The Shadow Year (13 page)

In the days that followed Thanksgiving, Jim dusted off Botch Town and set to work on it again, fixing things that had fallen down, putting in a stop sign where Willow Avenue met Hammond Lane. He made figures for Mrs. Homretz and her dog, Tatel, and a new Mrs. Harrington. The old Mrs. Harrington had cracked from her own weight. I was his assistant. He saw the car I'd painted white and told me it was “almost good.” We worked every night on the board after doing our homework. His plan was to let Mary have her way and show us where the prowler was. “Then we catch him,” he said.

I asked around school if any of the kids had sighted the man in the white coat or seen a face at their window. I had to be careful the way I put it, so no one would get wise to what was going on. Not a trace, though. No one had seen anything. Hardly anybody remembered the prowler, and it had only been a couple of weeks since Mrs. Mangini had been “viewed in the altogether,” as her husband, Joe, explained to Pop out on the front lawn. I'd been standing there when Joe went by wearing his Long Island Rail Road conductor's hat, his newspaper rolled up under his arm. After Joe had moved on, Pop said, “Christ.”

One night Jim called Mary over to our side of the cellar. We heard her stop talking to herself, and then the curtain that
separated the two halves opened. She took one step out on our side but didn't come any closer to the board.

“Do you get the plan?” Jim asked her.

“Yeah,” said Mary.

I laughed.

Jim hit me in the arm and told me to shut up. “We want you to tell us where the prowler is,” he said. He held up the figure he'd made from the army man—pin arms and bright eyes. “Show us,” he said, holding the figure out to her.

She shook her head. “Not yet.”

“Come on,” he said.

“No comment till the time limit is up,” she said.

We laughed because she'd stolen the line from an old
Superman
episode.

“What do you mean?” asked Jim.

She turned like a robot, walked past us, and went up the stairs.

The day I discovered the cheese ball in the kitchen garbage, we got our report cards. It was about a week before Christmas, and Krapp had done me wrong. When he handed it to me, he shook his head. I failed math and social studies, and the rest of the grades weren't too good either. After a long walk home and on the verge of tears, I entered the house. Jim was waiting for me. He immediately asked to see my card. One look and he smiled. “Nice work,” he said. “They could use you at Harvard.”

“What did you get?” I asked.

“I only failed one,” he said. “And straight C's.”

“Wait till they get home,” I said.

“Don't worry, just tell them Krapp hates you. They'll go for that.”

But they didn't. Even Mary, who spent all that extra time in her make-believe school, did lousy. There was a lot of yelling. My father, red in the face, poked me in the chest with his index finger and told me I'd have to learn math from him now. Jim sat
quietly, no matter what happened, and nodded. When it was over, we were all sent to bed. Mary went down the hall, and I dried my tears as I followed Jim upstairs. He went toward his room and I toward mine. Just before I closed the door behind me, he whispered, “Hey.” I turned around. He dropped into a squat, grunting and making faces. His hand was behind his back. Suddenly the report card fell to the floor between his legs. He stood, gave a sigh, and shut the door.

Two days after Christmas, there was a blizzard. The heat went off, and we were all huddled in the kitchen on couch-pillow beds. The oven was on and open. My mother had tacked blankets up over the entrances to the living and dining rooms. Mary and Jim and my mother were all sick with the flu, coughing and shivering, wrapped in blankets. My father sat in the cold in the dining room, drinking coffee and reading an old newspaper. He called for me.

“Go upstairs and put on a lot of clothes. If you stay in here with me, you might not catch what they have.” Steam came out of his mouth when he spoke. “Or you can go in Nan and Pop's—they have their electric heater on.”

I nodded and went past him toward the stairs, and I saw, out the bit of the front window not obscured by the darkened Christmas tree, a wall of snow, reaching up beyond the top of the glass. The wind shrieked around the house.

“How high is it?” I asked.

He turned to look at the living-room window. “They said five feet on the radio a couple of hours ago. But it's drifted up around the houses to the gutters. That's some serious snow.”

Up in my bedroom, teeth chattering against the cold, I dressed in layers of pajamas and shirts and pants. I put on my socks and sneakers, which I never usually wore in the house.
Outside my ice-crusted window, I saw a tidal wave of white in the front yard, and it sloped down to about four feet in the space between our house and the Farleys'. The street was blocked from view, and I could make out only the roofs on the other side. It felt like we were trapped with the wind in a snow globe.

When I got back downstairs, Mom was sitting at the other end of the dining-room table, a shawl over her bathrobe, smoking and shaking. “We're going to need aspirin and children's aspirin, and some frozen orange juice, a carton of cigs. I doubt the liquor store's open, but get a half gallon of wine if it is,” she said.

My father was hunched over the table, writing with a pencil stub on the back of an envelope. “Okay,” he said.

“How are you going to get to the street?” she asked.

“I could get out the back door,” he said, “but from the looks of it I'd have to dig through the drift in the front to get to the road. But that's like twelve feet of snow. Once I make it to the road, it should be all right. I heard the plow go through last night a couple times.”

