The Shadow Year

by Jeffrey Ford

  When I got home, Dr. Gerber was there. He had pulled the rocker over by the living-room couch, where Mary was sleeping wrapped in a blanket with a bed pillow under her head. A big steel pot we knew as “the puke bucket” was on the floor next to her. He opened his eyes and waved to me as I came through the door. He was smoking a cigar, which he took out of his mouth momentarily to put his finger to his lips, and cautioned me to be quiet.

  Gerber was the town doctor. He was a heavyset man with a thick wave of black hair, a wide face, and glasses. I never saw him without his black suit on and his black leather bag sitting next to him or in his hand. He gave us kids all our shots, choked us on flat sticks, rubber-hammered our knees, listened to our hearts, and came to our houses when we were too sick to make it to the office. When my mother first brought Mary, small and weak, home from the hospital, he stopped by every day for a month to help my mother administer a special medicine and to assure us that Mary would live. It was not unusual to find him, morning or night, dozing for a few minutes in our rocking chair, pocket watch in hand.

  Once, during a snowstorm, when it was impossible to drive and my mother thought Jim was having an appendicitis attack, Gerber came the half mile from his office on foot, trudging through the snow. When he pronounced that Jim was merely suffering from a bad case of gas, he shook his head and laughed. Then he went next door to see Pop, with whom he shared an interest in horses, had a glass of Old Grand-Dad and a cigar, and was off. I watched him through the front window as he left, the darkness falling hard with the snow.

  He didn’t stay long the day Mary was sick but told Nan that he had another dozen kids to see, all of whom had the same thing. When he left, I sat at the end of the couch and watched cartoons on TV with the sound off. Just when I was about to get up and go outside, Mary opened her eyes. She was shivering slightly. Her mouth started to move, and she mumbled something. I got up and went to the hall closet where the towels were kept. Taking a washrag, I wet it with cold water and placed it on her forehead. She grabbed my hand.

  “The boy,” she said. “He’s to show. I found him.” She pointed one finger down at the floor.

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

  She fell back to sleep and seemed to be more comfortable. I went out into the yard, bored, and looked for something to do. Jim, I knew, would not be home soon, as he had joined the wrestling team and now took the late bus. In the middle of smacking the cherry tree’s trunk with an old yellow Wiffle ball bat, it suddenly came to me what Mary had meant.

  I ran back inside and went into the cellar. Leaning out over Botch Town, I pulled the string for the sun. I started at Hammond Lane and scanned up and down the block, searching for the clay figure of Charlie Edison. Mrs. Harrington was standing, round as a marble, in her front yard. Mr. Conrad was out of place, standing next to Mrs. Hayes in the Hayeses’ backyard. Mr. Mason had fallen over in his driveway, Boris the janitor worked on his car. I did find Mrs. Edison making her way down Willow Avenue toward the school but didn’t see Charlie anywhere. Most of the characters usually just milled around by their houses, but Charlie was no longer there.

  I was about to turn out the light and give up my search when I finally saw him. All the way on the other side of the board, beyond the school field and the woods, his figure lay on its side, directly in the center of the glittering blue waters of the lake.

  Back upstairs, I put the leash on George, and we were out the door in a flash. Down the block and around the corner we went, moving quickly toward the school. It was getting late in the afternoon, and the temperature had dropped. The woods were somewhat forbidding to me since Charlie had gone missing, and I wasn’t supposed to enter them alone, but I hesitated for only a moment before plunging in beneath the trees.

  We took the main trail and after ten minutes of fast walking stood at the edge of the lake. All the neighborhood kids’ parents told them it was bottomless, but the older I got, the more I suspected that was just a story to keep us from swimming in it or trying to set sail on a raft.

