Sam Weller - Shadow Show

“You promise.”

“That’s what I just said. Joel will save with me. Won’t you, Joel?”

“I don’t want to do anything for this idiot.”

“Joel .”

“I guess okay,” Joel said.

Ben tugged his cowpoke out of the sand and jumped to his feet.

“I’ll get Dad.”

Joel said, “Wait.”

He touched his black eye, then dropped his hand.

“Mom and Dad are sleeping. Dad said don’t wake them up until eight-thirty. That’s why we came outside. They were up late at the party at Millers’.”

“My parents were too,” Gail said. “My mother has a beastly headache.”

“At least your mom is awake,” Joel said. “Get Mrs. London, Ben.”

“Okay,” Ben said, and began walking.

“Run ,” Joel said.

“Okay,” Ben said, but he didn’t change his pace.

Joel and Gail watched him until he vanished into the streaming mist.

“My dad would just say he found it,” Joel said, and Gail almost flinched at the ugliness in his voice. “If we show it to my dad first, we won’t even get our pictures in the paper.”

“We should let him sleep if he’s asleep,” Gail said.

“That’s what I think,” Joel said, lowering his head, his voice softening and going awkward. He had shown more emotion than he liked and was embarrassed now.

Gail took his hand, impulsively, because it seemed like the right thing to do.

He looked at their fingers, laced together, and frowned in thought, as if she had asked him a question he felt he should know the answer to. He looked up at her.

“I’m glad I found the creature with you. We will probably be doing interviews about this our whole lives. When we are in our nineties people will still be asking us about the day we found the monster. I’m sure we’ll still like each other even then.”

She said, “The first thing we’ll say is that it wasn’t a monster. It was just a poor thing that was run down by a boat. It’s not like it ever ate anyone.”

“We don’t know what he eats. Lots of people have drowned in this lake. Maybe some of them who drowned didn’t really. Maybe he picked his teeth with them.”

“We don’t even know it’s a he.”

They let go of each other’s hands and turned to look at it, sprawled on the brown, hard beach. From this angle it looked like a boulder again, with some netting across it. Its skin did not glisten like whale blubber but was dark and dull, a chunk of granite with lichen on it.

She had a thought, looked back at Joel. “Do you think we should get ready to be interviewed?”

“You mean like comb our hair? You don’t need to comb your hair. Your hair is beautiful.”

His face darkened and he couldn’t hold her gaze.

“No,” she said. “I mean we don’t have anything to say. We don’t know anything about it. I wish we knew how long it is, at least.”

“We should count its teeth.”

She shivered. The ants-on-skin sensation returned.

“I wouldn’t like to put my hand in its mouth.”

“It’s dead. I’m not scared. The scientists are going to count its teeth. They’ll probably do that first thing.”

Joel’s eyes widened.

“A tooth,” he said.

“A tooth,” she said back, feeling his excitement.

“One for you and one for me. We ought to take a tooth for each of us, to remember it by.”

“I won’t need a tooth to remember it,” she said. “But it’s a good idea. I’m going to have mine made into a necklace.”

“Me too. Only a necklace for a boy. Not a pretty one, like for a girl.”

Its neck was long and thick and stretched out straight on the sand. If she had come at the animal from this direction, she would’ve known it wasn’t a rock. It had a shovel-shaped head. Its visible eye was filmed over with some kind of membrane, so it was the color of very cold, very fresh milk. Its mouth was underslung, like a sturgeon’s, and hung open. It had very small teeth, lots of them, in slanting double rows.

“Look at ’em,” he said, grinning, but with a kind of nervous tremor in his voice. “They’d cut through your arm like a buzz saw.”

“Think how many fish they’ve chopped in two. He probably has to eat twenty fish a day just to keep from starving.”

“I don’t have a pocketknife,” he said. “Do you have anything we can use to pull out a couple teeth?”

She gave him the silver spoon she had found farther down the beach. He splashed into the water, up to his ankles, then crouched by its head and reached into its mouth with the spoon.

Gail waited, her stomach roiling strangely.

After a moment, Joel removed his hand. He still crouched beside it, staring into its face. He put a hand on the creature’s neck. He didn’t say anything. That filmed-over eye stared up into nothing.

“I don’t want to,” he said.

“It’s all right,” she said.

“I thought it would be easy to do, but it doesn’t feel like I should do it.”

“It’s all right. I don’t even want one. Not really.”

“The roof of his mouth,” he said.

“What?”

“The roof of his mouth is just like mine. Ruffled like mine. Or like yours.”

He got up and stood for a bit. Joel glanced down at the spoon in his hand and frowned at it, as if he didn’t know what it was. He put it into his pocket.

“Maybe they’ll give us a tooth,” he said. “As part of our reward. It will be better if we don’t have to pull it out ourselves.”

“Not so sad.”

“Yes.”

He splashed out of the lake and they stood looking at the carcass.

“Where is Ben?” Joel asked, glancing off in the direction Ben had run.

“We should at least find out how long it is.”

“We’d have to go get measuring tape, and someone might come along and say they found it instead of us.”

“I’m four feet exactly. To the inch. I was last July when my daddy measured me in the doorway. We could measure how many Gails it is.”

“Okay.”

She lowered herself to her butt and stretched out on the sand, arms squeezed to her sides, ankles together. Joel found a stick and drew a line in the sand, to mark the crown of her skull.

Gail rose, brushed the sand off, and stepped over the line. She lay down flat again, so her heels were touching the mark in the dirt. They went this way down the length of the beach. He had to wade into the lake to pull the tail up onto shore.

“It’s a little over four Gails,” he said.

“That’s sixteen feet.”

“Most of it was tail.”

“That’s some tail. Where is Ben?”

They heard high-pitched voices piping through the blowing vapor. Small figures skipped along the beach, coming toward them. Miriam and Mindy sprang through the fog, Ben wandering behind them with no particular urgency. He was eating a piece of toast with jam on it. Strawberry jam was smeared around his lips, on his chin. He always wound up with as much on his face as went into his mouth.

Mindy held Miriam’s hand, while Miriam jumped in a strange, lunging sort of way.

“Higher!” Mindy commanded. “Higher!”

“What is this?” Joel asked.

“I have a pet balloon. I named her Miriam,” Mindy said. “Float, Miriam!”

Miriam threw herself straight up off the ground and came down so heavily her legs gave way and she sat hard on the beach. She still had Mindy’s hand and yanked her down beside her. The two girls sprawled on the damp pebbles, laughing.

Joel looked past them to Ben. “Where is Mrs. London?”

Ben chewed a mouthful of toast. He was chewing it a long time. Finally he swallowed. “She said she’d come see the dinosaur when it isn’t so cold out.”

“Float, Miriam!” Mindy screamed.