Everywhere were vast low-lying tents of plastic covering creations that only in time would Roy reveal. I didn’t dare look.
Out in the middle of it all a barebone skeleton held a note, frozen, on the air. It read:
CARL DENHAM!
That was the name of the producer of King Kong.
THE CITIES OF THE WORLD, FRESHLY CREATED, LIE HERE UNDER TARPAULINS WAITING TO BE DISCOVERED. DO NOT TOUCH. COME FIND ME.
THOMAS WOLFE WAS WRONG. YOU CAN GO HOME AGAIN. TURN LEFT AT CARPENTERS’ SHEDS, SECOND OUTDOOR SET ON THE RIGHT. YOUR GRANDPARENTS ARE WAITING THERE! COME SEE! ROY.
I looked around at the tarpaulins. The unveiling! Yes!
I ran, thinking: What does he mean? My grandparents? Waiting? I slowed down. I began to breathe deeply of a fresh air that smelled of oaks and elms and maples.
For Roy was right.
You can go home again.
A sign at the front of outdoor set number two read: FOREST PLAINS, but it was Green Town, where I was born and raised on bread that yeasted behind the potbellied stove all winter, and wine that fermented in the same place in late summer, and clinkers that fell in that same stove, like iron teeth, long before spring.
I did not walk on the sidewalks, I walked the lawns, glad for a friend like Roy who knew my old dream and called me to see.
I passed three white houses where my friends had lived in 1931, turned a corner, and stopped in shock.
My dad’s old 1929 Buick was parked in the dust on the brick street, waiting to head west in 1933. It stood, rusting quietly, its headlights dented, its radiator cap flaked, its radiator honeycomb-papered over with trapped moths and blue and yellow butterfly wings, a mosaic caught from a flow of lost summers.
I leaned in to stroke my hand, trembling, over the prickly nap of the back-seat cushions, where my brother and I had knocked elbows and yelled at each other as we traveled across Missouri and Kansas and Oklahoma and…
It wasn’t my dad’s car. But it was.
I let my eyes drift up to find the ninth greatest wonder of the world:
My grandma and grandpa’s house, with its porch and its porch swing and geraniums in pink pots along the rail, and ferns like green sprinkler founts all around, and a vast lawn like the fur of a green cat, with clover and dandelions studding it in such profusion that you longed to tear off your shoes and run the whole damned tapestry barefoot. And—
A high cupola window where I had slept to wake and look out over a green land and a green world.
In the summer porch swing, sailing back and forth, gently, his long-fingered hands in his lap, was my dearest friend …
Roy Holdstrom.
He glided quietly, lost as I was lost in some midsummer a long time back.
Roy saw me and lifted his long cranelike arms to gesture right and left, to the lawn, the trees, to himself, to me.
“My God,” he called, “aren’t we—lucky?”
7
Roy Holdstrom had built dinosaurs in his garage since he was twelve. The dinosaurs chased his father around the yard, on 8-millimeter film, and ate him up. Later, when Roy was twenty, he moved his dinosaurs into small fly-by-night studios and began to make on-the-cheap lost-world films that made him famous. His dinosaurs so much filled his life that his friends worried and tried to find him a nice girl who would put up with his Beasts. They were still searching.
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sp; I walked up the porch steps remembering one special night when Roy had taken me to a performance of Siegfried at the Shrine Auditorium. “Who’s singing?” I had asked. “To hell with singing!” cried Roy. “We go for the Dragon!” Well, the music was a triumph. But the Dragon? Kill the tenor. Douse the lights.
Our seats were so far over that—oh God!—I could see only the Dragon Fafner’s left nostril! Roy saw nothing but the great flame-thrown smokes that jetted from the unseen beast’s nose to scorch Siegfried.
“Damn!” whispered Roy.