The Shadow Man

  The Shadow Man

  A Novel

  Sofia Shafquat

  New York

  Prologue

  The state of Texas measures nine hundred miles. I was getting seventy-nine miles to the hour, including stops. My stops were very brief—long enough to pay for and drink a little of the hot tea that would scald my tongue as I stood beside the car in the rest areas. Nine hundred miles. 11.39 hours, 5.7 cups of tea and some two and a quarter tanks of gas.

  I had just left the on-ramp and the towering signpost of a Dairy Queen when the siren blipped behind me. He nosed me to an exit. I stopped my little car on the edge of a ditch. He was large and meaty, with a big, coat-hanger mustache, and I shrank down toward the gearshift as he leaned into my window.

  “Lassnce and registrayshun, ma’am.”

  I found my wallet on the passenger seat and fumbled for a few seconds in the glove box. He breathed noisily as I flipped through a folder. I handed the rectangles over to him. “Was I speeding?” I asked. It came out much more matter-of-factly than I expected.

  He looked at my little rectangles. “You were.”

  “How fast?”

  “Sixty-three. State limit of fifty-fav. And you fayulled,” he continued, “to use dreckshunls whin switching lanes.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “You mand steppin’ into the patrol car? It’ll probly be a whole lot more comfortable.”

  I opened the door and climbed out, following him to the grime-streaked state-police sedan he had parked behind me. I opened the door before he could and sat on top of what looked like a lot of notebooks and maps. He climbed into the driver’s side, dwarfing the small space behind the steering wheel. He fanned my license and registration like two playing cards and copied from them onto a black ledger.

  “Where you comin’ from?”

  “New Jersey.”

  “Where you headed?”

  “California.”

  “All by yourself?”

  I nodded.

  “Matty long trip for a young lady like you,” he told me reproachfully, filling out a form with carbons underneath it.

  “Am I getting a speeding ticket?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Then what are you writing?”

  He studied me skeptically. “Sah-tation.”

  “Well, that’s the same as a ticket, right?”

  “Yup.”

  “Isn’t it for speeding?”

  “No.”

  “Then what’s it for?” I demanded.

  He interrupted his pen scratching and turned to face me. “Only one ticket tonight, miss.”

  “For what?” I demanded.

  “Failure to use dreckshunls whin switching lanes.”

  “Oh, my God,” I said indignantly. “How ridiculous. Do you know, where I come from—New Jersey—no one uses signals when they’re changing lanes?”

  “This ain’t New Jersey,” he said balefully, and returned to his writing.

  “Listen,” I said, sitting up straight. “When you’re the only car on the freeway, I don’t see what there is to worry about. Who cares if you use your signals? What difference does it make?”

  His face was bland. “Lawsa Texas. Ratt to the judge.” He handed me the ticket and pointed to a section on the back of it. “Judge Eliot Shutter. You kin go ahead an’ ratt to him.”

  I finished my letter to Judge Eliot Shutter, Eliot William Shutter, no less, in the parking lot of a truck stop. I was fuming, nervous, and my hands were shaking. I wrote longhand against the steering wheel; there was no typewriter, no desk, no setting in which to compose myself. What could I tell him? I was the only car on the freeway, I was coming out of a Diary Queen, I had a tall, hot tea in my left hand. It was dusk, I cruised into the fast lane, what use was there for the signal? Where I come from—in New Jersey—no one uses signals when they’re changing lanes. “Dear Judge Shutter: Now that I have explained what happened, I hope you will agree that a warning from your officer and not a $30 fine is justice enough. Thank you for your consideration.”

  I licked the envelope and felt for my keys. They were not in the ignition. They were not on the seat next to me. I panicked, sick and frightened. I was stuck on a Texas freeway, stuck at a truck stop, stuck in the dark without my keys. Calm down, calm down, Leslie, said the loud voice in my head. Your keys are in the trunk, where you set them, when you went to look for paper and an envelope.

