The Dinosaur Chronicles (25 page)

Jackson dug into his trouser pockets and dropped nine one-dollar bills to the Great Aribo’s magic Persian carpet.

The crowd hushed.

The clown moved closer. “Please,” he whispered to Jackson. “Don’t do this. Pick up the money.”

Then Jackson grinned a grin I’d never seen before, and a cold chill ran down my back. “I want to see
nine
, clown. Let me see
Nine!
”

To the gasps of the audience, the Great Aribo backed up, reached into the bucket and slowly pulled out an eighth white ball.

A single trickle of sweat ran down the Great Aribo’s brow as he launched the red ball, and soon all nine spheres orbited in a whirl of trajectories I doubted even a computer could track. I glanced at Jackson as the Great Aribo juggled the nine balls and I saw Jackson’s eyes narrow in concentration. It was like he wasn’t even listening as Aribo counted off the cycles: “Seven! … Eight! ... Nine!”

The crowd applauded the finish, but it was an uneven applause, as a newfound nervousness had gripped the watchers.

Jackson peeled off two fives and dropped them to the carpet.

I heard a woman in the audience go “Oh!” and a male voice say, “What’re you worried about? It’s all an act. The kid’s probably a plant.”

I tugged on Jackson’s sleeve. “No, Gil. Leave him alone.”

The Great Aribo stepped forward again. This time I saw wrinkles at the edges of the man’s eyes and deep furrows under the greasepaint. “Please. Pick up your money. Don’t do this to me!”

Jackson laughed. Laughed right in the man’s face. He said, “Show me Ten, clown! Show me you’re the Great Aribo!”

The Great Aribo staggered back, bent down and fumbled in the bucket. When he pulled out the ninth white ball, the crowd grumbled among itself, sensing the wrongness without being able to put a name to the wrongness.

Aribo balanced the red and four whites in his throwing hand, five whites in his feeding hand. He licked his lips and began.

Darkness had long fallen, and the high-gloss wooden balls glistened in the glow of the midway lights. They flickered as they danced from hand to hand and twirled as they passed through the tall arc of their orbit. The Great Aribo’s performance remained perfect, as no ball dropped, though as he announced the end of the tenth cycle, the rasp in the clown’s voice added a broken croak to the chilly autumn eve.

The audience had just seen a juggling act unparalleled—perhaps anywhere—yet only a few applauded. Apprehension hung over the crowd like a constellation of dark stars.

Jackson rummaged through his pockets. Grimly he pulled together a ten and a one. Several in the audience yelled “No!” but Jackson dropped the bills to the carpet anyway.

The Great Aribo fell to his knees, and tears tracked across the red and white of his makeup. He looked pleadingly at Jackson. “You have no idea what you’re doing!”

I had to put an end to this. I said to Aribo, “Just drop one of the damned balls and pay him his $33!”

Aribo looked sadly at me, and then I understood:
He could no more drop a juggled ball than the sun fall from the sky.
 

“Eleven!” Jackson snapped and folded his arms. “Gimme Eleven!”

Aribo slowly rose to his feet. He turned to the bucket but glanced back at Jackson. The look on the clown’s face was one of stark terror.

That a tenth white ball even
existed
in the bucket surprised me, but Aribo divided the eleven balls between his hands and wrists, and as he launched the orbs, a worried groan arose from the onlookers.

The balls danced, and they sparkled in the lights, and Aribo’s hands funneled the missiles across and up, and gravity pulled them back to earth, and an eternity later—it seemed—the eleven cycles were complete.

The Great Aribo fell, exhausted, to the carpet. He struggled to rise, but his arms and fingers twitched horribly, and he flopped about, in terrible and grotesque ways, and women cried and men looked off into the night. At last the Great Aribo gathered himself and sat up, and his now-bloodshot eyes looked warily at Jackson.

“This is all I have left,” Jackson said, fingering a ten-dollar bill and two ones. “Eat it, clown!” He flicked the bills to the carpet.

I couldn’t take it any longer. I hooked my leg behind Jackson’s heel and pushed. His eyes glared in surprise, but he tripped over my foot and landed with an “oomph” in the dirt and the gravel. I reached down for the money, but Aribo yelled, “No!”

