The Shadow Year (5 page)

School started on a day so hot it seemed stolen from the heart of summer. The tradition was that if you got new clothes for school, you wore them the first day. My mother had made Mary a couple of dresses on the sewing machine. Because he'd outgrown what he had, Jim got shirts and pants from Gertz department store. I got his hand-me-downs, but I did also get a new pair of dungarees. They were as stiff as concrete and, after months of my wearing nothing but cutoffs, seemed to weigh fifty pounds. I sweated like the Easter pig, shuffling through school zombie style, to the library, the lunchroom, on the playground, and all day long that burlap scent of new denim smelled like the spirit of work.

Jim was starting seventh grade and was going to Hammond Road Junior High. He had to take a bus to get there. Mary and I were still stuck at the Retard Factory around the corner. None of us was a good student. I spent most of my time in the classroom either completely confused or daydreaming. Mary should have been in fourth grade but instead was in a special class in Room X, basically because they couldn't figure out if she was really smart or really simple. The kids they couldn't figure out, they put in Room X. Although all the other classrooms had numbers, this one had just the letter that signaled something
cut-rate, like on the TV commercials: Brand X. When I'd pass by that room, I'd look in and see these wacky kids hobbling around or mumbling or crying, and there would be Mary, sitting straight up, focused, nodding every once in a while. Her teacher, Mrs. Rockhill, whom we called “Rockhead,” was no Mrs. Harkmar and didn't have the secret to draw the Mickey of all right answers out of her. I knew Mary was really smart, though, because Jim had told me she was a genius.

Once they called Jim into the psychologist's office and made my mother go over to the school and witness the tests they gave him. They showed him pages of paint blobs and asked him what he saw in them. “I see a spider biting a woman's lip,” he said, and, “That's a sick three-legged dog, eating grass.” Then they asked him to put pegs of various shapes into appropriate holes in a block of wood. He shoved all the wrong pegs into all the wrong holes. Finally my mother smacked him in the back of the head, and then he and she started laughing. Throughout sixth grade he incorporated something about Joe Manygoats, a Navajo boy written about in the fifth-grade social-studies book, into all his test answers, no matter the subject, and signed all yearbooks with that name. Still, he never failed a grade, and this gave me hope that I, too, would someday leave East Lake.

My teacher for sixth grade was the fearsome Mr. Krapp. To borrow a phrase from Nan, “as God is my judge,” that was his name. He was a short guy with a sharp nose and a crew cut so flat you could land a helicopter on it. Jim had had him for sixth grade, too, and told me he screamed a lot. My mother had diagnosed Krapp with a Napoleonic complex. “You know,” she said, “he's a little general.” He assured us on the first day that he “wouldn't stand for any of it.” The third time he repeated the phrase, Tim Sullivan, who sat beside me, whispered, “He'd rather get down on his knees.”

Krapp also had big ears, and he heard Tim, who he made get up in front of the classroom and repeat for everyone what
he'd said. That day we all learned an important lesson in how not to laugh no matter how funny something is.

School brought a great heaviness to the hours of my days as if they, too, had put on new dungarees. By that year, though, it was business as usual, so I weathered it with a grim resignation. The only thing drastic that happened in that first week occurred on the way home one afternoon: Will Hinkley, a kid with a bulging Adam's apple and curly hair, challenged me to a fight. I tried to walk away, but before I knew what was going on, a bunch of kids had surrounded us and Hinkley started pushing me. The whirl of voices and faces, the evident danger, made me light-headed, and what little strength I had quickly evaporated. Mary was with me, and she started crying. I was not popular and had no friends there to help me; instead everyone was cheering for me to get beat up.

After a lot of shoving and name-calling and me trying to back out of the circle and getting thrown into the middle again, he hit me once in the side of the head, and I was dazed. Clenching my fists, I held my hands up in front of my face, assuming a position I had seen in fights on TV, and Hinkley circled me. I tried to follow his movements, but he darted in quickly, and his bony knuckle split my lip. There was little pain, just an overwhelming sense of embarrassment, because I felt tears welling in the corners of my eyes.

As Hinkley came toward me again, I saw Jim pushing through the crowd. He came up behind Hinkley, reached around, and grabbed him by the throat with one hand. In a second, Jim wrestled him to the ground, where he punched him again and again in the face. When Jim got up, blood was running from Hinkley's nose and he was quietly whimpering. All the other kids had taken off. Jim lifted my book bag and handed it to me.

“You're such a pussy,” he said.

“How?” was all I could manage, I was shaking so badly.

“Mary ran home and told me,” he said.

“Did you kill him?”

He shrugged.

