Sam Weller - Shadow Show

They are in the car again now, and it is raining. Peter leans against the window on the passenger side, and he can see the droplets of water inching along the glass, moving like schools of minnows, and he can see the clouds with their gray, foggy fingerlings almost touching the ground, and the trees bowed down and dripping.

“Peter,” Mr. Breeze says, after an hour or more of silence. “Have you been watching your map? Do you know where we are?”

And Peter gazes down at the book Mr. Breeze had given him. Here are the highways, the states in their pale primary colors. Nebraska. Wyoming.

“I think we’re almost halfway there,” Mr. Breeze says. He looks at Peter and his cheerful children’s-program eyes are careful, you can see him thinking something besides what he is saying. There is a way that an adult can look into you to see if you are paying attention, to see if you are learning, and Mr. Breeze’s eyes scope across him, prodding and nudging.

“It’s a nice place,” Mr. Breeze says. “A very nice place. You’ll have a room of your own. A warm bed to sleep in. Good food to eat. And you’ll go to school! I think you’ll like it.”

“Mm,” Peter says, and shudders.

They are passing a cluster of houses now, some of them burned and still smoldering in the rain. There are no people left in those houses, Peter knows. They are all dead. He can feel it in his bones; he can taste it in his mouth.

Also, out beyond the town, in the fields of sunflowers and alfalfa, there are a few who are like him. Kids. They are padding stealthily along the rows of crops, their palms and foot soles pressing lightly along the loamy earth, leaving almost no track. They lift their heads, and their golden eyes glint.

“ Ihad a boy once,” Mr. Breeze says.

They have been driving without stopping for hours now, listening to a tape of a man and some children singing. B-I-N-G-O , they are singing. Bingo was his name-o!

“A son,” Mr. Breeze says. “He wasn’t so much older than you. His name was Jim.”

Mr. Breeze moves his hands vaguely against the steering wheel.

“He was a rock hound,” Mr. Breeze says. “He liked all kinds of stones and minerals. Geodes, he loved. And fossils! He had a big collection of those!”

“Mm,” Peter says.

It is hard to picture Mr. Breeze as a father, with his gaunt head and stick body and puppet mouth. It is hard to imagine what Mrs. Breeze must have looked like. Would she have been a skeleton like him, with a long black dress and long black hair, a spidery way of walking?

Maybe she was his opposite: a plump young farm girl, blond and ruddy-cheeked, smiling and cooking things in the kitchen, like pancakes.

Maybe Mr. Breeze is just making it up. He probably didn’t have a wife or son at all.

“What was your wife’s name?” Peter says at last, and Mr. Breeze is quiet for a long time. The rain slows, then stops as the mountains grow more distinct in the distance.

“Connie,” Mr. Breeze says. “Her name was Connie.”

By nightfall, they have passed Cheyenne— a bad place, Mr. Breeze says, not safe —and they are nearly to Laramie, which has, Mr. Breeze says, a good, organized militia and a high fence around the perimeter of the city.

Peter can see Laramie from a long way off. The trunks of the light poles are as thick and tall as sequoias, and at their top, a cluster of halogen lights, a screaming of brightness, and Peter knows he doesn’t want to go there. His arms and legs begin to itch, and he scratches with his sore, clipped nails, even though it hurts just to touch them to skin.

“Stop that, please, Peter,” Mr. Breeze says softly, and when Peter doesn’t stop he reaches over and gives Peter a flick on the nose with his finger. “ Stop .” Mr. Breeze says. “ Right. Now .”

There are blinking yellow lights ahead, where a barrier has been erected, and Mr. Breeze slows the Cadillac as two men emerge from behind a structure made of logs and barbed wire and pieces of cars that have been sharpened into points. The men are soldiers of some kind, carrying rifles, and they shine a flashlight in through the windshield at Peter and Mr. Breeze. Behind them, the high chain fence makes shadow patterns across the road as it moves in the wind.

Mr. Breeze puts the car into park and reaches across and takes the gun from its resting place in the glove box. The men are approaching slowly, and one of them says very loudly: “STEP OUT OF THE CAR, PLEASE, SIR,” and Mr. Breeze touches his gun to Peter’s leg.

“Be a good boy, Peter,” Mr. Breeze whispers. “Don’t you try to run away, or they will shoot you.”

Then Mr. Breeze puts on his broad, bright puppet smile. He takes out his wallet and opens it so that the men can see his identification, so that they can see the gold seal of the United States of America, the glinting golden stars. He opens his door and steps out. The gun is tucked into the waistband of his pants, and he holds his hands up loosely, displaying the wallet.

He shuts the door with a thunk, leaving Peter sealed inside the car.

There is no handle on the passenger side of the car, so Peter cannot open his door. If he wanted to, he could slide across to the driver’s seat, and open Mr. Breeze’s door, and roll out onto the pavement and try to scramble as fast as he could into the darkness, and maybe he could run fast enough, zig-zagging, so that the bullets they’d shoot would only nip the ground behind him, and he could find his way into some kind of brush or forest and run and run until the voices and the lights were far in the distance.

But the men are watching him very closely. One man is holding his flashlight so that the beam shines directly through the windshield and onto Peter’s face, and the other man is staring at Peter as Mr. Breeze speaks and gestures, speaks and gestures like a performer on television who is selling something for kids. But the man is shaking his head no. No!

“I don’t care what kind of papers you got, mister,” the man says. “There’s no way you’re bringing that thing through these gates.”

Peter used to be a real boy.

He can remember it—a lot of it is still very clear in his mind. “I pledge allegiance to the flag” and “Knick knack paddy whack give a dog a bone this old man goes rolling home” and “ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ now I know my ABCs, next time won’t you sing with me?” and “Yesterday… all my troubles seemed so far away” and…

He remembers the house with the big trees in front, riding a scooter along the sidewalk, his foot pumping and making momentum. The bug in a jar—cicada—coming out of its shell and the green wings. His mom and her two braids. The cereal in a bowl, pouring milk on it. His dad flat on the carpet, climbing on his Dad’s back: “Dog pile!”

He can still read. The letters come together and make sounds in his mind. When Mr. Breeze asked him, he found he could still say his telephone number and address, and the names of his parents.

“Mark and Rebecca Krolik,” he said. “Two one three four Overlook Boulevard, South Bend, Indiana, four six six oh one.”

“Very good!” Mr. Breeze said. “Wonderful!”

And then Mr. Breeze said, “Where are they now, Peter? Do you know where your parents are?”

Mr. Breeze pulls back from the barricade of Laramie and the gravel sputters out from their tires and in the rearview mirror Peter can see the men with their guns in the red taillights and dust.

“Damn it,” Mr. Breeze says, and slaps his hand against the dashboard. “Damn it! I knew I should have put you in the trunk!” And Peter says nothing. He has never seen Mr. Breeze angry in this way, and it frightens him—the red splotches on Mr. Breeze’s skin, the scent of adult rage—though he is also relieved to be moving away from those big halogen lights. He keeps his eyes straight ahead and his hands folded in his lap, and he listens to the silence of Mr. Breeze unraveling, he listens to the highway moving beneath them, and watches as the yellow dotted lines at the center of the road are pulled endlessly beneath the car. For a while, Peter pretends that they are eating the yellow lines.