The Shadow Year Page 11

  I walked over and stood next to him. He reached up and, placing a hand lightly upon my shoulder, stood, making believe he was using me as a crutch. “Thanks,” he said, and for a brief moment he put his arm around me and hugged me to him. My face went into the side of his coarse plaid jacket, and I smelled the machine oil. Then he let go and called for Jim and Mary to come back.

  We stopped on the way home and had dinner at a chrome-sided diner. My father ordered meat loaf, and the three of us ordered meat loaf, too. No one spoke through dinner, and when the ice cream came, he said to us, “How are you all doing in school?”

  I felt Jim lightly kick my shin under the table as he said, “I’m doing great.”

  “Good,” said Mary.

  I said nothing at first, but Jim kicked me again, and I said, “Doing fine.”

  Mary, in her Mickey voice, said, “Could you possibly…?” But my father didn’t notice or chose not to notice and called for the check.

  By the time we got back home, it was dark out. We got ready for bed and then sat in the living room. My mother was up and around and feeling good. She played the guitar and sang us a few songs. My father, like in the old days, read some poems to us from his collection of little red books—“The Charge of the Light Brigade,” “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” and “Crossing the Bar.” That night I slept well, no dreams, and the antenna whispered instead of moaned.

  There He Is

  I looked up Mr. Barzita’s phone number in the directory and began calling his house every day after school, but there was never an answer. I asked Nan and Pop if they had seen him, but they both told me no. Pop asked me why I wanted to know, and I just shrugged and said, “Because I haven’t seen him around.”

  “Do you ever see him in the cold weather?” asked Nan.

  It was true, he rarely showed himself after Halloween, and the weather had really gotten frigid. Mid-November, and the temperature had dropped into the teens for a week straight. We prayed for a snowstorm, but it seemed like even the sky was frozen solid. Jim and I rode over to Babylon on our bikes one Saturday afternoon and went skating on Argyle Lake, but otherwise I just stayed inside, reading and catching up on my journal, filling in those members of our neighborhood I’d yet to capture in words.

  There was one old lady who lived over by East Lake, and I couldn’t remember her name. It was written on her mailbox, but I kept forgetting to check it on the way home from school. I had a good story about her occasionally going door-to-door, like she was trick-or-treating, asking everyone on the block for a glass of gin. Her dog, Tatel, a vicious German shepherd, was worth a few lines, especially concerning the time it chased the mailman up the Grimms’ elm tree. I had a fine description of this old woman’s white hag’s hair, her skeletal body, and how her sallow skin fit her skull like a rubber glove, but no name. The cold snap had broken, and the temperature had risen slightly, so, just to get out of the house and get some fresh air, I put George on the leash and we took a quick walk around the block.

  I wrote her name in my mind, in script, three times—Mrs. Homretz—while George peed on the post of her mailbox. The sky was overcast, and even though the wind blew, it was mild enough to keep my jacket open. When I was sure I had it memorized, I turned to start home. Lucky for me I looked behind me when I did, because just then, rounding the turn on Willow and heading straight for me, were three kids on their bikes—Will Hinkley, Pinky Steinmacher, and Justin Walsh.

  “There he is!” cried Hinkley, and I saw all three of them lift their asses off their seats and press down hard on their pedals for a burst of speed. Even before my heart started pounding and I felt the fear explode inside me, I ran. They had blocked off my direct escape route and were gaining on me too fast for me to take the corner at Cuthbert in order to make my way around the block back to Willow. They’d have been on me before I reached the middle of that street. Instead I made a beeline for East Lake and the woods, thinking they might stop chasing me once they hit the tree line.

  George easily kept pace with me as we made our way across the field and then down the slope of Sewer Pipe Hill. I chose the main path, thinking that if they did come after me, I’d get as far into the woods as possible before cutting into the trees and underbrush. At the last second, I would head south toward the spit of woods that extended into the backyards of the Masons and Halloways. If I could make it that far, I could get back onto Willow close to my house and be home before they caught me. I stopped for a second to listen for them. The pounding in my ears was too loud at first, but then I heard Pinky give a battle cry. The sound of bikes breaking twigs, rolling over fallen leaves, followed.

