The Shadow Year (2 page)

My room was dark, and though it had been warm all day, a cool end-of-summer breeze now filtered in through the screen of the open window. Moonlight also came in, making a patch on the bare, painted floor. From outside I could hear the chug of the Farleys' little pool filter next door and, beneath that, the sound of George's claws, tapping across the kitchen linoleum downstairs.

Jim was asleep in his room across the hall. Below us Mary was also asleep, no doubt whispering the times tables into her pillow. I could picture my mother, in the room next to Mary's, lying in bed, the reading light on, her mouth open, her eyes closed, and the thick red volume of Sherlock Holmes stories with the silhouette cameo of the detective on the spine open and resting on her chest. All I could picture of Nan and Pop was a darkened room and the tiny glowing bottle of Lourdes water in the shape of the Virgin that sat on the dresser.

I was thinking about the book I had been reading before turning out the light—another in the series of adventures of Perno Shell. This one was about a deluge, like Noah's flood, and how the old wooden apartment building Shell lived in had broken away from its foundation and he and all the other tenants were sailing the giant ocean of the world, having adventures.

There was a mystery about the Shell books, because they were all published under different authors' names, sometimes by different publishing companies, but you only had to read a few pages to tell that they were all written by the same person. The problem was finding them in the stacks, because the books were shelved alphabetically, according to the authors' last names. I would never have discovered them if it wasn't for Mary.

Occasionally I would read to her, snatches from whatever book I was working through. We'd sit in the corner of the backyard by the fence, in a bower made by forsythia bushes. One day, amid the yellow flowers, I read to her from the Shell book I had just taken out:
The Stars Above
by Mary Holden. There were illustrations in it, one per chapter. When I was done reading, I handed the book to her so she could look at the pictures. While paging through it, she held it up to her face, sniffed it, and said, “Pipe smoke.” Back then my father smoked a pipe once in a while, so we knew the aroma. I took the book from her and smelled it up close, and she was right, but it wasn't the kind of tobacco my father smoked. It had a darker, older smell, like a cross between a horse and a mildewed wool blanket.

When I walked to the library downtown, Mary would walk with me. She rarely said a word during the entire trip, but a few weeks after I had returned
The Stars Above
, she came up to me while I was searching through the four big stacks that lay in the twilight zone between the adult and children's sections. She tugged at my shirt, and when I turned around, she handed me a book:
The Enormous Igloo
by Duncan Main.

“Pipe smoke,” she said.

Opening the volume to the first page, I read, “‘Perno Shell was afraid of heights and could not for the world remember why he had agreed to a journey in the Zeppelin that now hovered above his head.'” Another Perno Shell novel by someone completely different. I lifted the book, smelled the pages, and nodded.

Tonight I wanted Perno Shell to stay in my imagination until I dozed off, but my thoughts of him soon grew as thin as paper, and then the theme of my wakeful nights alone in the dark, namely death, came clawing through. Teddy Dunden, a boy who'd lived up the block, two years younger than me and two years older than Mary, had been struck by a car on Montauk Highway one night in late spring. The driver was drunk and swerved onto the sidewalk. According to his brother, Teddy was thrown thirty feet in the air. I always tried to picture that: twice again the height of the basketball hoop. We had to go to his wake. The priest said he was at peace, but he didn't look it. As he lay in the coffin, his skin was yellow, his face was bloated, and his mouth was turned down in a bitter frown.

All summer long he came back to me from where he lay under the ground. I imagined him suddenly waking up, clawing at the lid as in a story Jim had once told me. I dreaded meeting his ghost on the street at night when I walked George around the block alone. I'd stop under a streetlight and listen hard, fear would build in my chest until I shivered, and then I'd bolt for home. In the lonely backyard at sundown, in the darkened woods behind the school field, in the corner of my night room, Teddy Dunden was waiting, jealous and angry.

George came up the stairs, nudged open my bedroom door, and stood beside my bed. He looked at me with his bearded face and then jumped aboard. He was a small, schnauzer-type mutt, but fearless, and having him there made me less scared. Slowly I began to doze. I had a memory of riding waves at Fire Island, and it blurred at the edges, slipping into a dream. Next thing I knew, I was falling from a great height and woke to hear my father coming in from work. The front door quietly closed. I could hear him moving around in the kitchen. George got up and left.

I contemplated going down to say hello. The last I'd seen him was the previous weekend. The bills forced him to work three
jobs: a part-time machining job in the early morning, then his regular job as a gear cutter, and then nights part-time as a janitor in a department store. He left the house before the sun came up every morning and didn't return until very near midnight. Through the week I would smell a hint of machine oil here and there, on the cushions of the couch, on a towel in the bathroom, as if he were a ghost leaving vague traces of his presence.

Eventually the sounds of the refrigerator opening and closing and the water running stopped, and I realized he must be sitting in the dining room, eating his pile of spaghetti, reading the newspaper by the light that shone in from the kitchen. I heard the big pages turn, the fork against the plate, a match being struck, and that's when it happened. There came from outside the house the shrill scream of a woman, so loud it tore the night open wide enough for the Shadow Year to slip out. I shivered, closed my eyes tight, and burrowed deep beneath the covers.

