The Shadow Year

by Jeffrey Ford

  “The cops are there already,” he said. “We’ll have to crawl.”

  We made our way to within thirty yards of the southern bank of the lake and hunkered down behind a fallen oak. My heart was pounding, and my hands were shaking. Jim peeked up over the trunk and put the binoculars to his eyes.

  “It looks like they just got started,” he said. “There’s five guys. Two on the bank and three in a flat-bottom boat with a little electric motor.”

  I looked and saw what he had described. Coming off the back of the boat were two ropes attached to winches with hand cranks. The boat was moving along slowly, trolling the western side of the lake. Then I noticed some of the neighbors standing on the opposite bank. Mr. Edison was there, a big man with a bald head and a mustache. He wore his gas-station uniform and stood, eyes downcast, arms folded across his chest. It was the first I’d seen of him since Charlie had gone missing. Beside him was his next-door neighbor, Mr. Felina. There were a few other people I didn’t recognize, but when one of them moved to the side, I caught sight of Krapp. There he stood, dressed in his usual short-sleeved white shirt and tie, his hairdo flatter than his personality.

  “Krapp’s here,” I whispered.

  Jim turned the binoculars to focus on the group I’d been looking at. “Jeez, you’re right,” he said.

  “Wonder what he’s doing here?” I said.

  “I think he’s crying,” said Jim. “Yeah, he’s drying his eyes. Man, I always knew he was a big pussy.”

  “Yeah,” I said, but the thought of Krapp both showing up and crying struck me.

  Jim swung the binoculars back to see what the cops were doing. He reported to me that at the ends of those ropes they had these big steel hooks with four claws each. Every once in a while, they’d stop moving and reel them in by turning the hand cranks. He gave me an inventory of what they brought up—pieces of trees, the rusted handlebars of a bike, the partial skeleton of either a dog or fox…and on and on. They slowly covered the entire lake and then started again.

  “He’s not down there,” said Jim. “So much for Mary’s predictions.”

  I peered back over the fallen trunk and watched for a while, braver now that I probably wasn’t going to see Charlie. We sat there in the cold for two straight hours, and I started to shiver. “Let’s go home,” I whispered.

  “Okay,” said Jim. “They’re almost done.” Still he sat watching, and our hiding and spying reminded me of the prowler.

  From out on the lake, one of the cops yelled, “Hold up, there’s something here!” I stuck my head up to watch. The cop started turning the crank, reeling the rope. “Looks like clothing,” he called to the other cops on the bank. “Wait a second….” he said. He reeled more quickly then.

  Something broke the surface of the water near the back of the boat. It looked like a soggy body at first, but it was hard to tell. There were definitely pants and a shirt. Then the head came into view, big and gray, with a trunk.

  “Shit,” said Jim.

  “Mr. Blah-Blah,” I whispered.

  “Hand me the camera,” said Jim. “I gotta get a picture of this.”

  He snapped it, returned the camera to me, and then motioned for me to follow him. We got down on all fours and crawled slowly away from the fallen tree. Once our escape was covered by enough trees and bushes, we got to our feet and ran like hell.

  We stood behind the Halloways’ place, still in the cover of the woods, and worked to catch our breath.

  “Blah-Blah,” said Jim, and laughed.

  “Did you put him in there?” I asked.

  “Blah,” he said, and shook his head. “Nah, Softee molested him and threw him in there.”

  “Get out,” I said.

  “Probably Mason and his horrible dumpling sisters found him and took him to the lake. They’re always back here in the woods,” he said. “We should have had Mary predict where Mr. Blah-Blah would be.”

  “But then where’s Charlie?” I asked.

  He brushed past me and jumped the stream.

  I followed him and stayed close as we ran through the Halloways’ backyard and around the house to the street.

  When we got home, I was relieved to find that my mother wasn’t sitting at the dining-room table. The door to Nan and Pop’s was open. I could hear Pop in there figuring his system out loud, and, without looking, I knew that Mary was beside him. Jim took the camera and binoculars upstairs, and I walked down the hallway toward my parents’ room to see if my mother was up yet. She wasn’t in her bed, but when I passed by the bathroom door, I heard her in there retching.

