Shadow Season (4 page)

“How are you otherwise?” she asks.

“Fine.”

“And how are the nightmares?”

It’s what she calls his memory surges that occur when he smells blood. She’s a scientist at heart, practical in the extreme when it comes to others. She’s done the research, spent hours online looking up info and reading it to him in his office, trying to make him see reason. She thinks he’s hallucinating or having waking dreams.

Judith’s got texts that practically verify it. She constantly snaps her finger against the pages while rereading selected paragraphs aloud. She walks on thin ice. Considering the fact that her kid plays online games with the Senegalians and her husband prefers watching empty warehouses to her company, he figures she
shouldn’t feel quite so fucking comfortable hanging around all night long, reading Finn printouts about how crazy he’s supposed to be.

He tightens his grip on his cane and says, “I’m handling it.”

FINN MOVES DOWN THE ENORMOUS STAIRWAY
forgoing the banister, brushing his index and middle fingers against the wall. He’s hardwired into the history of the school and can feel the layers of dust and stain beneath his hand, all the trapped ghosts still twitching there.

His fingertips tingle with the touch of smooth ancient oak. It’s like reaching back a century. Step by step he descends, and even after all these years he can’t shake the sensation that he’s moving down into the earth itself. Into his own grave.

At the bottom he stands on the unevenly textured slate floor. He sometimes stumbles here, but everyone does. Girls are always taking headers and banging their knees, backpacks flying. He must always keep aware of subtle shifts and deviations. In the ground, in direction, in people.

Duchess has left a tray of baked cookies out on a table in the lobby. He smells that they’re still fresh. Chocolate chips with macadamia nuts. His mouth waters.

He sees Duchess stirring pots with a big wooden spoon or a ladle. This is his subconscious image of what a cook is, and it’s a revelation to learn how insipid his
deep-rooted notions can be. Duchess is the housemother and head of the kitchen staff. She lives in an apartment off the west wing of the student suites, across the hall from Roz. She’s a sixty-year-old black woman raised in the South Bronx who uses equal amounts of street wit, intimidation, and incredible cuisine to keep everybody in line. She’s big, wide, has some serious hips, and is always bumping into him and excusing herself. It’s sort of sexy but everything is sort of sexy to him now. A brush of fingers against his wrist can get him hard.

Her voice comes down from above him, which means she’s over six feet tall, at least in her shoes. Her laughter resonates from deep in her belly and slams like a sonic boom. It sometimes rocks him back a step. When she and Roz go on their little shopping excursions, he feels twice as lonely.

Hey now, check this out.

Someone is sneaking up behind him.

It’s a joke. It’s a gigglefest for the girls. It’s a game meant to drive him into action.

This is another parlor trick. People think they’re being silent as ninjas because they can’t hear anything above their own breathing and heartbeats. He doesn’t mind playing the game anymore. He has little else to do besides put on a show anyway.

He squares his shoulders and whips the cane around to snap lightly against flesh.

“Ow!”

Now comes the laughter, a pair of insolent titters. Neither is Vi’s.

“Hey, Mr. Finn, party in the dorm tonight!” It’s Sally. “Starts at dark and goes until dawn!”

“Why should tonight be any different?” he asks.

“You stopping by?” It’s Suzy. “You gonna rock out with us? It’s going to be a blast, you know it will. You mind picking up a keg for us?”

They’re both named Smyth even though they’re unrelated. They’re two of the more serious JDs of the school, always getting caught with pot or sneaking out to ride the back hills with boys from town. In the city it would be considered normal, but out here in the sticks he worries. It’s just so fucking boring in the valley. Of course they’re going to get into trouble. He tries to think of them as independent and willful, but Judith tells him there’s been at least one abortion apiece and a couple of brushes with cocaine. A couple of shoplifting raps, one liquor store smash-and-grab where they hooked a couple bottles of Wild Turkey. He’s put kids like these in rehab. He’s put kids like these in jail.