When I came downstairs the next morning, the door to Nan and Pop's was open. I stuck my head in and saw Mary sitting at the table in the kitchenette where the night before she had made cigarettes. She was eating a bowl of Cheerios. Pop sat in his usual seat next to her, the horse paper spread out in front of him. He was jotting down numbers with a pencil in the margins, murmuring a steady stream of bloodlines, jockeys' names, weights, speeds, track conditions, ciphering what he called “the McGinn System,” named after himself. Mary nodded with each new factor added to the equation.

My mother came out of the bathroom down the hall in our house, and I turned around. She was dressed for work in her turquoise outfit with the big star-shaped pin that was like a stained-glass window. I went to her, and she put her arm around me, enveloped me in a cloud of perfume that smelled as thick as powder, and kissed my head. We went into the kitchen, and she made me a bowl of cereal with the mix-up milk, which wasn't as bad that way, because we were allowed to put sugar on it. I sat down in the dining room, and she joined me, carrying a cup of coffee. The sunlight poured in the window behind her. She lit a cigarette and dragged the ashtray close to her.

“Friday, last day of vacation,” she said. “You better make it a good one. Monday is back to school.”

I nodded.

“Watch out for strangers,” she said. “I got a call from next door this morning. Mrs. Conrad said that there was a prowler at her window last night. She was changing into her nightgown, and she turned and saw a face at the glass.”

“Did she scream?” I asked.

“She said it scared the crap out of her. Jake was downstairs watching TV. He jumped up and ran outside, but whoever it was had vanished.”

Jim appeared in the living room. “Do you think they saw her naked?” he asked.

“A fitting punishment,” she said. And as quickly added, “Don't repeat that.”

“I heard her scream,” I said.

“Whoever it was used that old ladder Pop keeps in the backyard. Put it up against the side of the Conrads' house and climbed up to the second-floor window. So keep your eyes out for creeps wherever you go today.”

“That means he was in our backyard,” said Jim.

My mother took a drag of her cigarette and nodded. “I suppose.”

Before she left for work, she gave us our list of jobs for the day—walk George, clean our rooms, mow the back lawn. Then she kissed Jim and me and went into Nan and Pop's to kiss Mary. I watched her car pull out of the driveway. Jim came to stand next to me at the front window.

“A prowler,” he said, smiling. “We better investigate.”

A half hour later, Jim and Mary and I, joined by Franky Conrad, sat back amid the forsythias.

“Did the prowler see your mother naked?” Jim asked Franky.

Franky had a hairdo like Curly from the Three Stooges, and he rubbed his head with his fat, blunt fingers. “I think so,” he said, wincing.

“A fitting punishment,” said Jim.

“What do you mean?” asked Franky.

“Think about your mother's ass,” said Jim, laughing.

Franky sat quietly for a second and then said, “Yeah,” and nodded.

Mary took out a Laredo cigarette and lit it. She always stole one or two when she made them. No one would have guessed. Mary was sneaky in a way, though. Jim would have told on me if I'd smoked one. All he did was say to her, “You'll stay short if you smoke that.” She took a drag and said, “Could you possibly…?” in a flat voice.

Jim, big boss that he was, laid it out for us. “I'll be the detective and you all will be my team.” Pointing at me, he said, “You have to write everything down. Everything that happens must be recorded. I'll give you a notebook. Don't be lazy.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Mary,” he said, “you count shit. And none of that Mickey stuff.”

“I'm counting now,” she said in her Mickey voice, nodding her head.

We cracked up, but she didn't laugh.

“Franky, you're my right-hand man. You do whatever the hell I tell you.”

Franky agreed, and then Jim told us the first thing we needed to do was search for clues.

“Did your mother say what the prowler's face looked like?” I asked.

“She said it was no one she ever saw before. Like a ghost.”

“Could be a vampire,” I said.

“It wasn't a vampire,” Jim said. “It was a pervert. If we're going to do this right, it's got to be like science. There's no such things as vampires.”

Our first step was to investigate the scene of the crime. Beneath the Conrads' second-floor bedroom window, on the side
of their house next to ours, we found a good footprint. It was big, much larger than any of ours, and it had a design on the bottom of lines and circles.

“You see what that is?” asked Jim, squatting down and pointing to the design.

“It's from a sneaker,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.

“I think it's Keds,” said Franky.

“What does that tell you?” asked Jim.

“What?” asked Franky.

“Well, it's too big to be a kid, but grown-ups usually don't wear sneakers. It might be a teenager. We better save this for if the cops ever come to investigate.”

“Did your dad call the cops?” I asked.

“No. He said that if he ever caught who it was, he'd shoot the son of a bitch himself.”

It took us about a half hour to dig up the footprint, carefully loosening the dirt all around it and scooping way down beneath it with the shovel. We went to Nan's side door and asked her if she had a box. She gave us a round pink hatbox with a lid that had a picture of a poodle and the Eiffel Tower.

