The Shadow Year

by Jeffrey Ford

  I went across the hallway and tapped very lightly on Jim’s door. There was no answer. “Jim,” I whispered. Nothing. I tapped again. Then I heard the springs of his bed, his feet on the floor. He opened the door dressed in his pajama pants. His eyes squinted, and his hair was in a whirl.

  “What d’ya want?” he said.

  “I forgot to make the moon for Krapp.”

  A few seconds passed, like he’d fallen back to sleep on his feet. “Is it due today?”

  “Yeah.”

  He smiled and shook his head. “Now you’re at my mercy,” he said.

  “He’s gonna kill me if I don’t have it.”

  “You’ll be in detention for a week. He’ll make you write, five hundred times, ‘When Krapp Says Make the Moon, Make It.’”

  “I’m begging,” I said.

  “What time is it?” he asked.

  “Dad just left for work.”

  “Okay,” he said. “But later.”

  “It’s going to take a while, isn’t it? We should start now.”

  “I said I’ll do it. Go away.”

  He shut the door, and I heard him roll back into his bed.

  I couldn’t sit still. I even tried to think of some way to make the moon on my own, but every idea I had vanished as soon as it appeared. What was frustrating was that I could see it clearly, the image from my dream. No matter what else I thought about, it was also there, hovering in the background. I washed and dressed, brushed my teeth and combed my hair. Then I paced back and forth in my room, practicing excuses that I knew had no chance with Krapp.

  We had to leave for school by eight o’clock. Mary and I would walk to East Lake, and Jim would catch the bus at the corner across from Barzita’s. That morning he didn’t get up until seven, and then he decided he needed a shower. I was so mad at him, but I knew not to say anything. He ate his cereal like an old man, lifting the spoon to his mouth as if it weighed ten pounds. He chewed in slow motion, a smile on his face. It was 7:35 by the time he put his bowl and spoon in the sink. We had a little more than maybe fifteen minutes if we hustled. He stretched and yawned.

  “Okay,” he said, “let’s go.”

  I followed him down the cellar steps. He turned the light on. Then he stood rubbing his chin and his head, saying “Hmmmmm,” like Betty Boop’s Pappy. He walked over to the little table next to his chair that held his supply of junk for Botch Town and pushed the mess around with both hands.

  The cellar door opened. “What are you guys doing down there?” my mother called.

  “I’m looking for my compass for school,” he said.

  “It’s almost quarter of,” she said. “You’ve got to get going soon.”

  “Be right up,” he said.

  “The Glory That Was Grease” went through my mind, and I was just about to curse him out when he knelt down and pulled a box from under the table. He opened it, and inside was a plastic bag. After unrolling the plastic, he reached into it and came out with two handfuls of gray clay, the stuff of the inhabitants of Botch Town. He placed the two clumps on the table, rolled back the plastic, and slid the closed box back into its place.

  “One moon for Krapp, coming right up,” he said, standing, rubbing his hands. He lifted the two hunks of clay and mashed them together. When they were melded into one big piece, he began rolling it, rolling it, rolling it, faster and faster, like he was making a meatball. When it was a perfect sphere, he really went to work on it, pressing into it with his thumb, pinching pieces up, digging with his pinkie nail. I couldn’t believe it, but when he was done, holding his creation between his thumb and forefinger at its poles, it really looked like the moon.

  “There you go,” he said. “Krapp’ll never be the same.”

  “How will I carry it without wrecking it?” I said.

  “Easy,” he said, and looked down, surveying his junk collection again. He reached in and pulled out an old wooden Popsicle stick and stuck it into the bottom of my moon. “Moonsicle,” he said, holding it out to me. “I should sell the idea to Softee.”

  “Hurry up,” my mother called from the cellar door. Jim ran up the steps, and I followed more slowly, holding the moon in front of me like one of Mrs. Grimm’s candy apples.

  My mother had already gone out to her car. Mary had her coat on and was waiting for me by the front door.

  “What’s that?” she asked, pointing.

  “The moon,” said Jim. He brushed past us and left. “It looks great, doesn’t it?” he called back from the front steps.

