Shadow Man: A Novel (7 page)

“It’s cooler down here.”

“Tide’s changing. We’ll have to keep moving the blanket.”

“I don’t mind.”

I hadn’t noticed before, but Vera had a scar on the side of her upper right thigh. Hard and white, it was the size of a quarter, round and a little ragged, like Pluto through a telescope. Vera held a transistor radio to her ear and Kurt slept facedown on the blanket. She rubbed lotion on his back with her free hand and burrowed her feet into the sand. I walked toward the pier. It was crooked, pilings were missing, and the wood was ancient and dark. It was like a shipwreck without sails; a splintered galleon from a history book. Surfers shot through the pilings, shadowed for a moment, and then zipped with the wave into the sun. Their girlfriends sat on the beach, laughing and squeezing lemons over their hair; maybe it was the southern sun, but the girls here tanned better than the ones up north, the color was even, natural, a second tempting skin. One of them waved to me but I kept moving. The air beneath the pier cooled and I walked on. The dunes slumped closer to the beach, blankets were fewer, and I imagined an unchartered country, a stretch touched only by God. Like at the end of
Planet of the Apes
when Charlton Heston comes upon the Statute of Liberty toppled on the shore; both he and the statue, looking sideways at him from the sand, seem confused, and Heston realizes that the alien planet his spaceship landed on was
really earth in the way, way distant future, like starlight shooting backward, and all he ever knew and loved before was gone. Buckets, kids, a woman with a white robe and glass of iced tea waved to a man who stood in the blurry heat of a charcoal fire on the porch of a big house. I looked to the horizon. Vera’s world was out there, the silk bazaars and desert fires and farther east the Nile Delta, where Moses, according to the Bible and Fr. Heaney, was set adrift in a basket. I glanced back toward the pier and saw Vera walking toward me, passing through the shadows, her bathing suit flashing like blue magic.

“What’s your story, Jim?”

“It’s a small one.”

“I left Kurt sleeping. When the wave hits the blanket he’ll wake up quick.”

Vera laughed, playing it out in her head. She stood beside me. I felt Kurt’s shirt brush my arm. The surf swirled around our ankles. Pelicans raced in dark succession over the ocean, their wing tips inches from the waves; farther out fishing boats waddled silently where the water met the sky, reminding me of tin ducks at a carnival shooting stand. The bay we had crossed earlier was salty, tangy, tamed, almost restful with its bulrush and bone-gray trees, but this ocean was wild and pure and rough, its colors changing with sun and cloud from blue to deep blue to green to the foaming white edge of the wave’s curl. The waves struck the beach and pulled back, rushing out to their deep, hidden source, moving in warm and cool currents, invisible serpents. I ran from Vera and jumped into a wave, my body slicing through the water, feeling the pressure and the tug, the immense weight, and then surfacing, water running off me, shining in the sun, my face warm until another wave knocked and rolled me, my back scraping the sand, stinging and cool, and laughing with my mouth closed beneath the water, surrendering to its power. I walked out, dripping, toward Vera. I shook my wet hair.

She squealed and pushed me away. We stood looking at each other, smiling; me young and sand-scraped in the light, and Vera, her back to the dunes, her face toward the ocean. What is that word when all seems right, when a moment marks itself in you somewhere and you keep it? Resplendent. My dictionary called it resplendent.

“Let’s swim to the other side.”

“You’ve been there.”

“I’ll go back. You go, too, Jim. See what’s out there. So much. There was a church in Carthage on the cliffs. It had clinging vines and loose stones. The mosaics were fading. In the afternoons an old man would walk up the hill and play piano in the church. I never knew what he was playing, but the notes rolled out of that old church and over the sea and for all I knew they kept going and never quieted. I sat there many afternoons listening to that old man’s music and watching far-off boats. Can you picture it?”

“Yeah. It’s like in the near sunset, when a guy’s on his stoop, drinking a beer and smoking a cigar and listening to the Phillies on the radio. You can smell the aftershave coming off him and hear his wife inside through the screen door. It’s as if his day is done and for a couple of hours he lives inside that radio.”

“Those are the things you carry forever, Jim. Those scents and sounds.”

Vera walked back from the water and sat in the sand. I sat with her. Late-afternoon clouds, white, not threatening, hung before us. Sand crabs skittered; the tide crept up. Vera rubbed her scar.

“Sometimes it itches. It’s hard like a stone. Feel it.”

She was right.

“It’s part of my story, Jim.”

