Shadow Man

by Alan Drew

  He stared at her for a long time, his green eyes confused, it seemed, and then he set his right hand on hers and they sat like that for a few moments at the table in front of the window overlooking the wilderness.

  “I know what happened to you,” she said quietly.

  He let go of her hand.

  “It’s not your fault,” she said. “You were a child.”

  He pushed the chair back from the table and stood at the window.

  “Nothing happened to me,” he said.

  “You won’t tell anyone because you’re afraid it makes you look weak,” she said. “I know how you all think. I’ve been around police and their macho bullshit long enough.”

  “You expecting me to make something up so you can feel better about yourself?”

  She stood and grabbed his hand. “Don’t do that,” she said. “You won’t push me away. I’m not that soft.”

  He wanted to tell her, she could see it in his eyes. He was six foot two, two hundred pounds, his arms and chest still strapped with muscle, but he was trapped inside his body with his childhood self and the man who’d taken advantage of him and he didn’t know how to get out.

  He yanked his hand away. “You should go,” he said.

  “Listen to me, Ben,” she said. “This isn’t just about you. That’s what you don’t seem to understand.” She held on to his wrist, but he wouldn’t look at her. “You always tell me you don’t know what happened to your marriage, but you know.”

  “Jesus,” he said. “Talk about ulterior motives.”

  “How many nights did you sleep alone?” she said. “How many nights did you stay out in that barn? That’s because of Wakeland, right?”

  He went to the refrigerator, pulled out a Coors, and popped open the can.

  “You need to go,” he said again.

  “I’m not going until I’m finished,” she said. “You’re the most dangerous kind of man, because you’re frightened, and you lie so you don’t have to face the thing that terrifies you. You think it’s silence, but it’s lying. You think it’s only yours, but it’s others’, too. Yours, mine, Rachel’s—Emma’s.”

  “Leave Emma out of it.”

  “It’s hers, too,” she said. “Don’t you think it’s not. No one knows where they stand with you. No one knows who you are, for God’s sake. You’ve given your wife—your child—the worst kind of pain.”

  “She had the affair, not me,” he snapped.

  “Because she was looking for what you wouldn’t give her,” she said. “Because she knows there’s somewhere in you she can’t access. She feels you don’t love her enough because of it.”

  “You talking about Rachel?” he said. “Or are you talking about you? I mean, let’s keep things straight here.”

  “Let me tell you something,” she said, furious at herself for blushing. “I think I might love you, Ben Wade, I just might, despite my better judgment. But that’s not what this is about. I’m not trying to take something from you. I’m not trying to have you. I’m trying to give you something.”

  “You can give me something when I ask for it.”

  “You know what’s funny?” she said.

  “No idea.”

  “You haven’t even asked me how I know. The investigator’s got no questions.”

  She handed him a slip of paper. It had Tucker’s name on it, an apartment address, a phone number.

  “You know about him, right? I mean, you did that much of your job?”

  Silence, the paper shaking in his hand.

  “Let me frame this another way,” she said. “I don’t expect you to tell me. I don’t expect you to care enough to do so. Fine. But I expect you to tell someone, I damn well do. You’re a policeman. You know what happened to Lucero, you know what happened to this boy, and yet you still keep that man’s secret. He’s out there and you know exactly where he is and still you do nothing.”

  “Get out.”

  “You’re the evidence, Ben. You.”

  “Get out,” he shouted.

  She started toward the screen door, threw it open, and stopped.

  “I know what happened to you, Ben,” she said, “whether you tell me or not. I expect you to be the man I know, not the frightened child you were. And if you’re not going to do something about it, I damn well will.”

  Then she was out the door, the screen slamming so hard behind her she thought she broke the frame.

  14

  AN HOUR LATER, BEN WAS at the Wedge. A south swell was pumping hard, the peaks hollowed out by steady Santa Ana gusts. Ten-, fifteen-foot crushers collapsing in two feet of frothy water. A few of the hardcore guys were out, the beach bums who lived in rotting wooden apartments and worked stocking grocery shelves so that they could ride the waves every day, but these were swells that seemed to carry the whole weight of the Pacific in their walls, and they exploded onto the beach like trucks dropped from the sky.

