Shadow Man: A Novel (2 page)

“I need help,” she said.

Kurt told me to go pay the check. I watched from the cash register as he leaned in and talked to Vera as if he were bargaining over the price of a stolen watch. I didn’t know what he would do, but by the time I got back with the change, Kurt was standing by the booth, and in the next instant we were strolling out the door with Vera between us. She laced her arms into Kurt’s and mine and said an adventure was beginning. It seemed surreal to be walking through
our neighborhood with this new person leaning warm against me. Surreal being a word I’d discovered along with luminous a few days earlier on my daily scan of the dictionary in which I had promised Mom to learn every English word before I died. I told this to Vera and she kept repeating “surreal,” saying she liked the way it curled in her mouth and melted away.

We got to the house and opened the door and, suddenly, I felt Mom’s presence. She was cool on my shoulder, the way nighttime air whistles through a window crack. She died the winter before the summer Dad said I could call him Kurt. She was making a cake and had run out of brown sugar so she hurried out of the house and down the street to Merle’s Market, and as she was coming back, a Fleetwood skidded on ice, jumped onto the sidewalk, and killed her. A Fleetwood in our neighborhood meant a bookie or a mob-connected guy was tracking debts in the numbers racket. We never found out. No one saw the license plate, and the car sped away in a black flash through the snow. Mom had left the oven on preheat, flour on the table, and two egg yolks in a Pyrex mixing bowl. That scene was as precise as a still life, more vivid than her funeral mass or the way the sleet blew sideways when men my dad worked with burned the frost off the dirt and lowered Mom into the earth. I missed her; her linen dresses and her scent — Chanel and Clabber Girl Baking Soda — and her slacks and half shirts and her hair pulled back and bouncing. She would slide behind me, wrap me in her arms, and whisper in my ear, and sometimes she’d make me cut vegetables for dinner, laughing as onions made us both cry and joking until Dad (Kurt) got home and pulled out a beer, washed his face in the sink, and turned and hugged her, her back bending on his big forearms, telling him to get cleaned up better than that if he wanted to get kissed back, which he always did, but not before he stepped out on the stoop and breathed in the ending of the day. That’s the pretty version and the one I’m
sticking with, but to be honest, the real version was not that far off. We were happy.

Vera wasn’t the kind of woman to be shy about taking another woman’s space. She stepped across the threshold and told Kurt to put water on for tea and then she went upstairs and took a bath. She came down an hour later in one of Kurt’s T-shirts and a pair of cutoffs and sat at the kitchen table as if she’d been living in that house since it was built. Kurt seemed mystified, too, and we looked at each other as if to say,
Who’s going to tell her the rules?
but neither of us said a thing until Vera poked into the refrigerator and sighed. “Kurt, where are the lemons?”

We never had lemons in the house, but Kurt said, “Hmmm. We must be out.” Without another word, Vera grabbed her bulky macramé, fringe-swinging purse and disappeared out the door. Kurt looked at me and said: “I don’t know if I like her or not, but she is direct.” Unabashed, I thought, and went to the dictionary.

Vera came back with lemons, oranges, and grapefruits and squeezed them all into a pitcher and shoved it in the freezer and started talking about Cairo and the pyramids and the Nile and about these guys called muezzins who sing prayers from minarets shaped like flutes and how on a feast called Eid they slaughter sheep across the city, blood flowing in the streets and alleys and everyone giving thanks to Allah and feeding the poor.

“How do you know all this?” said Kurt.

“I was there, honey.”

“In Cairo?”

“All across the Delta.”

