Shadow Man: A Novel (10 page)

“I think there’s a killer down there, waiting, hanging back in the darkness. I think that man from Marrakesh is here. I can feel him. When someone’s been following you so long, you sense him; he becomes the twin you don’t want. I bet he’s out there, Jim, right now, looking up at us in this big lighted bird’s nest.”

She turned away from the window and slid back to Kurt.

“But he won’t come tonight,” she said, holding Kurt’s hand and looking at me across the table. Kurt said nothing and stared ahead. I scanned the restaurant, looking for a man I thought might be from Marrakesh, but I had never seen anyone from Marrakesh before, so I looked for somebody suspicious. There was a guy sitting by himself at the end of the counter, but he was eating an ice cream cone, and a girl came over and took a lick, and I guessed he probably wasn’t a killer, more likely the boyfriend of the waitress, but that was the thing about a killer, you never knew.

The food came and we ate in quiet. Kurt didn’t enjoy his fried clams and two paper cups of tartar sauce the way he had hoped.

Vera excused herself. She was gone for a long time, and then we heard, from the outside, someone yelling, “Kurt, Kurt.” We looked out the window and there was Vera standing on the boardwalk railing, holding three balloons and waving. Vera could do that, change a moment in a breath. She jumped into the sand and ran toward the waves, the balloons bobbing and disappearing in the darkness, until all we could see was Vera’s white dress in the night. Kurt shook his head the way a man does when he reads something disturbing in the newspaper.

“C’mon, Jim. We better get down there.”

“What should we do about this man she talks about?”

“I don’t feel concerned yet. You scared?”

“I’m curious, and a little scared.”

“That’s two of us.”

“He might have a gun.”

Kurt looked at me and said nothing. I followed him to the beach. Vera danced in the surf.

“I let the balloons go and the night swallowed them, or they’re still floating to the stars. I think they pop at a certain point.”

“Atmospheric pressure,” said Kurt.

“Aren’t you a smart one.”

“It’s like in a plane when your ears pop.”

“I thought you’d never been on a plane.”

“I’ve read about it.”

“The danger here has passed. I can feel it. Let’s go win me a stuffed animal down the boardwalk.”

“I’m good at pitching balls at milk bottles.”

“Every man has his talent.”

Kurt laughed. So did I. Vera ran out of the surf and held Kurt’s hand. She put an arm around my shoulders. Her wet dress and cool skin brushed me; I felt the squeak of salt as she dried in the night. Kurt won Vera a lime-green alligator wearing a top hat.

It cost him four dollars and sixteen balls at a booth run by a man who wore a carpenter’s nail sack for a change purse and had an accent from a history book. Vera liked him. He was exotic, not like HoJo’s clams and 7-Eleven Slurpees. He told us he escaped from Hungary and moved in with an uncle in Chesapeake. “My country shit. Here better, but English is hard. Hungarian is not so difficult. I love Grand Funk Railroad.” We walked on. Vera kissed Kurt and thanked him for the alligator. She named him Vlado. The world came to us through Vera. Hungary. Marrakesh. Vera said it was a world of spies and fragrances.

We walked back to the hotel. The girl at the front desk winked at me again. Kurt and Vera and I got in the elevator. Kurt put his fingers in his ears to block out the Beach Boys. I went to my room; Kurt and Vera rustled next door in 501, but then it quieted and I opened the balcony window to let in the sound of the waves. I kept the light off and turned on the TV. I flicked around and found an old black-and-white movie on a program called Fright Night.
Creature from the Black Lagoon
. It scared me when I was small, but now the creature was just a guy in a decorated wet suit with phony gills and big, unmoving, black bug eyes. I liked watching anyway, remembering the parts that once spooked me and wondering why I wasn’t scared anymore. The Creature, a part of us but not, like the man from Hungary. Someone knocked. I guessed a killer from Marrakesh wouldn’t be so polite, and when I creaked the door the girl from the front desk smiled and pushed her way in. She was a storm of cinnamon and perfume. She pasted her gum to the mirror, glossed her lips, and sat on the bed.

“Oh, I love this movie,” she said. “That water’s black like sin. The whole lagoon is evil.”

“Seems fake.”

“You’re no fun. The creature’s the devil.”

“All monsters are the devil.”

