff succeeded in getting Rufus back in and shutting the doors. Rufus kept growling and banging, but Martin could hear the cinder blocks getting stacked quickly back in place until the barrier was secure again.
Martin clambered out of the boxes and tried to grab hold of Rufus. “Shhhhh! Easy! Easy!” But Rufus was still all worked up, and in no mood to be comforted. Martin rushed over and put his ear up against the double doors.
He could hear his dad and the sheriff trying to catch their breath.
“Gordon,” Sheriff Grimes said matter-of-factly, “if I was actually awake just now, and not in the middle of some whacked-out dream, I would say you’ve got a dinosaur in your barn.”
“Don’t be dense, Frank. Dinosaurs are extinct.”
“Yeah? Then what would you call that thing?”
There was an excruciating silence. Martin bit down hard, fearing the worst was about to come. Then he heard his dad walking away, back toward the house.
“Where are you going?” said Mrs. Tinker.
“My rifle.”
Martin gasped and went stiff as a ramrod.
“Forget that, Gordy,” said the sheriff. “I’ll take him out right now, eh?”
“NOOOOO!” Martin bellowed at the top of his lungs.
“Martin?” he could hear his mom exclaim.
“Holy geez, is he inside there?” his dad shouted.
“NOOOO! NO GUNS!” Martin rocketed across the cellar and shot up the stairs, flying through the trapdoor.
As he raced over toward the lab area, his parents and Sheriff Grimes rushed in the side door.
“You can’t shoot him!” Martin hollered. “He’s not hurting anybody. Please, no guns, no shooting!”
His mom was slack-jawed. “You were down there with that thing?”
“Martin, what the bloody blazes is going on here?” his dad snapped.
“You got him all worked up,” Martin said loudly. “He’s not vicious or anything, but you have to—you can’t just—”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute. You knew that thing was down there?”
“Yeah. I mean…well, yeah. But—”
“For how long?”
“If everybody could just, you know, like, calm down—”
“How long, Martin?”
Now, with his dad scowling and everybody’s eyes focused on him like lasers, Martin was starting to feel a bit daunted.
“Four and a half months.” He took a hard swallow and let out a puff of air. “I found him. I fed him, and raised him. He thinks I’m his mom.”
The silence was deafening. Everybody gaped at him as though he had just dropped a boulder on a priceless Ming vase.
“Oh, lord,” Mrs. Tinker droned, a vaguely astonished look of recognition on her face. “The deformed lizard…”
Martin gave a pained little grin and a tiny shrug.
“What is that thing, son?” Sheriff Grimes asked.
Martin hesitated. “It’s um…it’s a, um…” He cleared his throat and faked a cough, covering his mouth. “T. rex.”
“A what?” his dad said.
“T. rex.”
Now the silence was even heavier—until it was broken by two loud roars from below.
Mrs. Tinker let out a faint moan, and her knees buckled. The sheriff grabbed her arm and steadied her.
“But it’s all okay now,” Martin said, with new purpose. “I told Mr. Eckhart, and he went over to the U, and they’re gonna, they’re gonna—”
“Who’s Mr. Eckhart?” Mr. Tinker said sharply.
“My science teacher. He said he can help. He’s gonna find a good place for him”—Rufus roared again, and Martin had to talk loudly to be heard over the din—“and so that’ll work out really well because that way nobody—”
“All right, stop. Stop! Don’t talk,” his dad interjected. “I need to think.” He started pacing, a look of intense concentration on his face.
“Look,” Mrs. Tinker said, “let’s all just go in the house for now, okay? We can call the police, and then things can—”
“I’m already here, Ann,” said Sheriff Grimes, with barely concealed annoyance.
“Right, of course. Sorry.”
“Holy geez,” said Mr. Tinker, gaping down through the trapdoor. “Will you just look at that thing.”
Rufus let out another roar.
“Can’t we just leave him alone?” Martin implored. “He’s not used to having all these people around.”
