The Identity Man (16 page)

Shannon went to work. He smoothed a surface for the wing attachment. He drilled a hole for the dowel. It was a pleasant, involving business. He could focus on it but still enjoy the sweet, energizing spring air. Applebee wandered into the house for a while and Shannon lost himself in fitting the wing to the broken angel. Then Applebee wandered back out again to watch. He smoked his pipe as Shannon smoothed the new piece onto the old. Now and then, he made what Shannon thought of as "old man conversation."

"Look at this," he said, peering out over the weeds toward the skyline. Biting on his pipe stem. Shaking his head. "It's a shame. It's like we've gone back to the jungle out here. I had to buy a gun. I did. A forty-five. I keep it in the closet in my bedroom. Half the time I'm terrified my grandson'll find it and blow his head off. But what else can I do? We have packs of predators roaming the street at night. Attacking anyone that moves. Breaking in and attacking women right at home in their own beds. Setting cars on fire, houses on fire. The media don't even report half of what goes on. How can they? They're too busy glamorizing slut actresses and gangster music stars. It wouldn't be good for business if they told people what really happens in a neighborhood when morality breaks down. We've got girls here getting pregnant at thirteen without husbands. The fathers taking no care of them or the children. And the sons become predators and it starts again. So help me, all it takes for the world to crumble to nothing is for women to lose their virtue and men their honor."

Shannon gave a sort of smile to himself. It was the usual old man complaint: the world's not what it used to be. It's all going to hell. Back in the day, everything was better. Blah blah blah. As if there was ever much honor or virtue in the world. Holding the angel's new wing piece on his lap now and sanding the edges, Shannon tried to humor him out of it. "I thought you said you weren't a preacher."

But Applebee didn't get the joke. He just went on. "A high school math teacher. Retired now. You can't teach children if they have no discipline. They won't let you discipline them yourself and they get no discipline at home. So it just gets worse. My daughter found that out—yes, she did, for all her idealism."

It was his first mention of his daughter and it turned Shannon's attention. He wanted to find out more. "Your daughter—is she a teacher, too?"

"Teaches the little ones. At least there's still some hope with them. But she finally gave up even on that. In the neighborhood, the thugs come younger and younger. Even the little ones can't be controlled anymore. Now she teaches on the west side, in a private school. That way, Michael can go there free of charge."

Shannon nodded. He liked the image of her teaching little children. It struck him as very womanly. It touched him somehow.

"Oh," said Applebee then, "a preacher." He suddenly got Shannon's joke. He gave a good-natured chuckle. "No, no, no. I guess I
was
going at it though, wasn't I? But no."

"A teacher not a preacher," said Shannon with a laugh.

"Exactly. This house did used to be a rectory, though."

"Oh yeah?" Shannon wasn't exactly sure what a rectory was.

Applebee must've picked up on that. "It was a preacher's house. The church used to stand right there." He pointed with his pipe stem to a field full of garbage. "It burned down years ago. That altarpiece—it was the only thing that was saved."

"Well, I guess the house must've had an effect on you," Shannon kidded him. "Cause for a teacher, you preach it pretty good."

Frederick Applebee laughed. "I'm just a cranky old man, that's all. But cranky old men know a thing or two. That's what makes them so damn cranky. Fact is, I'm no churchgoer and never have been but..."

Shannon had risen from his stool and was attaching the wing again. He took a pencil from his pocket and began to sketch an outline of feathers on the wood so he could carve them to join properly with the broken stump. He didn't notice that Applebee had gone into a fugue state and fallen silent.

Then Applebee said quietly, "You ever study calculus?"

"Oh, sure," murmured Shannon, sketching away. "Calculus? That's all I ever do."

"Yes," said the old man, almost to himself. "I understand. No one does anymore. But there's a lot of mystery to it. Infinite limits ... a lot of mystery." He shook his head slowly. "Sorry. These things—they run around in my brain and I've got no one to tell them to."

"That's all right. I don't mind. It's interesting."

