Shadow Man: A Novel (14 page)

Another wave gathered. I rose toward the sky. I would have liked to have been alive when the pirates sailed this coast and the Indians hunted the rivers and marshes. Sphagnum moss holds eighty-one times its weight in water; we learned that in biology class. The quarterback for the Eagles practiced passing by throwing spirals through a tire swinging on a chain. Richard Nixon gave that silly over-the-head arm wave and disappeared in shame in a helicopter. He was a Quaker and his middle name was Milhous. Holy water and snowflakes felt the same on your forehead. I loved the scents of gasoline and chocolate, and of Mom’s powder after her bath, but Mom was gone and even though Kurt kept her powder near the tub, the way he kept the Clabber Girl Baking Soda near the toaster, the same Clabber Girl that Mom had opened on the day she died, the scent was not the same. I liked Chick-O-Sticks, but not Jujubes; I didn’t masturbate because I felt too alone afterward.

Kurt brushed alongside me.

“Let’s swim in.”

He beat me to shore. He rode a wave like a seal, skimming the
foam of the white break, gliding to land and walking to dry sand where he plopped on his back, beads of water shining over his browning body. I caught a wave, but it slammed me hard, sucked me up, and slammed me again. I felt like a cartoon character in one of those inky, tumbling spirals. Mister Magoo. I dropped on the blanket next to Kurt.

“You want to lie on the blanket?”

“No,” said Kurt. “The sand’s heat feels good.”

“Should we go check on Vera?”

“In a little while.”

“I like this beach.”

“Yeah.”

“When are we going back to Philly?”

“Got to be soon, I guess. We’re running out of money. It’s amazing, Jim, how hard it is to put money in a wallet, but how easily it falls out. One day you’re feeling rich with a bump in your back pocket, and then that bump gets smaller and smaller. What would it be like to be rich, really rich?”

“Like a rock star.”

“Richer. My dad was always trying get-rich schemes. You know he painted ships like me, but he’d try to invent stuff on weekends. Once he invented a new car wax. He tested it on one of my Matchbox cars and it worked. Those little cars shined. But then he and I went out and rubbed it on the hood of our Buick and it left this dull, ugly smudge and my mom about killed him. I liked, though, that he kept trying to think of something new.”

Kurt smiled.

“I wish we saw more of them.”

“Maybe we’ll go to Florida at Christmas. Dad likes to golf now. Seems to be what you do when you retire. Me, I’ll play tennis. I’ll live right next to a court in a warm place and play tennis every morning.”

“Sounds rich.”

“I’ll never be rich, Jim. How about you? You gotta go to college. Your mom wanted that, and with all those words you know, it should be a cinch.”

“I want to go, but I don’t know what I want to be.”

“Don’t paint ships. The world is gray when you paint ships.”

“Is that a joke?”

“I wish.”

“Tell me about Mom.”

The sun climbed higher. I heard a distant radio. The beach was filling up with wet dogs, Frisbees, coolers, and sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper.

“When we got married your mom told me she didn’t want a big wedding. I said, ‘Okay, let’s have a small one.’ I had just started at the shipyard, and I thought I’d invite a few friends and some family. But your mom said, ‘Smaller.’ What could be smaller? She said, ‘You, me, and Father Heaney.’ She didn’t want a big show and a big white dress and flowers in the aisle. She said she just wanted to be there with me in the quiet of the church. She said all the other stuff would take away from what was happening between us. That’s what we did. It was a Friday night in the candlelight of the church vestibule, your mom, me, Father Heaney, and an altar boy who slipped in at the last moment to hold the ring and be best man.”

Kurt propped up on his elbows and looked to the waves.

“I loved that about her the most, Jim. Your mom loved strong but she loved quiet.”

“Father Heaney must have been young.”

“Younger and a little heavier, maybe.”

“He’s heard all my sins.”

“What’s he do with all of them: yours, mine, the whole parish? I wonder what it’s like to match the sins of people with their faces.”

“He can’t see you through that purple cloth.”

“He can see you just fine.”

A Lab ran up and sniffed around me; its ocean-wet fur tickled.

“Why are we here, Kurt? With Vera?”

He bit his lip they way he did with Mom when he was stalling for time, not knowing exactly what to say.

