Shadow Man

by Alan Drew

  Magnum, P.I. was back, and Ben assembled the bowl of vitamins he had to make his mother take with a glass of water. He had to wait until a commercial break to give her the pills, though, and he stood behind the couch, watching his daughter and his mother gape at Magnum hopping into a helicopter that zoomed him down an impossibly green coastline.

  “Where’s that woman you married?” his mother said, when the commercial break came and he handed her the first pill.

  “Rachel,” he said, dabbing a drop of water from her chin with a paper towel.

  “That’s what I said. That woman you married.”

  “She’s moved out, Mom,” he said. “We divorced. You know this.”

  Two more pills and a slurp of water, his mother’s clouded eyes staring at him. The vitamins were supposed to enrich the brain, open up the vascular walls and flood the synapses with oxygen.

  “I know what I know,” she said. “How did you mess that up? You always mess things up.”

  Emma glanced at him—a look of sympathy, he thought.

  “I didn’t buy her enough chocolate,” he said.

  Emma laughed, and his mother studied the two of them, trying to figure out if the joke was on her.

  “Oh,” Margaret said finally, sighing, “you were always a difficult child.”

  But then Thomas Magnum was back, diving from the hovering helicopter into the water to swim down a murderer, whom he dragged back to shore. Thomas Magnum had unraveled a murder with a connection to a drug ring run by an old Vietnam buddy, who was bringing the stuff in from Southeast Asia. He had fallen in love (again) with a beautiful, vulnerable woman, raced around Oahu in a red Ferrari, and tossed off a moral soliloquy at the end with his wet shirt clinging to his carpeted chest.

  “Eye candy,” his mother said, popping another chocolate into her mouth.

  “Got a nice car,” Ben said. “I’ll give him that.”

  A half hour later Ben was backing his truck into the street, while Emma was fastening her seatbelt. The blinds flashed open on his mother’s living room window. There she was, the wispy shadow of her body backlit through her nightgown, her thin hands yanking the window open to the wind again.

  —

  THEY TOOK A late-evening ride, Emma up ahead of him, her shadow and the horse’s undulating across the blowing grass. The visit to her grandmother and the ride had taken the edge off Emma’s anger, and she deigned to point things out to him—a mule deer’s ears flicking above the brush line, a kestrel hovering in the wind, a clump of flowering bladderpod.

  They were picking their way down Quail Hill when someone stepped out of the Bommer camp and hiked into the canyon. The man seemed to speed up when he saw the two of them, but then he reached down to retrieve something—an errant golf ball from Bommer Canyon Links, just on the other side of the ridge. The club sent caddies up to collect lost balls, but his presence broke the illusion of wilderness, of Ben and Emma alone in their own golden-lit bubble.

  Back at the house, they had ¡Fiesta! Night, complete with a wrinkling construction-paper sign Emma had made two years before, pre-divorce but imminent separation and forced family “fun” together. He let Emma play her radio station again—the whining pleas of some group he didn’t care to know the name of—while they worked together at the stove. He asked her about her classes, about her friend Heather, whose father had suffered a mild heart attack and had just been released from the hospital. “Fine” was all she’d give him, as she diced jalapeño, scooped the bits onto the knife blade, and slid them into a glass bowl.

  He waited a few moments, letting them work in the echo of the music, the singer moaning about reeling around a fountain and being slapped on a patio.

  “What is this stuff?” he said.

  “The Smiths,” she said. “They’re from England. Manchester, to be precise.”

  “Fifteen minutes with you?” he said, repeating the lyrics. “I wouldn’t say no?”

  Emma just shrugged.

  He wasn’t crazy about the lyrics, but she was growing up and he didn’t need to tick her off any more than he already had.

  “You know,” Emma said, “it’s pretty crappy that you went to his house. You scared him.”

  Good, Ben thought. You follow the rules when you’re scared. “It’s kind of crappy,” he said, “that I don’t know what’s going on with my own daughter.”

  “I don’t tell you because you go all Big Brother on me.” She cut into a tomato, seed and juice wetting the board. “I swear, it’s like you’ll arrest me if I don’t floss.”

  “Did you?” he said in an official voice. “This morning?”

