Shadow Man: A Novel (21 page)

The guy dipped his head and turned away, his back straightening as he walked toward another couple, his hair not even mussed by the breeze.

“Let’s eat,” said Vera.

“HoJo’s?”

Vera laughed and kissed Kurt on the cheek.

“Where else, Kurt? Where else on this beautiful evening?”

Vera reached for my hand. The three of us walked down the boardwalk in the dusk, the first blossoms of neon sputtering and humming at the Fun Park, a child’s voice wailing through the drop of a wooden roller coaster that dipped and clattered alongside us and shot back toward the sky. It was like it had been. Vera’s worry had left her; the man from Marrakesh, there, but faint, at the edges. It was good to see her like that again. I studied her as we walked, her
hand holding mine tight; her hair full around her, her face finally tan, as if in the course of the day she had slipped from one part of herself to another, like Superman, darting into a phone booth and coming out somebody else, but still with the hint, the discernible features of Clark Kent. You can’t explain it; it’s just that the better part returns and you wonder why it doesn’t stay, it seems so perfect. Vera had that more than anybody, and I understood why Kurt wanted to be around her: not for love, he’d love only Mom, but for that moment of resurrection.

“Go win me a stuffed animal, Kurt. A small one.”

He slapped a dollar down and hurled softballs at milk bottles. He slapped another down for me. We threw, balls exploding into cans, and the ones that missed, thunking against the tent. No animal. Two more dollars went down and Vera stood behind us licking cotton candy from her fingers. Kurt’s first ball went high, knocking off only the top bottle, but mine was a direct strike at the middle, bottles flew and scattered in joyous ruckus. Vera threw down her cotton candy and clapped and the counter man handed me a kangaroo wearing boxing gloves, small just like Vera wanted, and she took it and kissed its face and I stood there feeling as if I had handed her the Holy Grail.

Kurt laughed and punched me in the arm and Vera said it was magnificent the way those bottles went flying. She put her arm around me and kissed me on the forehead. I was her hero; that’s what she said. She held the kangaroo up and named him Sir Jim of the Strong Right Arm. We left the Fun Park for Howard Johnson’s and Kurt, whom Vera had dubbed Kurt of the Wild Pitch, ordered his clams, Vera a Jell-O fruit salad with a tea, and a double cheeseburger and large Coke for me. Vera looked out the window once; her face tightened a bit, but only for a moment. Kurt paid the bill; we sat amid the change, dirty plates, and glasses watching the busboy, with his paper hat and hairnet, work his way toward us.

“I wonder what that young man is thinking,” said Vera.

“He’s daydreaming.”

“How do you know?”

“By his face. Look at him. The only thing alive, barely alive, are his eyes, moving from dish to dish to fork. The rest of him is someplace else, someplace far away.”

“Well, you’re pretty smart, Mr. Wild Pitch.”

“I do the same thing. It’s how we stay sane.”

“Who?”

“Workingmen.”

“So all workingmen are out there daydreaming.”

“That’s right. Some are throwing pitches in the World Series. Some are rock stars. Some are on a date with a girl they’ll never have. Some are designing spaceships, or waterbeds; some are praying and some are picking lottery numbers and imagining how they’re going to spend it when it comes pouring in. It makes the hours go faster.”

“What’s your daydream, Kurt?” I said.

Kurt dipped his head and gave one of his sly smiles.

“The final game in the final set at Wimbledon. I’m up by a break. The grass is worn. The sky is clouding and everyone is worried about rain. The air cools. I’m out there with Jimmy Connors. Been on the court three hours and forty-five minutes. My hands are blistered. They sting. My knees ache; my toes are cramped. I’m serving. Jimmy’s squatting in that fidgety nervous dance he does, left to right, left to right. I step to the baseline. Bounce the ball. A little chalk dust rises. I toss and spring from my coil, arcing, I feel the sweet spot. The ball goes off the racquet fast; it’s going to curve and kick out, but Jimmy reads me and he’s all over it. He returns at a sharp angle, but I get to it. The volley’s on. The ball shooting back and forth. The crowd rises. They don’t want it to end, and from my place on the grass I can feel thousands of eyes holding me.