  I knocked once. “Are you all right?” I called.

  “I’ll be out in a second,” she said.

  You’ll Need This

  It had been obvious since the start of the school year that Mr. Rogers, the librarian, had been losing his mind. During his lunch break, when we were usually laboring over math in Krapp’s class, the old man would be out on the baseball diamond walking the bases in his rumpled suit, hunched over, talking to himself as if he were reliving some game from the distant past. That loose dirt that collected around the bases, the soft brown powder that Pinky Steinmacher ate with a spoon, would lift up in a strong wind, circling Rogers, and he’d clap as if the natural commotion were really the roar of the crowd. Krapp would look over his shoulder from where he stood at the blackboard and see us all staring out the window, shake his head, and then go and lower the blinds.

  The loss of his giant dictionary seemed to be the last straw for Rogers, as if it had been an anchor that kept him from floating away. With that gone, as my father would say, “he dipped out.” Each week we would be delivered to the library by Krapp and spend a half hour there with Rogers. Of late the old man had been smiling a lot, like a dog on a hot day, and his eyes were always busy, shifting back and forth. Sometimes he’d stand for minutes on end, staring into a beam of light shining in through the window, and sometimes he’d be frantic, moving here and there, pulling books off the shelves and shoving them into kids’ hands.

  Bobby Harweed was brutal to him, making gestures behind the librarian’s back, coaxing everyone to laugh (and you had to laugh if Bobby wanted you to). Bobby would knock books off the shelf onto the floor and just leave them there. For Rogers to see a book on the floor was a heartache, and one day Harweed had him nearly in tears. I secretly liked Rogers, because he loved books, but he was beginning to put off even me with his weirdness.

  On the Monday morning following the dredging, we had library. Rogers sat in his little office nearly the entire time we were there, bent over his desk with his face in his hands. Harweed started the rumor that he kept Playboy magazines in there. When the half hour was almost up, Rogers came out to stamp the books kids had chosen to borrow. Before he sat down at the table with his stamp, he walked up behind me, put one hand on my shoulder, and reached up over my head to the top shelf, from which he pulled a thin volume.

  “You’ll need this,” he said, and handed it to me. He walked away to the table then and began stamping books.

  I glanced down at the book. On the cover, behind the library plastic, was a drawing of a mean-looking black dog; above the creature, in serif type, The Hound of the Baskervilles. I wanted to ask him what he meant, but I never got the chance. News spread quickly through the school the next day that he had been fired because he went nuts.

  Having the Baskervilles in my possession was, at first, an unsettling experience. It felt like I had taken some personal belonging of my mother’s, just as if I had stolen my father’s watch or Nan’s hairnet. The book itself had an aura of power that prevented me from simply opening the cover and beginning. I hid it in my room, between the mattress and box spring of the bed. For the next few days, I’d take it out every now and then and hold it, look at the cover, gingerly flip the pages. Although by this time my mother used the big red volume of The Complete Sherlock Holmes only as an anvil in her sleep, there had been a time when she’d read it avidly over and over. She’d r
ead a wide range of other books as well but always returned to detective stories. She loved them in every form and, before we went broke, spent Sunday mornings consuming five cups of coffee and a dozen cigarettes, solving the mystery of the New York Times crossword puzzle.

  Painting, playing the guitar, making bizarre collages—those were mere hobbies compared to my mother’s desire to be a mystery writer. Before work became a necessity for her, she’d sit at the dining-room table all afternoon, the old typewriter in front of her, composing her own mystery novel. I remembered her reading some of it to me. The title was Something by the Sea, and it involved her detective Milo, a farting dog, a blind heiress, and a stringed instrument to be played with different-colored glass tubes that fit over one’s fingers. Something by the Sea was the name of the resort where the story took place. All the while she wrote it, she kept Holmes by her side, opened to The Hound of the Baskervilles.

