The Shadow Year Page 9

  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.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “No applause, just throw money,” said Jim. “Did you find a picture for the cover?”

  “There’s nothing Greek in here,” I said, “but this old woman’s face looks kind of Greek.” I showed him a picture of a woman who was probably about a hundred years old. She was in profile, wore a black shawl, and her face was a prune with eyes. “She’s from Mexico, though,” I said.

  “I heard she was half Greek,” said Jim. “Cut her out.”

  I did, pretty well, too, except that I hacked off the tip of her nose. He then told me to tape her face to a piece of paper and write the title of the report in a bubble coming out of her mouth, as if she were saying it. There was a subheading in the encyclopedia entry—“The Glory That Was Greece”—that he told me to use as the title of my paper. “Do it in block letters,” he said. “Then take the whole thing and put six books on top of it to flatten it out, and you’re all set. Krapp’s gonna be caught between a shit and a sweat when he sees this one.”

  Mary cried at bedtime because my mother wasn’t awake to tuck her in. Instead Nan sat with her until she dozed off. Jim and I were sent upstairs. Once the house was quiet, I got out of bed and snuck over to Jim’s room and knocked on the open door.

  “Yeah?” he said and opened one eye.

  “I think I know who the prowler is,” I whispered.

  He told me to come in. I sat at the bottom of his bed and told him about the man in the white car and recounted what had happened at the library. When I told him about the old man sniffing my sweater, he breathed deeply through his nostrils, rolled his eyes upward, and said, “Delicious.”

  “I’m telling you, it’s him,” I said. “He travels around during the daytime in that old white car, and then at night he sneaks through the backyards looking for kids to steal. I bet he took Charlie. Not only that, but I think he might be some kind of evil spirit,” I said.

  “If he’s an evil spirit,” said Jim, “I doubt he’d be driving a car.”

  “Yeah, but remember, the nun said that the evil one walks the earth. Maybe he gets tired of walking and needs to drive.”

  “Hey,” said Jim, “you said he always smells like smoke? That the books from the library he probably touched smell like smoke? That’s what Sister Joe told me was the secret to knowing him when he came. She said he’d smell like the fires of hell. Fire doesn’t smell, though, except for the smoke.”

  This revelation made me shiver, and I felt unsafe, even inside the house with Jim there. The old man could be anywhere—listening at the glass, sneaking in the
cellar window, anywhere.

  “So who is this guy?” asked Jim. “Where’s he live?”

  “I don’t know his name,” I said. “Do you remember the night we dragged Mr. Blah-Blah across the street? The guy who stopped and got out of his car? That’s the guy.”

  “He was kind of creepy-looking,” said Jim, “and I never saw him around here before.” He yawned and lay back on his pillow. “We’ll have to find out who he is.”

  “How?” I asked. I sat there for a long time, waiting for his answer.

  “Somehow,” he said, and turned over. I knew he was almost asleep.

  The antenna cried mercilessly all night, and I tossed and turned, thinking of the man in the white car, my fear in the library, and spying Mrs. Hayes’s tit. I could sense the evil as it crept forward day by day, dismantling my world, like a very slow explosion. I woke and slept and woke and slept, and it was still dark. The third time I awoke to the same night, I thought I heard the sound of pebbles jangling in soda cans. The plan had been to send George out after whoever it was who was taking the ladder, but I didn’t move, save to curl up into a ball.

  Every Shadowy Form

  The next day, Halloween, was clear and cool and blue. My mother had to leave for work early, so Nan made us breakfast. Jim told Mary and me to request oatmeal instead of eggs, so the latter would be there to steal later on and use for ammo on the night streets. I could tell that Mary was excited because she wasn’t being Mickey and wasn’t counting or doing any of her strange antics but instead was pumping Jim for a rundown on what the coming night would be like. This was the first year she was allowed to go out with us, without our mother. The ugly oatmeal came, lumps of steaming khaki—with raisins in it, no less—and we all forced it down.

