Eccentrics in Doonenville, Missouri

Eugene lugged the glycylphloyde-filled jar containing an oddly shaped lump of flesh, meat and bones into O'Malley's Pub & Techno-Grille, plopped it onto the bar, and proceeded to withdraw the carcass. He bit into it with obvious relish.

"Oh, that's just gross!" cried the plumpish barmaid. She was squeezed into a slush dress, a combination of liquid tagmite and synthetic polymer. It flashed neon colors and patterns at intermittent intervals.

"Actually it tastes a lot more like chicken than you can imagine."

He took another large bite and she crinkled her nose, turned heel and strutted away.

"What is it?" asked the bartender. He was a young, severely tattooed kid with gyros whizzing amongst a maze of magnets implanted into his shaved skull.

"A stillborn Triceratops," replied Eugene. His voice held an undercurrent of sadness. The next taste lacked his original enthusiasm.

"Go, dude!" encouraged one of several fraternity brothers gathered about the bar.

"Awesomely awesomtific!" cried another, and the group clanged mugs and drank heartily.

"Buy me a beer to wash it down."

Several of the boys eagerly complied.

Eugene stopped eating the dead dinosaur and started drinking in earnest, though on

occasion that evening he would delight his frat crowd friends with a gluttonous bite when they broke into a chant of "Go, Eugene! Go, Eugene! Eat that meat!"

On his walk home, much later and minus the jar of partially eaten remains, which the frat boys gleefully hoisted home where it became an object of intense scrutiny at future parties, Eugene's sodden mind suddenly stumbled onto the error of his scientific cloning equation, the remedy to stillborn baby dinos. He ran the rest of the way and proceeded to create a clutch of Triceratops eggs that, when hatched, produced his first real success at duplicating dinosaurs.

It was the year twenty-fifty-two, in the rural town of Doonenville, Missouri, and Eugene's cloning success was one in a string of extraordinary happenstance, some filled with fury and disorder, others with peculiarities and juvenile activities, but also filled with romance, love and happiness, yet all overshadowed, in the end, by the ultimate destruction of human civilization.

Cloning in those years had become quite advanced, and well established and practiced in scientific circles, but it was still not a thing for the ordinary citizen to dabble with, for that would not occur for a hundred more years. That is a different story, not yet written, for the events have not occurred, at least not near the year twenty and fifty-two in the rural county of Doonenville, Missouri.

The extraordinary happenstances began to take shape in the experimental compounds of

two superior scientists, equal in background, degrees and eccentricity, but different in sex,

for one was female, the other not. One was working diligently on cloning long ago extinct plant

life, or flora, and having remarkable success. The one not a female was working feverishly at cloning long dead animals, or fauna, to be more precise, dinosaurs. He was having some success, also, though a bit more measured and sometimes foolish.

The eccentric female scientist, Dr. Sache, preferred to be called Sonja, which was unusual for a doctor, because they usually insisted on being called just that, especially in those days, but this was even more unusual because her given name was Wendy. After showcasing her brilliance in studies at the University of Oregon, and widely known and envied for her eccentric behavior, Dr. Sache moved into seclusion on a twenty acre compound outside Doonenville. There she went to work, erecting a greenhouse, building a large, wooden privacy fence and meticulously constructing a garden unlike any seen on the planet in millions of years. Her degrees were well conferred. Her garden grew and grew.

Sonja worked her garden alone, and mixed DNA in her greenhouse lab alone, and wrote her scientific journal articles alone, but her acclaim grew like her garden. While cloning was more commonplace, and certainly not as newsworthy, Sonja's work was different, for she was bringing to life organisms much, much older than any yet accomplished. Her specialties were angiosperms, or flowering plants, from the Cretaceous Period, dating back over sixty-five million years. Her fertile soil soon blossomed with tetricia magnolia, thorny ficus, credneria, sassafras, viburnum. The colors splashed about were as varied as Monet's palette. Yet she was also having quite a success with ferns, horsetails, cycads and the like, plus the odd gingko.

Conifers were a breeze, since they shared much DNA with their modern cousins, and soon a line of glistening green firs, pines and yews lined the walls of her compound.

Then there was Dr. Eugene Bedemeyer, come to Doonenville by way of West Texas Polytech, graduate work at Colorado-Coors State University, and his doctoral research overseas in the ancient city of Glasgow, studying under the tutelage of the equally ancient yet esteemed clonologist Kronic Van Stanschar. So it was quite a happenstance that within a six month period both of these acclaimed scientists took up residence in this small Missouri town, and made more extraordinary because Dr. Bedemeyer purchased, unbeknownst to him, a sixty acre parcel that backed up to Dr. Sache's experimental garden.