  Thinking about my mother one night, I wondered if maybe there was something in The Hound of the Baskervilles that could tell me something secret about her. I passed up Perno Shell and pulled the book out from under the mattress. That night I stayed up late and read the first few chapters. In them I met Holmes and Watson. The book wasn’t hard to read. I was interested in the story and liked the character of Watson very much, but Holmes was something else.

  The great detective came across to me like a snob, the type my father once described as “believing that the sun rose and set from his asshole.” I imagined him to be a cross between Perno Shell and Phileas Fogg, but his personality was pure Krapp. When told about the demon hound, Holmes replied that it was an interesting story for those who believed in fairy tales. He was obviously “not standing for it.” Still, I was intrigued by his voluminous smoking and the fact that he played the violin.

  Delicious

  The days sank deeper into autumn, rotten to their cores with twilight. The bright warmth of the sun only lasted about as long as we were in school, and then once we were home, an hour later, the world was briefly submerged in a rich honey glow, gilding everything from the barren branches of willows to the old wreck of a Pontiac parked alongside the Hortons’ garage. In minutes the tide turned, the sun suddenly a distant star, and in rolled a dim gray wave of neither here nor there that seemed to last a week each day.

  The wind of this in-between time always made me want to curl up inside a memory and sleep with eyes open. Dead leaves rolled across lawns, scraped along the street, quietly tapped the windows. Jack-o’-lanterns with luminous triangle eyes and jagged smiles turned up on front steps and in windows. Rattle-dry cornstalks bore half-eaten ears of brown and blue kernels like teeth gone bad, as if they had eaten themselves. Scarecrows hung from lawn lampposts or stoop railings, listing forward, disjointed and drunk, dressed in the rumpled plaid shirts of long-gone grandfathers and jeans belted with a length of rope. In the true dark, as I walked George after dinner, these shadow figures often startled me when their stitched and painted faces took on the features of Charlie Edison or Teddy Dunden.

  Halloween was close, our favorite holiday because it carried none of the pain-in-the-ass holiness of Christmas and still there was free candy. The excitement of it crowded all problems to the side. The prowler, Charlie, schoolwork—everything was overwhelmed by hours of decision as to what we would be for that one night, something or someone who wasn’t us, but who we wished to be, which I supposed ended up being us in some way. I could already taste the candy corn and feel my teeth aching. My father had given me a dollar, and with it I’d bought a molded plastic skeleton mask that smelled like fresh BO and made my cheeks sweat.

  At the time the only thought I had about that leering bone face was that it was cool as hell, but maybe, in the back of my mind, I was thinking of all those eyes out there trying to look into me, and it was a good disguise because it let them think they were seeing deep under my skin even though it was only an illusion. I showed the mask to Jim, and he told me, “This is the last year you can wear a costume. You’re getting too old. Next year you’ll have to go as a bum.” All the older kids went around trick-or-treating as bums—a little charcoal on the face and some ripped-up old clothes.

  Mary decided she would be the jockey Willie Shoemaker. She modeled her outfit for Jim and me one night. It consisted of baggy pants tucked into a pair of white go-go boots, a baseball cap, a patchwork shirt, and a piece of thin curtain rod for a jockey’s whip. She walked past us once and then looked over her shoulder. In the high nasal voice of a TV horse-racing announcer, she said, “And they’re off….” We clapped for her, but the second she turned away again, Jim raised his eyebrows and whispered, “And it’s Cabbage by a head.”

  Only two days before the blessed event, Krapp threw a wet blanket on my daydreams of roaming the neighborhood by moonlight, gathering, door-to-door, a Santa sack of candy. He turned the joyous sparks of my imagination to smoke by assigning a major report that was to be handed in the day after Halloween. Each of us in the class was given a different country, and we had to write a five-page report about it. Krapp presented me with Greece, as if he were dropping a steaming turd into my open Halloween sack.

  I should have gotten started that afternoon once school let out, but instead I just sat in my room staring out the window. When Jim got home from wrestling, he came into my room and found me still sitting there like a zombie. I told him about the report.

