Shadow Man

by Alan Drew

  “I took the liberty,” Rutledge said, gesturing to a cup of coffee. “Figured you might have been out late last night.”

  Ben drank the coffee black.

  “You figured right.”

  It would be his fifth cup of the day, plus the couple of NoDoz to get the morning rolling. He’d barely slept all week. It didn’t help that he had been chasing ghosts since dropping his mother off at home—strange cars parked in the street, suspicious-looking men walking the sidewalk, unusual noises from the next door neighbor’s, a Mexican orange picker napping in a greenbelt. Santa Elenans didn’t bat an eyelash about a dead strawberry picker, but when they thought something was coming for them, they banded together like a tribe fighting a common enemy. The television news cycled and recycled the images of the Santa Elena house; they plotted the path the suspect must have taken on a freeway map of the basin. People woke to the news, coffee mugs in hand, their windows still slid open, the rush of the freeway in the near distance. The killer had stalked past them while they slept, when they were most vulnerable. It was only luck that separated them from the woman strangled last night.

  “Scary stuff,” Rutledge said. “My wife closed up the house this morning, shut all the windows, locked the doors. And we don’t have air-conditioning.”

  Rutledge was in his early sixties. He wore a California Angels baseball cap that half-hid his rheumy eyes. Ben remembered his political science class from junior year, the man skewing all of modern American history to prove that liberals were the downfall of civilization. It was total crap, but the class had been full of political fire and brimstone and it kept Ben awake, which was really all you could ask out of high school.

  “Open an upstairs window,” Ben said. “The serial’s not climbing. Not yet anyway.”

  “Makes things feel fragile, you know?”

  “That’s not what’s on your mind, though, is it?”

  Rutledge hesitated before folding the paper over. There was Lucero, smiling in front of a crushed-blue studio backdrop. Ben hadn’t seen the paper yet this morning. It looked like a yearbook photo. RANCHO SANTA ELENA STUDENT FOUND SHOT IN STRAWBERRY FIELD. The story was on page two, near the bottom of the page—the front page dominated by the bold headline about the Night Prowler—and nobody would pay attention to a dead Mexican kid.

  “Did Lucero kill himself?” Rutledge asked.

  “Could be,” Ben said.

  “Any chance this serial did it?” Rutledge said.

  “The ME hasn’t made a final determination.”

  Rutledge nodded, looking down at the paper. He was spooked.

  “I knew another kid, years ago,” he said finally. “He took an entire bottle of aspirin. His mother found him home midday, unconscious on his bed, and rushed him to Hoag emergency.” Rutledge swallowed before continuing. “They pumped it out of him, thank God, but his parents pulled him out of school once he was healthy; had to finish at the alternative school with the losers and thugs. In the summer, the family moved away. I was his homeroom teacher. He was pretty popular, had good grades until junior year. Then he started failing classes, girlfriend broke up with him. His mother came to talk to me, asking me to keep an eye on him. I met with his teachers, his coaches, asked them to let me know if anything seemed out of sorts, you know? Just six hours before he ate those pills, I asked him how life was treating him, and he says, ‘It’s a long, strange trip, Rutledge.’ It was our little joke.”

  He folded up the Rancho Santa Elena World News and turned the front page facedown on the tabletop. Ben could still see the headline in his head, though, the picture of Lucero, his electric smile.

  “This kid who took the pills,” Ben said. “Was he a swimmer?”

  “Yeah.” Rutledge nodded slowly, staring at his scrambled eggs.

  Ben’s stomach turned to water.

  “This Lucero kid,” Rutledge said. “He was a swimmer, too. I imagine you know that.”

  “Yep.”

  “Maybe as good as you,” Rutledge said. “Maybe better.”

  “So I’ve heard.” Ben sipped his coffee, though he had the caffeine shakes by now. “What’re you trying to tell me, Bryce?”

  “There’s this one day six months or so ago,” Rutledge said. “I had been working with our goalie late, twenty minutes, thirty maybe, after water-polo practice. So I send him home and come into the locker room. Everyone’s gone, but I hear shuffling around the corner of the lockers and Lewis comes out, nervous, asking me all about my classes, about my family. Mr. Jovial, you know?” He paused. “I like Lewis. We go to the same church, United Methodist over on Universidad. His kids are great—polite, good in school. Known Lewis for twenty years. Before he met Diane. Going back to before you were in school.”

