Shadow Man: A Novel by Jeffrey Fleishman Page A

smell.”
    We stood there awhile. She handed me a stick of gum and put more cinnamon gloss on her lips. She took my hand and said this is what it would be like when we got older, older and married with the kids sleeping in the house. Day’s end and parents talking outside in the night. She wasn’t speaking about being married to me; it was more general. She kissed me. It wasn’t hard and fast like she had done hours earlier before I went out with Kurt and Vera to dinner. This time it was soft.
    “I better git. My break’s over and I gotta get back to the front desk.”
    She left the balcony and crossed the room, her blond hair thick down her tan back. She opened the door, smiled, and disappeared, the flash of her green halter the last of her I saw.
    I was tired. The credits for the
Creature from the Black Lagoon
scrolled and the lady hosting Fright Night, a big-bosomed witch with an Eddie Munster hairdo, whom the guys back in Philly, and even Kurt, thought was sexy, announced that the next film would be the “creepy descent into madness when we enter the demented, demonic mind of perhaps our greatest horror actor, Vincent Price, in the classic
Pit and the Pendulum
.”
    I turned the TV off and lay on top of the bedcovers. The breeze was nice, the white curtain ghosting, and the scents of pot and cinnamon hanging around me. Alice was a strange girl. I was on a strange journey. My life in a bag and a suitcase, my dad next door with another strange girl, footsteps in the hallway, the crunch of the ice machine, footsteps returning, a key in a lock, the creak of a door, a laugh and surrender, the ocean tide changing, imperceptible, incremental, its wave lines rimmed by darting sandpipers pecking at crabs in the moonlight. I left the room and took the stairs down and out the back entrance to the beach. I mixed in with the mist and the night. Back in Philly, the
Inky
would be coming off the presses,the delivery trucks growling through the city and out to the suburbs. The paperboys would be waiting on their spider bikes in the dark, and the news would slap on doorways and driveways, slap, slap, slap, slap, hundreds of thousands of times before dawn.
    I walked to a pier with no lights. It looked like ancient bones, a carcass in the darkness. I heard voices in the waves. A guy in a white T-shirt hopped up from a blanket and a girl sat up and tied her bathing suit top. I walked under the pier and cut over the beach to the boardwalk. Our hotel glowed with a few lights in the distance. I felt like a king in an old book, sneaking out of my castle and walking through my kingdom while my subjects slept. I imagined that’s how God felt at night, looking down at the earth He made, quiet, the sinners and the missionaries sleeping, nobody doing anything wrong, nobody doing anything right, just the world spinning. A ball bounced across my feet and off the boardwalk, into the sand. A dog chased right behind it. An old guy in shorts, slippers, and an open bathrobe meandered out of an alley and onto the boardwalk.
    “Crazy fucking dog I got. Never sleeps. Insomniac. I have to let him run for the next hour and maybe he’ll drop. You got a dog out here?”
    “Just me.”
    “Nice, huh. Not another soul around. It’s how it is in winter. Just me and the dog, no tourists.”
    The dog scampered back and dropped the ball. The guy picked it up and hurled it down the boardwalk, the ball bouncing toward infinity, the dog in pursuit. The guy lifted a flask from his pocket. He sipped and we studied each other in the night. His face was gray-and-black stubble, but he had a good haircut and his robe, brocaded in gold stitching, was neat and clean, not the robe of a guy who might have wandered away from a state hospital. He capped the flask and lit a thin cigar. He was a writer. A technical writer. He wrote about science and medicine in journals and magazines. Hewas working on a story about a new mechanical heart valve that was smaller, thinner, and