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  To the Class of ’23–’24.

  We were awesome.

  1

  Under a high blue heaven, under the zealous sun, the kid and his dinosaur travel a hot, empty highway. The kid is small and skinny as a lost dog. Eighteen, nineteen, you might guess. A dust mask covers the bottom part of his face, outsize shades the top. They conceal wide, long-lashed, animal eyes. He rides a big-tyred bike heavy with packs and bags and sloshing water bottles.

  The dinosaur is a Carnotaurus sastrei. Imagine a classic T. rex. King of the killers. Draw it badly: a heavy, dumb-looking head. Ludicrous wiggling arms, like maggots. Too-long legs, a whippy tail. You’ve drawn a Carnotaur. He walks the cracked, dusty verge between the crumbling blacktop and the sage in two-metre strides but his feet are cracked and scabbed, his claws worn to nubs of flaking keratin. His hips move stiffly, his tail drags a furrow in the dust. His eyes are crusted with dried rheum.

  A yellow plastic tag is stapled through the loose skin of his armpit.

  The old country road melts into mercury heat-haze. What travellers used to call a blue highway. It is an hour since a vehicle passed, longer still anything with a human in it.

  The kid stops, shakes off the aches from long kilometres hunched over handlebars. The Carnotaur sags on its haunches and turns its blunt head toward the kid. Teeth as long and sharp as stilettos fill those jaws but its breath is laboured and wheezing. The kid fishes in a bike bag and produces a clay bulb, shaped like a fat contented bird. A shot bird: its body is pocked with holes. He slots smaller clay pipes into the holes. A plumed bird. He lifts the ocarina to his lips and plays a tune. Its melody is angular, it lilts without rhythm or beat.

  The Carnotaur weaves his head toward the song, fixes the kid with one eye, then the other. He coos, scrapes, shakes his tail and spine, settles to the dust.

  The kid lifts a sloshing plastic carboy of sun-warm water from the bike.

  ‘Come on, güey,’ he says.

  The Carnotaur lowers his head and opens his mouth. The kid slips the top of the carboy between the palisades of teeth. He strokes the silken, beautifully mottled skin of the beast’s throat. The Carnotaur tips back his head. The water spurts from between the many many teeth.

  ‘Come on,’ the kid says again and taps the Carnotaur alongside his jaw. He shakes his head and flings the water carboy far across the sun-pocked blacktop. ‘I’ll get you there. I promise.’

  To the kid’s desert-eyes the carno’s hide looks glossier, his eyes brighter, his colours richer, as if shining through fresh rain.

  The kid takes a chill-flask from his handlebar bag, pulls down his bandanna and drinks. The water is bliss. His body wants to swig it all down. He sips. Tiny, frugal sips. Save water for what needs it.

  He slings his leg over the crossbar of his bike, clicks up the power and pushes off. The laden bike wobbles but he finds his balance. Another song from the ocarina. The Carnotaur falls in beside him.

  Kid and dinosaur head up the long straight highway, toward the heat shiver, and beyond, the dark line of the mountains.

  2

  The dino bounced off the top of the Dodge Ram, dashed the length of the Winnebago’s roof, hurdled the hood, feathers and quills rattling, and lit out for the night market in the parking lot of the dead Costco.

  Tif chased after it. Timursaur: Timurlengia eutoica. Length: 4 metres. Height: 2 metres. Weight: 200 kilos. Top speed: 45 kph. He had the numbers. He had the numbers of all the deadstock at Dino!Dino! And the numbers said, you ain’t ever catching Timurlengia eutoica. But still he ran, lungs burning, because a Timursaur loose in a market is a thing that cannot be. Because he’s the one who let it slip past him in the press between the raptor-arena and the holding pen. Because he was a wrangler, a wannabe buckaroo, and a buckaroo is brave and strong and able. Yes, sir.

  Shouts went up. Rogue dino! We’ve got a rogue dino!

  Lights behind him threw his shadow across the scrubby concrete. A Hilux swung out to match pace with him. The horn blared. He glanced over. The tinted window was down. The mirror visor of the Silver Clown turned to him from behind the wheel.

