The Identity Man Page 11

  Shannon smiled to himself as he watched the bloated corpse shoved into the back of the ambulance. He felt again the power of his anonymity, the possibility of a fresh start.

  As he drove away, he thought to himself: New mang. Don't blow it.

  The next day, he was still thinking along the same lines. He was walking on a narrow street. Ruined brick apartment buildings slanted and loured on either side of him. He felt a tingle on the back of his neck. He looked over his shoulder. He saw this guy stepping out of a pale green Ford, a Crown Victoria with a white scrape on the side. He was a small guy, hungry-thin or maybe drug-thin. He was dressed in a cheap black suit, white shirt, narrow tie. He had a shaved head. He had smart, searching, dangerous eyes. They looked in Shannon's direction—then quickly looked away.

  About half an hour later, Shannon caught a glimpse of him again, the same guy, on a corner several blocks to the north. It made him nervous. Was this fucktard following him?

  He ducked into a restaurant to see what would happen. He watched through the front window as the guy wandered off.

  Then, since he was here, he decided to get something to eat. It was a nice place, a family place with lopsided wooden floors and wooden plank walls painted cheerful red. It was called Betsy's. Betsy served the food. She was a warm, friendly lady in her sixties with a small face, sad-eyed but also cheerful. When she brought him his waffles and chicken, he realized how hungry he was and tore into them. Betsy stood over him, nodding with approval. "There's a man who can eat," she announced to the other people in the restaurant. The other people nodded, too. Some of the little children covered their mouths and giggled.

  Betsy and her restaurant and the friendly people here made him feel better about things, less depressed. As he ate his waffles, he started to think that maybe this wasn't such a bad town to be in after all. He thought of the bag of tools in his closet and he remembered what the foreigner had said to him: We put you in place where there is many buildings, much work. There'd be many buildings and much work here, all right. He could make good money if he put his mind to it.

  He started to see the logic of the thing. Maybe the old foreign buzzard wasn't such an idiot after all.

  Later that afternoon, he sought out a neighborhood where there was some construction going on. Crews were clearing away the wreckage of several houses. Other crews nearby were laying fresh foundations. There was even a wooden frame or two beginning to rise against the sky. He began to imagine himself working here. He would be part of a big project: building the city back up again. He could go to Betsy's for lunch on Sundays and eat waffles and chicken and tell her about his week. Tomorrow, he decided, he'd start calling the numbers in the help-wanted ads on the computer.

  Evening was coming as he made his way back to his brownstone. He didn't know the streets and got a little lost. Just as the sun was going down and the color draining out of the sky, he came upon a sight he would never forget.

  There was a house on a street called H Street. A beautiful old clapboard house, all white, two stories plus an attic under a pitched roof. Behind its security bars, it had mullioned windows flanked by black shutters, white drapes visible on the inside. There was a white picket fence enclosing the front yard.

  All around the house, there were empty lots, expanses of rubble and wreckage, overgrown with weeds. It was as if the flood and fire had destroyed everything near the white house, and yet passed over the house itself, leaving it unharmed.

  It was a striking contrast: the house untouched in the midst of the ruins. Shannon stopped to look. That's when he noticed the woman in one of the upstairs windows. The light was on up there. The window was a rectangle of yellow glowing against the dusk. It was too high to reach from the ground so there were no security bars blocking the view. He could see the woman clearly. She was standing just by the drapes, gazing out through the glass into the distance. She was crying—crying terribly. He could see her whole body shaking with the force of her grief. Now and then, she pressed her hand to her mouth as if she didn't want anyone to hear her sobs.

  The crying woman was in her twenties. She was pretty and slender. Shannon stood gazing at her, entranced by the depth of her suffering and by the secret intimacy of watching her unawares.

  After a while, he realized he'd been staring at her for long seconds. He became afraid she would look down and see him spying on her sorrow. He forced himself to turn away.

  As he did, he caught a glimpse of movement. He had a sense that something—someone—had just darted off into the shadows. He scanned the empty lots on every side of him. At first, he saw nothing, no one.

