Shadow Man: A Novel (20 page)

“There used to be slave ships out there, Jim. Not that long ago, either, in historical terms anyway. Could you imagine being a boy or a man chained for weeks, maybe months, in the bottom of a wooden ship? Chained to hundreds of others. What did they think at night, listening to the creaking of that big boat, wondering where in the hell they were going? Death and stink all around them.”

Kurt let it stop there. He stared at the horizon. I imagined sea and shoal and forest and mountain rising in the blue-green of the New World. Not for those on the boat; theirs was a land of whips and ropes looped over trees, fields of cotton and tobacco and big pillared houses. It was hard for a white person to feel close to a black one. Even the black families on this beach, scattered dark splotches in the sand drinking out of coolers and building castles just like the white families next to them, seemed exotic, living in my world, but not exactly in it, as if there was another dimension, existing alongside mine but separated by a sheet of glass as clear and as impenetrable as a Krispy Kreme window. Everyone pretended, but sometimes make-believe was not enough, and that’s when you felt bad about your white skin, how much it gave you, how much it took from others.

I had a black friend in Philly named Arenthal. He had a plug-in amplifier and Fender guitar and he wanted to be Jimi Hendrix; he wove leather headbands through his high-rise Afro and loved to show off a molar he chipped once while playing “The Star Spangled Banner” with his teeth. I met him one day after seeing him through Nut Johnson’s telescope running at the school track. He was spindly, but fast. Nut and I went over and watched him, clicking and scrunching through the cinder in his spiked shoes that when he hit twenty yards turned to blur. I couldn’t run that fast with three legs and a set of wheels. Nut’s mother called him home for dinner, but I stayed, and Arenthal and I went for cherry sodas at a store between the white edges and black edges of North Philly. The
Inquirer
called such places “racial buffer zones” that kept the city from exploding. It was the make-believe world.

One night, I invited Arenthal to Nut’s rooftop. He peered into the telescope, looked at me, amazed, and looked back. He aimed it as the stars and was so thrilled that he didn’t step away at the crucial time — those heavenly minutes — when Nut wanted a glimpse at
Mrs. Romano. I knew what Arenthal felt, the first time you saw a star up close. He panned across black, sparkly space, pushing Nut, who was losing his patience, back and naming every star he saw. Funk. Otis. Martin. Malcolm. Shaft. Hendrix. Africa. He claimed them all. Nut said most stars already had names and were plotted with numbers and degrees, but Arenthal said he didn’t care; he said everyone was entitled to as many stars as they wanted; no one could get to a star anyway, and no one person could own a million of them.

Sitting on a rooftop in the night with a black kid wasn’t done often in my neighborhood and Nut and I, wanting to avoid questions and trouble and worse, never mentioned it. We snuck Arenthal down through Nut’s narrow box of a house, past his sleeping parents, stepping over Wowser, the clawless ginger-colored cat, through the kitchen, and out the back door into the quiet alley, where Arenthal winked and sprinted home through the darkness.

“Goofy kid,” said Nut.

“What do you mean?”

“Rather look at stars than tits.”

Arenthal wasn’t at the track the next day, or the one after that. Nut and I spotted him a few days later in the buffer zone with a cast on his right arm. Some guys in my neighborhood caught him and beat him the night he ran home from Nut’s house. They held a knife to him and told him if he came back they’d cut him deep. They set his track shoes on fire. I went home and told Kurt (Dad) and he got upset and cursed. He gulped a beer on the stoop, talking to Mom, who sat below him, calming him, her head leaning against his leg. I listened through the curtain. I couldn’t make out all the words, but later Kurt came into the kitchen and handed me thirty dollars and told me to give it to Arenthal for a new pair of track spikes. I had never seen that much money come out of Kurt’s pocket at one time; even our special dinners at Howard Johnson’s in New Jersey cost only fifteen dollars, which to Kurt was exorbitant, just
like the electric and gas bills and the garbage collection fees that once a month gave him headaches and sent his checkbook flying off the table to the tune of words so foul that Mom told him he was mouthing the devil’s aria.

