Shadow Man: A Novel by Jeffrey Fleishman

from Hungary. Someone knocked. I guessed a killer from Marrakesh wouldn’t be so polite, and when I creaked the door the girl from the front desk smiled and pushed her way in. She was a storm of cinnamon and perfume. She pasted her gum to the mirror, glossed her lips, and sat on the bed.
    “Oh, I love this movie,” she said. “That water’s black like sin. The whole lagoon is evil.”
    “Seems fake.”
    “You’re no fun. The creature’s the devil.”
    “All monsters are the devil.”
    “Not all. Frankenstein wasn’t the devil. He was body parts brought to life with lightning. I like that movie better than this one. When I’m alone at the front desk late at night, I make up scary movies in my head.”
    “Like what?”
    “I was robbed once.”
    “In a movie.”
    “Real thing. A guy ran in with a knife and waved it in my face and told me to give him money. I handed him thirty-five dollars from the special ‘robbery drawer’ my daddy rigged up for the night shift. The big money we slide underneath in a second drawer with an electronic lock. The guy seemed startled when I gave him the money. He looked at it, looked at his knife, and ran out laughing down the boardwalk.”
    “You’re lucky.”
    “You wanna smoke some pot?”
    “I thought you were a Christian. A Baptist.”
    “I am, silly. But I’m a sinner, too. Not big sins, though.” She laughed. “You can get saved again and again; my daddy says that’s what he likes most about Jesus. The ability to fail.”
    She pulled out a small joint from her shorts pocket and lit it with a hotel match. She burned her fingers, her eyes watered, and she coughed. She hadn’t smoked pot a lot, and neither had I. Twice, once in the rear parking lot at St. Jude’s when I hoped the scent of it would mix in with the scent of incense and no one would notice, and the other time at the ball field around the corner from my house, sitting in the dark in a dugout with Scooter Meyers, listening to Elton John on a cassette player Scooter hauled around in a book bag. Most of the pot I saw was in tiny roaches in ashtrays of cars driven by longhairs just out of high school. Beer was bigger in my neighborhood. Six-packs on an autumn night, standing around flames in a barrel, guys talking about the Eagles’ passing statistics and wardpolitics, looking at the stars and listening to fights and love echoing out of row houses, bits and pieces of lives slipping beyond brick walls and into the night, so everybody knew a little about everybody else, but not enough to pretend intimacy.
    I didn’t even drink a lot of beer. Maybe a bottle a week, if it was handed to me by a guy like Manny Jesus, whom everybody called Mr. Two-first-names, but not too loudly because Manny kept a silver Derringer tucked in his blue jeans. Kurt didn’t drink a lot of beer, either, just that precious one after work on the stoop, and sometimes on a Friday night, he’d have a few extra, but not too many. On Sundays, he played tennis.
    The girl handed me the joint.
    “What’s your name?”
    “Jim.”
    “Yours?”
    “Alice.”
    “That’s an old person’s name.” I laughed.
    “It is not. My daddy picked it when he saw a picture in the newspaper of the Bay Crab Queen the day I was born. Her name was Alice.”
    “What did your mom think about that?”
    “She run off a week after she got out of the hospital with me. Took up with another man. Daddy was wrecked for months. That’s when he found Jesus.”
    She took the joint back, pinching it in her fingers.
    “It’s Hawaiian or Colombian or something with a foreign name. My brother gets marijuana for waxing surfboards under the pier. He surfs, too. He’s older. He went to Vietnam for a year, but my daddy says there’s no soldier in him anymore.”
    She put the joint in the ashtray and went to the window and shushed the smoke out into the ocean breeze. She called me out to the balcony.
    “Let the wind blow through you. It’ll get rid of the pot