Early Man
Interpreters of the photos will likely suspect that she was thrown backward by the thunderous impact of the foot of the 45-foot-tall dinosaur against the gravel. With her hands and feet on the ground, with her stomach to the sky, it will look like she enthusiastically crab-walked backward in a fervent effort to find safety.
In reality, her efforts are decidedly halfhearted. “These poses of yours, Charlie, I don’t think they’re right.” She drops her hips to the gravel, freeing her right hand to point toward the smallish head that tops the smooth S of the long neck of the sauropod shaped out of shotcrete bleached by the sun and sandblasted by the wind in the San Gorgonio Pass. “I think it’s his teeth I should be frightened of, not his toenails.”
“Definitely not, Carrie. For two reasons,” her boyfriend declares. “First, old Dinny here likely developed pretty terminal trench foot tromping through primordial swamps—”
Charlie pauses expectantly. Sighing, his girlfriend grimaces as if she’s smelled something truly atrocious. He snaps a picture.
“—and, second, he was definitely a herbivore. Those flat teeth of his didn’t tear into anything tougher than the leaves of prehistoric plants.”
Shaking her head, Carrie stands. She starts to slap her hands against the front of her shorts, but then decides to dust them on the back of his, instead.
“Hey!” he protests. “What’s with the public spanking?”
“It’s your punishment for making me feel dirty.”
“Is something wrong?”
Carrie wants to shout that–if her interpretation of some of the photos she has discovered scattered throughout Charlie’s boxes in the process of moving in together is right–something is, indeed, wrong. Instead, she whispers, “Nothing.”
The man looks thoughtfully at the woman for a moment. Married and divorced before he had hit 30, he has learned through personal experience the painful lesson that nothing tends to translate into something. But that timely understanding of women is in the mind of a man; inevitably, it is overpowered by that timeless fascination for dinosaurs that is in the heart of a boy. Thus, his eyes are destined to drift from the woman to the dinosaur.
“So,” she sighs into the silence, “how long did it take to build Dinny?”
“So long that when Claude Bell started sculpting him, Dinny was still a Brontosaurus. By the time he finished, Dinny was an Apatosaurus, instead.”
“What? Did Brontosauruses go extinct again?”
“Forget extinct. Brontosauruses never really existed,” he explains. “The first fossilized skeleton of an Apatosaurus that the paleontologist O.C. Marsh discovered was missing the head. So, sorting through the piles of spare parts that he had accumulated back at his museum, he simply pulled out one that looked like it fit. By the time he eventually excavated a complete skeleton of an Apatosaurus–one with the head on it–he had become so attached to the picture he had created in his mind that he couldn’t conceive that was what it really looked like. He thought it was a separate species, one he named Brontosaurus. When later paleontologists finally identified the mistake Marsh had made and–decades later–decided to correct it, their rules stipulated that they stick with the scientific classification first published: Apatosaurus. So Brontosauruses never really existed.”
“Nice lecture, professor,” she says. “Especially considering it’s outside your discipline.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” he says. “I think there’s a lesson in this story for all of us, something about the dangers of trying to create a complete picture from incomplete evidence.”
Now, it’s the woman’s turn to look thoughtfully at the man for a moment.
Where the tail of Dinny the Dinosaur touches the rough terrain behind the Wheel Inn in Cabazon, almost 150 feet from his head, an open door reveals a set of stairs to the belly of the beast. Inside, a laminated poster taped to one of the murals of prehistoric creatures painted by the late Mr. Bell illustrates the striking contrast between his interpretations of the fossil record and those of Dinny’s current curators:
Dinosaurs:
A Different View
Creationist scientists think there is
evidence which shows that dinosaurs
and man existed at the same
time. These scientists point to
archeological and anthropological
evidence of descriptions of what seem
to be dinosaurs in recent history…
As the couple climbs the stairs to the gift shop inside Dinny, a series of such slapped-together posters cite Scripture to support the creationist theory–based on a literal interpretation of the Biblical Book of Genesis–that the Earth is only about 6,000 years old.
