Jacob Two-Two and the Dinosaur (2 page)

When Jacob Two-Two finally got out of school late that afternoon, the other kids were waiting for him. But they hadn’t stayed behind to tease him about his British accent. Instead they wanted to be friends. All of them. Even fat Freddy.

Jacob Two-Two was thrilled. Things were working out for him in Montreal at last.
Then it happened
. At the dinner table that night his father announced, “Mummy and I are going to Kenya for two weeks. On safari. But don’t worry. Aunt Ida is coming to stay with you.”

“Oh, no,” Noah groaned.

“Not Aunt Ida,” Marfa said.

“You forget that I’m seventeen now,” Daniel said, insulted. “We don’t need anybody to stay with us. I can look after the others.”

Jacob Two-Two was too sad to say anything.

CHAPTER 2

er name was Aunt Ida, but as far as Jacob Two-Two and his two older brothers and two older sisters were concerned she was the perfectly horrid Aunt Good-For-You. Aunt Good-For-You was their father’s older sister. She never visited the house without bringing the children a gift that was good for them. Say, a quart of her homemade carrot juice. Or a large box of alfalfa sprouts. Or five spools of dental floss. If she brought candy bars, they were sugar-free and made of pressed dates and granola. Before handing them over she would say how lucky they were and how the children of China or India would
be grateful for something so good for them. Thank you, Jacob Two-Two would say, because his mother was watching him closely. Thank you, Aunt Ida. Yum, yum.

On birthdays Aunt Good-For-You usually came with books that would help the children choose a sensible career or improve their table manners or teach them to be very, very nice to everybody, including obvious stinkers.

Aunt Good-For-You, who had never married, had no children of her own. She was thin and tall and wore her gray hair in a bun. She didn’t drink beer or wine or whiskey, which was no good for you, or ever lie down on a sofa to daydream, which was even worse for you.

Immediately after Jacob Two-Two’s parents flew off to Kenya, Aunt Good-For-You opened all the windows to clear the house of the foul smell of Daddy’s cigars. Then she went on a tour of inspection. She took down Daniel’s
Sports Illustrated
bathing beauty calendar, saying it was bad for him, and she did the same with Emma’s poster of Robert Redford, saying it was no good for her. Noah was told he couldn’t play his David Bowie records, which were bad for him, and Marfa was made to do without her red nail polish, which was no good for her. They weren’t
allowed to watch just about everything on TV, because it was too violent. Or read lying down, because it was bad for their eyes. Or eat standing up, because it was no good for their digestion. But the very first night in the house she did promise to read aloud to Jacob Two-Two before he went to sleep. Aunt Good-For-You had brought along the first volume of the
Britannica Junior Encyclopedia
. “Tonight,” she said, “we will begin with the letter A.”

The first Saturday afternoon, sensing unrest in the house, Aunt Good-For-You surprised them, announcing, “I’m willing to take you out tonight for a real treat. Any ideas?”

“Dracula and the Nose-Pickers are playing at the Palace tonight,” Daniel said. “They’re really great! They chop pianos to bits, whack each other over the head with guitars, and spray the crowd with hot pig’s blood.”

“Don’t you think,” Noah asked, “that in view of how violent city life has become it would be good for us to learn something about self-defense?”

“Well, I’m not sure about that,” Aunt Good-For-You said. “Why don’t we take in the new kung fu movie at Cinema V,” Noah asked, “if only for educational purposes?”

“I’m all for a hockey game,” Emma said, but of course she intended to play for the Montreal Canadiens one day.

“Why don’t we eat dinner at the Ritz,” Marfa said, “really pigging it, and then sign Daddy’s name to the bill?”

The last time they had been to the Ritz it was their father who had taken them there for Sunday brunch. As she had lined up at the buffet table for her fifth helping of dessert, Marfa had earned a very dirty look from the waiter. “It’s not for me,” she had said, fluttering her eyelashes. “It’s for my kid brother. My poor parents. It’s very embarrassing for them to take such a greedy-guts to a real restaurant.”

“What would you like to do, Jacob Two-Two?” Aunt Good-For-You asked.

Absolutely anything, Jacob thought, except listen to another page of the
Britannica Junior Encyclopedia
. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said.

“What we are going to do,” Aunt Good-For-You said, “is dine at the Contented Vegetarian Snack Bar.”

Oh, no, Jacob Two-Two thought. Not mock hamburgers again.

“And then,” Aunt Good-For-You said, “we are going to a lecture at the Museum of Fine Arts on ‘The Life of the Dinosaurs.’ The lecture will be illustrated. Now, isn’t that fun?”

Everybody groaned.

But to Jacob Two-Two’s surprise the lecture was better than fun – it was fascinating.

Like him, he learned, dinosaurs had a reputation for being dimwitted. Even so, they had been lords of all life on earth for something like seventy million years. Their name came from Greek and meant “terrible lizards.” In their time, dinosaurs had been gigantic creatures, the largest weighing eighty tons and measuring twenty-seven yards. They had disappeared from the face of the earth about sixty-five million years ago. Nobody knew why for sure. Maybe it was because of their tiny brains, or it could have been due to the fact that other creatures ate their eggs. It was also possible that they had all gotten sick at the same time. Or that there had been a shower of meteorites on earth, wiping them out. But even today their fossils could sometimes be found as far away as Tanzania, in Africa, or as near as
the province of Alberta, in Canada. “Fossil” comes from the Latin
fossilis
, meaning “dug up.”

Some of the dinosaurs had been carnivores, that is to say, eaters of the flesh of other animals. Others had been herbivores, or vegetarians, just like Aunt Good-For-You. The best-known of the giant dinosaurs were the
Diplodocus
,
Brontosaurus
, and
Brachiosaurus
. It was once thought that yet another breed of dinosaur, the
Stegosaurus
, had two brains: a little one in its head and a much larger one at the base of its spine. In 1912 this inspired a poem written by Bert L. Taylor, a columnist for the
Chicago Tribune
. It began:

CHAPTER 3

t seemed like centuries, but actually only two weeks had passed when Jacob Two-Two’s mother and father came home. Happily, they smelled of cigars and champagne and perfume and everything else that was wonderfully bad for you. They had come with gifts, of course. Gifts that weren’t good for children. Real Kikuyu spears and shields for the boys. Tribal necklaces for the girls. Then, opening a cigar box, their father said, “There is also this.”

And out of the cigar box popped what appeared to be a green lizard.

“Oh, no,” Emma said, fleeing in one direction.

“How disgusting,” Marfa said, fleeing in the other direction.

“I found him on the shores of Lake Begoria,” their father said. “We were standing beneath a towering cliff, watching a furious steam jet, maybe twenty feet high. Suddenly the earth rumbled and shuddered, knocking us off our feet. The water jet from the underground stream burbled and bubbled, rising another hundred feet, and out of it shot this curious creature, which landed right on my chest. I smuggled him through customs for you.”

The lizard, or whatever it was, stood in the center of the living-room carpet, looking everybody over.

“Is he ever ugly,” Daniel said.

“Let me take him to my biology class,” Noah said. “I’ll bet my teacher would just love to cut him up.”

“Oh, no you don’t,” Jacob Two-Two said. “Oh, no you don’t! I like him. I’m going to keep him for a pet.”

Then, to everybody’s amazement, the lizard – or whatever it was – raced across the carpet, climbed into Jacob Two-Two’s lap, and sat there, his head dipping slightly to one side.

“I’m going to call him Dippy,” Jacob Two-Two said. “I’m going to call him Dippy.”