Neither knew the close proximity to the other, though each read the rival's prolific contributions to the scientific journals of the day, and each admired the other's proclivity with cloning techniques and the success it brought, though each also envied the other's equally publicized eccentricities, the true ones as well as the false.

What helped this distance of minds, if not of actual space, was, first, Sonja's seven foot wood slat fence, built for privacy as much as to keep ravenous jackrabbits at bay. The second was the fifteen foot metal perimeter fence, topped with razor wire, Eugene had constructed around his parcel of land, and, though he enjoyed solitude, he had a more immediate reason for such a secure barrier - to keep in his own cloned experiments. In a short span of time, Sonja's rapidly developing conifers outgrew even Dr. Bedemeyer's metal monstrosity, and branches drooped lazily into his compound.

Another thread in this complex, extraordinary happenstance was that Dr. Bedemeyer, like Dr. Sache, worked with species cloned from the Cretaceous Period, although Eugene thought in

much larger, and potentially destructive terms, messing with animals that dwarfed him in size. This was not surprising in a male, from that decade or any other.

While Dr. Sache, or Sonja, or Wendy, was having immense success with her Cretaceous

garden, with some plants growing taller than her seven foot fence, and others stretching to a height that surpassed the fifteen-footer professionally installed by Dr. Bedemeyer, Eugene himself was having mixed results with his own reincarnations from the same geological era. However, Eugene was having considerably more luck in enhancing his eccentricities, while poor Sonja saw a decline in the reporting of her quirks as she became more engrossed in her work, decidedly more like a hermit, and less interested in promoting her severe social shortcomings to the world.

Eugene readily took to socializing in the small town of Doonenville, playing pool in a jock strap, or once buying a Mercedes-Ford and driving it straight into the river across from the dealership. There was the time he escorted one of his bizarre experiments to the park. People gawked. A few pointed. Most appeared disgusted.

"What's that?" inquired one boy.

"Why it's a cog," Dr. Bedemeyer exclaimed proudly.

"A cog?"

"Or a dat, if you prefer."

The cog/dat chased its tail, then stopped and looked indifferently at the boy.

"It's ugly," decided the boy.

"All pets are ugly," Eugene explained.

Back in his compound, Eugene was experiencing a lack of success. At first the

Triceratops hatched dead and deformed, then dead but looking like a baby triceratops should. Some were born alive and looking whole, but vital organs were missing, so the first

living dinosaurs on his compound did not live all that long.

Yet after returning from an excursion into town, Dr. Bedemeyer experienced his "Eureka!" moment. It was the now legendary trip that bore witness to Eugene lugging the glass jar containing the dead baby Triceratops into O'Malley's. He later attributed his new insight to the cloning process to that now famous dinner.

Still drunk from his discovery, and inebriated in general, Eugene set straight away to work. Soon he had fertilized eggs implanted in alligators he kept for incubation purposes. Within weeks he had fully developed eggs, which he transplanted to special incubators. Not long after, Dr. Bedemeyer gazed upon his first, normal Triceratops baby. Soon after two more hatched.

While the new arrivals grew fat and happy, knocking their tiny, bony heads against each other, against chairs and boxes and Eugene's shins, the doctor was busy on the second and third batches of dino babies. Soon, a Saltasaurus, two Ouranosaurus’, and a Bactrosaurus joined his growing brood.

Dr. Bedemeyer provided open spaces for these plant-eaters to roam about, and had fresh grasses, leaves and hay trucked in for the insatiable bunch of youngsters. The Triceratops triplets took great delight in their head-butting games, and charging the others, particularly the Bactrosaurus. Perhaps it was the colorful mud-red and yellow-speckled ridge that ran along its spine, or the mottling of neon green and blue across the belly and thick legs, or perhaps because it was the smallest of the creatures, but the Bactrosaurus seemed to be mercilessly picked on by the bullying trio. The dark blue resonator that rested atop his nostrils would send out shrill blasts

as the baby Bactrosaurus was chased about the compound. Sometimes it took refuge behind the Saltasaurus, which had little tolerance for the three-horned beasts since they interfered in his main pursuit - eating. The Saltasaurus was a miniature version of the hulking Brontosaurus, yet would grow to an impressive length of thirty-five feet from the tip of the tail to his rather pointed snout. While its massive back was a bland bluish-brown with dark spots, the markings along the neck and tail were impressive mottled purple streaks. Eugene thought it one of the prettiest creatures he had ever seen.