“I swear I thought I’d seen just about everything,” his dad muttered as he watched the scaly creature bobbing around below him.
“Okay, why don’t you all just stay put for now,” said the sheriff. “I’ve got a tranquilizing rifle back at the station, I’ll just go and—”
“No!” Martin shouted. “You can’t shoot him!”
“Not with bullets, son. Just something to put him to sleep.”
As he headed for the door, Martin raced after him. “He doesn’t need to sleep! You just got him all excited. You don’t have to shoot him!”
His mom grabbed him by the arm. “All right, Martin, enough.”
“Why does he have to shoot him? He’s not hurting anybody. I can handle him! Why can’t we just wait until—”
“Martin, you need to be quiet!” his dad barked. “You go on up to the house. Go to your room and stay there. We’ll deal with you later. Your mother and I need to talk.”
Martin looked up at his mom, a look of desperation on his face. She let go of his arm, but her eyes had the same chilly glare as his dad’s. “Go on.”
And so, his heart leaden, Martin trudged out of the barn, across the yard, into the house, and up the stairs to his room. He could only imagine what they were talking about down there in the barn, but he tried hard not to think about it. Because the one thing he knew for sure was that the big loser in the deal was going to be Rufus.
For twenty minutes Martin paced in his room. It seemed like he might wear a hole in his shoes, but he didn’t care. His mind kept getting yanked back to what his parents were probably talking about down there. Sell Rufus to some circus? Bring in a bunch of heartless researchers to dissect him like a frog? Shoot him in cold blood and mount his head on the wall like a moose? The possibilities were bad, worse, and unthinkable.
Martin kept stopping at the window to look out across the yard to the barn. Rufus wasn’t roaring anymore, and the long silence was starting to drive Martin nuts. Finally, he saw his parents come out of the lab and head back to the house. They seemed calmer than before, but then the worst possible thing happened: Martin heard a car door
slam out front, and moments later Sheriff Grimes was in the house again—and there was somebody with him. Martin quietly opened the bedroom door and tiptoed out onto the landing, from where he could see a sliver of the living room as they all gathered there. There was something long and dark in the sheriff’s hand, and the sight of it made Martin’s blood run cold. He’d never seen a tranquilizing rifle before, and he didn’t like the looks of this one, not one bit.
The first one to talk was the man who came in with Sheriff Grimes, and Martin recognized the loud, boisterous voice immediately: Ben Fairfield.
“Hey there, Gordo! Annie. I understand there’s something to see in your barn.”
“You heard that, huh?” Mr. Tinker said coolly.
“Yeah, how ’bout that,” the sheriff chirped. “Right when I pull up, who’s driving by but Ben?”
“Oh, you know how it goes,” said Mr. Fairfield. “Wherever Frank is, that’s where there’s trouble. Ha ha haaa! So what do you think? Can we have a look?”
His parents mumbled something Martin couldn’t make out; then the whole group headed toward the kitchen. Martin scurried back to the bedroom window and watched as they filed out into the backyard and made their way to the barn, gathering around a lower-level window.
Mr. Fairfield stooped down to look inside, and Martin could tell he saw Rufus down there, because he quickly jumped to his feet and looked at the other three, bug-eyed. A big grin spread across his face, and he stooped down to the window again. He watched Rufus for a bit; then, for some strange reason, he started laughing. He laughed harder, then leaned in close and made some weird barking noises, like he was trying to get a rise out of Rufus. Hooting like a chimpanzee, he tapped on the glass and waved his hands tauntingly.
Martin kicked the wall. This was just too much.
He bolted out of the room and raced down the stairs, through the kitchen, and out into the yard. He felt like marching right in there and giving them all a piece of his mind, but he thought better of it and ducked down behind the concrete birdbath in the center of the yard to watch and listen.
Mr. Fairfield wasn’t laughing or waving his hands anymore, but he was still stooped down at the barn window, watching Rufus with an oversize smirk frozen on his face like a mask. Martin could see Rufus’s head zipping back and forth as he paced restlessly inside.