Shadow Man: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

the stove near the crucifix. Mom’s spirit was there, not ready to give its blessing for Kurt to start a new life. That was fair. No one wants to be forgotten, especially in a house that held your pots and recipes and two boxes of stuff Kurt and I taped and wrote on with Magic Marker and slid into the attic next to the Christmas ornaments and a bicycle that had been there since before we moved in. It’s hard to choose what you want to save of a person; it makes you wonder if you really knew them at all. Every scrap, shred, picture, scribbled note, favorite sweater is sacred.
    Vera slipped in amid these things when we weren’t looking. She brought stories that made the world bigger and more interesting. Our row house didn’t have enough rooms to hold Vera’s tales and Mom’s memory, so Kurt, finding a streak of spontaneity I had only seen on the tennis court, stepped into my room just before dawn andannounced: “Jim, we’re hitting the road. Get dressed.” He loaded us into the Impala when the streets were dewy and cool, and paperboys strained against their canvas sacks of headlines, while milkmen delivered bottles from Kensington to Fish Town to Rittenhouse Square. Paperboys and milkmen didn’t need maps. They knew the alleys, back alleys, crevices, the fires in the drums near the trestles, the shantytowns on the riverbank and the iron and cement underbelly that kept the city from sinking. A lot of paperboys I knew were also altar boys; milkmen were pretty much just milkmen, except for Eddie Blankenridge who strangled widows in their bathrobes before the police arrested him climbing out of a window.
    I had packed shorts, T-shirts, one pair of jeans, my dictionary, and the Beatles’
White Album
. You never know when you might come across a stereo. The
White Album
was my favorite, a jumble of moods and images. That’s what I liked most about the Beatles; they were magpies (one of my favorite words, looked up after I heard it in a poem) gathering a little of this and a little of that and turning them into “Rocky Raccoon,” “Cry Baby Cry,” and “Savory Truffle.” Vera liked the Beatles, too, but was more partial to the Rolling Stones and Tim Buckley. Kurt liked some guy named Walter Jackson, who had a deep, welling voice with no cracks, like a perfect sphere. That’s all we had to listen to in the Impala — the radio and one Walter Jackson eight-track that kept sticking on song three until Kurt whacked it and it warbled back to the baritone of a man broken by the cruelty of love.
    “Kurt, you have to buy more music.”
    “I could listen to Walter Jackson every hour of every day.”
    “I don’t know if Jim and I can.”
    Kurt hit the gas and the car gripped the road, speeding south along the Delaware coast. Vera tried to light a cigarette but matches died against the wind. She cupped her hands and dipped her head below the glove box, and finally asked Kurt to slow down, which madeWalter Jackson louder, like God coming through a silver speaker. Vera took a drag and Kurt was off again, Vera’s ember burning orange and fast. I kept looking over at her. Who was this woman? She said in the diner that night we met her that she was hiding from a man, and then with her stories of Cairo and Marrakesh I thought of her as a spy or a damsel of intrigue, an updated Lizabeth Scott with purple-tinted sunglasses and fingernails dotted with stars. Kurt wasn’t telling me all he knew, and he seemed a different person, too, a man with more sides than I had once known. If I held him to the light I’d see all kinds of angles and colors. He started wearing sandals and skipped his normal haircut day at Johnny’s; he didn’t even shave every day, and on the days he didn’t he looked like, but not exactly like, an apostle.
    We crossed out of Delaware to Maryland and into eastern Virginia and the scents of bay crabs and marshes and smoked ham; signs for fireworks and summer squash. Moss hung in streaks and tresses, and the