  The truck driver found me hauling luggage from my trunk by way of having remembered I could fold down the back seat. I had pulled my telephone, pillow, laundry basket and suitcase onto the asphalt and was tugging at my winter coat when I heard his voice above the rattle of tangled coat hangers.

  “Pardon me, miss. You from California?”

  I yanked myself out of the car. He was tall, he had a mustache and he looked like Robert Redford.

  “You from California, miss?”

  “No,” I said. I was out of breath.

  “Gee, I thought you were. I noticed your plates.”

  “Yes,” I said. “New Jersey. Same color as California.”

  “Well.” He shrugged, smiling. “I guess I was wrong. I was hoping you were going to California.”

  I watched him in the bluish streetlamp glare. “I am.”

  He wanted directions to San Jose. I told him I couldn’t help him; I didn’t know them and was busy trying to find my keys. He brought me a flashlight from the big silver rig I could see at the far end of the parking lot, its silent bulk massed next to the long tonnage of ten or fifteen others. He flicked the light along the front seat of the car and there, on the floor mat, lay my ring of glinting keys. He offered to buy me coffee inside.

  I sat opposite him at a vinyl-and-formica booth and watched the gold chain shift on his neck as he swallowed. His skin was burnished by the sun. His hands were strong and elegant. He was from Fort Worth and his name was Matthew.

  I followed him across the flatlands. He drove a steady fifty-eight, sometimes dropping to fifty-five. I kept my eyes on the orange canopy strung across the tail of the truck.

  He waved me to the shoulder a couple of times to look at the stars. “Lord above,” he said, “You gotta look at these stars.” I stood next to him on the roadside, cars thudding past us, trucks leaving shudders like waves in the sea.

  “I need to get some sleep,” he said finally. It was eleven o’clock, our second break. “How do you feel about getting a motel?”

  I stared at him in the dark. His head was craned back, his eyes on the glitter strewn across the sky. What did he mean, getting a motel?

  “Okay,” I said.

  Odessa, Texas, smells unmistakably of oil. The smell hung in the car, in the still air of the parking lot, and in the front room of the motel. Matthew stood slightly in front of me.

  “Two rooms for the price of one?” he said to the desk clerk. Her expression remained stony above the two lines of red that stood for her lips.

  “How about it?” he repeated.

  “Two rooms’ll cost you two rooms. Twenty-three ninety-five each.”

  He turned to me. “Okay with you?” The desk clerk watched us, her eyes blinking steadily behind the glasses on her nose.

  “Okay with me,” I said.

  She handed us keys. “Next level. Facing front.”

  We climbed the concrete stairs to the upper balcony. “I need to clean up,” he said. “Fifteen minutes and I’ll meet you in your room?”

  I tried to read his face. He was looking at his watch.

  “What number did you get?” he said, turning over his key.

  “Three twenty five.”

  “I’ll knock at your door. Give me fifteen minutes.”

  I sat on the bed and took off my shoes.
A fat lamp dwarfed the end table. I moved a grimy ashtray to the dresser and went into the bathroom to wash my face.

  I was looking through the phone book when he tapped on the door. He had showered. His hair was wet; he wore a bright plaid shirt, and he entered the room on a cloud of cologne.

  “Hi,” I said, stepping backward.

  His eyes went straight to the silent TV. “That thing turn on?”

  “You can try,” I said.

  I sat on the bed while he flipped through the channels. “What do you like to watch?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I never watch TV.”

  He left the dial on a nature program and sat carefully on the other side of the bed. I listened to him talk, first about the wildlife on the screen and then about Texas, Fort Worth and the sheet metal he was taking all the way to San Jose.

  He sat on my bed for an hour, and somewhere after midnight he unfolded his long legs and rose with a groan. “Time to pack it in,” he said. “Gotta get up at three. It sure was nice to talk to you.”

  I shook the hand he offered me. When I woke up the next morning, the truck was gone. The pavement in the sunshine next to my car stood gray and long and empty.

  I ran on a road that smelled of the oil and reminded me of jackals. It was shadeless, barren and spooky, as though humans never walked it but drove it in trucks, and the green scrub on either side was the habitat of animals—coyotes, hawks and congregations of jackals that barked and held session when the air was cool. I ran straight out, took a right, and ran straight again along an endless stretch of slightly sagging barbed-wire fence.

