Shadow Season (2 page)

Finn reaches out to touch the blackboard and steady himself. The rage strikes quickly with the scent, as it always does, threatening to overpower him. He makes a fist with his left hand and tightens it against the head of his cane. He’s cracked a lot of them this way. His hands still retain power.

The dark comes to life again, replaying what the investigators called “the incident.” He’s trapped in the splinters of his own fracturing skull and feels the echoing stab of agony. It takes a second to get ahold of himself and remember where he is now, who he is now.

I am stone in the night, Finn thinks. I will not break.

“Have Nurse Martell look at that, Jesse,” he tells her, his smile natural and easy, hiding nothing and hiding everything. He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out his handkerchief. “Use this. She’s still in her office, isn’t she?”

He knows she is. He hasn’t heard her car drive off yet. Roz’s car is a flatulent ’58 Comet on its third turn of the odometer. There have been grease fires in the engine block, and it blows enough smoke that he can feel the oily residue on the breeze settling against his skin like a mist. When she stomps the pedal it backfires like a twelve-gauge, often making the younger girls giggle. Back in the city, it made the gangbangers dive to the curb.

Jesse says, “I think so.” She plucks his handkerchief from him with a short, fierce action. “How did you
know I hurt myself?” she asks with a quiver of a grin in her voice.

Like most people, she’s moderately impressed by this sort of carnival trick. It’s one of the reasons she has a crush on him. It’s the kind of thing that raises him to just above pitiful and makes him almost cute. Sometimes the girls want to hug him, the way people like to coo at babies or pick up midgets.

He swings the cane up to tap at the stack of novels resting on the corner of his desk. “Don’t forget to take the Kerouac, Robbins, and Vonnegut.”

“Thanks for lending them to me, Mr. Finn.”

“Sure.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“I know.”

“You always take such good care of your books. No cracks in the spine, not a single dog-ear anywhere. Some of the girls, during study hall, they’re so nasty they spit between the pages. It’s
uber-disgusting
. But your copies look brand-new.”

Despite the fact that it’s true, Jesse doesn’t realize how ludicrous her own comment is. He’s grateful for that. She shouldn’t always have to worry about making a mistake around him, to be terrified of talking. There are some people who can’t even start a sentence with
I
around him because they think they’ll hurt his feelings.

Still, the rage bucks against his sternum, trying to get out, wanting to scream at the kid, I fucking can’t see, what do I give a shit about books anymore?

A blind man taking good care of his library. If the comment is silly, the fact is absurd. He used to be a bibliophile. He used to be concerned with the look of
words and the structure of sentences. When he was a rookie he’d write up his daily logs with a kind of lyrical zeal until his lieut came down on him for it. He used to frequent secondhand shops in the city and spook the neighborhood when his radio squealed. He used to be a lot of things.

Finn’s left plenty behind but there’s more he doesn’t have the courage to give up. There’s no reason to thumb through his favorite hardbacks anymore, even though the urge is still there. They sit on the shelf wasted. They are paper and he is stone.

Jesse’s been borrowing novels from him all semester, one of the few students who actually does outside reading. Or even curriculum reading, for that matter. She’s hitting that phase where novels that caused a stir in the fifties and sixties hold a great interest for her. “I can’t stand how
repressive
the school library is,” she says now. “You know someone erased the word ‘fuck’ from
Catcher in the Rye?
And they crossed out all the ‘god’s in ‘god damn.’ Isn’t that illegal?”

“It is if it’s the librarian doing it.”

“I don’t know who’s doing it. My mother would throw a fit if she knew I was reading
Slaughterhouse-Five
and
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
and
On the Road.”

She’s right, Mrs. Ellison would, and without even knowing why. Simply because there are others who’ve told her that certain fiction shouldn’t be read, especially by young girls in private schools. But Finn believes that parents who would send their daughters to the St. Valarian’s Academy for Girls are already guilty of living by outdated notions of gentility. This school gives a lot but is ultimately for suckers.

He thinks, Why aren’t you reading Judy Blume, kid? Or Jackie Collins? Why aren’t you cyber-stalking some jock from across the river? Why do you give a damn about Billy Pilgrim and Sal Paradise and Sissy Hankshaw?

Let the parents throw their fits. He doesn’t care. He’s learned he can get away with a lot. People feel too ashamed to give him much grief.

“You don’t narc on me and I won’t on you,” he tells her. “Deal, Jesse?”

“Deal, Mr. Finn.”

“Solid.”

She makes a grab for the novels and nearly drops them. She moves in close, her breath a mixture of fruity gum, mint toothpaste, and Duchess’s breakfast of waffles and eggs Benedict. The syrup reeks. “It’s going to snow tonight. Your coat, that one you wear when you go for your walks, I don’t think it’s going to be warm enough for you. I can run back to your cottage and get you something heavier, if you like.”

“Thanks anyway, Jesse.”

“I really think I should.” Her voice is a little sharp, like a mom who’s fed up.

“I’m okay.”

“I mean, it’s no problem. I don’t mind. It’ll only take me a few minutes, and I think I should—”

“That won’t be necessary,” he says, appreciative but annoyed by her careful attention. It would be so easy to allow himself to go with it, to become weak, the way he nearly was with Vi, the way the world wants him to be, so it can decimate him. “I’ll be fine.”

“You need a hat. You never wear a hat. Maybe Santa will bring you one.”

She leaves the room, hesitating in the doorway, watching him for a moment longer before she turns and ambles off down the corridor. She won’t visit the nurse. She’ll knot his monogrammed handkerchief around her cut flesh and stare at his initials. Maybe she’ll buy him a hat. She’ll replay their puerile conversation over and again until it takes on a much greater meaning. He was once sixteen too, a bony boy with a bumbling step.