Hinkley lived, and his mother called our house that night complaining that Jim was dangerous, but Mary and I had already told our mother what had happened. I remember her telling Mrs. Hinkley over the phone, “Well, you know, you play with fire, you're liable to get burned.” When she hung up the phone, she flipped it the middle finger and then told us she didn't want us fighting anymore. She made Jim promise he would apologize to Hinkley. “Sure,” he said, but later, when I asked him if he was really going to apologize, he said, “Yeah, I'm going to take him to Bermuda.”

In reality, the start of school was anticlimactic, because the prowler had surfaced twice more. The Hayeses' teenage daughter, Marci, spotted him spotting her sitting on the toilet late one night. The Mason kid, Henry, who regularly proclaimed in school that he would someday be president, found the shadow man in their darkened garage, crouching in the corner behind the car when he took out the empty milk bottles after dinner. As he told Jim and me later when we went to talk to him about it, “He ran by me so fast I didn't see him, but his air was cold.”

“What do you mean, ‘his air was cold'?” asked Jim.

“It smelled cold.”

“Unlike yours?” said Jim.

Henry nodded.

That evening, down in the cellar, Jim made tiny red flags out of sewing needles and construction paper and stuck them into the turf of Botch Town in all the spots we knew that the prowler had been. When he was done, we stepped back and he said, “I saw this on
Dragnet
once. Just the facts. It's supposed to reveal the criminal's plan.”

“Do you see any plan?” I asked.

“They're all on our block,” he said, “but otherwise it's just a mess.”

Apparently we weren't the only ones concerned about the prowler, because somebody called the cops. Thursday afternoon a police officer walked down the block, knocking on people's doors, asking if they'd seen anything suspicious at night or if they'd heard someone in their backyard. When he got to our house, he spoke to Nan. As usual, Nan knew everything that happened on the street, and she gave the cop an earful. We hid in the kitchen and listened, and in the process we learned something we hadn't known. It so happened that the Farleys had found a human shit at the bottom of their swimming pool, as if someone had sat on the rim and dropped it.

When the cop was getting ready to leave, Jim stepped out of hiding and told him we had a footprint we thought belonged to the prowler. He smiled at us and winked at Nan but asked to see it. We led him back to the shed, and Jim went in and brought out the hatbox. He motioned for me to take the lid off, and I did. The cop bent over and peered inside.

“Nice job, fellas,” he said, and took the box with him, but later on, when I walked George around the block that night, I saw the pink cardboard box with its poodle and the Eiffel Tower jutting out of the Manginis' open garbage can at the curb. I went over to it and peeked under the lid. The footprint was ruined, and I decided not to tell Jim.

As George and I continued on our rounds, autumn came. We were standing at the entrance to East Lake beneath a full moon, and suddenly a great burst of wind rushed by. The leaves of the trees at the boundary of the woods beyond Sewer Pipe Hill rattled, some flying free of their branches in a dark swarm. Just like that, the temperature dropped. I realized that the crickets had gone silent, and I smelled a trace of Halloween.

Down the block a wind chime that had been silent all summer sounded its cowbell call. I looked up at the stars and felt my mind start to wander, so I sat down at the curb. George sat next to me.

That day in school, they had herded us into the cafeteria and showed us a movie,
The Long Way Home from School.
It was about kids playing on the train tracks and getting flattened by speeding trains or electrocuted on the third rail. The guy who narrated the stories looked like the father from
Leave It to Beaver.
He told one about kids thinking it was fun to climb on train cars and run across the tops. Little did they know that the train was about to pull out. When the movie showed the train starting to move, he said, “Oops, Johnny fell in between the cars and was crushed to death by tons of steel. It's not so much fun when you're flat as a pancake.” After that came a scene of a kid shooting a slingshot at a moving train crosscut with another scene of a little girl in a passenger compartment pressing her hand to her eye as blood dripped down her face while the landscape rolled by. “Nice shooting, cowboy,” Mr. Cleaver said.

After the movie they made us line up out in the hallway on our knees with our heads down and pressed into the angle where the floor met the wall. “Cover the back of your head by locking your fingers behind it. This will protect you from flying debris,” said Mr. Cleary, the principal, one hand lightly stroking his throat. We were led to believe that this crouching maneuver would save us if the Russians dropped an atomic bomb on our town.

My mother had told us that if the air-raid siren ever really went off, I was to get home. She and my father had devised a plan. The minute the siren sounded, someone was supposed to shovel dirt into the window wells of the cellar and then get all the mattresses from the house and lay them out on the first floor to block the radiation from seeping down into the basement. At one time they had stocked a bunch of cans of food in the cellar and gallon bottles of water, each with a drop of bleach in it to keep them fresh. But as time went on, the supplies dwindled to a single can of Spam and a bottle of water that had gone green.

As George and I got up and headed back home, I daydreamed a
Twilight Zone
scenario of us projecting ourselves into the world of Botch Town to escape the horrible devastation of atomic bombs.