  I’d gotten my arm into one sleeve of my jacket, but as I switched hands with the moon to get the other in, I banged the soft clay against the banister. There was a small dent where it had hit, which I felt like a wound in my side.

  All the way to school, kids laughed at my moonsicle and flaunted their own huge creations of baked and painted plaster or papier-mâché balloons. Still, I held that stick carefully, not letting the weight of the clay ball topple it from my grip. It was the only thing standing between me and Krapp.

  I got to Krapp’s room and was heading for the coat closet when someone gave my elbow a shove. My arm flew straight out, but I held tight. Unfortunately, the moon didn’t. It flew three feet through the air and then landed with a plop on the floor. I wanted to turn and see who’d hit me, but just then Hodges Stamper was backing away from the closet. I heard Hinkley laughing as I lunged for the clay. Too late. Without realizing it, Stamper stamped one half of it into a pancake with his heel. I considered just kicking it into the dark part of the coat closet, but then Krapp called for us to take our seats. With one good jab, I skewered the mess that was my moon.

  Everybody had a moon project on his or her desk, and each was more amazing than the next. Pat Trepedino’s could actually have been the moon. I just sat there holding my stick. Krapp started his inspection, up and down the aisles. He made no comment as he went. You could hear him sniffing like a bloodhound for failure. Finally he got to me, and he looked down at the thing I held in my hand. I stared up at him.

  “It got stepped on,” I said. I darted a glance up the next row and saw Hinkley smile.

  Krapp leaned over and, extending his thumb and forefinger, clasped the wooden stick, relieving me of the weight of my flattened moon. Once it was in his hand, he walked up to his desk and dropped it into the trash. It hit with a clunk, and I could feel the other kids wanting to laugh.

  He said nothing. Then the other kids were called one at a time to the front of the room to explain how they had made their moons. Only once, when Mitchell Erikson told how his was molded out of Plasticine and how he and his father shot it with BBs to make the craters authentic, did Krapp look over at me and sigh. After the last bell of the day sounded, as I was slinking toward the coat closet, he called me up to his desk.

  He waited until the last of the kids was out of the room and said, “Your moon was pathetic. You have till tomorrow to make me a real moon.”

  I nodded.

  “And it better not come on a stick,” he added.

  Mary was waiting for me outside the school. I told her to hurry, and I walked as fast as I could, breaking into a run when we got to the Masons’ lawn. Inside the house I ditched my book bag on the couch and headed for Nan and Pop’s door. I didn’t even say hello before I told them that I needed plaster.

  “What for?” asked Nan, looking up from her latest paint-by-number.

  “I have to make the moon.”

  “You’re going to make the moon out of plaster?” said Pop, and he laughed.

  “It’s for school, and I have to do it today.”

  Nan looked over at Pop and said, “Go get him some plaster.”

  Pop put out his cigarette and said, “Yes, Your Highness.”

  He got dressed in his baggy pants and a button-down shirt, and off we went in the blue Impala. At the hardware store, the guy behind the counter asked, “What do you need it for?”

  Pop said, “Ask the kid,” as he pulled some bills from his pocke
t.

  “I don’t have to ask the kid,” said the guy, and he laughed loud. “Making the moon, right?”

  Pop just held out his hand for the change.

  “I’ve sold ten boxes of plaster this week.”

  We left, and as we were passing through the door, Pop said, “Dimwit,” and I wasn’t sure if he meant me or the hardware guy.

  On the way home, he pulled in to the parking lot shared by the deli and Mr. Pizza and the drugstore. He killed the engine.

  “Here,” he said. “Go into the deli and get a quart of skim milk.” He handed me a dollar. “I’m going up to the drugstore to get my prescription. I’ll meet you back here in a couple of minutes.”

  “Can I get a piece of bubble gum?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Get one for the other kids, too.”

