The Shadow Year (19 page)

We knew that if my mother was talking while she was drinking, she'd drink faster. At dinner Jim had a thousand questions about Bermuda, and before she could start to clean up the plates, I started talking to her about Sherlock Holmes. I think Mary knew what we were up to, and she went to her room. After a while my mother had drunk so much she just started talking on her own. She smoked like mad and told us about a place called Far Rockaway and when she and my father lived in Kentucky near Fort Knox. She told us about a library there in a mansion run by two old women, blind twins, who knew where every book was and how sometimes the local doctor took a pig instead of money for curing someone.

When she moved to the living-room couch, we went with her. Jim and I nodded every now and then to let her know we were listening. If we saw her smile when she told us something, we laughed. Eventually her eyes closed, her cigarette burned away in the ashtray, the half-filled wineglass tilted toward the floor. Words kept coming out, but more and more slowly making less and less sense. The last thing she said was “You're bad at bad,” and then she was out cold. Jim grabbed the glass before it spilled, and I stubbed out the cigarette. Together we took her shoulders and gently moved her back so her head rested on the pillow. Jim sent me to get a blanket and the big red book. We
set her up with the book open on her chest and then went next door to tell Nan we were going to bed.

Upstairs in my room, I dressed and, as Jim had instructed, pulled the covers up over my pillow to make it look like I was asleep. Every stair step creaked under our sneakers on the way down. We crept into the kitchen, and Jim turned out the light there and in the dining room. Slowly, so as to not make a sound, Jim opened the back door. It squealed as it swung wide enough for us to pass through. We slipped out into the yard without a hitch. It was nine-thirty, and we had till midnight, when my father got home from work.

We walked around the corner of the house and crossed the lawn to the street. There was a breeze that smelled like the ocean. Peter Horton lived all the way up near Hammond, and we turned in that direction. Most of the houses we passed were darkened, and some had only a light on in an upstairs bedroom window. We stayed out from under the glow of the streetlamps, crossing back and forth, trying not to scrape our feet on the gravel.

Jim wore the camera around his neck on a thin strap, and it bounced off his coat with every step. Across from Mr. Barzita's house, he led me up the side street toward Cuthbert Road. It was a clear night, and away from the streetlamps you could see all the stars. Jim gave me the sign to be extra quiet. We went up on a lawn on the right side of the street and headed around that house to the backyard. We passed right beneath a lit window. My heart started pounding, and my ears pricked up on their own like a dog's. Behind the place it was completely dark. We had to weave around lawn furniture and croquet wickets. Luckily, the back fence was a split-rail. Jim went over the top, and I slid through the middle space into the Hortons' backyard.

Their place was older than the other houses on the block, and bigger—three stories of busted and cracked stucco and a
porch out front with columns. Their yard was bigger, too, more than double the size of ours. They had no lawn, but there was a thicket of tall pines surrounding the house, front and back. The fallen needles made for quiet walking.

We crept around the side of the house and crawled in under the branches of a big pine. From there, if we crouched, we could see the road and the house. The lights were out inside, and I thought of all the tons of Hortons, sleeping. They were big, lethargic people, every one with moon eyes and slow wit. They dressed like people in old brown photographs. Four boys and three girls. The father had something that looked like a ball sack coming off his chin. My mother told me it was called a goiter. He wore the same white T-shirt every day, his stomach sticking out, and the mother had dimples on her elbows, dresses like worn nightgowns. They seemed to have come off a farm somewhere, as if a twister had lifted the place and dropped it and them onto Willow Avenue.

The street was empty in front of their house. Two cars went by, and I tensed with each one. That's when it struck me that Jim's plan was crazy. I wondered how he was going to get a photo of Mr. White. Did he expect to catch a shot of those pasty hands around Peter's throat?

“Hey,” I said to him. “This is crazy.”

“I know,” he said. “What if I get a good picture, though?” he whispered.

I shook my head.

“Instant evidence,” he said.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Ten at the latest.”

