The Shadow Year

by Jeffrey Ford

  “Are you my right-hand man?” asked Jim.

  “Yes,” said Franky. “But what if he’s in there?”

  “Before he touches you, just say you’re making a citizen’s arrest.”

  Franky thought about this for a moment.

  “Don’t do it,” I said.

  Jim glared at me. Then he put his hand on Franky’s shoulder and said, “He saw your mom’s ass.”

  Franky nodded and went to the pipe opening. He bent down, got on his knees, and then crawled forward into the dark a little way before stopping. Jim went over and lightly tapped him in the rear end with the toe of his sneaker. “You’ll be a hero if you find him. They’ll put your picture in the newspaper.” Franky started crawling forward again, and in seconds he was out of sight.

  “What if he gets lost in there?” I said.

  “We’ll just have everyone in town flush at the same time, and he’ll ride the wave out into the sump behind the baseball field,” said Jim.

  Every few minutes one of us would lean into the pipe and yell to Franky, and he would yell back. Pretty soon we couldn’t make out what he was saying, and his voice got smaller and smaller. Then we called a few more times and there was no answer.

  “What do you think happened to him?” I asked.

  “Maybe the pervert got him,” said Jim, and he looked worried. “He could be stuck in there.”

  “Should I run home and get Pop?” I asked.

  “No,” said Jim. “Go up to that manhole cover on the bike path by the playground and call down through the little hole. Then put your ear over the hole and see if you hear him. Tell him to come back.”

  I took off running up the side of Sewer Pipe Hill and across the field as fast as I could. Reaching the manhole cover, I got on all fours and leaned my mouth down to the neat round hole at its edge. “Hey!” I yelled. I turned my head and put my ear to the hole.

  Franky’s voice came up to me quite clearly but with a metallic ring to it, as if he were a robot.

  “What?” he said. “I’m here.” It sounded as if he were right beneath me.

  “Come out,” I called. “Jim says to come back.”

  “I like it in here,” he said.

  In that moment I pictured his house; his sister, Lily, with her crossed eyes; his mother’s prominent jaw and horse teeth, her crazy red hair; the little figures his father fashioned out of the wax from his enormous ears. “You gotta come back,” I said.

  A half minute passed in silence, and I thought maybe he had moved on, continuing through the darkness.

  Finally his voice sounded. “Okay,” he said, and then, “Hey, I found something.”

  Jim was sitting on the lip of the sewer pipe reading a magazine, while George sat at his feet staring up at him. As I eased down the side of the hill, he said, “Look what George tracked down by that fallen tree.” He pointed into the woods. “There were some crushed beer cans and cigarette butts over there.”

  I came up next to him and looked over his shoulder at the magazine. It was wrinkled from having been rained on, and there was mud splattered on the cover. He turned the page he was looking at toward me, and I saw a woman with red hair, black stockings, high-heeled shoes, a top hat, and an open jacket but nothing else.

  “Look at the size of those tits,” said Jim.

  “She’s naked,” I whispered.

  Jim picked the magazine up to his mouth, positioning it right in the middle of her spread-out legs, where the little hedge of red hair grew over her pussy, and yelled, “Hellooooooo!”

  We laughed.

  I forgot to tell Jim that I’d made contact with Franky. Instead we moved on to the centerfold. Three full pages of a giant blonde bending over a piano bench.

  “Aye-aye, Captain,” said Jim, and rapidly saluted her ass four times. Then we flipped the pages quickly to the next naked woman, only to stare and swoon.

  As I reached down to pet the dog for his discovery, we heard Franky inside the pipe. Jim got up and turned around, and we both stared into the opening. Slowly the soles of his shoes appeared out of the dark, and then his rear end, as he backed out into daylight. When he stood up and turned to face us, he was smiling.

  “What’s your report?” asked Jim.

  “It was nice and quiet in there,” said Franky.

  Jim shook his head. “Anything else?”

  Franky held out his hand and showed Jim what he’d found. It was a green plastic soldier, carrying a machine gun in one hand and a grenade in the other. I moved closer to see the detail and noticed that the figure wore no helmet, which was unusual for an army man. He wore cartridge belts over each shoulder, and his lips were pulled back so that you could see his teeth gritted tight.

