The Shadow Year
Authors: Jeffrey Ford
Jeffrey Ford
For
Jim, Mary,
and
Dool,
whose love was like a light
in the shadow years
It began in the last days of August, when the leaves of the elm in the front yard had curled into crisp brown tubes and fallen away to litter the lawn. I sat at the curb that afternoon, waiting for Mister Softee to round the bend at the top of Willow Avenue, listening carefully for that mournful knell, each measured
ding
both a promise of ice cream and a pinprick of remorse. Taking a cast-off leaf into each hand, I made double fists. When I opened my fingers, brown crumbs fell and scattered on the road at my feet. Had I been waiting for the arrival of that strange changeling year, I might have understood the sifting debris to be symbolic of the end of something. Instead I waited for the eyes.
That morning I'd left under a blue sky, walked through the woods and crossed the railroad tracks away from town, where the third rail hummed, lying in wait, like a snake, for an errant ankle. Then along the road by the factory, back behind the grocery, and up and down the streets, I searched for discarded glass bottles in every open garbage can, Dumpster, forgotten corner. I'd found three soda bottles and a half-gallon milk bottle. At the grocery store, I turned them in for the refund and walked away with a quarter.
All summer long, Mister Softee had this contest going. With each purchase of twenty-five cents or more, he gave you a card:
On the front was a small portrait of the waffle-faced cream being pictured on the side of the truck. On the back was a piece of a puzzle that when joined with seven other cards made the same exact image of the beckoning soft one, but eight times bigger. I had the blue lapels and red bow tie, the sugar-cone-flesh lips parted in a pure white smile, the exposed towering brain of vanilla, cream-kissed at the top into a pointed swirl, but I didn't have the eyes.
A complete puzzle won you the Special Softee, like Coney Island in a plastic dishâfour twirled Softee-loads of cream, chocolate sauce, butterscotch, marshmallow goo, nuts, party-colored sprinkles, raisins, M&M's, shredded coconut, bananas, all topped with a cherry. You couldn't purchase the Special Softeeâyou had to win it, or so said Mel, who through the years had come to be known simply as Softee.
Occasionally Mel would try to be pleasant, but I think the paper canoe of a hat he wore every day soured him. He also wore a blue bow tie, a white shirt, and white pants. His face was long and crooked, and at times, when the orders came too fast and the kids didn't have the right change, the bottom half of his face would slowly meltâa sundae abandoned at the curb. His long ears sprouted tufts of hair as if his skull contained a hedge of it, and the lenses of his glasses had internal flaws like diamonds. In a voice that came straight from his freezer, he called my sister, Mary, and all the other girls “sweetheart.”
Earlier in the season, one late afternoon, my brother, Jim, said to me, “You want to see where Softee lives?” We took our bikes. He led me way up Hammond Lane, past the shoe store and the junior high school, up beyond Our Lady of Lourdes. After a half hour of riding, he stopped in front of a small house. As I pulled up, he pointed to the place and said, “Look at that dump.”
Softee's truck was parked on a barren plot at the side of the place. I remember ivy and a one-story house, no bigger than a
good-size garage. Shingles showed their zebra stripes through fading white. The porch had obviously sustained a meteor shower. There were no lights on inside, and I thought this strange because twilight was mixing in behind the trees.
“Is he sitting in there in the dark?” I asked my brother.
Jim shrugged as he got back on his bike. He rode in big circles around me twice and then shot off down the street, screaming over his shoulder as loud as he could, “Softee sucks!” The ride home was through true night, and he knew that without him I would get lost, so he pedaled as hard as he could.
We had forsaken the jingle bells of Bungalow Bar and Good Humor all summer in an attempt to win Softee's contest. By the end of July, though, each of the kids on the block had at least two near-complete puzzles, but no one had the eyes. I had heard from Tim Sullivan, who lived in the development on the other side of the school field, that the kids over there got fed up one day and rushed the truck, jumped up and swung from the bar that held the rearview mirror, invaded the driver's compartment, all the while yelling, “Give us the eyes! The fuckin' eyes!” When Softee went up front to chase them, Tim's brother Bill leaped up on the sill of the window through which Softee served his customers, leaned into the inner sanctum, unlatched the freezer, and started tossing Italian ices out to the kids standing at the curb.
Softee lost his glasses in the fray, but the hat held on. He screamed, “You little bitches!” at them as they played him back and forth from the driver's area to the serving compartment. In the end, Mel got two big handfuls of cards and tossed them out onto the street. “Like flies on dog shit,” said Tim. By the time they'd realized there wasn't a pair of eyes in the bunch, Softee had turned the bell off and was coasting silently around the corner.
I had a theory, though, that day at summer's end when I sat at the curb, waiting. It was my hope that Softee had been hold
ing out on us until the close of the season, and then, in the final days before school started and he quit his route till spring, some kid was going to have bestowed upon him a pair of eyes. I had faith like I never had at church that something special was going to happen that day to me. It did, but it had nothing to do with ice cream. I sat there at the curb, waiting, until the sun started to go down and my mother called me in for dinner. Softee never came again, but as it turned out, we all got the eyes.