Standing still there in the dark beneath the tree made me cold, and I started to shiver. Jim crouched, watching the street, his camera in both hands at the ready. Another car passed. I think it was Mr. Farley. A long time went by. I yawned and took hold of a branch. Closing my eyes, I thought about how much
it felt like we were in Botch Town instead of somewhere in real life. For a moment I was tiny and made of clay. Then Jim tapped my leg.

When I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw, through the opening in three crisscrossing branches, was the white car pulling up to the curb just beyond the halo of a streetlight. It glided in without a sound. Mr. White rolled down his window and lit his pipe. We could see that he had his hat on and wore his overcoat. Before he even tossed his match out, I could smell the smoke. He sat there, smoking and looking at the house through the pines.

Jim and I were frozen in place, and the smoke came stronger and stronger, until my eyes started to water. We shouldn't have smelled it so much, and I started to think it was finding us for him. I wanted to run, and I touched Jim's shoulder to tell him we had to leave. He held his hand up and pointed. Mr. White was tapping out his pipe against the side of the car. He rolled up the window.

When I saw the window go up, I breathed a sigh of relief, but then the car door opened and he stepped out. He put his hands in his overcoat pockets and headed straight for us. There was no way he could see us, and I thought he'd turn and go toward the house, but he didn't. He came on, taking long strides straight toward our tree. I turned to run, and just as I did, I saw the flash go off. The next thing I knew, I was leaping through the middle space in the split-rail fence. Jim just jumped right over it without touching, the camera flying out behind him on its string. I didn't know if Mr. White was right behind me, but I wasn't going to turn around to find out.

We made it to the front lawn of the house whose yard we'd passed through earlier and then stopped when Jim put his hand on my shoulder. We were both winded, but it was clear that Mr. White wasn't coming through the backyard.

“He'll come in the car,” said Jim.

Just as he spoke, the metal gate in the fence of the yard across the street opened with a squeal. We looked up. I knew right away it wasn't Mr. White. The figure stepped past the deeper shadow of the house. It was a teenage kid in a black leather jacket and a white T-shirt. He waved for us to come to him. I was unsure, but he waved more frantically, and finally Jim took off toward him. I didn't want to be left behind, so I went, too.

The guy leaned over and whispered, “Stay quiet and follow me.”

We went through the gate, and as soon as we did, headlights appeared, turning off Hammond and onto Cuthbert. I had to really move to keep up with Jim and the other guy. He led us through the backyards, and it didn't take long to see he knew where he was going. Every place where two fences didn't quite meet and you could squeeze through, every place where there was a lawn chair or a tree branch to help you over a fence, every path among the trees and bushes, he knew without thinking. We moved like Barzita's squirrels from one end of Cuthbert to the other.

We came out of the backyards where Myrtle intersected Cuthbert and hid behind a lawn swing.

“We'll wait here,” said the guy.

I noticed that his hair was combed forward in a wave and that he wore white Converse. A thin silver chain with a crucifix on the end looped down across his chest. A moment later the long car rolled slowly by. We could see Mr. White in the driver's seat, his head swiveling left to right and back again as he looked from lawn to lawn. The car stopped in front of one house for a while and then started up again and disappeared down the street. Once he was gone, we ran at top speed across the asphalt of Myrtle and Cuthbert, into the backyards that bordered the backyards of Willow Avenue. We moved through them like fish in water.

The guy took us to the Curdmeyers' grape arbor. Once we were under the trellises, he stopped. “You're just across the street,” he said. “Watch for headlights.”

“Do you know the man with the white car?” Jim whispered to him.

He smiled on one side of his mouth. “Sure,” he said. “I've seen everything.”

We thanked him for saving us and turned to head out across the Curdmeyers' yard toward the front. “Come out again some night,” he said, “and I'll show you guys around.” Jim and I looked back, but he was gone.

Sneaking into the house was a delicate process of slowly opening doors and cautious stepping. The warmth and total silence made it seem as if the house itself was sleeping. As we passed through the kitchen, I saw that the time was eleven-thirty. My mother was exactly where we'd placed her on the couch. We crept past her, and just before we reached the stairs, she said something with the word “palatial” in it. Jim looked back and smiled at me. More quietly than Mr. White, we made it to the landing outside our bedrooms. I went into my room, and Jim followed me. He stood at the entrance and whispered into the dark, “Do you know who that was?”

