The Shadow Year by Jeffrey Ford Read Free Book Online Page B

surfaced twice more. The Hayeses’ teenage daughter, Marci, spotted him spotting her sitting on the toilet late one night. The Mason kid, Henry, who regularly proclaimed in school that he would someday be president, found the shadow man in their darkened garage, crouching in the corner behind the car when he took out the empty milk bottles after dinner. As he told Jim and me later when we went to talk to him about it, “He ran by me so fast I didn’t see him, but his air was cold.”
    â€œWhat do you mean, ‘his air was cold’?” asked Jim.
    â€œIt smelled cold.”
    â€œUnlike yours?” said Jim.
    Henry nodded.
    That evening, down in the cellar, Jim made tiny red flags out of sewing needles and construction paper and stuck them into the turf of Botch Town in all the spots we knew that the prowler had been. When he was done, we stepped back and he said, “I saw this on Dragnet once. Just the facts. It’s supposed to reveal the criminal’s plan.”
    â€œDo you see any plan?” I asked.
    â€œThey’re all on our block,” he said, “but otherwise it’s just a mess.”
    Apparently we weren’t the only ones concerned about the prowler, because somebody called the cops. Thursday afternoon a police officer walked down the block, knocking on people’s doors, asking if they’d seen anything suspicious at night or if they’d heard someone in their backyard. When he got to our house, he spoke to Nan. As usual, Nan knew everything that happened on the street, and she gave the cop an earful. We hid in the kitchen and listened, and in the process we learned something we hadn’t known. It so happened that the Farleys had found a human shit at the bottom of their swimming pool, as if someone had sat on the rim and dropped it.
    When the cop was getting ready to leave, Jim stepped out of hiding and told him we had a footprint we thought belonged to the prowler. He smiled at us and winked at Nan but asked to see it. We led him back to the shed, and Jim went in and brought out the hatbox. He motioned for me to take the lid off, and I did. The cop bent over and peered inside.
    â€œNice job, fellas,” he said, and took the box with him, but later on, when I walked George around the block that night, I saw the pink cardboard box with its poodle and the Eiffel Tower jutting out of the Manginis’ open garbage can at the curb. I went over to it and peeked under the lid. The footprint was ruined, and I decided not to tell Jim.
    As George and I continued on our rounds, autumn came. We were standing at the entrance to East Lake beneath a full moon, and suddenly a great burst of wind rushed by. The leaves of the trees at the boundary of the woods beyond Sewer Pipe Hill rattled, some flying free of their branches in a dark swarm. Just like that, the temperature dropped. I realized that the crickets had gone silent, and I smelled a trace of Halloween.
    Down the block a wind chime that had been silent all summer sounded its cowbell call. I looked up at the stars and felt my mind start to wander, so I sat down at the curb. George sat next to me.
    That day in school, they had herded us into the cafeteria and showed us a movie, The Long Way Home from School. It was about kids playing on the train tracks and getting flattened by speeding trains or electrocuted on the third rail. The guy who narrated the stories looked like the father from Leave It to Beaver. He told one about kids thinking it was fun to climb on train cars and run across the tops. Little did they know that the train was about to pull out. When the movie showed the train starting to move, he said, “Oops, Johnny fell in between the cars and was crushed to death by tons of steel. It’s not so much fun when you’re flat as a pancake.” After that came a scene of a kid shooting a slingshot at a moving train crosscut with another scene of a little girl in a passenger compartment