Scott T. Hutchison

Petey Rat Tail’s Emporium of Archeological Antiquities

Lately, I’ve felt skin-crawling, goose-bumped with the feeling of being hunted. It makes sense that there’s an angry hunger out there, slithering through primordial forest, hovering in shadows and shallows—intent upon tearing a sinewy hunk outta my ass. But I knew the pitfall traps of this life going in, and all I’ve got to say is, “my teeth are sharp, how ‘bout yours?” I curse the day that somebody gets the drop on me.

Meanwhile, I’m sacrificing my precious time with the modern task of making money in the CE, scorching the air with fossil-fueled exhaust coughs from my rusty van, getting my plastic table set up at the next flea market and the next. Can’t lose time worrying about any angsty feelings spiking in my hypothalamus--I have my own prey to stalk.

“You sure these are genuine, Slick? I ain’t a ol’ man to take, lightly.”

This customer’s a skeptic, one who maybe knows a shade. Time to bowl him over. “Those teeth you’re holding in your hand right there—Angustidens, same era as Megalodon. anywhere from twenty to thirty million years ago. Oligocene and Miocene epochs. A school bus is thirty-five feet long, this behemoth was a tail-slapping forty. You’re holding teeth that ate seals and sea
turtles, hose chompers fought and devoured whales of the genus Livyatan, which of course gave rise to the age-old story of the gi-normous Leviathan. It’s mind-boggling how long those teeth have stood the test of time on this earth--lotta blood passed over those babies. Now I’m sure you know, a fella like you, about how the Great Whites of today swim in all stealthy on their quarry, tearing soft chunks from the victim’s underbelly. But this giant came head on, got that big-wide-toothy mouth open to the size of a granite quarry and he chomped down, crushing skull and fins and bone. This beast didn’t just kill for food, he killed for sport.”

The thin old man hooks his loose hand around his right suspender, adjusts his glasses, shakes the five black teeth in his left hand. “Well, Mr. Petey Rat Tail, they look a mite puny for a Megalodon. Other places, I seen some five, six inches long.”

Wasn’t how I was shining him, but if he has Meg in his head, then so be it--that’s how this bite’s gonna bring home bacon.

“You’re a man who knows his prehistoric sharks. Those big teeth you’re talking about? You aren’t getting those for less than five hundred smackers, depending on condition of enamel, root, serrations and so forth. Some Moroccan specimens go for over two grand. But we’re talking about an extinct, prehistoric megatoothed shark. Same animal, big jaw. Over three hundred teeth in that mouth. Those big ones you’re talking about triangulate out front, for the power-bite, while these smaller razors in the back do the actual slicing and dicing. Picture it: all the raw beast ripping through in that attack—you, sir, have got a hold of something biblical. He’s opening wide and driving into the rib cage of a ten-ton Steller’s Sea Cow, shaking that blubber and crushing bone to smithereens. My God, man, you’ve got primordial death, right in the palm of your hand.” The old coot was making me work, and I was nearly at the end of my Google script. “But I’m not selling any two-thousand-dollar front tooth, no sir, I’m offering you five back teeth—five, mind you--for fifty dollars, and that’s a steal.”

The old guy squinted, first at the Emporium sign, then at me; I watched the familiar wheeler-dealer glint fire up in his eyes. “Thirty.”

With my signature hair style and a name like Petey Rat Tail, I feel like everybody with any sense should be forewarned--regarding me. The possibility of getting taken should be easily visible, like rodent smear marks on subterranean walls. I’m happy to settle on forty, considering I’d purchased the lemon and tiger shark teeth that morning, got ‘em from my usual kid who tide line scooped the sand, down on Venice Beach.

Thing is--and it’s something that’s damn hard to do in this day and age--I made that old man happy. I sold him a visceral story: millions of years of primal predation and sustenance. He’ll go home tonight, and run his fingers along the rough and ocean-polished edges. He’ll check himself in the mirror, holding a spike tooth up to his own canine, finding himself lost in a violent past-- and he will be amazed.