“We can give you the cash,” Sally says. “Please, oh please, Mr. Finn.” She throws in just enough of an exaggerated whine for him to realize they’re not serious, this time. “Come on, it’ll be a gas. You can tell us what it was like when you were young, drinking mead down by the Nile, watching baby Moses float by in his wicker basket.”

“Those were good times,” Finn tells her. “Waving to the pharaoh’s barge. Watching the pyramids go up. All the slave girls waving the palm fronds. Still, why don’t you just spike the punch like all the other delinquents do?”

“Mr. Finn’s no square, he knows our action.”

“He’s hep to the world. He doesn’t see but he sees.”

“That’s why we like you, Mr. Finn.”

“Yeah, you hear everything but you don’t judge and you never rat.”

“Not so far as you know anyway,” Finn says.

He wonders when the fifties lingo started to come back into style. A few of the girls use it now and it keeps throwing him off, like he’s listening to a Hot Rod drive-in flick.

“We know all right,” Sally contends, and puts an arm halfway around him, tapping the small of his back gently.

“We trust you.”

They huddle closely together and too near to his face. They have no true concept of personal space. They force him into almost nestling with them. Finn wears expensive black shades, more because they remind him of his father than anything else. When the girls speak to him, he can feel their breath fogging his lenses.

“Do me a favor, you two,” he says.

“You ask and we answer the call. Don’t we always answer the call?”

“You do.”

“Then ask.”

“Don’t break curfew for at least a few days until after this storm passes and we dig ourselves out, okay? It’s supposed to be a bad one.”

“Us, break curfew?” Suzy tries to sound offended. “You can’t be serious, dad, we’re not those kind of janes.”

“Like you said, I know your action.”

“Yes, you do.”

“So promise me.”

Sally, about two inches from his chin, “Only for you, Mr. Finn. Righteous?”

“Sure.”

“You want to walk with us?”

He shakes his head. “I’m heading home for a while. I’ll meet you for dinner.”

“Right on.”

They move gracefully but without lifting their feet high enough. Their heels scuff the slate as they sort of skip-shuffle to the front doors of the building, called the Main House. He assumes they’re holding hands. His brain is fiery. No one ever told him what kind of details he’d hunger for.

When he sees Sally Smyth, he sees a girl he once stood beside at the concession stand at Jones Beach when he was fifteen. It was a murderous summer, and he’d just gained another ten pounds of muscle, filling out pretty good by then, and the girl was a touch sunburned already, wearing a bikini with a T-shirt wrapped around her hips, copper hair in a ponytail, sunscreen a little too thick on her forehead and chin, but cute as hell. She was buying a soft-ice-cream cone covered with colorful sprinkles. The wafer cone had already softened and was dripping vanilla. She turned too quickly and accidentally tapped him with the tip of the vanilla swirl directly in the center of his chest. She smiled and apologized. He grinned and began to flirt, and within seconds a loudmouthed guy arrayed in tattoos rushed up and threatened to kick Finn’s ass. The beau glowered at Finn, flexing wildly and making his tribal ink ripple and flutter. As the girl drew her boyfriend off, Finn stood there
with his chest sticky, staring after her, surrounded by indifferent people shouldering past.

When he sees Suzy Smyth, he sees the same girl.

It’s Vi he has to worry about.

Violet Treato is the princess of body brushes. She’s just shy of eighteen. She has a refined sense of flirtation and seems to genuinely want him. He’s never had the best impulse control, and in the dark she’s almost impossible to resist.

A week into the fall semester he returned to his cottage and found her drinking his Glenfiddich. She could hold her liquor but was still pretty far gone. She brought her lips to his and tore open her own blouse, pressed her moderate tits to his chest and mumbled about his cock. She threw his cane aside and urged his hands between her legs. She’d already dispensed with the panties. Her voice coursed through him. She was wet and shaved. The freshness of her skin and the tremendous warmth of her cunt nearly threw him over the edge.

