Sixty-Two Shimmers

The thermometer nailed above Odell's shaved-ice stand read 114, which was two degrees hotter than the air had any right to be and one degree past the number that was supposed to shut the whole fair down.

Wyatt had been watching that thermometer since noon instead of the dunk tank, because his grandfather had bet him a dollar it would hit 115 by two o'clock, and Wyatt intended to collect.

"Heat like this, the blacktop starts lying to you," Grandpa Cal said, fanning himself with a paper program. "Every year, right around now. You watch the far end of the square."

Wyatt watched. Founders' Day filled the square every June on the single hottest afternoon the almanac could find for it, a decision the town had made so long ago that nobody living remembered whose idea it was, and the crowd down by the courthouse steps had started to shimmer, doubling itself in the rising heat the way a stick doubles in a glass of water.

It wasn't magic. His teacher had drawn it on the board back in April: cool air on top, a thin oven of hot air right along the ground, light bending through the difference until your eyes got two pictures instead of one. A mirage, same family as the water that never sits still on a desert highway.

Everybody in the square had seen it a hundred summers running. Everybody called it the shimmer and mostly stopped looking, the way you stop hearing a fridge hum.

Wyatt counted the shimmer-crowd against the real one anyway, because he was twelve and counting things was something to do with his hands. Sixty-one people by the funnel cake stand, sixty-one wavering copies of them a few feet up and to the left, same shirts, same hats, same lazy drift toward the shade.

Sixty-two on the second count.

"Grandpa. There's one extra."

"Heat plays tricks on a count," Cal said, not really listening, eyes on the dunk tank where a boy from Wyatt's class had just gone under.

"Not tricks. A number. Sixty-one people, sixty-two shimmers." Wyatt pointed. "That one's not doing what everybody else is doing."

Every shimmer-person moved a beat behind their real one, the way a reflection in a pond catches up half a second late. The extra one wasn't behind anybody. It stood still at the edge of the courthouse steps while sixty-one wavering copies drifted past it, facing the crowd instead of mirroring it.

Cal's paper program stopped moving.

"What's it wearing," he said, too carefully for a man who'd claimed thirty seconds ago he wasn't looking.

"I can't tell yet. It's too far and too wobbly." Wyatt squinted. "Straw hat, maybe. Like yours."

Odell set two shaved ices on the counter without being asked, cherry for Wyatt, nothing for herself, and followed both their stares down the square with the particular calm of a woman who had been selling ice at this fair for forty Junes.

"Cal Ashworth standing this close to my stand past noon," she said, mostly to herself. "That's new this year." Cal didn't answer her either.

"First time you've clocked the extra one," she said to Wyatt, not a question. "Most kids get one summer of just seeing double before they notice the count's off. You did it in an afternoon."

"Is it dangerous?"

"It's heat," she said, which was not the same as no. "The square's been the hottest patch of ground in this county since before it was paved, and hot ground plays fair with nobody. Most years the extra one stays down by the steps and never gets any closer, and everybody just goes home a little rattled and calls it the light."

"Most years," Cal repeated.

"Cal Ashworth, you know exactly what I'm not finishing that sentence with, so don't make me."

Wyatt looked between them, the way you look between two adults who have just agreed, without a single further word, to keep something from you badly.

By half past one the extra shimmer had drifted twenty feet closer to the funnel cake line, moving in a direction none of the real crowd was moving, straw hat now unmistakable, a walk Wyatt had watched every single day of his life from three steps behind it on the way to school.

"That's your walk," Wyatt said. His voice came out smaller than he meant it to. "That's exactly how you walk."

Cal didn't answer. He'd gone the colour the shaved ice was supposed to be, and his hand had found the fence rail like he needed it to stay upright in weather he'd stood in every June for sixty years.

"Grandpa, sit down. You look —"

"I'm fine," Cal said, in the voice grown-ups use for the opposite of fine, and took one step toward the shade of the awning, and his knees simply stopped agreeing to hold him up.

He went down hard against the fence rail, eyes open, breathing too fast and too shallow, sweat gone from his face in a way that Wyatt's brain understood, all at once, was worse than sweat.

Down by the courthouse steps, sixty feet away, the extra shimmer folded to the ground at the exact same instant, in the exact same shape, and lay there wavering while the real crowd walked through it without seeing.

"ODELL." Wyatt was already moving, already on his knees on blacktop hot enough to sting through his shorts, hands under his grandfather's shoulders the way the school video had shown for heat stroke, not letting himself look back down the square to see if the other one was getting up too.

"Water, now, and get him in shade, don't you dare wait on me," Odell said, already there with a cup, already yelling past Wyatt's head for the first-aid tent. Between them they dragged Cal the six feet into shadow, propped him against the ice cart's cool metal side, poured water over his wrists the way the video said, kept talking to him, kept his eyes on theirs and not on anything sixty feet away.

It took four long minutes for his breathing to even out and his eyes to focus properly on Wyatt's face instead of somewhere past it.

"Bet's off," Cal said finally, voice cracked but his own again. "Never made it to two o'clock."

"Don't joke," Wyatt said, and found he was crying a little, angry about it, wiping his face with a wrist that smelled like melted cherry ice.

The paramedics said heat exhaustion, textbook, a close one but not the emergency kind, keep him cool and hydrated and off blacktop till the temperature broke. Cal was sitting up in the first-aid tent inside the hour, embarrassed, waving off a second bottle of water, telling the volunteer he'd stood in worse Junes than this one.

Cal wouldn't meet his eyes while the volunteer wrapped a cuff around his arm. Wyatt caught the dodge and asked it straight, the only kind of question he had left in him.

"Why'd you bring me this year? You never even come near the dunk tank. You hate the crowds."

Cal was quiet long enough that the volunteer finished and moved to the next cot before he answered.

Cal looked at his own hands, not at his grandson. "Doctor said something in March I didn't much care for. Told your mother, not you. Said a man my age ought to have somebody close by this time of year who notices things fast. You've always been sharper with numbers than the rest of us put together. Didn't seem right not to use that, once I knew," he said.

"You bet me a dollar," Wyatt said, "so I'd stare at a thermometer all afternoon."

"Kept your eyes on the square the whole day, didn't it. Wasn't going to tell a twelve-year-old to watch for his own grandfather's ghost. Told him to watch a number instead. Same job. Better odds he'd actually do it," Cal said, and almost smiled, the way a man does when getting caught costs him less than staying quiet would have.

Wyatt didn't know whether to be furious or grateful, and settled, for now, on both at once, which felt like the only honest thing available to feel.

Wyatt didn't go back to the dunk tank. He sat by the ice cart with Odell instead, watching the square from the shade, where the shimmer had gone back to doing what it always did, sixty-one wavering copies drifting a beat behind sixty-one real people.

No sixty-second figure. Not by the steps, not anywhere he could find, no matter how many times he counted.

"Does it always stop, once somebody goes down?" he asked.

"Every time I've seen it," Odell said. "For the one it was showing you, anyway." She started wiping the counter, not quite meeting his eye. "The fair's been held on the hottest recorded day of the year, every single year, for sixty-one years running. It's in the town ledger at the courthouse, if you ever want to feel worse about a coincidence. Sixty-one years, sixty-one hottest days, never once missed."

Wyatt sat with that, the number and the other number, the ones that matched without either of them saying so.

"They could just move it to a cooler day," he said.

"They could," Odell agreed, and didn't explain why nobody ever had, and went back to wiping the counter, and left him watching the empty stretch of blacktop by the courthouse steps where the heat kept rising, patient, off a square that had never once in sixty-one years been asked to cool down.