  I took the money, nodded, and we got out of the car. Pop headed down toward the pharmacy, and I went into the deli. The deli always smelled like a holiday. Rudy, the little German guy who owned it, always wore a white apron. He cooked and prepared everything he sold right in the back of the store—potato salad, coleslaw, meatballs, roast turkey, pot roast, dumplings. It was all displayed on a field of greenery beneath a length of glass curved like the windshield of a car. I slid open the door of the cold case and grabbed a bottle of milk. Rudy asked how my parents were, and I told him, “Fine,” as I dug three pieces of Bazooka out of a plastic bucket next to the cash register.

  “And you are being good?” he said, smiling.

  I nodded, pocketed two pieces of the gum, and took the change. As I left, he called, “Tell your mother I have fish cakes.”

  Out on the sidewalk, I held the bottle of milk under my arm as I worked to open my piece of Bazooka. I shoved the pink rectangle into my mouth. It took some strong tooth work to turn the little rock into something pliable. While I went at it, I read the tiny comic it came wrapped in. Bazooka Joe, a kid with an eye patch and a baseball hat, and his friend Mort, who wore the collar of his red sweater up over his mouth, were standing next to a rocket ship. Neither the jokes nor the fortunes printed beneath the comics ever made any sense, but I read them anyway, getting my full penny’s worth.

  As I shoved the crumpled comic into my pants pocket, I felt a hand close around my elbow and a large body push against me. At first I thought it was Pop, but he’d just have called my name. I looked up and realized I was being pushed to the edge of the sidewalk, toward the alley that ran between a high chain-link fence and the wall of the deli. Turning my head, all I saw was a flap of white material.

  We turned into the alley. “Move your ass,” Mr. White said, a bead of spit hitting my cheek. The thought that at any second he might snap my neck made me go slack, and I dropped the milk bottle. I heard it crash against the asphalt, and when it did, Mr. White shoved me harder, and the wad of Bazooka shot out of my mouth. That woke me up, and I started struggling. But he held on tight, his grip ice cold, and pressed me up against the wall. I tried to scream, but he leaned in next to me, his sour breath in my nose. My throat closed. I pushed off the wall, and he pushed me, and I hit the back of my head against the concrete. Things got woozy, and all of a sudden my arms and legs started to tingle.

  Then Mr. White spun away from me, and I saw Pop behind him in the alley.

  “What the hell d’ya think you’re doing?” Pop yelled.

  Mr. White brought his arm up, striking like a cobra, and his fingers squeezed into Pop’s left shoulder. Pop grunted once and his knees buckled slightly, but at the same time he swung with his free right hand, a perfect punch straight out of Jamaica Arena. It hit Mr. White square on the left temple, so hard his hat was knocked sideways, pushing White back two steps, his overcoat flapping. With that momentum he turned and ran down the alley like a spider on his long legs, his shoes clicking on the pavement, his hand clamped to the hat to hold it on. In a blink he was gone around behind the stores.

  By that time I was crying, and Pop pulled me into a hug. The broken milk bottle crunched beneath our feet as we left the alley. He led me back to the car and opened the door for me. He got in behind the wheel and put the key in the ignition. “We’re gonna get that son of a bitch,” he said, rubbing his shoulder. He backed the car out. Next thing I knew, we were parked at the police station.

  We sat at a table in a wood-paneled room. There was an American flag on a stand in the corner, and a framed portrait of President Johnson on the wall. A cop sat across from us, pen in hand, taking down what Pop told him. Every once in a while, when he stopped writing to ask a question, the cop wiggled in his seat, full of what I guessed was excitement.

  “Have you ever seen this man before?” he asked, and I realized he was talking to me.

  “Ever see him?” Pop asked.

  I nodded.

  “Where’d you see him?” said the cop.

  “He was a janitor in our school for a couple of days.”

  “Boris? At East Lake?” the cop asked.

  “When Boris was gone,” I said. “His name is Lou.”

  “I’ll have to get some information from the school, and then we can put out an APB,” he said to Pop, as if I weren’t there.

  “I know where he lives,” I said.

  The cop looked over at me. “Really? Where?”

  “Around behind the stores.”

  “Can you take me there now?”

  I nodded.