I only book a table at this particular flea market once a month. That puts time in between me and somebody who wants to come back next week and complain about authenticity or being took. Since the meandering shoppers are mostly tourists, moving my show around means they’re usually gone by the time I swing back to any given market, setting up the Emporium sign behind my table wherever I can buy a spot. I’m not territorial about location—just profits. The teeth are a steady sale, and if I send somebody over to Miss Shandy and her jewelry table, then I get a cut of her take on wire-tying a shark tooth into a necklace. Teeth, however I represent and move them, are dependable money makers.

I’m simply a part of a long history of curios and illusions and dime shows. The marveling over exotics has always been with us—as has the pitch to purchase and own something tangible from a semi-unique experience. In olden days, you enter the tent, observe the Alligator Boy, and you’re enraptured by the fabulism and exaggeration of his life-story. They’re waiting for you at the exit. Carnies are hawking at you left and right, selling you proof of the follies you’ve been chasing. You feel the need to purchase a picture to take home. You will show it off like plundered treasure, as if you are a part of that bizarre and harried narrative. No one ever reveals that there was a kid who made his living by having a full pot of glue painted all over his body, allowing it to dry and crack with his movements. In time, he learned how to aggressively hiss for greater effect and takings.

My gaffs keep it simple, easy. I’m not Barnum, sewing an orangutang torso onto some fat salmon—can’t see myself venturing out on the edge of that kind of suckery. But if you want a coprolite—if you have some kind of vital need to own fossilized dinosaur poop—then I’m your bargain. I make regular trips to the dog park where I’ll kindly volunteer to pick up after Great Danes and Saint Bernards, then I’ll add drops of water and a few pinches of granite dust to the droppings before drying out those enormous turds in my dehydrator. I’ve named my dehydrator Barney; I keep Barney heated up out in the work shed because of the moisture-removing airflow and smell.

There’s a wide variety of roasts and boils in my trade. I’ve pot-heated collected pine sap and poured it over dried beetles and dragonflies—once it hardens, the Jurassic Park players are delighted to pay up for DNA trapped in what might be prehistoric amber. It ain’t considered a fake when you’re careful with the script and you use words like “maybe” and “Cretaceous”—
which the real geeks know is when T-Rex and Triceratops and velociraptors did their roaming. And you can take this to the bank: God bless ‘em, Crichton and Spielberg knew that, too.

Gastroliths are also a dinosaur crowd-pleaser, and I sell one or two every time my table’s legs hit the ground. Reptiles, amphibians, and birds all use gizzard stones, but sauropod dinos were big enough to swallow something sizable. Stomach acid and grinding against other rocks made them perfectly smooth. Conveniently for me, a river rock, rolled in a tumbler until the surface texture is near-sea glass silky and then wiped down with a finishing acid—that nature-freebie becomes a gastrolith, and I deliver my provenance: “this gut stone, which the overseas dealer I work with informed me came back into the light in Mongolia; it was found among the remains of a Psittacosaurus, or Parrot-Lizard, who thundered in packs across the earth 120 million years ago. We’ve unearthed more complete skeletons of Psittacosaurus than any other species, which is why these stones are a bit more affordable than rarities like fossil fragments of the feathered oviraptor.”

You tumble out a big, heavy, shiny one, knowing you can earn a pretty penny for your quick touchups. When the mark asks you how big was that there Parrot-Lizard you encourage him to heft and caress the rock, lead him into imagining thirty-tons of organic Transformer-sized monster machine. If he balks at the big stone price, then you pull out smaller ones from beneath your display table, tell him you also have lesser stones thought to have been retrieved from a diplodocus. You let him handle five or six waxy-feel stones, tell him hold on, you’re kind of fond of these and might not want to sell them. That usually sets a wannabe relic-man to salivating. What’s most amazing: selling actual gut stones from the Current Era is even easier on you than the river rock gaff--you don’t show him your entire cache of “dippy-stones,” which you purchase once or twice a year at bulk-bargain price from a Florida slaughterhouse that processes farm-raised ostriches--a small cash exchange with people who don’t mind quietly selling the contents of the gizzards.