“I was wrong,” Charlie whispers, contemplating one of the posters at the top of the stairs.
“About what?” Carrie asks, half-fearing some sort of spontaneous conversion to creationism.
“Apparently, about Dinny being herbivorous.” He theatrically throws his arms wide to encompass the round room that they stand on the threshold of. “Here we are, in the proverbial ‘belly of the beast.’”
“Just like Jonah?” She chuckles.
“Just like Jonah.” Charlie laughs–a little too loudly. “Maybe his great fish is one of those ‘descriptions of what seem to be dinosaurs in recent history’?”
“Indeed, it may be,” intones a booming baritone, startling the couple. It echoes eerily throughout the round room, as the source of the voice is the clerk behind the cash register at the center of the gift shop. “You find that notion funny?”
“No more so than the idea of a creationist gift shop inside of a dinosaur,” Charlie honestly states. Although he was a Midwestern transplant trained to be “Minnesota Nice,” he has since evolved past the point of not articulating uncomfortable truths for the sake of politeness. “Let alone a dinosaur whose interior decorations include dated plaster portraits of early men.” He points to the busts of brutish, hairy humans labeled Cro-Magnon Man–30,000, Neanderthal Man–150,000, and Java Man–400,000 built into the walls of the round room.
“That’s why,” the clerk calmly replies, “we’ve supplemented Mr. Bell’s original lineup with this poster of Piltdown Man. If Mr. Bell had decorated this room a little earlier in the 20th Century, he’d have probably believed the number 500,000 should’ve been below that particular portrait. But—”
“But Piltdown Man never even existed,” Charlie admits.
“That’s right.” The clerk nods. “But evolutionists believed he did–for four decades–based on so-called scientific evidence: a human skull and an orangutan jaw that looked like they fit together, stained brown to make them look fossilized.”
Carrie shakes her head, suddenly understanding that no evidence Charlie–or anyone else–could produce will ever really challenge the belief of the clerk. So she attempts to dissipate the tension. “You know,” she says, “the English words clerk and cleric—”
“—derive from the same term in Latin?” The clerk touches the crucifix around his neck. “Clericus, a man in a religious order.”
“You,” she says, “have faith.”
“I have to,” the clerk declares. “Our world wouldn’t make much sense to me without it.”
Next to the exit, the couple sees a sign. It states that there is a $5,000 fine for sliding down Dinny’s concrete tail.
Charlie chuckles. “Seems like someone who basically believes that The Flintstones was an accurate account of the lives our ancestors should charge a little less for sliding down the tail of a dinosaur. I mean, Fred did that at the start of every episode!”
With that, Charlie pounces onto Dinny the Dinosaur. Crouching atop the tail, he turns to hand his camera to Carrie.
She starts to laugh.
“What?” he asks.
“It’s just that”—she stops to gasp for breath—“if I said to someone that I was about to photograph you in a compromising position, on top of a piece of tail, this is not the picture—”
He smiles. “Sometimes, I suppose, even photographic evidence doesn’t support the pictures we form in our minds.”
“That’s true,” she says. After all, how convincing was the evidence she had found of an earlier man—those photos scattered throughout his boxes? At best, the equivalent to some small, separate piles of fossils—not to a complete skeleton, literally, in their closet.
“You know,” she says, “the clerk was right.”
“About what?” he asks, half-fearing some sort of spontaneous conversion to creationism.
“That you have to have faith,” Carrie declares. “Without it, our world wouldn’t make much sense to me, either.”
Despite the puzzled look on Charlie’s face, she snaps a picture.
A graduate of the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California, Chad Greene is a professor of English at Cerritos College. His writing has appeared in such sadly defunct journals as Art of This, Black Denim Lit, Fewer Than 500, Journal of Microliterature, Literary Orphans, Mojave He[Art] Review, Nanoism, Oblong, Southern California Review, The Southlander, and Stymie.