What happened to Arenthal bothered Kurt for a long time and he kept asking me about him. I told him Arenthal bought new shoes and was running again at the track. He decided not to come over and look through Nut’s telescope anymore, but we could say hi to each other and talk every now and then in the buffer zone. I saw him a few times, but then he vanished. One night, while I was sleeping, Kurt came into my room with a cassette player. He sat on the bed and pushed the button, and it was a voice I had heard snippets of in school over the years. I sat up and Kurt and I listened to Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 speech at the Lincoln Memorial; we just sat there, Kurt holding the tape player, listening as moonlight came through the window and the noises of the city fell distant and hushed. Kurt never mentioned that night or Arenthal again. He had a way of doing that, of getting so intense, so quietly feverish about something, that it burned a mark in you and you kept it as your own private thing. I asked Mom about it once and she said it often appeared that Kurt wasn’t paying attention to things, that he’d drift away on the stoop or the couch with a whole other world going on in his mind, but that really Kurt paid attention to everything, and it was when you weren’t paying attention that he’d surprise you with a new dress or a tape of Martin Luther King Jr. That’s what had excited Mom most in life, wondering and waiting for Kurt’s next revelation.

Vera returned from the sea. She sat next to Kurt and me on the sand, and if you were looking at us through Nut Johnson’s telescope, you’d have thought we were a happy family. You would have given us a story: Ahhh isn’t that nice, look how close they are, sitting on the beach wet and without towels enjoying the freedom of the day and
the company of one another. Yes, you would have thought, the father must be a workingman; you can tell by the arc of his back and his taut, long muscles, and the boy is still growing, a budding astronomer or some other academic or bookwormish thing, and the mother, pale as winter sky in her black bikini, is protecting her pretty (they must be pretty) eyes behind dark pools of sunglasses. What’s in her eyes, you would think. What does she see when she tousles her boy’s hair and leans into her man, kissing and laughing with him in the sand and running down the beach, twirling in a gauzy white shirt, so gauzy as to be insubstantial, gauzy as smoke pulled apart by wind or by biplanes humming above the shore? You would have thought vacations never last long enough, and that in a better world they would never end; they would just go on and on like starlight and infinity, families at the beach, playing, swimming, and tanning in a buffer zone between birth and death. Then you’d pan the telescope to somebody else, make up another story, like counting cars on the highway or collecting postcards; it’s all pretend dreams and mind games that get put away at the end of the week when the hotel bill is paid and the car is packed and the final glance is given to the rolling sea.

The maid fixed the bed and left new towels, but she did not touch the mirror in Room 501. Kurt studied Vera’s lipstick escape map and told her we would follow the tangerine side street next to the hotel to the larger red road that led to the interstate. Vera stood beside him, biting her lower lip, her hair still dripping, and agreed, but not before laying out another route, which Kurt said was fine, but it would mean an extra two turns to the interstate. Too many wasted seconds; too much time for closing gaps. Vera shook her head. Kurt was appeasing the way a parent tricks a child into believing that the pillows and sheets on the floor are a magic castle of dungeons and spires and princesses. Vera went into the bathroom, turned on the shower, and started singing, not a particular
song, just strands of chirpy notes and whistles. Kurt looked at me and laid out his own plan.

“When we were out swimming Vera thought the man from Marrakesh was below us in the depths. She clung to me, scared that she’d be snatched and pulled under. Then she calmed down as if a shark had drifted away. Even wanted to swim by herself. But these episodes are coming closer together. She needs help. I don’t want to leave her alone. Dropping her off in a hospital and driving away wouldn’t be right. I think we should play along awhile longer, pretend we’re still on an adventure hiding from a bad man. We’ll drive back to Philly and I’ll try to get hold of her family. She said she was from Cleveland, remember? If we can’t get them right away we’ll call doctors and see what we should do. At least in Philly, if she’s committed to an institution we can visit her. I want to believe her, but I can’t anymore. Did you see her tracing the lipstick map, standing there, peering right through it, like a kid playing imaginary war in the alleys but thinking it was real.”

“Did you see the pill bottles in her purse?”

“Yeah. They’re empty. She was taking something, but the prescription was faded and I couldn’t make out what it was.”

“What if there really is a man? He’s out there like she says, and that’s what’s driving her crazy, and every time she tries to convince someone, he’s gone.”

“I don’t think so, Jim. That would be terrible if it were true.”

“We don’t know for certain, do we?”

“No, we don’t. You want to believe it, don’t you?”

