The Shadow Year

by Jeffrey Ford

  Jim was disappointed, but he said, “Okay.” Even I wanted to see the Blood-Sweating Hippo, but we turned and walked away. My mother bought us cotton candy—plumes of blue wrapped in a paper cone. The first bite was like eating hair, until it suddenly melted into straight sugar. We found seats in the wooden bleachers and looked out into the well-lit center ring.

  The midget with the top hat who’d sold us our tickets stepped into the spotlight carrying his megaphone in one hand and a whip in the other. Some of the lights around the audience went out. He lifted the megaphone and said, “Ladies and gentlemen and children of all ages.” Like earlier, I couldn’t make out anything he said after that. When he finally stopped mumbling, he turned and faced the main entrance to the tent. An elephant came in with a woman riding behind its head. The huge beast’s trunk dragged in the sawdust, and it moved slowly, lumbering back and forth with each step. The midget cracked the whip and yelled something with the word “pachyderm” in it. The elephant stepped into the center ring and laboriously made its way around the circumference. When the whip cracked again, a flap in the elephant’s backside opened and giant, steaming turds just fell out like cannonballs on an assembly line.

  “The greatest show on earth,” said my mother.

  We saw a trapeze act, a lion tamer, and then came the clowns. They drove into the center ring in a little car. Explosions came out of the tailpipe. The door opened, and fifteen clowns jumped out one after the other. Mary counted off every one. She stood up and waved to them as other kids did. They tooted horns and lit firecrackers. Crazy hair and ripped clothes—they were like bums off the street with painted faces and gloves. Each one wore a hat with a feather or a tassel or a flower coming out the top.

  The clowns went up into the bleachers all around the ring, shaking hands, squirting water out of flowers they wore on their lapels, getting too close to people. Everybody was yelling and screaming, and the band was playing “Happy Days Are Here Again.” One clown made his way up toward where we sat. Mary stepped into the aisle to meet him. He had a flowerpot hat, gloves without fingers, painted teardrops, and glasses. Leaning over her, his face right in Mary’s, he put out his hand to shake. Her smile turned in an instant, her whole face collapsing into fear. She ran back to her seat and leaned into my mother. The clown waved and was gone.

  At the end they shot the midget out of a cannon. A puff of smoke, an explosion, and then he flew across the center ring into a net that dropped him onto a pile of old mattresses. As he took the football helmet off his head and bowed, I wondered what he did at night. I saw him in a shack, playing cards with Admiral Gullet and Sweet Marie. They discussed the death of the elephant, but in his head he was thinking of the cannon.

  Before Jim could even ask, my mother started heading for the hippo tent. “The Blood-Sweating Hippo,” said Jim, putting his hand to his forehead. I trailed after them with Mary, who was walking slowly.

  “Come on, let’s go,” I said.

  She held out her hand. I took it and made her run with me to catch up.

  The guy at the tent entrance taking the money told us we had only ten minutes, because everything was closing down. “I can’t guarantee he’ll sweat blood in ten minutes,” he said. It cost a quarter a person, and we all went in. This tent was bigger than the other sideshow tents. There was a light at the center, but it was pitch dark around that.

  “Low tide,” my mother said of the smell.

  We made our way to a circular enclosure and peered over the walls. There was a lightbulb above the ring that lit the slick hide of the hippo. The creature lay there, in straw sodden with its own piss, huge and unmoving. All it did was breathe. We stared at it for as long as we could. Then Jim picked Mary up and held her so she could see. She pointed to the edge of the enclosure at something I hadn’t noticed before. There was a track that went around the rim of the circle, and on it was a turtle. A few seconds later, she pointed to another spot, and there was a rabbit.

  “The tortoise and the hare,” said my mother.

  “What does that have to do with a hippo?” I asked.

  “Ask the midget,” she said.

  “Let’s look some more,” said Jim. My mother joined him. I was going to take another peek, but when I turned to see where Mary was, she was gone. I walked back into the shadows of the tent and called her name. After searching around the entire perimeter and not finding her, I told my mother.

