The Shadow Year (9 page)

The days sank deeper into autumn, rotten to their cores with twilight. The bright warmth of the sun only lasted about as long as we were in school, and then once we were home, an hour later, the world was briefly submerged in a rich honey glow, gilding everything from the barren branches of willows to the old wreck of a Pontiac parked alongside the Hortons' garage. In minutes the tide turned, the sun suddenly a distant star, and in rolled a dim gray wave of neither here nor there that seemed to last a week each day.

The wind of this in-between time always made me want to curl up inside a memory and sleep with eyes open. Dead leaves rolled across lawns, scraped along the street, quietly tapped the windows. Jack-o'-lanterns with luminous triangle eyes and jagged smiles turned up on front steps and in windows. Rattle-dry cornstalks bore half-eaten ears of brown and blue kernels like teeth gone bad, as if they had eaten themselves. Scarecrows hung from lawn lampposts or stoop railings, listing forward, disjointed and drunk, dressed in the rumpled plaid shirts of long-gone grandfathers and jeans belted with a length of rope. In the true dark, as I walked George after dinner, these shadow figures often startled me when their stitched and painted faces took on the features of Charlie Edison or Teddy Dunden.

Halloween was close, our favorite holiday because it carried
none of the pain-in-the-ass holiness of Christmas and still there was free candy. The excitement of it crowded all problems to the side. The prowler, Charlie, schoolwork—everything was overwhelmed by hours of decision as to what we would be for that one night, something or someone who wasn't us, but who we wished to be, which I supposed ended up being us in some way. I could already taste the candy corn and feel my teeth aching. My father had given me a dollar, and with it I'd bought a molded plastic skeleton mask that smelled like fresh BO and made my cheeks sweat.

At the time the only thought I had about that leering bone face was that it was cool as hell, but maybe, in the back of my mind, I was thinking of all those eyes out there trying to look into me, and it was a good disguise because it let them think they were seeing deep under my skin even though it was only an illusion. I showed the mask to Jim, and he told me, “This is the last year you can wear a costume. You're getting too old. Next year you'll have to go as a bum.” All the older kids went around trick-or-treating as bums—a little charcoal on the face and some ripped-up old clothes.

Mary decided she would be the jockey Willie Shoemaker. She modeled her outfit for Jim and me one night. It consisted of baggy pants tucked into a pair of white go-go boots, a baseball cap, a patchwork shirt, and a piece of thin curtain rod for a jockey's whip. She walked past us once and then looked over her shoulder. In the high nasal voice of a TV horse-racing announcer, she said, “And they're off….” We clapped for her, but the second she turned away again, Jim raised his eyebrows and whispered, “And it's Cabbage by a head.”

Only two days before the blessed event, Krapp threw a wet blanket on my daydreams of roaming the neighborhood by moonlight, gathering, door-to-door, a Santa sack of candy. He turned the joyous sparks of my imagination to smoke by assigning a major report that was to be handed in the day after
Halloween. Each of us in the class was given a different country, and we had to write a five-page report about it. Krapp presented me with Greece, as if he were dropping a steaming turd into my open Halloween sack.

I should have gotten started that afternoon once school let out, but instead I just sat in my room staring out the window. When Jim got home from wrestling, he came into my room and found me still sitting there like a zombie. I told him about the report.

“You're going to be doing it on Halloween if you don't get started,” he said. “Here's what you do: Tomorrow, right after school, ride down to the library. Get the G volume of the encyclopedia, open it to Greece, and just copy what they have there. Write big, but not too big or he'll be onto you. If it doesn't look like there's enough to fill five pages, add words to the sentences. If the sentence says, ‘The population of Greece is one million,' instead write something like, ‘There are approximately one million Greeks in Greece. As you can see, there are many, many Grecians.' You get it? Use long words like ‘approximately' and say stuff more than once in different ways.”

“Krapp warned us about plagiarism, though,” I said.

Jim made a face. “What's he gonna do, go read the encyclopedia for every paper?”