He stopped himself and stopped her. He spoke in muted tones for over an hour and gave her a lot of coffee. When he asked if she understood his position she said, “Yes, of course, Finn, but you have to understand mine too. I’m not a little girl. I care for you. I want you. I won’t write our names inside hearts all over my notebooks. I won’t even bother you. I’ll prove myself to you though. You can’t force me to quit trying that. We’re going to be together. I believe that, and I believe in you.”

It was the kind of speech you wait your whole life to hear, and it scared the piss out of him. Five minutes after Vi left Judith walked into his cottage without knocking.
She saw the bottle of Glenfiddich out, the cups of coffee, maybe a blouse button on the floor. Finn later found two on the throw rug.

She’d clocked Vi going out. He’d forgotten that bored, unhappy people were always inspecting everything. He had to start locking his door.

Finn puts on his coat and steps outside. The snow is coming down roughly now, still hard crystal. He hears Murphy in the distance, scraping off one of the walkways with a shovel. Within an hour Murphy will have the snowblower out, clearing paths between the academy buildings and the cottages. Later on he’ll drive his truck with the plow out front across the main parking lot. If the blizzard is as bad as they’re saying, none of his hard work will matter much. Judith will go out and offer him hot chocolate at least two or three times, but she won’t chat with him at all. She’ll just hand him the styro-foam cup and retreat back to her office, and return to her vigil.

Instead of heading home, Finn walks toward the cemetery, feeling the urge to push himself. It’s about a quarter mile behind his cottage, down a dirt path that follows the naturally twisting grades of the area.

This is the last chance Finn will have to get out and walk for a while before the storm comes down in full. He needs to move. If he doesn’t move, he’s afraid of what might happen.

He’s got to test himself constantly. It’s too damn easy to grow complacent and docile, to stay within readily defined boundaries. Others always want to grab him, lead him, aid him, lock him down, hold his hand. He’s always this close to becoming a cripple.

On the job he’d met two blind shut-ins. One hadn’t been out of his apartment for forty years, completely cared for by his wife. When the old lady died, the blind geriatric left her on the bed for three weeks, bloated and black with flies, because he was paralyzed with the fear of what might happen to him afterward. He lived on watered-down cans of soup and dropped twenty pounds until the stink alerted the neighbors and Finn showed up.

The other was a seventeen-year-old kid who’d been homeschooled all his life. He’d never been outside his apartment unless his mother was latched around his throat, and then only to the small garden in back of the building. Even when one of the windows got blown out by a stray gunshot from the street, the mother lied and said it was a golf ball. Like people golf in the East Village alleys every day. The kid was happy and well cared for and smiled like a doofus, intentionally kept stupid, with no idea of what he was missing out there. When Finn left, the mother was having metal shutters put in.

As he got used to counting off steps to his classroom, to the dining hall, to Roz’s quarters, his front step, Finn realized that a couple hundred square yards could become his entire world. The safe embrace of it is too appealing to him. He thinks of that petrified old man and it gets him moving. He wanders, gets lost, sometimes calls out for help, fighting to keep the terror from his voice. It’s better than the alternative.

The snow drives against his face and he feels it building up on his glasses. What a bad joke that he has to clean them off.

He slows his pace, unsure of why. Something is distracting
the hell out of him. He focuses past the warble of the wind through the trees. The snow lands on the back of his neck, but he’s already gone cold.

Finn’s always been a man who trusted his instincts, but now he relies on them almost entirely. He has to. He’s a slave to his remaining senses. It makes him want to scream. It makes him want to scream right now.

The graveyard is one of those half-hidden places. It’s pitted, choked with weeds, and filled with crumbling tombstones and uncleared rock.

He takes another step, then another. He swings his cane. He’s close to the first grave. By running his fingers in the grooves of the stones, he’s memorized the names on many of the markers. He knows their distance from the path.