I thought Kurt was going to say Mississippi, but he thought better of it. Vera and her friends had hiked across North Africa years ago, starting in Cairo then to Alexandria and then into Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco. She spoke of Bedouins and fires in the desert and storms that blew through the sand. She kept talking as if the
whole trip were playing out in front of her, every detail an ornate creation, much better and more alive than the slide shows we had at school and those
National Geographic
pictures that were beautiful but seemed too pretty to be real. Vera’s stories were ragged and exotic and full of things like horses galloping along beaches or the sounds of hammered copper, and big bazaars, and a souk in Marrakesh, where a man with skin the color of eggplant and eyes like blue ice reached his hand into a sack of saffron and held it up like gold. Marrakesh, what a word. Three syllables of music. Mar-ra-kesh. I think I heard it once in a Lizabeth Scott movie, or maybe it was a film with Humphrey Bogart, whom Kurt wasn’t crazy about, but I found him believable in most roles. Marrakesh. Tripoli. Carthage. Vera was lucky, and I felt lucky, too, just listening. I looked over at Kurt, and he was following Vera’s stories. She was chattering, yes, but Kurt was enthralled and every now and then he looked for a spot to interject something. He’d fill with air, but then he’d hold it as if wondering how a guy who paints ships in Philly can spin out something as remarkable as Marrakesh. But finally, after Vera had trekked us across the Maghreb — I had to look that one up — Kurt couldn’t hold it in any longer.

“I play tennis on grass,” he said.

A pause. A too-long pause.

Vera laughed and reached out for Kurt’s hand. He pulled it back, not fast or startling but in a way a plate is cleared from a table. Vera laughed again, but she clipped it. Kurt smiled one of his famous half smiles that kept you guessing, and I think Vera caught this, too. The conversation changed to things more American, closer to home and graspable (a word that looks funny but does exist), but I thought Vera had a lot more desert stories in her and I hoped to hear them all.

The light was warm over the kitchen table. A sixty-watt yellow glow that obscured the exactness of things not directly in the light; they lingered in the shadowy edges the way actors stand in the wings
before a cue leads them into the floodlights. I could hear rain falling in the alleys. It rattled over our stoop and set the neighborhood dogs running. They barked close and then distant and then I heard children sloshing near the manhole covers that bubble up when it storms. Lightning flashed, but there wasn’t much thunder and soon the storm passed, leaving soaked kids and a coolness behind. I left Kurt and Vera in the kitchen and walked down the alley to St. Jude’s. The streets were slick and pure, black mirrors reflecting the gray ghosts of clouds racing overhead in the wind and, every now and then, a break in the clouds and a glimmer of moon. The rain had cleaned the dust from the church’s stained-glass windows; I studied the deep, rich colors of the saints, the artistry of their beards and hands and their eyes, the way they followed you, watching you from up there, frozen, but at night, after a rain, they seemed alive. I walked to the front of the church; water poured from the drain spouts and made mud beneath the holly bushes. The stairs were slippery, the railings rusty.

Father Heaney’s head was bowed in the rectory window. He was likely reading one of his mystery novels. He once told Kurt they cleared his head after tending the sick and hearing confessions littered with “misdemeanors and a few felonies from the unexpected.” Russet-haired with a pink Irish face, Fr. Heaney had given me my first communion years earlier. There is a lot to think about in that second when Jesus hovers before you, crisp and hard and then softening on your tongue and melting into you and becoming part of you in a slow dissolve as you cross yourself and walk back to your pew, tasting cardboard and grain, but knowing it’s Jesus who rose from the dead to save your soul. I like that moment of believing. Fr. Heaney told Kurt — he was always pulling Kurt aside after Saturday-evening mass — that the act of communion was “transcendence of the spirit.” Transcendence was one of my first dictionary words. Transcendence will lead you through the dictionary, which is
really a book of clues, to spirit, revelation, and redemption. The only problem with communion was that you had to go to confession first, whisper your sins through a web of cheesecloth to the silhouette of Fr. Heaney, who knew who you were no matter how hard you tried to disguise your voice. Once I tried a Peter Lorre imitation and Fr. Heaney laughed and said: “Jim, just give it to me straight.” I didn’t tell him all my sins. Some of them belonged to me and not to God.

I was going to knock, but I left Fr. Heaney alone with his mystery novel. The city was quiet, its great energy washed and calmed by the rain. Dogs were rooting in the garbage of a blown-over trash can, and I walked home and stepped up the stoop and into the kitchen. Kurt and Vera were drinking vodka and lemonade, sitting across from each other like two poker players; Kurt cagey and Vera garrulous, making you wonder if she had a full house or a handful of nothing. They weren’t drunk but they were happy.

“When you hit a backhand, Vera, your body flows in one long twist. People think a forehand is easier to hit than a backhand, but I disagree. A backhand is more natural, and much prettier when hit correctly. It’s like opening up your wings to fly.”