“I hit a slice backhand to slow the pace. It kicks up funny on the
grass. Jimmy mis-hits. The ball comes to me soft and high. I step in and drill it down the alley. Jimmy races to it but barely gets his racquet on it. I hear him grunt. The ball floats toward me high and at the net. I step in, not a thought in my brain, and put it away and see Jimmy racing for it, but it’s beyond him and out of sight and Jimmy looks at me from across the net and then he drops his head and walks toward me. The crowd is going crazy, but Jimmy and I lean in and touch foreheads and find a piece of silence.

“When the prince or earl or whoever hands me the trophy cup, I’m struck by how light it is. It seemed so heavy when I had watched on TV as other champions lifted it. I take a shower. The blisters are raw and pink, the muscles are balled and tight, and the soreness settles in. But I stand there with the water rushing over me, feeling, I think, how God must want each of us to feel at least once on this earth.”

A plate clattered at another table.

“I can see you running toward the ball, Kurt, your racquet back and waiting,” said Vera.

Kurt lifted his soda.

“That daydream will get me through three or four cans of gray.”

Vera leaned forward.

“You know what my daydream is, boys? To sleep one solid night without worrying that the man is getting closer. Just to breathe calmly and sleep, cool air running over my shoulders, like when I was a kid with the winter blanket falling away and me reaching for it, but still asleep, not waking.”

“What’s your daydream, Jim?”

I sat back.

Mine was of Mom, and lately, of Alice, but I didn’t tell them. I must have blushed, though; Kurt and Vera pointed and laughed and I felt heat bleed across my face. I wanted Mom back. I wanted her to be waiting in our house after this adventure, but I knew she wouldn’t be there and all the rooms would be empty. In my daydream
I whispered dictionary words to her, odd antecedents and unusual origins. She laughed at their sounds and meanings and said I was a smart boy of syllables and mischief; she told me this at the kitchen table when the late-afternoon autumn light was beyond the sink, retreating, leaving the kitchen dark, the white light of the rising moon far away down the street, when the neighborhood lingered in that in-between silence of dinners cooking and afternoon movies and men coming home and steam clinging to windows.

I looked at the busboy. He was a table away; dirty plates slipped through his hands like playing cards. He sweated through his hairnet and kept his head down; the world could have crumpled around him and he wouldn’t have known. He had a faint mustache and sparse, coiled whiskers on his chin and jawline. His white busboy’s shirt was stained with condiments and grease, the sleeves too long for his arms; his pants were black, his face pale. He seemed like candle wax come to life. A girl, a young woman actually, wearing cutoffs, a tank top, and flip-flops and carrying a baby on her hip walked in and kissed him on the cheek and stood in front of him. He didn’t look at her for long. He reached into his pocket and handed her a few bills and she left, the baby waving its tiny, fleshy fingers at him. Kurt dropped a few extra quarters on the table and we slid out of our booth and back onto the boardwalk. We walked for an hour, not saying much, strolling to where the boardwalk ended at the dunes and the only lights were from ships in the black, black distance. Vera caught a chill and she walked back to the hotel between Kurt and me, each of us with an arm around her to warm her.

Room 503, my room, was full of flowers. I saw them when I creaked the door as Kurt and Vera passed to 501. I pushed the door open and light from the hall spilled into a room covered in daisies, roses, carnations, black-eyed Suzies, long-stemmed irises, and others I couldn’t name in splashes of purples, reds, and yellows. They were thrown about as if tossed by wind and their scents held back the salt
air of the beach. I stepped in, closed the door, and breathed them in. I turned on the TV and the flowers turned to silhouettes in the blue glow. I sat and smiled and watched the weatherman move the sun up the coast; farther north, Nova Scotia was lost in rain and fog and the weatherman noted that the Atlantic cold-water cod were running; it all tied in with Arctic air masses and deep, frigid currents. A guy with a lunatic’s face and a cowboy hat popped up selling used cars and I turned the channel and saw a note on the mirror.

“Daddy ordered waaaaaay to many flowers from the Farm Fresh. Aren’t they pretty?”

A girl’s penmanship was a loopy thing of wonder. I read the note, put it back on the mirror, took it down and read it again, searching between words and letters for things not spelled out. I cried. I don’t know why. It just came. Not long and sloppy, just real quiet; I held it deep in me and let it out a little bit at a time, the way you let the pressure hiss from a radiator.