When George and I got home, the wine bottle sat on the kitchen counter, empty, and my mother was passed out on the couch. There was a cigarette between her fingers with an ash almost as long as the cigarette. Jim went and got an ashtray that was half a giant clamshell we had found on the beach the previous summer, and Mary and I watched as he positioned it under the ash. He gave my mother's wrist the slightest tap, and the gray tube dropped perfectly whole into the shell.

I wedged a pillow under her head as Jim took her by the shoulders and settled her more comfortably on the couch. Mary fetched the
Sherlock Holmes.
Jim opened it to
The Hound of the Baskervilles,
the story that obsessed her, and gently placed the volume binding up, its wings open like those of a giant moth, on her chest.

We went next door to say good night to Nan and Pop.

“Where's your mother?” asked Pop.

“She's out cold,” said Jim.

Nan's lips did that kissing-fish thing that they did whenever she was trying to trick you into ignoring the truth. I had first noticed it that past summer on the day the ladies came over and she read the cards for them. The widow, old Mrs. Restuccio, who lived by herself next to the Curdmeyers across the street, had drawn the ace of spades. Nan's lips started going, and she quickly pulled the card from the table and exclaimed, “Misdeal.” There was a moment where the room went stone quiet, and then, as if someone flipped a switch, the ladies started chattering again.

The first Saturday morning after school started, I followed Pop around the yard holding a colander as he harvested the yield of the trees. Before he picked each piece of fruit, he'd take it lightly in his hand as if it were a live egg with a fragile shell.

As we moved from tree to tree, he told me things about them. “Never put a peach leaf near your mouth,” he said. “They're poisonous.” When we came to the yellow apple tree: “This tree grew from seeds that no one sells anymore. It's called Miter's Sun, and I bought the sapling from an old coot who told me there were only a half dozen of them left in the world. It's important to take care of it, because if it and the few others that remain die off, this species will be gone from the face of the earth forever.” He picked a small, misshapen yellow apple from a branch, rubbed it on his shirt, and handed it to me. “Take a bite of that,” he said. From that ugly marble came a wonderful sweetness.

We continued on to the plum tree, and he said to me, “I heard you were in a fight this week.”

I nodded.

“Do you want me to teach you how to box?” he asked.

I thought about it for a while. “No,” I said, “I don't like to fight.”

He laughed so loud that the crow sitting on the TV antenna atop the house was frightened into flight. I felt embarrassed, but he reached down and put his hand on my head. “Okay,” he said, and laughed more quietly.

After retiring from the Big A, Aqueduct Racetrack, where he had worked in the boiler room for years, Pop had taken up an interest in trees, especially ones that gave fruit. On our quarter-acre property, he planted quite a few—a peach, a plum, three apples, a cherry, an ornamental crabapple, and something called a smoke bush that kept the mosquitoes away—and spent the summer months tending to them: spraying them for bugs, digging around their bases, pulling up saplings, getting rid of dead branches. I'd never seen him read a book on the subject or study it in any way; he just started one day within the first week after leaving his job.

Nan had shown us old, yellowing newspaper clippings from when Pop was a boxer in Jamaica Arena and photographs of him standing on the deck of a ship with an underwater suit and a metal diving helmet that had a little window in it. Once when my parents thought I was asleep on the couch but I just had my eyes closed, I learned that he had spent time in a mental institution, where they'd given him electroshock therapy. Supposedly, when he was fifteen, his mother had sent him out around the corner for a loaf of bread. He went and joined the merchant marine, lying about his age, and returned home after three years, carrying the loaf of bread. Later, when he was asked how his mother had reacted, his answer was “She beat the shit out of me.”

He was powerfully built, with a huge chest and wide shoulders. Even when he was in his old age, I couldn't circle one of his biceps with both my hands. Every once in a while, we'd ask to see his tattoos, vein-blue drawings he could make dance by flexing his muscles: a naked woman on his left forearm, an eagle on his chest, and a weird fire-breathing dragon-dog, all
curlicue fur and huge lantern eyes, on his back, which he had gotten in Java from a man who used whalebone needles. He told Jim and me that the dragon-dog was named Chimto and that it watched behind him for his enemies.

The trees may have been Pop's hobby, but his true love was the horses. He studied the
Daily Telegraph,
the horse paper, as if it were a sacred text. When he was done with it, the margins were filled with the scribble of horses' names, jockeys' names, times, claiming purses, stacks of simple arithmetic, and strange symbols that looked like Chinese writing. Whatever it all stood for, it allowed him to pick a fairly high percentage of winners. There was one time when he went to the track and came home in a brand-new car, and another when he won so much he took us all on vacation to Niagara Falls. Pop's best friend was his bookie, Bill Pharo, and Pop drove over to Babylon to see him almost every day.