The Shadow Year

by Jeffrey Ford

  By then it was late, and the street we were on, which I didn’t know the name of, was deserted. Many of the houses had turned off their lights as a sign they either had gone to bed or were out of candy. That was the way Halloween always went: When you weren’t watching, it lay back and went to sleep. It was quiet, eerie. I told Mary to get up, and she did. I vaguely remembered the direction home, and we started off, walking quickly, sticking to the shadows so as not to be noticed. We passed darkened houses whose trees were hung with wind-whipped strands of white toilet paper, smashed jack-o’-lanterns in the road, broken shells and the iridescent film of egg splatter reflected under streetlights where a battle had taken place. Every shadowy form startled me and brought to mind the prowler and Charlie and worse.

  Mary hadn’t worn a coat or a sweatshirt, having felt that without people seeing her baggy shirt, no one would be able to make out that she was Willie Shoemaker. It hadn’t mattered, because kids kept asking me all night, “Hey, what’s your sister supposed to be?” The guesses ranged from baseball player to clown to janitor, but no one hit on a jockey, even when Mary said, “They’re coming around the back turn….” It was getting colder by the minute, so I gave her my hooded sweatshirt.

  Crossing the school field was harrowing, and we kept to the dark of the perimeter fence, in order to remain inconspicuous. Instead of striking out across the field and the lit basketball courts and front drive, I opted for the path that went around the sump. It took a little longer, but that vision of Henry Mason being attacked and the fact that Mary was with me made me cautious. The overgrown weed lot was lonesome enough to make me shiver, and the dirt hills were a strange, barren moonscape, but once I saw the street on the other side, I felt we were going to be okay. It was right then, as we stepped down onto the pavement, that lurching into the glow of the streetlight came a hulking form with a red and blistered face, its hair sloughing off, leaving huge bald spots. The creature whimpered as it tottered forward, its hands stretched out in front. Mary put her arms around me, pressing her face to my side, and I stood, unable to move, my mouth open. Then I realized it was poor Peter Horton, half blind and suffering the effects of a Nair attack, trying to grope his way home. We let him pass and then continued on.

  As we came down a side street that opened onto Willow Avenue, I finally relaxed. Mary wasn’t holding my hand anymore, as she could sense my ease and was calmer herself. All we had to do was get to Pine, turn left, and walk down seven houses. I wondered where Jim had gone and what adventures he had met, and then I gave myself over to thinking about the moment when I would empty my sack onto the dining-room table.

  Mary interrupted me by pulling on my shirt. “Pipe smoke,” she said.

  I stopped walking and looked up. There, no more than twenty yards away, in the halo of a streetlight, was that old white car parked on Pine. At that moment it pulled away from the curb and rolled in the direction of our house. Grabbing Mary by the arm, I led her through a hole in the hedges we had been passing and whispered to her, “Don’t make a sound.” We stood motionless and waited. Only when I heard the car turn around and recede into the distance toward Hammond did I pull Mary back out to the street.

  “Run,” I told her, grabbing her hand. We sprinted around the corner onto Willow and all the way home. She’d been right: Pervading the air at the spot where the two roads intersected was that smoldering scent of the man with the white coat. It followed us to the doorstep.

  I sat at the dining-room table, chewing away like a cow with its cud, on both a Mary Jane and the contents of a miniature box of Good & Plenty, feeling slightly nauseated. My mind was vacant, and I was so weary I could hardly keep my eyes open. I had an animal fear that if I closed them, my pile of booty, which formed a small, colorful mountain, might disappear. Mary had already fallen asleep on the living-room floor, a melting Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup smearing her outstretched hand. My mother sat across from me smoking a cigarette and picking through both my pile and Mary’s for caramels, which, it was understood, were hers.

