The Shadow Year

by Jeffrey Ford

  Jim liked the idea and told me to go get the notebook. I returned to the cellar, and he told me every word to write. Here’s what he said:

  I wrote as fast as I could, but my hand cramped. Jim finally took over and finished it. As he tore the letter out of my notebook, he said. “Let’s send one to Krapp, too.”

  “Same as the police?” I asked.

  “No, I have a special message for him,” said Jim. He picked up the pencil and leaned over the notebook. He wrote only two words and then ripped the page out and held it up. In big, sloppy letters it read:

  We laughed hard.

  “His address is in the phone book,” Jim said. “Look it up for the envelope. I’ll get the stamps.”

  I took a deep breath when I went out to the mailbox on the corner. The street glistened under the light poles, and steam rose from the lawns. Taking a look up the block, I saw no headlights coming, so I started out at a slow jog. I had the two anonymous letters in my coat pocket, and I left the coat unzipped so as to run better. I made it to the corner halfway to Hammond in no time flat. The only thing that slowed me was the sight of Mr. Barzita’s house across the street. It crouched in the dark perfectly still behind a net of crisscrossing fig branches. When I reached for the handle of the mailbox, I looked down and saw what I thought was a clump of snow transform into a dead kitten lying on the frozen ground, its mouth open. It had sharp teeth, and its fur was pure white. A few inches away, someone had left a bowl half filled with milk, now frozen. I dropped the letters into the box and took off back home at top speed.

  Not on Your Life

  Nan reached way back into her bedroom closet and pulled out a long, dark brown billy club with a woven royal blue tassel around the handle. “That’s the dress one,” she said. She handed it to Jim.

  “Oh, man,” he said.

  Mary reached for the tassel.

  Nan went in for another and brought forth the club with the dice. It was shorter and blunter than the dress club, and blond in color. Inlaid into its side were two yellowed dice, showing six and one. She handed that one to me, and I could feel the energy go up my arm.

  Next came the blackjack, shining like a scorpion, and Nan demonstrated on her palm, thunking it repeatedly with the rubbery weight. “You can break a skull with it,” she said. Jim reached for it, and Nan laughed. “Not on your life,” she said, and put it away.

  Mary went over to look at the glass Virgin Mary filled with Lourdes water on the dresser, but Nan called her back and handed her a real police badge. Then, from out of her bathrobe pocket, she drew the police revolver. It had a wooden handle, and the rest looked like tarnished silver. She held it above our heads in her right hand, her grip wobbling. Jim’s hand went toward it, and I ducked slightly. Mary held out the badge.

  “You can’t touch this. In case of an emergency, I keep it loaded,” Nan said.

  “You’re loaded,” Pop called down the hallway.

  Nan laughed and put the gun away. She let us handle the clubs for another few seconds, and then when Jim made like he was going to crush my skull, she asked for them back. We couldn’t believe it when she let Mary keep the badge.

  “We’ll split it,” said Jim.

  Mary said, “No,” and left the bedroom. We heard the door to our house open and close, and she was gone. Nan gave Jim and me each a ladyfinger. We sat with Pop at the kitchenette table, where he smoked a Lucky Strike. Nan made tea and sat down with us.

  Proof

  After the drudgery of Silas Marner, Krapp dusted the chalk off his hands and stepped away from the blackboard. “It seems,” he said, “that someone has written me a letter.” His face flushed red, and his jaw tensed. When I heard the word “letter,” I almost peed my pants. Don’t look away, I reminded myself.

  “Someone has sent me a letter, I think, telling me who I am,” he said. He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a neatly folded square of notebook paper. He opened it and turned it to the class. We read it. Tim Sullivan had to cover his face with both hands, but no one made a sound. “I think it was one of you,” he said, staring up and down the rows into each person’s eyes. “Because…the writer missed the contraction.” When he got to me, I did my best not to blink.

  “In fact,” he began, folding the letter and returning it to his pocket. He rubbed his hands in front of us. “I know who it was. You forget that I see your handwriting all the time. I took the letter and matched the handwriting to its author on one of your papers. Now, would the guilty party like to confess?”

