JM Huscher​
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Brontosaurus
 
 
1.
 
My fingers curled around Danny's trachea like a house fire collapsing. I remember the sound of him choking on his own laughter while my scalp oozed bloody from where he had ripped a fistful of my hair out. His sister was screaming at both of us, but I kept squeezing until I could see him afraid of me.
          I was 15. A wiry little thing with bony wrists and ankles. Not at all built for fighting, which made me a target. Danny had 50 pounds on me and took me for an easy mark, maybe. I’d surprised myself by getting the best of him. I remember thinking he’d leave me alone after that, but I was wrong. It got worse.
          Later that year he lunged at me in geometry class with the sharp end of a compass in a white-knuckled grip, but the worst of it was this unshakeable hollow feeling stuck to his name.
          Danny was the last time I ever took a swing at someone. 30-some years ago now, but I can still hear the sound of his laugh sneaking out through my grip.
 
2.
 
Tried to put a bunch of that shit behind me when I became a dad. Awash in my not knowing what to do, I’d resort to doing the stuff I had seen or heard of parents doing. I tried reading bedtime stories to my boys on and off these last two years or so. It was in some parenting blog that referenced a scientific study on one thing or another and so I figured sure, let’s give it a go.
          ​At first the boys would fall asleep mid-chapter or we’d have to go backwards or stop for context. Then I had to ad lib an ending for Harry Potter book four, in which Cedric fainted in the graveyard or hurt his shoulder or something, but ended up being a tri-wizard co-champion with Harry. Sometimes I’d love the book (Winnie-the-Pooh or Stuart Little), but it couldn’t hold their attention.
          Sometimes I’d tell them other stories. No book at all. They like the one about how, in middle school, I was tasked with instructing my Hungarian classmates English pronunciation. They giggle at the girl who said “tooze broosh” instead of “toothbrush”. They liked the one about my falling into a lake during a litter cleanup day. Not much for them to sink their teeth into in the story of how I met their mother. How the power went out that night and she got all of my Star Trek references.
          I started telling them stories from history. Silly President McKinley trying to prove how strong he was by doing his inaugural address without a coat (and then catching pneumonia). Walt Whitman seeing a typo in a newspaper and then spending most of the civil war writing letters for soldiers. The Carlisle Indian Industrial school’s lasting mark on the game of football.
          ​Of all of these, the only one they have ever asked for on repeat was the Bone Wars. 

3.
 
I was a shy kid. Tried to plan my answers to questions ahead of time, so OK. If I ever get asked, I’d think to myself, My favorite dinosaur is the Brontosaurus.
          I thought about the ankylosaur, but he was hard to love, perpetually cowering in defensive posture. And harder to draw. There were playground rumors that Triceratops was so dumb it had a second brain for its butt. You’re thinking velociraptor, but the ones from the movie were Utah Raptors. Velociraptor was the size of a chicken. T. Rex ate carrion like a vulture. Dilophosaurus and stegosaurus were always pictured hungry and circling–predator and prey backed up into a corner. You could almost smell the inevitable blood spill.
          ​Brontosaurus took up two whole pages in my science book by itself. I imagined that something so big must have lived for a thousand years, and back then I wanted to live forever.
          ​Brontosaurus. He was so big, he never had to fight.
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4.
 
This is not how I told it to the boys, but this is more or less how it lives in my head.
          Othniel Marsh was Yale-educated and the more methodical of the two. Edward Cope was independently wealthy and impulsive. After the civil war, the two of them began competing over dinosaur fossils in the American West.
          The Bone Wars start with Marsh publicly shaming Cope, pointing to the reconstruction of Elasmosaurus bones in which Cope had placed the head on the wrong end of the skeleton. Cope forked over the cash to try and buy up any remaining copies of the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia journal where Marsh had published the article, but it was too late.
          ​It got worse from there. Marsh used wealthy connections to bribe Cope’s workers, paying them to ship fossil samples to him instead of their employer. Cope paid workers to spy on Marsh and blew up dig sites with dynamite to keep Marsh from finding anything. They burned through cash, lost in their own self-destructive, labyrinthine battles.
          When Cope died, he willed his remains to the University of Pennsylvania, with the specific intention of having his brain measured posthumously. His final challenge to Marsh was to do the same. Even dying couldn’t pull him from the fight. Whoever’s brain is bigger wins, I guess.
            You have to tell it this way. Methodical and calculated. Bore them with it if you can. Anything to keep them from kicking at each other. These boys will shove their ear right up to the other one’s mouth just so they can fight over the sound of breathing, I swear to god.
 
5.
 
I was seventeen. Back living with my parents again.
          ​A neighbor boy who hated me for reasons I still do not understand visited our driveway with a can of black spray paint. He left thick lines on square letters f-a-g-g-o-t. He had been deliberate with each concrete-staining stroke. Left the empty Rustoleum can in our driveway like awful punctuation.
          We barely knew each other, but I had a reputation for writing my name in softer cursive, and the boys here were more interested in flattened knuckles and knowing who stood where. He was waiting across the street when I came outside and picked up the empty aerosol can. Standing in the grass with his arms crossed over his chest. Soft hair falling into his eyes, pushed there by the breeze. He yelled across the street at me, asking if I wanted to do something about it. A thin voice, sharpened.
          I said nothing. Tucked my chin against my chest. Look at how it’s just glancing off you, J. Sticks and stones, J.
          This and a hundred other times. Different boys. Different words. I said nothing. Every skinny boy knows this pattern; trying to dodge. Learning to let them say it, whatever it is. I made myself small, cowering. Smaller target. I didn’t always get it right.
 