  “The idea,” he told Mary, “is to get as much candy as possible. You want candy, wrapped candy. If you get a candy bar, that’s the best—a Hershey bar or a Milky Way. Mary Janes are okay if you don’t mind losing a few fillings, little boxes of Good & Plenty, Dots, Chocolate Babies, packs of gum, all good. Then you’ve got your cheapskate single-wrapped candy—root-beer barrels, butterscotches, licorice drops—not bad, usually given out by people who are broke, but what can they do? They’re trying.

  “You don’t eat anything that’s not wrapped, except for Mr. Barzita’s figs. Some people drop an apple in your bag. You can’t eat it, but you can throw it at someone, so that’s okay. Once in a while, someone will bake stuff to give out. Don’t eat it—you don’t know what they put in it. It could be the best-looking cupcake you ever saw, with chocolate icing and a candy corn on top, but who knows, they might have crapped in the batter. I’ve seen where people will throw a penny in your sack. Hey, a penny’s a penny.

  “You always stay where we can see you. If someone invites you into their house, don’t go. When we tell you to run, run, ’cause kids could be coming to throw eggs at us. If you hear someone shout ‘Nair bomb,’ run like hell.”

  “What’s a Nair bomb?” asked Mary.

  “Nair is that chemical stuff women use to take the hair off their legs. Kids pour it into balloons and throw them. If you get hit on the head with it, all your hair will fall out. If it gets in your eyes, it could blind you for a while.”

  Mary nodded.

  “I’m going to give you two eggs tonight. Save them until you see someone you really want to get. Aim for the head, ’cause if it hits their coat, it will probably bounce off and smash on the ground. Or you can throw it at the house of someone you hate. Who do you hate?” Jim asked.

  “Will Hinkley,” Mary said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “We’ll egg his house tonight for sure,” said Jim. “Maybe I’ll put one through his front window. One more thing: Kids will try to steal your sack of candy. Don’t let them. Scream and kick them if they try to. I’ll come and help you.”

  “Okay,” said Mary.

  We went in and said good-bye to Nan before leaving for school. She was at her table in the little dining area. Heaped on the table were three enormous piles of candy: rolls of Swee-Tarts, Mary Janes, and miniature Butterfingers. She took one from each pile, stuffed them in a little orange bag sporting a picture of a witch on a broomstick, and twisted the top. Pop was sitting in his underwear watching her, chewing a Mary Jane.

  School was endless that day. We usually had a holiday party in the classroom on Halloween, but not that year. It was canceled because Krapp had to give us a series of standardized intelligence tests. It was a day of filling in little bubbles with a number-two pencil. The questions started off easy but soon became impossibly strange. There were passages to be read about sardine fishing off the coast of Chile and math problems where they showed you a picture of a weird shape and asked you to turn it around in your mind 180 degrees before answering questions about it.

  I realized right when I was about to turn in one of the exams that I’d meant to skip an answer I didn’t know but instead had filled in that bubble by mistake, so that all my answers from that point on would really be for the following question. I felt a fleeting moment of remorse as I put the test in Krapp’s hand.

  On the playground at lunch break, Tim Sullivan told me his theory about taking standardized tests. “I don’t even bother reading the questions,” he said. “I just guess. I’ve got to get at least some of them right.”

  Later, back in the classroom, Patricia Trepedino, the smartest girl in the class, referred Krapp to question number four. “It says,” she said, “concrete is to peanut butter as…”

  “Yes,” said Krapp, checking his sheet.

  “Chunky or plain?” she asked.

  He stared at her with the same blank look that Marvin Gompers had worn after telling us in third grade that he was made of metal and then running headfirst into the brick wall behind the gym. Finally Krapp snapped out of it and said, “No talking, or I will have to invalidate your test.”