She understands they’re two of a kind, in some way. Lonely outsiders, a pair among the handful left behind during winter vacation for lack of families or other reasons. Finn does a quick count. There are ten students and faculty members left on campus. Eleven if Vi has stayed, and he suspects she has.

Of course she has.

Roz’s car starts up in the lot out front. It grumbles, falters, and gurgles. She’s off with Duchess to pick up extra supplies for Christmas dinner before the snow starts.

The scent of the girl’s blood lingers, keeping his head red and sticky.

He reaches into his desk for the bottle of cologne he keeps there. He dabs some on his index finger, covers his top lip, and breathes, and breathes. It doesn’t drive away the vision of his dead wife Dani, naked and glaring, sticking the S&W .38 in his face and pulling the trigger.

ST. VALARIAN’S ACADEMY FOR GIRLS IS
a small but prestigious school with a relatively meager staff. Four satellite cottages surround three buildings built a century and a half ago, protected by the historical society because a minor Civil War battle occurred on its front steps and Rutherford B. Hayes once slept here back when the school was a hotel. Whenever you told anybody that, you also had to explain that Hayes was the nineteenth president of the United States. They’d ask, Ah yeah, what did he do? And you had to explain, He got the last federal troops out of the South after Reconstruction, he ordered the Panama Canal built, and he reformed a corrupt and bankrupt Civil Service.

Everyone would go, Ah yeah, what’s his name again?

An hour and a half north of Manhattan you were in the deep sticks, nearly as off the map as if you’d gotten lost in the Ozarks. When you said “town” you were talking about Three Rivers, which really wasn’t much of a town at all. Just a main street five blocks long with a handful of stores that made most of their money off St. Val’s. A couple of stoplights, hardly any road signs.

There are truck stops with bad food. There are train tracks but no station. Juke joints with country rockers
blaring solid bass tracks and mean harmonizing so the strippers could hump the poles and get nasty enough to make a few bucks. Enough to feed their habits and feed their kids.

A small rural town like most others, except this one’s on its way out. To the east is a closed sugar factory. To the north, an abandoned feed mill. A lot of stores are still open but more and more are closing. The nicer houses close to Main Street still look well kept, lawns trimmed, flower beds heavy with new growth in summer. The owners are retirees set with their pensions, with nowhere to go anyway.

Moving out from the center of town through neighborhoods you see cheaper properties going to hell. Huge Victorians that should’ve been converted years ago now boarded up. There are halfway houses for runaways, dopers, the mentally challenged, abused wives. Nursing homes where the elderly look near-enough dead on the porches that every time you pass by you’ve got to wonder, He still breathing?

Spiraling out from there you see the effects of inflation and recession more blatantly. Shacks are scattered into the hills as if they were tossed there by hurricanes. They lean, propped in odd directions, pine-board doors hanging from busted hinges, roofs and walls ready to collapse.

The old ways don’t die, they persist through poverty, illness, depression, murder. Floods have washed the land into beautiful and strange patterns, boulders and uprooted trees stacked against the rim of the box valley. Cinder-block roadhouses still kick it up each night, more lively now than ever.

All of this Roz has described for him in great detail.

A lot of the land has been sold to developers who are waiting for the economic stimulation promised by the president. Most men of the holler have worked their lives away in the sugar factory and the feed mill. Many of them drifted down to the city or up to the Canadian border towns. Those left can only survive now by cooking and transporting meth.

There’s one river nearby, ten minutes to the west, which overflows every couple of decades and takes a number of lives. The diners, bars, and hardware stores have newspaper clippings showing the devastation going back to the 1890s. Mud that reached the third-floor rain gutters, dead children stuck in treetops.

The story goes that three creek beds converged there, giving the area its name, but if you ask why the place isn’t called Three Creeks instead you’ll get no answer.

St. Val’s is south of the holler, situated in its own valley. The land is lush and beautiful in the summer, set off just far enough to always be considered outside of town.

The only other guy currently on campus is Roddy Murphy, an off-the-boat Irishman from the north side of Galway. Chief custodian, electrician, snow-removal expert, groundskeeper, and all around fix-it dude with an attitude. As Finn collects his belongings from the classroom, he hears Murphy downstairs dragging equipment across the front walk in preparation for the blizzard.

Last year around his birthday Murphy got lonely for home and decided to bond with Finn a bit. They spent the night drinking Jameson in Murph’s apartment and Finn learned that drunk Irishmen really do sing
“Kathleen.” As Murphy outpaced Finn three to one he got louder and more physical, pounding on Finn’s shoulder and sort of dancing around his living room.

Halfway through the night Murph admitted that he’d fooled around a bit with a couple of the young wans. He called himself a fookin’ idjit and tried to sound abashed and contemplative. Finn got the distinct sense that Murphy was lying in order to impress him, maybe get Finn to confess his own sins. The next day, Murphy claimed not to remember most of the night. Maybe it was the truth, but it had left Finn feeling a little cagey ever since.

Carrying his overcoat, Finn makes his way along the empty corridors, the annoying tap of his cane the only sound. He hears it as if someone else is making the noise and finds himself becoming increasingly upset with that person. The silence of the building causes him some anxiety. He relies heavily on noise.

Judith’s door is open. Before he can knock she says, “Hello, Finn. You really need to cut back on the cologne, dear.”

Her lips are wet. He can tell by the soft snapping of suction when she parts them. She’s on her feet near the window, where she twists a knob and lowers the volume on the Mahler CD playing. She smokes menthol 120s and the smell is barely present in the office. She’s like a kid hiding her habit from her parents, sneaking a cigarette and blowing smoke out the window.

He knows she wants to talk. She damn near always wants to talk, always did want to talk, even before this thing with Vi.