Forty-six words. Kurt had spoken forty-six words. A paragraph. Without stopping. It might have been a record.

“Teach me to hit a backhand, Kurt.”

“One day, maybe.”

“Now.”

“It’s dark and there’s no court.”

“In the alley.”

Tennis was sacred to Kurt, and Vera was asking him to hit in the alley, which I suspected may have been sacrilege. Kurt sat for a minute. He sipped his lemonade and vodka. He got up and left the room, and I figured this was the end of Vera. But Kurt returned with a tennis racquet (not his best one) and two cans of balls (old). He walked into the alley.

“Jim, get down there. Vera, come here.”

He gave her the racquet. She slipped between his arms. Kurt bent her body and taught her the flow of the backhand. Vera hit wet balls down the alley. I chased them and threw them back. She was laughing and Kurt was telling her to concentrate and to pretend she was lifting into flight. One time she did and the ball zipped down the alley with topspin, water streaming off it like a shooting star in a telescope. I ran after it into the dark, my breath and heart beating harder, my sneakers soaked, a smile breaking across my face. The whole neighborhood was sleeping except the three of us and when I turned with the soggy ball in my hand, Kurt and Vera shimmered like cutouts in the night. As I walked closer, I heard their voices and for a moment pretended that Mom was home and nothing had changed. Another rainstorm rolled in and Vera and I went running for the house while Kurt jumped on the stoop and back off again, juggling two balls in puddles beneath the sputtering streetlight like some crazy kid or a guy with a night pass to the carnival.

There’s light through the window shade. It’s morning, or perhaps some luminary trick. I’m lying on my back like a corpse, waiting for what, I don’t know. I think something’s supposed to happen. It seems to me there should be sounds by now, some shape moving toward me. I try to remember my name. I can’t, but I know I am somebody; I can count my fingers. Is every day like this? I don’t know. I know Kurt and Vera by heart. They live inside of me, and I know that they were real. I can still hear them. The shade is bright with light and someone, a woman in white, is saying, “Good morning, James.” I must be James because she’s pulling down my sheet and propping me up on a pillow. She hands me a glass of water. It seems like this scene has happened a million times, but I can’t recall what happens next. The woman in white opens a drawer and rattles things; she combs my hair and holds a mirror up. An old man looks back. Not old, entirely. Maybe fifty or fifty-two. Lines fan out from the eyes, but the face is sharp, perhaps a bit slack under the chin. The hair is gray and black, the color of a sweater Kurt used to wear, but Kurt’s is not the face I’m looking at, although there is a resemblance. The man in the mirror, not a bad-looking guy really, seems lost, as if he’s trying to remember where he put the car keys, or how he ended up at the bank when he was aiming for the grocery store. I look at the woman in white. Then to the mirror. “That’s you, James. Hurry up, we’ve got to get you ready. Eva is coming today.” I can’t recall who Eva might be, maybe another woman in white. Flowers sit in a vase on a table near the bed, and there’s a little desk in the corner under the window. The desk is covered in papers and books. “Are you
going to write today, James?” I don’t know. Is that what I do? The woman in white pours me juice and hands me a pill. I seem to know what to do, so this must have happened a million times, although if it did, the woman in white should know I prefer grapefruit juice to orange juice. Prefer comes from preferential. The woman in white pulls up the shade, and for a moment she disappears in the light that rushes into the room. “A new day, James.” I guess it is.

“Where am I?”

“You’re where you’ve been for the last two years. St. Jude’s home.”

“Is this heaven?”

The woman in white laughs as if I’ve made a joke, but I feel completely serious.

“No, James, this is earth.”

“What city?”

“Philadelphia.”

“Philadelphia.”

“You were born here, not far from where you’re sitting right now, if you look out that window across the rooftops and the steeples. There’s not as many steeples as there used to be, with churches moving out to the suburbs and leaving us in a city without God.”

“God is a concept by which we measure our pain. John Lennon said that.”

“Well, I don’t know about John Lennon, but seems like a little of that memory of yours is kicking in. Might be one of the good days.”

“John Lennon was a Beatle. The best one in my opinion, although Paul had a gift for melody. The others I can’t remember. Who’s Eva?”

“You know who Eva is, James. Think.”