  Jim finally came home, and my mother took Mary off to bed, telling Jim and me it was time to go upstairs. We gathered all the candy together and put it in the community pot, a huge serving bowl that otherwise got used only on Thanksgiving. As we headed up the stairs, Jim whispered behind me, “We egged the hell out of Hinkley’s house and almost got away without anyone seeing us. But I saw Will’s weasel face at the upstairs window. I doubt he’ll tell his parents, since we’d kick his ass, but watch out for him. I’m sure he saw me.”

  That was the news I was left with at my bedroom door, and suddenly I was no longer tired. The threat of Hinkley’s revenge and his sharp knuckles was enough to revive me, but since he wasn’t there at that moment, it eventually receded, and I lay in bed, reviewing the night, the costumes, the thrill of running away across the field at East Lake, Peter Horton. Then, of course, I came to the incident with the pipe smoke, and the memory of the white car pulling away from the curb made me realize that something was missing. I got out of bed and quietly made my way downstairs to the dining room. There, I dug through the giant bowl of treats we had collected.

  What was missing were the plump, ripe figs that each year Mr. Barzita wrapped in orange or black tissue paper and tied at the top with ribbon. I saw in my mind a fleeting image of his knotted old fingers, shaking slightly, making a bow. The figs were a Willow Avenue tradition, but this year there were none. I concentrated, searching my memory and realized that Mr. Barzita’s house had been dark and he hadn’t been at his front gate to meet us and drop one of his “beauties,” as he called them, into our sacks. In the rush and fever of greed, we hadn’t noticed his absence but had simply moved on to the Blairs’ house. Then I worked away at a dark spot in my memory, trying to remember if the white car had been parked in front of his house when we had first passed it early on in our travels. It was Old Man Barzita’s place the car had pulled away from when Mary and I noticed it. Perhaps I’d had my mask on, or my thoughts were on the handful of silver-wrapped Chunkies that Mrs. Harrington had dropped into my sack. No matter how I tried, I couldn’t remember those minutes.

  Instead I pictured Barzita as a young man, stepping out of that disease-laden room during the war. I wondered if the prowler, the man in the white coat, who had become, for me, Death himself, had appeared on Halloween to finally claim a man who by all accounts should have perished years before in another country.

  For solace I walked down the hallway to my parents’ bedroom. My mother had returned to the living room and passed out on the couch. My heart sank as I viewed the empty bedroom. The light was on, as it always seemed to be, but the bed was unmade, and my father’s work clothes from earlier in the week lay in a pile on the floor.

  As I stood in the doorway, the weariness that had enveloped me earlier returned, and I yawned. I tottered forward into the room and crawled into my parents’ bed on my mother’s side. The mattress was soft, and I sank into it. Immediately I noticed the aromas of machine oil and my mother’s deep powder, and these scents combined, their chemistry making me feel safe. I lifted the red, bug-crushing weight of The Complete Sherlock Holmes from the night table and turned to The Hound of the Baskervilles.

  The print was very small and set in double columns, the pages tissue thin. I found the place where I had left off in my own copy and started reading. Not even a minute went by, and the tiny letters began moving like ants. Then gravity took over, and my arms couldn’t hold the volume up.

  I dreamed Halloween and an egg battle on the western field beneath the moon at East Lake. Pinky Steinmacher’s little brother, Gunther, hit me in the head with an egg and knocked me over. When I opened my eyes, all the kids from both sides were gone, and the man in the white coat was leaning over me to lift me up. I pretended to still be asleep as he carried me, the wind blowing fiercely, toward his car parked by the basketball court. He said in an angry voice, “Come on, open your eyes,” and then I did, and it was morning, and I realized that his voi
ce had been Jim’s: “You’ll be late for school.” I was in my own bed, upstairs in my room.

  It was a rush to get ready, and all three of us kids were groggy. I remembered at the last second to take my report for Krapp from beneath the pile of books. Mary and I made it to school just before the bell rang, and we hurried to our classrooms. I was in my seat no more than five minutes before Krapp stood up from his desk and said, with a grim smile on his face, “Hand me your reports.” As soon as he said it, I looked around and could identify by the flush of red that spread across their faces all of those who’d let Halloween enchant them into inaction. “Who doesn’t have it?” said Krapp. Five trembling hands went up. He lifted his grade book and recorded the zeros with excruciating precision, saying with each one, “A zero for you and two detentions.” Someone behind me started crying, but I didn’t dare turn around to look.

