Throwing Shadows Read online

  Also by E. L. Konigsburg

  Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth,

  William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth

  From the Mixed-up Files

  of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

  Altogether, One at a Time

  A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver

  The Dragon in the Ghetto Caper

  The Second Mrs. Gioconda

  My Father’s Daughter

  Throwing Shadows

  Journey to an 800 Number

  Up From Jericho Tel

  Samuel Todd’s Book of Great Colors

  Samuel Todd’s Book of Great Inventions

  Amy Elizabeth Explores Bloomingdale’s

  T-Backs, T-Shirts, COAT, and Suit

  TalkTalk

  The View From Saturday

  Silent to the Bone

  The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place

  The Mysterious Edge

  of the Heroic World

  For Fred Sochatoff—

  who was there at the beginning,

  before either of us knew

  it was a beginning

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events,

  real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters,

  places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination,

  and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons,

  living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

  www.simonandschuster.com

  Copyright © 1979 by E. L. Konigsburg

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in

  part in any form.

  ALADDIN PAPERBACKS and related logo are registered trademarks

  of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Collier Books edition 1988

  First Aladdin Paperbacks edition February 1981

  Second Aladdin Paperbacks edition April 1998

  Third Aladdin Paperbacks edition September 2007

  2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

  The Library of Congress has cataloged a previous edition as follows:

  Konigsburg, E.L.

  Throwing shadows / E.L. Konigsburg

  p. cm.

  Summary: Five short stories in which young people gain a sense of self.

  1. Identity—Juvenile fiction. [1. Identity—Fiction. 2. Short stories.]

  I. Title.

  PZ7.K8352Th 1988

  [Fic]—dcl9 87-21741

  ISBN-13: 978-0-689-30714-0 (hc.)

  ISBN-10: 0-689-30714-4 (hc.)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-4169-4959-6 (pbk.)

  ISBN-10: 1-4169-4959-3 (pbk.)

  eISBN: 978-1-4424-3975-7

  Contents

  On Shark’s Tooth Beach

  by Ned

  The Catchee

  by Avery

  In the Village of the Weavers

  by Ampara

  At the Home

  by Phillip

  With Bert & Ray

  by William

  On Shark’s Tooth Beach

  by Ned

  My dad is Hixon of Hixon’s Landing, the fishing camp down on the intracoastal waterway just across Highway A1A. Our camp isn’t a fancy one. Just two coolers, one for beer and one for bait, plus four boats and eight motors that we rent out.

  Dad was raised on a farm in Nebraska, but he joined the Navy and signed on for the war in Vietnam and came back knowing two things. One, he hated war, and two, he loved the sea. Actually, he came back with two loves. The other one was my mother. There wasn’t any way anyone could get him to settle anywhere that was far from the ocean when he got out of the service, so he bought this small stretch of land in north Florida, and we’ve been there for all of my life that I can remember.

  Dad’s got this small pension for getting wounded over in Nam, so between what we sell, what we rent and what the government sends, we do all right. We’re not what you’re likely to call rich, but we are all right. Mom doubts that we’ll ever make enough money to pay for a trip to her native country of Thailand, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She says that it is more important to love where you’re at than to love where you’re from.

  Mom makes and sells sandwiches for the fishermen. She does a right good job on them, I can tell you. There is this about Mom’s sandwiches: you don’t have to eat halfway through to the middle to find out what’s between the bread, and once you get hold of a bite, you don’t have to guess at whether it is egg salad or tuna that you’re eating. The filling is high in size and in flavor.

  The town next door to us is spreading south toward our landing, and both Mom and Dad say that our property will be worth a pretty penny in a few years. But both of them always ask, “What’s a pretty penny worth when you can’t buy anything prettier than what you already have?” I have to agree. Maybe because I don’t know anything else, but I can’t imagine what it would be like not to have a sandbox miles and miles long and a pool as big as an ocean for a playground across the street—even if the street is a highway. I can’t ever remember going to sleep but that I heard some water shushing and slurping or humming and hollering for a lullaby.

  Last spring, just as the days were getting long enough that a person could both start and finish something between the time he got home from school and the time he went to bed, I went out onto our dock and I saw this guy all duded up from a catalogue. Now that the town has grown toward us, we have more of these guys than we used to. When you’ve been in the business of fishing all your life, you come to know the difference between fishermen and guys who have a hobby. Here are some of the clues:

  1. The hat. A real fisherman’s hat is darkened along the edges where the sweat from his hand leaves marks. A non-fisherman’s hat has perfect little dent marks in it.

  2. The smile. Real fishermen don’t smile while they’re fishing unless someone tells them a joke. Real fishermen wear their faces in the same look people wear when they are in church—deliberate and far-off—the way they do when they don’t want to catch the eye of the preacher. The only time that look changes is when they take a swig of beer and then it changes only a little and with a slow rhythm like watching instant replay on television. Non-fishermen twitch their necks around like pigeons, which are very citified birds, and non-fishermen smile a lot.

  3. The umbrella. Real fishermen don’t have them.

  This old guy sat on a wooden-legged, canvas-bottom folding campstool that didn’t have any salt burns on it anywhere and put his rod into one of the holders that Dad had set up along the dock railing. Then he held out his hand and called out, “Hey, boy, do you know what I’ve got here?”