  We were off again, down the trail, branches whipping my face, ruts making me stumble. I tried not to think about what would happen if they caught us. George would hold his own against them, but just picturing Hinkley’s fists made me go weak inside.

  “He’s right in front of us!” Walsh yelled, and I knew they could see me. I left the path and cut into the trees. They continued behind me, but the underbrush and fallen logs slowed them down, and it sounded as if they had left their bikes behind. If you were a coward like I was, it was a good thing to be a fast runner, which I also was. I ran for another five minutes at top speed, and then I had to stop, not because I was winded but because the lake spread out before me. I’d trapped myself.

  I knew that if I had to turn either right or left, they would catch me easily. The lake was still frozen from the cold snap, but a thin layer of water slicked the top as it had begun to thaw. I put a foot out onto the slippery surface and gradually eased my weight down. It held me. George was uncertain of the ice, and I had to drag him along behind me. I took slow, careful steps forward. By the time my pursuers had broken through the trees at the edge of the lake, I was about fifteen feet from shore. I didn’t look back, although they were calling my name and saying I was a “fairy” and a “scumbag” and a “piece of shit.” George didn’t like the situation at all and began to growl.

  “Egg my house?” I heard Hinkley scream, and then I saw a rock whiz past my head, hit the ice, and slide three-quarters of the way to the opposite shore.

  “Let’s go get him!” yelled Steinmacher, and they must have stepped onto the ice together, because I felt the entire surface of the lake undulate and make a growling sound like George did just before chewing a sneaker. Following that, there was a cracking noise, like a giant egg hatching, and a splash. I looked over my shoulder and saw Walsh standing three feet from shore, up to his waist in brown water. I kept going forward as they helped him out of his hole and retreated.

  Their extra weight on the ice must have made it unstable, because now with each step I took I could hear tiny splintering noises and see fissures spread like veins in the clear, frozen green beneath each foot. The wind was blowing fiercely in the middle of the open expanse, and my feeling of victory at their retreat suddenly vanished, replaced by the prospect that the lake might, at any moment, open up and swallow me. That’s when the rock hit me in the back of the head, and I went down hard on my chest and face. I heard a great fracturing sound, and my mind went blank as much from fear as from the concussion.

  When I finally opened my eyes, I remained splayed out, listening. I heard the wind, dead leaves blowing through the woods, George quietly whimpering, and a very distant sound of laughter, moving away. Every now and then, the ice made a cracking noise. I was soaked from having fallen into the film of water atop the frozen surface, and it came to me slowly that I was trembling. With the slowest and most cautious of movements, I got to my knees. Once I achieved that position, I rested for a moment. My head hurt and I was dizzy, so I closed my eyes. My next goal was to stand, and I told myself I would count to thirty, stand up, and get to shore.

  When I reached twenty-five, I happened to look down, and staring up at me through the green ice was a pair of eyes. At first I thought it was my reflection. I leaned down closer to the surface to get a better look, and there, beneath the ice, was the pale, parti
ally rotted face of Charlie Edison. His hair was fixed solid in a wild tangle. Much of the whites of his eyes had gone brown, and they were big and round like fish eyes. His mouth was open in a silent scream. Next to his face was the palm of one hand, and I could barely see past his wrist, as the forearm disappeared into the murk below. His glasses were missing, and so was the flesh of his right cheek.

  When I screamed, I felt as though he was screaming through me. Dropping George’s leash, I scrabbled to my feet, and, slipping and sliding, ice cracking everywhere around me, I ran straight toward the shore, twenty yards away. In the midst of one step, I felt the ice crack and give way beneath my heel, but I was already gone. The dog and I reached the shore at the same moment, and we both jumped the last few feet over the thin ice at the edge.

  Chattering like mad and half frozen, I came out of the woods through the Halloways’ backyard. My pant legs were stiff, as was the front of my shirt. When I walked through the front door of our house, the warmth thawed my fear, and I began to cry. My mother was cooking dinner in the kitchen, but she just said, “Hello,” and didn’t come in. I went upstairs to my room, pulled off my wet clothes, and got into bed. Until I was called to dinner, I lay under the covers, shivering.