  I knew that Jim would never confess. He’d just sit there and nod slightly. That’s what I intended to do, but inside I was getting weaker by the second. Part of me wanted so badly to blurt out that it was me. But then I realized that it really wasn’t me, it was Jim, and he wasn’t even here, and that’s when Krapp slapped his hands together and said, “Will Hinkley, come forward.” To hear it made me hollow inside, but I automatically laughed. No one even noticed me, because everybody had begun whispering. Krapp called, “Silence!”

  “I didn’t do it,” Will said, refusing to get out of his chair.

  “Come up here now,” said Krapp. He trembled like George with a sneaker in his face.

  “I didn’t write you any letter,” said Hinkley, his Adam’s apple bobbing like mad.

  “I have the proof,” said Krapp. “Go to the office. Your parents are waiting there with Mr. Cleary.”

  Will Hinkley got out of his seat, red in the face and with tears in his eyes. As he opened the door to leave the room, Krapp said to him, “No one tells me who I am, young man.”

  “You’re Krapp,” said Hinkley, and he ran down the hall, his sneakers squealing at the turn. The door swung shut, and Krapp told us to take out our math books.

  All through the travels of A, B, C, and D from Chicago to New York at a hundred miles an hour, I thought about the cops opening the other letter. I saw them jump into their black-and-white cars, turn on the sirens, and then arrive at Mr. White’s house. They crash in the back door, their guns out. Inside, it’s dim and smells like Mr. Clean. They hear Mr. White escaping up the attic steps. By the time the cops reach the attic, all they find, in the middle of the floor, is a pillar of salt.

  Jim didn’t like it when I told him what happened. “That rots,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because now the cops are gonna think Hinkley wrote the other letter, too, and he’ll get all the credit when they catch Mr. White.”

  “We could have just told and gotten the credit,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Jim.

  “Tim told me Hinkley’s punishment is that he has to stay after school every day for the rest of the year and roll the trash barrels down to the furnace room,” I said.

  “Hinkley can take the credit,” he said.

  My mother had a bad night that night. She was fierce, her face puffy with anger. The air went thin, and it got hard to breathe. She was yelling insults at my father, cursing, drinking fast. My father sat at his end of the dining-room table, smoking a cigarette, head bowed. Mary and Jim headed for the cellar. I ran to my room, lay on my bed, and cried into my pillow. Her voice came up through the floor, a steady barrage that, like the blizzard, swelled into a howl, receded, and then swelled again. It went on and on, and I never heard my father say a word.

  I eventually dozed off for a little while, and when I awoke, it was quiet. I got out of bed and carefully went down the stairs. The lights were out, and there was a lingering haze of cigarette smoke. I heard my father snoring from the bedroom down the hall. Going into the kitchen, I looked around in the dark for the bottle of wine. I found it on the sink counter and grabbed it by the neck.

  At the back door, I undid the latch as quietly as possible, opened the storm door, and then pushed open the outer wooden door. Half in and half out of the house, one foot on the back porch, I heaved the bottle into the night. It clunked against the ground, but I didn’t hear it break. When I turned back into the house, I jumped,
because Nan was standing there in her bathrobe and hairnet.

  “Go get it,” she said.

  I started to cry. She stepped forward and hugged me for a minute. Then she whispered, “Go.”

  I went out into the night in my bare feet and pajamas. It was freezing cold. I walked all around the area I thought the bottle had landed, but only when I stubbed my toe on it did I see it. Back inside, Nan wiped the dirt off with a towel. I showed her where I’d gotten it from, and she replaced it on the counter. While she was locking the back door, she told me to go to bed.