  Eyes rolling.

  “I don’t like secrets,” he said, pouring oil into the frying pan. “They lead to bad things.”

  “Is that what happened with you and Mom? You kept secrets from each other?”

  He reached for the top cabinet, but pain shot through his shoulder. Emma stood on her toes and grabbed the packet of taco sauce for him.

  “You should put stuff in the lower cabinets,” she said.

  “Thanks,” he said, tossing the ground beef in the frying pan. “I don’t know what happened with me and your mother.”

  When they told Emma they were getting a divorce, Ben and Rachel had settled on the easiest explanation: They had fallen out of love. “It happens sometimes,” Rachel had said, hugging Emma. Since the divorce, Emma and Rachel seemed to have grown closer, while Emma had dug a moat around herself with Ben, and he’d wanted to tell Emma the real reason for the split: Your sweet, sweet mother couldn’t keep her hands off the fucking history teacher down the hall. She and Mr. Timeline had worked together on a grant to get Macintosh computers for the library at the crappy, underfunded North Hollywood high school. The history teacher listened to her, Rachel had said at the time. Clearly a rebuke of Ben, whom Rachel had called “abstracted” and “distant.” Ears, the gateway to love! In the year since the divorce, Ben had wanted to tell his daughter the truth; he wanted her sympathy, her loyalty, especially since she and Rachel both seemed to blame him for the death of the marriage. Fallen out of love? Jesus. As though he and Rachel had sighed together one morning in mutual realization that Love had slipped out the back door and was never coming back. Oh, well. We’d better tell Emma.

  “Mom says you guys grew apart,” Emma said, “whatever that means.”

  He sprayed the raw meat with lime, the citrus stinging a hangnail on his thumb.

  “Is that a quote?” he said.

  “Paraphrasing,” she said.

  He flipped the meat, browned side up, and watched the place on his ring finger where the band had been, the fat still indented. He’d tossed it in the trash one drunken night but then retrieved it immediately and hid it in a box in the rifle cabinet.

  “I guess that’s one way to think about it,” he said.

  He had been completely broadsided by the affair. “I wanted you to know,” Rachel had said late on a Friday night, while they sat watching a Dodgers game and ate Vietnamese takeout. “I needed you to know.” One moment he’d been sitting on the couch, Rachel’s warm shoulder leaning against his, watching Fernando Valenzuela strike out the side, and, whiplash, the next he was some idiot who’d been T-boned by a cheating wife. He’d first met the history teacher, Dennis Jackson, a couple years earlier at a school fundraising BBQ, shook Mr. Timeline’s hand, talked with him for a few minutes about Skylab falling back to earth. “Hope it falls west of Alameda and east of Wilmington,” Ben remembered saying. “We have to educate the kids,” Mr. Timeline had said, “not arrest them.” Rachel swore it hadn’t started back then, swore it’d only been a few months, but she could have kept on sleeping with the man, and Ben, the goddamned veteran detective breaking open drug cases, wouldn’t have been the wiser to what his wife was doing in her afternoons after classes. Grading papers, my ass!

  Rachel wanted to explain why to him that night. She needed him to understand, she said, but he wasn’t sticking around to listen to what she
needed.

  “Stay,” she said, following him to the front door, tugging on the edge of the windbreaker he was yanking over his shoulders. “Ben, I told you because I love you.”

  He imagined slapping her then, when she said that, a vivid, satisfying smack of skin against skin, and he knew he had to get out of there before he did something stupid.

  “Let’s talk,” she said, still holding on to the zipper of his coat. “We need to talk, please.”

  “Let go,” he whispered through clenched teeth.

  He got trashed that night in a seedy bar on Venice Boulevard. When the bar closed, he got a motel room overlooking the stream of cars on the 405 Freeway and stayed through the weekend, and when he finally stumbled back to the house on Monday after Emma had gone off to school, prepared to kick Rachel out, she was sitting on the steps to the front porch, looking like hell. He sat down next to her and watched with her in silence as a trash truck made its way down the street.

  “Let me explain,” she finally said. “I need you to understand.”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t want to know why.”

  “We have to talk about this, Ben. There’s a reason why—”

  “I just want it to stop.”