  Its surface was littered with fallen leaves, and in those places where the water peeked through, the reflection of the surrounding trees was rippled by the wind moving over its surface. It was so peaceful. I didn’t know what I expected to find—maybe a body floating out in the middle—but it looked just like it always did in autumn. I stood there for quite a while, listening to acorns and twigs falling in the woods around me, thinking about Charlie. I imagined him resting lightly on his back at the bottom, his eyes wide, his mouth open as if crying out. His hands reached up for the last rays of sunlight that came in over the treetops, cutting the water and revealing the way through his murky nightmare back up to the world. The gathering dusk chased George and me down the path and back out of the woods.

  That night I woke from sleep shivering. The wind was blowing, and the antenna on the roof above my room vibrated with a high-pitched wail, as if the very house were moaning. I made it to the bathroom, got sick, and staggered back to bed, where I fell into feverish dreams—a tumbling whirl of images punctuated with scenes of the sewer pipe, the lake, the descending brick stairway at St. Anselm’s. Teddy Dunden paid me a visit. Charlie, his mother, the man in the white car, a pale face at the window, and Perno Shell himself chased me, befriended me, betrayed me, until it all suddenly stopped. I heard the birds singing and opened my eyes to see a hint of red through the window. There was a wet cloth on my forehead, and then I noticed the shadowy form of my father, sitting at the end of my bed, hunched forward, eyes closed, one hand lying atop the covers next to my ankle. He must have felt me stir. He whispered, “I’m here. Go back to sleep.”

  Although the fever had broken and I was feeling much better by nine o’clock in the morning, the virus bought me a day off from school. Mary didn’t go either, and my mother stayed home from work to take care of us. It was like the old days, before the drinking and the money trouble. Nan came in, and we all sat for an hour after breakfast at the dining-room table, playing cards: old maid and casino. I had a great adventure with my plastic soldiers, which I hadn’t bothered with for months, on the windowsill in the living room while the brilliant, cold day shone in around me. We watched a mystery movie on TV with Peter Lorre as the sauerkraut-eating detective Mr. Moto, and my mother made spaghetti with butter.

  Around three o’clock I lay back down on the couch and closed my eyes. Mary sat on the floor in the kitchen putting together a puzzle, while my mother sat in the rocker beside me and dozed. All was quiet save for the murmur of the wind outside.

  I thought back to when I was in fourth grade and had stayed out of school off and on for forty-five days. My mother wasn’t working then, and if I didn’t feel like going to school, she let me stay home. I had genuinely discovered reading that year, and I lay in bed much of the time, devouring one book after another: Jason and the Argonauts, Treasure Island, The Martian Chronicles, Charlotte’s Web. It didn’t matter what type of story it was; the characters were more alive to me than all the students and teachers at East Lake.

  At lunchtime I would come out into the living room, and my mother would make the spaghetti, and we would watch an old movie. I was the only fourth grader who could identify Paul Muni or Leslie Howard on sight. I loved the mystery movies, their plots and the sense of suspense. My favorites were the ones with the Thin Man, and my mother, of course, was partial to Basil Rathbone as Holmes. Mr. Cleary threatened to keep me from passing fourth grade, but my mother went over to the school and told him I was passing, and I did.

  Remembering that year, I realized how different my mother was from other parents. That difference was like a light that always shone in the back of my mind no matter how dim things got when she’d drink. She scared me, and I hated what she became, but that light was like the promise of an eventual return to the way things once were. Those memories protected me as I fell a thousand stories down into sleep.

  I woke from that peaceful nap of no dreams only because Jim pried open my left eye with his thum
b. “This one’s dead, Doctor,” he said. I came to and noticed twilight at the window, heard the sound of the wine bottle pinging the rim of a glass in the kitchen. The first thought I had was of Charlie at the bottom of the lake. Who could I tell who would believe what I thought I knew?

  After dinner my mother put the Kingston Trio on the Victrola and sat at the dining-room table drinking and reading the newspaper. Mary was on her roller skates, going round and round, following the outer curve of the braided rug in the living room. Inside her orbit, Jim showed me some of his wrestling moves.

  “Could you possibly…?” I heard my mother say, and then she called us over to her.