I looked up, and the Great Aribo shook his head. “You can’t touch it! Only
he
can!”

A man, gray and grizzled and biting down on a cigar long dead, pulled Jackson from the dirt. “Pick up the bills,” the man told him. “Now!”

One thing about Jackson: You couldn’t push him. If he didn’t want to do something, the Devil himself couldn’t make him. He looked the gray-haired man in the eyes and cursed him and his ancestors in vivid Anglo-Saxon I’d only seen written down in a few borrowed and heavily-thumbed paperbacks.

The gray-haired man put his left fist into Jackson’s face and I saw a tooth come flying out.

“Stop!” yelled Aribo. “No violence! It’s done,
so it must be done!
” He rose, trembling, to his feet and staggered to the bucket.

There, he sobbed and collapsed back to the carpet. “I don’t
have
an eleventh white ball!”

Jackson shook himself free of the gray-haired man’s grip and said, through his busted lip, “We can fix that!” He looked around and picked up a quartz pebble, and he wrapped his handkerchief around the stone, and then he tied it once, twice, to make it roughly the same size as the juggling balls. “Here you go, Aribo!” Jackson tossed him the ersatz orb. “Let’s see you do
Twelve!
”

The Great Aribo shook himself, or maybe he just shook, but he gathered the eleven balls and the clothed pebble and stood, trembling, in the middle of the old Persian carpet. From the crowd I heard several prayers and one assertion that Jackson was dead meat.

Then, the Great Aribo began.

I cannot describe to you how long it took for the Great Aribo to empty just his throwing hand. Six missiles rose like roman candles before his sending hand could even begin to funnel the rest into the loop. Time passed in long, fragmented seconds, though that seems contradictory, yet that’s how I remember it: the long tosses, the high arcs, the gleaming wooden balls and the one clothed pebble. At the end of the first cycle, it was the crowd and not Aribo who softly, almost reverently, said, “
One.
” Instinctively, I gripped the hand of the person next to me, as surely the rest of the crowd must have gripped the hands of their neighbors. Only Jackson stood out front, alone, watching the sweat-drenched face of the Great Aribo as the tormented clown kept his missiles flying.

“Two,” the crowd exhaled, and then “Three” and “Four” and “Five.”

The Great Aribo’s knees now shook, violently, and I could not see how the man could stand, and then he fell to his knees, and the crowd moaned “Oh!” but Aribo kept the balls aloft, and not a one struck the carpet as he completed the sixth, seventh and eighth cycles.

Aribo’s hands darted back and forth in unfocusable blurs as he passed the balls along. His lips quivered and the muscles in his neck jumped; he hadn’t blinked at all in many long seconds.

Cycles Nine and Ten passed, and the man whose hand I held gripped with a fury that would have been painful at any other moment.

“Eleven,” the crowd announced as the red ball rose for the final time.

The twelfth cycle commenced, and for the first time I began to hope that the Great Aribo would pull it off. Yes—a few more seconds and Aribo would be done, and then I’d hustle Jackson out of the park before the crowd forgot the clown’s injunction against violence.

But Aribo never finished the twelfth cycle. I’m not sure if the ground opened up, or the sky, or both. I do think it was Jackson’s cloth-covered pebble coursing at the peak of the arc when the lightning struck. I’m not certain, but that’s what I think. The bolt seared several of the balls, burned the Persian carpet to a fine gray dust and sent the Great Aribo and most of the crowd flying through the air. I don’t remember much else about that night. The sirens, the flashing lights, my folks in the hospital room are just stills in a reel of unexposed blackness. There was one casualty, of course: Jackson had been crisped beyond recognition, and though he hadn’t been the most likeable guy around, I still felt sad. He could be nice; for a time that night, he was.

So lightning finally ended the drama. Lightning. I’ve since read that a bolt can strike up to five miles away from the storm in which it is bred. Perhaps that’s so, but I don’t recall any storminess at all that night. In fact, my mind wants to tell me that the sky was clear. I could look it up in the weather records, of course, but why bother? Here’s what I think: I think the magic in the carpet was overused and finally shorted out. Or maybe the genie of the carpet became incensed by Jackson’s demands. Go ahead and laugh. Make up your own explanation.