Jim told Franky, “Carry it like it's nitro,” and we took it into our yard and stored it in the toolshed back by the fence. When Franky slid it into place on the wooden shelf next to the bottles of bug killer, Mary said, “One.”

Nan made lunch for us when the fire whistle blew at noon. She served it in our house at the dining-room table. Her sandwiches always had butter, no matter what else she put on them. Sometimes, like that day, she just made butter-and-sugar sandwiches. We also had barley soup. Occasionally she would make us chocolate pudding—the kind with an inch of vinyl skin across the top—but usually dessert was a ladyfinger.

Nan had gray wire-hair like George's, big bifocals, and a brown mole on her temple that looked like a squashed raisin. Her small stature, dark and wrinkled complexion, and the silken black strands at the corners of her upper lip made her seem to me at times like some ancient monkey king. When she'd fart while standing, she'd kick her left leg up in the back and say, “Shoot him in the pants. The coat and vest are mine.”

Every morning she'd say the rosary, and in the afternoon when the neighborhood ladies came over to drink wine from teacups, she'd read the future in a pack of playing cards.

Each day at lunch that summer, along with the butter sandwiches, she'd also serve up a story from her life. That first day of our investigation, she told us one from her childhood in Whitestone, where her father had been the editor of the local paper, where the fire engines were pulled by horses, where Moishe Pipik, the strongest man alive, ate twelve raw eggs every
morning for breakfast, where Clementine Cherenete, whose hair was a waterfall of gold, fell in love with a blind man who could not see her beauty, and where John Hardy Farty, a wandering vagrant, strummed a harp and sang “Damn the rooster crow.” All events, both great and small, happened within sight of a local landmark, Nanny Goat Hill.

“A night visitor,” she said when we told her about the footprint we had found and preserved in her pink hatbox. “Once there was a man who lived in Whitestone, a neighbor of ours. His name was Mr. Weeks. He had a daughter, Louqueer, who was in my grade at school.”

“Louqueer?” said Jim, and he and I laughed. Mary looked up from counting the grains of barley in her soup to see what was so funny.

Nan smiled and nodded. “She was a little odd. Spent all her time staring into a mirror. She wasn't vain but was looking for something. Her mother told my mother that at night the girl would wake up choking, blue in the face, from having dreamed she was swallowing a thimble.”

“That wasn't really her name,” said Jim.

“As God is my judge,” said Nan. “Her father took the train every day to work in the city and didn't come home until very late at night. He always got the very last train that stopped in Whitestone, just before midnight, and would stumble home drunk through the streets from the station. It was said that when he was drunk at a bar, he was happy-go-lucky, not a care in the world, but when he got drunk at home, he hit his wife and cursed her.

“One night around Halloween, he got off the train at Whitestone. The wind was blowing, and it was cold. The station was empty but for him. He started walking toward the steps that led down to the street, when from behind him he heard a noise like a voice in the wind.
OOOOoooo
was what it sounded like. He
turned around, and at the far end of the platform was a giant ghost, eight feet tall, rippling in the breeze.

“It scared the bejesus out of him. He ran home screaming. The next day, which was Saturday, he told my father that the train station was haunted. My father printed the story as kind of a joke. No one believed Mr. Weeks, because everyone knew he was a drunk. Still, he tried to convince people by swearing to it, saying he knew what he saw and it was real.

“On the way into the city on the following Friday, he told one of the neighbors, Mr. Laveglia, who took the same train in the morning, that the ghost had been there on both Monday and Wednesday nights and that both times it had called his name. Weeks was a nervous wreck, stuttering and shaking while he told of his latest encounters. Mr. Laveglia said Weeks was a man on the edge, but before getting off the train in the city, Weeks leaned in close to our neighbor and whispered to him that he had a plan to deal with the phantom. It was eight o'clock in the morning, and Mr. Laveglia said he already smelled liquor on Weeks's breath.

“That night Weeks returned from the city on the late train. When he got off onto the platform at Whitestone, it was deserted as usual. The moment he turned around, there was the ghost, moaning, calling his name, and coming straight at him. But that day, in the city, Weeks had bought a pistol.
That
was his plan. He took it out of his jacket, shot four times, and the ghost collapsed on the platform.”

“How can you kill a ghost?” asked Jim.

“It was eight feet tall,” said Mary.

“It wasn't a ghost,” said Nan. “It was his wife in a bedsheet, standing on stilts. She wanted to scare her husband into coming home on time and not drinking. But he killed her.”

“Did he get arrested for murder?” I asked.

“No,” said Nan. “He wept bitterly when he found out it was
his wife. When the police investigation was over and he was shown to have acted in self-defense, he abandoned his home and Louqueer and went off to live as a hermit in a cave in a field of wild asparagus at the edge of town. I don't remember why, but eventually he became known as Bedelia, and kids would go out to the cave and scream, ‘Bedelia, we'd love to steal ya!' and run away when he chased them. Louqueer got sent to an orphanage, and I never saw her again.”

“What happened to the hermit?” asked Jim.

“During a bad winter, someone found him in the middle of the field by his cave, frozen solid. In the spring they buried him there among the wild asparagus.”