  Jim and I each went to one side of the chair. She pointed at a small photograph in the newspaper. “Look who that is,” she said.

  I didn’t recognize him at first because he wasn’t wearing his paper hat, but Jim finally said, “Hey, it’s Softee.”

  Then the long, haggard face came into focus, and I could just about hear him say, “What’ll it be, sweetheart?”

  My mother told us that he’d been arrested because he was wanted for child molestation in another state. For a while he’d been a suspect in the Charlie Edison case but had been cleared of that suspicion.

  “What’s child molestation?” I asked

  “It means he’s a creep,” said my mother, and she turned the page.

  “He gave some kid a Special Softee,” said Jim.

  My mother lifted the paper and swung it at him, but he was too fast.

  “What’s the world coming to?” she said, and took another sip of wine.

  That night I couldn’t get to sleep, partly because I had slept during the day and partly because my thoughts were full of all the dark things that had burrowed into my world. I pictured a specimen of Miter’s Sun fresh from the branch but riddled with wormholes. The antenna moaned in the wind, and it didn’t matter how close Perno Shell was to the golden streets of El Dorado—the aroma of pipe smoke made it impossible to concentrate on the book.

  I got up and went to my desk, opened the drawer, and took out my stack of Softee cards. The vanilla-cone head now struck me as sinister; leering with that frozen smile. I took them over to the garbage pail and dropped them in. Back in bed, though, all I could think of was the one card—the eyes—that I had never owned. I was unable to throw that card out, bury it, burn it with the rest of the deck, those eyes were always gaining power, and they watched me from inside my own head. I hunkered down under the covers and waited to hear my father come in from work.

  Instead I heard a scream—Mary downstairs—and the sound of George barking. I jumped out of bed and took the steps. Jim was right behind me. When we got to her darkened room, she was sitting upright in bed with a terrified look on her face.

  “What?” said Jim.

  “Someone’s outside,” she said. “There was a face at the window.”

  George snorted and growled.

  I felt someone at my back and turned quickly. It was Nan, standing there in her quilted bathrobe and hairnet, holding a carving knife in her hand.

  Jim took George by the collar and led him to the kitchen. “Get ’em, George,” he said, and opened the back door. The dog ran out, growling. Mary, Nan, Jim, and I waited to hear if he caught anyone. After some time passed, Nan told us to stay put and went out, holding the knife at the ready. A few seconds later, she came back, George at her heels.

  “Whoever it was is gone,” she said. She sent Jim and me back to bed and told us she’d sit with Mary until our father got home. My mother had never even opened an eye, and as I passed her bedroom, next to Mary’s, I saw her lying there, mouth open, the weight of Holmes holding her down.

  You’d Be Surprised

  By the time I was in the kitchen the next morning, fixing a bowl of cereal, Jim had already been out in the backyard studying the scene of the crime.

  “The ladder was up against the house,” he said.

  “Any footprints?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Your father is contacting the police about it from work today,” called my mother from the dining room.

  Jim leaned in close to me and whispered, “We gotta catch this guy.”

  I nodded.

  I went to school, my head full of worry, only to learn something that almost made me laugh with joy. At recess Tim Sullivan told me that his father had said that the police were going to dredge the lake for Charlie Edison. I couldn’t believe how lucky I was. It was as if someone had read my mind, and not just that, they were doing something about it. I suppose it only made sense, given the circumstances of Charlie’s disappearance, but for me it was a relief.

  That afternoon Krapp announced that the police were going to be “searching” the lake for Charlie on Saturday and they had asked all the teachers to announce that no kids were allowed near the school field or in the woods on the weekend. Part of our homework assignment was to tell our parents.

  “We’ll go into the woods behind the Halloways’ house,” Jim said later that day after I’d told him. We were in his room, and he was supposed to be doing his homework. “The cops will have guys at the school field and maybe over on Minerva, but they probably won’t be that far into the woods. We’ll take the binoculars.”

  I nodded.

