The Shadow Year

by Jeffrey Ford

  “What?” I asked.

  “What happened at East Lake. Maybe he possessed Tony to break the windows.”

  “He has powers,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “It’s starting to get scary.”

  “Is Boris dead?” I asked.

  “Here’s what I think,” he said. “Mr. White killed him and then put him in his own car and drove it way out onto the ice of the bay. The ice melts, it cracks, and Boris and his car are gone.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  Like That

  It was late afternoon and raining hard outside. Mary and I were in the cellar, staring at Botch Town. Jim hadn’t gotten home from school yet. She told me to sit down in Jim’s chair.

  “You have to stare hard at one person,” she said.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “You pick,” she said.

  “I’m going to stare at Mr. Conrad,” I said, and pointed.

  She stepped up next to the chair, leaned over, and started whispering numbers into my ear. Numbers and numbers, like string that held my head in place. They came in torrents, then showers, and then I didn’t notice them at all. What I noticed was that a piece of clay had crumbled and fallen off the back of Mr. Conrad’s head. I noticed his ears, and his pose, slightly hunched. He was standing in front of his house, looking across the street toward the Hayeses’ place. It was all cardboard and clay, but something was shifting at the edges. I saw the lawns and the house across the street with its shrubs and yellow door. The color of the door caught my attention, and then I heard Mary say, “Equals,” and for just a split second I was in a bedroom and Mrs. Hayes was naked on the bed. She was smoking a cigarette, and her legs were open. I blinked, and she vanished back into the hole in Mr. Conrad’s clay head in front of his cardboard house.

  “Like that,” said Mary.

  After she went into her schoolroom and the lesson had begun, I noticed that Boris the janitor was no longer on the sewer pipe but now rested on top of an old end table halfway between Botch Town and the pipe.

  I wasn’t sure if my head hurt because of what Mary had done or if everything was just too much to think about anymore. The four-thirty movie on TV was Mothra. There were two tiny twins in it who lived in a birdcage and sang like the antenna. I fell asleep when Mothra’s caterpillar was swimming across the ocean and woke once when he had wings and was destroying a city. The next I knew, Jim was calling me for dinner.

  At dinner Mary told how this kid in her class, Gene, who walked with steel crutches and was called “the Mechanical Crab,” puked. “Mr. Cleary came in and cleaned it,” she said.

  My mother laughed into her wine.

  “Did he use the red stuff?” asked Jim.

  Mary nodded.

  “Did he make a face?” I asked.

  “Almost,” said Mary.

  Jim put his right hand to his throat, tightened his nostrils, and shifted his eyes side to side. My mother laughed so hard she coughed. Even when Mary and I stopped laughing, my mother kept on coughing. It went on and on. She held her cigarette away from her with one hand and used the other to cover her mouth. Her face went red, and tears came to the corners of her eyes. The harder the coughing got, the less sound came out. Jim got up and slapped her hard on the back. She took a swing at him, and he jumped away. A moment later she caught her breath. “You’re gonna kill me,” she said, still laughing.

  Welcome, Lou

  After the Pledge of Allegiance and the collection of lunch money, when Krapp was telling us about George Washington cutting down the cherry tree, a knock came on the classroom door.

  “Come in,” Krapp called. In stepped Mr. Cleary. He held the door with his shoulder and said, “I want you to meet the new janitor, who’ll be taking over until Boris comes back.” I pictured Boris sitting behind the wheel of his car at the bottom of the bay. Charlie was in the passenger seat. Cleary stepped in and to the side, opening the door more. A tall, scrawny man in gray work clothes came forward. “This is Lou,” said Cleary. The man’s shirt had a white oval that held the name LOU stitched in red.

  Krapp said, “Welcome, Lou.”

  Lou lifted his head, and I saw how pale he was. The light was on his hair, and it was White. The shivering started in my legs and ran up my spine. Mr. White mumbled, “Thank you,” and stepped back into the shadow of the hallway.

