The Shadow Year (7 page)

The next day on the playground at school, I overheard Peter Horton telling Chris Hackett that there had been someone at his mother's window the night before.

“Who was it?” asked Chris. “Batman?”

Peter thought for some time and then laughed so his whole giant body jiggled. “No, course not,” he said. “She thought she was lookin' at a full moon, but then it was a face.”

“What a dip,” said Chris.

Peter thought just as long again and then said, “Hey,” reaching out one of his man-size hands for Chris's throat. Hackett took off, though, running across the field, yelling, “Your mom's got a fart for a brain!” Horton ran four steps and then either forgot why he was running or became winded.

The minute I heard what Peter had said, I thought back to the board the previous night and remembered the shadow man's pins scratching the back wall of the Hortons' house. When I got home that afternoon, I told Jim, and we went to find Mary. At first she was nowhere to be found, but then we saw little clouds of smoke rising from the forsythias in the corner of the backyard. We crossed the leaf-covered grass and crawled in to sit on either side of her.

“How do you know where to put the people in Botch Town?” asked Jim.

Mary flicked the ash off her cigarette exactly the way my mother did and said, “Ciphering the McGinn System.”

“You're handicapping them?” I asked.

“From your morning line,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You read them to me,” she said.

“My notebook?”

She nodded.

“A town full of horses,” said Jim.

“It's not a race,” I said.

“Yes it is, in the numbers,” she said, staring straight ahead.

“Do you figure it in your head or on paper?” I asked.

“Sometimes,” she said.

Mary stamped out her cigarette. We sat there quiet for a time, the wind blowing the branches of the bushes around us. Above, the dying leaves of the oak tree scraped together. I tried to understand what she was doing with the information I was giving her but couldn't stretch my imagination around it.

“Where's Charlie Edison?” asked Jim.

“Gone,” said Mary.

“But where does he belong on the board?” he persisted.

“I don't know. You never read him to me,” she said, turning to me.

“I never read you his mother either,” I said.

“I saw her,” said Mary. “Saw her on the street and saw her with Mommy.”

For the next fifteen minutes we told her everything we knew about Charlie Edison: all of his trials and tribulations in school, what color bike he rode, what team insignia was on his baseball hat (the Cleveland Indians), and so on. She nodded as we fed her the information. When we were done, she said, “Good-bye now,” and got up and left the forsythias.

Jim started laughing. “It's all luck,” he said. “There's only so much space in Botch Town, and the figures have to go some
where. There's a good chance you'll get it right sometimes.”

“I don't know,” I said.

“You think she's Dr. Strange,” he said, and laughed so hard at me I was convinced I'd been a fool. For my trouble he gave me a Fonseca Pulverizer in the side muscle of my right arm that deadened it for a good five minutes. As he left me behind in the bushes, he called back, “You'll believe anything.”

In silent revenge I thought back to the night a few years earlier when my parents had told Jim and me that there was no Santa Claus. Just that afternoon Jim and I had been lying on our stomachs in the snow, trying to peer into the cellar, which had been off-limits since Thanksgiving. “I see a bike,” said Jim. “Christ, I think I see Robot Commando.” But when my mother dropped the bomb that there was no Santa Claus, I was the one who simply nodded. Jim went to pieces. He sat down in the rocking chair by the front window, the snow falling in huge flakes outside in the dark, and he rocked and sobbed with his hands covering his face for the longest time.

I left the bushes and went inside to dig around in the couch cushions for change. I found a nickel and decided to ride to the store and get a couple pieces of Bazooka. There was still an hour left before my mother got home from work and made dinner. The sun was already setting when I left the house. Night was coming sooner and sooner each day, and I rode along wondering what I should be for Halloween. I took the back way to the store, down Feems Road, and wasn't paying much attention to what was going on around me when I suddenly woke up to the scent of a vaguely familiar aroma.

A few feet in front of me, parked next to the curb, was a white car. I knew I had seen it before but couldn't recall where. Only when I was next to it and looked in the open passenger-side window to see a man sitting in the driver's seat, did I remember. The fins, the bubble top, the old curved windshield—it was the car that had stopped the night we dragged Mr. Blah-
Blah across the street. As I passed, I saw the man inside, wearing a white trench coat and white hat. He was smoking a pipe. His face was thin, with a sharp nose, and his eyes squinted as if he were studying me.