  ‘Can you drive?’

  ‘Ain’t legal.’

  ‘Can you drive?’

  ‘I can drive.’

  ‘Drive.’

  He slipped behind the wheel. The Silver Clown swung up onto the truck bed. The showground floods struck glints and brilliants from her lamé suit. Tif checked dash, pedals. An old gas model, not self-drive but automatic gear shifts. He could drive this. He slapped the handle forward, floored the pedal. Spun the wheels. The dino was all the way across the grass-pocked, patchy blacktop of the old highway. He pumped the horn to warn the market people, who browsed unconcerned from car to car, truck to truck under the floodlights, picking up an heirloom tomato, a box set of DVDs, seven skeins of embroidery thread. The Timursaur was at the fence now. It could climb. Tif could not. Up it went, claws hooking the wire mesh, in two bounds.

  The fence loomed. The Silver Clown banged on the roof.

  ‘A la derecha!’

  At the last instant Tif swung the pickup. In the rearview cameras he saw the Timursaur perch a moment on the fence, then leap.

  No need to warn people now. They fled as the dinosaur crashed down among them. They screamed as it trumpeted, then leapt onto the roof of a retro VW camper. They shrieked as it loped across the tops of the parked cars. Windows shattered, roofs bowed. They scattered. Some carried guns—most carried guns, this was gun country—but in the panic, in the darkness, among the moving bodies that didn’t know where was safe, where was danger, what was going to happen, they didn’t dare draw them. Rogue dinosaur on the rampage. Rogue dinosaur in the night market.

  The Silver Clown leaned around the back of the cab to bellow through the window. Tif saw his face reflected in her helmet visor. Deadly cheekbones, big eyes, curly hair. Terror.

  ‘Fucking. Drive. Chavo.’

  He drifted the pickup through the open gates. The Hilux grazed license plates with a HiAce, tailgate down and laden with military miniatures. He bounced the heel of his hand off the horn. The Silver Clown cried warnings and obscenities like a prophet of apocalypse.

  ‘Where is it?’ Tif shouted. Gunshots. Flat, fast, panicky.

  ‘That way,’ Tif and the Silver Clown shouted as one. Tif slid the pickup into a cross aisle. Buyers and vendors dove for safety between the parked cars.

  ‘If some gun-happy cholo shoots it…’ the Silver Clown yelled. Then Tif spotted the Timursaur running a line of market cars, leaping roof to roof.

  ‘Get me behind it!’ the Silver Clown ordered. Her lamé clothing fluttered. Tif pulled in on the Timursaur’s spined heels. His wheels crushed night market wares laid out on groundsheets and blankets. Car parts, bottles and cutlery. Craft pots. Vegetables and smokables. The Timursaur was running out of road; he was running out of road. The Timursaur saw it too.

  ‘Hold on!’ He swung the pickup through another crossway onto the main drive. He had read the dino true. It landed three metres ahead of the pickup, headed for the gas station and beyond that, the house roofs and garden furniture of Santa Rosa.

  It could not be allowed to reach suburbia.

  The open space gave opportunity for gunslingers. Hard flat snapping sidearm shots. Tif’s side mirror exploded in shards of glass and plastic.

  ‘Mierda!’ the Silver Clown swore, ducking behind the cab.

  Men in hats fired big handguns from the cover of the parked SUVs. Tif sucked in his lips and crashed the pedal. The pickup surged forward. The Silver Clown crouched, balanced, spinning the neural lariat.

  The Timursaur heard the thing on its heels, dodged right. Into a bullet. It gave a high-pitched shrill and spun. A second shot took it through the neck. The Timursaur reeled, stood stunned, shocked. In that instant, the Silver Clown struck. She dropped the neural leash around its neck and whipped the free end to a cleat.

  ‘Get between them!’

  Tif stood on the pedal. In the same instant, the Silver Clown hit the remote. The Timursaur spasmed, kicked as three tasers’ worth of volts hit it. Went down. The pickup slewed toward the felled dinosaur. Steer into the skid. Like the Skulls and Bones taught you. Eyes wide, Tif gritted his teeth, whipped the wheel. The back end went out, the pickup pivoted around the front wheels and came to a halt a lariat-length from the dazed Timursaur. The Silver Clown jumped clear as the shock lariat sliced across the rear of the pickup.