  Before leaving, Mr. Cleary turned to us and said, “I expect you to treat Lou with all the respect you would Boris.” Someone laughed for a split second—one of the girls. Cleary scanned the class, shot a look at Krapp, and then left.

  I was stunned well past the class punishment of writing a hundred times “I must not laugh at Mr. Cleary” and past the making of George Washington’s wooden teeth. On the playground at recess, I stood with my back to the chain-link fence at the boundary of the field, shivering.

  Later that afternoon our class passed Mr. White in the hallway on our way to the library. His smell of pipe smoke gagged me and made my eyes tear. With a squeegee on a stick and a bucket of water, he was cleaning the big windows that looked out on the courtyard. He had his back to us as we went by, but after we passed, I glanced over my shoulder and saw him watching.

  In the library, now under Krapp’s control, perfect silence was the rule. I sat with a book open on the table where the sunlight streamed in through the courtyard window. My eyes were closed, and I repeated to myself what Jim had said: “He knows less about us than we know about him.”

  When I eventually opened my eyes, I saw Mr. White out in the hallway through the glass panes of the library door. He was slowly rubbing with a dirty rag. His eyes darted quickly as he looked from kid to kid to kid and back again. Before he could look at me, I closed my eyes.

  That night Jim gave me his penknife. “Keep it in your coat pocket,” he said. “Go for the face.” I tried to picture myself stabbing Mr. White in the cheek and heard metal hit bone. Jim’s advice was “Don’t let him get you by yourself.” He told me six different ways to escape from Mr. White. One was to crawl between his legs and run, and another was to kick him in the nuts and run. He repeated all six.

  The next day it took me twice as long as usual to walk to school. Mary even told me to hurry up. The whole time I kept shoving my hand into my coat pocket to check for the knife. Once in the building, as we passed the main office on the way to our classrooms, I looked down the hall to my right at the door to the furnace room and pictured Lou standing amid flames. I stopped walking and thought about running home. Then, between the main office and the door at the end of the hall, I saw the entrance to the nurse’s office.

  I made it to my desk in Krapp’s room on time. After holding out until well into the lecture about the solar system, I put up my hand. He noticed me, and although he hadn’t asked a question, he pointed to me and said my name.

  “I feel like I’m going to throw up,” I said.

  “Oh, no,” he said, and in less than two minutes he wrote out a pass.

  The windowless hallways were empty and dim. I moved quickly, afraid that at each turn I’d come face-to-face with Mr. White. When I reached the hall lined on one side with courtyard windows and saw the main office, it was like coming out of a tunnel. I ran the rest of the way to the nurse’s door.

  Mrs. Edwards was thin and old. She kept her gray hair long and always wore her white nursing cap and uniform. I never saw her give out any medicine or cure anybody of anything, but she was nice. If she bought your story, she’d send you home. Mary, who visited her frequently, had told me that if the coffee in Mrs. Edwards’s cup was dark, she’d make you stay, but if it was light, she’d call home and have someone come and pick you up.

  The nurse asked me what was wrong with me, and I told her. When she went into the little room in her office where she kept supplies and a cot for sick kids, I stepped closer to her desk and looked into her cup. There was coffee the blond color of the club with the dice, and inside I felt like Pop winning a double. Mrs. Edwards came back and choked me with a
wooden stick, checked my ears with a flashlight, and banged my knees with a rubber hammer. Then she told me to go lie down on the cot in the sickroom.

  “Take your sneakers off first,” she said.

  It was dark in the small room, with the exception of a sliver of light coming in the half-closed door to the larger office. I lay there peering at the opening, listening hard to hear if she was calling Nan. She made a phone call, mumbled for a few minutes, and hung up. A second later the door opened wider, and she was standing over me.