  Then a flash of red caught his attention. He turned and saw the red brake lights of a car. The car was just turning the corner, heading off down a side street. It had its headlights off and its body was sunk in twilight. But as it drove away, it passed under a streetlamp. Shannon saw the car was green. Maybe a Ford. Maybe—he wasn't sure—a Crown Victoria...

  He remembered the man he had seen earlier in the day: the small, drug-thin man with the shaved head and the cheap suit and the smart, searching, dangerous eyes.

  NOW IT WAS a few weeks later. Shannon was working as a carpenter. He'd been taken on by a contractor named Harry Hand. "Handsome Harry" everyone called him, which was a joke because he was a little fat guy with a puckered face. He looked like a munchkin gorilla.

  Handsome Harry had some kind of city connections. That was probably how he landed his job, overseeing a rebuilding development in the northeastern section. He was always slipping envelopes to guys in suits. Cops and inspectors, Shannon figured. That was the way the city worked. Shannon himself had to pay a "threeper"—a 3 percent kickback to stay on the job. But he was pulling down thirty-three an hour and the good working weather was holding day after day, so he had no complaints on the money front.

  In fact, for a while, he had no complaints at all. There he'd be of a fine spring morning, up astride the second-floor joists in the cool and faintly liquid breezes, lost in the rhythm of air-nailing fire blocks between the vertical studs, lost in a sweet dream. He'd look up, look around, and what would he see? The other frames of other houses nearby him, the fresh brown of new wood rising from the colorless rubble and mud. It was as if he was part of something big, a big project to rebuild the broken city. It gave him a good feeling. It was just as he'd imagined it would be.

  ***

  Sometimes little boys liked to come and watch the construction. They probably should've been in school, but they hung around the site watching the work. There was this one cute little guy who would hang around Shannon in particular. When Shannon was perched on a cinderblock eating his lunch, the boy would stand over him, asking all kinds of questions about his tools and about how you build things. Some of the other boys would hang around behind this one boy too sometimes, listening in.

  "My Daddy, he build things, too," the boy said to Shannon once.

  "Oh yeah?" said Shannon, chewing his sandwich.

  "Yeah, he build all kinds of things. He come home, he gonna build us a house like this one."

  Shannon figured the boy was making it up. He figured the boy's father was really in prison. It made him feel sorry for the little guy. The next weekend, he went out and bought some carving equipment, chisels and gouges and turning tools and so on. When he came back to work, he went to the lead man on the site, Joe Whaley, and asked if he could use some of the blocks sawed off from the studs. Joe said sure, because they just got thrown away anyway. Shannon cut the blocks and carved them and made a dump truck, with a bed that lifted and a gate that opened and wheels that turned and everything. He gave it to the little boy as a present. The little boy got all big-eyed and open-mouthed, like the truck was worth a million dollars. It made Shannon feel good. He made a couple of other trucks for some of the other kids and he carved a few soldiers and whistles for some of the others.

  One day, Handsome Harry was checking out the site and he noticed this going on.

  "Hey, Conor, l
ook at that, that's all right," said Handsome, admiring one of Shannon's trucks, holding it and turning it this way and that in front of his scrunched-up gorilla face. "Where'd you learn to do that?"

  Shannon shrugged. "I can just do it. I always could."

  Handsome nodded with appreciation. "Look at that," he said. "That's all right."

  So it went. One fine spring day after another. Out at the site, up on the joists, wind in his hair, song in his heart basically. Sometimes he'd get worried, nervous. He'd scope the newspapers or watch some true crime show on television to see if anyone mentioned him. Once or twice, someone did. The police were still "searching nationwide for murder suspect John Shannon," as one TV newswoman put it.

  But day after fine spring day, no one came looking for him. No cops cruised slowly past, eyeing him from the patrol car window. No curious civilian tilted his head, and thought, Where have I seen that face before?