  “She probably went outside,” she said. “Go see.”

  I ran toward the front of the tent, a rectangle of late-afternoon light guiding me. At the flap I asked the guy who took the money if he’d seen my little sister. He pointed past the tents. “She went out there,” he said. I took off in the direction he indicated and saw her standing out past the circus in the muddy field. I called to her, but she wouldn’t come. When I got to her side, she was looking at the ground. A crocus was growing up out of the mud. It hadn’t opened yet, but inside you could see yellow.

  “Mom says hurry up, we’re leaving,” I told her.

  In the car on the way home, Jim called Mary “Sweet Marie” about twenty times. Finally my mother told him to shut up. She asked us each what our favorite part of the circus was.

  “The midget getting shot out of the cannon,” said Jim.

  I told her I liked the hippo.

  “What about you, Mary?” she asked.

  There was silence, and then Jim said, “The clowns?”

  “I thought you liked clowns,” said my mother.

  “He wasn’t a clown,” said Mary. “It was Mel.”

  “Who’s Mel?” said my mother.

  “Mister Softee,” she said.

  My mother and Jim and I laughed, but Mary never even smiled.

  “Softee’s in jail,” said my mother.

  Something Holy

  Sunday morning my parents couldn’t get out of bed. My mother called Jim to her and told him to take me and walk to church. Mary got out of it because they didn’t trust us to take care of her on such a long journey. We got dressed and put on white shirts and ties. Our Lady of Lourdes was quite a walk from our house, and I dreaded making the trip in my good shoes, soles as hard as rock. Before we left, Nan gave us money to light candles for her.

  On the way out the front door, I asked Jim, “Why do you light the candles?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s something holy.”

  The day was warm, and birds were singing. There was dew on the lawns. When we reached the intersection of Willow Avenue and Feems Road, Jim turned.

  “This isn’t the way to church,” I said.

  “I know,” he said, and smiled.

  I stood my ground.

  “Go to church if you want,” he said. “I’m going to get a chocolate milk at the deli and sit behind the stores.”

  “You have money?” I said.

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out the candle money. “I’ll share it with you.”

  For about two seconds, I thought of church—Father Toomey, dead already, yelling at everyone; the bells; the songs. “Okay,” I said.

  Jim had enough for a chocolate milk and a big chocolate-chip cookie. We sat on milk crates in the alley behind the deli, out of sight in an alcove.

  “What if we get caught?” I asked.

  “No one ever comes back here but kids,” he said, and then held up the cookie the way the priest holds up the host and broke it in half.

  After we finished eating, Jim got up and went to the edge of the alcove and stuck his head out to look around. When he looked in the direction of the drugstore, I saw him pull his head back quick. He came over to me.

  “Hinkley’s coming on his bike,” said Jim.

  I got off my milk crate. He motioned for me to get flat against the wall while he snuck back to the opening. I saw him hunch down, and just as I heard the sound of the bike tires, he pounced. Before Hinkley’s eyes could even go wide, Jim had an arm around his throat and was dragging him off the bike. The bike hit the groun
d, the front tire spinning. Hinkley struggled to get away, but Jim punched him in the face, and he went down on all fours.

  “You hit my brother with a rock on the lake,” said Jim, and kicked him in the ribs. Hinkley went over on his side, gasping for air.

  “I heard for that letter we wrote Krapp you have to roll the barrels to the furnace room,” said Jim, laughing. He walked over to the bike and picked it up.

  Hinkley got to his feet. He lunged at Jim and tried to tear his grip off the bike handles. Jim pushed Hinkley aside with one arm and kicked out two front spokes. “How’s the furnace room?”

  “It stinks,” said Will.

  “What’s that mean?” asked Jim, cocking his foot as if to kick again.

  “Were you down there with Lou?” I asked.

  “Oh, that washed-out guy? Yeah.” He laughed.

  When Hinkley laughed at Lou, we laughed with him.

  “What about Lou?” asked Jim.