  Secrets

  It was a Wednesday, but we were off from school because the next day was Thanksgiving. The weather was bad, and I couldn’t sit still inside, so I decided to go with Nan to pick up Aunt Gertie at the Babylon train station. Nan drove at a crawl and made only right-hand turns. Pop called her style of driving, “Going there to get there.” Sometimes when I was down at the candy store in town, I’d see the big blue Impala creeping by with Nan at the wheel, looking all around and smiling like Mr. Magoo. Once, when I was with her, an angry guy drove past us and yelled, “Get a horse and buggy!” Today the torture was compounded by sleet and hail.

  An hour later we were somewhere in Brightwaters, over by the bay, searching for the correct series of right-hand turns that would send us back toward Babylon. Thankfully, the hail had stopped, but night was coming on.

  “What do you think about secrets?” I said to her.

  Her lips were going, and she was staring straight ahead. She jammed on the brakes at a stop sign, and then we made a turn. Right, of course. “Honesty’s the best policy,” she said.

  A few minutes later, I said, “Aren’t you talking about lies?”

  “Maybe,” she said, and laughed. She drove on for a while, eyes peeled for another right turn. “Did I ever tell you I was married before Pop?”

  “I heard about it,” I said.

  “My first husband’s name was Eddy. What a head of hair. He was a motorcycle cop in New York. A terrible drunk. Once he drove his motorcycle through a plate-glass window and was in the hospital for six months.”

  I waited for her to go on, but she didn’t. “What happened to him?” I asked.

  “Eventually he died of pneumonia,” she said.

  “Did you ever ride on his motorcycle?”

  “Sure,” she said. “He could be a lot of fun. But he was crazy. When he’d get drunk, he’d shoot his gun off in the street.”

  She laughed again, and so did I.

  “I have his gun and badge and billy clubs in my closet. Remind me to show you.”

  “Cool.”

  “One of the clubs has dice inlaid into it. Beautiful. And there’s a blackjack. Do you know what that is?”

  “No.”

  “It’s leather with a piece of lead rolled into it and stitched up. You can break somebody’s skull with it.”

  “Wait till Jim sees that,” I said.

  “If you beat somebody with it, there’s no black-and-blue marks. You can’t play with it, though. It’s deadly. I think it’s illegal now,” she said, and put her finger to her lips.

  “When did you marry Pop?” I asked.

  “A couple of months after Eddy died.”

  They’ll Bring the Fetid Cheese Ball

  Aunt Gertie was stout and pale, all bottom lip and jowls, like Winston Churchill with a hairnet, and Mary could face her only as Mickey. “Snap out of it, sweetie,” Aunt Gertie told her. “You’re acting simple.” She handed me a five and said my hair was ridiculous. When she paid Jim, she just shook her head and winced. Then she ordered Nan, calling her Maisie, to hand out the black-and-white cookies in the bakery box on the table. She never came without them—platters of icing in half-moons. She asked us how we were doing in school and scowled at our reports. Aunt Gertie worked for the bishop in Rockville Centre, so when she asked if we said our prayers, we nodded.

  “Yeah,” said Jim. “We pray we do better in school.”

  Her body jiggled, and we knew she was laughing.

  “We want to ask you about the hermit from where you and Nan grew up,” I said.

  “What hermit?” she said.

  “Bedelia,” said Nan.

  Aunt Gertie made a sour face.

  “The one who lived in a cave in the field of asparagus,” said Jim.

  Aunt Gertie laughed. “Heaven help us,” she said, and folded her stubby arms across her chest.

  “Remember, we’d go out there and call”—here Nan brought her hand up to the side of her mouth and wiggled her fingers—“Bedelia, we’d love to steal ya?’”

  “Nothing of the sort,” said her sister. “That never happened.”

  “God as my judge,” said Nan.

  “Malarkey,” said Aunt Gertie.

  As we retreated through the door to our house, Pop looked up over his paper and said, “Thanks.”