“I’d rather believe that than the other. It’s like when Mom died. I knew it. We went to the funeral home and I saw her next to the lilies, but I kept waiting for someone to come and tell me different.

“When do we leave?”

“Check out early tomorrow morning. We’ll drive it in one day.”

“What about the gun?”

“There are no bullets. We’ll let her keep it.”

Bad men. I’ve seen them on the news with numbers below their chins and eyes caught unaware. They appear right after dinner, hovering on the screen between six and six thirty, their lives and crimes compressed into a few lines, unless they did something spectacular, like killing housewives in bathrobes, boiling puppies, or robbing banks with toy guns. Kurt had known a few of them, union guys with drug habits and strange ideas about raising cash, like Leonard Lupo, who stormed a Moose Club with a bowie knife and a World War II grenade that blew up in his hand as he ran out the door, scattering money and blood into the air before bartender Mike Iaonne tied a rag around Leonard’s wrist, which looked like an orange that had been put through the squeezer, except that it was red, and carried him to the hospital on the corner, picking up bits of Leonard’s blown-off hand on the way and calling the failed bandit a “dumbass and a fool beyond comprehension.” I wondered if Kurt and I would be on the news; two guys in an Impala with a woman who disappeared, leaving only a scarf and a map on the backseat. The camera would pan and the scarf would lift in the breeze as two cops studied the map and Kurt and I stood near the hood of the Impala trying to explain that it began in the winter when a wife and a mother died in the Philly snow.

“A man from Marrakesh?” a cop would say. “What man from Marrakesh?”

Vera came out of the bathroom and she and Kurt went out. I studied Vera’s lipstick lines on the mirror. We were there, invisible, wandering over clear glass. I traced. But where to go after the last red line opened up to the interstate? I-64. Streaking east and west, but beyond that, nothing but my reflection. I left 501. A whoosh of balcony air slammed the door behind me. A man pushing a stroller with a sleeping toddler smiled and went to the elevator and down to the beach. I stood in the hall, watching elevator numbers descend
and rise, thinking about nothing and having no thought to move me, when the elevator opened and Alice stepped out with a box of soap and a tray of cut flowers.

“Ain’t they pretty? Daddy found them at the Farm Fresh and wanted me to sprinkle a few in each room. Smell.”

She lifted carnations, daisies, and a few she called irises.

“I’m going to put this one in your room. The petals are still perfect.”

She kissed me on the cheek. She opened 503 and pulled me in, dropping flowers on the bed, holding me in daylight, showing me the pollen on her fingers, and saying that she couldn’t stay but that she would be back. She handed me an iris and headed to the door, balancing her box of soap and flowers and singing “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”

“Let’s do something.”

“I gotta put these flowers out. Daddy said to.”

“I’ll help.”

“No.”

“Let’s go swimming.”

“Boy, I gotta work. You go swimming. I’ll see you later.”

She walked away in her cutoffs and purple halter. How many colors did she have? I didn’t want to swim. I took the elevator down. Slim was playing solitaire in the lobby, muttering to himself. A guy with white shorts and matching knee socks was reading the brochure about Indians, telling his wife, “Here’s an interesting fact …” Kurt and Vera were talking to a man on the boardwalk. I went out the door toward them and saw the man had a Bible open on the railing and Kurt looked at me, saying in his eyes,
Jim, if you’ve got any sense, you’ll keep on strolling
. I didn’t. Bible pages lifted and riffled like white wings in the breeze. The young man was intense.

“The Lord saves,” he said.

“Not everyone,” said Vera.

“There are those who choose not to be delivered.”

“I’m a Catholic,” said Kurt.

“No harm. Catholics can be saved.”

Kurt shisssed like he did whenever he missed an easy forehand.

“What about Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists? What about half the planet?” said Vera.

“Doomed.”

“Doomed?”

“Only those who accept Christ …”

“You can’t save me. Christ can’t save me. You can’t save anyone on this beach. You’re a boy with a book of fables.”

The guy’s jaw tightened. Kurt looked to the sea. Vera stared at the guy, not angry, not dismissive, but with an open face: her soul challenging his. The man picked up the Bible, ran his fingers over its emblazoned gold cross. He didn’t want to leave; he wanted a way in, but he had nothing. Jesus would have waited Vera out. He would have bent down, plucked something from the boardwalk, and spun a parable out of a sliver of wood.