The next afternoon I was in the public library copying from the G volume. With the exception of the fact that I learned that Greeks ate goat cheese, none of the information in the book got into my head, as I had become merely a writing machine, scribbling down one word after the next. The further I got into the report, the harder it was to concentrate. My mind wandered for long stretches at a time, and I stared at the design of the weave in my balled-up sweater that lay on the table in front of me. Then I'd look over at the window and see that the twilight was giving way to night. I was determined to finish even if I got yelled at for being late for dinner. When I hit the fourth page, I
could tell that the information in the encyclopedia was running out, and so I started adding filler the way Jim described. The last page and a half of my report was based on about five sentences from the encyclopedia. I didn't know how late it was when I finished, but I was so relieved I began to sweat. I rolled up my five handwritten pages and shoved them in my back pocket. Closing the big green tome, I went to reshelve it. As I was coming out of the stacks, I suddenly remembered my sweater and looked over at the table where I'd been working. Sitting there in my chair was the man in the white trench coat. He had my sweater in his hands, and he appeared to be sniffing it. My heart instantly began pounding. I was stunned for a second, but as soon as I came to, I ducked out of the aisle and behind the row of shelves to my right.

I ran down to the center aisle and made for the back of the stacks. I was pretty sure that when he came looking for me, he would head up the center aisle so that he could look down each row. Once I reached the back wall, I moved along it to the side of the building that held the front door. Checking my pocket, I touched the rolled-up report. I didn't care about leaving the sweater behind. I waited, while in my mind I pictured him walking slowly toward me, peering down each row. My breathing was shallow, and I didn't know if I would have the power to scream if he somehow cornered me. Then I saw the sleeve of his trench coat, the sneaker of his left foot, before he came fully into view, and I bolted.

I was down the side aisle and out the front door in a flash. I knew that whereas a kid might run in a library, an adult probably wouldn't, which might give me a few extra seconds. Outside, I sprinted around to the side of the building where my bike was chained up. Whatever time I had saved was spent fumbling with the lock. Just when I had the bike free and got my ass on the seat, I saw him coming around the side of the building. My
only route to Hammond was now cut off. Instead of trying to ride past him, I turned and headed back behind the library, into the woods that led to the railroad tracks.

I carried my bike over the tracks in the dark, listening to the deadly hum of electricity coursing through the third rail and watching both ways for the light of a train in the distance. Although the wind was cold, I was sweating, trying not to lose my balance on the dew-covered wooden ties. All the time I cautiously navigated, grim scenes from
The Long Way Home from School
played in my memory. At any second I expected to feel a bony hand on my shoulder.

On the other side of the tracks, there was another narrow strip of woods, and I searched along it, walking my bike, until I found a path. I wasn't actually sure what street it would lead me to, since I had never gone this way before. Jim and I had occasionally crossed back and forth over the tracks, but always in daylight and always over on the other side of town behind the woods that started at the school yard. This was uncharted territory for me.

I walked clear of the trees onto a road that didn't seem to have any houses. My mind was a jumble, and I was on the verge of tears, but I controlled myself by trying to think through where I was in relation to the library and home. I figured I was west of Hammond and if I just followed the street I was on, it would finally meet up with the main road. Getting on my bike, I started off.

No sooner had I pedaled twenty feet than I saw, way up ahead, the lights of a car that had just turned onto the street, moving slowly. A moment later I noticed another car parked on the right-hand side of the road only a few feet ahead of me. I would have taken to the woods, but I couldn't see a path, and it was too dark to try to find one. I got off my bike, gave it a good shove, and watched it wheel into the tall grass and bushes, where
it fell over, pretty well concealed from sight. I crouched low and scrambled to hide against the side of the parked car, an old station wagon with wood paneling.