“Who?” I asked, dropping my coat on the chair.

“Ray Halloway.”

Ever since the day of the circus, my mother was in a strange mood. I'd seen it happen before. Her anger was somehow turning into energy. I could almost hear it percolating in her head. After dinner she no longer sat smoking and staring. Now she was near frantic, her nights filled with projects. She painted, she wrote, she created a TV commercial for a contest put on by Hebrew National salami. She told us all about it and sang the song she wrote, set to the tune of “Hava Nagila.” One of the lines was “Even the all-knowing swami eats Hebrew National salami.” At the end, she said, there should be balloons and confetti and cannons shooting salamis into the air. We told her it was great. She sent it off in the mail with high hopes, and the next night she started on a painting of Mount Kilimanjaro.

My father didn't change. Every morning at five o'clock, his alarm would ring. He'd sit up in his underwear on the edge of the bed, hunched over, breathing heavily and grunting every few seconds. He'd groan and then lurch to his feet. He'd dress in his work clothes from the day before. He'd comb his hair with water, and by five-twenty he'd be sitting in the kitchen, sleeves rolled up, with a cup of instant coffee, smoking. His gaze wouldn't stray from the clock over the back door. At five-thirty he'd stand and place his cup on the counter.

Next door, Pop had his own contest going. Every day after figuring the horses, he'd take out a bag of candy and lay it on the table. The contest was to make up a new name for the candy. He gave pieces of it to all of us—hard caramels with chunks of nuts in them. I could feel the brown spackle sucking out my teeth. In his boxer shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, he sat chewing and jotting names along the edge of an old newspaper.

“Nuttos.”

“Crackos.”

“Chewos.”

Nan started every morning by squeezing half a lemon into a glass of boiling water. She drank it steaming hot, all at once, moving her lips and gulping till it was gone. The hot water was followed by a bowl of cold prunes in their own juices. “Why don't you just use dynamite?” Pop said. After breakfast she walked a hundred times from one end of the apartment to the other in her robe and hairnet.

Mary sat in the corner of the fence, back behind the forsythias, smoking a cigarette. The day was overcast and breezy. I saw her from the kitchen window, and she was talking to herself.

Jim and I took a visit to Botch Town. After turning on the sun, Jim lifted the figure of Ray that had long lain on its side from behind the Halloway house. He then picked up the figure of the prowler. Holding them out to me, he said, “I think these are the same guy.”

I nodded.

“Maybe when his parents moved, he ran away and came back here,” said Jim. He put the figure of Ray on the board and put the prowler carefully into the Hall of Fame so his pin arms wouldn't damage the others already resting there peacefully.

“Where's he living?” I asked.

“I bet in his old house. It's still empty. That's why Mary left him behind it.”

“Wouldn't somebody try to find him?”

“Maybe not, because he's eighteen,” said Jim.

“But what's he doing here?”

“We'll ask him all that.”

“Not for a while,” I said. “I don't want to get caught.”

“Ray knows what Mr. White is doing,” said Jim. “He can help us save Peter Horton. Besides, he's cool, isn't he?”

“He's great at running,” I said.

“I wonder if he eats out of the garbage,” said Jim.

I pictured Ray in the moonlight, lifting a trash-can lid and finding a pink hatbox filled with dirt.

Later Jim finished off the film in his camera by taking shots of everyone. He got one of Nan in her bathrobe and hairnet shaking her fist at him and smiling. He caught Pop smoking a Lucky Strike, reading the horse paper, his glasses perched at the end of his nose. Mary held her badge out, my mother stirred a big pot of the orange stuff, my father stared, and Jim snapped away. George hunkered down at the end of his leash to take a crap in the backyard, and Jim raised the camera. The dog had his back to us, but I called, “George. Hey, George. Georgie.”

Jim aimed, saying, “George, say cheese. Say cheese.” George looked back over his shoulder at us and growled, his bottom teeth bared. Jim snapped it, and then he had Mary take one of him and me, standing side by side in front of the shed.