Shallow Graves

York Health & Racquet Club.
    The gang passed and they found themselves alone.
    “You made it,” Meg said.
    “Wouldn’t miss this for the world.”
    “Here,” Meg called. “A present.”
    She pitched him an apple. He caught it left-handed.
    “I hate apples,” he said.
    Sam grinned. “So do I.”
    “ CLEARY STILL A small town?” Pellam smiled.
    She frowned.
    He asked, “Won’t they talk, we walk around like this?” They circled on the fringes of the festival.
    “Let ’em,” Meg said. “I’m feeling rebellious today. Phooey.”
    Sam was running sorties to the booths but always circling back to study Pellam with casual awe. Then he’d be off again, hooking up with some buddies from school, conspiring, looking amazed and devious and overjoyed—and always on the move.
    “Energetic, aren’t they?” Pellam watched an impromptu race.
    Meg said, “There’s nothing like children for perspective. What they teach you about yourself is the best. Somebody said that the most honest and the most deceitful, the cruelest and the kindest of all peopleare children.” She laughed. “Of course, that’s only half true when you’re talking about your own kids.”
    “You think about it, there are very few good movies about children,” Pellam said. “Sentiment, mostly. Or revisionism—directors trying to patch up their own childhood on celluloid. Or trying to put adult values on kids’ shoulders. Cheap shots, you ask me. I’d like to see a movie about the ambivalence of being a child. That would be a good project.”
    “Why don’t you suggest it to your studio?”
    Former studio, he thought, and didn’t answer. Meg jogged away quickly to keep Sam from climbing a fence.
    Pellam found himself in front of a turkey shoot booth, where you could win stuffed birds, chocolate turkeys, and a fifteen-pound frozen one by plinking tiny sponge rubber ducks—painted to look like turkeys—with a battered Sears pump action .22. Pellam called Sam over to him.
    “What do you want, son, one of those little stuffed turkeys or a candy one?”
    Sam looked shyly at his mother, who said, “Tell Mr. Pellam what you’d like.” She looked up, grinning. “This, I’ve got to see.”
    “I guess chocolate, okay?” His eyes on Pellam.
    Meg said, “If he can win it you can eat it.”
    “But maybe not all at once,” Pellam said. “It looks pretty big.”
    The booth attendant took a dollar from Pellam, who asked, “How many to win one of those chocolate turkeys? The bigger one?”
    The man loaded the skinny gun. “Six hits out of ten.”
    “Okay.” Pellam leaned forward, resting on the chest-high bench, and fired four shots slowly. They all missed, kicking up dust in the sandbag bullet trap.
    Sam laughed. Meg did too.
    Pellam slowly stood up straight. “Think I’ve got the feel.” He quickly lifted the stock to his cheek. Six shots—fast, short cracks, as fast as he could work the slide. Six ducks flew off the board.
    “Holy shit,” the booth man whispered. Then he blushed. “Oh, beg your pardon, Mrs. Torrens.”
    Pellam handed the gun back, and Sam took the candy, staring at him. Eyes wide. “Wow.”
    “What do you say, Sam?”
    “Holy . . . ,” the boy began slowly.
    Meg warned, “Sam.”
    “. . . cow. Wow, thanks, Mr. Pellam. That was like totally fresh. I mean, totally.”
    Meg said, “Sam . . .”
    Sam said, “Mom thinks I don’t speak English.”
    “I know fresh,” Pellam said. He looked at the candy. “I hope that it is too.”
    Sam peeled back the foil and bit off the bird’s head. “Wow,” he said through a mouthful of chocolate and walked away, looking back every fourth or fifth step. Another story was about to circulate.
    They wandered on. She said, “I thought all you knew was muzzle-loaders.”
    “I drive the L.A. Freeway. You gotta know how to shoot.”
    “Where’d you learn?”
    “My father,” he said.
    “Where’d you grow up?” she asked.
    “Simmons.”
    She turned to him. “No! Not just across the river?” She nodded west.
    “The very same.”
    “It’s a lot like Cleary.”
    “Little poorer, little scruffier,” Pellam said. “And we don’t get the tourists for the leaves. It’s mostly pine.”
    They walked in silence for a moment, kicking through the tall grass at the edge of the football field.
    “Keith couldn’t make it?”
    “He’ll be coming by later. He’s at his company.”
    “It was good of him to help me the other day.”
    “He said