  “I know.”

  “I didn’t think much of it then,” Rutledge said. “He was always there after practice. You don’t build a great program without putting in the extra time.”

  “But something’s eatin’ you.”

  Rutledge turned his neck and the bone cracked. Ben could actually hear it pop into place.

  “I got to my office and saw the boy, this Lucero kid, come out of the corner of the locker room.” Rutledge shook his head. “He didn’t have his shirt on yet and he was holding the towel in front of him, but, you know, he just got out of the swimming pool, so that wasn’t unusual. The boy glanced at me, though, and I could tell something wasn’t right. There was just…there was a look in his eye.”

  “Like he was embarrassed?”

  “No,” he said. “Like…he was wondering what I was going to do.”

  “Well? What did you do?”

  “I asked Lewis about it later and he said the boy’s parents wanted him to quit the team; the kid was upset and Lewis was trying to talk him through it.”

  “And that sounded reasonable to you?”

  “Yeah, it did,” he said. “I mean, you line up all the students Lewis has helped get into good schools and it’d stretch from here to downtown L.A.” He hesitated a moment. “This kid, Lucero, was up for a big scholarship. Wakeland was excited about it. USC, I think.”

  “Does it seem strange to you that the parents of an illegal would tell their kid to quit the team when he was up for a scholarship at USC?”

  “Shit,” Rutledge said, looking down at his cup of coffee. “I didn’t know the boy was an illegal.”

  Rutledge said he needed to use the facilities. He got up and headed for the restroom and Ben sat in the café, his coffee going cold, his stomach roiling. He watched a group of water-polo players clear the table of tacos and baskets of tortilla chips. The kid nearest him was huge, his shoulders straining the trainer jacket, the white letters of the S and A stretching against his shoulder blades. “My dad’s got a .45 under his bed,” one of the boys facing him said. “Blow his fucking head off if he tries our place.”

  “Boom, man,” the big one with his back to Ben said, gunning his finger in the air.

  Even from here, Ben could smell the chlorine on their bodies, that chemical stink that bleached your hair, soaked into your pores, and dried your insides out. He remembered the August before his freshman year in high school, when he was invited to preseason training with the swim team. Maybe that’s what Voorhees and Wakeland had talked about that night after Wakeland drove him home. His mom and stepdad were all gung ho for it, and by the end of the second week of training Ben was blowing by the frosh-soph kids and sticking close with the JV. By Wednesday of the third week, Ben was chasing down a junior, Russell Paxton, in his lane. Russell was a big kid, as Ben recalled, at least six foot three. Russell was fast, but no way in hell would Ben let him pull away. If he started to lose the kid’s toes in the bubbles, Ben kicked harder, shoved more water out of the way.

  “You should be with the frosh fags,” Russell spat at Ben once while they hung from the pool edge between sets.

  “Nah,” Ben said. “I like it here with the junior pussies.”

  That afternoon, the university diving team w
as doing flips off the platform, chopping waves across the surface of the pool. Russell came off a turn and met one of the waves mouth first. He pulled up, gagging, and Ben slipped by him, not missing a stroke. Five strokes in, Russell grabbed his ankle, yanking him into the water mid-breath. Ben sucked a gallon down his throat, and when he kicked to get to the surface, Russell’s chest was there, blocking his way. Ben thought he was going to drown, his lungs clogged, his limbs leaded weights, but then his head punctured the surface and he got air again and a surge of fury electrified his limbs. When Russell came off the wall, Ben punched down through the water, nailing him on the back of the head. Russell got Ben by the balls, the kid’s fist clamping down, sending stars into his eyes, but Ben kept throwing punches until Wakeland and the assistant coach got their tentacles around them and yanked the two apart.

  Inside the locker room, Wakeland let him have it.

  “I’m not having any of that bullshit in my pool,” he said. “You got it?”

  Ben nodded, his balls throbbing in his stomach.

  “I’m calling home,” Coach said.

  “No, don’t,” Ben said. Things had been relatively calm between Ben and his stepfather, and he didn’t want to go back to the old days. “Please don’t.”