  He was out into the break, diving beneath the grind of the first wave, only to be knocked backward by the next. A gasp of air and down again, deep below the crashing peak of the third wave, into the dark silence. His head shot above the water on the backside of the break, a line of swells stacking up again on the horizon, barreling toward him.

  The first time it happened, Ben was fourteen and half drunk on Negra Modelos. Wakeland had thrown out his back lifting a lane-line reel, and they had sat on the patio in the sun, Wakeland gulping vodkas to take the edge off his spasmed muscles.

  “I need your help,” Wakeland said. “I need to lie down.”

  Wakeland leaned on Ben’s shoulder all the way to the bedroom. There he gingerly stripped to his underwear, lay on the bed, pointed to a bottle of lotion on the bedside table, and told Ben what to do: a dollop in the palms, and then start at the lower lumbar, down near the base of his back where the slatted muscles butterflied away from his spine.

  “Not like that,” Wakeland said. “You’ve never done this, have you?”

  Ben shook his head, embarrassed about all the things he’d never done.

  “Let me show you. You learn to do this and the girls will love you.”

  And then Ben was shirtless, pressed into the warm space left vacant by Wakeland, the man’s hands working down his back. The problem was, it felt good—to be touched, to have your muscles, sore from workouts, kneaded out. His mother didn’t hug, and he wouldn’t have allowed it anyway. He’d never had a girlfriend. Boys, friends on the swim team, punched one another, slapped backs, but no one touched him. It felt good to be touched, it did. Then Wakeland’s fingers pressed the muscle and bone just beneath Ben’s underwear line, and a nervousness pricked Ben’s body. He closed his eyes then and imagined Rachel. He had only just met her in algebra class—at least a year before she’d pay any attention to him—but he loved the way her hair hooked her ear, the way she held her pencil and ignored him while he watched her take notes. He tried to imagine, as he’d done every day in class, her thin body beneath her blouse, and he could almost do it, almost conjure the shadow of her shape beneath the fabric.

  “Take these off,” Wakeland said, tugging on Ben’s jeans.

  Ben kicked into the first wave of the set, his body flung forward on the crest, his feet pitching out above his head. He dug his hand into the face, and his fins found the glass below the lip, his lateral muscles slicing into the water, his left foot carving a wake into the peak. For a moment he shot through the tube, the lip of the crest spitting out above his torso, his world narrowing to a cylinder of churn and hollow rush. Then the sunlight turned green and the tube closed off, tossing him to the beach floor. He let the wave take him, the roil of it spinning him through the sand and seaweed.

  No, Ben had thought then, but it seemed stupid not to; shit, the guys on the team spent half their lives walking around in Speedos. The whole team took yearbook pictures in their suits, busting out push-ups before the shots to look cut for the chicks who would later ask them to sign the page. Besides, Wakeland was the coach, and
you did what your coach said; it was practically written into the Constitution.

  Ben’s bare legs upset his imagination. He couldn’t conjure Rachel anymore. At first he stared at a framed picture hanging on the wall. It was a print of an oil painting of the Laguna Coast. A single tree clung to a rocky outcropping, while huge waves exploded onto the rocks. The whitewash slammed the exposed roots, and Ben tried to place his mind there, in the water, down below the rocks, where his father’s ashes floated in the salt. But he couldn’t ignore Wakeland’s hands, the man’s fingertips crawling up the side of his torso, and he shut his eyes to try to find Rachel again. She was there and then she was gone, and he felt sick for a moment before he found her again—her naked body as he imagined it would be, bird-boned and softly curved, smelling of soap. The hands were on the back of his thighs now, the fingers fanning toward the center of his teenage world, and he made those hands Rachel’s—her fingers small and delicate, warm across his skin. But Wakeland’s callused hands scratched Ben’s skin, and before he knew what was happening, before he could get back to Rachel, he was sticky wet, and a wave of confusion ran through him. He ran to the bathroom and cleaned himself up, throwing his soiled underwear in the trash, hiding them beneath the tissues and a cardboard toilet roll.