  The antenna gave me no sleep that night, and I knew there was something in the corner behind the open closet door. George must have felt it, too, because he growled in his sleep at the end of the bed. After what seemed a week passed in one night, each of my forced daydreams of Perno Shell lost in an arctic blizzard melted by fear, I finally heard my mother get up. Before going downstairs, I swung the closet door closed and then touched the bare wood of the floor with my foot. It was damp.

  I squinted in the fluorescent light of the kitchen. My mother was at the sink, cleaning out the turkey. She wore her bathrobe, the sleeves rolled up, and her hair was crazy. There was a cigarette going in the ashtray on the counter, and next to it sat a cup of black coffee. The linoleum was cold. Out the window behind her, I saw a gray dawn with steam rising from the ground. I walked closer and looked at the massive pink and yellow bird, its cavern, its sharp wingtips, its nose and hairs. My father’s work gave it to him for free, and he’d brought it home wrapped up in a towel like a baby.

  “Twenty-six pounds,” she said. She dropped the bird into the sink, pulled off a rubber glove, and took up her cigarette. “It’s a real SOB.”

  She poured me a bowl of nameless flakes, drowned them in fake milk, added half a sliced banana, and covered it all with sugar. We sat in the dining room. She smoked and drank her coffee while I ate.

  “What are you reading?” she asked me.

  “Hound of the Baskervilles,” I said.

  As haggard as she looked, her face lit up.

  “A. Conan Doyle,” I said.

  “What’s your favorite part?” she asked.

  In my imagination I saw the figure of Dr. Watson, his black bag in hand. He waved to me from across a snowy cobblestone street. “Watson,” I said.

  My mother smiled and took a drag on her cigarette. “I think the stories are really about Watson,” she said. “He was wounded in the Afghan War, at the Battle of Maiwand. I think the stories are about Watson home from the war, using the writing of the stories to cure himself. He’s a doctor, as was Conan Doyle.”

  “What about Sherlock Holmes?” I asked.

  “He’s a drug addict and he plays the violin,” said my mother.

  I nodded like I knew what she meant and quickly asked who was coming for dinner. She went through the list of guests, punctuating it with short comments: “They’ll bring the fetid cheese ball again this year….”

  Amid a haze of cooking t
urkey, Jim and Mary and I watched every minute of the Macy’s parade on the tube. Jim declared that the whole thing would rot if they didn’t have the giant balloons.

  “And Santa,” Mary added.

  “I hate the singers,” I said.

  “All they’re doing is playing a record on a loudspeaker, and the singer just waves to people,” said Jim.

  “Stinks,” said Mary.

  George came in and got up on the couch between Jim and Mary. As soon as the dog lay down, Jim took to very, very lightly brushing just three of George’s back hairs. Eventually George snarled. Jim laid off for a few seconds before doing it again. Three times later we all laughed, and suddenly George snapped. He hated to be made fun of.

  Mary put an end to it by saying, “Stop. Santa’s coming.” But it wasn’t for another hour. When he finally sailed past with his waving elves and bag of presents, it was as if attached to the back of his sleigh’s runners was the movie March of the Wooden Soldiers with Laurel and Hardy. As Santa returned to the North Pole, he pulled that gray nightmare over us like a blanket, and Mary went Mickey. I could never decide which was creepier, the army of rouge-cheeked wooden soldiers or the hairy monsters that swarmed out of the caves beneath the story-land village. There was singing in it, and the singing didn’t stink. Laurel and Hardy acted like idiots, and we enjoyed that.

  To kill time before the company showed up, Jim and I took George for a walk to the school field. We messed around by the basketball court, peered down into the now-silent kingdom of crickets in the sump, and walked the perimeter. Eventually Jim said, “We’re gonna be late,” and started for home. I wanted to tell him about Charlie being in the lake, but when we reached the edge of the school yard, he started to tell me about this girl in his class in junior high. “She has tits like torpedoes,” he said. “Up periscope.”

  And then we were home. The house was jangling with heat and voices. The smell of turkey roasting was as thick in the air as my mother’s perfume on work mornings. Cars lined the curbs going both ways. My father let us in the front door and told us to hurry up and get dressed.