The headlights of the approaching car came slowly closer. By the time it passed the parked car I was hiding behind, I was really hunkered down, my hands covering my head air-raid style, my right leg off the curb and under the car. The passing vehicle then picked up speed, almost disappearing around the bend at the opposite end of the road before I could get a look at it. Peeking out, I caught a glimpse of the fins of the old white car. I wasn't sure whether to sit tight in case the stranger reached a dead end and came back or to get on my bike and make a run for it.

I felt the car I was next to begin to gently rock. From inside there came a muffled moan. I lifted my head up carefully and peered in the window. Only then did I notice that all the windows were fogging over. The car's interior was dark, but the dashboard was glowing. Through one unfogged patch of glass, I could just make out something on the front seat. Lying there was Mrs. Hayes, her eyes closed, her blouse open, one big, pale breast visible in the shadows and one bare leg wrapped around the back of a small man. After seeing his grease-slicked hair and flapping ears, I didn't have to get a look at his face to know that it was Mr. Conrad.

I ran over to where my bike had fallen in the weeds and lifted it. In an instant I was on it and pedaling like a maniac up the street.

As it turned out, I found Hammond and made it back to the house safely, never seeing the white car along my way. When I pulled up in the front yard, I knew I was late and would get yelled at, perhaps sent to my room. Luckily, through all the turmoil, my report on Greece was still in my back pocket, and my hope was that this document could be used as proof that I hadn't just been goofing off.

I opened the door and stepped into the warmth of the living room. The house was unusually quiet, and I was inside no more than a few seconds when I could feel that something wasn't normal. The light in the dining room, where my mother usually sat drinking in the evenings, was off. The kitchen was also dark. I walked over and knocked on Nan's door. She opened it, and the aroma of fried pork chops wafted out around us. Her hairnet was in place, and she wore her yellow quilted bathrobe.

“Your mother's gone to bed already,” she said.

I knew what she meant by this and pictured the empty bottle in the kitchen garbage.

“She told me to give you a kiss, though,” she said. She came close and gave me one of those air-escaping-from-the-wet-mouthpiece-of-a-balloon kisses. “Jim told me you were at the library doing your homework. I left food for you in the oven. Mary's in with us.”

And that was it. She went back into her apartment and closed the door. Like my father, I was left to get my own dinner, alone. It was all too quiet, too stark. I sat in the dining room by myself and ate. Nan wasn't a much better cook than my mother. Every dinner she made had some form of cabbage in it. Only George happened by while I sat there. I cut him a piece of meat, and he looked up at me as if wondering why I hadn't taken him out yet.

When I'd finished eating and put my plate into the kitchen sink, Jim came down from upstairs.

“Did you get your paper finished?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Let me see it,” he said, and held out his hand.

I pulled it out of my back pocket and handed the rolled-up pages to him.

“You shouldn't have bent it all up. What was your country again?” he said, sitting down at the dining-room table in my mother's chair.

“Greece.”

He read through it really quickly, obviously skipping half the words. When he got to the end, he said, “This last page is one hundred percent double-talk. Nice work.”

“The Greece part in the encyclopedia ran out,” I said.

“You stretched it like Mrs. Harrington's underwear,” he said. “There's only one thing left to do. You gotta spice it up a little for the big grade.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Let's see,” he said, and scanned the pages again. “It says the chief exports are cheese, tobacco, olives, and cotton. I saw a kid do this thing once for a paper, and the teacher loved it. He taped samples of the exports onto a sheet of paper. We've got all this stuff. Get me a blank sheet of paper and the tape.”

Jim went to the refrigerator and took out a slice of cheese and the bottle of olives. I fetched the paper and tape for him, and then he told me to get a copy of a magazine and start looking for a picture of Greece to use as the cover of the report. Fifteen minutes later, as I sat paging through an old issue of
Life,
he showed me the sheet of paper he had been working on.

“Feast your eyes,” he said. The page had the word “EXPORTS” written across the top in block letters. Below that a square of American cheese, half an olive (with pimiento), a crumpled old cigarette butt from the dining-room ashtray, and a Q-tip head, each affixed with three pieces of tape. The name of each item was printed beneath it.