  Pop and I sat in the back of the police car, and the cop drove. We parked outside Mr. White’s house. “There’s another car on the way. When they get here, tell them I went inside.” He drew his gun and held it pointing straight up, checking it. “Stay in the car,” he said, looking at us through the rearview mirror, and then he opened his door and went around the side of the house toward the back.

  “Dick Tracy,” said Pop. He lit a cigarette. “How did you know where this guy lives?” he asked.

  I was thinking of being locked inside the freezer in the garage. “A kid in school who lives over here told me.”

  He took a drag on his butt and considered what I’d told him. “How are you doing?” he asked.

  I nodded yet again but didn’t say anything.

  “Well, my shoulder hurts like hell where he grabbed me. Must have been some kind of pressure point or something.”

  Another black-and-white car with two cops in it passed by and pulled over to park in front of us. Pop got out and told them that the first cop had gone inside. They drew their guns and went around back. I kept listening for gunshots and death screams, but the day was perfectly blue and calm. The new leaves of the trees around the house rustled quietly.

  “I don’t know why I went to look for you down that alley,” Pop said. “Another couple of minutes and you could have been gone.”

  “Chimto,” I said.

  “That dog doesn’t miss a trick.”

  The cops returned a few minutes later. Our officer, his gun back in his holster, got into the car and said, “He’s cleared out. Looks like whoever was there threw stuff together quickly. We might’ve just missed him. We’ll tell the school to warn the kids, and we’ll run it in the newspaper. Even if he crosses state lines, we’ll get him.”

  Back at the police station I told them what Mr. White’s car looked like, but I was afraid to say any more. Pop called home to let Nan know what had happened. By the time we passed through the front door of the house, my mother was home. She was waiting for me. As soon as I saw her, I started crying again, and she put her arms around me. “It’s okay,” she said. “You’re okay.”

  Time of the Season

  And then the Shadow Year rolled on. The thought of Mr. White fleeing town with the police on his tail assured us it was over. We left Botch Town to its own devices and all slept better. Jim took the money he’d saved from birthdays and holidays and bought an old guitar. Mary suddenly stopped figuring the horses and spent more time outside with her new real friend, Emily, from Cuthbert Road. The girl was tall and skinny, with a big nose and long hair that covered her
face. She and Mary smoked roll-ups back behind the forsythia. Their favorite song was “Time of the Season.”

  The only reminder I had of my near abduction was when I saw Pop rub his shoulder where Mr. White had grabbed him. He told me one afternoon, “That guy put the touch on me.” Still, that was enough of a reminder so that I never went anywhere alone. I spent my free time writing my own version of Perno Shell’s last adventure, and I avoided having to make the moon. My mother called Cleary and told him I had to take it easy for the rest of the school year and that I was going to pass to the next grade no matter what. Cleary didn’t argue.

  On the final day of school, fifteen minutes before the last bell rang, Krapp got out of his chair and stepped to the front of the room. We were eating cupcakes with sprinkles and drinking soda brought in by Pat Trepedino’s mother. The kids were all talking and milling around the warm classroom.

  “Well, we had a good year,” said Krapp. I think I was the only one paying attention to him. “I hope you remember your lessons and that you all enjoy the junior high,” he said, speaking to the back wall. He looked around and then returned to his desk. When the bell rang, there was a loud cheer from all over the school. I was slow gathering my things. I didn’t want to leave East Lake in the wild rush to summer but rather to walk one last time down the quiet hallways.

  Leaving the classroom, I turned and said good-bye to Krapp. He looked up at me, waved with a flick of his pencil, and went back to his work. As I passed through the door into the hall, his chair tipped back, and just like that, he fell slowly into my past. The halls were as quiet as the night I had roamed them with Jim and Ray. I caught a whiff of the library, the hot dogs and beans from lunch, and, always, the red stuff. My report card, though far from good, showed that I had graduated from the Retard Factory. I went through the open front doors, and summer was there to meet me—a warm breeze, a blue sky, someone mowing a lawn somewhere. Mary was waiting, and we’d never walked home so slowly.