By now the growth of Dr. Sache's garden created an abundance of stimulating scents and odiferous distractions, and the sight of the towering, grass-green firs combined to create in the juvenile dinosaurs an inner burning that created an urge of unstoppable proportions. The Saltasaurus was the first to get a taste of the luscious greens. With a tremendous push of its forelimbs, it balanced on the hind stumps that served as legs. With the additional height, the small head on top of the slender, leathery neck snaked forward and disappeared into the succulent branches of a trespassing tree. Small dagger teeth raked along branch after branch, losing as much as it devoured, and the fresh foliage that fell on the ground was quickly

devoured by the Triceratops, Ouranosaurus' and the happily bleating Bactrosaurus. As they fed and jockeyed about, the metal fence was kicked and rammed about, until a section toppled over like a giant domino onto the smaller wooden fence. That section of Dr. Sache's fence snapped and buckled, and suddenly the ravenous beasts were at the open gates of the Garden of Eden. The lush sights and smells inspired a stampede as each animal raced toward forbidden fruit.

The commotion brought both scientists running from their labs. When Sonja noticed the carnage befalling her precious garden her face became gray and cloudy. Eugene seemed both

alarmed and amused. Sonja spotted her eccentric neighbor, marched up and rained expletives onto his face from a distance of six inches. At first stunned, Eugene quickly recovered, waiting for an opening, a parting of storm clouds, as Sonja's tirade continued unabated. Finally, she

paused to draw a large breath. Eugene was prepared. He opened his mouth to counter one verbal assault with another.

"Eergaah!" The words tangled in his throat, looped around each other, and crashed.

"Oh, great. You speak as well as you clone, you.. you baboon!"

Eugene stared, drinking in the sight. Enlarged nostrils gulping moist air, her dark eyes cast open like dual caves, spongy lips flaying as hate spewed from Sonja's mouth.

"That's what you should have cloned, a baboon! Even a baboon couldn't mess up cloning a baboon!"

Eugene realized that in this eccentrically impassioned face he stared at there was a look

he had never seen in a human before, and he stood dazed, even as she had gained her second wind and continued the assault, more raucous then before.

"How in Hades did you end up right next to ME!" She threw her hands up in disgust. "I must be cursed!"

It dawned on Dr. Bedemeyer that he was, after all these crazed years filled with scientific study and outlandish behavior, lovestruck. This infatuation did not glow like a soft ember in his heart, spreading warmth throughout his tired body, instead it seized him as a tidal wave crashes over luckless, land-bound prey. It blasted through, and into, every fiber of his being, and shook

him so badly his teeth chattered. It had so taken charge of him that, when Sonja stopped again, for her third wind, Eugene grabbed both sides of her head and, with spittle hanging from her mouth as the spent fuel of her onslaught, he pulled her lips to his and kissed her deep, while tidal wave after tidal wave drove down upon him.

Soon afterward the fences between the two, the small wooden one, and the larger metal

one topped with razor wire, came down, and Eugene’s dinosaurs - the sauropauds, the

platosaurs, eventually even hipposaurs and groanosaurs - feed upon the richness of Sonja’s cambrianic ferns, and lush pine trees, and the delightfully fragrant and colorful flowering plants. Their scientific studies and discoveries and successes blossomed beyond their wildest dreams, but their eccentricities declined, and eventually mention of the “cloning couple” tapered off from

the paparazzi, even while their scientific publication flourished. However, Eugene was still known to occasionally bring a dat or a cog into town, and play a subdued game of pool with the frat boys, but even these trips became sporadic.

The doctors Bedemeyer enjoyed their time together on their compound, and lived long, happy lives, though they did fail at their attempts of creating a little Bedemeyer, but this failure never took the smiles from their faces when they came to town for dinner and a movie.

In time, however, in a future far removed from Sonja’s and Eugene’s, but with equally extraordinary happenstance, the cloned dinosaurs were again able to become masters of the planet, and man, through neglect and stupidity, with glaring egotism and blind foresight, found himself naked and defenseless and living once again in caves. Yet that is another time, and should not worry anyone living in Doonenville, Missouri, today.

Toby Boyle

Ó 2005