The Shadow Year by Jeffrey Ford Read Free Book Online

the things that he owned: the leopard-skin rug, the shrunken head, the axes and knives and ancient pistols. Otherwise he was a pretty blank person, save for his toupee, which sat on his head like a doily. Mavis, on the other hand, had been born in Ireland, in the town of Cork, and had the most beautiful way of talking. She had grown up with the actor Richard Harris, who sang the song about the cake in the rain.
    By the time I was done, it was quiet downstairs, and I knew that my parents had finally gone to bed. Still, I wasn’t tired, and on top of that I was a little spooked by the day’s events. Any thought of death was capable of conjuring the angry spirit of Teddy Dunden. To dispel his gathering presence, I got out of bed and tiptoed quietly down the stairs. In the kitchen I stole a cookie, and that’s when I decided to visit Botch Town.
    Every old wooden step on the way to the cellar groaned miserably, but my father’s snoring, rolling forth from the bedroom at the back of the house, covered my own prowling. Once below, I inched blindly forward, and when my hip touched the edge of the plywood world, I leaned way over and grabbed the pull string. The sun came out in the middle of the night in Botch Town. I half expected the figures to scurry, but no, they must have heard me coming and froze on cue. Peering down on the minute lives made me think for an instant about my own smallness.
    Scanning the board, I found the prowler, with his straight-pin hands, on the prowl, hiding in the toothpick grape arbor netted with vines of green thread behind Mavis and Dan’s house across the street from ours, his clever, glowing eyes like beacons searching the dark.

The Retard Factory
    School started on a day so hot it seemed stolen from the heart of summer. The tradition was that if you got new clothes for school, you wore them the first day. My mother had made Mary a couple of dresses on the sewing machine. Because he’d outgrown what he had, Jim got shirts and pants from Gertz department store. I got his hand-me-downs, but I did also get a new pair of dungarees. They were as stiff as concrete and, after months of my wearing nothing but cutoffs, seemed to weigh fifty pounds. I sweated like the Easter pig, shuffling through school zombie style, to the library, the lunchroom, on the playground, and all day long that burlap scent of new denim smelled like the spirit of work.
    Jim was starting seventh grade and was going to Hammond Road Junior High. He had to take a bus to get there. Mary and I were still stuck at the Retard Factory around the corner. None of us was a good student. I spent most of my time in the classroom either completely confused or daydreaming. Mary should have been in fourth grade but instead was in a special class in Room X, basically because they couldn’t figure out if she was really smart or really simple. The kids they couldn’t figure out, they put in Room X. Although all the other classrooms had numbers, this one had just the letter that signaled somethingcut-rate, like on the TV commercials: Brand X. When I’d pass by that room, I’d look in and see these wacky kids hobbling around or mumbling or crying, and there would be Mary, sitting straight up, focused, nodding every once in a while. Her teacher, Mrs. Rockhill, whom we called “Rockhead,” was no Mrs. Harkmar and didn’t have the secret to draw the Mickey of all right answers out of her. I knew Mary was really smart, though, because Jim had told me she was a genius.
    Once they called Jim into the psychologist’s office and made my mother go over to the school and witness the tests they gave him. They showed him pages of paint blobs and asked him what he saw in them. “I see a spider biting a woman’s lip,” he said, and, “That’s a sick three-legged dog, eating grass.” Then they asked him to put pegs of various shapes into appropriate holes in a block of wood. He shoved all