There’s one more postscript. A few months after the incident, I received a letter from the Great Aribo. He’d addressed it to “The Friend of the Boy Who Died,” care of my high school. In it, he thanked me for trying to help him that night. He also said he had found a new purpose in life as a product promoter on the Midnight Shopping Channel. He couldn’t be the Great Aribo anymore, because while he did know how to juggle, the greatness of his act had lain in the magic of the carpet, now gone. But he confided that, late at night in his apartment, he did still juggle—just a bit—and think about the time he’d kept twelve aloft, all at once.

Afterword

Rejected by
Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine
for being “too sad.” Seriously.

That’s actually a rejection that a writer would frame and hang on his or her wall. It meant that the writer had had an impact on a reader. Which is the point of all writing.

One technical note: In doing the research for this story (and Yes, a decent writer has to do research for pretty much
every
story!), I found that juggling records are, in fact, being kept, and that videos of record-breaking juggles
are
available. After doing the research, I had to go back and make The Great Aribo’s feats even more astounding.

Seriously.

If you’ve reached this page of
The Dinosaur Chronicles
, I thank you and I hope you’ve run across an entertaining diversion or two.

At this point it’s almost a requirement for a writer to say a few words about what inspired him or her to enter The Starving Profession. (Though poets have it even worse.)

The first books that I read, that didn’t have illustrations and were really
books
, were the
Hardy Boys
mysteries. Before then, I couldn’t imagine how anyone could read a story that wasn’t illustrated. I had a vast comic book collection that, Yes, Mom later forced me to cull down to just a few volumes. (We were moving, having boxes shipped, and keeping expenses down was an issue.)

Today, I could buy a retirement home from the values of the originals I threw away. This is not an exaggeration or a joke. Well, maybe a
small
exaggeration.

Later I graduated from the
Hardy Boys
to
Rick Brant
and
Ken Holt
. Much better writing, much better plotting. Years later (as an adult) I discovered
The Three Investigators
books, which had a bizarre charm based on the likely and unlikely interactions of its juvenile protagonists with the Great Adult World. The
Nancy Drew
s, for the most part, I found disappointing, but the
Judy Bolton
series, despite writing shakiness in its early volumes, had an emotional appeal that maintained interest.

As an army brat in Fort Eustis, Virginia, I soon read through all of the science-fiction section of the post library. And all of their Perry Masons, as well. Agatha Christie didn’t do much for me until later in life.

Of the speculative fiction writers that had an impact, Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein must be mentioned, as well as Gordon R. Dickson and his
Dorsai!
series. Much later, the
Uplift War
stories by David Brin inspired, though as a writer (by then) I could tell when Brin was “writing” and “generating word count”—mainly when I got to the points in his novels where I’d say to myself, “Okay, I know what you’re doing. Now get on with the plot.”

Of the individual novels that stay in my mind, the following are of note:
We All Died at Breakaway Station
by Richard C. Meredith,
Sinister Barrier
by Eric Frank Russell and
Sleeping Planet
by William R. Burkett, Jr.
 

Eric Frank Russell is today much underappreciated. If you get a chance to read one of his novels, I urge you to do so.

Will there be a
Dinosaur Chronicles II
? I don’t know. I certainly have enough material to come up with a second volume. Much depends on you, dear reader, and on your reaction to this collection. The publishers do provide a feedback mechanism by which you can give voice to your opinion.
 

If you wish to see a
Dinosaur Chronicles II
, please let the ol’ dinosaur know!
 

Sincerely, Joseph M. Erhardt

The greatest resource a writer can have, if one is available, is a writer’s group. Or is it “writers’ group”? The editor in me still debates the question. Nevertheless, having others’ eyes peruse the prose you proffer for praise and peccadillos is a prize of incalculable value, because it is seriously difficult to edit
yourself
. Eventually all dedicated writers
do
learn how to edit themselves, but it is a struggle. Still, not all the skill in the world will help you edit yourself when, for example, your mind keeps supplying missing words that aren’t in your prose, even after you’ve read over a text five times.