The Shadow Year (14 page)

I started out and wound my way around drifts of snow as I went. The illuminated windows of the houses, some showing lit Christmas trees, made me feel better each time I saw one. Then the wind picked up, and the snow started to come faster, driving against me. My ears hurt from the cold, and my hands were freezing in my coat pockets. I could barely make out the tree
tops of the woods, looming darker than the night behind a house I was passing. The snow was fierce, and I had to get in under the trees to get some relief. I walked up the driveway of the darkened house, into the backyard. On my way to the woods, I saw an old wooden garage, the snow drifted against one side. It was open, so I went in to rest for a minute. It smelled of gasoline, but it was a pleasure to stand on the solid concrete floor. Leaning against the wall, I listened to the wind outside and closed my eyes.

I could have stayed there for a long time. I found that my sight had adjusted to the darkness of the place, and I realized that there was a car only a foot away from me. It was a white car. I squinted. A big white car. I thought about how I'd been fooled by the drugstore guy, but then I saw something behind the backseat where the windshield curved down. Resting against one of the fins, I got a better look. It was a kid's baseball hat. When I saw the Cleveland Indian's smile, I turned and looked at the house. A light went on in an upstairs window. I let out a whispered cry and ran. Before I knew it, I was in the woods, running through knee-deep snow.

I don't remember how I got there, but I kind of woke up and found myself banging on the back door of our house. My father opened it and drew me into his arms.

“It's all right,” he said, and I realized how heavily I was breathing. I pulled my hood off and shielded my eyes for a moment against the fluorescent light.

“I came to get you,” I said, almost crying.

“I know,” he said, and pulled me close to his side.

On the floor around us, my mother was sleeping by the entrance to the living room, Mary was sitting up reading an old racing form, and Jim lay with blankets piled over him, staring up at me. He was trembling from fever, but he said, “Nice work.”

I pointed at Mary and said, “Is she better?”

“Yeah,” said my father. “She sweated the shit out.”

Mary looked up from her form. “I sweated it,” she said.

Jim laughed.

My father sent me to the bathroom to get out of my wet clothes, and he went upstairs to my room and got me underwear and socks and slippers and two sets of pajamas. My feet itched terribly as they thawed. After I dressed, I came out to the living room, where my father sat on the couch in front of the Christmas tree. On the coffee table were two small glasses and the squat, dark bottle of Drambuie. I sat down next to my father, and he leaned forward and poured out the golden syrup. He struck a match and touched the flame to the liquid in my glass. A blue flame wavered across the surface. We watched it for a little while, and then he said, “Okay, blow it out.” I did.

“Give that a minute,” he told me, and took a sip of his. He lit a cigarette. “I don't know how you made it. It's rough out there. I was just about to put my jacket on and go back out to look for you.”

“Why'd it take you so long?” I asked.

“Well, I went up to Hammond on my way out. And it was plowed, so I started walking to the stores, and about halfway there I look over on the side of the road and see a hand coming out of the snow. At first I thought I was seeing things. So I walked over to it and kicked some snow from around it, and there's a body.” He took another sip.

“What'd you do?” I asked.

“I dug the body out. Man, this guy was frozen solid. I mean solid, like a statue. Finally I turn the body over—the eyes were shattered like glass. You know who it was?”

“Who?” I said.

He pointed with the two fingers that held his cigarette. “The guy up the street. You know, the old man with the squirrels.”

“Mr. Barzita,” I said, and felt the snow in my face. I thought about him sitting among his trees with the gun on his lap, his
eyes shattered, and I took up the Drambuie. The first taste was sweet molten lava. Barzita turned to confetti.

“He's plucked his last fig,” said my father. “So once I found him, I had to go up to the stores and use the pay phone to call the cops. They told me I had to go back and wait by the body, so I did. I stood there for about two hours, freezing. Finally the cop came, and him and me put the body in the backseat of his car and took it to the hospital. On the way there, we got stuck and had to dig out. We had to help other people who were stuck. It was a big rigmarole. Bullshit on top of bullshit. The cops asked me all kinds of questions. They figured the guy'd gone out to the store early and maybe a plow clipped him in the dark. His neck was broken. After it was over, the cop gave me a ride. I still had to get the aspirin and stuff. On the way, though, more bullshit. Then he got a call and had to drop me up by the library. You know, one thing after another.”