There was no answer. Shannon came out of his focus on the wing long enough to glance at Applebee. Applebee was holding his pipe to his mouth and tapping the stem against his lower lip. He was looking thoughtfully over the arches and jumbles and lopsided spires of the debris lying in the high weeds. Shannon figured he was thinking about the old days. He smiled again. He liked Applebee. He was a good old guy.

Coming back to himself, Applebee noticed Shannon watching him. And he noticed the wing Shannon was working on and how well it fit to the stump on the broken angel and how perfectly and gracefully Shannon had drawn the feathers. "Look at that," he said, perking up, delighted. "Why, that's wonderful. Where'd you learn to do that?"

"I just can," Shannon said with a shrug. "I've always been able to."

At that moment, the little boy—Michael—came bursting out of the house into the backyard. All his earlier solemnity was gone. He was running full speed, squealing with laughter.

"Ho!" cried Frederick Applebee as the boy darted behind him and clutched at his legs, hiding. "What's this?"

Michael's mother cracked open the screen door behind him, peeking around the edge of it with bright, mischievous eyes.

"Where'd he get to?" she said. "I know he's here somewhere."

The little boy giggled behind his grandfather's legs as the woman came out of the house and crept steadily toward him like a stalking cat.

"I know he's here somewhere," she said again.

The boy, unable to tolerate the suspense, broke from behind Applebee's legs and ran for it. The mother went after him and caught him and swept him up in her arms, laughing and tickling him.

Shannon felt a hitch in his chest at this first close sight of her, the sight of her bright eyes and smile and the sound of her laughter. She was wearing loose jeans and a baggy sweatshirt, but Shannon could see her figure moving under them as she wrestled with her son. She was definitely the woman he'd seen weeping in the window, but so different from that woman, so lively and hilarious, that he half doubted the two were the same.

"Henry Conor, this is my daughter, Teresa Grey," Frederick Applebee said.

She came over to them, clutching the giggling, struggling boy in her arms so that his feet kicked and dangled off the ground. She was as pretty up close as she'd been through the window, prettier because she was smiling now. She had big, warm brown eyes, high cheekbones, and a chin like the point of a valentine. She had her father's squashed nose, but smaller, more graceful, like an Irish pug. Her hair sprang out all over the place in corkscrew curls, which Shannon found endearing.

"Hi, Henry," she said. She held the boy in one arm, letting him slide his way to the ground. She offered her free hand and Shannon shook it.

"Look at this," said Applebee, indicating the angel on the reredos. "He's doing a great job so far."

"Oh, I'm glad!" she said. She had a warm voice, on the deep side. "My father loves this old thing. He was crushed when it got broken. Oh, you
are
doing a good job, aren't you?"

"Just the wing," said Shannon modestly. "The head'll be the hard part."

The boy squirmed free of Teresa's hold and dashed for the house. Laughing uncontrollably, he shouted, "I'm getting away!"

"Excuse me," Teresa said to Shannon with a laugh.

Shannon felt another hitch inside him as he watched her go chasing after the child, shouting play threats at him.

He went back to work. He began to carve the delicate wing feathers with an X-Acto knife. The old man wandered into the house and back out again later, standing and watching, chatting about the thoughts he had had on his mind for too long. At lunchtime, the woman brought him a sandwich and a Coke. Now and then, the boy peeked solemnly at him through a rear window. Shannon made faces at the kid and pretended to shoot at him. The boy ducked and came back, fighting down a smile. He was too shy, though, to come out into the yard.

At one point, the old man came out and gave Shannon a key, a small Medeco with a green spot stuck to the bow. "You can get in the back door with this, in through the security gate and the kitchen. In case you want to fetch the altarpiece when no one's around."

Shannon was touched. He had broken into a lot of houses in his life, and he was touched that the old man trusted him with the key.

It was a good day all around. Shannon liked the work and he enjoyed the family and the spring weather was fine. As he carved the delicate feathers, his mind went back to how, not long ago, not very long ago at all, he'd been a hunted man, hiding in a cemetery tomb, of all places, with life in prison or death hanging over him. The thought made him lift his face gratefully to the sun and breathe in deeply.

