The Shadow Year Read online

  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.

  A Prowler

  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 Fran
ky slid it into place on the wooden shelf next to the bottles of bug killer, Mary said, “One.”

  As God Is My Judge

  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.”

  Sewer Pipe Hill

  After lunch we put George on the leash and took him out into the backyard. Mary didn’t go with us because she decided to have a session with her make-believe friends, Sally O’Malley and Sandy Graham, who lived in the closet in her room. Once in a while, she’d let them out and she would become Mickey and they would go to school together down in the cellar.

  Jim had the idea that we could use George to track the pervert. We’d let him smell the ladder, he’d pick up the scent, and we’d follow along. Franky Conrad joined us in our backyard where the ladder again lay propped against the side of the toolshed. For a while we just stood there waiting for the dog to smell the ladder. Then I told Jim, “You better rev him up.” To rev George up, all you had to do was stick your foot near his mouth. If you left it there long enough, he’d start to growl. Jim stuck his foot out and made little circles with it in the air near George’s mouth. “Geooorgieee,” he sang very softly. When the dog had had enough, he went for the foot, growling like crazy and fake-biting all over it—a hundred fake bites a second. He never really chomped down.

  When he was revved, he moved to the ladder, smelled it a few times, and then pissed on it. We were ready to do some tracking. George started walking, and so did we. Out of the backyard, we went through the gate by Nan’s side of the house and under the pink blossoms of the prehistoric mimosa tree into the front yard.

  Around the corner was East Lake School, a one-story redbrick structure, a big rectangle of classrooms with an enclosed courtyard of grass at its center. On the right-hand side was an alcove that held the playground for the kindergarten—monkey bars, swings, a seesaw, a sandbox, and one of those round, turning platform things that if you got it spinning fast enough, all the kids would fly off. The gym was attached to the left-hand side of the building, a giant, windowless box of brick that towered over the squat main building.

  The school had a circular drive in front with an elongated, high-curbed oval of grass at its center. Just west of the drive and the little parking lot there were two asphalt basketball courts, and beyond that spread a vast field with a baseball backstop and bases, where on windy days the powdered dirt of the baselines rose in cyclones. At the border of the field was a high barbed-wire-topped fence to prevent kids from climbing down into a craterlike sump. Someone long ago had used a chain cutter to make a slit
in the fence that a small person could pass through. Down there in the early fall, among the goldenrod stalks and dying weeds, it was a kingdom of crickets.

  Behind the school were more fields of sunburned summer grass cut by three asphalt bike paths. At the back the school fields were bounded by another development, but to the east lay the woods: a deep oak-and-pine forest that stretched well into the next town and south as far as the railroad tracks. Streams ran through it, as well as some rudimentary paths that we knew better than the lines on our own palms. A quarter mile in lay a small lake that we had been told was bottomless.

  That day George led us to the boundary of the woods, near the pregnant swelling of ground known as Sewer Pipe Hill. We stood on the side of the hill where a round, dark circle of the pipe protruded and faced the tree line. Some days a trickle of water flowed from the pipe, but today it was bone dry. Jim walked over to the round opening, three feet in circumference, leaned over, and yelled, “Helloooooo!” His word echoed down the dark tunnel beneath the school fields. George pissed on the concrete facing that held up the end of the pipe.

  “X marks the spot,” said Jim. He turned to Franky. “You better crawl in there and see if the prowler is hiding underground.”

  Franky rubbed his head and stared at the black hole.