Sam Weller - Shadow Show

Miriam flopped onto her back with a sigh. “I’m deflating. I’m deflat.”

Joel looked at Gail in disgust.

Mindy said, “It stinks here.”

“Do you believe this?” Joel asked. “She’s not coming.”

Ben said, “She told me to tell Gail if she wants breakfast to come home. Can we buy my cowboys today?”

“You didn’t do what we asked, so you aren’t getting anything,” Joel told him.

“You didn’t say I had to get a grown-up. You just said I had to tell a grown-up,” Ben said, in a tone of voice that made even Gail want to hit him. “I want my cowboys.”

Joel walked past the little girls on the ground and grabbed Ben’s shoulder, turned him around. “Bring back a grown-up or I’ll drown you.”

“You said I could have cowboys.”

“Yes. I’ll make sure you’re buried with them.”

He kicked Ben in the ass to get him going. Ben cried out and stumbled and glanced back with a hurt look.

“Bring an adult,” Joel said. “Or you’ll see how mean I can get.”

Ben walked off in a hurry, head down, legs stiff and unbending.

“You know what the problem is?” Joel said.

“Yes.”

“No one is going to believe him. Would you believe him if he said we were guarding a dinosaur?”

The two little girls were speaking in hushed voices. Gail was about to offer to go to the house and get her mother when their secretive whispering caught her notice. She looked down to find them sitting cross-legged next to the creature’s back. Mindy had chalk and was drawing tic-tac-toe on its side.

“What are you doing?” Gail cried, and grabbed the chalk. “Have some respect for the dead.”

Mindy said, “Give me my chalk.”

“You can’t draw on this. It’s a dinosaur.”

Mindy said, “I want my chalk back or I’m telling Mommy.”

“They don’t even believe us,” Joel said. “And they’re sitting right next to it. If it was alive, it would’ve eaten them by now.”

Miriam said, “You have to give it back. That’s the chalk Daddy bought her. We each got something for a penny. You wanted gum. You could’ve had chalk. You have to give it back.”

“Well, don’t draw on the dinosaur.”

“I can draw on the dinosaur if I want to. It’s everybody’s dinosaur,” Mindy said.

“It is not. It’s ours,” Joel said. “We’re the ones who discovered it.”

Gail said, “You have to draw somewhere else, or I won’t give you back your chalk.”

“I’m telling Mommy. If she has to come down here to make you give it back, she’ll scald your heinie,” Mindy said.

Gail started to reach out, to hand back the chalk, but Joel caught her arm.

“We’re not giving it,” he said.

“I’m telling Mother,” Mindy said, and got up.

“I’m telling with her,” Miriam said. “Mother is going to come and give you heck.”

They stomped away into the mist, discussing this latest outrage in chirping tones of disbelief.

“You’re the smartest boy on this side of the lake,” Gail said.

“ Either side of the lake,” he said.

The mist streamed in off the surface of the water. By some trick of the light, their shadows telescoped, so each girl appeared as a shadow within a larger shadow within a larger shadow. They made long, girl-shaped tunnels in the vapor, extending away, those multiple shadows lined up like a series of dark, featureless matryoshka dolls. Finally they dwindled in on themselves and were claimed by the fishy-smelling fog.

Gail and Joel did not turn back to the dinosaur until Gail’s little sisters had vanished entirely. A gull sat on the dead creature, staring at them with beady, avid eyes.

“Get off!” Joel shouted, and flapped his hands.

The gull hopped to the sand and crept away in a disgruntled hunch.

“When the sun comes out, it’s going to be ripe,” Joel said.

“After they take pictures of it, they’ll have to refrigerate it.”

“Pictures of it with us.”

“Yes,” she said, and wanted to take his hand again but didn’t.

“Do you think they’ll bring it to the city?” Gail asked. She meant New York, which was the only city she had ever been to.

“It depends who buys it from us.”

Gail wanted to ask him if he thought his father would let him keep the money but worried that the question might put unhappy ideas into his head. Instead she asked, “How much do you think we might get paid?”

“When the ferry hit this thing back in the summer, P. T. Barnum announced he’d pay fifty thousand dollars for it.”

“I’d like to sell it to the Museum of Natural History in New York City.”

“I think people give things to museums for free. We’d do better with Barnum. I bet he’d throw in lifetime passes to the circus.”

Gail didn’t reply, because she didn’t want to say something that might disappoint him.

He shot her a look. “You don’t think it’s right.”

She said, “We can do what you want.”

“We could each buy a house with our half of Barnum’s money. You could fill a bathtub with hundred-dollar bills and swim around in it.”

Gail didn’t say anything.

“It’s half yours, you know. Whatever we make!”

She looked at the creature. “Do you really think it might be a million years old? Can you imagine all those years of swimming? Can you imagine swimming under the full moon? I wonder if it missed other dinosaurs. Do you think it wondered what happened to all the others?”

Joel looked at it for a while. He said, “My mom took me to the natural history museum. They had a little castle there with a hundred knights, in a glass case.”

“A diorama.”

“That’s right. That was swell. It looked just like a little world in there. Maybe they’d give us lifetime passes.”

Her heart lightened. She said, “And then scientists could study it whenever they wanted to.”

“Yeah. P. T. Barnum would probably make scientists buy a ticket. He’d show it next to a two-headed goat and a fat woman with a beard, and it wouldn’t be special anymore. You ever notice that? Because everything at the circus is special, nothing is special? If I could walk on a tightrope, even a little, you’d think I was the most amazing boy you knew. Even if I was only two feet off the ground. But if I walked on a tightrope in the circus, and I was only two feet off the ground, people would shout for their money back.”

It was the most she had ever heard him say at one go. She wanted to tell him he was already the most amazing boy she knew but felt it might embarrass him.

He reached for her hand and her heart quickened, but he only wanted the chalk.

He took it from her and began to write on the side of the poor thing. She opened her mouth to say they shouldn’t but then closed her mouth when she saw he was writing her name on the pebbly turtle skin. He wrote his name beneath hers.

“In case anyone else tries to say they found it,” he told her. Then he said, “Your name ought to be on a plaque here. Our names ought to be together forever. I’m glad I found him with you. There isn’t no one I’d rather have been with.”

“That’s a double negative,” she said.

He kissed her. Just on the cheek.

“Yes, dear,” he said, like he was forty years old and not ten. He gave her back the chalk.

Joel looked past her, down the beach, into the mist. Gail turned her head to see what he was staring at.

She saw a series of those Russian-doll shadows, collapsing toward them, just like someone folding a telescope shut. They were mother-shaped, flanked by Miriam and Mindy shapes, and Gail opened her mouth to call out, but then that large central shadow suddenly shrank and became Heather. Ben Quarrel was right behind her, looking smug.