  Jim took the soldier out of Franky’s hand, looked at it for a second, said, “Sergeant Rock,” and then put it into his pocket.

  Franky’s brow furrowed. “Give it back,” he said. His hands balled into fists, and he took a step forward as a challenge.

  Jim said, “Let me ask you a question. When the prowler saw your mother’s ass…”

  “Stop saying my mother’s ass,” said Franky, and took another step forward.

  “…did it look like this?” asked Jim, and he flipped the magazine so that the centerfold opened.

  Franky saw it and went slack. He brought his hands up to his cheeks, his fingers partially covering his eyes. “Oh, no,” he said, and stared.

  “Oh, yes,” said Jim. He ripped off the bottom third, the page containing the big ass, and handed it to Franky. “This is your reward for bravery in the sewer pipe.”

  Franky took the torn page in his trembling hands, his gaze fixed on the picture. Then he looked up and said, “Let me see the magazine.”

  “I can’t,” said Jim. “It’s Exhibit A. Evidence. You’ll get your fingerprints on it.” He rolled it up and put it under his arm the way Mr. Mangini carried the newspaper as he walked down the street coming home from work every evening.

  We spent another couple of hours looking for clues all around the school field and through the woods, but George lost the scent, and we eventually headed home. At every other driveway we passed, Franky would take his piece of centerfold out of his back pocket and stop to stare at it. We left him standing in front of Mrs. Grimm’s house, petting the image as if it were flesh instead of slick paper.

  Botch Town

  When we got home, Jim made me go in first and see if the coast was clear. My mother wouldn’t be home for about two hours, and Nan and Pop were in their place. I didn’t see Mary around, but that didn’t matter anyway.

  Up in his room, Jim slid the loose floorboard back and stowed the magazine. Then he got up and went to his desk. “Here,” he said, and turned around holding a black-and-white-bound composition book. “This is for the investigation.” He walked over and handed it to me. “Write down everything that’s happened so far.”

  I took the book from him and nodded.

  “What are you gonna do with the soldier?” I asked.

  Jim took the green warrior out of his pocket and held it up. “Guess,” he said.

  “Botch Town?” I asked.

  “Precisely,” he said.

  I followed him out of the room, down the stairs, through the living room, to the hallway that led to the first-floor bedrooms. At the head of this hall was a door. He opened it, and we descended the creaking wooden steps into the dim mildew of the cellar.

  The cellar was lit by one bare bulb with a pull string and whatever light managed to seep in from outside through the four window wells. The floor was unpainted concrete, as were the walls. The staircase bisected the layout, and there was an area behind the steps, where a curtain hung, that allowed access from one side to the other. Six four-inch-thick metal poles positioned in a row across the center of the house supported the ceiling.

  It was warm in the winter and cool in the summer down there in the underground twilight, where the aroma of my mother’s oil paints and turpentine mixed with the pine and
glittering tinsel scent of Christmas decorations heaped in one corner. It was a treasure vault of the old, the broken, the forgotten. Stuff lay on shelves or stacked along the walls, covered with a thin layer of cellar dust, the dandruff of concrete, and veiled in cobwebs hung with spider eggs.

  On Pop’s heavy wooden workbench, complete with crushing vise, there sat coffee cans of rusted nuts and bolts and nails, planes, rasps, wrenches, levels with little yellow bubbles encased to live forever. Riding atop this troubled sea of strewn tools, seemingly abandoned in the middle of the greatest home-repair job ever attempted, was a long, curving Chinese junk carved from the horn of an ox, sporting sails the color of singed paper, created from thin sheets of animal bone, and manned by a little fellow, carved right out of the black horn, who wore a field worker’s hat and kept one hand on the tiller. Pop told me he had bought it in Singapore, when he traveled the world with the merchant marine, from a woman who showed him my mother as a little girl dancing, years before she was born, in a piece of crystal shaped like an egg.