  “I only saw Lou one day. When a kid pukes and they get it with the red stuff, after a while it forms into like a red ball. I watched Lou take one of those out of the barrel and put it in the furnace. It sizzled and smelled like hamburgers.”

  “What was he like?” I asked.

  “Really white,” said Hinkley.

  “Did he say anything to you?” asked Jim.

  “Yeah, he told me if I found out for him who threw a rock through his window, he’d give me ten bucks. I didn’t know, but I told him I’d heard it was Peter Horton so he would give me the money.”

  Jim let go of Hinkley’s bike, and it dropped onto the ground. He stepped away, and Hinkley went for the handlebars. Jim moved quickly, grabbing Hinkley’s arms and locking them behind his back. He called us faggots as Jim turned him toward me. “Punch him in the face,” said Jim.

  I stepped up, but Hinkley was kicking the air, trying to keep me away. Jim kneed him in the back and told him to take his punishment. “Hit him!” yelled Jim. I just stood there, looking at Hinkley’s face. “As hard as you can!” Hinkley squinted and turned his face to the side. Finally Jim called me a pussy and just let him go.

  Hinkley sprang for his bike and was on it in a second. He rode thirty feet away from us and then stopped and yelled back, “I know where Lou lives! For another ten bucks, I’m gonna tell him your sister helped Peter Horton.” Jim took off after him, but Hinkley was gone.

  When Jim and I returned to Botch Town that night, we found that Mary had never left. Boris was back at his house working on his car, Charlie was in the lake, and Mr. Conrad stood in the Hayeses’ backyard, leaning against the house. Mr. Barzita had been retired to the shoe box where Jim kept the figures of all those who’d died or moved away from the neighborhood. With a black crayon, in block letters, he’d written on the lid “Hall of Fame.” It didn’t matter what you did on Willow Avenue while you were there; everyone wound up in the Hall of Fame. We found Barzita in among the others, lying on top of Mrs. Halloway, and Jim laughed.

  Sure enough, the white car was parked in front of Peter Horton’s house. The prowler was in the Hortons’ backyard. Jim asked Mary how long the car had been there, and she said, “Three nights.”

  “That’s about how long it was parked outside of Boris’s before he ran away,” said Jim. “Mr. White’s gonna do something soon.”

  I pictured Mr. White trying to lift Peter’s huge body over his shoulder.

  “Yes,” said Mary.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Three,” she said.

  “Three?” said Jim. “What’s that mean?”

  “One more than two,” said Mary.

  “What about Peter?” I asked.

  She shook her head and said, “I don’t know.”

  “Okay,” said Jim, “you can go play.”

  Mary went through the curtain to her side. When we heard the class start, Jim leaned in close to me and whispered, “Should we tell her about what Hinkley said?”

  “Do you think he’ll do it?” I asked.

  “No, but…”

  “What about we tell her if we find the white car in front of our house?”

  Jim agreed, and then he told me his new plan. He’d dug around in the couch cushions and under the bed and come up with enough money to buy flashbulbs for his camera. “We’ll catch him at the scene of the crime,” he said.

  Instant Evidence

  We knew that if my mother was talking while she was drinking, she’d drink faster. At dinner Jim had a thousand questions about Bermuda, and before she could start to clean up the plates, I started talking to her about Sherlock Holmes. I think Mary knew what we were up to, and she went to her room. After a while my mother had drunk so much she just started talking on her own. She smoked like mad and told us about a place called Far Rockaway and when she and my father lived in Kentucky near Fort Knox. She told us about a library there in a mansion run by two old women, blind twins, who knew where every book was and how sometimes the local doctor took a pig instead of money for curing someone.

  When she moved to the living-room couch, we went with her. Jim and I nodded every now and then to let her know we were listening. If we saw her smile when she told us something, we laughed. Eventually her eyes closed, her cigarette burned away in the ashtray, the half-filled wineglass tilted toward the floor. Words kept coming out, but more and more slowly making less and less sense. The last thing she said was “You’re bad at bad,” and then she was out cold. Jim grabbed the glass before it spilled, and I stubbed out the cigarette. Together we took her shoulders and gently moved her back so her head rested on the pillow. Jim sent me to get a blanket and the big red book. We set her up with the book open on her chest and then went next door to tell Nan we were going to bed.