  And so, slowly, day after day, it became real to him: he was free. The foreigner had done it, done just what he'd promised: new face, new papers, new life entirely, like princess in fairy tale. No more three strikes. No more Whittaker job. No more Hernandez killings. No more John Shannon at all. John Shannon was gone. He was Henry Conor now.

  Ironically, that's when he started to get crawly. As soon as he started to feel safe, as soon as his new life started to fit him comfortably and he started to get used to it, he began to get that itchy feeling he got sometimes where his skin felt like it was made of spiders. He couldn't sleep at night. He stayed awake, pacing, rubbing his arm where the scars used to be. He got angry. He thought: What am I supposed to do, just hammer nails every day for the rest of my life? Well, fuck you. It took half a bottle of bourbon sometimes just to put his lights out.

  He needed a woman, that's what. He went out and prowled some bars. He picked up a girl who said she worked in a hair salon. She took him back to her room. Sat him naked in a chair and climbed aboard. For two days, she rode him as if he would take her to the coast nonstop. It was pretty wild. He thought maybe they'd have a thing together. But that was it for her. One weekend and she was done with him. She liked to go with different guys, she said. She didn't want to stick with anybody. A few days later, Shannon was just as crawly as he'd been before.

  Now this guy Joe Whaley, the lead guy on the site: he was a watchful character. He was the kind of guy who could just look at a person and tell you a lot about him. He had all kinds of insights about the workers on the site, and the bosses who came by, and the inspectors who came by for payoffs. He must have noticed what was going on with Shannon, how crawly Shannon was, because one day he said to him, "Hey, Conor. Let's have a beer after work."

  Whaley was about forty. He was big: broad shoulders, a gut on him. He had a smart, sly face that looked like it had been places. He sat across from Shannon in a booth in a tavern. They each had a mug of beer. It was a quiet place, with no music.

  "Where you from, Conor?" Whaley asked.

  "Utah, originally," Shannon said. He got that from the movie he'd watched in the white room, the Western about the people on the stagecoach. It had been filmed in Monument Valley, Utah—it said so in the credits. The freedom of its desert distances and the mystery of its stark rock formations had appealed to Shannon. He dreamed of what it would have been like to grow up in the clean wilderness air. But he'd never actually been to Utah and didn't know anything about it, so he added, "But we moved around a lot."

  Whaley didn't care. He hadn't brought Shannon here to talk about Utah. He hunched forward over the table. He spoke in a low murmur out of the corner of his mouth.

  "There's a lot of money to be made in this town, you know."

  "Yeah," said Shannon. "A lot of work."

  "There is. And other stuff, too."

  "What do you mean?" Shannon already knew what Whaley meant. He wondered how he could just pick him out like that. Identity like stain, he thought.

  "Look around, man. Fucking place is lawless. All the gang-bangers everywhere. Minute the sun goes down, there's AK's and nine-a's firing all over the place. You can hear them as we're sitting here."

  Shannon nodded. He heard them. Bang, bang. Rat-tat-tat.

  "Police have their hands full," Whaley went on. "They can't be everywhere, right? Lot of nice houses on the west side, nobody patrolling them. And the phone lines are still wonky, too. I know people at the alarm companies. Alarms don't always work, know what I'm saying? No one to blame, just wonky wires."

  Shannon nodded.

  "Know what I'm saying?" Whaley asked again.

  "Yeah," said Shannon. He was thinking: No. Don't do this. You're free. Don't blow this. But he felt crawly and crazy, too, and he was feeling, Well, if identity like stain then it's like stain, right? What can you do?

  "I might have something for you Saturday."

  "Saturday," Shannon repeated.

  "A job. You interested?"

  Shannon nodded, sort of as if he was thinking about it, and sort of as if he was saying yes. "Saturday."

  A couple of days later, with the weather still so fine, Shannon decided to walk to work. When he was a couple of blocks away from the site, he passed by a green Crown Victoria parked at the curb. He remembered the guy with the shaved head and looked around to see if he was anywhere nearby. He wasn't, of course. Shannon couldn't even be sure this was the same car although—look at that—it did have a scrape on the side just like the one he'd seen before.

