Shadow Man

by Alan Drew

  “What’re you doing over here?”

  The man came out of nowhere, and Ben didn’t have time to zip. He stood there hyperventilating, his fingers clasping closed the waist of his only pair of churchgoing khakis.

  “Go on,” the man said to Elizabeta. “Get out of here.” He leaned his bare forearm against the plastic orb of the geodesic dome, his hand hanging like a butcher’s hook above Ben’s head. “A little ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours’?”

  Ben nodded.

  “Button those pants.” The man turned away. “And at a church picnic,” he laughed. “I wonder what your mother would think.”

  “Sir, please don’t tell her.” Ben’s stomach turned to water. “We weren’t doing anything, just looking.”

  “Listen,” the man said, “you introduce me to your mother and I’ll keep this between you and me and God.”

  Ben’s mother sat on the edge of a cement picnic bench, her face glowing in the sun, a plate of fruit salad balanced on the knob of her knee. When they got close, the man curled his fingers around Ben’s elbow.

  “Ms. Wade?”

  “Yes,” Ben’s mother said, turning her face toward him, the left side lit up with sun.

  “I thought you should know what your son’s been up to,” he said.

  “Up to?” she said, standing up now.

  “I’m sorry,” the man said, shaking his head as though it killed him to have to tell her. “Maybe we should speak in private.”

  The three of them shuffled away from the table and stood in the heat of the midday sun. The man introduced himself. “Will Voorhees,” he said, taking Ben’s mother’s fingers in the palm of his hand.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’ve seen you from a distance.”

  A crescent of white teeth lit up Voorhees’s face.

  “Boys will be boys, of course.” Voorhees let out a long sigh and shook his head once. “But I found your son showing his”—he cleared his throat—“his private parts to this poor girl over here.” He nodded in the direction of Elizabeta, who was sitting next to her father, her eyes saucers of fear.

  His mother showered him with a scalding look. Ben wanted to object, wanted to tell his mother about the promise Voorhees had made. He still had a hard-on, though, and he figured that fact alone made whatever he’d say worthless. God knew he had a hard-on.

  “I’ve upset you,” Voorhees said. “I should have kept my mouth shut.”

  “No, Mr. Voorhees. Obviously, I need to keep a closer eye on my son.”

  “I can’t imagine how difficult it is to raise a boy alone.”

  Sunlight sparkled on the tears in his mother’s eyes. Will Voorhees touched the bare skin of her upper arm. “Let me get you something to drink,” he said.

  At home, his mother made Ben scrub his hands with pumice stone, made him wash his mouth out with soap. “I’m so embarrassed,” she said. “Thank God for Mr. Voorhees.”

  A week later it was “Thank God for Mr. Voorhees” when he took them to Balboa Island for an ice cream and a walk among the wealthy. “Thank God for Mr. Voorhees” when he purchased them a new couch and coffee table and then sat on it and drank a sugared cup of coffee. “Thank God for William” when she forced Ben to play catch with him in the completed greenbelt behind the apartment complex. And “Thank God for Will” when, on the edge of eviction from the apartment, he paid their rent.

  One night four months later, Ben woke after midnight to the sound of the wind rattling the aluminum windowpane. He needed to pee, so he tiptoed down the hall in his underwear and caught the faint strain of classical music humming from behind his mother’s closed bedroom door. He stopped in the hallway to listen—the bowed tension of violins rising and swelling, the rhythmic sound of breathing, as though two swimmers were sucking oxygen out of the air between strokes. Despite the episode with Elizabeta, Ben knew almost nothing about sex, at least not the specifics of the act, but something in him divined the meaning of the sounds and he stood there listening, the breathing growing heavier, tears slicking his face, knowing that whatever was happening on the other side of that door finally severed him from his father.