“This woman, I can’t explain, bringing in this energy and way to forget. I just want to forget, Jim, just for a little while longer what happened near that snowbank last winter, what we left in that graveyard. I know it can’t be forgotten forever, but for a little while maybe we can get above it.”

“But the gun and the man from Marrakesh.”

“Think of her as Lizabeth Scott in tie-dye.”

“That’s not funny.”

“I don’t think there’s a man from Marrakesh, Jim. There might be; I can’t say for certain. That’s the thing about Vera. I think her imagination has crowded in on her life. For most people, it’s the other way around, but Vera is full of tiny worlds and many stories. I think, at least for now, she needs us and, Jim, we needed her.”

“Do you love her?”

“No. But I’m learning there can be other things between a man and a woman. At first, I thought I was cheating on your mom. I’d think about that hard at night, but your mom, no matter where she is, knows my heart. We have to carry on, Jim, any way we can.”

“Vera sure doesn’t like Howard Johnson’s.”

“Probably why the relationship is doomed.”

Kurt laughed. It was a strong laugh in the sun, near the water on the beach, mixing in with the wind and the waves like a part of nature. Do the dead look down from heaven? I decided not to ask Kurt. I lay back and thought about it myself, the sun warming my closed eyelids, making me see yellow-orange, a kind of glow, like being inside a broken egg. The man I met on the beach the other night, the science writer, he would have said no to my question. People can’t peek from heaven because there is no heaven and
there is no God; there are only bacteria and parasites, gnawing at the rims of good cells to sneak in and do damage. I was not that cynical, or maybe I was not that scientific. I believed in cells and spirits, a commingling of things like dead plankton floating, descending, falling onto the ocean bed or accumulating on reefs and the hulls of ships, giving new life, a kind of resurrection in the depths. Maybe it was that way in the sky and space, too, like those comets in Nut Johnson’s telescope; they could be fiery, galactic matter as easily as they could be souls racing between purgatory and paradise.

Purgatory’s a good word. It sounds and looks like what it is, a space, a floating wrinkle, or maybe a crack in the cosmos, a shelter or a holding cell, a place for sinners to purify before going to the light. Going to the light was a phrase repeated a lot by TV mystics — vacuum cleaner salesmen and women from New Mexico — who spoke of lying in hospital beds and glimpsing a tunnel and a light and feeling they should walk toward it. They never reached the light, never “crossed over” to the other side. They said it was God. I didn’t trust them. An element of trust went missing when you appeared on talk shows like Mike Douglas or Merv Griffin. If there was a light, something out there beyond the knowing, I hoped Mom went toward it, that her spirit left her body and floated over that snowbank and up over our neighborhood and beyond Philadelphia, and that she found warmth and grace, not the kind the people talked about but the pure uncommercial kind, the kind you can’t describe because the sensation is written with different words, words from another book, not the Bible, but a whole other book no one can decipher until soul and body part. I hoped that in the end the empirical (a word from biology class) and the spiritual became one.

I was sweating on the blanket; Kurt was sleeping in the sand. I sat up. The beach was full. I watched the girls in their bikinis; they moved like cheetahs. They were combed and polished, checking their tops and tan lines, flicking back their hair. The breeze from
the shoreline snaked up the beach like the cool currents in the deep water where the waves gathered.

I saw Vera walking with her macramé purse and fedora straw hat. She wore a black bikini instead of her blue one-piece; her skin was pale and smooth, her black hair scattered over her shoulders, and in the distance she moved toward us in determined steps, her footprints deep and straight-lined in the sand as if she were following a map, not a circuitous map, but a map drawn by a hand intimate with the subtleties of the land. She spotted me watching her and waved. Her smile was big on her slim face, and I still couldn’t tell if she was beautiful or not, but there was something about her that once you saw her you had to watch. I saw other men, their wives changing diapers or throwing Frisbees, watching, too. Maybe it was the color of her skin, or the way she moved, like a white stone melted to liquid. She looked like the Vera I had first met, not the one with the gun in her bag, but the one who on a rainy night in Philadelphia squeezed lemons into a pitcher and shoved it into our freezer. She was a little femme fatal, black and white and color, all at once; and maybe that was why the man from Marrakesh, if he existed, kept following her across America.

She sat in the sand. “I’m revived, Jim. I slept deeply and had many dreams, good dreams. I dreamed of a horse, a big white horse, a stallion, running through a souk and across the desert toward the sea. He had no rider. He was just big and free. His mane all tangled.”

