Hardly a day passed that Jim Trebble didn’t think about how a big, juicy hamburger from Burger World would taste, tucked into a sesame seed bun with a slice of tomato and a crisp piece of lettuce. Fred used to could down three of ’em at one sitting, plus an order of onion rings and a thick chocolate milk shake. Jim had worked up to two burgers and a plateful of french fries, but anything more made him feel like his belly might bust wide open.
“You ain’t a man till you can eat three,” Fred had teased him, and three Burger World hamburgers had been Jim’s goal ever since, if only he could remember where Burger World was. Out on Route 16 somewhere, but he couldn’t think of the exact spot, and anyway, that was too far for him to go. He could make it into town, and once he’d even gotten out to Uncle Owen’s farm, but past that, the edges of the world seemed to dissolve into a foggy bog, and Jim was afraid to go any farther.
When he wasn’t thinking about hamburgers, he was thinking about meat loaf and mashed potatoes, pumpkin pie, turkey with gravy and dressing at Thanksgiving, rare roast beef on Christmas Eve. He liked to dream about chocolate cake, baked potatoes, sweet potato casserole, and corn on the cob fresh from the garden. He even pondered crisp cucumbers from time to time, even though he’d never liked cucumbers all that much. But you’ll get to missing anything if you haven’t had a bite of it in longer than you can recall.
Jim tried to eat. Tried as hard as he could. Problem was, everything slipped through his fingers before it got to his mouth. Just this morning he’d gone to pick a honeysuckle blossom to get a little taste of nectar, but when he’d reached to pinch the flower off the vine, it was like his fingers were made of air. He could see them, so he was pretty sure they were there, but for some reason nothing else knew it. He’d cup his hands to get a sip of water from the creek, and the water would ignore him, slipping past his fingers like they didn’t exist.
So Jim wasn’t sure if they did or not.
The sun was getting high in the sky when Jim heard the dog bark, which meant that boy Wendell was out and about tramping through the woods. Jim stepped through the door and checked for his shadow, the same way he’d done every day since the beginning of the summer, when he’d woken up to find himself in the cabin, wondering what he was doing there. There’d been a dog then, too, barking in the distance, and it had sounded so much like his dog, Buddy, that Jim had rolled over and mumbled, Hush, boy, I’m still sleeping. But when he’d opened his eyes, he hadn’t been in his room. It had been the strangest thing in the world.
Now, outside, he looked at the ground. His shadow still wasn’t there. It confounded him, not having a shadow anymore. If he were invisible, he could understand it. But he knew in broad daylight folks could see him, at least a little, tiny bit. He’d found his way to Granny’s house a few weeks ago, to see what she was fixing for lunch. She’d looked straight at him and backed into the table, rattling the ice in the tea pitcher.
“That you, Jim?” she’d asked in a trembling voice. “I don’t believe it could be, now could it?”
It’s me, Jim insisted, but Granny didn’t appear to hear.
“Lord, son, we’ve been missing you a long time,” Granny went on, and Jim waited to hear more, waited for Granny to tell him where everyone else had gone to and explain why he could find her house, just couldn’t seem to find his own. But she started crying instead. Jim tried to pat her on the shoulder in a comforting way, but when he touched her, she shivered, and he thought he’d best leave her alone. On his way out he glanced in the mirror in the front hallway, and there he was—Jim Trebble, age twelve, a little bit see-through, a little bit shiny around the edges, but it was definitely him.
Now when he went out during daylight, he stayed to the shadows and the shady parts. No point scaring folks to death.
He hadn’t seen Wendell in a week or so. Wendell almost always brought his dog, a redbone hound named King, and he talked that dog’s ear off, told him baseball scores and his plans for building a fort in his backyard, if only his dad could get some time off from the mill. Jim could picture that fort, high up in a tree, with good, strong walls to keep the enemy out. He knew just how to build a fort like that, and it drove him crazy that he couldn’t give Wendell some help, that he couldn’t even get Wendell to see that he was there.
He caught up with Wendell near the creek. Wendell’s nose was peeling from a sunburn, and Jim remembered how he always got sunburned in the summer. But now his skin was pale, hardly even a color. King looked over when Jim got close, the way he always did, and Jim wondered if the dog could see him even though he was standing in the shade of an oak tree. Folks said dogs had all sorts of abilities humans didn’t know about, and Jim believed it. In his opinion, most people weren’t half as smart as a dog. His own dog, Buddy, was a superior creature to himself in almost every way, except that he couldn’t talk, and even there Jim thought Buddy was just holding back, not wanting to show off.
“Come here, boy,” Jim called to King, and to his surprise the dog growled, a deep-throated growl that made Jim step even farther back into the shadows, and then let out a deep bay that lifted into a chorus of short, high-pitched barks.
“What is it, boy?” Wendell asked, looking around. A cloud passed over the sun. “Come on, King. Let’s head for the river.” King gave out one more low growl, a warning to whatever—or whoever—was out there, and then trotted over to Wendell’s side. They set out walking again.
Jim didn’t follow. He hunkered in the shadows, trembling a little. He’d known King for a while now, and the dog had never growled at him before. It felt to Jim like the dog had turned against him somehow. That confused him and made him feel lonesome. He only had a few friends now, and he’d counted King among them.
The birds in the trees overhead chattered feverishly among themselves. Jim turned to head back to the cabin, not bothering to stay out of the sun’s way. He hated it when Wendell went to the river. It gave Jim a sick feeling to even get near the water, which was funny, since he could remember fishing down there with Daddy and Fred and Uncle Owen, and a long time ago he used to go swimming at the bend with his friends. Not with Wendell, though. Jim hadn’t met Wendell until—well, Jim wasn’t so good with time anymore. He couldn’t exactly remember when he’d met Wendell.
The sun beat against Jim’s back. He could feel the sense of it, if not the heat. He held up his hand and waved it around, but still no shadow. He kept waving and waving, though, and then, just for a second, he thought he saw a hint of a dark patch against the dirt.
Well, what do you know about that? he thought. He looked around to see if there were any witnesses to this amazing event.
But he was all by himself except for the birds, who went on chirping and twittering as if nothing had happened and nobody at all was there.