The Shadow Year by Jeffrey Ford Page B

mother wasn’t working then, and if I didn’t feel like going to school, she let me stay home. I had genuinely discovered reading that year, and I lay in bed much of the time, devouring one book after another: Jason and the Argonauts, Treasure Island, The Martian Chronicles, Charlotte’s Web. It didn’t matter what type of story it was; the characters were more alive to me than all the students and teachers at East Lake.
    At lunchtime I would come out into the living room, and my mother would make the spaghetti, and we would watch an old movie. I was the only fourth grader who could identify Paul Muni or Leslie Howard on sight. I loved the mystery movies,their plots and the sense of suspense. My favorites were the ones with the Thin Man, and my mother, of course, was partial to Basil Rathbone as Holmes. Mr. Cleary threatened to keep me from passing fourth grade, but my mother went over to the school and told him I was passing, and I did.
    Remembering that year, I realized how different my mother was from other parents. That difference was like a light that always shone in the back of my mind no matter how dim things got when she’d drink. She scared me, and I hated what she became, but that light was like the promise of an eventual return to the way things once were. Those memories protected me as I fell a thousand stories down into sleep.
    I woke from that peaceful nap of no dreams only because Jim pried open my left eye with his thumb. “This one’s dead, Doctor,” he said. I came to and noticed twilight at the window, heard the sound of the wine bottle pinging the rim of a glass in the kitchen. The first thought I had was of Charlie at the bottom of the lake. Who could I tell who would believe what I thought I knew?
    After dinner my mother put the Kingston Trio on the Victrola and sat at the dining-room table drinking and reading the newspaper. Mary was on her roller skates, going round and round, following the outer curve of the braided rug in the living room. Inside her orbit, Jim showed me some of his wrestling moves.
    â€œCould you possibly…?” I heard my mother say, and then she called us over to her.
    Jim and I each went to one side of the chair. She pointed at a small photograph in the newspaper. “Look who that is,” she said.
    I didn’t recognize him at first because he wasn’t wearing his paper hat, but Jim finally said, “Hey, it’s Softee.”
    Then the long, haggard face came into focus, and I could just about hear him say, “What’ll it be, sweetheart?”
    My mother told us that he’d been arrested because he was wanted for child molestation in another state. For a while he’d been a suspect in the Charlie Edison case but had been cleared of that suspicion.
    â€œWhat’s child molestation?” I asked
    â€œIt means he’s a creep,” said my mother, and she turned the page.
    â€œHe gave some kid a Special Softee,” said Jim.
    My mother lifted the paper and swung it at him, but he was too fast.
    â€œWhat’s the world coming to?” she said, and took another sip of wine.
    That night I couldn’t get to sleep, partly because I had slept during the day and partly because my thoughts were full of all the dark things that had burrowed into my world. I pictured a specimen of Miter’s Sun fresh from the branch but riddled with wormholes. The antenna moaned in the wind, and it didn’t matter how close Perno Shell was to the golden streets of El Dorado—the aroma of pipe smoke made it impossible to concentrate on the book.
    I got up and went to my desk, opened the drawer, and took out my stack of Softee cards. The vanilla-cone head now struck me as sinister; leering with that frozen smile. I took them over to the garbage pail and dropped them in. Back in bed, though, all I could think of was the one card—the eyes—that I had never owned. I was unable to throw that card out, bury