  Krapp swept down the aisle, taking reports, and I held mine out to him. Just before his fingers closed on it, I noticed that on the front cover I’d misspelled “Greece,” writing “The Glory That Was Grease.” He took it all in in a second—the cutout picture of the old Mexican woman in the shawl, the misspelling—and shook his head in disgust. He added the paper to the stack in his other hand, and what he didn’t notice, I did. The back of the bottom page, which held the samples of exports, was completely mottled with dark, greasy stains.

  That paper came back to me the next day, bearing an F grade and the words “plagiarism” and “a stinking mess” written across the woman’s wrinkled cheek. The stench of moldy cheese, rotten olive, and cigarette combined to make it smell like shit. I brought it home and showed it to Jim. He shrugged and said, “That’s the breaks.” He told me not to tell our parents about it. “They won’t even notice, they’re so busy with work and…” He tilted his head back and brought his arm up as if drinking from a big bottle. “Take it outside and bury it,” he said. “It smells like a dead man’s feet.” So I did, knowing that no good would come of it. Mary watched me dig a hole with the shovel. When I was done laying the foul muddle to rest and had tamped down the dirt, she put a rock on top to mark the grave.

  Sleeping Powder

  I stood above Botch Town, surveying its length and breadth, and noticed that since Jim had started wrestling, taken up with a new group of friends, and stayed away from the house as much as possible, a thin film of dust had settled on his creation. I imagined it to be a sleeping powder, like a sprinkling of magic dust from an evil magician in a fairy tale. The town appeared quiet, as if in a deep sleep, and there was a certain loneliness that pervaded the entire expanse. Nothing much had moved since I’d last looked at it, before Halloween. Charlie still lay in the lake, Boris was still at work on his car, Mrs. Harrington had rolled forward onto her stomach to sleep.

  The only change I noticed was that the prowler was now placed behind our house. I figured that Mary must have moved him after seeing his face at her window. Of course, in reality he was long gone and had probably spied on a dozen other families since he’d looked in on her. The repair to Mrs. Restuccio’s roof still had not been completed, and although the Halloways had moved out of the neighborhood more than a year ago, the figure of Raymond, the oldest boy, still lay sleeping behind the house. I wondered if this was to be the end of Botch Town, if Jim, getting older now, would forsake it and it would continue to sleep and slowly decompose until the clay figures cracked and turned to dust and the cardboard houses wilted and fell.

  I walked over to a corner of the cellar to a box of old toys we no longer played with. Rummaging through it, I found a Matchbox car, a reproduction of a hearse—long and black. The back doors opened, and there had once been a little coffin that you could slide in and out. Using Jim’s supplies, I painted this car white and, while it was still wet, set it down on Willow Avenue, parked in front of Mr. Barzita’s place. After taking one more look at the entire board, I reached out over it and turned off the sun.

  We Didn’t Go to Church Today

  My father miraculously appeared in his bed Sunday morning. I happened to go down the hall to the bathroom, and on my way I noticed him lying there asleep next to my mother. The sight of him startled me, and I went upstairs to tell Jim, who was still sleeping. He got up and followed me downstairs. I went in and told Mary. Nudging her awake, I said, “Hey, Dad’s home.” She joined Jim and me, and we took up positions around the bed, staring and waiting. After quite a while, my father suddenly sat up and opened his eyes as if a nightmare had awakened him. He shook his head and breathed out, like a sigh of relief, and smiled at us.

  We learned that not only was he there, but he would be home for the entire day. After he got up and had his coffee, he asked us if we wanted to go for a drive.

  “Where?” asked Jim.

  “I don’t know. We’ll find out when we get there,” he said.