  I walked on over to him and said, “Name’s Ned.”

  “What’s that?” he asked, cupping his hand over his ear so that the breeze wouldn’t blow it past him.

  “I said that my name is Ned,” I repeated.

  “All right, Ed,” he said. “I have a question for you. Do you know what this is, boy?”

  “Name’s Ned,” I repeated. I looked down at the palm of his hand and saw a medium-sized shark’s tooth from a sand shark. “Not bad,” I said.

  “But do you know what it is, boy?” he asked.

  I could tell that it wasn’t the kind of question where a person is looking for an answer; it was the kind of question where a person just wants you to look interested long enough so that he can get on with telling you the answer. I decided that I wouldn’t play it that way even if he was a customer. Three boys in a row made me mean, so I said, “Medium-sized sand.”

  “What’s that?”
he shouted, cupping his hand over his ear again.

  “Medium-sized sand,” I repeated louder.

  “That’s a shark’s tooth,” he said, clamping his hand shut.

  Shoot! I knew that it was a shark’s tooth. I was telling him what kind it was and what size it was.

  “That is a fossilized shark’s tooth, boy,” he said. “Found it just across the street.”

  “Name’s Ned,” I told him, and I walked away.

  Sharks’ teeth wash up all the time at the beach just across the road from Hixon’s Landing. There’s a giant fossil bed out in the ocean somewheres, and a vent from it leads right onto our beach. When the undertow gets to digging up out of that fossil bed and the tide is coming in, all kinds of interesting things wash in. Besides the sharks’ teeth, there are also pieces of bones that wash up. I collect the backbones, the vertebraes, they’re called; they have a hole in them where the spinal column went through. I have a whole string of them fixed according to size.

  I collect sharks’ teeth, too. I have been doing it for years. Mom started me doing it. It was Mom who made a study of them and found what kind of animal they might come from. Mom has these thorough ways about her. Dad says that Mom is smarter’n a briar and prettier’n a movie star.

  Mom fixes the sharks’ teeth that we collect into patterns and fastens them down onto a velvet mat and gets them framed into a shadowbox frame. She sells them down at the gift shop in town. And the gift shop isn’t any tacky old gift shop full of smelly candles and ashtrays with the name of our town stamped on it. It’s more like an art gallery. Matter of fact, it is called The Artists’ Gallery, and Mom is something of an artist at how she makes those sharks’ teeth designs. Some of the really pretty sharks’ teeth Mom sells to a jeweler who sets them in gold for pendants. When she gets two pretty ones that match, he makes them into earrings.

  When I find her a really special or unusual one, Mom says to me, “Looks like we got a trophy, Ned.” When we get us a trophy, one that needs investigating or one that is just downright super special, we don’t sell it. Shoot! We don’t even think about selling it. There’s nothing that bit of money could buy that we’d want more than having that there trophy.

  Most everyone who comes to Hixon’s Landing knows about Mom and me being something of authorities on fossils, especially sharks’ teeth, so I figured that this old dude would either go away and not come back or hang around long enough to find out. Either way, I figured that I didn’t need to advertise for myself and my mom.

  The next day after school there was the old fellow again. I wouldn’t want to sound braggy or anything, but I could tell that he was standing there at the end of our dock waiting for me to come home from school.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Well, boy,” he said, “did you have a good day at school?”

  “Fair,” I answered. I decided to let the boy ride. I figured that he couldn’t hear or couldn’t remember or both. “Catch anything?” I asked.

  “No, not today,” he said. “Matter of fact I was just about to close up shop.” Then he began reeling in, looking back over his shoulder to see if I was still hanging around. He didn’t even bother taking the hook off his line; he just dumped rod and reel down on the dock and stuck out his hand to me and said, “Well, son, you can call me President Bob.”

  “What are you president of?” I asked.

  “President of a college, upstate Michigan. But I’m retired now.”

  “Then you’re not a president,” I said.

  “Not at the moment, but the title stays. The way that people still call a retired governor, Governor. You can call me President Bob instead of President Kennicott. Bob is more informal, but I wouldn’t want you to call me just Bob. It doesn’t seem respectful for a boy to call a senior citizen just Bob.”

  “And you can call me Ned,” I said. “That’s my name.”

  “All right, son,” he said.

  “After the first day, I don’t answer to son or to boy,” I said.

  “What did you say your name was, son?”

  Shoot! He had to learn. So I didn’t answer.

  “What is your name again?”

  “Ned.”

  “Well, Ned, would you like to take a walk on the beach and hunt for some of those sharks’ teeth?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  He must have counted on my saying yes, because the next thing I see is him dropping his pants and showing me a pair of skinny white legs with milky blue veins sticking out from under a pair of bathing trunks.

  As we walked the length of the dock, he told me that he was used to the company of young men since he had been president of a college. “Of course, the students were somewhat older,” he said. Then he laughed a little, like punctuation. I didn’t say anything. “And, of course, I didn’t often see the students on a one-to-one basis.” I didn’t say anything. “I was president,” he added. He glanced over at me, and I still didn’t say anything. “I was president,” he added.

