by Joe Hill
“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 that 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. It probably had 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’d found farther down the beach. He splashed into the water, up to his ankles, 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 in 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’s 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 a 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 that 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.
Miriam flopped onto her back with a sigh. “I’m deflating. I’m deflat.”
Joel looked at Gail with a mix of frustration and 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, grabbing 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, and Mindy and Miriam walked into it. 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 smoke. They extended away into the vapor, 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, flapping 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’d 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 the question might put unhappy ideas in 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.
Heather stalked out of the mist, her drawing pad under one arm. Coils of blond hair hung in her face. She pursed her lips and blew at them to get them out of her eyes, something she only ever did when she was mad.
“Mother wants to see you. She said right now.”
Gail said, “Isn’t she coming?”
“She has egg pancake in the oven.”
“Go and tell her—”
“Go and tell her yourself. You can give Mindy her chalk before you go.”
Mindy held out one hand, palm up.
Miriam sang, “Gail, Gail, she bosses everyone around. Gail, Gail, she is really stupid.” The melody was just as good as the lyrics.
Gail said to Heather, “We found a dinosaur. You have to run and get Mom. We’re going to give it to a museum and be in the paper. Joel and I are going to be in a photo together.”
Heather took Gail’s ear and twisted it, and Gail screamed. Mindy lunged and grabbed the chalk out of Gail’s hand. Miriam wailed in a long, girlish pretend scream, mocking her.
Heather dropped her hand and grabbed the back of Gail’s arm between thumb and index finger and twisted. Gail cried out again and struggled to get free. Her hand flailed out and swatted Heather’s drawing pad into the sand. Heather didn’t give it any mind, her bloodlust up. She began to march her little sister away into the mist.
“I was drawing my best pony,” Heather said. “I worked on it really hard. And Mom wouldn’t even look at it because Mindy and Miriam and Ben keep bothering her about your stupid dinosaur. She yelled at me to get you, and I didn’t even do anything. I just wanted to draw, and she said if I didn’t go get you, she’d take my colored pencils away. The colored pencils! I got! For my birthday!” Twisting the back of Gail’s arm for emphasis, until Gail’s eyes stung with tears.
Ben Quarrel hurried to keep alongside her. “You better still buy me my cowboys. You promised.”
“Mom says you aren’t getting any egg pancake,” Miriam said. “Because of all the trouble you’ve caused this morning.”
Mindy said, “Gail? Do you mind if I eat the piece of egg pancake that would’ve been yours?”
Gail looked over her shoulder at Joel. He was already a ghost, twenty feet back in the mist. He had climbed up to sit on the carcass.
“I’ll stay right here, Gail!” he shouted. “Don’t worry! You’ve got your name on it! Your name and mine, right together! Everyone is going to know we found it! Just come back as soon as you can! I’ll be waiting!”
“All right,” she said, her voice wavering with emotion. “I’ll be right back, Joel.”
“No you won’t,” Heather said.
Gail stumbled over the rocks, looking back at Joel for as long as she could. Soon he and the animal he sat on were just dim shapes in the fog, which drifted in damp sheets, so white it made Gail think of the veils that brides wore. When he disappeared, she turned away, blinking at tears, her throat tight.
It was farther back to the ho
use than she remembered. The pack of them—four small children and one twelve-year-old—followed the meandering course of the narrow beach, by the silver water of Lake Champlain. Gail looked at her feet, watched the water slop gently over the pebbles.
They continued along the embankment, until they reached the dock, their father’s dinghy tied up to it. Heather let go of Gail then, and each of them climbed up onto the pine boards. Gail did not try to run back. It was important to bring their mother, and she thought if she cried hard enough, she could manage it.
The children were halfway across the yard when they heard the foghorn sound again. Only it wasn’t a foghorn and it was close, somewhere just out of sight in the mist on the lake. It was a long, anguished, bovine sound, a sort of thunderous lowing, loud enough to make the individual droplets of mist quiver in the air. The sound of it brought back the crawling-ants feeling on Gail’s scalp and chest. When she looked back at the dock, she saw her father’s boat galumphing heavily up and down in the water and banging against the wood, rocking in a sudden wake.
“What was that?” Heather cried out.
Mindy and Miriam held each other, staring with fright at the lake. Ben Quarrel’s eyes were wide and his head cocked to one side, listening with a nervous intensity.
Back down the beach, Gail heard Joel shout something. She thought—but she was never sure—that he shouted, “Gail! Come see!” In later years, though, she sometimes had the wretched idea that it had been “God! Help me!”
The mist distorted sound, much as it distorted the light. So when there came a great splash, it was hard to judge the size of the thing making the splashing sound. It was as if a bathtub had been dropped from a great height into the lake. Or a car. It was, anyway, a great splash.
“What was that?” Heather screamed again, holding her stomach as if she had a bellyache.
Gail began to run. She leaped the embankment and hit the beach and fell to her knees. Only the beach was gone. Waves splashed in, foot-high waves like you would see at the ocean, not on Lake Champlain. They drowned the narrow strip of pebbles and sand, running right up to the embankment. She remembered how on the walk back the water had been lapping gently at the shore, leaving room for Heather and Gail to walk side by side without getting their feet wet.