I panicked and took off down the sidewalk, pedaling as fast as I could. Behind me I heard the car start up, and that pushed me to pump even faster. I made it around the turn that led to the stores but didn't stop. Instead of heading left to the deli, I made a right on Hammond and rode all the way down to Willow and back home. I was almost home and thoroughly winded when I finally stopped to see if he was still behind me. The street was empty, and night was only a few minutes away.

I didn't want to tell Jim what had happened, because I knew he would laugh, but I couldn't shake the memory of the way that guy had stared at me. It took a lot of effort to put him out of my mind. Mom came home, we had dinner and did our homework and went next door to listen to Pop play the mandolin, and after a few hours I was able to forget him. When I went to bed, though, and opened the novel about Perno Shell in the Amazon, that face came floating back into my mind's eye. Pipe smoke! The same exact scent that had made me look up during the bike ride now emanated from the pages of my book.

The next day Pop had to drive over to the school and pick Mary up. She was running a high fever and feeling sick to her stomach. Something was definitely making the rounds at East Lake. When my class was in the library that afternoon, Larry March, the boy who smelled like ass, puked without warning all over the giant dictionary that old Mr. Rogers, the librarian, kept on a pedestal by the window. Larry was escorted to the nurse's office, and Boris the janitor was called in, pushing his barrel of red stuff and carrying a broom. I don't know what that red stuff was, but in my imagination it was composed of grated pencil erasers and its special properties absorbed the sins of children. He used about two snow shovels full in the library that day. As Boris disposed of the ruined dictionary, much to Mr. Rogers's obvious sadness, he said, “It must have been the black olives.”

Back in Krapp's classroom, though, after library, Patricia Trepedino puked, and then after watching her, Felicia Barnes upchucked. Boris and his barrel of red stuff were in hot demand, because reports of more puking came in from all over the school. Krapp was visibly shaken, his nostrils flaring, his eyes darting. After everything was cleaned up, a lingering vomit funk pervaded the room. He opened all the windows and put on a filmstrip for us about the uses of fossil fuels, featuring a
talking charcoal briquette. He sat in the last row in the dark, dabbing his forehead with a handkerchief.

When I got home, Dr. Gerber was there. He had pulled the rocker over by the living-room couch, where Mary was sleeping wrapped in a blanket with a bed pillow under her head. A big steel pot we knew as “the puke bucket” was on the floor next to her. He opened his eyes and waved to me as I came through the door. He was smoking a cigar, which he took out of his mouth momentarily to put his finger to his lips, and cautioned me to be quiet.

Gerber was the town doctor. He was a heavyset man with a thick wave of black hair, a wide face, and glasses. I never saw him without his black suit on and his black leather bag sitting next to him or in his hand. He gave us kids all our shots, choked us on flat sticks, rubber-hammered our knees, listened to our hearts, and came to our houses when we were too sick to make it to the office. When my mother first brought Mary, small and weak, home from the hospital, he stopped by every day for a month to help my mother administer a special medicine and to assure us that Mary would live. It was not unusual to find him, morning or night, dozing for a few minutes in our rocking chair, pocket watch in hand.

Once, during a snowstorm, when it was impossible to drive and my mother thought Jim was having an appendicitis attack, Gerber came the half mile from his office on foot, trudging through the snow. When he pronounced that Jim was merely suffering from a bad case of gas, he shook his head and laughed. Then he went next door to see Pop, with whom he shared an interest in horses, had a glass of Old Grand-Dad and a cigar, and was off. I watched him through the front window as he left, the darkness falling hard with the snow.

He didn't stay long the day Mary was sick but told Nan that he had another dozen kids to see, all of whom had the same thing. When he left, I sat at the end of the couch and watched
cartoons on TV with the sound off. Just when I was about to get up and go outside, Mary opened her eyes. She was shivering slightly. Her mouth started to move, and she mumbled something. I got up and went to the hall closet where the towels were kept. Taking a washrag, I wet it with cold water and placed it on her forehead. She grabbed my hand.

