Shadow Man: A Novel by Jeffrey Fleishman Page B

out of the store; they held on to syllables longer, their consonants were softer, their words seemed to float, especially the words of three girls who walked into the 7-Eleven in their bikinis, sand on their brown shoulders, their long hair damp and flat against their backs. Kurt saw me watching.
    “Hey, Jim, why don’t we ask those girls if they want to play miniature golf? There’s all kinds of miniature golf down here. Volcanoes, gorillas.”
    I blushed and sucked on my Slurpee.
    “We can wait for those girls to come out, Jim. They’re probably getting Slurpaaaays, too.”
    “Listen to Kurt with his new accent,” said Vera. “Take me to your plantation, sir.”
    “Let’s just go,” I said.
    Kurt and Vera laughed. As we backed up, the girls stood at the counter, their brown fingers sliding coins to a clerk in a red shirt. Kurt turned on the radio again. The Jackson Five. When Michael sang about something as lowly as a rat, it calmed you, made you think of something religious. I closed my eyes, the sun warm on my face and arms, my hair windblown and feeling like straw, the Impala moving slow in the traffic. Kurt’s patience could be measured in centimeters, but this traffic, which would normally have him squirming and cursing, didn’t bother him; he sat there sweating and humming to songs as Vera uncapped silver nail polish and, leaning over me, painted a star, the kind you got for getting an A on an arithmetic exam, on his cheek. Kurt found a parking spot after he bargained with a guy. We pulled the top to the Impala shut and Vera chased me out of the car. She hung a towel in the window and changed into her bathing suit. I thought it would be a bikini, but it wasn’t, it was a sky-blue one-piece that made her legs longer. She put on an old fedora and one ofKurt’s buttondown shirts bought years earlier when he thought he might look for a job with a desk and an air conditioner. He never found one, but I don’t think he searched too hard. I had to admit, I never could have imagined him coming home from work without scratches on his arms and ship rust in his hair. We followed Vera over a small dune through tall, itchy grass to where the sand tapered to the beach. The waves were green and white-tipped, kites snapped in the air, and Vera threw down a blanket near the edge of where the last wave rolled up the farthest.
    “It’s cooler down here.”
    “Tide’s changing. We’ll have to keep moving the blanket.”
    “I don’t mind.”
    I hadn’t noticed before, but Vera had a scar on the side of her upper right thigh. Hard and white, it was the size of a quarter, round and a little ragged, like Pluto through a telescope. Vera held a transistor radio to her ear and Kurt slept facedown on the blanket. She rubbed lotion on his back with her free hand and burrowed her feet into the sand. I walked toward the pier. It was crooked, pilings were missing, and the wood was ancient and dark. It was like a shipwreck without sails; a splintered galleon from a history book. Surfers shot through the pilings, shadowed for a moment, and then zipped with the wave into the sun. Their girlfriends sat on the beach, laughing and squeezing lemons over their hair; maybe it was the southern sun, but the girls here tanned better than the ones up north, the color was even, natural, a second tempting skin. One of them waved to me but I kept moving. The air beneath the pier cooled and I walked on. The dunes slumped closer to the beach, blankets were fewer, and I imagined an unchartered country, a stretch touched only by God. Like at the end of
Planet of the Apes
when Charlton Heston comes upon the Statute of Liberty toppled on the shore; both he and the statue, looking sideways at him from the sand, seem confused, and Heston realizes that the alien planet his spaceship landed on wasreally earth in the way, way distant future, like starlight shooting backward, and all he ever knew and loved before was gone. Buckets, kids, a woman with a