  Tap, tap, tap. I listened to my feet. The air warmed and swelled around me, heating to life in the yellowing sun, its tarry smell thickening the farther I went. I doubled back and rinsed off in the gleaming motel bathroom, zipped up my bag and turned in my key. The thin-lipped woman at the desk made a pointed effort to ignore me.

  He was nowhere on the highway to El Paso. I stopped for gas at a dusty Mobil station and paid the silent boy behind the register, whose dark eyes bored right into me. I hurried back past the pumps, guiltily, as though he knew I had picked up a trucker and still followed the highway in search of him.

  I drove the miles in silence, shedding first my sweatshirt and then my socks as the temperature climbed higher and the hot air from the window beat a steady rhythm to the ribbon of landscape unrolling outside. The sun began to burn the left half of my face. I passed the trucks—titans of the interstate, lone lions riding the continent, streaked with grime and lumbering on an odyssey of their own. None of the rigs was his. They were bigger, smaller, longer, fatter, and none carried the load of sheet metal bound for San Jose.

  “Would you sleep with just anybody, Leslie?” Larry had said once, shrinking back from me, a funny twist to his nose and mouth as he tilted his head for my reply.

  I had thought about my answer. “Maybe.” Then I changed my mind. “No,” I said, “Not everybody. Or just anybody.”

  “Huh,” said Larry. “For me, it has to be love. I have to love the person. I have to love who they are.”

  Who are you, Leslie Kovalsky, who are you? the freeway sang to me, the plains tumbling sand and sagebrush past my windows. I did eighty for an hour in New Mexico, the wind whistling hotly over the sunroof. At any moment I could have driven off the interstate into the sagebrush and disappeared. Leslie Kovalsky would vanish into the United States, somewhere between where she made her last telephone call from some dive motel with cigarette burns in the sheets and her next logical day-length destination. And no one would know where exactly she fell off the map, where the desert sucked her up, where fate pulled the curtain between Leslie and the ones who loved her. The mommy doll, the daddy doll, and all the others. Who all wanted Leslie to be safe. But here was Leslie flying—flying away, with a road map and a pillow and an unplugged phone. And somewhere, maybe Yuma, a tightlipped waitress would appear, a white scar hidden by her molded-plastic shoes.

  Getting away, getting away, getting away. There were different ways to do it. Starting over, staying connected, or cutting the ties.

  I spent the night in Tucson in a cupboard of a room with a bed that would vibrate if you fed it a quarter. I was woken by the sunlight cutting through the slatted shutter and the thudding of suitcases being loaded outside. As I pulled the shutter back, the breadth of the eighteen-wheeler met me, the orange canopy that Matthew had tightened in the starlight still knotted by the rope against the rear. I slammed the shutter closed and leaned against the sill. Then I packed very carefully and lugged my bag outside. He was nowhere near the truck. I put the bag in the car, conscious of the motel windows looking out at me, and as I pulled the car away, I saw the license plate. Land of Lincoln. 2514 N. Illinois.

  Wrong state. Wrong truck. I continued on my way.

  It was an appearance of a nebula. “Life is episodic, Leslie,” Larry had always boomed at me. “Our emotional life, I mean. The rest of our life, you see, is this sequence of routine. You get up, you go to the bathroom, you go to sleep. It’s all very predictable. But our emotional life—” and here he would hammer the table with the flat of his nail-bitten hand, “is completely the other way. It’s made up of these nebulas, these cloudy things that float in and engulf us—happenings, sort of creating turmoil, sadness—or bliss. And then, you know, the nebulas break up and are gone, and we’re left with the silt they leave behind. And here’s the important thing.” He would look at me keenly each time he repeated the lecture. “If we’re to get what we’re supposed to from the nebula, we have to sift through the silt and make sense of it. We have to give the nebula form.”