My father got up and turned out all the lights except those on the tree. We sat in silence, staring at the colors. I drank only half the Drambuie before I put the glass down on the table.

“Have you squinted yet this year?” he asked. He had this thing about squinting at the Christmas lights in the dark. We both squinted for a while, and then I leaned my head back and closed my eyes.

“Okay,” he said, “what's nine times nine?”

I made believe I'd fallen asleep, but I heard Mary from the kitchen call quietly, “Eighty-one.”

The next day, as soon as he could get through, the heating guy came and fixed the oil burner. It was good to get out of the kitchen. Jim was feeling all better, except he had a cold. He and I went outside in the frigid wind and sunshine to help my father, who had to get to work that night, dig a path to the street and free the cars. I waited for a chance to talk to Jim about what I'd seen, and my father finally went inside for a while.

“I know I was wrong about Barzita,” I said, “but now I know where the man with the white car lives.”

“Where?”

I told him about the house with the garage that bordered the woods.

“What if he killed Barzita and then dumped the body in the road during the blizzard?” Jim said.

“I didn't think of that,” I told him. “I figured I was just wrong.”

“If you didn't think of it, it's probably right,” he said. “We'll go through the woods, and you can show me the guy's house, but we have to wait till the snow's gone. Otherwise he can track our footprints back home.”

“I left footprints,” I said.

“Let's hope the storm covered them.”

On the days left of our Christmas vacation, we went sleigh riding, had a massive snowball fight with armies of kids, and Jim and I walked to the bay one afternoon because Larry March told us his father said it was frozen solid. Jim said March's old man's head was frozen solid, but we walked out onto the bay, powdered snow swirling around us in the sunlight. There were eruptions of ice that stood a foot or so above the surface. Sometimes the ice was rumpled, sometimes patches were clear and smooth and you could look down into the murk below. If it weren't for me being scared of falling through, Jim would have gone all the way to Captree Island. When I told him I was going back to shore, he turned to me and said, “I know why Mary won't help us.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Pop and her aren't working the figures for the races. He told me the other day, he's waiting for the running of the pigs down at Hialeah. There's no races for him to bet on right now. I'll bet she thinks she's on vacation like Pop.”

That night, standing before Botch Town, we asked Mary if Jim's theory was right. She didn't say anything but stepped forward to the board and scrutinized it. We stood there for a while until Jim looked at me and shook his head. He reached around Mary, picked up the prowler figure, and tried to hand it to her. She pushed his arm away.

“No,” she said, and looked around the board. She found the white car parked up the block by Mr. Barzita's house and picked it up. When she put it down, it landed right in front of our house.

“When?” Jim said.

“Now,” said Mary.

“Now?” I asked.

“Right now,” said Mary.

Jim had already taken off up the stairs, and I was close behind him. We went to the front window and looked out into the
night. The snow was everywhere, and the moon was full. Jim said, “Oh, shit,” and a second later I saw the headlights. The white car crept slowly by. After the taillights disappeared from view, Jim stepped back and sat on the couch.

“I told you,” I said.

When we went back down into the cellar to tell Mary she was right, she'd already gone over to her own side of the steps. We heard her over there as Mickey. Then Mrs. Harkmar was telling him he had all the right answers. Jim turned his attention to the board. “The prowler is prowling,” he said.

“Who?” I asked.

“Hey, look,” said Jim. “She changed that.” He was pointing to the figure of Charlie Edison, now in our backyard.

“What's that supposed to mean?” I said, and could tell he'd caught the inch of fear in my voice.

“He's coming up the drainpipe for you,” he said.

I laughed, but later, after the lights were out and I was in bed and Charlie was behind my open closet door, I wasn't laughing. That night Charlie spoke through the sound of the antenna singing. Three times I heard his voice come out of the noise and call for his mother. Each time I was just about asleep when I heard it.

Back in school, at the start of gym class on Monday, this big weird kid, Hodges Stamper, came up behind me, put his arm around my throat, and choked me. Coach Crenshaw stood there scratching his balls, watching the whole thing. Hodges applied so much pressure that I couldn't breathe. Using the heel of my sneaker, I kicked him in the shin with everything I had, and he grunted and let go. There was spittle at the corners of his mouth, and he was smiling. I slunk away and hid next to the bleachers.