  “I’m going out to use the lavatory,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

  I nodded, hoping I looked as miserable as I was trying to. She pulled at the door, leaving it a bit ajar. I heard the outer office door open and close, and then silence. In my thoughts I pictured the cup of light coffee and saw Nan getting into the blue Impala. For a few seconds, I was pleased with myself, until another thought broke through. Jim and I hadn’t told Mary that Lou was Mr. White. Jim had said not to, because it would scare her too much. Now she’d be left at the school with him roaming around and not know. She’d have to walk home by herself. I tried to talk myself out of its being a problem, but in the end I knew I couldn’t leave her. As soon as the nurse came back, I’d tell her I was okay. A little while later, I heard the door to the office open and close. I got off the cot and went to talk to Mrs. Edwards, but just as I reached for the doorknob, I smelled pipe smoke. Through the opening I saw a bristled broom head pushing red stuff around the floor. I nearly cried out. I heard Jim’s voice in my head, telling me to hurry up in Mr. White’s garage. I stepped quietly backward, got down on the floor, and slid under the cot. My cheek rested against the cold floor as I stared hard through the opening into the outer office.

  Three times I saw the broom go by, followed by Lou’s big sneakered feet. He was working his way across the office, getting closer and closer to the sickroom. I thought of the penknife in my coat pocket back in the closet in Krapp’s room. Then he was right outside, his shadow blocking the light from the office. Even above the pounding of my heart, I heard him sniffing the air like an animal. He pushed the door open, and as his left foot moved forward, I heard Mrs. Edwards’s voice. “Hi, Lou.”

  He backed away from the door and turned around. “Just about done here,” he said, and moved out of sight. I slid out from beneath the cot and got onto it, knowing that Mrs. Edwards would be looking in to check on me.

  “Okay, that’s it,” I heard Lou say.

  “Thanks,” said the nurse.

  Lou had left my door open wider than before, and as he passed by on his way out, he turned his head and stared in at me. When he saw me lying there, his eyes widened. He hesitated for a fraction of a second and then smiled.

  I told Mrs. Edwards I was better, and she sent me back to class. On the trip through the hallways I scurried like an insect but slowed when I passed Room X. The teacher was at the blackboard writing numbers, and I saw Mary sitting next to the Mechanical Crab, her eyes closed, mumbling to herself. I didn’t see Lou again for the rest of the day. When I found Mary after school, I told her to hurry, and we walked quickly toward home. On the way I told her that Mr. White was Lou. She nodded but said nothing.

  Another sleepless night, and the next day my mother made egg-salad sandwiches for our lunch bags. Their fart stench swirled around me as we walked to school. Jim had told me he’d come up with a plan by that night, but we had to go another whole day. He knew I was on the verge of just telling our parents everything. In the meantime he taught Mary some karate moves. Every step we took was dreadfully slow. When we passed Mrs. Grimm’s house, Mary said to me, “I’ll poke his eyes like Moe.”

  “Good,” I said.

  By the time we got to school, almost late, we came through the front door, and there was Boris the janitor in his baggy shirt and work gloves, pushing the broom. It was just us and him in the foyer of the school.

  “Boris, where were you?” I said to him.

  He stopped sweeping and looked up. He shrugged. “I run away,” he said.

  In the following days, Boris’s story came to us through our mother at dinner as she relayed whatever gossip Nan had picked up from the neighborhood ladies. She told us that someone had put a letter in Boris’s mailbox that said they were after him. He got scared and ran away for a while. He visited a cousin in Michigan. The police were investigating it, but Boris had lost the letter. My mother laughed at this last fact. “That figures,” she said. “Sounds like he was on a bender.”

  For Jim, Boris’s return called into question Mary’s powers. Even with all she had been right about, he let this one thing convince him we’d been fooling ourselves. “It makes sense that Mr. White has Mr. Clean bottles at his house,” he said. “He’s a janitor. Barzita did get hit by the snowplow, and Charlie must have fallen into the lake by accident. It’s all coincidence.” I went along with him because I also wanted it to be true.

  All Mary said was “Who sent the letter to Boris?” I never asked, “What about the orange paper and ribbon?”

  Spring stuck its big toe into winter, and we let the investigation drop as the days grew a little brighter, a little warmer. I was slowly forgetting my fear, and at night, without the howling of the winter wind, the antenna was silent. Charlie no longer had a voice. His sullen, sodden presence behind the open closet door became increasingly easy to ignore, to pretend it was nothing.

