The Shadow Year

by Jeffrey Ford

  When I saw the window go up, I breathed a sigh of relief, but then the car door opened and he stepped out. He put his hands in his overcoat pockets and headed straight for us. There was no way he could see us, and I thought he’d turn and go toward the house, but he didn’t. He came on, taking long strides straight toward our tree. I turned to run, and just as I did, I saw the flash go off. The next thing I knew, I was leaping through the middle space in the split-rail fence. Jim just jumped right over it without touching, the camera flying out behind him on its string. I didn’t know if Mr. White was right behind me, but I wasn’t going to turn around to find out.

  We made it to the front lawn of the house whose yard we’d passed through earlier and then stopped when Jim put his hand on my shoulder. We were both winded, but it was clear that Mr. White wasn’t coming through the backyard.

  “He’ll come in the car,” said Jim.

  Just as he spoke, the metal gate in the fence of the yard across the street opened with a squeal. We looked up. I knew right away it wasn’t Mr. White. The figure stepped past the deeper shadow of the house. It was a teenage kid in a black leather jacket and a white T-shirt. He waved for us to come to him. I was unsure, but he waved more frantically, and finally Jim took off toward him. I didn’t want to be left behind, so I went, too.

  The guy leaned over and whispered, “Stay quiet and follow me.”

  We went through the gate, and as soon as we did, headlights appeared, turning off Hammond and onto Cuthbert. I had to really move to keep up with Jim and the other guy. He led us through the backyards, and it didn’t take long to see he knew where he was going. Every place where two fences didn’t quite meet and you could squeeze through, every place where there was a lawn chair or a tree branch to help you over a fence, every path among the trees and bushes, he knew without thinking. We moved like Barzita’s squirrels from one end of Cuthbert to the other.

  We came out of the backyards where Myrtle intersected Cuthbert and hid behind a lawn swing.

  “We’ll wait here,” said the guy.

  I noticed that his hair was combed forward in a wave and that he wore white Converse. A thin silver chain with a crucifix on the end looped down across his chest. A moment later the long car rolled slowly by. We could see Mr. White in the driver’s seat, his head swiveling left to right and back again as he looked from lawn to lawn. The car stopped in front of one house for a while and then started up again and disappeared down the street. Once he was gone, we ran at top speed across the asphalt of Myrtle and Cuthbert, into the backyards that bordered the backyards of Willow Avenue. We moved through them like fish in water.

  The guy took us to the Curdmeyers’ grape arbor. Once we were under the trellises, he stopped. “You’re just across the street,” he said. “Watch for headlights.”

  “Do you know the man with the white car?” Jim whispered to him.

  He smiled on one side of his mouth. “Sure,” he said. “I’ve seen everything.”

  We thanked him for saving us and turned to head out across the Curdmeyers’ yard toward the front. “Come out again some night,” he said, “and I’ll show you guys around.” Jim and I looked back, but he was gone.

  Sneaking into the house was a delicate process of slowly opening doors and cautious stepping. The warmth and total silence made it seem as if the house itself was sleeping. As we passed through the kitchen, I saw that the time was eleven-thirty. My mother was exactly where we’d placed her on the couch. We crept past her, and just before we reached the stairs, she said something with the word “palatial” in it. Jim looked back and smiled at me. More quietly than Mr. White, we made it to the landing outside our bedrooms. I went into my room, and Jim followed me. He stood at the entrance and whispered into the dark, “Do you know who that was?”

  “Who?” I asked, dropping my coat on the chair.

  “Ray Halloway.”

  Say Cheese

  Ever since the day of the circus, my mother was in a strange mood. I’d seen it happen before. Her anger was somehow turning into energy. I could almost hear it percolating in her head. After dinner she no longer sat smoking and staring. Now she was near frantic, her nights filled with projects. She painted, she wrote, she created a TV commercial for a contest put on by Hebrew National salami. She told us all about it and sang the song she wrote, set to the tune of “Hava Nagila.” One of the lines was “Even the all-knowing swami eats Hebrew National salami.” At the end, she said, there should be balloons and confetti and cannons shooting salamis into the air. We told her it was great. She sent it off in the mail with high hopes, and the next night she started on a painting of Mount Kilimanjaro.