  “You’re going to be doing it on Halloween if you don’t get started,” he said. “Here’s what you do: Tomorrow, right after school, ride down to the library. Get the G volume of the encyclopedia, open it to Greece, and just copy what they have there. Write big, but not too big or he’ll be onto you. If it doesn’t look like there’s enough to fill five pages, add words to the sentences. If the sentence says, ‘The population of Greece is one million,’ instead write something like, ‘There are approximately one million Greeks in Greece. As you can see, there are many, many Grecians.’ You get it? Use long words like ‘approximately’ and say stuff more than once in different ways.”

  “Krapp warned us about plagiarism, though,” I said.

  Jim made a face. “What’s he gonna do, go read the encyclopedia for every paper?”

  The next afternoon I was in the public library copying from the G volume. With the exception of the fact that I learned that Greeks ate goat cheese, none of the information in the book got into my head, as I had become merely a writing machine, scribbling down one word after the next. The further I got into the report, the harder it was to concentrate. My mind wandered for long stretches at a time, and I stared at the design of the weave in my balled-up sweater that lay on the table in front of me. Then I’d look over at the window and see that the twilight was giving way to night. I was determined to finish even if I got yelled at for being late for dinner. When I hit the fourth page, I could tell that the information in the encyclopedia was running out, and so I started adding filler the way Jim described. The last page and a half of my report was based on about five sentences from the encyclopedia. I didn’t know how late it was when I finished, but I was so relieved I began to sweat. I rolled up my five handwritten pages and shoved them in my back pocket. Closing the big green tome, I went to reshelve it. As I was coming out of the stacks, I suddenly remembered my sweater and looked over at the table where I’d been working. Sitting there in my chair was the man in the white trench coat. He had my sweater in his hands, and he appeared to be sniffing it. My heart instantly began pounding. I was stunned for a second, but as soon as I came to, I ducked out of the aisle and behind the row of shelves to my right.

  I ran down to the center aisle and made for the back of the stacks. I was pretty sure that when he came looking for me, he would head up the center aisle so that he could look down each row. Once I reached the back wall, I moved along it to the side of the building that held the front door. Checking my pocket, I touched the rolled-up report. I didn’t care about leaving the sweater behind. I waited, while in my mind I pictured him walking sl
owly toward me, peering down each row. My breathing was shallow, and I didn’t know if I would have the power to scream if he somehow cornered me. Then I saw the sleeve of his trench coat, the sneaker of his left foot, before he came fully into view, and I bolted.

  I was down the side aisle and out the front door in a flash. I knew that whereas a kid might run in a library, an adult probably wouldn’t, which might give me a few extra seconds. Outside, I sprinted around to the side of the building where my bike was chained up. Whatever time I had saved was spent fumbling with the lock. Just when I had the bike free and got my ass on the seat, I saw him coming around the side of the building. My only route to Hammond was now cut off. Instead of trying to ride past him, I turned and headed back behind the library, into the woods that led to the railroad tracks.

  I carried my bike over the tracks in the dark, listening to the deadly hum of electricity coursing through the third rail and watching both ways for the light of a train in the distance. Although the wind was cold, I was sweating, trying not to lose my balance on the dew-covered wooden ties. All the time I cautiously navigated, grim scenes from The Long Way Home from School played in my memory. At any second I expected to feel a bony hand on my shoulder.

  On the other side of the tracks, there was another narrow strip of woods, and I searched along it, walking my bike, until I found a path. I wasn’t actually sure what street it would lead me to, since I had never gone this way before. Jim and I had occasionally crossed back and forth over the tracks, but always in daylight and always over on the other side of town behind the woods that started at the school yard. This was uncharted territory for me.

  I walked clear of the trees onto a road that didn’t seem to have any houses. My mind was a jumble, and I was on the verge of tears, but I controlled myself by trying to think through where I was in relation to the library and home. I figured I was west of Hammond and if I just followed the street I was on, it would finally meet up with the main road. Getting on my bike, I started off.