“You can't go out the front door,” she said.

“I'm not gonna. I'm going out the upstairs window. I'll lie flat and breaststroke to the street,” he said, smiling. He lit a cigarette. “I'll go in a minute.”

“How are you going to get back in?” she said.

“I'll worry about that later.” My father turned to me and said, “Go ask Nan and Pop if they need anything from the store.”

I went next door, and it was warm. The rings of the little electric heater glowed bright orange. Pop was sitting in the chair in the corner, his head back, lightly snoring, and Nan was on the couch at a tray, doing a paint-by-number.

She looked up and said, “Close the door, quick.”

I did and went over to see her picture, which was of a bull
fighter. Although she wasn't great at staying in the lines, the blobs of color were starting to become something. “It's good,” I said, and then asked if she wanted anything from the store.

“No, but who's going to the store in this mess?” she asked.

“Dad's going,” I said. “He's going out the front window upstairs.”

A few minutes later, my father, dressed in his jacket, a pair of gloves, and Jim's black skullcap, led Nan, my mother, and me upstairs. We went into Jim's room, and my father started moving the desk and chair away from the windows. I looked out and could see that the snow had drifted up to the edge of the roof. My father removed one of the storm windows from its frame and shoved the window the whole way up. The wind and snow blasted into the room, and we all stepped back. My father said, “If I sink in, throw me a line,” and laughed. Then he hoisted himself through the opening, into the storm.

Mom and Nan and I crowded around the window, the snow blowing in our faces. My father crept down the sloping roof and, when he reached the edge, lay down on his stomach. He carefully pushed himself out onto the snow and immediately sank in a foot or two.

“Oh, Christ,” said my mother.

“He loves the elements,” said Nan.

He started wriggling forward toward the street. He moved very slowly, and I thought the drift might devour him at any second. Halfway there he stopped and just lay still.

My mother called out to him, “Are you all right?”

“Things are shifting a bit,” he said.

He started forward again, and when he eventually came close to the street, he got up on his knees and crawled quickly like a crab. Then he went over the edge. I don't know if he heard us, but we clapped. A strong gust pushed us all away from the opening. My mother stepped through the blowing snow and shut the window with a bang. The room went very still.

“It's so dark out already,” said Nan.

When we got downstairs, my mother went back into our kitchen and I followed Nan into her house. She put the TV on for me, and I watched a Hercules movie with the sound off while she painted. Last night I hadn't gotten much sleep, with all the coughing and maneuvering in the crowded kitchen. My weariness and the warmth of the heater made me doze. When I woke up a while later, Nan had put away her paints and was frying a pork chop at her little stove. On the TV, Hercules was lifting a giant boulder. Pop was awake now, reading a magazine. He saw I was also awake and said, “You shouldn't watch this junk,” nodding toward the television. “You should read a magazine. It's educational. See?” He turned the magazine in his hands so I could see the page he was on. There was no writing, just a picture of a naked woman sitting on the lap of a guy in a gorilla suit. I could feel my face flush red. Nan looked over and laughed. “Put that away,” she said. He closed the magazine and threw it down next to his chair.

After lunch Pop brought out his project. I sat next to him at the kitchenette table. He'd been putting together a plastic model kit that had two figures—a Neanderthal man, who stood on one side of the base, and a human skeleton that stood on the other. The caveman was finished and stood, dressed in a leopard skin, with a club in his hand. Pop worked on the human rib cage, gluing each sharp bone in place, and I held the skull, working the movable jaw up and down. Nan passed by every few seconds, doing her daily exercise, walking from the living room to the bedroom one hundred times.

While he worked, Pop sipped at a glass of Old Grand-Dad and told me something that happened once when he was in the merchant marine. His ship was off the coast of Italy, and they were coming into port. It was a beautiful clear day, and the sun was bright. “The town we were heading for came in sight on the horizon,” he said. “I thought I was seeing heaven. The build
ings of the town glowed pure white in the sun. As we got closer, it looked even more beautiful—even the streets were white. Then we landed and went ashore. And let this be a lesson to you….”

I nodded.

“Our ship had brought the seagulls, and they circled in the sky by the hundreds, thinking we were a fishing boat. That's when I realized that the whiteness of the buildings and streets was from dried gull shit. Over time those birds had covered everything.”

When I went back next door to our house, my mother was drinking and smoking at the dining-room table. I could tell by the look on her face that she was in a bad mood, so as cold as it was, I went up to my room and, fully clothed, got into bed and pulled the covers up. Before long I built up some heat in my cocoon and drifted off to sleep. It seemed like only minutes later that Jim was standing next to my bed with a blanket wrapped around him. “Get up,” he said.

I opened my eyes, and he said, “It's three-thirty, and Dad's not back yet.”

“How long's he been gone?” I asked.

“Like five hours. Even if he crawled, he'd have made it by now.”

“What's Mom say?” I asked.

He closed his eyes, tilted his head back, and snored. “She's out cold in the kitchen. Mary's fever's gotten worse. We need the children's aspirin. Nan's got her in her place, wrapped up on the couch. I'm going out to look for Dad.”