  Leaning against the pipe that ran along the back wall and then out of the house to connect with the sewer line were my mother’s paintings: a self-portrait standing in a darkened hallway, holding me when I was a baby; the flowering bushes of the Bayard Cutting Arboretum; a seascape and view of Captree Bridge. All the colors were subdued, and the images came into focus slowly, like wraiths approaching out of a fog.

  Crammed into and falling out of one tall bookcase that backed against the stair railing on the right-hand side were my father’s math books and used notebooks, every inch filled with numbers and weird signs, in his hand, in pencil, as if through many years he had been working the equation to end all equations. I remember a series of yellow journals, each displaying in a circle on the cover the bust of some famous, long-dead genius I would have liked to know more about, but when I pulled one journal off the shelf and opened it, that secret language inside told me nothing.

  In the middle of the floor to the right of the stairs sat an old school desk, with wooden chair attached, and a place to put your books underneath. Around this prop Mary created the school that her alter ego, Mickey, attended. Sometimes, when I knew she was playing this game, I would open the door in the hallway and listen to the strangely different voices of the teacher, Mrs. Harkmar, of her classmates, Sally O’Malley and Sandy Graham, and naturally of Mickey, who knew all the answers.

  Back in the shadows where the oil burner hummed stood a small platform holding the extreme-unction box, a religious artifact with hand-carved doors and a brass cross protruding from the top. We had no idea what unction was, but Jim told me it was “holy as hell” and that if you opened the door, the Holy Ghost would come out and strangle you, so that when they found your dead body it’d look like you just swallowed your tongue the wrong way.

  To the left of the stairs, beneath the single bare bulb like a sun, lay Jim’s creation, the sprawling burg of Botch Town. At one point my father was thinking of getting us an electric-train set. He went out and bought four sawhorses and the most enormous piece of plywood he could find. He set these up as a train table, but then the money troubles descended and it sat for quite a while, smooth and empty. One day Jim brought a bunch of cast-off items home with him, picked up along his early-morning paper route. It had been junk day, and he’d delivered his papers before the garbagemen had come. With coffee cans, old shoe boxes, pieces from broken appliances, Pez dispensers, buttons, Dixie cups, ice cream sticks, bottles, and assorted other discarded items, he began to build a facsimile of our neighborhood and the surrounding area. It became a project that he worked on a little here, a little there, continuously adding details.

  He’d started by painting the road (battleship gray) that came down straight from Hammond Lane and then curved around to the school, made from a shoe box with windows cut in it, a flagpole outside, the circular drive, basketball courts, and fields. Neatly written on the building in black Magic Marker above the front doors was RETARD FACTORY. The rest of the board he painted green for grass, with the exception of the lake in the woods, whose deep blue oval was covered with glitter.

  I left Jim there, contemplating his miniature world, and went back upstairs to record what we’d so far discovered.

  Dead Man’s Float

  I sat at the desk in my room, the open notebook in front of me, a pencil in my hand, and stared out the window, trying to recall all the details surrounding the prowler. There was the old ladder and the footprint, sitting, like a dirt layer cake, in a pink hatbox in the shed. I could have started with Mrs. Conrad and her ass, or just her scream.

  But, in fact, I didn’t know where to start. Although from the time I was six, I had always loved writing and reading, I didn’t feel much like recording evidence. Then, through the open window, I heard the Farleys’ back screen door groan open and slam shut. I stood and looked out to see what was going on. It was Mr. Farley, carrying a highball in one hand and a towel in the other. He was dressed in his swimming trunks, his body soft and yellow-white. His head seemed too heavy for the muscles of his neck, and it drooped forward, making him look as if he were searching for something he’d dropped in the grass.

  The Farleys’ pool was a child’s aboveground model, larger than the kind you blow up but no bigger than three feet deep and no wider than eight across. Mr. Farley set his drink down on the picnic table, draped his towel over the thickest branch of the cherry tree, shuffled out of his sandals, and stepped gingerly over the side into the glassy water.

  He trolled the surface, inspecting every inch for beetles and bees that might have escaped the draw of the noisy little filter that ran constantly. He fetched up blackened cherry leaves from the bottom with his toes and tossed them into the yard. Only then did he sit, cautiously, the liquid rising to accommodate his paunch, his sagging chest and rounded shoulders, until his head bobbed on the surface. Gradually he dipped forward, bringing his legs underneath him. His arms stretched out at his sides, his legs straightened behind him, his back broke the surface, and his face slipped beneath the water, leaving one bright bubble behind in its place.