  It was a quick slide into marriage after that, and that summer they all were moved into Voorhees’s three-bedroom townhouse overlooking the brand-new third hole of University Golf Club. Ben tried to get along with the man; he tried to sit at the dinner table and read passages from the New American Bible. He tried to let the man help him with his geometry homework. But Voorhees’s voice grated Ben’s ears, his aftershave twisted his gut; the man’s fake smile couldn’t camouflage his hostility toward Ben. So Ben pointed to a scalene triangle instead of an isosceles, solved for circumference instead of area, until the man gave up. Then Ben started running away. He escaped into the open fields, where he flushed out rabbits for a falconer and his Harris’s hawk. He rode his bike out to the end of the El Toro runway and let jets swoop over him to a landing. He hiked it up to the ranch’s stables in Bommer Canyon, where Billy James, one of the last cowboys, let him take Comet, retired and swaybacked, for trots into the finger canyons that led to Crystal Cove. There he’d tie up Comet and strip down to his underwear to dive through the kelp into the Coke bottle–green below, imagining the ash of his father floating cilia-like among the sea-palm algae. When his stepfather told him to be home at 5:00, Ben stumbled in at 6:00. When his stepfather told him to go up to his room, Ben went out the sliding glass door and ran through the rough and the sand traps of the golf course. When Voorhees kinked his arm to force him into the car to go to church, Ben ripped his elbow away and hid in the geodesic dome in La Bonita Park, thinking of the day he almost saw Elizabeta’s breasts.

  Then one night Voorhees slipped a folded pamphlet across the kitchen table to him—boys smiling on the edge of a pool, boys coiled on diving platforms ready to spring into the water. A boy hanging his head to have a medal hung over his neck. We build character, we build discipline, we build CHAMPIONS! read the caption.

  “This will give you structure,” Voorhees said. “Focus.” And then they prayed on it, the three of them clasping hands around the dinner table, their heads bowed.

  Seven hours every day, from 8:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M., with a break for lunch.

  There were twenty kids, none of them boys Ben knew, and each morning they ran laps around the track, then weight-trained in the high school gym. They swam in the afternoons to a rhythmic count Coach Wakeland called out, twenty boys synchronized to a 4/4 rhythm. They fist-swam to work on body positioning, ran long-axis drills, sprinted freestyle 25s and 100-meter butterflies and 200-meter individual medleys. Swimming uncoupled Ben from his anger; there was only the celadon-blue water, the black line on the pool bottom, and the endless somersaulting at the wall. And the coach’s voice that summer was the metronome to his life. Three strokes and a breath on four, Wakeland’s four-beat striking Ben’s ear as it broke the surface of the water, his body slipping down the lane, his voice in his head indistinguishable from the coach’s. It happened without him recognizing it, his voice becoming Wakeland’s, and one night when his stepfather berated him for not taking out the trash, Ben escaped to the upstairs bath and slipped his head beneath the scalding water, Wakeland counting to sixty-seven before Ben burst to the surface, his anger drowned in the tub.

  Margaret was sitting now, her knees pressed to her chest. He was in for the long haul today. Over at the taqueria, he got a concha and another coffee. On a television bolted to the wall, Eyewitness News was showing a picture of the Santa Elena victim, April Howard, smiling in front of a Christmas tree.

  “Freaky,” the man said, handing Ben his pastry. “Complete loco.”

  “Lock your windows,” Ben said.

  “Got bars on the windows around here,” the man said, laughing. “We already know what’s up.”

  Right. This guy’s not hitting poor neighborhoods.

  Back at the truck, Ben made a note on his legal pad. Opportunistic. Neighborhoods with low crime rates. You feel safe, y
ou’re dead. Santa Elena: bull’s-eye. He underlined it twice.

  His mother was still sitting down, brushing her hand across the stone. He glanced over his notes, three pages of them from the Mission Viejo scene where Emily was killed, another two from last night’s scene until his interview with Wakeland, where his notes became mostly indecipherable. He’d seen Coach Wakeland around in the last four years, sure—once in the Safeway near the school, when Ben left his basket of milk and eggs in the frozen section and walked out; a few times from afar when picking up Emma at school—but Ben lived on the other side of town and could mostly avoid the man. From a distance, Wakeland was abstract, someone from another life and time; standing right next to him, though, the man was as concrete as Ben’s own flesh and bone. Flipping through the pages, Ben found the notes from his conversation with Neil Wolfe. He talked about Wakeland like he was his father. Like he was scared to disappoint him. Ben added to the notes: Emotional leverage.