  “Can you imagine if they pull him out of the lake?” he said, staring at the floor as if he were seeing it before his eyes. “We’ll have to get up and go early.”

  I wasn’t so sure I wanted to see them dredge Charlie up, but I knew I had to go. “If they find him, does that mean he fell in or someone threw him in there?” I asked.

  “Who do I look like, Sherlock Holmes?” he said.

  After that he gave me instructions to rig the ladder the next day after school. “Get two old soda cans and fill them with pebbles,” he said. “Tie one to one end of the ladder with fishing line and one to the other end the same way. If he comes at night and tries to take it, we’ll hear him and let George out.”

  The week dragged in anticipation of the Saturday dredging. Mary sat with me the following afternoon as I worked at setting up the ladder. It lay along the fence on the right-hand side of the yard, near the clothesline. She had counted the number of pebbles I put into the first can and would not let me tie the second one on until it contained the exact same number.

  “Two more,” she said when I figured I was done. I looked over at her, and she lifted her hand. First the index finger came up and then, slowly, the thumb. I laughed and put another two in.

  “So Charlie’s in the lake,” I said as I tied the second can in place. I had not yet spoken to her about her Botch Town revelation.

  “He’ll be in the lake,” she said.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “He’ll be in the lake.”

  I went out on my bike looking for someone to write about and passed Mr. Barzita’s house. He was such a quiet old man that I’d almost forgotten he lived on our block. There he was, though, raking leaves in his front yard. He had lived alone since his wife died, back when I was only seven. His property was surrounded by a chain-link fence, and instead of opting for the usual open lawn, he had long ago planted rows of fig trees, so that his house was obscured by a small orchard. Even though he lived in solitude, rarely emerging from his front gate, he always smiled and waved to us kids when we rode by on our bikes, and he would come to the fence to talk to grown-ups.

  Mr. Barzita was one of those old people who seemed to be shrinking and would simply fade away rather than die of old age. During the winter I never saw him, but every spring he reappeared, more wizened than the year before. On the hottest summer days, he’d sit in his chaise lounge among the fig trees, sipping wine, holding a loaded pellet pistol in his lap. When squirrels invaded his yard to get at the figs, he’d shoot them. If you yelled to him, “How many?” he’d hold whatever his kill was up by the tails.

  One Sunday when my father and I were driving by the old man’s house, I asked what he thoug
ht of Barzita killing the squirrels. My father shrugged. He told me, “That guy was in the medical corps in the army during the Second World War. He was stationed at a remote mountain base in Europe, and there was an outbreak of meningitis—a brain disease, very contagious, very deadly. They asked for volunteers to take care of the sick. He volunteered. They put him and another guy in a locked room with fifteen infected soldiers. When it was over, he was the only one who came out alive.”

  I tried to imagine what it must have been like in that room, the air stale with the last exhalations of dying men.

  “A lot of these old farts you see scrabbling around town…” he said. “You’d be surprised.”

  Hand Me the Camera

  Jim looked both ways up and down Willow to check for cars or anyone who might be watching, and then he and I ducked into the Halloways’ driveway and behind the hedges. We ran around the side of the house, through the backyard, and down a slope that led to the stream. Jumping the stream, we moved in under the trees. It was a little before eight o’clock on Saturday morning. The sky was overcast, and there was a cold breeze that occasionally gusted, lifting the dead leaves off the floor of the woods and loosing more from the branches above.

  We followed a winding path toward East Lake. Jim suggested we not take the most direct route that passed closest to the school yard but that we arc out on a lesser-used trail through moss patches and low scrub. He had Pop’s old binoculars slung around his neck, and I carried the Brownie camera. As we neared the lake, Jim warned me to keep quiet and said that if we were spotted, we should split up; he’d head toward the railroad tracks, and I’d go back the way we came. I nodded, and from that point on, we only whispered.

  After jumping the snaking stream twice more, from mossy hillock to root bole, from sandbank to solid dirt, we came in view of the lake. Jim crouched and motioned for me to get down too.