Shadow Man: A Novel (5 page)

“That smell is who we all are,” said the guy. “My preacher, he works there, too, says it’s the raw element of this world, connecting us all, animal and man alike, until God takes our souls.”

“How long has your family been here?” said Vera.

“Since the ships came from Africa.”

“You ever been?”

“To Africa? No. I ain’t even been, I’ll bet, more’n fifty miles from where I’m standing right now. Got no need. The world comes to us here, like you people. Taking Route 13 to that big bay bridge tunnel yonder. All I ever need to see of the world I can see through the windshields of passing cars.”

“You play a lot of tennis?” said Kurt.

“See that school wall? I hit against it two hours a day. That wall is tougher than any man who ever played. The ball just keeps coming back, coming back. There’s no time to think.”

“Instinctive,” said Kurt.

“If that’s what you want to call it.”

Kurt pulled a roll of grip tape from his bag and handed it to the guy. The guy thanked him and said good-bye; he walked past the edge of the court and toward the pines, his racquet spinning in his hand like a propeller.

“You believe in God, Jim?”

“I do.”

“Kurt?”

“Mostly.”

Vera sat back on the hood of the Impala and we were quiet. Kurt wiped sweat from his face. Tranquility is how my dictionary described it. Then the cicadas started a boisterous music in the trees, and that riled other noises, dragonflies dancing and bobbing over the car, Vera’s rattling map, Kurt packing his tennis gear and sitting in the front seat, clicking the ignition, the eight-track squeaking to life and Walter Jackson rolling in like a storm from a great distance. We were off again, bound farther south toward the marshes that fringed the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, the tang of egg, wet,
and reed filling the air, salty on our tongues and slipping into our lungs. Egrets and smaller white and gray birds took flight around us, keeping pace with the Impala and then peeling off in silent arcs while above the windshield and over the water gulls glided on the crosswinds, their wings outstretched and still.

“Vera?”

“Yes, Jim.”

“What’s your story?”

Kurt’s hands tightened on the wheel and the Impala slid into the tunnel darkness, millions of gallons of water above us, heaving down in a long curve, like a bow with the string pulled, and above that, out of sight, the sky and the birds.

I sit on the bed, dressed. It is morning. The woman in white is busy around me, doing what I don’t know, but the shade is open and I can see out the window into the street. Two boys, their backpacks riding low, walk toward school, I suppose. I have a recollection of such scenes. The boys disappear around a corner and the street is quiet for a moment until a car comes and a woman steps out her front door and onto the sidewalk. She seems late for something, running unsteadily in high heels, her body swaying.

“James, Eva is coming soon. She’s taking you out. You’d better comb your hair.”

The woman in white leads me away from the window and into the bathroom. The mirror shows my face. I look skeptical. I wet my hands and run them through my black-and-gray hair and then pull a comb through it. The woman in white says I look handsome, but I feel wet and lost and I want to know about the face in the mirror, my face, the one that is still there, but somehow hiding in bones and skin that ever so slightly have changed through the years to look a little like Kurt but mostly, I suppose, like me when I was younger. But I am not young and this is the face I’ve become, settled into. I feel like a dream in stone. The lady in white brushes my shoulder and slides a pen into my shirt pocket.

“You’re a writer, James. A journalist. You wrote about things all over the world.”

“What things?”

She holds newspaper stories with my name on the top. She says that’s me. James Ryan.

“Mmmmm,” I say.

I sense this explanation happens every day. It seems repeated but I can’t be sure. The woman in white recites it like an actor saying her lines, or a person talking to a fool, bright and cheery, rehearsed, a mantra perhaps.

“Tell me about Kurt and Vera, James.”

“What about them?”

“Everything. You took a trip with them. A long trip to the shore.”

“An adventure, Kurt called it. Virginia Beach.” The woman in white sits on the bed with a folded shirt in her arms.

“And Vera. What was she like?”

“Enchanting. That’s how Kurt described her to me once. We were sitting on our back stoop the second night after we met Vera and that’s what he said. I agreed with him. It was funny, though, because Kurt never used that kind of word before. I knew all kinds of words back then. I looked them up in a dictionary my mother gave me one Christmas. Kurt thought it was an odd gift to give a kid.”