  My father didn’t change. Every morning at five o’clock, his alarm would ring. He’d sit up in his underwear on the edge of the bed, hunched over, breathing heavily and grunting every few seconds. He’d groan and then lurch to his feet. He’d dress in his work clothes from the day before. He’d comb his hair with water, and by five-twenty he’d be sitting in the kitchen, sleeves rolled up, with a cup of instant coffee, smoking. His gaze wouldn’t stray from the clock over the back door. At five-thirty he’d stand and place his cup on the counter.

  Next door, Pop had his own contest going. Every day after figuring the horses, he’d take out a bag of candy and lay it on the table. The contest was to make up a new name for the candy. He gave pieces of it to all of us—hard caramels with chunks of nuts in them. I could feel the brown spackle sucking out my teeth. In his boxer shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, he sat chewing and jotting names along the edge of an old newspaper.

  “Nuttos.”

  “Crackos.”

  “Chewos.”

  Nan started every morning by squeezing half a lemon into a glass of boiling water. She drank it steaming hot, all at once, moving her lips and gulping till it was gone. The hot water was followed by a bowl of cold prunes in their own juices. “Why don’t you just use dynamite?” Pop said. After breakfast she walked a hundred times from one end of the apartment to the other in her robe and hairnet.

  Mary sat in the corner of the fence, back behind the forsythias, smoking a cigarette. The day was overcast and breezy. I saw her from the kitchen window, and she was talking to herself.

  Jim and I took a visit to Botch Town. After turning on the sun, Jim lifted the figure of Ray that had long lain on its side from behind the Halloway house. He then picked up the figure of the prowler. Holding them out to me, he said, “I think these are the same guy.”

  I nodded.

  “Maybe when his parents moved, he ran away and came back here,” said Jim. He put the figure of Ray on the board and put the prowler carefully into the Hall of Fame so his pin arms wouldn’t damage the others already resting there peacefully.

  “Where’s he living?” I asked.

  “I bet in his old house. It’s still empty. That’s why Mary left him behind it.”

  “Wouldn’t somebody try to find him?”

  “Maybe not, because he’s eighteen,” said Jim.

  “But what’s he doing here?”

  “We’ll ask him all that.”

  “Not for a while,” I said. “I don’t want to get caught.”

  “Ray knows what Mr. White is doing,” said Jim. “He can help us save Peter Horton. Besides, he’s cool, isn’t he?”

  “He’s great at running,” I said.

  “I wonder if he eats out of the garbage,” said Jim.

  I pictured Ray in the moonlight, lifting a trash-can lid and finding a pink hatbox filled with dirt.

  Later Jim finished off the film in his camera by taking shots of everyone. He got one of Nan in her bathrobe and hairnet shaking her fist at him and smiling. He caught Pop smoking a Lucky Strike, reading the horse paper, his glasses perched at the end of his nose. Mary held her badge out, my mother stirred a big pot of the orange stuff, my father stared, and Jim snapped away. George hunkered down at the end of his leash to take a crap in the backyard, and Jim raised the camera. The dog had his back to us, but I
called, “George. Hey, George. Georgie.”

  Jim aimed, saying, “George, say cheese. Say cheese.” George looked back over his shoulder at us and growled, his bottom teeth bared. Jim snapped it, and then he had Mary take one of him and me, standing side by side in front of the shed.

  A Lot of Screaming Ensued

  While Krapp broke a sweat for the Little Big Horn, I tried to spy on Hinkley. He sat two rows across and one seat up, so I only caught his profile—the red hair, the freckled milky skin stretched taut over his cheekbones. I didn’t believe he had the nerve to tell Lou that Mary had helped Peter Horton break the window, but I watched him. It was the sight of his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down in his skinny neck that eventually made me unsure. As Krapp started to act out Custer’s last stand, Hinkley cast a glance over his shoulder like he heard me thinking about him and caught me staring. The instant he looked in my eyes, he turned away.