  Scenes from Perno Shell’s adventures twined around my wondering what they had to do with Mr. White. I was almost certain from the smell of smoke that he’d read all the books I had. Either he just liked to read kids’ books or it was a clue of some kind. But how could I know? The figures of Shell and Mr. White passed each other in the desert, on the Amazon. They became each other and then went back to being themselves in hot-air balloons. I saw them talk to each other, and then I saw them wrestle each other, Shell all in black and Mr. White in his overcoat and hat, on a rickety little bridge high above a bottomless lake. “The Last Journey of Perno Shell,” I said. George woke up, looked at me, and went back to sleep.

  Driving Back to Yugoslavia

  It was the day the temperature finally rose above freezing, and we were allowed back on the playground after lunch. The ground was still hard as a rock, and the dark clouds threatened more snow. I was on the way out toward the fence to talk to Tim Sullivan when I passed Peter Horton, and he was telling two other kids, “Boris’s gone.”

  “Boris?” I said, and went over to where they were standing.

  “My dad was there when they went to his house last night,” said Peter.

  “Who?”

  “The cops,” he said. “He didn’t come to work for, like, four days and didn’t call. Cleary sent the cops to see where he was. He was gone.”

  “What do you mean, ‘gone’?” I asked.

  “His car was gone,” said Peter.

  “He’s driving back to Yugoslavia,” said one of the other kids.

  In my mind I saw a barrel of the red stuff with a broom leaning against it in the dim light of the furnace room beneath the school. I looked for Boris—his plaid shirt, his missing teeth, his five strands combed over a bald head—but only his voice came to me. “You are talking dogshit,” he said. I pictured a cop throwing our letter in the trash along with the pink hatbox that held the footprint.

  When I finally got out to the fence where Tim was, he asked, “Who’ll clean the puke now?” and the saliva slid to the corners of my mouth.

  By the time Jim and I arrived in Botch Town that night, Mary had already been there. Boris was off the board. The white car was turning onto Hammond, and the prowler was at the edge of the woods behind Halloways’. Jim called Mary over to our side. As soon as she came through the curtain, he asked her, “Where’s Boris?”

  Mary turned and walked to the back wall. She lifted something off the big pipe that ran to the sewer. When she returned, she showed us it was Boris.

  “Where is he?” said Jim.

  “Away,” said Mary.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “I heard it in school,” she said.

  “She doesn’t know any more than we do,” said Jim.

  “Did the prowler get him?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  Mary stepped backward toward the curtain. Just before she went through, Jim asked her, “What do you know?”

  “He’s cold,” she said. “Very cold.”

  The next morning we were dressed and out early. The sky was overcast, and a light snow fell around us as we made our way through the woods. Neither of us said a word, and the journey went so fast it was as if the woods were shrinking. We were suddenly there, like in a dream, peering through the branches at Mr. White’s backyard. There was a numbness throbbing in my head, and I felt weak. Jim scanned the windows for signs of movement and said, “Same as last time.” He crouched low and ran for the garage. For a whole minute, his back to the wooden wall, he stood perfectly still, and we listened.

  I looked to the house for the thousandth time. When I looked back, Jim was gone around the side. A second later he was back, waving me to follow him. I couldn’t move at first, but then he whisper-yelled, “Hurry,” and it put me in motion. I joined him, and we walked around to the front.

  Again I hesitated in the shadow at the edge of the entrance. The cold concrete-and-oil smell put me off. I turned and looked behind me to where the driveway curved around toward the street. Jim was already at the back of the place, his hand on the freezer latch. It squealed when he opened it. He got his fingers under the lid and was trying to pull it up.

  “Help me,” he said. “Hurry up.”

  I ran to help him. Together we lifted the heavy lid like the top of a coffin. A light came on inside, reflecting off the walls of ice. It was big enough for a body, but there was no body there. It was empty.

  “Shit,” said Jim, and he was about to lower the lid when I saw something crumpled up in the corner.

  “Look,” I said.

  He saw it and said, “Get it. I can hold this by myself for a second.”

  I let go and dove halfway in to grab the piece of wadded orange paper. I knew what it was before I put it in my pocket. Sliding out, I helped Jim lower the lid. With two inches left to go, we just dropped it and ran. The sound of it latching echoed behind us. We were out and around the garage in a flash. At the edge of the woods, we crouched down and rested, watching the house.