  A wedge of men in hats, with guns, advanced up the parking lot.

  ‘Stop them,’ the Silver Clown said.

  ‘They’ve got guns!’

  ‘Be sweet.’

  ‘Be what?’

  The Silver Clown knelt at the side of the fallen Timursaur. Tif jumped from the cab and walked slowly toward the armed men, hands high, palms open.

  ‘We’re with the rodeo!’ Behind the armed men, the people of the night market osmosed from between the cars. ‘We can take care of this.’

  ‘Like you did?’ a man in a hat shouted. ‘Look at this. Look at it!’

  ‘Please, we know what we’re doing.’

  ‘Someone owes us!’ shouted another man in a hat.

  ‘Dino!Dino! will cover it.’ Tif wasn’t sure about that. There was insurance. Had to be. Didn’t there?

  The men stopped but did not re-holster their guns.

  ‘Tif,’ the Silver Clown called. ‘Come here.’

  He heard an unfamiliar softness in her voice. It scared him.

  The Silver Clown knelt in a pool of dark, iron blood. The Timursaur lay on its side, unconscious, the neural leash around its neck. Blood pumped from a deep neck wound. Dinosaur physiology was alien from mammals’ but Tif could see that in any living thing this was a deadly wound. Still he asked, ‘Could the veterinarians…’

  ‘They could not,’ the Silver Clown said.

  ‘Is there anything we can do?’

  ‘Only one,’ the Silver Clown said.

  Tif crouched in the blood and reached out to stroke the soft, feathery down. The Silver Clown knocked his hand away.

  ‘She’s still live!’ she hissed. She slipped off the lariat and found the yellow tag hidden in the down of its armpit. She took off a glove. Her fingers danced over the tag. It beeped and flashed red.

  ‘But its microbiome…’

  ‘Get clear. You have fifteen seconds.’

  Tif scrabbled seven steps to his left.

  ‘More,’ the Silver Clown said. She backed five metres from the twitching Timursaur, which was slowly surfacing from the shock. The armed men came around the pickup and hesitated, uncertain, unsettled by the blood, by the sheer presence of the dino—a thing they likely had only ever seen on a screen—by the beeping thing on the Timursaur’s side, by the flashing red light.

  ‘No closer,’ the Silver Clown said. ‘Unless you want to end up in the Late Cretaceous.’

  The beeping stopped. The light locked. The Timursaur vanished. Gone into the Cuando. The tag fell to the ground. The Silver Clown scooped it up, wiped off the blood and folded it back into her motley.

  ‘Tif, conmigo. I’ll drive.’

  ‘Hey what about…’ a third gunman shouted. The Silver Clown turned her visor to him. He took a step back. Silver Clowns were legend, were perilous, were all the danger and glamour and chaos of the rodeo.

  ‘Nuestro trabajo está hecho aqui.’

  She drove. Tif didn’t think she was any better a driver than him.

  * * *

  Arcadio, the pen-jefe, came with Tif as far as the golden doors.

  ‘Go up with me?’ Tif asked.

  ‘Best not.’

  ‘I’d like…’

  ‘You’ll have help,’ Arcadio said. Then the doors slid open and Tif stepped into the elevator.

  The elevator was gold. And gold was the vision that greeted Tif when the doors opened and he stepped into the PalaeoBowl’s Golden Circle. A paradise in glass and gilt, high above the hot sand of the ronda. Club spaces, private booths, guest boxes: gold. Gold too the beer taps, the lamps and light fittings and sockets. The buttock-plump leather sofas. Even the glass, tilted outward at the top to eliminate reflections and allow unrestricted views of the ring: gold.

  Then the Guest Services host, hurrying as fast as her gold-and-white boots would allow, stepped between the gawping apprentice wrangler, smelling of the shit of the pens, and golden glory.

  ‘You can’t be here,’ she said.

  ‘I’m meeting…’

  ‘Next level,’ she said.