  “He stood like this,” said Krapp, legs spread apart, his hands holding invisible six-shooters. “He was the last guy left, standing on this little hill. All around him was a sea of Indians on horseback with bows and arrows.” Krapp aimed and fired with the guns that weren’t there. “Custer was a crack shot and killed an Indian with every bullet he had left, but then the arrows came….” Krapp took one in the back, and Tim Sullivan lost it. “When the guns were empty, he pulled his sword from its scabbard.” The sword came out in slow motion, and he held it pointing toward the ceiling. More arrows hit Krapp, and he twitched with each strike. He made a face that was supposed to be agony but looked more like Custer’s last dump. By the time he let the whole thing go, we were all laughing. He looked confused and just about to get pissed off, but instead he smiled. A moment later he took a bow. There was silence, a pause, and somehow all at once we thought to clap for him.

  By the end of the performance, I was certain Hinkley had done it.

  Out on the playground, I found Peter Horton and told him that Hinkley had taken ten dollars from Lou the janitor and lied about who’d broken the window.

  “Why’d he do that?” said Peter.

  “To get the ten bucks,” I said.

  “He didn’t know who did it?”

  “He just said it was you to get the money. Lou thinks you did it. Now do you get it?”

  “But I didn’t do it,” said Horton, pacing back and forth. His face grew red, and there was a saliva bubble between his lips. His eyes were wider than ever. Finally he lumbered off, looking for Hinkley. I followed at a distance. Peter traipsed through a kickball game and right between two kids trading baseball cards. Hinkley was talking to a couple of girls when Horton’s fingers closed around the back of his neck, then landed a slow-moving punch that came as if through water but hit like a torpedo. Hinkley’s whole body shook. Krapp was on the scene in a shot, threatening trips to the office for all involved. I kept my distance and watched as Krapp helped Hinkley to his feet. His nose was bloody, and he looked dazed. Krapp told him to brush himself off and go to the office. Peter was already on his way across the field, crying. As Krapp yelled at him to get going, Hinkley looked around and found me. He smiled, the blood running down across his lips.

  Hinkley and Horton never came back to the classroom that afternoon, and word got around that they were suspended and their parents had to come for them. Krapp was doing geometry—circles, triangles, dashed lines—with three different colors of chalk—white, blue, and pink. My mind was numb from it. “That’s the point,” said Krapp, and there was a knock at the door. He went out into the hallway, and we could hear someone talking to him. Krapp stuck his head back in and called my name. The first time it went right through me. The second, I woke to it and felt instant embarrassment. I got out of my seat and walked to the door. He leaned close and whispered to me, “You’re wanted in the office.”

  Cleary sat behind his desk in his camel-hair jacket and black tie, his drastic crew cut and sideburns that Jim said he put on like a helmet every morning. His hand was around his throat, and his look was, by Mary’s scale, dark coffee. It was so quiet that I heard the brass clock on his desk tick. Out the window behind him, I saw the gates to the school, the blue sky, and the way home.

  “Have a seat,” he said. “Do you know why you’re here?”

  I sat in the chair, facing him across his desk, and shook my head.

  “We had an incident on the playground today,” he said, “between Peter Horton and William Hinkley. Did you see it?”

  I nodded.

  “I hear you told Peter Horton something that got him mad at Hinkley,” he said.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Maybe?” he asked, and then proceeded to lay out the whole story in perfect detail. He knew about Lou and the ten dollars, the rock through the window, the lies, all of it. “Did you start this fight?” he asked.

  As he spoke, I was scared, but once his words evaporated, I started really thinking. “It was unfair what Hinkley did to Peter,” I said. “I wanted to warn him in case Lou went to his parents.”

  “A noble gesture,” said Cleary, raising his eyebrows. “William told me that your brother beat him up behind the deli on Sunday.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You were there,” he said. “You won’t be suspended this time, but I’ll be calling your parents to inform them of all this. You may go back to class.” His hand swept slowly away from his neck and pointed me to the door.

  From what Cleary told my mother, she deduced that we hadn’t gone to church on Sunday. A lot of screaming ensued. I took a lesson from Jim and just nodded quietly.

