Old Bones

Troy had taken a break from his DinosaurPark to build hurricane chimes. He had hauled the empty steel oil drums home in the back of his pick-up truck from the marina where he worked in the summer as a welder. He threaded heavy chains through holes drilled in the bottoms and hung them from a tree made of old I-beams salvaged from the steel mill after it closed and all the jobs had gone to Tijuana.

"I don't know if I get it," Gus said. He had dropped by to see Troy about some firewood, and Troy had taken him out behind the house, past the dinosaurs, to the top of the ridge that ran behind his cabin. Despite a stiff breeze, the heavy drums hung silent and still from the end of their chains. Troy took two cans of Labatt’s Blue out of the pockets of his green plaid work jacket and handed one to Gus. They opened the cans, and sucked up the foam before it overflowed onto their hands. With yellowed fingers, they rolled cigarettes from dark blue pouches of Drum tobacco, licking the papers before they pinched the excess tobacco from the ends.

"What don’t you get?" Troy asked, the smoke billowing out with his words. "They’re like wind chimes, only they're so big it'll take a hurricane to move them." Cigarette held between his lips, he gave one of the drums a hard push, and they careened into each other as melodiously as a car crash. "It's like a warning system," he shouted over the noise.

"Yeh, but by then your cabin will have blown away."

"Yes, I know, that’s the irony. It’s art." Sometimes Troy thought Gus had done too much acid in the sixties. The steel drums slowed and the noise subsided; a slight echo bounced off the ridge on the other side of the road. Gus sucked on his cigarette and nodded slowly as if he was beginning to get it.

They walked back to the house following the path that Troy had worn by dragging the materials for the hurricane chimes. "You not doing the dinosaurs anymore?" Gus asked.

"Of course I am, I just thought I’d do something different for a change." And really although he was happy with the chimes, he was looking forward to getting back to the dinosaurs.

It had been a good fall. Almost too good. The warm weather had meant an extra week of work at the marina. He'd been getting worried that they'd never lay him off. He had a lot of work to do before the snow came, and building the chimes had put him behind schedule.

The path took them past the brontosaurus eating the last yellow leaves from a Manitoba Maple. Troy could never look at his dinosaurs without his heart swelling with pride, and this one was his favourite. It was also his biggest. All the dinosaurs were life-sized, built entirely to proportion, and constructed exclusively out of scrap iron.

He spent his summers driving the back roads in his rusty pick-up truck looking for scrap. It had been easy at first, but he had pretty much exhausted the scrap heaps of the local farmers. He was finding he had to go further and further afield to find what he needed. The closed steel mill had been good - the owners had stripped it of most of its equipment, but there had been a goldmine out by the rail tracks - ancient stuff that had been torn out in the last refitting in the boom times of the sixties. Cogwheels, bits of presses, all waiting to be welded into dinosaur bones.

Gus crushed his empty beer can between his hands and shoved it into his pocket. Troy did the same but tossed it instead into one of the piles of scrap behind the shed. He went into the cabin and brought back two more cans, and they popped them open leaning against Gus's half ton.

Troy was the dark one of the two, although these days the long black curls of his ponytail were streaked with grey. Gus's ponytail, while thinner than it used to be, was as blond as ever. They had joked once how well they had matched their spouses. Troy and Jessica dark, Gus and Sara fair. Troy wondered what they looked like now, and somehow couldn't imagine them aging like himself and Gus with ever-spreading crowsfeet. In his mind, they would always be the same.