  “It’s all right, Benjamin,” Wakeland said on the other side of the closed door. “That happens sometimes. It’s natural. Nothing to be ashamed of.”

  Ben unlocked the door and came out into the light of the hallway, and Wakeland hugged him like a father, tousled his hair, and told him it was all right, everything was okay. He wouldn’t tell anyone.

  “Just between you and me.”

  The wave finally let Ben go and he lay there in the shallows, getting the feeling back in his body. His wrist ached, his neck and shoulder were kinked and bruised, yet he swam out again and let himself be punished by the waves. He wasn’t even trying to ride them anymore. He simply turned his body into the swells and let the crushers throw him onto the shore. He wanted to break his neck, wanted to be planted in the sand. He crashed onto his back, slammed headfirst, cracked his knee, but he kept coming up sucking air, kept swimming out to meet the waves, to get pummeled onto the shore, and his body kept rising to the surface, his lungs expanding with the salted air.

  —

  HE CALLED RACHEL from a pay phone in the parking lot of an In-N-Out Burger on Balboa Boulevard in Newport Beach.

  “I want to see you and Emma,” he said. “Before I’m on tonight.”

  “You frightened her yesterday,” Rachel said.

  “I know,” he said. “I overreacted.”

  “You did,” she said. “You frightened me, too.”

  “Oh, c’mon, Rach.”

  “If you’d seen the look on your face, you’d understand why.”

  “Rachel,” he said. “Let me come over. Please.”

  The line was silent for a moment. Someone ordered Animal Style at the drive-up window. Please, Rach. Please. A seagull snatched a crushed French fry from the pavement.

  “No, Ben,” she said. “Not yet. We need a couple days.”

  —

  SITTING IN HER Z in the parking lot, Natasha watched the boys stream out of the swim complex, their hair wet and slicked, their workout bags slung over their shoulders. They looked impossibly young to her, newly formed, their bodies a fragile miracle.

  Practice was over, but between the slats of the metal fence Natasha could see Coach Wakeland still walking the edge of the pool, and the arms of a single swimmer slashing through the water.

  Two minutes later, she walked into the boys’ locker room. The cement was still wet with footprints. The air stank of sweat and mildew, of body odor and cheap cologne. She was here on impulse, driven not by any rational search for evidence but simply by a need to see the man, to look him in the eye—to see if you could read such sickness in the face.

  The office was empty, the door locked. On the wall across from the office was a line of framed photographs—a dozen or more pictures of boys with medals dangling from their necks. THE WALL OF FAME was stenciled in light blue above the photos. Ben’s photograph hung on the wall directly opposite the window to Wakeland’s office, his bare shoulders covered only by the ribbon of a county medal. Two down the line was Tucker, bare shouldered, too, holding up a gold trophy, much younger-looking than he looked now—no dark circles under the eyes, no worry lines crisscrossing his forehead. Then Lucero, in the last picture frame. The boy held a medal up to the camera so that the gold edge of it filled up the bottom corner of the shot. The picture couldn’t have been more than a few months old, maybe regional or state finals from last spring. He was a beautiful child—a shock of hair, a wide smile, and deep black eyes, all of him electric, alive, caught forever in gelatin and paper, pinned there behind the glass for Wakeland to enjoy from his office chair. All of them, a whole wall full of boys, smiling back at Wakeland as though they had given their blessings to be hung on a hook. Natasha had the sickening feeling that this wall was a different kind of trophy case.

  She heard a whistle echo from the pool and then a man’s voice calling out a cadence: “One, two, three, breathe. One, two, three, breathe.”

  She found Wakeland pacing the side of the pool, stopwatch in hand, a single boy freestyling down the line. She stood in the shadows of the cement diving platform and watched. He wasn’t a big man, but his body was wiry, and there was a vanity about his dress—the shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal his biceps, the shorts tight around his muscular thighs. The boy flipped at the wall and kicked it hard down the line.

