The Shadow Year Read Online Free PDF Page B

with the exception of the lake in the woods, whose deep blue oval was covered with glitter.
    I left Jim there, contemplating his miniature world, and went back upstairs to record what we’d so far discovered.

Dead Man’s Float
    I sat at the desk in my room, the open notebook in front of me, a pencil in my hand, and stared out the window, trying to recall all the details surrounding the prowler. There was the old ladder and the footprint, sitting, like a dirt layer cake, in a pink hatbox in the shed. I could have started with Mrs. Conrad and her ass, or just her scream.
    But, in fact, I didn’t know where to start. Although from the time I was six, I had always loved writing and reading, I didn’t feel much like recording evidence. Then, through the open window, I heard the Farleys’ back screen door groan open and slam shut. I stood and looked out to see what was going on. It was Mr. Farley, carrying a highball in one hand and a towel in the other. He was dressed in his swimming trunks, his body soft and yellow-white. His head seemed too heavy for the muscles of his neck, and it drooped forward, making him look as if he were searching for something he’d dropped in the grass.
    The Farleys’ pool was a child’s aboveground model, larger than the kind you blow up but no bigger than three feet deep and no wider than eight across. Mr. Farley set his drink down on the picnic table, draped his towel over the thickest branch of the cherry tree, shuffled out of his sandals, and stepped gingerly over the side into the glassy water.
    He trolled the surface, inspecting every inch for beetles andbees that might have escaped the draw of the noisy little filter that ran constantly. He fetched up blackened cherry leaves from the bottom with his toes and tossed them into the yard. Only then did he sit, cautiously, the liquid rising to accommodate his paunch, his sagging chest and rounded shoulders, until his head bobbed on the surface. Gradually he dipped forward, bringing his legs underneath him. His arms stretched out at his sides, his legs straightened behind him, his back broke the surface, and his face slipped beneath the water, leaving one bright bubble behind in its place.
    He floated there for a moment, his body stretched tautly across the center of the pool, and there came an instant when the rigid raft of his form gave way to death. His arms sank slowly, and his body curled like a piece of dough in a deep fryer. Mr. Farley really could do a mean dead man’s float. I wondered if he left his eyes open, letting them burn with chlorine, or if he closed them in order to dream more deeply into himself.
    I sat back down at my desk, and instead of writing about the investigation I wrote about Mr. Farley. After describing him getting into the pool and fake-drowning, I recorded two other incidents I remembered. The first had to do with his older son, Gregory, who had since moved away from home. When the boy was younger, Farley, an engineer who made tools for flights into outer space, tried to get his son interested in astronomy and science. Instead the kid wanted to be an artist. Mr. Farley didn’t approve. Before Gregory left home for good, he made a giant egg out of plaster of paris and set it up in the middle of the garden in the backyard. It sat there through months of wind and rain and sun and eventually turned green. On the day after the astronauts walked on the moon, Mr. Farley sledgehammered the thing into oblivion.
    The second incident happened one day when my father and I were raking leaves on the front lawn. Suddenly the Farleys’ front door opened and there he stood, weaving slightly, highball in hand. My father and I both stopped raking. Mr. Farley started down the steps tentatively, and with each step his legs buckled a little more until he stumbled forward, his knees landing on the lawn. He remained kneeling for an instant and then tipped forward, falling face-first onto the ground.