My favorite bible verse is Psalm 74:14—“It was you who crushed the heads of Leviathan and gave it as food to the creatures of the desert.” That’s what I do. I brush and crush up this and that, and I feed dreams to all sorts of lonely, dried-up old creatures. I deliver pieces of a nearly-untouchable past for them to pass along to Juniors and III’s and IV’s. There’s booths around here brimming with storied silver sets and dishware that some proud family thought would provide big money for their descendants. They might as well melt down that Victorian cruet set, find some crafty-assed tabletop design to decorate with shards of red and blue toile. Their value pales in comparison to the desires wanting my lines and product.

I provide Algerian-dug meteorites from deep beneath the mysterious sands of the Sahara—pieces of exploding stars and the metal cores of asteroids that burned their way through the heavens down to us. My haughty hand-over-my-chest speech: we are privileged to touch the heart of ancient suns. That’s a line sure to be passed along—attached to the sodalite and blue apatite rocks I bought for cheap on Etsy. They’re semi-porous, and a blow torch does wonders to pock and boil their surface.

I buy obsidian from a guy I know living off-the-grid in Oregon. He makes a few bucks from picking up rocks and sending me sizes and shapes I can work with: lots of sentiment for Native American weapon and tool artifacts, like arrowheads and adzes. I bought a book on flint-knapping, and I’ll chip out all sorts of projectile points while watching old movies on tv at night: I admit, The Sting, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and American Hustle contain elements that make them my favorites. And as long as I sell my chippies as “authentic” Indian arrowheads and not “ancient,” then the name of Petey Rat Tail’s Emporium of Archeological Antiquities remains unbesmirched.

I spin possible fictions, and I deliver so much more than mere commerce. Who am I to deny a fellow human his fantasies of taking down a mighty mastodon?

I see him coming. The old man’s returned, with company, at closing time. It’s been a good day, lots of shake going on, and I’m a little tired, uncharacteristically slow closing up shop. Since I’m only once-a-month, my table is located out on the edge, near where vendors park the box trucks for hauling and storing their made-in-China junk. There’s a huge guy darkening the sky behind my octogenarian friend, blocking out the shadows of dusk.

The old guy steps into the tent light, smiling. “Job 41:1 asks the question, ‘Can you pull in Leviathan with a fishhook or tie down its tongue with a rope?’ And my answer is, no. That hook don’t take, and that lying tongue needs cutting more than tying. I have a diving business in South Carolina, right near Folly Beach. My divers specialize in finding Megalodon teeth. Sand tiger, bull, and reef sharks, too. Sell to collectors, all over the world. We are legit, the real deal. Unlike that stuff your tongue was flapping about today.”

The big guy steps forward. He isn’t put together quite right—he’s wearing full camo, head to toe except for the eye hole in his balaclava, but in his hand he’s carrying a Polynesian weapon, a leiomano. I always admired those, hoped to get around to making a couple of them. This one looks like a well-used leather paddle, with tiger shark teeth sewn into it, the sharp points protruding along the edges. When Gargantua’s deep voice rumbles from underneath the mask, it sounds hard and frictious enough to scrape wall drawings in the Caves of Altamira. “Crooked people like you—it’s bad business.”

The old man does a two-step shuffle, his limbs free-flowing like he was born yesterday. “The Lord will punish with his sword—his fierce, great and powerful sword—Leviathan the gliding serpent, Leviathan the coiling serpent; he will slay the monster.”

The old fart knows his scripture. I recognize the verse from Isiah, grin, lean into my table and grab the six-inch Clovis spear point chipped out of Mookite—she’s a pretty, near-artsy blade I knapped while watching Catch Me If You Can. I spread my arms wide. “Well, come on, fellas, let’s see what you can take.” These are my kind of people.

END

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Scott T. Hutchison's work has appeared in The Muleskinner Journal, Vestal Review, and The Razor. New work is forthcoming in The Raven Review, Close to the Bone, and Bull.