“Tell me more about Vera. Was she pretty?”

“She could change on you like light through stained glass. Her hair was long and dark and her cheeks were high, her eyes restless. Her hands fluttered around her words and her fingers were long, almost translucent, and she wore spoon and amber rings that rattled on tabletops and car doors. She was great at thumb wrestling. I wanted to kiss her once. Not in a romantic way. She was in the kitchen. It was almost dark. She was squeezing grapefruits into a pitcher and she seemed scared or lost and I thought if I kissed her on the forehead she’d be okay. But I didn’t. I just watched her for a while. When you were with Vera it seemed all the other sounds in the world went quiet. Did you ever know someone like that?”

The woman in white walks with a folded shirt to the window. Her back is to me; I think she says something, but I cannot be sure. There’s a knock. The door opens and a lady steps in.

“Hi, Eva,” says the woman in white, turning from the window.

The lady called Eva kisses me on the cheek and then on the forehead.

“He had a good night.”

I am being talked about in the third person. I may be an idiot, but this much I know.

“James, I am Eva, your wife. I’m taking you on a ride to the beach. You love the beach.”

“It’s cold.”

“You like it best in the cold. The cold and the gray, you used to say.”

They hand me a coat. The woman holds my hand. Her hand is warm and firm; it slides nicely into mine. We step into the hallway, and the woman in white, from behind us, yells “good-bye,” and we walk and I smell disinfectant. The scent passes and the front door opens and Eva, that is her name, and I descend the stone stairs and into the gray light, which she says I like and find inspiration from, which she says she always found strange, a man being moved and inspired by a sky the color of granite.

“That’s from spending so much time in Eastern Europe, James. I think there’s cloud and drizzle in your bones.”

“The Berlin Wall.”

“Yes, James. The Wall. See, sometimes you do come back, you do remember. I know you can remember more. You’ll come back. You’re just a little confused now, but you’ll come back.”

The lady kisses me on the lips. I feel like a dog that has learned a new trick. But I can tell in the lady’s eyes that she means it; I am lost and she has come to bring me back, from where and to where I don’t know, and she kisses me again, hard, and I have to say, I do like the way she tastes and feels and I seem to know her the way you know a character in an old storybook. The lady opens the door to a red Fiat Spider convertible.

“Remember? It’s yours. But it’s falling apart. Too many miles and rust around the back wheels. Look, the top is worn right here.”

I drop into the seat and close the door. Other scents. Cigarettes, mint, the perfume the lady is wearing, dampness and lemon, maybe from wood polish. Eva, she tells me her name is Eva, starts the car and we’re off. I like sitting low like this, close to the ground, the tug of speed and gravity. Eva turns a corner and the back of the Fiat shimmies on the wet street, and she looks at me and rolls her eyes, and I think this must have happened a million times, but I can’t be sure and so I look out the window at the stubby stoops and squat row houses and out to the wide boulevard and along a river and toward factory smoke and a bridge, which the lady tells me leads to the Jersey Shore. I know this. I know this geography.

I know Bob Dylan’s on the tape player, but I don’t know exactly what I’m doing here or why this lady in the driver’s seat, who has just shifted into fifth gear, wants part of me, is driving me somewhere. I feel like a guy who showed up on the wrong night at the wrong theater trying to make sense of the scenery and strange faces coming out of the wings. Bob Dylan sings about leopard-skin pants and pillbox hats, and his is a voice you won’t forget, no matter how much of your own life you’ve forgotten. It’s a voice whistling through bone, rattling and whining as if it’s fighting its own sound, daring beauty to be a mongrel. Very unlike the voice of Walter Jackson. My feet are cold. We’re on the Atlantic City Expressway. The lady pulls off at a rest stop.

“I need a cigarette, James. Can’t take Europe out of the girl.”

She blows smoke through the crack in the window, a bit of drizzle on her face. I like this sky, this grayness. It mutes.

“It was like this all across Eastern Europe that year. Cold, dim, governments falling around us. Remember how we had to search every night to find an open phone line, one with no static, so you could send your stories back to the paper? You were an expert with
alligator clips, taking apart the phone jacks in our hotel rooms, twisting wires to get your connection. Remember that? Sometimes you’d curse through the night because you couldn’t get a connection to get your story out.”

