Free Shadow Man: A Novel by Jeffrey Fleishman

Some guy from Massachusetts the other week wanted more and I said, ‘No sir, buddy.’ I’m a Baptist and I don’t need that on my soul. Kissing’s okay, though. Mr. Jones, our Bible group leader, says kissing teaches, what’s that word, uh, moderation, that’s it, moderation and maturity. If you’re here next week — I can’t tell how long you’ll be here because your daddy, he is your daddy, right? ’Cuz one time we had a kidnapped boy here with a terrible man. The police came. — Anyway, there’s this special preacher coming all the way up from Charlotte to give a sermon on young people and love. My daddy says he’s a mighty fine preacher. Are you a Baptist? You’re not a Jew, are you? My daddy says stay away from Jews. I better git.”
    She left.
    That was the second time I made out with a girl. It was nice to have it happen unexpected. My first make-out was with Carmen Pasquele at night in an alley beyond a summer stickball game. I was batting fifth and Carmen, whom I had held hands with two days earlier, came along and whispered for me to follow her. I knew what was coming and I got a little knotted as I walked past Stan’s Deli and the truck repair shop and into the alley, where Carmen leaned back on the wall and pulled me to her and kissed me so soft that I barely felt it, but I did and it went right through me like a sip of hot chocolate slipping down your throat and spreading through your chest. She kissed me again and I heard the thwack of our fourth batter, Billy Holmes, and Carmen knew and she said, “Go back to your game, Jim.” She kissed me on the cheek and went the other way down the alley, her sandals scraping the road and her dress so short you had to wonder what Carmen was actually hiding up there.
    The phone rang. I thought it might be the girl from the front desk, but it was Kurt.
    “We eat in five minutes.”
    I shut off the light and went out on the balcony. The man on the boardwalk was gone and the thrum of the waves hypnotized me, washing in a thought and carrying it away, then washing in another one. I looked over and saw Vera sitting on the balcony of 501. She was in the dark, too, her cigarette ember moving like a lazy firefly. She wore a white dress that made her incandescent against the night and the moon, like those jellyfish that glow in the cold, cold deep of the ocean. She was crying, her body a ripple of slow shakes, swallowing her sound so Kurt wouldn’t hear.
    She didn’t see me on the balcony of 503. I blended in with the night. The break of the waves hid my breathing. Kurt came up behind her. He kissed her neck and rubbed her shoulders. Vera turned into him, and it seemed like a scene from our kitchen back in Philly years ago when Kurt held my mom in the darkness after dinner, when they thought I was asleep, but I was awake on the stairs watching their shadows dance on the wall from headlights passing in the alley. Kurt held Vera like a lover, but also like he was holding himself and, to me, he was newborn in the darkness.
    The trip had already changed him. The scent of paint and turpentine no longer trailed him, the bay and the ocean healed the cuts and nicks on his hands; fresh skin grew over the scrapes on his forearms. He walked less like a workingman and more like a man indifferent to the world. The order he had once known, which had kept the bills in his wallet layered in sequential order and the Impala buffed and shined, no longer mattered, or at least seemed less immediate, less pervasive. He was half shaven and uncombed, this new creature, my father. His tennis clothes were rumpled, but his game stayed sharp, and if you wanted to see the old Kurt you sat near the baseline and watched the squeak and slide of his feet, the butterfly stroke of his backhand. He kept his tenderness, the way he dipped his head and whispered a word when he wanted you to glimpse what was in hisheart; Vera drew that out in him the way a hot pin gives rise to a splinter wedged