“The boy,” she said. “He's to show. I found him.” She pointed one finger down at the floor.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

She fell back to sleep and seemed to be more comfortable. I went out into the yard, bored, and looked for something to do. Jim, I knew, would not be home soon, as he had joined the wrestling team and now took the late bus. In the middle of smacking the cherry tree's trunk with an old yellow Wiffle ball bat, it suddenly came to me what Mary had meant.

I ran back inside and went into the cellar. Leaning out over Botch Town, I pulled the string for the sun. I started at Hammond Lane and scanned up and down the block, searching for the clay figure of Charlie Edison. Mrs. Harrington was standing, round as a marble, in her front yard. Mr. Conrad was out of place, standing next to Mrs. Hayes in the Hayeses' backyard. Mr. Mason had fallen over in his driveway, Boris the janitor worked on his car. I did find Mrs. Edison making her way down Willow Avenue toward the school but didn't see Charlie anywhere. Most of the characters usually just milled around by their houses, but Charlie was no longer there.

I was about to turn out the light and give up my search when I finally saw him. All the way on the other side of the board, beyond the school field and the woods, his figure lay on its side, directly in the center of the glittering blue waters of the lake.

Back upstairs, I put the leash on George, and we were out the door in a flash. Down the block and around the corner we went, moving quickly toward the school. It was getting late in
the afternoon, and the temperature had dropped. The woods were somewhat forbidding to me since Charlie had gone missing, and I wasn't supposed to enter them alone, but I hesitated for only a moment before plunging in beneath the trees.

We took the main trail and after ten minutes of fast walking stood at the edge of the lake. All the neighborhood kids' parents told them it was bottomless, but the older I got, the more I suspected that was just a story to keep us from swimming in it or trying to set sail on a raft.

Its surface was littered with fallen leaves, and in those places where the water peeked through, the reflection of the surrounding trees was rippled by the wind moving over its surface. It was so peaceful. I didn't know what I expected to find—maybe a body floating out in the middle—but it looked just like it always did in autumn. I stood there for quite a while, listening to acorns and twigs falling in the woods around me, thinking about Charlie. I imagined him resting lightly on his back at the bottom, his eyes wide, his mouth open as if crying out. His hands reached up for the last rays of sunlight that came in over the treetops, cutting the water and revealing the way through his murky nightmare back up to the world. The gathering dusk chased George and me down the path and back out of the woods.

That night I woke from sleep shivering. The wind was blowing, and the antenna on the roof above my room vibrated with a high-pitched wail, as if the very house were moaning. I made it to the bathroom, got sick, and staggered back to bed, where I fell into feverish dreams—a tumbling whirl of images punctuated with scenes of the sewer pipe, the lake, the descending brick stairway at St. Anselm's. Teddy Dunden paid me a visit. Charlie, his mother, the man in the white car, a pale face at the window, and Perno Shell himself chased me, befriended me, betrayed me, until it all suddenly stopped. I heard the birds singing and opened my eyes to see a hint of red through the window. There was a wet cloth on my forehead, and then I no
ticed the shadowy form of my father, sitting at the end of my bed, hunched forward, eyes closed, one hand lying atop the covers next to my ankle. He must have felt me stir. He whispered, “I'm here. Go back to sleep.”

Although the fever had broken and I was feeling much better by nine o'clock in the morning, the virus bought me a day off from school. Mary didn't go either, and my mother stayed home from work to take care of us. It was like the old days, before the drinking and the money trouble. Nan came in, and we all sat for an hour after breakfast at the dining-room table, playing cards: old maid and casino. I had a great adventure with my plastic soldiers, which I hadn't bothered with for months, on the windowsill in the living room while the brilliant, cold day shone in around me. We watched a mystery movie on TV with Peter Lorre as the sauerkraut-eating detective Mr. Moto, and my mother made spaghetti with butter.

Around three o'clock I lay back down on the couch and closed my eyes. Mary sat on the floor in the kitchen putting together a puzzle, while my mother sat in the rocker beside me and dozed. All was quiet save for the murmur of the wind outside.

I thought back to when I was in fourth grade and had stayed out of school off and on for forty-five days. My mother wasn't working then, and if I didn't feel like going to school, she let me stay home. I had genuinely discovered reading that year, and I lay in bed much of the time, devouring one book after another:
Jason and the Argonauts, Treasure Island, The Martian Chronicles, Charlotte's Web.
It didn't matter what type of story it was; the characters were more alive to me than all the students and teachers at East Lake.