  “You’re better than Russell,” Wakeland said, his face softening. “Faster. That’s why he did it.”

  Ben smiled. Damn right he was better.

  “You’re off the pool today. Dress and get out of here.”

  The next day Wakeland called races: 100-meter freestyle, single elimination, two kids at a time. Wakeland shuffled the frosh and JV, and after three rounds Ben and Russell were the last two swimming. Wakeland smiled at them, sizing them up before opting for a 200-meter individual medley to finish things off—50 butterfly, 50 breast, 50 back, and 50 free. Brutal.

  Ben had Russell on the butterfly, at least two strokes ahead and pulling away as he came off the first wall. Ben glared at the kid as he passed him. Take that, asshole. By the time he spun for the breast, Ben had gained a length, and he burst out into the calm water in front of him, surfacing into the hollers and whistles of the boys on the side of the pool and then back down into the thrumming water. The first wall off the breast, Russell closed the gap by a length. At the first wall off the back, Russell was at Ben’s feet, and Ben’s chest suddenly constricted, his lungs closing down. His left calf cramped, a knot of muscle curling his toes with pain, and Russell torpedoed ahead of him. Shit, shit, shit. Ben barely got his shoulders out of the water, his lead legs sinking into the deep, and then Russell was at the wall and that was it. When Ben hit the wall, he climbed out of the water and puked his guts out all over the green grass.

  He sat there next to his own stinking insides and watched the boys retire to the locker room, until the pool went a flat reflective blue. It was at least ten minutes before he realized he had been digging a hole in his wrist with the nails on his right hand, and by the time he got back to the locker room and out of his suit, everyone was gone.

  “You’ve got what counselors would call an anger-management problem.”

  Ben spun around: Coach Wakeland, his arms crossed in front of his chest.

  “I’m rude, I’m ungrateful,” Ben said. “Don’t take responsibility for my actions, mean, thoughtless.”

  Wakeland grabbed Ben’s wrist and turned it over. Four crescent nail marks, swelling with blood.

  “No,” Wakeland said. “You’re just unhappy.”

  Wakeland hunted bandages and antiseptic out of a cabinet in his office while Ben slipped into his jeans and T-shirt and sat back down on the bench, suddenly feeling the life go out of his muscles.

  “You know why you lost that race?” Wakeland said as he swabbed the cuts on Ben’s wrist.

  “ ’Cause I suck.”

  Wakeland laughed, a sad one.

  “Because you don’t know how to breathe.” The coach taped the bandage to Ben’s wrist. “Stand up and take a breath.”

  Ben did, a deep one.

  “Keep your shoulders down; stop puffing out your chest.” Wakeland put his hands on Ben’s shoulders and shoved them down.

  Breath. With the palms of his hands, Wakeland clamped Ben’s ribs in place.

  “You lost that race because you only got sixty percent of the air you needed,” Wakeland said. “Your legs cramp up?”

  “Double knots.”

  “Your chest feel crushed?”

  “Like someone jabbed fists into them.”

  “That’s because they were empty and your stomach muscles were pushing against them, constricting them. You panicked and you started breathing with your chest and shoulders, and you let Russell pull away from you.”

  Coach grabbed the waistband of Ben’s jeans. “You breathe with your diaphragm,” he said. “Here.” Wakeland’s fist pushed against Ben’s stomach and he explained how the diaphragm worked, the way it contracted, opening up the thoracic cavity and allowing lung expansion, the way a man who is breathing right simultaneously takes in more air and uses less. “It’s like singers,” he said. “Opera singers. You ever listen to them?”

  “My mom and stepfather love that crap.”

  “Next time sit down and listen with them,” he said. “Pay attention to how long they hold notes. That’s the diaphragm. Breathe,” he said. Wakeland’s fist knuckled Ben’s stomach. “Push my hand away.”

  Ben tried, but the coach’s fist was stabbing into his gut.

  “What are you, some kind of wimp?” he said. “Push my fist.”

  Ben had to brace his feet against the floor, leaning his torso into Coach’s fist. Ben took another breath, this one bigger than the last, and a new compartment opened in his lungs; he could feel it, cool air against the inner warmth of his lungs.

  “Good,” Wakeland said, letting go of his waistband. “Now you’re breathing.”