“You don’t have to tell me.”

“I thought you wanted to know.”

“I do, but a scar like that, I guess, is personal. I just don’t know why we’re on this trip or where we’re going.”

The man was from Marrakesh. He was not a spice merchant; he was a rich man’s son Vera had met in a tea shop. He said he was a jeweler, but he was a smuggler, a man who traded diamonds and guns across Africa. He was tall and lean with long muscles and he moved, Vera said, as if he never touched the ground. He fed her pomegranates and saffron rice. Vera had been traveling with friends, but she stayed behind in Marrakesh with the man until she found out all of his lies, or most of them, or enough to spoil what was once enticing. She left one night and he came looking. He found her in Casablanca.

She ran away again and he tracked her down in Rabat, where he shot her with a small pistol on a drunken night; a woman doctor dug out the bullet, cleaned the wound, and stitched her. Vera said she remembered the way the brownish antiseptic mixed with the blood, turning her skin yellow and sepia like a strange vegetable under the steel examining room light. The doctor told her to escape and said Vera didn’t understand that she had become a trapped prize; a woman with fair skin and blue eyes on the North African coast was precious. Like a diamond to be possessed but never loved.

Vera made her way to Spain and flew home to the Cleveland suburb where her father sold Cadillacs and winter came in hard and the scenery was so changed from Marrakesh that she felt safe, as if delivered to a new shore with no trace of that other world. But the man began appearing, in a mirror, a store window, a distant figure on a sidewalk. She felt him everywhere: the shadow behind her in the movie theater, the stranger with his face hidden by a newspaper in a café. The man, his name was Mounir, hovered but never arrived, as if he wanted to haunt, like a wild dog slinking through tall grass on the African plains before it strikes. Vera said he would kill her; she was sure of it. She ran again.

She had been running seven months, the bullet wound, once spreading like a purple bloom beneath her skin, healed to a raised
white scar. That’s when she met Kurt and me in the Philly diner and came home with us that night. She said the man had been tracking her across alleys and that she hid in a church, scrunched down behind the altar, and then slipped out through the vestibule to the street where she spotted Kurt and me in the window. Maybe, she said, it was the light over the table, but from the outside Kurt and I seemed like people she could trust, and when she came in and sat with us, she looked at Kurt’s hands, hard and battered from sandblasting and painting ships, and knew he would offer sanctuary. She said they were strong hands, solid and coarse enough to keep even a gun smuggler from Marrakesh away. That’s what she thought; that’s all she wanted, a pair of steady hands to keep her safe.

She had not seen the man since she’d been with us, although driving down the Eastern Shore, she thought she glimpsed him behind us in an El Dorado that turned and vanished in the road dust. Vera stopped her story. She put her chin on her knees and looked at the ocean. She leaned on me and we sat in the sand. The waves were cold and clean, hitting the shore hard, mist rising, the way it does just before night when the tide and the air change and new creatures scatter over the sand.

I didn’t know what to think of Vera’s story. It was more mysterious than even the best Lizabeth Scott movie, and I bet Kurt, if he knew the tale, which he must, felt he was in a script, on the lam, and protecting a girl with a bullet in her past. I supposed that would intrigue Kurt, that late-night, movie-watching side of him, anyway. The mark was there on Vera’s leg. It looked like a bullet scar would look, and Vera did know about spices and desert windstorms and Marrakesh with its colors, balconies, and flowers mixing in with boats and nets and fishermen hunched over hash wisps from shisha pipes. But why does a man like the one she described spend all his time following her and doing nothing? I looked behind me and down the beach. Was a stranger with an accent and a small pistol
roaming the coming night? I squinted but saw nothing. Then a figure moved under the pier and headed toward us: Kurt, cursing, sandy, his blanket drenched.

“I was sleeping and the wave hit me and washed my beer away.”

Vera laughed. I laughed, too. Kurt’s cutoffs hung damp and heavy at his waist. He grabbed Vera, threw her on his shoulders, and twirled her toward the waves. She screamed and laughed and told Kurt he had better put her down, but he kept twirling, getting dizzy, losing his knees, wobbling as the water rushed up on him and then he tumbled into a big wave with Vera, and for a moment they were gone, and then Vera popped up and then Kurt. She walked over and pushed him back into the water and another wave came and knocked them both into the shore and they popped up again, beaten and tired and Vera grabbed Kurt and held him and jumped up in his arms and he carried her out of the waves, and she seemed small, thin, her black hair matted in strands, as if the waves had washed some of her away. We walked under the pier and toward our car. Kurt carried Vera the entire way. She tried to teach us a few words of Arabic, the throaty, clipped syllables made the night exotic. Inshallah — God willing. Allahu Akbar — God is great. Hasbyallah wa ne’malwakil — I complain to God, He is my best resort. God is in the language, Vera said; he lives in Arabic more than he does in English.