At lunchtime I would come out into the living room, and my mother would make the spaghetti, and we would watch an old movie. I was the only fourth grader who could identify Paul Muni or Leslie Howard on sight. I loved the mystery movies,
their plots and the sense of suspense. My favorites were the ones with the Thin Man, and my mother, of course, was partial to Basil Rathbone as Holmes. Mr. Cleary threatened to keep me from passing fourth grade, but my mother went over to the school and told him I was passing, and I did.

Remembering that year, I realized how different my mother was from other parents. That difference was like a light that always shone in the back of my mind no matter how dim things got when she'd drink. She scared me, and I hated what she became, but that light was like the promise of an eventual return to the way things once were. Those memories protected me as I fell a thousand stories down into sleep.

I woke from that peaceful nap of no dreams only because Jim pried open my left eye with his thumb. “This one's dead, Doctor,” he said. I came to and noticed twilight at the window, heard the sound of the wine bottle pinging the rim of a glass in the kitchen. The first thought I had was of Charlie at the bottom of the lake. Who could I tell who would believe what I thought I knew?

After dinner my mother put the Kingston Trio on the Victrola and sat at the dining-room table drinking and reading the newspaper. Mary was on her roller skates, going round and round, following the outer curve of the braided rug in the living room. Inside her orbit, Jim showed me some of his wrestling moves.

“Could you possibly…?” I heard my mother say, and then she called us over to her.

Jim and I each went to one side of the chair. She pointed at a small photograph in the newspaper. “Look who that is,” she said.

I didn't recognize him at first because he wasn't wearing his paper hat, but Jim finally said, “Hey, it's Softee.”

Then the long, haggard face came into focus, and I could just about hear him say, “What'll it be, sweetheart?”

My mother told us that he'd been arrested because he was wanted for child molestation in another state. For a while he'd been a suspect in the Charlie Edison case but had been cleared of that suspicion.

“What's child molestation?” I asked

“It means he's a creep,” said my mother, and she turned the page.

“He gave some kid a Special Softee,” said Jim.

My mother lifted the paper and swung it at him, but he was too fast.

“What's the world coming to?” she said, and took another sip of wine.

That night I couldn't get to sleep, partly because I had slept during the day and partly because my thoughts were full of all the dark things that had burrowed into my world. I pictured a specimen of Miter's Sun fresh from the branch but riddled with wormholes. The antenna moaned in the wind, and it didn't matter how close Perno Shell was to the golden streets of El Dorado—the aroma of pipe smoke made it impossible to concentrate on the book.

I got up and went to my desk, opened the drawer, and took out my stack of Softee cards. The vanilla-cone head now struck me as sinister; leering with that frozen smile. I took them over to the garbage pail and dropped them in. Back in bed, though, all I could think of was the one card—the eyes—that I had never owned. I was unable to throw that card out, bury it, burn it with the rest of the deck, those eyes were always gaining power, and they watched me from inside my own head. I hunkered down under the covers and waited to hear my father come in from work.

Instead I heard a scream—Mary downstairs—and the sound of George barking. I jumped out of bed and took the steps. Jim was right behind me. When we got to her darkened room, she was sitting upright in bed with a terrified look on her face.

“What?” said Jim.

“Someone's outside,” she said. “There was a face at the window.”

George snorted and growled.

I felt someone at my back and turned quickly. It was Nan, standing there in her quilted bathrobe and hairnet, holding a carving knife in her hand.

Jim took George by the collar and led him to the kitchen. “Get 'em, George,” he said, and opened the back door. The dog ran out, growling. Mary, Nan, Jim, and I waited to hear if he caught anyone. After some time passed, Nan told us to stay put and went out, holding the knife at the ready. A few seconds later, she came back, George at her heels.

“Whoever it was is gone,” she said. She sent Jim and me back to bed and told us she'd sit with Mary until our father got home. My mother had never even opened an eye, and as I passed her bedroom, next to Mary's, I saw her lying there, mouth open, the weight of
Holmes
holding her down.