I Dream of Jeannie
came on. I propped a pillow and leaned back, covering myself in flowers. In the silences between the dialogue of Jeannie and Master, I heard the ocean. Jeannie crossed her arms and boinked — the sound like springs — and disappeared in a curl of smoke into her bottle. My face was tight from dried tears. I sat up and flowers fell and I went to the bathroom and put my face in a sink full of water. I dried and waited for Alice, peeking my head out the door every now and then to see if the elevator numbers were moving. I put my ear to the wall with 501, but I heard nothing, maybe a rustle, but their room was still.

I opened my dictionary, closed it. I went to the balcony and crossed the border from pollen to sea, the change dramatic; the flowers in the room turned to scentless beauty, as if under glass in a museum. I stepped back into the room and the flowers’ scents filled me again, and the sea fell away as if it were not there. A knock. The slender rap of a girl’s knuckles. I opened the door.

“You get my flowers?”

I laughed quietly and Alice stepped in. I closed the door. Alice knelt on the bed, flowers in her hair, counting petals in the dark. They floated like pieces of night.

“You’re leaving tomorrow.”

“Early.”

“All the nice boys leave.”

“How many?”

“A few, but no one got flowers. Only you. Kiss me once and lie down and let me sleep on your chest. We can’t do more. If you were staying, maybe. I can’t give my whole self to a boy who will be gone. But we can wake in the morning with a room full of flowers, and that’ll be something you’ll never forget.”

We kissed. We kissed twice, even though she said only once. She gathered alongside me, her head was light. She traced my face with a finger.

“I’ll draw you on paper later.”

I closed my eyes. Lying there with Alice was good enough; I was curious about those places I had never been, but mostly I was happy just to feel her breathing in my arms on our private sea of flowers. She felt like a part of me, her skin mine, and I held her tight, not too tight to wake her but tight enough to claim her for the hours we had left. I played songs in my head and wondered about God looking down into all the rooms on earth, and what it’d be like when I was older lying in a different room with another girl, remembering Alice in the darkness of a new place. I watched the blowing curtain. The curtain in my room back in Philly rarely felt the breeze, the streets and alleys were so tight and narrow that the wind couldn’t find our house; it blew past us to wider spaces beyond. The sounds, Alice’s breathing, the waves, all went quiet, as if they were moving away from me and into the distance. I slept.

I don’t know if I dreamed. I woke and Alice was still there on my
chest; the dawn hadn’t come, but the night was turning to gray dust and I could see blues, whites, yellows, and pinks flaming around me. I shut my eyes. A door in the hall slammed and the wall with 501 shook. I heard Vera, it seemed to be Vera, screaming not words but tangled indecipherable gasps. I jumped up from Alice and ran into the hall and saw Kurt standing at the door of 501 with a bucket of ice; cubes speckled the hallway as if he had run from the vending machines back to the room. He must have heard her scream, too. He saw me and rolled his eyes. Vera’s screeches came through the door. Kurt reached for the knob and slowly opened 501. I heard a pop and saw Kurt’s ice skip out of the bucket and fly around him like tiny, clear planets. Kurt’s body jolted back and he looked down and dropped the bucket and then stepped wobbly across the threshold. I heard another pop and glass break. I ran and saw Kurt lying on the carpet, two paintbrush strokes of blood widening from him, one near his chest and the other at his thigh.

Vera was standing on the bed in underpants and no shirt, the silver gun heavy and smoking near her breasts. She was crying and shaking and screaming, “The man! The man!” The room smelled like the scene of a toy cap-gun fight; the scent of gunpowder, but deep in it a musky, sweet tang. Vera’s lipstick mirror map was shattered and the TV screen was static with the color of salt and pepper. I got down next to Kurt. His blood warmed my knees. All his muscles were still. His eyes were open as if examining the fallen galaxy of ice around him. I lay beside him and held him and asked him not to go.

“Kurt, please stay.” I kept saying please like I did when I was a child trying to get something from him he didn’t want to give. I gripped his hand and looked into his face, sideways and scrunched on the carpet. He squeezed my hand and tried to say something, but the word stopped, half formed in his mouth. His eyes closed like they did when he’d stand on our stoop after work and drink his beer before dinner. I didn’t want to take my face off the carpet.

I wanted to stay staring at him, holding him; I wanted to go where he was going and to wait for that frozen word to be released from his mouth. He was about to tell me something, something I needed to know.