August 31, 2003
Roamed the Earth
In the back yard there was a giant stone sticking out of the garden.
“That’s a dinosaur’s footprint,” Ray explained.
“No it’s not.”
“Sure it is,” he said, balancing a checker on the back of his hand. “It has been here since the dinosaurs roamed the earth. They didn’t bother moving it when they built the house – it’s too heavy to move – so they just built the yard around it.”
“It doesn’t look like a dinosaur’s footprint.”
“Sure it does. Look.” He clicked the checker down and walked over to the stone. “This here is where a claw went,” he said, placing a finger on the stone and tracing the outline.
“What kind of dinosaur?’
“I suspect it was a Tyrannosaurus Rex. They were the king of the dinosaurs. Rex means king in Latin.”
“No it doesn’t.”
“Sure it does. Why don’t you ever believe anything I ever tell you?”
“You mom told me not to.”
"Did you move yet?”
“Not yet.”
“Well waiting isn’t going to help you.”
“I’m hungry.”
”She’ll be back soon, and then she’ll cook us something to eat.”
“I want to go home.”
“You go home at ten tonight.”
“I have to go to sleep at nine.”
“Well you can go to sleep on the couch and your parents will wake you up when they come home.”
“Are you going out tonight?”
“Yes.”
Mrs. Franklin came to the screen door.
“How about some spaghetti” Ray said.
“You can cook your own dinner Ray,” she said.
“Ahh, come on ma, lets make it a meal together.”
“I don’t have time. I need to paint.”
Mrs Franklin was an amateur painter of landscapes. She watched television programs that showed how to use a palette knife to make a tree, and the correct way to paint snowcaps on purple mountain ranges. In the living room, above a varnished wooden table, there was a huge, dark painting of mountains and trees that she had done in the German romantic tradition by way of Lakewood Colorado.
Her son, Ray, was a sculptor and a dancer. He was tall, with curly black hair and a close cropped mustache. He would sculpt masks out of black ebony and sell them at crafts fairs in parking lots around the city. He lived in a small apartment on the second floor of his mother’s house, and spent much of his free time in the back yard carving.
They lived in a quiet neighborhood. Their house was two-stories tall, with a large porch and four windows; a design known as the Denver Square. In front there was a small circular garden that Mrs. Franklin had filled with plastic flowers. Roy lived on the second floor, and he would sometimes sit up on the roof above the porch whittling one of his masks with a pocket knife.
There was a missing finger that tied him to the crime scene, but I don’t know which one, and there was a time when it looked like his case might get thrown out of court because the police left the finger in the same refrigerator that they stored their lunches in.
During the trial my father would talk to Mrs. Franklin on the phone and say how sorry he was and was there anything we could do. I never went back to her house for babysitting after that. You’re old enough to have a sitter here, my mother explained.
He was tried and convicted of first degree murder. I would sit in my room and contemplate the idea of it, life in prison. You would be alive, but in a different world. Life in prison meant that you could never walk down the street again or carve a mask in the backyard. How could a person survive that? Would they want to? I would fall asleep at night imagining how I would escape if my room was a cell – how I would roll myself into the smallest point in the room and then vanish, and it could work because life in prison was another dimension, so anything would be possible there.
We fell out of touch. One year the Christmas cards stopped. The house was sold, the plastic garden raised and sown over. Mrs. Franklin died in her sleep. All that remains is the rock in the backyard, and the knowledge that something ancient and dangerous had passed there, but was extinct now.