  “I don’t give a damn about Hinkley,” my mother said, “but lying about going to church is a venial sin.” I tried to remember if Mrs. Grimm had taught us that one.

  My mother was angry, but the worst part was she told my father that he had to take us to church next Sunday. The look of betrayal he gave us was like a slap in the face.

  “Are you kidding?” said my father.

  “You’re their father, you’ll take them.”

  “Bullshit,” he said. “I don’t go to church.”

  We let the rest of the week go by without trying to sneak out at night. Jim would have gone, but I wasn’t ready to take the chance again. Every night the long white car sat outside the Hortons’ house in Botch Town. My only relief was that I’d told Peter about Mr. White being after him because of Hinkley’s story. I wanted to believe that was enough. “Monday night,” said Jim.

  Jim got his pictures back from the drugstore Saturday afternoon. We were standing over Botch Town, using its sun to see them better. Scenes of George and the family flipped by, and then Jim stopped and pulled one glossy black-and-white photo closer to his face. The flash had gone off in the dark beneath the tree and reflected off Mr. White’s face pushing through the shadowy branches.

  “It’s just his head and his hat,” said Jim.

  “But it looks like it’s flying in the dark,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Jim.

  “Did you notice how quiet he was?”

  “He has powers,” said Jim. He continued flipping through the photos, and when he came to the one of me and him in front of the shed, he said, “You can have that.” I put it in my back pocket. We returned to the shot of Mr. White and stared at it for a long time.

  “When we get more evidence, we’ll send this to the cops,” he said.

  The next morning, dressed in his brown suit that was so worn it shone, a tie, and his good shoes, my father led us out to the car. Mary and I sat in the back and Jim sat with him up front. “This is just bullshit,” my father said, turning around to look as he backed out of the driveway.

  At church my father took a seat in the first row, on the left, right on the aisle in front of the altar, and we filed in next to him. The smell of incense was eerie, not to mention the plaques on each of the church’s great sweeping arches—the story in pictures of Christ’s crucifixion. The thick air, the dim silence, made the place seem filled with time. Ea
ch second weighed a ton, each minute was a great glass bubble of centuries. The drudgery of church was the most boring thing I ever lived through. Mrs. Grimm had taught us about purgatory, and that was going to church every day until someone’s prayers sent you on to heaven.

  The Mass started, and no matter what we were supposed to do—stand, kneel, or sit—my father sat through it all. Jim, Mary, and I followed the routine, but my father just sat with his arms folded and one leg crossed over the other. He watched the priest, and when Father Toomey rang the bell and people pounded their chests, my father laughed. On the way home, he told us, “Nice story, but when you die, you’re food for the worms,” and then he pulled over to a hot-dog cart on the side of the road.

  When we got home from church, Nan came in with some news. She said she had just gotten off the phone with Mrs. Curdmeyer, who told her that Mrs. Horton was dead. “She died in her sleep,” said Nan.

  “That’s a shame,” said my mother, and I thought about never waking up. The next thing that went through my mind was the sight of the white car parked in front of our house in Botch Town.

  A Silent Island

  Mrs. Horton’s wake was held at Clancy’s Funeral Home, an old white mansion with giant oaks looming over it. My parents and Jim and I came up the front steps and into the heavy florist scent of the lobby. The furniture in the foyer was gold with thick carved legs. On a coffee table sat a huge vase of white lilies. Paintings of landscapes in gold swirling frames lined the walls. A grandfather clock of polished wood stood in the corner, its pendulum swinging behind glass. On its face was a crescent moon and stars.

  Teddy Dunden’s father, who was a fireman during the day, worked nights as an usher at Clancy’s, holding the door and steering people to the different death rooms. He was a burly, red-faced man with a gray mustache and curly brown hair. He said hello to my parents, and they greeted him in whispers. He looked at the floor, his hands folded like at church, and led us to a room that was crowded with people, all dressed in black. It was quiet but for the sound of crying up near the front, where I saw the lighted coffin surrounded by flowers.