  “There’s supposed to be some good fishing in Michigan,” I said.

  “Oh, yes! Yes, there is. Good fishing. Fine fishing. Sportsmen’s fishing.”

  We crossed AlA and got down onto the beach from a path people had worn between the dunes, and I showed him how to look for sharks’ teeth in the coquina. “There’s nothing too much to learn,” I said. “It’s mostly training your eye.”

  He did what most beginners do, that is, he picked up a lot of wedge-shaped pieces of broken shell, mostly black, thinking they were fossil teeth. The tide was just starting on its way out, and that is the best time for finding sharks’ teeth. He found about eight of them, and two of them were right nice sized. I found fourteen myself and three of mine were bigger than anything he collected. We compared, and I could tell that he was wishing he had mine, so I gave him one of my big ones. It wasn’t a trophy or anything like that because I would never do that to Mom, that is, give away a trophy or a jewelry one.

  President Bob was waiting for me the next day and the day after that one. By the time Friday afternoon came, President Bob gave up on trying to pretend that he was fishing. He’d just be there on the dock, waiting for me to take him sharks’ tooth hunting.

  “There’s no magic to it,” I told him. “You can go without me.”

  “That’s all right, Ned,” he said. “I don’t mind waiting.”

  On Saturday I had a notion to sleep late and was in the process of doing just that when Mom shook me out of my sleep and told me that I had a visitor. It was President Bob, and there he was standing on his vanilla legs right by my bedroom door. He had gotten tired of waiting for me on the dock. It being Saturday, he had come early so’s we could have more time together.

  Mom invited him in to have breakfast with me, and while we ate, she brought out our trophy boxes. Our trophies were all sitting on cotton in special boxes like the ones you see butterflies fixed in inside a science museum. Mom explained about our very special fossils.

  “Oh, yes,” President Bob said. Then, “Oh, yes,” again. Then after he’d seen all our trophies and had drunk a second cup of coffee, he said, “We had quite a fine reference library in my college. I am referring to the college of which I was president. Not my alma mater, the college I attended as a young man. We had quite a fine library, and I must confess I used it often, so I am not entirely unfamiliar with these things.”

  That’s when I said, “Oh, yes,” except that it came out, “Oh, yeah!” and that’s when Mom swiped my foot under the table.

  President Bob plunked his empty cup down on the table and said, “Well, come on now, Ned, time and tide wait for no man. Ha! Ha!”

  I think that I’ve heard someone say that at least four times a week. Everyone says it. Dad told me that it was a proverb, an old, old saying. And I can tell you that it got old even before I reached my second birthday.

  When we got down to the beach, President Bob brought out a plastic bag and flung it open like a bag boy at the supermarket. But there wasn�
��t much to fill it with that day because the currents had shifted and weren’t churning up the fossil bed.

  “I suppose you’ll be going to church tomorrow,” he said.

  “Yes,” I answered.

  “I think I’ll do some fishing in the morning. I’ll probably have had enough of that by noon. I’ll meet you at the dock about twelve-thirty. We can get started on our sharks’ tooth hunt then.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I help Mom with the sandwiches and then we clean things up and then we go to late services. Sunday is our busiest day.”

  “Of course it is,” he said.

  Mom and I got back about one-thirty and changed out of our good clothes before Dad came in as he always does on Sundays to grab some lunch before the men start coming back and he has to get busy with washing down motors and buying. (What he buys is fish from the men who have had a specially good run. Dad cleans them and sells them to markets back in town or to people who drive on out toward the beach of a Sunday. Sometimes, he gets so busy buying and cleaning that Mom and I pitch right in and give him a hand.)

  Dad had not quite finished his sandwiches and had just lifted his beer when he got called out to the dock. There was this big haul of bass that some men were wanting to sell.

  Mom and I were anxious to finish our lunch and clean up so’s we could go on out and see if Dad would be needing some help when President Bob presented himself at the screen door to our kitchen.

  “Knock, knock,” he said, pressing his old face up against the screen. The minute we both looked up he opened the door without even an if you please and marched into our kitchen on his frosted icicle legs. “I think you’re going to be interested in what I found today,” he said. “Very interested.”

  Mom smiled her customer smile and said, “We are having very busy day, please to excuse if I continue with work.”

  “That’s perfectly all right,” President Bob said. “You’re excused.” Then he sat down at the table that Mom was wiping off. He held up the placemat and said, “Over here, Mama-san. You missed a spot.”

  Mom smiled her customer smile again and wiped the spot that he had pointed to, and President Bob put the placemat back down and emptied the contents of his plastic bag right on top of it. He leaned over the pile and using his forefinger began to comb through it. “Ah! here,” he said. He picked up a small black thing between his thumb and forefinger and said to Mom, “Come here, Mama-san.” Mama-san is some kind of Japanese for mama. A lot of people call my mom that, but she says it’s okay because it is a term of respect, and a lot of people think that all Orientals are Japanese. Sometimes these same people call me Boy-san, which is to boy what Mama-san is to mama. They call me that because I have dark slanted eyes just like Mom’s, except that hers are prettier.