“Not all. Frankenstein wasn’t the devil. He was body parts brought to life with lightning. I like that movie better than this one. When I’m alone at the front desk late at night, I make up scary movies in my head.”

“Like what?”

“I was robbed once.”

“In a movie.”

“Real thing. A guy ran in with a knife and waved it in my face and told me to give him money. I handed him thirty-five dollars from the special ‘robbery drawer’ my daddy rigged up for the night shift. The big money we slide underneath in a second drawer with an electronic lock. The guy seemed startled when I gave him the money. He looked at it, looked at his knife, and ran out laughing down the boardwalk.”

“You’re lucky.”

“You wanna smoke some pot?”

“I thought you were a Christian. A Baptist.”

“I am, silly. But I’m a sinner, too. Not big sins, though.” She laughed. “You can get saved again and again; my daddy says that’s what he likes most about Jesus. The ability to fail.”

She pulled out a small joint from her shorts pocket and lit it with a hotel match. She burned her fingers, her eyes watered, and she coughed. She hadn’t smoked pot a lot, and neither had I. Twice, once in the rear parking lot at St. Jude’s when I hoped the scent of it would mix in with the scent of incense and no one would notice, and the other time at the ball field around the corner from my house, sitting in the dark in a dugout with Scooter Meyers, listening to Elton John on a cassette player Scooter hauled around in a book bag. Most of the pot I saw was in tiny roaches in ashtrays of cars driven by longhairs just out of high school. Beer was bigger in my neighborhood. Six-packs on an autumn night, standing around flames in a barrel, guys talking about the Eagles’ passing statistics and ward
politics, looking at the stars and listening to fights and love echoing out of row houses, bits and pieces of lives slipping beyond brick walls and into the night, so everybody knew a little about everybody else, but not enough to pretend intimacy.

I didn’t even drink a lot of beer. Maybe a bottle a week, if it was handed to me by a guy like Manny Jesus, whom everybody called Mr. Two-first-names, but not too loudly because Manny kept a silver Derringer tucked in his blue jeans. Kurt didn’t drink a lot of beer, either, just that precious one after work on the stoop, and sometimes on a Friday night, he’d have a few extra, but not too many. On Sundays, he played tennis.

The girl handed me the joint.

“What’s your name?”

“Jim.”

“Yours?”

“Alice.”

“That’s an old person’s name.” I laughed.

“It is not. My daddy picked it when he saw a picture in the newspaper of the Bay Crab Queen the day I was born. Her name was Alice.”

“What did your mom think about that?”

“She run off a week after she got out of the hospital with me. Took up with another man. Daddy was wrecked for months. That’s when he found Jesus.”

She took the joint back, pinching it in her fingers.

“It’s Hawaiian or Colombian or something with a foreign name. My brother gets marijuana for waxing surfboards under the pier. He surfs, too. He’s older. He went to Vietnam for a year, but my daddy says there’s no soldier in him anymore.”

She put the joint in the ashtray and went to the window and shushed the smoke out into the ocean breeze. She called me out to the balcony.

“Let the wind blow through you. It’ll get rid of the pot smell.”

We stood there awhile. She handed me a stick of gum and put more cinnamon gloss on her lips. She took my hand and said this is what it would be like when we got older, older and married with the kids sleeping in the house. Day’s end and parents talking outside in the night. She wasn’t speaking about being married to me; it was more general. She kissed me. It wasn’t hard and fast like she had done hours earlier before I went out with Kurt and Vera to dinner. This time it was soft.

“I better git. My break’s over and I gotta get back to the front desk.”

She left the balcony and crossed the room, her blond hair thick down her tan back. She opened the door, smiled, and disappeared, the flash of her green halter the last of her I saw.

I was tired. The credits for the
Creature from the Black Lagoon
scrolled and the lady hosting Fright Night, a big-bosomed witch with an Eddie Munster hairdo, whom the guys back in Philly, and even Kurt, thought was sexy, announced that the next film would be the “creepy descent into madness when we enter the demented, demonic mind of perhaps our greatest horror actor, Vincent Price, in the classic
Pit and the Pendulum
.”

