Free The Shadow Year by Jeffrey Ford Page B

Fonseca Pulverizer in the side muscle of my right arm that deadened it for a good five minutes. As he left me behind in the bushes, he called back, “You’ll believe anything.”
    In silent revenge I thought back to the night a few years earlier when my parents had told Jim and me that there was no Santa Claus. Just that afternoon Jim and I had been lying on our stomachs in the snow, trying to peer into the cellar, which had been off-limits since Thanksgiving. “I see a bike,” said Jim. “Christ, I think I see Robot Commando.” But when my mother dropped the bomb that there was no Santa Claus, I was the one who simply nodded. Jim went to pieces. He sat down in the rocking chair by the front window, the snow falling in huge flakes outside in the dark, and he rocked and sobbed with his hands covering his face for the longest time.
    I left the bushes and went inside to dig around in the couch cushions for change. I found a nickel and decided to ride to the store and get a couple pieces of Bazooka. There was still an hour left before my mother got home from work and made dinner. The sun was already setting when I left the house. Night was coming sooner and sooner each day, and I rode along wondering what I should be for Halloween. I took the back way to the store, down Feems Road, and wasn’t paying much attention to what was going on around me when I suddenly woke up to the scent of a vaguely familiar aroma.
    A few feet in front of me, parked next to the curb, was a white car. I knew I had seen it before but couldn’t recall where. Only when I was next to it and looked in the open passenger-side window to see a man sitting in the driver’s seat, did I remember. The fins, the bubble top, the old curved windshield—it was the car that had stopped the night we dragged Mr. Blah-Blah across the street. As I passed, I saw the man inside, wearing a white trench coat and white hat. He was smoking a pipe. His face was thin, with a sharp nose, and his eyes squinted as if he were studying me.
    I panicked and took off down the sidewalk, pedaling as fast as I could. Behind me I heard the car start up, and that pushed me to pump even faster. I made it around the turn that led to the stores but didn’t stop. Instead of heading left to the deli, I made a right on Hammond and rode all the way down to Willow and back home. I was almost home and thoroughly winded when I finally stopped to see if he was still behind me. The street was empty, and night was only a few minutes away.
    I didn’t want to tell Jim what had happened, because I knew he would laugh, but I couldn’t shake the memory of the way that guy had stared at me. It took a lot of effort to put him out of my mind. Mom came home, we had dinner and did our homework and went next door to listen to Pop play the mandolin, and after a few hours I was able to forget him. When I went to bed, though, and opened the novel about Perno Shell in the Amazon, that face came floating back into my mind’s eye. Pipe smoke! The same exact scent that had made me look up during the bike ride now emanated from the pages of my book.

It Must Have Been the Black Olives
    The next day Pop had to drive over to the school and pick Mary up. She was running a high fever and feeling sick to her stomach. Something was definitely making the rounds at East Lake. When my class was in the library that afternoon, Larry March, the boy who smelled like ass, puked without warning all over the giant dictionary that old Mr. Rogers, the librarian, kept on a pedestal by the window. Larry was escorted to the nurse’s office, and Boris the janitor was called in, pushing his barrel of red stuff and carrying a broom. I don’t know what that red stuff was, but in my imagination it was composed of grated pencil erasers and its special properties absorbed the sins of children. He used about two snow shovels full in the library that day. As Boris disposed of the ruined