  Children of All Ages

  My mother had seen them setting up the tents in the empty lot next to where she worked in Farmingdale. Every night at dinner, on our way to Bermuda, we detoured to the circus. On Saturday we finally went—us three kids and our mother. She put on lipstick and curled her hair, but she was still pale in her turquoise dress and green overcoat. Her perfume was suffocating.

  She smoked with the car windows closed, the sharp haze burning my nose hair as we watched the towns roll by. On the radio, Elvis sang “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” We passed the college, which rose up out of a vast field like a city from a science-fiction movie. Jim was always happy to go anywhere, and Mary wanted to see the clowns. I didn’t care about the circus, but I made believe I was excited.

  We parked at the edge of a wide field. The ground was total mud, and on the walk to the tents my mother lifted her whole foot out of her stuck shoe more than once. We gathered before a stand where a midget with a mustache sat. He wore a top hat and a coat with red and white stripes.

  My mother paid for our admission, and the midget looked angrily up at us as he handed her the four tickets. We stood around until there were no more people coming from the parking lot. When he’d sold the last ticket, the midget stood up and lifted a megaphone.

  “Ladies and gentlemen and children of all ages,” I think he said, but anything that came after was muffled.

  “What’s he saying?” asked Jim.

  My mother shrugged and tossed her cigarette into the mud.

  The midget’s harangue went on and on. From somewhere he’d gotten a cane, and every once in a while he rapped the tabletop in front of him. Mary put her hands over her ears. When he finally finished, we moved slowly past him with the rest of the crowd. In amid the maze of yellow tents, I did catch a spark of excitement, because there was a whole row of them filled with the sideshow. Paintings, full of color and wild images, which hung outside each tent, told what was behind its flaps. The first one in the row was for Sweet Marie, a fat woman. The picture showed a woman like a Thanksgiving Day parade balloon, perfectly round, sitting on a bench knitting.

  “Sweet Marie,” said Jim, and he pointed to Mary.

  Mary shook her head and said, “You are.”

  My mother led the way into the dark tent. Other people were already inside. Beneath one bare bulb, like the sun of Botch Town, up on a small stage that bowed under her weight, sat Sweet Marie. She had on only a skirt and a bra, so you could see all the mounds and folds and blobs of fat. There was a light blue bow in her hair, and her face was like a beer belly with eyes and a mou
th. My mother whispered, “Disgusting,” and sent us up front for a better look. Jim led me right to the edge of the stage in front of her. The air there was thick with the smell of straw, canvas, her body odor, and cigarette smoke. I looked up at her face and only then noticed that she had a goatee beard. I backed away.

  “No pictures,” she said. “If you want a photo, I have signed photos here for a quarter.” She held one up. The shot was of her lying on a rug in a bathing suit big enough to drown in. Scrawled in Magic Marker, I think it said “Sweet on you, Marie.” People started leaving.

  “You’ll look, but you don’t want my picture,” she said with an edge to her voice. “Buy a picture.”

  My mother called us to her, saying, “That’s enough of this.” We followed. Outside, she said, “Good Christ, this is a dump,” and laughed. “Let’s see what else they have.”

  The painting for Mr. Electric was of a young, muscular man, drawing lightning bolts down from dark clouds. Inside the tent we found an old guy with glasses and a World War I flying helmet covered in sequins. He put a lightbulb in his mouth, and it lit up. The next tent housed a guy in an old-fashioned uniform with gold fringe on the shoulders and a hundred buttons. Admiral Gullet swallowed swords and fire. Jim and I liked it that when he burped, smoke came out. The rubber lady was in a box with three sides so we could see in, and there was a sling around her right arm. My mother laughed about that for the next two tents.

  The last tent in the row of sideshows was one you had to pay extra to enter. “The Blood-Sweating Hippo” was the attraction, but there was no painting for it. It was top secret. My mother hesitated at the entrance and said, “It’s almost time for the show in the big tent. If we have time after that, we’ll come back to this.”