My mother was a better painter than she was a cook. I loved her portrait of my father in a suitâthe dark red background and the distant expression he woreâbut I wasn't much for her spaghetti with tomato soup.
She stood at the kitchen stove over a big pot of it, glass of cream sherry in one hand, a burning cigarette with a three-quarter-inch ash in the other. When she turned and saw me, she said, “Go wash your hands.” I headed down the hall toward the bathroom and, out of the corner of my eye, caught sight of that ash falling into the pot. Before I opened the bathroom door, I heard her mutter, “Could you possiblyâ¦?” followed hard by the mud-sucking sounds of her stirring the orange glug.
When I came out of the bathroom, I got the job of mixing the powdered milk and serving each of us kids a glass. At the end of the meal, there would be three full glasses of it sitting on the table. Unfortunately, we still remembered real milk. The mix-up kind tasted like sauerkraut and looked like chalk water with froth on the top. It was there merely for show. As long as no one mentioned that it tasted horrible, my mother never forced us to drink it.
The dining-room walls were lined with grained paneling, the knots of which always showed me screaming faces. Jim sat across the table from me, and Mary sat by my side. My mother
sat at the end of the table beneath the open window. Instead of a plate, she had the ashtray and her wine in front of her.
“It's rib-stickin' good,” said Jim, adding a knifeful of margarine to his plate. Once the orange stuff started to cool, it needed constant lubrication.
“Shut up and eat,” said my mother.
Mary said nothing. I could tell by the way she quietly nodded that she was being Mickey.
“Softee never came today,” I said.
My brother looked up at me and shook his head in disappointment. “He'll be out there at the curb in a snowdrift,” he said to my mother.
She laughed without a sound and swatted the air in his direction. “You've got to have faith,” she said. “Life's one long son of a bitch.”
She took a drag on her cigarette and a sip of wine, and Jim and I knew what was coming next.
“When things get better,” she said, “I think we'll all take a nice vacation.”
“How about Bermuda?” said Jim.
In her wine fog, my mother hesitated an instant, not sure if he was being sarcastic, but he knew how to keep a straight face. “That's what I was thinking,” she said. We knew that, because once a week, when she hit just the right level of intoxication, that's what she was always thinking. It had gotten to the point that when Jim wanted me to do him a favor and I asked how he was going to pay me back, he'd say, “Don't worry, I'll take you to Bermuda.”
She told us about the water, crystal blue, so clear you could look down a hundred yards and see schools of manta rays flapping their wings. She told us about the pure white beaches with palm trees swaying in the soft breeze filled with the scent of wildflowers. We'd sleep in hammocks on the beach. We'd eat pineapples we cut open with a machete. Swim in lagoons. Washed
up on the shore, amid the chambered nautilus, the sand dollars, the shark teeth, would be pieces of eight from galleons wrecked long ago.
That night, as usual, she told it all, and she told it in minute detail, so that even Jim sat there listening with his eyes half closed and his mouth half open.
“Will there be clowns?” asked Mary in her Mickey voice.
“Sure,” said my mother.
“How many?” asked Mary.
“Eight,” said my mother.
Mary nodded in approval and returned to being Mickey.
When we got back from Bermuda, it was time to do the dishes. From the leftovers in the pot, my mother heaped a plate with spaghetti for my father to eat when he got home from work. She wrapped it in waxed paper and put it in the center of the stove where the pilot light would keep it warm. Whatever was left over went to George the dog. My mother washed the dishes, smoking and drinking the entire time. Jim dried, I put the plates and silverware away, and Mary counted everything a few dozen times.
Five years earlier the garage of our house had been converted into an apartment. My grandparents, Nan and Pop, lived in there. A door separated our house from their rooms. We knocked, and Nan called for us to come in.
Pop took out his mandolin and played us a few songs: “Apple Blossom Time,” “Show Me the Way to Go Home,” “Goodnight, Irene.” All the while he played, Nan chopped cabbage on a flat wooden board with a one-handed guillotine. My mother rocked in the rocking chair and drank and sang. The trilling of the double-stringed instrument accompanied by my mother's voice was beautiful to me.
Over at the little table in the kitchenette area, Mary sat with the Laredo machine, making cigarettes. My parents didn't buy their smokes by the pack. Instead they had this machine that
you loaded with a piece of paper and a wad of loose tobacco from a can. Once it was all set up, there was a little lever you pulled forward and back, and presto. It wasn't an easy operation. You had to use just the right amount to get the cigarettes firm enough so the tobacco didn't fall out the end.
When my parents had first gotten the Laredo, Mary watched them work it. She was immediately expert at measuring out the brown shag, sprinkling it over the crisp white paper, pulling the lever. Soon she took over as chief roller. She was a cigarette factory once she got going; Pop called her R. J. Reynolds. He didn't smoke them, though. He smoked Lucky Strikes, and he drank Old Grand-Dad, which seemed fitting.
Jim and I, we watched the television with the sound turned down. Dick Van Dyke mugged and rubber-legged and did pratfalls in black and white, perfectly synchronized to the strains of “Shanty Town” and “I'll Be Seeing You.” Even if Pop and my mother weren't playing music, we wouldn't have been able to have the sound up, since Pop hated Dick Van Dyke more than any other man alive.