  He approached it. He looked in the window. There was nothing special in there. Just some stuff lying on the passenger seat: a packet of Kleenex, some cheap sunglasses, some kind of gum or candy wrapper, and a receipt. Shannon read the receipt. It was from a restaurant called the World Café.

  He looked around again. There was still no sign of the guy with the shaved head. He thought, You don't even know it's the same car. Not for sure. You're being totally paranoid.

  And he went on to work.

  But all day long, he had the feeling he was being watched. He kept looking around to see if there was anyone there.

  Late in the afternoon, he was skinning the second story, laying in some plywood, when he got that feeling and glanced over his shoulder. There, beyond another frame rising in an empty lot, there was a brick apartment building, about five stories tall. At that time of day, the building cast a long shadow on the sidewalk. Shannon thought he saw someone in that shadow, someone just standing there suspiciously. Shannon was too far away to be sure, but he thought it could've been that guy, the Crown Victoria guy with the shaved head again. He stared harder, trying to make the man out, but just then...

  "Hey, Conor!"

  Shannon was so startled he nearly toppled off the joist. He looked down, his heart pounding. It was only fat little Handsome Harry, standing on the ground right below him, tilting his gorilla face up at him, shielding his eyes from the sun.

  "Hey, Conor. Come down here a second."

  Shannon glanced back at the shadow of the apartment building. If there had been anyone there before, he was gone now. Paranoid. Shannon edged around the plywood and climbed down the metal ladder to the ground.

  He stood with Handsome at the base of the frame. The construction went on, and they had to talk loudly over the banging hammers and the buzzing saws and the spitting nail guns.

  "I got a guy who wants to talk to you," Handsome said.

  Nervous as he already was, Shannon now tasted a coppery spurt of fear on his tongue. "What guy?"

  "Just a guy, looking for someone."

  "Looking..."

  "To do some work."

  "Oh, looking for a carpenter, you mean?"

  "Yeah, only he wants, like, a sculptor guy, a carver. A guy who can carve things—like you were doing for the kids. That's what made me think of you. Those trucks you were making for the kids."

  "Oh. Oh, yeah." Shannon felt himself relax. Don't be so jumpy all the time, he told himself. Don't be so paranoid. You're a new mang.

  "You can pick up some extra m
oney on the weekends," said Handsome Harry.

  "Is it legal?"

  "What're you, the pope? Yeah, it's fine. It's nothing. I get a hundred off the top, finder's fee. Then you're on your own."

  Shannon thought about it. There was no harm in talking to the guy. "Where is he?"

  "Right over there."

  Shannon looked where Handsome pointed. There was a battered blue station wagon that must have been a hundred years old standing by the curb. Standing by the station wagon was an older guy. He was a dignified college professor sort. Short, kind of tubby. Wearing a brown cardigan over a button-down shirt and khaki slacks. He had clipped salt-and-pepper hair and elegant features except for the squashed Negro nose. His eyes were mild but searching and intelligent.

  Shannon walked over to him and offered his hand. "I'm Henry Conor," he said.

  "Frederick Applebee," said the professor type. "Are you the sculptor?"

  "Yeah, I guess so. Why?"

  "I wasn't sure where to look for one. They're a lot harder to find than you'd think, especially around here. Someone suggested I try a carpenter." The man had a gentle, pleasant voice, soothing to the ear. "Take a look at these for me, would you?"

  He handed Shannon some snapshots. They were pictures of a carving of some kind. A wooden screen with a lot of background tracery on it, then up in front, two angels with trumpets, one on each side, facing each other. In the middle, between them, there was a third angel, lifting his hand as if he was making an announcement. In one or two of the photos, the sculpture was intact and the angel in the middle was whole. In most of the pictures, though, the thing had been scraped up and damaged and the center angel had been broken. The angel's head and one of his wings were gone.