  She nodded—giving up a little too easily, he thought—and ran her fingers along the edge of his hand. He didn’t pull away, and she finally clasped his pinkie between her thumb and forefinger and they sat like that for five minutes, the trash truck stopping and starting, the compactor crushing what the neighborhood tossed away.

  Maybe that’s why he got shot three weeks later. He was distracted in the street: Moments when he should have been watching a suspect’s right hand for sudden movement, moments when he should have been tuned to the bullshit some perp was feeding him, he imagined Rachel, her hand on his coat, pleading for him to stay and him not knowing how he could or how he couldn’t.

  “You know, sweetheart,” Ben said now. “It’s hard to explain what happens to husbands and wives.”

  “You mean you think I’m too young to understand, right?”

  “No,” Ben said. “I mean it’s difficult to explain.”

  “Give me some credit,” she said. “I’m fourteen, not some little girl.” She sliced a red onion in half and then pointed at his arm with the tip of the knife. “I know what that scar on your arm is. I’ve always known. You don’t think I believed that stupid story about being in a car accident?”

  Yeah, he did think she bought that stupid story. Rachel thought she bought it, too. Ben remembered Emma, a nine-year-old in ponytails, peeking around the corner into their bedroom, her face white with fear, while he unwrapped the bandage and drained the fluid from the hole. He yelled at her to go away, and a few moments later he listened to her crying in the kitchen while Rachel tried to calm her down.

  “We were just trying to protect you.”

  “Well, it made it scarier, not knowing the truth.”

  After he came home from the hospital, Rachel babied him. She wanted to bring him dinners in bed, wanted to swab the wound with alcohol, wanted to drain the pus and blood herself and wrap the blue-yellow flesh back into the gauze and tape. She tried once. He was groggy-headed and looped with painkillers, and when she touched his arm he slapped it away. No way could he let her touch him. She took his punishment, which just pissed him off more, made him feel like an absolute jerk. When she went back to teaching after a week’s leave to care for him, Ben put in a call to Dan Garrett, the resource officer at the high school, and had him keep an eye on Rachel and the history teacher. Dan said he never saw them together, not even a glance in the hallways, and Ben, sitting on his ass in the house in Marina del Rey, unwrapped the wound and dabbed it with the stinging alcohol twice a day until it healed into a molten scar of flesh.

  “I’m sorry it scared you,” he said.

  “Well, you can’t take it back,” she said, halving an avocado now. “I just wish you and mom would stop BS’ing me.”

  “We’re not BS’ing you,” he said. “Sometimes I don’t really know what happened. You know, I’m not all that great with emotional stuff.”

  “No kidding,” she said. “Maybe it’s because you were always out in the barn, listening to the scanner.” She hacked the pit with the knife and twisted it out of the avocado meat. “I mean, Mom would sometimes stand in the kitchen, staring out the window at the barn. It was kind of depressing.”

  “Maybe,” he said. Ben remembered Helen Galloway this afternoon, saying kids sometimes blamed themselves, thought they caused their parents to split. He knew Emma wanted a clear answer, some one thing to blame that would acquit her of any responsibility. Maybe he did spend too many nights alone after they returned to Santa Elena. Maybe he did ignore Rachel. But coming back here had been more difficult than he imagined, a sort of desperate retreat, an admission of failure. The big bad world was too big and too bad for Benjamin and Rachel Wade.

  “Look, whatever happened with me and your mom,” he said, touching the back of his daughter’s head, her hair fine and soft like her mother’s, “has nothing to do with you, okay?”

  She stopped cutting into the avocado, her eyes welling with tears.

  “I love you and your mother loves you, period. You got it?”

  “Yeah,” she said, nodding. “It’s rotten.” She showed him the blackened half of the avocado.

  “It’s a tragedy,” he said. “We’ll have to suffer through.”

  Ben threw the tortillas in the pan now to fry them up, and Emma started setting the table. The radio went to commercial, some announcer screaming about a monster-truck jam. Ben reached into the refrigerator and popped the tab on a Coors, happy to have an evening off and glad to have that conversation out of the way. Then the commercial gave way to guitar and driving bass.