  The truck from Illinois had marked the end. The last wisp of the nebula, the cloud mass, the cotton-candy state of Texas that had drifted in, and, one day later, just as calmly drifted out. I was meant to turn the cloud mass over. Play with it. File it. Redefine it. “Remember,” Larry would say, “to understand the cloud mass, you look for its beginning, its middle and its end. Because it’s by making order that we push ourselves along. Do you see that, Leslie? Otherwise we might as well be a bunch of amoebas, oozing and looking for a warm place.”

  I had to nod. He was smart. I would often stare at him when he didn’t know it, trying to guess where the nebula cut off. The one that shrouded him and me. For there was an end to them all, he had said—the cloud masses, the rolling pieces of the giant storms. And why were they storms? Why did they shake us? Were they shuddering histories that had to be?

  SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

  1988

  CHAPTER ONE

  Glass

  He came to the beach that day. I didn’t really think he would. He had sort of agreed to meet me there, but I didn’t give him very good directions. As I was carrying my chair and straw bag over to the sand dunes where the empty sailboat sat high on the beach by the houses, I realized that it wasn’t 26th Street—it was 23rd Street. I was three whole streets off.

  I thought, he’s absolutely never going to find me.

  I sat myself down. I had brought a book. I tried to read it. I was very nervous. It was that kind of waiting you do when you hope against hope and you know deep inside that you’re only waiting to be let down. I try not to let myself get too upset when I’m let down. When I was nine or ten years old, in the fourth or fifth grade, someone once told me that the only sure-fire way to stay happy was to have no expectations at all. I can still hear the voice, female and a little stern: “Leslie, there’s only one way to never be disappointed. You must never have any expectations.”

  As the years passed, I remembered the words every once in a while. They rang like a warning, skeptical and cold, and for a long time I did not understand them. I put them away for safekeeping, to use when I was older, and then one day, when I reached the world-wise age of eighteen, they dropped again into my consciousness, trying me out for size. Be sure you have no expectations—and may you never experience despair.

  Boy, I thought. That’s a really appalling phi
losophy. I’ve tried many times to think who the perpetrator of that sinful notion originally was, and the person who comes to mind is this gangly teacher my brother once had. Tall and skinny, she would sub now and then for the older grades. I would watch her pivot angularly around the classroom, as if she knew that the realm of children in which she moved could not permit the full funereal passage of her musty corduroy skirts and her fading Oxford shoes. Her hair, jutting from the straight line of a center part over bottle-thick glasses, greeted the world in a yellow disguise, the brittle result of peroxide applied to simulate a beauty she would never own. Miss Root was her name. And it fit her perfectly. She was the image of a root—long, pallid and colorless, the only woman I knew who looked like one of the pencils I kept in my pencil box. And what a terrible thing to tell a little kid. Never have any expectations.

  But sometimes, if only as a psychological trick, this expectationless deal wasn’t so dumb. Once in a while I’d try it, just so I wouldn’t completely shatter when the thing I wanted so badly didn’t work out. But then again, if you have to counsel yourself that heavily to get ready for something, you obviously have some pretty incredible expectations. There’s really no way to set yourself up to not set yourself up. People always say, “Oh, honey, put it out of your mind.” But that’s no good either. You can’t put things like that out of your mind. All you do is waste a lot of time coaching yourself to knock it out of your mind and you know all along exactly what it is you’re obsessed about, and so you wind up more frustrated and peeved at the world than ever.

  Nevertheless, I tried the no-expectations maneuver. I was there for maybe half an hour. I knew he was never going to come. I was a complete idiot. I couldn’t believe I had screwed up the streets. Maybe he would find me because of the boat, but there were others all over the beach, and if I were him and there were all these boats to choose from, I sure as hell wouldn’t know which was the right one. And you know how hard it is to find people sitting on the beach. They just sort of get lost in the sand. The glitter and glare makes it pretty much impossible to recognize umbrellas or coolers or faces you might otherwise know very well. I couldn’t believe that as many times as I had gone there and stared at the sign as I crossed from the road onto the sand, I still managed to tell him the wrong street.