6.
 
I don’t want for them the childhood that I had.
          I drew for myself, on the first trip home from the hospital (that car seat secured and checked a thousand times in the back seat of the Subaru), a hard line on ever lifting a hand against this boy. I spent so much on what I would not become that I sometimes couldn’t imagine myself as anything bigger than the lack of violence. What am I to do when he won’t eat? When he won’t sleep? When the second one arrives and they both seem to live and breathe antagonism.
          You try whatever you can, because you don’t know. You end up telling your kids a bedtime story about two paleontologists who can’t get along not because of that Dinosaur Train show or because one has been flipping through a book on dinosaurs or because the other has been sleeping with a T. Rex stuffie, but because you don’t know what else is left.
          Their favorite part of the story is when, somewhere in the middle of all of it, in 1879, Marsh started to piece together a massive skeleton from Wyoming. At some point, he reached for the wrong skull. Maybe in a rush. Maybe careless. You really need to play this part of the story up a bit. Paint the scene. It was some version of the same mistake he made with Elasmasourus. But this time the bones was much larger. He named the skeleton Brontosaurus Excelsus. The noble thunder lizard.
          ​24 years later, paleontologist Elmer Riggs discovered the mistake. He determined that the Brontosaurus fossil was actually an Apatosaurus, a genus Marsh himself had already named in 1877. Since Apatosaurus was older, it won the naming rights. From that point on, there was no Brontosaurus.
          And yet.
          They know this part of the story, but they always lean in just a bit.
          ​There it was in the coloring book. Named on the placard in a museum. Label on a rubber toy. In 1989, the USPS chose four dinosaurs to put on a stamp. Pteranodon, Tyrannosaurus, Stegosaurus, and, 86 years into the myth, a pair of tall sauropods emerging from a forest, their long curved necks extending up into the pale blue and a single word in white text below them: Brontosaurus.
          ​The boys feel like they are being let in on a secret. They get to be smarter than the post office, which, at seven, feels like a pretty big deal.
 
7.
 
I don’t remember when, but it was probably summer. A long day with too much sun made longer by the lack of school and a thick cloud of boredom. It was probably something of mine, broken. Maybe a baseball card bent. Robin Yount with those blue stirrup socks, looking off to the left with a bat over his shoulder. The new horizontal distortion of a clean fold running across his chest. You can’t do that. You can’t do that to Robin Yount. That’s mine.
          Closed fist to the back and then my brother turned, his mouth contained the silent beginning of a scream. I can still see it. I hate that I can still see it. In my hand, Robin Yount was still waiting for that fastball high and inside, because they never pitched that guy clean. Sure there’s a fold, but you don’t drop a short knock into shallow right for your 3,000th career hit by letting that sort of thing slow you down.
          I never understood it until deep into adulthood. A dozen axioms. Shit rolls downhill. Hurt people hurt people.
          I never wanted to be that way. Rubbed my knuckles for days after hitting someone across the jaw for the first time. Whose hands are these? I kept thinking. Long after they stopped aching I kept running my thumb hard against the top of them, trying to rub out a stain.
          Whose hands are these?
          It was so easy to imagine that they might not be mine. Someone else’s mistake. The wrong bones on the wrong skeleton.
 
8.
 
After a century of Brontosaurus’ taxonomic exile, in 2015, Emanuel Tschopp, Octávio Mateus, and Roger B.J. Benson published a study in PeerJ titled “A specimen-level phylogenetic analysis and taxonomic revision of Diplodocidae (Dinosauria, Sauropoda)”. Having reexamined the fossils of Apatosaurus, scrutinizing every vertebra and femur with fresh eyes, they found enough variation to justify a second genus within that collection of bones. They gave this new dinosaur an old name.
          Brontosaurus.
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9.
 
You always give in too easily, she said.
          So I told her about the electricity in my fist the first time my closed fist met someone’s jaw bone. I told her about the sound of Danny choking. There’s an almost magnetic pull to that sort of power, but then it echoes in a feedback loop until you feel yourself drowning in the regret.
          Backing down was always harder, I said. But if you never do it, you won’t have anything left when it really matters.
          I still get scared of a lot of things, I said. But you have to save something. You have to save enough to leave the alcoholic ex in the dust and not look back. Enough to let go of a distorted dream. Enough to recognize that you can’t pry the hatred out of someone else’s tight grip and enough to let them hold it. Enough to carry all your shit down a flight of stairs and into the back of a tiny Uhaul trailer. Enough to support a kid on a $15-an-hour job, burning student loan money on diapers. Enough to pick your tired self up again. Every day.
          ​Even when I was little, I was scared. We used to make-believe we were dinosaurs in the yard, and I was the only kid who picked the big, dumb tree-eater. They’d scream and claw at each other, pulling their arms into their T-shirts to give themselves tiny raptor arms. I’d climb to the top of the slide and just watch. They could name me or not. I’ve been here all along. Big as a Brontosaurus. I never wanted to fight

 

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I hold an MA in Fiction from UC Davis and have published fiction, narrative nonfiction, and essays in over 25 magazines and journals, including Bayou Magazine, Writing on the Edge, Cobalt Review, and Los Angeles Review. My work, which blends honest introspection with richly detailed storytelling, has earned a fellowship from Writing by Writers, the Elliot Gilbert Prize for Fiction, Writer of the Year from the Omaha Entertainment Awards, and was runner-up for the Maurice Prize in Fiction.
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