She crushes her cigarette in the ashtray, rolls the window down, and throws it out, a flash of lipstick brightening the gray. I seem to have this memory from someplace else, but it’s gone and the lady waves smoke from the car and checks the mirror. She is graceful. I would not say elegant, but graceful. She pulls her dark hair back and ties it. Her face is a small sea of white, made fainter by lipstick and blue eyes; the blue of the earth seen from the moon. They come at you, inquisitive, not threatening. She says she is my lover, my wife; the one who raced through history with me and laughed with me amid the coal-stained hotels and icy bedrooms of Eastern Europe. She says the curtains in those rooms were brocaded, thick as blankets, letting in no light, even at midday. It was Charles Dickens, only gloomier, but somehow, at that time, along the lines of that changing map, it was the best place to be. If this happened, as she says it did, wouldn’t I know? Some shred, some bright rag of memory? How can I not reach back to something so immediate in her voice? Am I that scoured of who I was?

“They brought him into the streets of Bucharest, James. Remember that? His scared ashen face, the face that had terrified so many. There it was among the bare trees and rifles of winter. In his coat, looking more like a doorman than a dictator. They tried him and then shot him on the cobblestones. You typed all night on that story. That image. You wanted to get it so right.”

She leans over and kisses me. She starts the car and we are on the highway, past pines and sandy fringes, through a tollbooth and into traffic that thins as we head toward skeletal splays of neon hanging unlit from buildings in the mist. We come to the final stoplight, the beach and the pier ahead of us, gray compressing the horizon
beyond the dark rocks of the jetty. The waves don’t roll to the shore; they lunge, out of rhythm, breaking hard, white foam chasing spindly legged birds over the sand. This I do remember, this beach of childhood, of Kurt with his workingman’s sunburn, his beer can half buried in the sand, his legs white with Coppertone, and Vera sitting in one of those low canvas chairs under an umbrella, reading the romantic parts of a book out loud to Kurt, who sometimes laughed but mostly shook his head. I see them out there. I want to go to them, me now in this old state, but I know when I get to where they’re sitting, they’ll be gone.

“Let’s walk, James.”

She takes my hand. We’re careful on the slippery boardwalk. The shops are shuttered. I breathe in the dying-autumn scents of funnel cakes and taffy. She wraps her arms around mine, puts her head on my shoulder. There’s a crack of sunlight in the gray. It shines on the sea, making a streak of blue through the green; the water is clean this time of year, unsettled but pure. A surfer bobs two hundred yards offshore. The water that far out is calm, the waves undefined, rolling, slowly finding form. The surfer waits. One wave then the next. Patient and cold, he spots that lift of water rising shadow-like behind him. He paddles. The wave catches him and they are one, and suddenly he’s up, the board racing ahead of the wave, skimming through the curl, and the surfer disappears for a moment, but then his head breaks through the white and the wave crashes around him, an explosion of water, and he tumbles into the surf, his board twirling in the air like a broken airplane wing. He rises from the water, shiny in his wet suit, shivering and laughing. I feel I can hear him laughing in the wind.

“Sit here, James.”

She lays plastic on the wet bench. She pulls a bottle of wine from her bag, two glasses and a corkscrew.

“Vranac. You must remember Vranac. From Montenegro. Good,
cheap wine; we drank it all across the Balkans. There’s a shop in New York that sells it. I saw it in their window the other day. The same label. It’s more expensive now. I guess the Balkans have become exotic. Mass graves and grapevines. Those graves, James, I still think about them. Rotting belts and tangled bones, you wrote. I think we used to pay five Deutsche Marks a bottle back then. Here.”

I sip.

“Maybe your taste will remember what your mind cannot.”

I sip again, but no. It is good, but it brings nothing back, awakens no ghosts.

She lifts a fat envelope from her bag and thumbs through it.

“These are some of my favorite stories of yours, James. I keep them with me wherever I go. They’re getting brittle and yellow. I should laminate them, but I like the feel of the paper. Let’s see. Here’s a good one.
MERCHANT OF DEATH KILLED AT SEA.
”