  He floated there for a moment, his body stretched tautly across the center of the pool, and there came an instant when the rigid raft of his form gave way to death. His arms sank slowly, and his body curled like a piece of dough in a deep fryer. Mr. Farley really could do a mean dead man’s float. I wondered if he left his eyes open, letting them burn with chlorine, or if he closed them in order to dream more deeply into himself.

  I sat back down at my desk, and instead of writing about the investigation I wrote about Mr. Farley. After describing him getting into the pool and fake-drowning, I recorded two other incidents I remembered. The first had to do with his older son, Gregory, who had since moved away from home. When the boy was younger, Farley, an engineer who made tools for flights into outer space, tried to get his son interested in astronomy and science. Instead the kid wanted to be an artist. Mr. Farley didn’t approve. Before Gregory left home for good, he made a giant egg out of plaster of paris and set it up in the middle of the garden in the backyard. It sat there through months of wind and rain and sun and eventually turned green. On the day after the astronauts walked on the moon, Mr. Farley sledgehammered the thing into oblivion.

  The second incident happened one day when my father and I were raking leaves on the front lawn. Suddenly the Farleys’ front door opened and there he stood, weaving slightly, highball in hand. My father and I both stopped raking. Mr. Farley started down the steps tentatively, and with each step his legs buckled a little more until he stumbled forward, his knees landing on the lawn. He remained kneeling for an instant and then tipped forward, falling face-first onto the ground. Throughout all this, and even when he lay flat, he held his drink up above his head like a man trying to keep a pistol dry while crossing a river. I noticed that not a drop was spilled, as did my father, who looked over at me and whispered, “Nice touch.”

  I put the pencil down and closed the noteb
ook with a feeling of accomplishment. Jim had Botch Town, Mary had her imaginary world, my mother had her wine, my father his jobs, Nan the cards, and Pop his mandolin. Instead of writing about the footprint or Mrs. Conrad’s scream, I planned to fill the notebook with the lives of my neighbors, creating a Botch Town of my own between two covers.

  When I went down into the cellar to tell Jim about my decision, I found him holding the plastic soldier up to the lightbulb. Big white circles had been painted over his eyes, and his hands, which had once held the machine gun and grenade, had been chopped off and replaced with straight pins that jutted dangerously, points out, from the stubs of his arms.

  “Watch this: glow-in-the-dark paint,” said Jim, standing the figure upright on the board between our house and the Conrads’. He then leaned way out over Botch Town and pulled the lightbulb string. The cellar went dark.

  “The eyes,” he said, and I looked down to see the twin circles on the soldier’s face glowing in the shadows of the handmade town. The sight of him there, like something from a nightmare, gave me a chill.

  Jim stood quietly, admiring his creation, and I told him what I had decided to do with the notebook. I thought he would be mad at me for not following his orders.

  “Good work,” he said. “Everyone is a suspect.”

  He Walks the Earth

  Saturday afternoon I sat with Mary back amid the forsythias and read to her the descriptions of the people I had written about in my notebook so far. That morning I’d gone out on my bike early, scouring the neighborhood for likely suspects to turn into words, and had caught sight of Mrs. Harrington, whom I had nicknamed “the Colossus” for her mesmerizing girth, and Mitchell Erikson, a kid who shared my birthday and who, for every school assembly and holiday party, played “Lady of Spain” on his accordion.

  I doled them out to Mary, starting with Mr. Farley, reading in the same rapid whisper I used when relaying a chapter of a Perno Shell adventure. Mary was a good audience. She sat still, only nodding occasionally as she did when she sat with Pop while he figured the horses. Each nod told me that she had taken in and understood the information up to that point. She was not obviously saddened when Mrs. Harrington’s diminutive potato-head husband died, nor did she laugh at my description of Mitchell’s smile when bowing to scanty applause. Her nod told me she was tabulating the results of my effort, though, and that was all I needed.