  The lingering twilight finally breathed its last, and that first moment of night was like a gunshot at the start of a race. Instantly, frantic kids in costumes streamed from lit houses, beginning their rounds, not to return until they had reached the farthest place they could and still remember how to get home. My mother and Nan stood at the front door and waved to us as Jim led the way, dressed in a baggy flannel shirt, ripped dungarees, a black skullcap, and a charcoal beard. Mary followed him in her jockey outfit, and I brought up the rear, stumbling on the curbs and across lawns because the eye slits in my skull mask drastically limited my view. Even though it was cold and windy, my face was sweating before we had climbed two front stoops and opened our bags. I could hear every breath I took, and each was laced with the hair-raising stench of molded plastic. Finally, after I walked into a parked car, I decided to push the mask back on my head and only pull it down over my face when we got to a house’s front steps.

  We traveled door-to-door around the block, joining with other groups of kids, splitting away and later being joined by others. Franky Conrad, dressed like a swami, with a bath towel wrapped in a turban around his head, eyeliner darkening his eyes, and a long purple robe, walked with us for a dozen houses. The Farley girls were angels or princesses, I couldn’t tell which, but their costumes, made from flowing white material, glowed in the dark. President Henry Mason was dressed in his Communion suit, a button on the lapel that said VOTE FOR HENRY, and his sisters were ghosts with sheets over their heads. Reggie Bishop was a robot, wrapped in silver foil, wearing a hat with a lightbulb sticking out the top that went on and off without a switch, and Chris Hackett wore his father’s army helmet and told us how his dad had gotten hand-grenade shrapnel in his ass and lost three fingers in Korea.

  We worked the trick-or-treat with dedication that rivaled our father’s for his three jobs, systematically moving up one side of the street and then down the other. Our pillowcases filled with candy. Old Lady Restuccio gave out Chinese handcuffs, a kind of tube woven from colored paper strips. You stuck a finger in each side and then couldn’t pull them out. Th
at’s how we lost Franky Conrad. He was left behind, standing on Mrs. Restuccio’s lawn, unable to figure out that you just had to twist your fingers to free them. The slow, the hobbled, the weak—all were left in our wake as we blitzkrieged Willow Avenue and moved on to Cuthbert.

  When we finished with the last house on the last street in that part of the development, we took the secret trail through the dirt hills, through the waist-high weeds, to the path that led around the high fence of the sump, and came out on the western field of East Lake, just beyond the basketball courts. In the moonlight, a strong wind whipping across the open expanse and driving tatters of dark clouds above, we met up with Tim Sullivan and some of his friends. We rested for a while there and stuffed chocolate and licorice into our mouths as sustenance for the next leg of the journey.

  Just as we were getting ready to head east toward Minerva Avenue on the other side of the school field over by the woods, we were attacked by Pinky Steinmacher, Justin Walsh, and about twenty other dirt eaters. The eggs flew back and forth. President Mason took one in the face and went down on his knees in tears. Someone yelled that Walsh had Nair bombs, and we fled. Jim had Mary by the hand, and I was right behind them. As we ran around the back of the school, I looked over my shoulder to see the enemy swarming toward Henry. His sisters, the horrible dumplings, had also abandoned him and were gaining on me. We would learn the next day that they beat him with flour socks until he went albino, split his lip, and stole his sack of treasure. Then Pinky peed on him.

  We begged our way up Minerva and the street beyond that, and as we roamed farther from our own neighborhood, kids would break off and head back toward more familiar ground. Once when we left Mary standing on the sidewalk by herself for a minute, a kid tried to steal her sack, but she was able to keep him off by swinging her curtain rod/jockey whip until Jim got to her and pummeled the kid. We ended up taking his sack and splitting its contents three ways. Still, the run-in made Mary nervous, and she had to sit down on the curb for a while, mumble some numbers, and have a cigarette. The rest of the group went on without us. While we were waiting for Mary to relax, a bunch of Jim’s junior-high friends came by, and just like that he left me in charge of Mary and went off with them.