  “Yeah you’re gonna feel my hand.” The voice a low growl from the hi-fi speakers. “Honey you’re gonna feel my hand…”

  He set the beer on the counter and ran across the room to turn up the music. “What is this?” he said to Emma.

  Emma leaned her hands on the kitchen counter, cocked her hips, and smiled.

  “The Stooges,” she said, bobbing her head to the beat.

  “Danger…little stranger…” There was a vulgar power in the voice, as though the singer would destroy everything and no one could stop him.

  “What?” Ben said, turning down the noise.

  “Iggy and the Stooges.” Then she launched into a pop-music history lesson. Detroit. Godfather of punk. Something about David Bowie. Drugs. But Ben wasn’t really listening; he was rifling through his coat in the hall closet, pulling out the Polaroid he’d snapped at Rafferty’s scene.

  “Iggy did crazy things onstage,” Emma was saying. “Cut his chest open with shards of beer bottles, smeared himself with peanut butter.”

  Ben stared at the words in the picture. That was it, lyrics.

  “He walked over a crowd once, with people in the audience holding him up,” Emma went on. “Said he was Jesus afterward.”

  “How do you know this stuff?” he said, looking up at her. He didn’t like the excitement in her voice.

  She shrugged. “I’m just cool, I guess,” she said, smiling again. “Iggy was crazy. People walked out of his shows freaked out.”

  He wrote down the name on a slip of paper by the phone and stuffed it into his jeans pocket.

  “What is that?” Emma asked, nodding to the picture in his hand.

  “Nothing.” Ben slipped it back into his coat.

  “Ah, an investigation. But that’s ‘adult’ stuff.”

  “Stop it,” he said, his voice louder than he wanted.

  “Geez,” she said. “All right.”

  When the song was over, he switched off the radio and put Al Green on the turntable—sweet, sweet vinyl, with all the scratches and pops. They sat silent, bent over their tacos, Al Green preaching the “Love Sermon.” But the killer’s song had upset the air of the house, filled it with a darker tension. He only sat
at this table when Emma was here, the empty third spot generally relieving him of his appetite. “I want to do everything for you,” Al sang, “that ordinary men won’t do.” Yeah, man, preaching to the choir.

  “So who is this guy your mother’s seeing?”

  “Come on,” Emma said, tossing her taco on her plate. “Fiesta Night, Dad.”

  As a rule, while eating during Fiesta Night, they could only speak Spanish. Emma instituted this rule when he and Rachel started breaking their agreement not to argue in front of their daughter. “I hereby declare we shall only speak Spanish while eating tacos,” Emma had said. They knew little Spanish, just the pleasantries and basic commands, and the dinners on Fiesta Night, at least, were all politeness and awkward phrasings.

  “I don’t care about Fiesta Night,” he said. “I want to know what’s happening in your lives. It’s like covert ops between you two.”

  “I don’t want to be your informant, Detective.”

  He exhaled a long line of air. “Muy bien,” he said now, bobbing his head from side to side in mock silliness. “Salsa es muy caliente!”

  “Sí,” she said. “El carne asada es muy bien!”

  “Feliz Navidad,” he said.

  THE GARGANTUAN SELF

  He’d watched her for two days while he and a couple of Hondurans laid PVC for a sprinkler system next door, his shovel digging deep into the clay soil. He’d gotten strong doing this kind of work, his shoulders rippled with muscle, his biceps and forearms wiry sinews. The old woman clipped dead heads from thornbushes, watered flower baskets that were like purple constellations.

  She reminded him of someone, someone from a long time ago, but for the first day he couldn’t say who. He kept watching her until he remembered the woman, the one who had lived next door to the house where he was kept in the basement. He saw her the day his father brought him home from the doctor. The woman had been in the side yard, near the painted-over window to his basement, watering flowers that were like pink explosions. His dad made them sit in the car and wait, the sunlight so bright that he had to squint to keep it from stabbing inside his head; they waited until she rolled up the hose and went inside her house. Down in the basement, there had always been a shadow cast across the painted-over window, something like smoke that rippled into arms and legs, a shadow he sometimes spoke to when he was in the darkness. It hadn’t been smoke or a black angel, it had been this woman, just outside the painted-over window, watering flowers in the sun.