  “Push it,” Wakeland yelled. “Push through the pain. Pain is nothing. It doesn’t exist.”

  The boy hit the wall and Wakeland clicked the watch.

  “Fifty-nine point two,” Wakeland said. “Needs to be fifty-eight, at least. We’ll keep working at it.”

  Wakeland helped the boy out of the pool and flipped him a towel. The boy started drying off, his muscles long and lean, as though they’d just been formed. He couldn’t have been older than fourteen.

  “Is this the next one?” Natasha said, coming out of the shadows.

  Wakeland spun around, caught off guard. “What?”

  “You grooming him?” she said.

  “This is a closed practice,” Wakeland said.

  “What’s your name?” she said to the boy.

  “Phillip.”

  “Phillip,” she said. “Go home.”

  The boy looked at Wakeland, confused. “Go ahead,” Wakeland said, and the boy flopped it across the pool top to the locker room.

  “Let me guess,” she said. “His parents are divorced, he’s been having trouble in school, you’re turning his life around, going to make him a swimming star.”

  “Who are you?”

  She stared at him, letting him know she wasn’t frightened. He was nothing—a leather-faced middle-aged man, his cheeks dotted with discolored spots that could be the beginning of melanoma, if there was any justice in the world. He was nothing, just blood and bone, viscera and sinew; he was the thing rotting by Thursday if killed on Monday.

  “I’m the person who knows what you are,” she said.

  His face went white. “You’re trespassing,” he said. “You need to go or I’ll call the police.”

  “I’ll dial the number for you.”

  —

  THE PROBLEM WAS, everyone knew he was Wakeland’s. He drove around town with the man in his Mustang. When Wakeland had the team over for barbecues, Ben was the one who stayed late, drinking beer on the patio. Ben was the star, the one with two county records—one in freestyle and one in butterfly—the one who would get scholarships to college, and Wakeland was the man who would make it happen. All the guys on the team were jealous of him, and Ben liked their jealousy. He needed it then; it was like food for his ill-formed teenage soul. Once, in L.A., Ben had helped internal affairs nail one of their own, a narco cop skimming off the top of the drug-raid stash and selling on the side. When they br
ought him in, he told them he’d gotten so turned around that everything seemed straight again. His kid needed to go to college. His wife needed a new car. His house was falling down and needed repairs. So what if he took a little dope that would grow mold in a precinct basement to make his family’s life a little better? Maybe that’s how it was for Ben, everything so crooked it turned straight again. By the time things started happening with Wakeland, he needed the man—felt love for him, maybe, the kind you felt for an authoritarian father—and when he didn’t need him anymore, he was so far in he didn’t know how to get himself out. He never should have gone back to Wakeland’s apartment after that day. But he did; God damn, he did, and still, all these years later, Ben couldn’t say exactly why.

  After Rachel refused to see him, he drove to his mother’s place. He needed an answer to something, needed it today.

  “You haven’t been here in a month,” she said from the couch when he came through the door.

  “We just went to the cemetery. I was here four days ago with Emma.”

  “Emma?”

  “Your granddaughter.”

  “Oh,” she said, her voice wavering, her hand pressed up against the side of her head, trying to grasp a fading memory. “How can I forget my granddaughter?”

  “You’re sick, Mom.”

  “This man is too hairy,” she said to the television, as Tom Selleck climbed out of the water after a swim. “Why have you been away for a month?”

  Ben turned off the television and knelt in front of his mother, pushed his face close so she would focus on him.

  “You look tired,” she said, putting her hand on his cheek. “Have Rachel make a nice dinner for you and put your feet up.”

  “Mom,” he said. “I need to ask you about Lewis Wakeland.”

  “The coach?” she said. “Oh, he’s a nice man.”

  “No, Mom,” he said. “He isn’t.”

  “Oh, he looks out for you.”

  “Why did you let me run around with him?”

  “There were ants in the kitchen today,” she said, waving her hand at the linoleum floor, shuddering. “Get rid of them for me.”