She glanced over at Kurt.

“Look at him snoozing. He looks like a big, sunburned child. We’d better wake him and turn him soon. Thanks for your note. When I woke up I looked from the balcony and saw you two on the beach, father and son. That’s good, Jim. You think Kurt will like my new bathing suit?”

She got up and twirled. Her wet feet squeaked in the sand. I saw the raised circular scar, the color of cinnamon and milk, high on her
leg. It looked like the first time I saw it: the circumference of a coin, a bullet hole, an indentation, a frozen ripple of gathered skin.

“I need a tan on my stomach, though. It’s as white as new socks.”

She sat beside me on the blanket and kissed my cheek.

“We’re in no danger today, Jim. It’s our day. Your day, my day, Kurt’s day.”

She leaned back, pulled her fedora tight, narrowing her vision. The sun was hot. I rose and went to the water, diving in without thinking about the chill, letting it jolt me, stinging my browning skin. I stood in the waves. They were gentler than in the morning. The tide was shifting around me, imperceptible, nature and the moon conspiring in their work, tugging at the great body of water, changing the lines in the sand. I looked to Vera, a faint shell dabbed with black. Kurt was still sleeping. Something pushed me. A splash. I went under.

“Boy, you better pay attention.” Alice laughed as I surfaced. “I knocked you over easy.”

She dove in and slid up my body, her skin as cool as shaved ice. She let go, twirled in the gentle surf, and dove in again.

“Why aren’t you working? Who’s at the front desk?”

“My uncle,” she said. “I needed a swim and I saw you. How’s your room?”

“Fine.”

“Who’s that woman with you and your dad? It’s not your mom. I can tell a mom.”

“She’s a friend. Her name’s Vera.”

“She’s strange. The other night, it was real late, maybe three
AM
, she came down to the desk. Gave me a startle. Her one hand was shaking and she was trying to hold it still. She asked if we had any city maps. I gave her one and she unfolded it. She said she needed a more detailed map with every street and road. I told her that’s all we had. I smiled and said sorry. My daddy told me to do that when we couldn’t meet the needs of our customers. I told her I’d try to get
her a better map in the morning. She turned and went back to the elevator, not saying another word. It was strange, like she was sleepwalking or something, and the whole time that hand was shaking. Like it had a mind of its own.”

“She’s okay. She’s just odd sometimes. She’s traveled all over the world.”

I wasn’t going to tell Alice about Vera. We swam out to deeper water, our heads bobbing close to each other. Alice pulled up her top and hugged me while we floated. I had never felt a girl’s breasts on me; it was blurry beneath the water and I couldn’t see, but I could feel her shape pressed upon me; I could feel her cool, squeaky skin and the deeper warmth near her bones. Her body felt like two currents; her arms around my neck, I could hear her breathing in one ear, and I could hear the ocean in the other. I felt the world had shrunk, but I knew it hadn’t, and all anyone on the beach could see, if they were looking at all, was our bobbing heads; everything beneath, her breasts, her knees, her toes dangling against my toes, was invisible, even to me.

The sun was moving away from us and over the land, and the moon was gathering in the sky, not too pronounced, but just enough to let you know that night was coming with the new tide. Alice was weightless in my arms, insubstantial, holding me, brushing against me as we floated. We seemed like two fish circling and touching each other. Slippery breaths. I kissed her, soft, like on the balcony the other night. She tasted of salt, of the sea, and she kissed back. The water held us. Cool and warm currents spiraled around, and Alice kissed me again, the water lifting us toward the moon. We dipped in the wake of a wave as it rolled toward shore and rose again on a new wave gathering below us. I opened my eyes. Alice’s eyes were closed. Her hair floated on the water. We were far from shore, but I could see the umbrellas, like flowers in the sand, and the blankets, and the tall grass bending in the breeze on dunes near the houses
with painted white window frames and cedar sides, some dark as mulch, others faded to bone. Alice stopped kissing me and slipped her arms from around me; she straightened her top and swam gracefully away. I followed with a breaststroke, my arms and legs out of rhythm, but I was moving forward, a vessel, trailing Alice to the shore. She rode a wave in as if she were born from water. I caught a slow wave farther out, riding in its middle, feeling it curl around me until it gently broke.