A shiver of excitement coursed through her, and she squeezed his hand. “Do you think they will let us name it?”
“It already has a name. Everyone will call it Champ.”
“But maybe they will name the species after us. The Gailasaurus.”
“That would be naming it after you.”
“They could call it a DinoGail Joelasaurus. Do you think they will ask us questions about our discovery?”
“Everyone will interview us. Come on. Let’s get out of the water.”
They sloshed to the right, toward the tail, bobbing on the surface of the water. Gail had to wade back up to her waist to go around it, then started ashore. When she looked back, she saw Joel standing on the other side of the tail, looking down at it.
“What?” she said.
He reached out gently and put his hand on the tail. He jerked his hand back almost immediately.
“What’s it feel like?” she asked.
Even though she had climbed the net snarled around it, and had stood on top of it, she felt in some way that she had not touched it yet.
“It’s cold,” was all he said.
She put her hand on its side. It was as rough as sandpaper and felt like it had just come out of the icebox.
“Poor thing,” she said.
“I wonder how old it is,” he said.
“Millions of years. It’s been alone in this lake for millions of years.”
Joel said, “It was safe until people put their damn motorboats on the lake. How can it know about motorboats?”
“I bet it had a good life.”
“Millions of years alone? That doesn’t sound good.”
“It had a lake full of fish to eat and miles to swim in and nothing to be afraid of. It saw the dawning of a great nation,” Gail told him. “It did the backstroke under the moonlight.”
Joel looked at her in surprise. “You’re the smartest little girl on this side of the lake. You talk just like you’re reading from a book.”
“I’m the smartest little girl on either side of the lake.”
He pushed the tail aside and sloshed past it, and they walked dripping onto the shore. They came around the hind end and found Ben playing with his tin cowpoke, just as they had left him.
“I’ll tell him,” Joel said. He crouched and ruffled his little brother’s hair. “Do you see that rock behind you?”
Ben didn’t look up from his cowboy. “Uh-huh.”
“That rock is a dinosaur. Don’t be afraid of it. It’s dead. It won’t hurt anyone.”
“Uh-huh,” Ben said. He had buried his cowboy up to his tin waist. In a small, shrill voice, he shouted, “Help! I’m ah-drownin’ in this heah quicksand!”
Joel said, “Ben. I’m not playing pretend. It’s a real dinosaur.”
Ben stopped and looked back at it without much interest. “Okay.”
He wiggled his figure in the sand and went back to his shrill cowboy voice. “Someone throw me a rope before ah’m buried alive!”
Joel made a face and stood up.
“He’s just useless. The discover of the century right behind him, and all he wants to do is play with that stupid cowboy.”
Then Joel crouched again and said, “Ben. It’s worth a pile of money. We’re all going to be rich. You and me and Gail.”
Ben hunched his shoulders and put on a pouty face of his own. He could feel he wasn’t going to be allowed to play cowboy anymore. Joel was going to make him think about his dinosaur, whether he liked it or not.
“That’s all right. You can have my share of the money.”
“I won’t hold you to that later,” Joel said. “I’m not greedy.”
“What’s important,” Gail said, “is the advancement of scientific progress. That’s all we care about.”
“All we care about, little guy,” Joel said.
Ben thought of something that might save him and end the discussion. He made a sound in his throat, a great roar to indicate a jolting explosion. “The dynamite went off! I’m burnin’!” He flopped onto his back and began to roll desperately around. “Put me out! Put me out!”
No one put him out. Joel stood. “You need to go get a grown-up and tell them we found a dinosaur. Gail and me will stay here and guard it.”
Ben stopped moving. He let his mouth loll open. He rolled his eyes up in his head. “I can’t. I’m burnt to death.”
“You’re an idiot,” Joel said, tired of trying to sound like an adult. He kicked sand onto Ben’s stomach.
Ben flinched and his face darkened and he said, “You’re the one who is stupid. I hate dinosaurs.”
Joel looked like he was getting ready to kick sand in Ben’s face, but Gail intervened. She couldn’t bear to see Joel lose his dignity and had liked his serious, grown-up voice, and the way he had offered Ben a share of the reward money, without hesitation. Gail dropped to her knees next to the little boy and put a hand on his shoulder.
“Ben? Would you like a brand-new box of those cowboys? Joel says you’ve lost most of them.”
Ben sat up, brushing himself off. “I was going to save up for them. I’ve got a dime so far.”
“If you go and get your dad for us, I’ll buy you a whole box of them. Joel and I will buy you a box together.”
Ben said, “They’ve got them for a dollar at Fletcher’s. Do you have a dollar?”
“I will after I get the reward.”
“What if there isn’t no reward?”
“You mean to say what if there isn’t any reward,” Gail told him. “What you just said is a double negative. It means the opposite of what you want things to mean. Now, if there isn’t any reward, I’ll save up until I have a dollar and buy you a box of tin cowboys. I promise.”
“You promise.”
“That’s what I just said. Joel will save with me. Won’t you, Joel?”
“I don’t want to do anything for this idiot.”
“Joel.”
“I guess okay,” Joel said.
Ben tugged his cowpoke out of the sand and jumped to his feet.
“I’ll get Dad.”
Joel said, “Wait.”
He touched his black eye, then dropped his hand.
“Mom and Dad are sleeping. Dad said don’t wake them up until eight-thirty. That’s why we came outside. They were up late at the party at Millers’.”
“My parents were too,” Gail said. “My mother has a beastly headache.”
“At least your mom is awake,” Joel said. “Get Mrs. London, Ben.”
“Okay,” Ben said, and began walking.
“Run,” Joel said.
“Okay,” Ben said, but he didn’t change his pace.
Joel and Gail watched him until he vanished into the streaming mist.
“My dad would just say he found it,” Joel said, and Gail almost flinched at the ugliness in his voice. “If we show it to my dad first, we won’t even get our pictures in the paper.”
“We should let him sleep if he’s asleep,” Gail said.
“That’s what I think,” Joel said, lowering his head, his voice softening and going awkward. He had shown more emotion than he liked and was embarrassed now.
Gail took his hand, impulsively, because it seemed like the right thing to do.
He looked at their fingers, laced together, and frowned in thought, as if she had asked him a question he felt he should know the answer to. He looked up at her.
“I’m glad I found the creature with you. We will probably be doing interviews about this our whole lives. When we are in our nineties people will still be asking us about the day we found the monster. I’m sure we’ll still like each other even then.”
She said, “The first thing we’ll say is that it wasn’t a monster. It was just a poor thing that was run down by a boat. It’s not like it ever ate anyone.”
“We don’t know what he eats. Lots of people have drowned in this lake. Maybe some of them who drowned didn’t really. Maybe he picked his teeth with them.”<
br />
“We don’t even know it’s a he.”
They let go of each other’s hands and turned to look at it, sprawled on the brown, hard beach. From this angle it looked like a boulder again, with some netting across it. Its skin did not glisten like whale blubber but was dark and dull, a chunk of granite with lichen on it.
She had a thought, looked back at Joel. “Do you think we should get ready to be interviewed?”
“You mean like comb our hair? You don’t need to comb your hair. Your hair is beautiful.”
His face darkened and he couldn’t hold her gaze.
“No,” she said. “I mean we don’t have anything to say. We don’t know anything about it. I wish we knew how long it is, at least.”
“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 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. He probably has 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 had found farther down the beach. He splashed into the water, up to his ankles, then 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 into 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 is 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 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 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 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?”