A breeze reached him and a tendril of decay drifted beneath his nostrils: the stench of the fallen city.

SHANNON FELL IN LOVE
with her—with Teresa. It was something entirely new.

Every weekend, he went to the white clapboard house on H Street to work on the altarpiece. He worked long days, the whole day, so that the work progressed quickly. By the end of only the second Sunday, he had the angel's feathery wing piece nearly done.

While he worked, Frederick Applebee and Teresa and the boy Michael would come out in the yard to be with him, each in their turn. Applebee, for instance, would wander out of the house now and then to check his progress. He would stand around and maunder in that old man way of his about the old days and the state of the world, about mathematics and how civilization was crumbling to dust and so on. Then, later, little Michael would come out and stand with his thumbs in his pockets, swiveling his upper body back and forth. He would ask questions—how do you do this and why do you do that? One afternoon, Shannon gave him tools and some wood to play with. The boy gouged some of the wood and glued some pieces together and called it a helicopter and showed it proudly to his mother.

Teresa visited with him, too. She brought him iced tea and sandwiches. She sat nearby and drank a glass of iced tea herself, keeping him company while he worked. She admired his skill at shaping the wing feathers to match the ones on the original angel. She asked him about his life, where he came from, what he had done. He tried to be careful in answering her questions, but he had to say something. He told her stories he'd derived from the black-and-white movies he'd watched in the white room. He said he'd grown up in Utah among the stark rock outcroppings and level desert plains. He told her he'd lived in a small town with his father, who was a banker, and with his housewife mom. He felt bad about lying to her like that, but what else could he do?
What the hell?
he said to himself. It made a strange kind of sense in a way, didn't it? He was telling her about the life he
should have
had because she was the kind of girl he might have known if he had had that life.

That's the way she seemed to him. She seemed part of that life he'd seen in the black-and-white movies, that life he remembered but had never lived. She was the girl he remembered but had never known. She was warm-hearted and generous, cheerful and funny, so completely different from the anguished woman who'd been weeping in the window that he almost forgot ever having seen her like that. She had a natural, unaffected way of praising his work while making jokes about herself. She would tell him how beautiful and graceful his carved feathers were, for instance, and then go into some anecdote about how clumsy she was with her hands. She would make faces and do silly voices as she told the story, slipping from her precise and mellow diction into street rhythms for humor and emphasis, or even sticking her tongue out to one side and crossing her eyes at a punch line to startle him into laughter. She never tried to seem sexy or alluring or mysterious with him. She was just comical and regular, the same way she was with her son. Shannon watched her with her son sometimes. He watched her teasing the boy out of his heavy solemnity with goofy jokes and faces. He watched her wrestle with the boy, giggling in the dirt, or play some madcap version of football with him that was as good as wrestling. She was always full of that kind of energy and cheer.

"I try to make sure he gets to do guy stuff," she told Shannon as she sat beside his workplace on the remnants of a cinderblock wall. A field strewn with garbage spread out behind her. She drank from her mug of tea and kept an eye on the boy where he played with plastic soldiers in the sparse grass at the other end of the yard. "Daddy throws a ball with him sometimes, but he doesn't have the energy he used to have and ... he was never much into sports anyway. I try to make sure Michael gets to do some roughhousing and ... you know. That sort of thing. Luckily, he's still little. I don't know what I'm gonna do when he has to learn to swing a bat and stand up for himself in a fight and all that."

Shannon looked up from his work long enough to glance over at the boy—and at the woman watching the boy. A vague understanding dawned in him. Without really putting it into words, he started to see why they all came out to the backyard to watch him work, why they all talked to him like this and asked him questions and told him their thoughts. It was because of her husband, because her husband had been killed in the war, and now there was an empty place in the family where he had been. Shannon didn't fill that place, he simply stood in it, like those actors who stand in for a star before the cameras start to roll. He could've been anyone—any man, at least—and they would have talked to him because he was in that place, because the boy missed his father and the old man missed the company of his son-in-law and the woman missed her husband. It was as if they were talking to that other man by talking to Shannon.