Sam Weller - Shadow Show

I was fourteen or fifteen, reading like the Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil set loose at the Olde Country Book Buffet, and couldn’t help noting that too many artists and writers died young and often not well. Then Ray Bradbury came along on this glutton’s word menu and showed me with his “Forever and the Earth” that no, Thomas Wolfe did not have to stay dead —not when we needed him.

Years later when the story of Marilyn Monroe seized me—she was “the saddest woman in the world,” said her short-term husband Arthur Miller—I set out to give her something a little better than what foolish choices, DNA tics, and the Wheel of Cosmic Fortune handed her. This is my third Marilyn story. There will likely be more in the future. Perhaps one day I’ll get it completely right.

But for now, I’ll borrow Mr. Stan Laurel’s derby and tip it to his very good friend and advocate Mr. Ray Douglas Bradbury: He showed me the way.

It was August, when the crickets sang slowly and the past lingered in bright pools of glorious light, even though it would soon be gone, the way summer was all but over, yet the heat was still on the rise. The weather had been extreme that month: days of drenching rain, sudden showers of hail, temperatures passing record highs. Local children whispered that an angel had fallen to earth in a thunderstorm. There were roving groups who swore they had found signs. Footprints in the grass, black feathers, a campfire in the woods behind the high school where there were sparks of shimmering ash. One neighborhood boy vowed that he had seen a man in a black cloak rise above the earth and walk on air, and although no one believed his account, mothers began to keep their children home. They locked the doors, called in the dogs, kept the lights on after dusk.

No one cut through the field anymore, except for Abbey and Cate, best friends, who at age sixteen were too old to be kept home and far too sure of themselves to be afraid of a story. They had jobs at the town pool as swim counselors, and late in the afternoons they walked home together, arms draped over each other’s shoulders, making their way through the pale heat, their long hair scented with chlorine. Usually they stopped at the library, where Cate would wait outside, dreamy-eyed, while Abbey ran in to find a new book, which would get her through the night. She’d had trouble sleeping lately, and books were her antidote to the darkness of these late-August nights. She had the distinct impression that something was beginning and something was ending; there were just so many days like this left to them. Before they knew it, time would speed up and the future would appear on a street corner or in a park, and there they’d be, grown women who’d forgotten how long a summer could last.

The librarian, Mrs. Fanning, often had a stack of books waiting for Abbey, and choosing the right one had become a sacred ritual. On this day Abbey returned Great Expectations and took up Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes .

“Excellent choice,” Mrs. Fanning said, pleased. “By the pricking of my thumb, something wicked this way comes. The title comes from Macbeth , Act IV.”

“Do you believe people are wicked?” Abbey asked.

Outside the world was green, shifting in the dappled light. Cate was sitting on the steps, head thrown back, basking in the last of the sun. If Abbey tried to talk about her worries with her friend, Cate would admonish her. “You think too much!”

“Certainly some people are,” Mrs. Fanning said. “But there’d be no interesting novels without them, would there?”

In a fiction it was possible to discern the wicked from the pure of heart. Roses withered when devious individuals passed by; blackthorns grew about them. But such clues were not as evident in real life. “Judge a person the same way you judge a book,” Mrs. Fanning suggested. “A search for beauty and truth, a gut response to what feels a lie. Intuition.” She seemed quite sure of herself. “Imagination.”

Abbey began reading on the way home from the library, acting out all the parts. She concentrated so deeply on the words on the page that she stumbled over shifts in the concrete sidewalk.

“You live in books.” Cate grinned.

“I would if I could,” Abbey admitted.

“What’s the good of that?” Cate sighed, for she yearned for real life. She wanted adventure, one-of-a-kind experiences. She was suddenly beautiful and there were teenage boys who followed her around town, just as suddenly in love with her, though they were still too young to say so. She confided that her plan was to leave town after high school graduation, find her way to California, see every bit of the coast. She’d study butterflies in Monterey, sharks in San Diego. She had a fearless nature, which was why Abbey both admired her and was concerned for her at the same time. They were nearly home, but Cate lagged behind, gazing over at the field, the one wild piece of land left in town.

“What would you do if you saw an angel?” she asked in a low voice.

They stood together on the corner, where they met every morning.

“There’s no such thing,” Abbey said. “Not around here.”

“If there was.” Cate squinted to see into the distance. “Seriously.”

“I’d write about him,” Abbey said.

As for Cate, they both knew she’d fly away, triumphant and distant in the arms of an angel.

It was Cate who insisted they take the shortcut the following afternoon, forsaking the library, so they might walk through the field where the angel was said to be.

“How many times do you get to search for an angel?” she teased, running off before Abbey could say that if there was such a thing, perhaps it wasn’t meant to be a sight for human eyes, that the very brightness of such a creature might burn and blind anyone who gazed upon him. Cate had already climbed the fence that separated the path from the field, and Abbey had no choice but to follow, up and over the fence, leaping clumsily onto the ground. The books she’d meant to return to the library weighed down her backpack. Cate grinned and pointed to a dark splotch on the ground. It was only a single feather in the tall grass beside the creek, but when Cate ran to grab it, Abbey felt a hollow chill. The water in the creek was green, slow-moving, and swirls of insects rose from it. They used to swim here when they were younger, practicing the backstroke and the butterfly.

Cate ran back, her hair flying out behind her. She held up the feather. “We’re definitely on the right path.” She elbowed Abbey, then nodded to a willow tree. A young man in a black coat was gazing at them. Abbey took a step back. He was wearing leather gloves though the weather was fine.

“Don’t tell me you’re afraid?” Cate teased. “He’s probably Bobby Marcus’s cousin.”

Bobby Marcus was their twelve-year-old neighbor who’d told everyone that his cousin from Los Angeles was spending a few weeks with them, and that he slept all day and was out all night. Not that there was anywhere to go in their town in the evenings, only the Blue Note Bar and Grill, where some of their fathers stopped on the way home from work.

Dusk was falling down among the trees. The swirls of insects above the creek turned blue in the murky air. The young man had long dark hair and an easy gait. He had dramatic features, gray, light-filled eyes. He looked a few years older than the girls, perhaps nineteen. He was making his way through the tall grass, approaching as if he knew them and was meant to speak to them, as if he’d been sent to them on this evening in August. Most people were now at home, sitting down to dinner, and Abbey’s mother would be watching from the door. She worried about her daughter, who spent so much time alone. She’d be even more concerned if she knew that there were nights when Abbey climbed out her bedroom window so that she could amble through town in the dark. Abbey had never even told Cate that she climbed out her window on restless nights, her feet landing in the ivy. Sometimes she went to sit on the stone steps of the library, wondering about the world beyond their town; other times she came to this very field and read by moonlight, savoring her aloneness. Now she wasn’t certain she’d come back here again. The edges of the grass were sullen and plumy in the shifting light.