  After dinner that night, Voorhees and Ben’s mother retreated to the backyard patio while Ben finished the dishes. They liked to share a glass of white wine in the setting sun while they debriefed each other about their day and listened to the classical station on the radio. This was husband-and-wife time, and Ben wasn’t invited. “There is no more important relationship than the one between husband and wife,” Voorhees liked to say. He meant that the husband and wife were the glue to the family, that without that bond everything else would fall apart—the marriage, children’s morals, western civilization—but Ben came to understand it as Voorhees’s biblical justification to get his wife alone. And he wanted her alone a lot.

  Finished with the dishes, Ben locked himself in the bathroom, stripped off his shirt, and stared at himself in the mirror. He was sinewy and lean, his shoulders broadening, a few wisps of hair creeping up his belly. He liked the bulge of his muscles, the planks of his chest; it was a body, he thought, that deserved to be admired. He pressed his fist into his lower stomach and breathed, trying to push against it with his rising diaphragm. Outside, he could hear the baritone’s beefy notes rising and falling. He didn’t know what the man was singing about—it was in Italian, or Spanish or something—but the music made him feel weird, sadly happy. On the bathtub edge, Ben tried to breathe with the singer, even voicing a few off-tune notes. He felt stupid doing it, but he was in the bathroom and who the hell cared? When the man hit the final note, holding it solid against the pulsing strings, Ben held the note with him. He sounded like an idiot but he held it, his diaphragm pushing against his jeans, his shoulders flat and square, the air vibrating his vocal cords with the singer’s until the baritone cut out and Ben’s unsteady voice went on for one beat more.

  Wakeland called races the next day, too. Again it was Ben and Russell in the final round. It was another 200-meter IM, and nearing the first 100 it was a dead heat, the two of them crowding the line, their bodies surging forward with each stroke. At the turn for the first 25 breast, the fists knuckled the bags of Ben’s lungs and fire seared his legs. Coming into the wall, Ben was staring at the white bottoms of Russell
’s feet, and following the turn those feet started to disappear into the bubbles and froth of his stroke. Ben was going down, worse than the day before, and in his distraction he sucked in water on the upstroke. He choked and then swallowed it down and shot his head above the water, spitting and huffing at air.

  He felt it then, the oxygen bellowing his lungs. Screw the race. Just breathe. He dunked his head and stared at the black line beneath him. He imagined knuckles stabbing his gut. He tried to shove them away and the oxygen expanded his lungs. The power came back into his legs, the burn cooled by the oxygenated blood coursing through his veins. When he came into the wall, he flipped and caught the back of Russell’s feet. When he came into the wall for the freestyle, he flipped and pumped his legs for ten seconds before surfacing, never taking his eyes off the line, his muscles exploding with power, obliterating some physical wall built by his mind. Breathe. Just breathe. On the other side of that wall was nothing but open water, and in the open was nothing but Ben’s body torpedoing through the clear space. He closed his eyes and stretched it out, floating in that beautiful darkness, everything narrowing and opening up at the same time. Here, Ben hadn’t left his father dead in a ditch for forty-five minutes. Here, he didn’t feel unloved by his mother. Here, there was no lying stepfather. He didn’t feel like smashing his hand through plywood doors or stabbing himself with his fingernails, and he rode that blackness into an oblivion of time and space until someone was tugging on his arm and he was rifled back into the light.

  “Stop,” Wakeland said, when Ben surfaced. “You can stop now.” Ben blinked into the light and looked behind him to find Russell and the other kids staring at him from the other side of the pool, an awed confusion on their faces. He’d swum an extra lap.

  “You found something there, didn’t you?” Wakeland laughed, slapping Ben on the chest. “Yeah, you found something.”

  —

  RUTLEDGE WAS BACK at the table, his face flushed, the edges of his hair wet.

  “You all right?” Ben said.

  “I’m fine,” he said, but the man still seemed spooked. “About a month ago, I was down at Balboa Island with my grandkids. We were on the car ferry back. I saw Lewis and the boy sitting two cars up, in that little Corvette of his. I almost went over to say hello, but then I realized they were arguing—at least that’s what it looked like. The boy got out of the car, and then Wakeland hopped out and grabbed his arm. When they reached the other side, the boy got back in the car and they drove off.”