  Upstairs in my room, I dressed and, as Jim had instructed, pulled the covers up over my pillow to make it look like I was asleep. Every stair step creaked under our sneakers on the way down. We crept into the kitchen, and Jim turned out the light there and in the dining room. Slowly, so as to not make a sound, Jim opened the back door. It squealed as it swung wide enough for us to pass through. We slipped out into the yard without a hitch. It was nine-thirty, and we had till midnight, when my father got home from work.

  We walked around the corner of the house and crossed the lawn to the street. There was a breeze that smelled like the ocean. Peter Horton lived all the way up near Hammond, and we turned in that direction. Most of the houses we passed were darkened, and some had only a light on in an upstairs bedroom window. We stayed out from under the glow of the streetlamps, crossing back and forth, trying not to scrape our feet on the gravel.

  Jim wore the camera around his neck on a thin strap, and it bounced off his coat with every step. Across from Mr. Barzita’s house, he led me up the side street toward Cuthbert Road. It was a clear night, and away from the streetlamps you could see all the stars. Jim gave me the sign to be extra quiet. We went up on a lawn on the right side of the street and headed around that house to the backyard. We passed right beneath a lit window. My heart started pounding, and my ears pricked up on their own like a dog’s. Behind the place it was completely dark. We had to weave around lawn furniture and croquet wickets. Luckily, the back fence was a split-rail. Jim went over the top, and I slid through the middle space into the Hortons’ backyard.

  Their place was older than the other houses on the block, and bigger—three stories of busted and cracked stucco and a porch out front with columns. Their yard was bigger, too, more than double the size of ours. They had no lawn, but there was a thicket of tall pines surrounding the house, front and back. The fallen needles made for quiet walking.

  We crept around the side of the house and crawled in under the branches of a big pine. From there, if we crouched, we could see the road and the house. The lights were out inside, and I thought of all the tons of Hortons, sleeping. They were big, lethargic people, every one with moon eyes and slow wit. They dressed like people in old brown photographs. Four boys and three girls. The father had somethin
g that looked like a ball sack coming off his chin. My mother told me it was called a goiter. He wore the same white T-shirt every day, his stomach sticking out, and the mother had dimples on her elbows, dresses like worn nightgowns. They seemed to have come off a farm somewhere, as if a twister had lifted the place and dropped it and them onto Willow Avenue.

  The street was empty in front of their house. Two cars went by, and I tensed with each one. That’s when it struck me that Jim’s plan was crazy. I wondered how he was going to get a photo of Mr. White. Did he expect to catch a shot of those pasty hands around Peter’s throat?

  “Hey,” I said to him. “This is crazy.”

  “I know,” he said. “What if I get a good picture, though?” he whispered.

  I shook my head.

  “Instant evidence,” he said.

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “Ten at the latest.”

  Standing still there in the dark beneath the tree made me cold, and I started to shiver. Jim crouched, watching the street, his camera in both hands at the ready. Another car passed. I think it was Mr. Farley. A long time went by. I yawned and took hold of a branch. Closing my eyes, I thought about how much it felt like we were in Botch Town instead of somewhere in real life. For a moment I was tiny and made of clay. Then Jim tapped my leg.

  When I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw, through the opening in three crisscrossing branches, was the white car pulling up to the curb just beyond the halo of a streetlight. It glided in without a sound. Mr. White rolled down his window and lit his pipe. We could see that he had his hat on and wore his overcoat. Before he even tossed his match out, I could smell the smoke. He sat there, smoking and looking at the house through the pines.

  Jim and I were frozen in place, and the smoke came stronger and stronger, until my eyes started to water. We shouldn’t have smelled it so much, and I started to think it was finding us for him. I wanted to run, and I touched Jim’s shoulder to tell him we had to leave. He held his hand up and pointed. Mr. White was tapping out his pipe against the side of the car. He rolled up the window.