I turned the TV off and lay on top of the bedcovers. The breeze was nice, the white curtain ghosting, and the scents of pot and cinnamon hanging around me. Alice was a strange girl. I was on a strange journey. My life in a bag and a suitcase, my dad next door with another strange girl, footsteps in the hallway, the crunch of the ice machine, footsteps returning, a key in a lock, the creak of a door, a laugh and surrender, the ocean tide changing, imperceptible, incremental, its wave lines rimmed by darting sandpipers pecking at crabs in the moonlight. I left the room and took the stairs down and out the back entrance to the beach. I mixed in with the mist and the night. Back in Philly, the
Inky
would be coming off the presses,
the delivery trucks growling through the city and out to the suburbs. The paperboys would be waiting on their spider bikes in the dark, and the news would slap on doorways and driveways, slap, slap, slap, slap, hundreds of thousands of times before dawn.

I walked to a pier with no lights. It looked like ancient bones, a carcass in the darkness. I heard voices in the waves. A guy in a white T-shirt hopped up from a blanket and a girl sat up and tied her bathing suit top. I walked under the pier and cut over the beach to the boardwalk. Our hotel glowed with a few lights in the distance. I felt like a king in an old book, sneaking out of my castle and walking through my kingdom while my subjects slept. I imagined that’s how God felt at night, looking down at the earth He made, quiet, the sinners and the missionaries sleeping, nobody doing anything wrong, nobody doing anything right, just the world spinning. A ball bounced across my feet and off the boardwalk, into the sand. A dog chased right behind it. An old guy in shorts, slippers, and an open bathrobe meandered out of an alley and onto the boardwalk.

“Crazy fucking dog I got. Never sleeps. Insomniac. I have to let him run for the next hour and maybe he’ll drop. You got a dog out here?”

“Just me.”

“Nice, huh. Not another soul around. It’s how it is in winter. Just me and the dog, no tourists.”

The dog scampered back and dropped the ball. The guy picked it up and hurled it down the boardwalk, the ball bouncing toward infinity, the dog in pursuit. The guy lifted a flask from his pocket. He sipped and we studied each other in the night. His face was gray-and-black stubble, but he had a good haircut and his robe, brocaded in gold stitching, was neat and clean, not the robe of a guy who might have wandered away from a state hospital. He capped the flask and lit a thin cigar. He was a writer. A technical writer. He wrote about science and medicine in journals and magazines. He
was working on a story about a new mechanical heart valve that was smaller, thinner, and lighter than a dime. What was happening in laboratories was amazing; science was accelerating so fast that the world was being reborn in its own technology. He talked about grids and fiber optics and words flashing through this thing called ether. It sounded like science fiction. Even though it was real, it seemed fake, made up, and that was what enchanted him. Enchanted was his description. Putting words to such visions and inventions crowded him and he needed, with his dog, to escape his room and typewriter and wander the night and the beach thinking about star distances and cellular structures.

I asked him if he had ever been to Marrakesh. He hadn’t. He knew about North Africa from maps and medical stories he wrote about parasites and waterborne diseases and how an epidemic becomes a pandemic and how it all can start with a microbe in a village nobody ever heard of. The guy made me think about the planet’s many layers, so many sounds and silences coiling through deserts, jungles, and slums, like the one in Calcutta that Fr. Heaney took up Sunday collections for. You could never really know the world; you had to break it into the geographies that interested you most. He asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I told him that I’d like to see as much of the world as I could, even if I couldn’t understand it all, it’d be nice to glimpse with my own eyes. He stood with his cigar and looked at the black ocean.

“Make sure you see it,” he said. “It’s changing fast, not like evolution. That’s a slow and grinding dance. But today there’s something new with every rotation. A new medicine, a new disease, a new way to heal a wound, a new weapon to kill with. The human capacity to at once save itself and annihilate itself amazes me. Truly amazes me. I live in the science of it.”

“You have a family?”

“Just that dog and my typewriter. I had a wife. She died in a plane
crash. Ice on the wing. They have new systems and chemical solutions now to de-ice planes.”

“My mom died, too. She was hit by a car that skidded on ice.”

“Frozen water. Pretty, but dangerous. I’m sorry about that.”

“I miss her.”

The guy sipped from his flask. His dog returned, panting, and dropped the ball. The guy picked it up and he and the dog walked back toward the alley. He turned and gave one of those two-finger waves off the eyebrow, the kind in the Bogart movies. The air changed; pink and orange needles brightened the gray horizon, but it was still night on the boardwalk, as if the dawn were sneaking in on the darkness, starting from way out, and slowly, the way you turn a kaleidoscope, bleeding the sky with color.