  “Where’s Boris?” said Jim. “Mary sent us on a wild-goose chase.”

  “She just said he was very cold. Maybe he’s in the lake.”

  “The lake’s still frozen,” said Jim.

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Wait a second,” he said. He brushed away the pine needles on the ground and dug around until he found a good-size stone. Seeing the way he gripped it, I got up and started running. I ran a hundred yards before I heard the crash of window glass, and then I heard Jim running behind me. We didn’t let up until we were all the way to the stream behind Halloways’.

  “Let me see the clue,” he said, working to catch his breath.

  I dug into my pocket and pulled out the ball of orange tissue paper.

  “A snot rag?” said Jim.

  “No,” I said. I opened the paper, and as the folds came away, inside was revealed a length of black ribbon.

  “Fig Man,” he said. “His Halloween treats.”

  I nodded.

  “How’d you like that throw?” he said. “Right through the upstairs window.” He laughed.

  I jumped the stream. “Now he’ll know we were there,” I said.

  “He knows less about us than we know about him,” said Jim. He jumped, and off we ran.

  At dinner we learned from my mother that the cops wouldn’t even consider Boris a missing person until another week or so went by. She went on to tell us about how he left his family and ran away from Communism. “Boris came all that way to be the janitor of East Lake School,” she said, and laughed.

  As soon as the last word was out of her mouth, we heard the sirens coming down the block. Jim was the first away from the table, but we all—my mother, Mary, and me—were at the window when the three cop cars screamed past. We went for our coats and shoes, even my mother.

  She told us to stay close to her, and we followed. It wasn’t as cold as it had been. The skies were clear, and the moon was out. Other neighbors were either ahead of us or just coming out their front doors as we passed. We saw Mr. Mangini, Mr. and Mrs. Hackett, the woman my mother called Diamond Lil, and the tired old Bishops with Reggie between them, talking a mile a minute.

  Jim walked up behind me, leaned over, and said, “Maybe they found Boris’s body.”

  I nodded, and Mary looked over, bringing her finger to her lips.

  The action was definitely at East La
ke. As we passed Mrs. Homretz’s house, we could see the police cars pulled up on the field between the school and the woods, their red lights flashing. A crowd of people from the neighborhood was being held back by a cop. We joined the group. Mr. Mason, a thin man with big glasses, like a grown-up Henry, told my mother that Tony Calfano had shot out all the windows of the school with a pellet rifle. We heard more little bits and pieces of the story from other people. Mr. Felina said, “Apparently he just went from window to window, like clockwork, and shot each one.”

  Jim grabbed me, and we wove our way through the crowd until we were near the front. Across the field we saw the broken glass everywhere, reflecting the moon. From there I could see that some of the windows had no glass left and some just had huge jagged holes, like Mr. Barzita’s frozen eyes. The cop who was keeping us back told everybody as much as he knew. We listened to him, and he said that the suspect was still there when they arrived. “He’s in the back of the patrol car,” said the cop. “We have the gun.”

  Cleary pulled up then and parked in the bus circle. He got out of his car, wearing a rumpled suit. Moving stiff and slow as a sleepwalker, he came over to where we all stood.

  “Please, go home,” he said, even letting go of his throat to raise both his hands in the air. “Go home and call your neighbors and tell them no school tomorrow.”

  The kids in the crowd were told to shut up by their parents.

  Jim and I looked at each other and smiled. “No school for you,” he said. “Tony Calfano is my new hero.” He made like he had a rifle and was shooting from the hip. “I should do the same at the junior high.”

  “No school,” Mary said on the way home. No one else was near us, but my mother kept her voice low. “Our taxes are going to have to pay for that,” she said angrily. “Who gave that crazy guinea a gun?”

  Well after we put ourselves to bed, Jim knocked on my door. He let the light from the hall in and took a seat at the end of my bed. “Did you think it could be Mr. White’s revenge for my busting his window?”