  That fall after summer camp, Ben had pulled a fire alarm during lunch. All the kids standing in lines on the baseball field, the teachers and staff streaming out through the front doors of the school, two fire trucks and three police cars spinning their lights on the blacktop. It was fantastic. All of that, all of that drama—he had caused it. But some seventh-grade goody-goody girl told the principal she saw Ben yank the lever, and before he could revel in the prank he was suspended for three days.

  “You’re a fraud,” Ben yelled at Voorhees when he took Ben by the arm that night and dragged him upstairs. “A liar, a loser.”

  When Voorhees locked him in his room, Ben kicked through the particleboard door.

  “Please”—his mother’s small voice on the other side of the door—“please, Ben, calm down. We need this.” He didn’t realize then what she was saying to him: Ben was hurting their marriage, threatening to throw them back into poverty.

  “You’re a bitch,” he said to his mom. “How could you marry that loser?”

  Then he punched out the screen, jumped from the second-story window, and ran into the dark across the golf course. He ran to the high school swim complex; the lights were off, the gate locked. That didn’t stop him: He scaled the fence, tore off his shirt and shoes, and dove into the water in his shorts. He freestyled it down the pool, spun, and freestyled it back, the water dark and stinging with chlorine. He didn’t know how long he was out there, but his lungs burned, his muscles cramped. When he finally pulled up, Coach Wakeland was sitting on a plastic chair near the pool’s edge.

  “Give me a reason not to call the cops,” he said.

  “Call them,” Ben said. “Let them arrest me.” And then, hanging on the edge of the pool, his feet dangling in the dark water beneath him, he spilled it all to Wakeland. Leaving his dad in the ditch. The police never finding the Chevelle that killed his father. Pulling the fire alarm. His asshole stepfather. Calling his mom a bitch. All of it.

  Wakeland watched Ben’s face, a sad smile on his lips. “You’ve gotten faster,” the coach finally said. “Get inside and dry off.”

  In the locker room, Ben toweled off. His legs were rubber, his arms Jell-O, his muscles shaking.

  “You’re hypoglycemic,” Wakeland said. “You need to eat.”

  Wakeland found him a pair of shorts in the lost and found, and then they were in Wakeland’s Mustang, blasting down Conquistador Road through the patchwork of fields separating Santa Elena from Tustin. They were silent in the car, Ben exhausted and feeling stupid about all the shit he’d said. When they crossed over into Tustin, Wakeland pulled into a strip mall, parked, and then steered Ben into a booth in a run-down taqueria with brightly colored sombreros hanging from the drop ceiling. Wakeland ordered in Spanish, which impressed the hell out of Ben. His father had spoken some Spanish, but Ben had never met another white man willing to utter a single hola. Five minutes later, a massive burrito was sitting in front of him, soaking in red sauce.

  “Lengua,” Wakeland said.

  Ben glanced at the cutting board behind the counter, on it a slug of raw meat.

  “Tongue?” Ben said. “I’m not eating that.”

  “When someone takes you to dinner, you eat.”

  Ben bit into it, and damn if it wasn’t the tastiest thing he’d eaten, at least since the mule-deer steaks his father used to grill when he was a kid.

  “First,” Wakeland said, putting his palms on the table, “never call your mother that name again. She brought you into this world, and you respect that.”

  “Didn’t ask to be born.”

  “You sound like a stupid thirteen-year-old kid.”

  He was a stupid thirteen-year-old kid, but he didn’t want to sound like one.

  “Second, what happened to your father was an accident,” Wakeland said, his burrito sitting before him, untouched. “You were a child. You were in shock. People do strange things when they’re in shock, things that can’t be explained.”

  Ben set down the burrito and stared at a Spanish phrase scraped into the wooden table. Chupa mi pito.