“A different God,” said Kurt.

“Same God, different name,” said Vera. “He’s a desert god, ruler of a harsh place.”

Kurt opened the Impala’s trunk and tossed us towels. We drove to a hotel and the girl at the counter — she looked no older than me — said, “Do y’all need a room?” Y’all was so much softer than Vera’s Arabic; it was a word that didn’t come at you so much as rolled over and through you. The girl pinged a silver bell on the counter and a little, bent man appeared and grabbed our two suitcases. He walked
toward the elevator, his right foot splayed as if unhinged, and the girl whispered to us, “He’s my uncle. He ain’t right in the head if you know what I mean. But Daddy’s gotta take care of him. Kin is kin, after all. But he’s good for carrying things and he’ll show you to your rooms.”

The elevator opened on the fifth floor and you could faintly hear the Beach Boys, tinny, every note false, from the transistor in the lobby. Kurt and Vera took 501 and the bent man led me to 503. Vera came in and gave the man two quarters and he handed me the key and disappeared. Vera kissed me on the cheek and ran off to 501. My room’s balcony overlooked the ocean. It was night. The sand was gray from up here and the ocean black. Lights glowed on the faraway horizon, floating in the air, unattached, like spirits, but I knew they were the lights of freighters and trawlers that sailed beyond. A man leaned over the boardwalk railing nearest the hotel. He looked out to sea and then turned and looked at the hotel, up its floors as if he were staring right at me, and then looked away again to the sea. I went inside and closed the curtains.

The phone rang. “How y’all doing? Rooms okay? Can I gitcha anything?” I said thank you and no. I took a shower, the warm water tasted like salt. I dressed and watched TV. A knock on the door.

“Hey, I came to check on you. Need towels. Soap?” said the girl from the desk.

“No. Well, maybe an extra towel if you have any.”

She laughed. “You wanna make out? I’m a good kisser. But only kissing. Some of you boys want more but I only kiss.”

She was blond and wore white shorts and a forest-green halter top. She stepped in and wrapped her arms around me and started kissing me; her lips were shiny and smelled of cinnamon. She pressed hard and her teeth clinked my teeth but then she eased and kissed some more and it was strange and nice, and I don’t know why, but I closed my eyes and kissed her back and we fell on the bed and she landed on top of me. She had a short, hard tongue, and she was light
upon me. She sat up and straightened her hair. “I better git down to the desk. My uncle’s down there; he gets confused after a while. Maybe I’ll come back later and we’ll kiss some more. But only kissing. Some guy from Massachusetts the other week wanted more and I said, ‘No sir, buddy.’ I’m a Baptist and I don’t need that on my soul. Kissing’s okay, though. Mr. Jones, our Bible group leader, says kissing teaches, what’s that word, uh, moderation, that’s it, moderation and maturity. If you’re here next week — I can’t tell how long you’ll be here because your daddy, he is your daddy, right? ’Cuz one time we had a kidnapped boy here with a terrible man. The police came. — Anyway, there’s this special preacher coming all the way up from Charlotte to give a sermon on young people and love. My daddy says he’s a mighty fine preacher. Are you a Baptist? You’re not a Jew, are you? My daddy says stay away from Jews. I better git.”

She left.

That was the second time I made out with a girl. It was nice to have it happen unexpected. My first make-out was with Carmen Pasquele at night in an alley beyond a summer stickball game. I was batting fifth and Carmen, whom I had held hands with two days earlier, came along and whispered for me to follow her. I knew what was coming and I got a little knotted as I walked past Stan’s Deli and the truck repair shop and into the alley, where Carmen leaned back on the wall and pulled me to her and kissed me so soft that I barely felt it, but I did and it went right through me like a sip of hot chocolate slipping down your throat and spreading through your chest. She kissed me again and I heard the thwack of our fourth batter, Billy Holmes, and Carmen knew and she said, “Go back to your game, Jim.” She kissed me on the cheek and went the other way down the alley, her sandals scraping the road and her dress so short you had to wonder what Carmen was actually hiding up there.