  ‘But it stopped…’

  ‘This ain’t for you people,’ she said through the narrowing gap of the closing elevator doors. The elevator ascended. The doors opened and he stepped into the lobby of the CEOs’ office.

  He knocked.

  As he waited, Tif wondered: if the Golden Circle was a vision of glammy paradise, how much more shiny must be the offices of Barton and Luella Mathers, proprietors of the Santa Rosa PalaeoBowl and the Dino!Dino! Rodeo?

  The Silver Clown opened the door.

  ‘Entra.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’m your abogada, chavo. Someone has to speak for you. There are things a Silver Clown can say.’

  How much more shiny? Not at all. Not even close. Dino! Dino!’s office was a plain suspended-ceiling, fluorescent- lit box at the rear of the stadium. Metal shelving for those files that still needed paper, stationery, printers. A water cooler. A broad, workmanlike desk, with two executive chairs side by side. Behind them, the room’s only remarkable feature: a ceiling-height portrait of Barton (short) and Luella (lanky), side by side against a chorus of dinosaurs beneath a boiling sky of judgement. Above, behind all, hoverin’ Jesus, loving arms outspread. All this in a heavy crusty gilt frame.

  After ten minutes—Tif restless, fidgeting, the Silver Clown sitting silently, hands on her thighs, hardly even seeming to breathe—Barton and Luella arrived. Tif stood—the home had given him manners, if little else. The Silver Clown remained seated, silent and unmoving. Barton and Luella took their seats before their respective portraits.

  ‘We love our employees,’ Luella said. She sat back in her chair, smiled. ‘Truly. We think of them—of you—as family. Like it says over the gate. The Greatest Family Show in History. But…’

  She glanced across at Barton, who leaned forward, fingers interlaced on the desk.

  ‘But this is a hot sticky mess, I say, a hot sticky mess.’

  Luella gave Tif a pitying look.

  ‘Have you any idea of the insurance liability?’ Barton continued. ‘Egregious, I say. Egregious.’

  ‘Sr Tamim is aware of this,’ the Silver Clown said abruptly. Barton recoiled a hair, two hairs. Such was the mystique of the Silver Clowns.

  ‘There were at least five good rodeos left in that timur,’ Luella said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Tif said. ‘What more…’

  ‘Without Sr Tamim I wouldn’t have been able to get the Timursaur out of the parking lot,’ the Silver Clown cut in. Light glinted from her helmet: a look to Tif. Say nothing.

  ‘Without him it wouldn’t have gotten out of the pen in the first place,’ Barton blustered.

  ‘We don’t deal in what ifs,’ the Silver Clown said. ‘Can’t. Craziness. There are no alternatives.’

  There are no alternatives, everyone murmured. First rule of the B2T2, leave no dangling timelines.

  ‘It had to go back,’ the Silver Clown said.

  ‘It would have been better…’ Barton said.

  ‘If it hadn’t been here. We made—Sr Tamim and I—made the best of a bad situation. The good old boys shot it, Barton. Shot it.’

  Luella made a small twitching shiver. Pearls gleamed in her earlobes.

  ‘I’m sorry, son, but you understand I can’t do anything but let you go,’ Luella said.

  ‘Should have been a lot more,’ Barton said. ‘A lot. But…’

  Again Tif caught the glint of the Silver Clown’s visor. Take it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Tif said. ‘Thank you.’

  The Silver Clown nodded.

  ‘Count yourself lucky,’ Barton said.

  The Silver Clown stood. Tif left the office. He was sure Jesus of the Dinosaurs looked a fuck you at him as the Silver Clown closed the door.

  * * *

  They gave him a cardboard box for his things. All his things were in his tent, in the contract workers’ site outside the PalaeoBowl. They made him take the box anyway. It was part of the show.

  He carried the box of shame past the dino pens. The Spinosaurus with its tiger-stiped dorsal sail, the Ankylosaurus slowly swishing its clubbed tail. The big herbivores in their geo-fenced enclosure. To each he said his private goodbye and gave a public parting nod. Last of all the big T, shining star of Dino!Dino!

 

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