  “Forgive yourself,” Wakeland said.

  “That’s stupid.”

  “Right now,” the coach said. “At this table. Forgive yourself.”

  It was confusing. If it wasn’t his fault, why did he have to forgive himself?

  “Say it.”

  “I forgive myself.”

  “Say it again.”

  “I. Forgive. Myself.”

  Wakeland finally bit into his burrito, and Ben, getting his appetite back, joined him.

  “I want you on the swim team next year,” Wakeland said.

  “Yeah, all right.” He wanted to be on the swim team, but he wanted to sound cool about it.

  Wakeland smiled. A boy, maybe Ben’s age, started hacking away at the meat on the counter with a chopping knife.

  “Third,” Wakeland said, “when we’re done here, I’m calling your mom and stepdad and taking you home.”

  “I’m not going.”

  “You’ll go back, because there’s nowhere else to go,” Wakeland said.

  The stark goddamned truth.

  “Your stepfather might be a jerk,” Wakeland said, “but see it through his eyes. Every time he looks at you, he sees the face of the man who loved his wife before him. That’s not easy for a man. Besides, he’s paying for that roof over your head, for the food you eat, for the clothes you wear, and it sounds to me like you’re being a pain in the ass in return. Some people might call that ungrateful.”

  A man in the back called in Spanish to the boy behind the counter, waving a finger at him. The boy stopped chopping the meat and the man came over, taking the boy’s hand in his so they sliced the meat together. Ben felt a lump in his throat watching it.

  “They don’t give a shit about me,” Ben said.

  “Part of being an adult,” Wakeland said, “is dealing with things that make you uncomfortable. The only way you’ll make anything of yourself is by learning to do that.”

  Wakeland took two more bites of his burrito and then said something in Spanish to the man behind the counter.

  “Sí,” the man said, and pointed to the phone on the wall.

  “What’s the number?” Wakeland said.

  Ben glared at him but then rattled it off and watched Wakeland talk to his mother on the phone, reassuring her that everything was fine, that Ben was safe.

  “She was in tears,” Wakeland said. “I don’t think you have any idea how your mother feels.”

  When they got back into town, Wakeland swung a left at Junipero. Ben told him he was going the wrong way.

  “I want to show you something.”

  Two minutes later, they were idling in front of a condominium.

  “This is my place,” Wakeland said. “The next time you need to get out, you come here and cool off. You got it?”

  The condo was painted off-white, the shrubs clipped into rectangles; a basketball hoop dangled over the driveway.

  “Yeah,” Ben said. “I got it.”

/>   And then Wakeland drove him across town, into the waiting arms of his mother. When Margaret took Ben inside, Wakeland and Voorhees stood outside in a pool of streetlight, talking. Ben had no clue what they said to each other, still didn’t all these years later, but when Voorhees came back in he didn’t lay into Ben, just looked at him and said, “Let’s get you to bed. You must be exhausted.” A minor miracle, and the beginning of a sort of truce between Ben and his stepfather.

  Now waves of heat were rising from the hood of the truck, the sun rust orange in the smog. He watched his mother, on her knees in front of the grave. Man, he’d been a pain-in-the-ass kid—though knowing that didn’t warm him to his stepfather’s memory. Seven cholos, dressed in wifebeaters and inked with gang tats, jaywalked Katella Avenue, forcing cars to hit their brakes. Yeah, tough guys. He couldn’t sit here anymore; serial murderers didn’t take breaks on the weekends.

  When he got to his mother, she was holding her right hand up to her ear. “What’s that sound?” she said.

  “The freeway, Mom.”

  “It’s so loud.”

  Midmorning traffic, hordes daytripping to the beach. It’d take an hour to get her home.

  —

  AT 12:47 THAT afternoon, Ben got a call from Rutledge, the high school AP. They met at the Orange Blossom coffee shop in the strip mall adjacent to the school complex. Inside, Rutledge had his face buried in the paper, a plate of chorizo and eggs in front of him, untouched. A firm handshake and Ben sat down.