  We all went and piled into his car, Jim on the passenger side of the front seat and Mary and me in the back. It was cold out, but they opened the windows up front, and we drove along with the radio blaring and the wind blowing wildly around us. No one said anything. My father pulled over at a roadside hot-dog stand. We ordered cream sodas and those hot dogs that snapped when you bit them, covered in cooked onions and mustard. Sitting on overturned milk crates a few feet from the hot-dog stand, we ate in silence. Then we got back into the car and drove fast, and I had a feeling of freedom, of skipping school and running away.

  When we had gone many miles and there was no hope of going back, Mary leaned over the front seat and said, “We didn’t go to church today.”

  My father turned and looked at her for a second, smiling, “I know,” he said, and laughed out loud.

  We wound up at a huge park on the North Shore. The lots were almost empty even though the day was beautifully clear. We left the car in the middle of the concrete expanse, surrounded by woods on three sides.

  “Which way will we walk?” my father asked me.

  I pointed to the west, because it seemed like it would take us the farthest from the road and away from the parking lots.

  “Okay,” he said, “and they’re off….”

  We got out of the car, zipped up our coats, and started walking. Jim moved right up next to our father and tried to match him step for step. I had wanted to be there, next to him, but I didn’t make a fuss about it. Mary and I brought up the rear. We left the concrete behind and stepped into the shadows beneath the tall pines. There was a half foot of fallen oak leaves and brown pine needles on the ground, and Mary and I shuffled our feet, occasionally kicking them into the air. She found a giant yellow leaf as wide as her face, poked two eyeholes into it, and held it up by the stem like a mask.

  We walked along a path for quite a while, saw crows in the treetops, and came to a clearing where my father raised his hand and put his finger to his lips. We three kids stopped walking, and he crouched down and pointed into the trees on the other side of the clearing. Standing there staring at us was a huge deer with antlers. A whole minute went by, and then Mary said, “Hello,” and waved to it. The deer sprang to the side and disappeared back into the woods.

  My father looked down at the sandy ground. “Tracks,” he said. “A lot of them came through here in the last few hours.” He then found a fox track and showed that to us as well. After the clearing we changed direction, unanimously deciding, without saying so, that we’d follow the deer. We never saw it again for the rest of the day, but the trail we took led us to a huge hill. My father held Mary’s hand to help her, and we all scrabbled up the hill, slipping on the fallen leaves and resting from time to time against the trunks of trees.

  As it turned out, the deer had led us in the right direction, for as we crested the rise, the trees disappeared and we could see out across the Long Island Sound all the way to the Connecticut shore. The water was iron gray and choppy, dotted with whitecaps. A strong wind blew in our faces. The hill was covered in grass down the other side and devoid of trees. At its base was a little inlet that, farther west
, skirted the set of sand dunes between us and the sound. It was as wide as two football fields and as long as four, its surface rippling in the wind. An army of white birds stood along its shore, pecking at the wet sand.

  My father sat down at the top of the hill and took out his cigarettes. As he lit a match and cupped it in his hands, catching its spark at the end of his smoke, he said, from the side of his mouth, “You better go down there and investigate.” We didn’t need to be told twice but charged down the hill, whooping, and the birds took off, lifting into the sky in waves. It felt for a second as if I could lift into the air, just like the birds. Jim tripped and rolled a quarter of the way down, and, seeing him, Mary followed his lead, fell, and rolled the rest of the way.

  We stayed there by the water for a long time, skipping stones, dueling with driftwood swords, watching the killifish swarm in the shallows. An hour or two passed, and when Jim and Mary decided to try to catch one of the fish with an old Dixie cup they found in the sand, I looked up at my father just sitting there. I sidled away from them and went back up the hill. During the climb I lost sight of him, as the steep incline prevented me from seeing more than a few feet ahead of me, but when I got to the top and he came into view, I noticed that he had his glasses in his hand. I think he’d been crying, because as soon as he saw me coming, he wiped his eyes and put the glasses back on.

  “Come here,” he said to me. “I need some help.”