Crenshaw eventually blew his whistle and told us he had invented a new sport for the New Year. “Push Off the Mats,” he called it. The middle of the gym floor was covered with wrestling mats. He had us line up and asked Bobby Harweed and Larry March to be captains and to pick two teams. I was chosen third to last; my stock had risen.

“Each team lines up on one side of the mat, facing the other,” said Crenshaw. “I blow the whistle, and then you all crawl toward each other. If you stand up, you're out. The idea is to drag your opponent to the edge of the mat and make some part of their body touch the wooden floor. As soon as they touch, they're out. Then you can go help your teammates drag the rest of their guys off.”

He told us to line up and pointed to the edge each team should take. Then he yelled, “Crawling position!” and we got down on all fours. He put his whistle to his mouth, waited ten seconds, and blew. We charged forward. While I was crawling, I was frantically looking for one of the two kids weaker than me. I saw one, soft and white as marshmallow, kneeling as if he were in a trance, and I veered toward him.

Before I got there, though, somebody grabbed me from the side. I looked around, and it was Hinkley. He took my leg and pulled me. I went down on my stomach and tried to dig my fingers into the mat. It didn't work. I was sliding along. When he was just about to force my foot down onto the wood, I flipped over on my back and with my free leg kicked him out onto the floor. I sat up in time to catch the look of surprise on his face. Crenshaw blew the whistle and made the “you're out” sign at him.

I turned back to the battle in the center of the mat. Our team had cleared off all their guys except Stamper, who knelt like a mound in the middle of everything, kids swarming all over him. I joined in. He pushed and grunted and spat, but we were too many for him. He finally went over, and we dragged him toward the side like we were moving Gulliver. I looked up and saw Crenshaw smiling at the action. We got Stamper so that his head was out over the wood. He wouldn't let us push his head back, though, so five guys, all at once, on the third Mississippi, pushed down, and it finally hit the floor with a crack. I saw Stamper twice later that afternoon—once when I went to the bathroom and once to get a drink from the water fountain. Both times he was leaning against a wall in the hallway, and both times he asked me if it was lunch yet.

In math, Krapp whipped us with long division, and in the middle of one of his explanations, out the window, across the
field, on the baseball diamond, Mr. Rogers appeared as if from thin air, talking, with his finger pointing up. Krapp stared like he was seeing a ghost. The ex-librarian walked the bases through half-melted clumps of snow. As he rounded second, he stopped for a moment to clap. At third he signaled “safe” and turned to view the cheering crowd. Home base was covered by a small ice dune. Rogers climbed it halfway, with a strong wind in his face. Then a police car showed up on the field, and like we were watching a movie, we all got up and went to the window. Krapp said nothing. Two officers got out of the black-and-white car with the blinking cherry on top, and each took one of Mr. Rogers's arms. He kept talking as they loaded him into the backseat of the cruiser. The engine started, and they rolled away toward Sewer Pipe Hill.

Krapp told us to sit down. He closed the math book and checked the clock. It was fifteen minutes until the end of the school day. He went behind his desk and grabbed his chair, lifted it and slowly carried it out in front of the class. Placing it down, he took a seat facing us.

“From now until the bell rings, I will answer any question you have. You can ask me anything except one thing,” he said. “You can't ask me why the sky is blue.”

You could have heard a pin drop. I felt all of us kids tense like one clenched muscle. No one wanted their Krapp too nice. He looked out over our heads at some spot on the back wall. I stared so hard at the clock that I could see the minute hand move. Almost a whole quarter hour of complete silence. At four minutes to, I thought of a question. In my mind's eye, I saw myself raising my hand and saying, “Where's Charlie Edison?”—but I never did. Finally Hodges Stamper raised his hand and asked, “Is it almost lunch yet?”

“You've had lunch,” said Krapp, and then the bell rang.

Jim made me tell him about it three times. He called it “The
Soft Side of Krapp,” but I told him about how Krapp sat staring at us, his arms crossed against his chest. “Like he had all the answers,” I said. “Kind of like a swami.”

“He'll be out on the baseball diamond in no time,” said Jim.