Sam Weller - Shadow Show

After a time, Peter nods.

You loved them, right? Peter thinks, and he can feel his throat tighten.

He hadn’t meant to kill them. Not really.

Most of the time he forgets that it happened, and even when he does remember he can’t recall why it happened.

It was as if his mind was asleep for a while, and then when he woke up there was the disordered house, as if a burglar had turned over every object, looking for treasure. His father’s body was in the kitchen, and his mother’s was in the bedroom. A lot of blood, a lot of scratches and bites on her, and he put his nose against her hair and smelled it. He lifted her limp hand and pressed the palm of it against his cheek and made it pet him. Then he made it hit him in the nose and the mouth.

“Bad,” he had whispered. “Bad! Bad!”

“It’s going to be better once we get to Salt Lake,” Mr. Breeze says. “It’s a special school for children like you, and I know you’re going to enjoy it so much. You’re going to make a lot of new friends! And you’re going to learn so much, too, about the world! You’ll read books and work with a calculator and a computer, and you’ll do some things with art and music! And there will be counselors there who will help you with your… feelings. Because the feelings are just feelings. They are like weather, they come and go. They’re not you , Peter. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Yes,” Peter says. He stares out to where the towering white-yellow butte cliffs have been cut through to make room for the road; and the metal guardrail unreels beside them; and the sky is a glowing, empty blue. He blinks slowly.

If he goes to this school, will they make him tell about his mom and dad?

Maybe it will be all right, maybe he will like it there.

Maybe the other children will be mean to him, and the teachers won’t like him either.

Maybe he is special.

Will his fingernails always hurt like this? Will they always have to be cut and filed?

“Listen,” Mr. Breeze says. “We’re coming up on a tunnel. It’s called the Green River Tunnel. You can probably see it on your map. But I want to tell you that there have been some problems with these tunnels. It’s easy to block the tunnels from either end, once a car is inside it, so I’m going to speed up, and I’m going to go very, very fast when we get there. Okay? I just want you to be prepared. I don’t want you to get alarmed. Okay?”

“Okay,” Peter says, and Mr. Breeze smiles broadly and nods, and then without another word they begin to accelerate. The guardrail begins to slip by faster and faster until it is nothing but a silver river of blur, and then the mouths of the tunnels appear before them—one for the left side of the road, one for the right, maybe not mouths but instead a pair of eyes, two black sockets beneath a ridged hill, and Peter can’t help himself, he tightens his fingers against his legs even though it hurts.

When they pass beneath the concrete arches, there is a soft whuff sound as if they’ve gone through the membrane of something, and then suddenly there is darkness. He can sense the curved roof of the tunnel over them, a rib cage of dark against dark flicking overhead, and the echo of the car as it speeds up, faster and faster, a long crescendo as the opening in the distance grows wider and wider, and the opening behind them grows smaller.

But even as the car quickens, Peter can feel time slowing down, so that each rotation of tire is like the click of the second hand of a clock. There are kids in the tunnel. Twenty? No, thirty maybe, he can sense the warm bodies of them as they flinch and scrabble up the walls of the tunnel, as they turn and begin to chase after the car’s taillights, as they drop stones and bits of metal down from their perches somewhere in the tunnel’s concrete rafters. “Yaaah!” they call. “Yaaah!” And their voices make Peter’s fingers ache.

In front of them, the hole of daylight spreads open brighter, a corona of whiteness, and Peter can only see the blurry shadow-skeletons of the kids as they leap in front of the car.

They must be going a hundred miles an hour or more when they hit the boy. The boy may be eight or nine, Peter can’t tell. There is only the imprint of a contorted face, and the cry he lets out, a thin, wiry body leaping. Then a heavy thump as the bumper connects with him, and a burst of blood blinds the windshield, and they hear the clunking tumble of the body across the roof of the car and onto the pavement behind them.

Mr. Breeze turns on the windshield wipers, and cleaning fluid squirts up as the wipers squeak across the glass. The world appears through the smeared arcs the wipers make. There is a great expanse of valley and hills and wide open sky.

We’re getting very low on gas,” Mr. Breeze says, after they’ve driven for a while in silence.

And Peter doesn’t say anything.

“There’s a place up ahead. It used to be safe, but I’m not sure if it’s safe anymore.”

“Oh,” Peter says.

“You’ll tell me if it’s safe, won’t you?”

“Yes,” Peter says.

“It’s called Little America. Do you know why?”

Mr. Breeze looks at him. His eyes are softly sad, and he smiles just a little, wanly, and it’s tragic, but it’s also okay because that boy wasn’t special, not like Peter is special. It is something to be left behind us, says Mr. Breeze’s expression.

Peter shrugs.

“It’s very interesting,” Mr. Breeze says. “Because there once was an explorer named Richard Byrd. And he went into Antarctica, which is a frozen country far to the south, and he made a base on the Ross Ice Shelf, south of the Bay of Whales. And he named his base ‘Little America.’ And so then later—much much later—they made a motel in Wyoming, and because it was so isolated they decided to call it by the same name. And they used a penguin as their mascot, because penguins are from Antarctica, and when I was a kid there were a lot of signs and billboards that made the place famous.”

“Oh,” Peter says, and he can’t help but think of the kid. The kid saying, “Yaaah!”

They are driving along very slowly, because it is still hard to see out of the windshield, and the windshield wiper fluid has stopped working. It makes its mechanical sound, but no liquid comes out anymore.

It is a kind of oasis, this place. This Little America. A great, huge parking lot, and many gas pumps, and a store and beyond that a motel, with a green concrete dinosaur standing in the grass, a baby brontosaurus, a little taller than a man.

It is the kind of landscape they like. The long, wide strip-mall buildings with their corridors of shelves; the cavelike concrete passageways of enormous interstate motels, with their damp carpets and moldering beds, the little alcoves where ice machines and tall soda vendors may still be inexplicably running; the parking lots where the abandoned cars provide shelter and hiding places, better than a forest of trees.

“There are a lot of them around here, I think,” Mr. Breeze says as they settle in next to a pump. Above them there is a kind of plastic-metal canopy, and they sit for a while under its shade. Peter can sense that Mr. Breeze is uncertain.

“How many of them are there, do you think?” Mr. Breeze says, very casually, and Peter closes his eyes.

“More than a hundred?” Mr. Breeze says.

“Yes,” Peter says, and he looks at Mr. Breeze’s face, surreptitiously, and it is the face of a man who has to jump a long distance but does not want to.

“Yes,” he says. “More than a hundred.”

He can feel them. They are peering out from the travel-center building and the windows of the boarded-up motel and old abandoned cars in the parking lot.