“Do you feel better?” I asked.

He sat down on the edge of the bed and shook his head. The only other time I'd seen him look as weak was when I went to one of his wrestling matches and he'd lost. I had an image in my mind of my father up to his hips in snow, unable to move, and sinking slowly, like it was quicksand. “I'll go,” I said.

“Yeah, right,” he said.

I threw the blanket off and sat up. “I can do it,” I said, and the part of me that didn't want to was not in my head.

“You'll have to go out the window,” he said.

“I'm just afraid of sinking in.”

“It stopped snowing, and it looks like there's an ice crust, so you'll slide across it.”

I got out of bed and went to the closet for my coat.

“It's getting late, and it'll be dark soon. You gotta go up to the stores and look for him. If you don't see him by then, come right back.”

“Okay,” I said. My gloves were long lost, so I took a pair of white socks out of the dresser and put them on my hands.

“Put your hood up,” he said.

We went into his room.

“Does Nan know about this?” I asked.

“If she did, she wouldn't let you go,” he said. Then he stepped forward and pushed up the window. The wind blew in, and I walked forward. He helped me up to the sill, and I scrabbled through onto the roof. The sudden cold, the sight of the houses sunk in snow, stunned me, and I crouched down. The sky was as deep in its gray as the bubble lights were in color.

“Shit or get off the pot!” Jim yelled, and I felt his hand on my shoulder. I looked back once to see him leaning out the window. When I reached the edge of the roof, I got down on my stomach as I'd seen my father do. Jim was right, there was a sheen of ice on the snow. By the time I thought about sinking in, I was halfway across. I pictured myself trapped in snow, unable to breathe. The image scared me, and I went faster until I fell. Thinking I was going under, I screamed. The snow that cushioned my fall was only up to my waist. I stood and caught my breath, amazed that I'd made it. All down the block in front of me, the snow was drifted up on either side, to the edge of the rooftops in giant waves. I remembered when Mrs. Grimm
taught our catechism class and told us about the parting of the Red Sea.

I made slow headway, as though in a dream. Beneath the wind it was so silent that at one point my ears made their own sound, and I thought I heard Nan calling my name. I trudged forward toward Hammond Lane at the end of the block, where I hoped the plows had gone through more than once.

The snow started again, giant wet flakes, and night was no more than an hour away by the time I reached Hammond. My sneakers were soaked and freezing. The snow was bunching up under my pant legs, and the socks weren't gloves. My nose was running. I had to climb a mountain of plowed snow at the end of the block. It was pretty solid, but coming over the peak scared me because it felt like I was twenty feet up. I scrabbled down the other side to where the road was covered in only a few inches of packed snow. Hammond led straight to the stores. I was tired, but now I could walk easily, and that was a relief. A black car came out of the gloom behind me, its tire chains like a drumbeat. I knew it was Mr. Cleary, the principal of East Lake, because he drove with his left hand on the wheel and his right around his throat, where it always rested. I waved, but he didn't see me.

The parking lot at the stores had been plowed, and all around its edges were giant walls of snow, like a fort. The deli, the candy store, the supermarket, and Howie's Pizza were all dark. At the end of the row, though, it looked like there was a light on in the drugstore. In my mind I saw my father standing at the counter talking to the drug guy with the thick glasses, and I walked faster.

In the window of the store hung an old poster of the Coppertone girl and the little dog yanking her pants down. The lights were definitely on, and I tried to look up the main aisle as I pulled on the door handle. It was locked. I tried it again and again. I moved to the side of the door to look up another aisle
but saw no one. I banged on the window. Staring dully into the fluorescent-lit store, I heard a car's tire chains out on Hammond. The sound slowed, and then I realized it was turning in to the parking lot. I looked over my shoulder and saw a long white car. It turned and started toward me, its headlights making my eyes squint. I felt weak and couldn't move. My mouth went dry. The sound of the car's tire chains as it slowly crossed the lot had become my heartbeat. When the car reached Howie's Pizza, the fear exploded inside me, and I bolted around the side of the drugstore. There was a wall of plowed snow in front of me, and I jumped up onto the first ice block. I climbed up and up like a monkey. Behind me I heard the car stop and its door open. When I reached the top, I looked back for just a second. Only after I jumped did I realize that the person standing next to the car was not the man in the white coat but the drugstore guy. It was a sheer twelve-foot drop. When I hit, my knees buckled and I went face-first into two feet of snow.

I got up and turned to go back over the hill but was confronted by a wall of ice. It was unclimbable. I felt like crying, but I didn't. The dark made me think about how great it would be back in the oven warmth of the kitchen. I took a few deep breaths and thought about how to get home. I wasn't familiar with the street I was trapped on, which ran behind the stores. Hinkley lived in this neighborhood, so I didn't go there much. What I did know was that at the end of the winding block it touched the woods somewhere. I thought the drifts might not be as bad under the trees, and I could cut through to the Masons' backyard and then climb over the fences to ours.