Andrew Klavan - The Identity Man

As this occurred to him in that vague way, Shannon felt a sort of hollow sadness without really knowing why. Without really knowing why, he said: "The little man must miss his father, huh."

"I guess so," Teresa murmured in a faraway voice-watching the boy and speaking as if she wasn't thinking about what she said. For a moment then, just a moment, Shannon saw her again as he'd seen her first. The same wild suffering shimmered beneath the surface of her distant expression, barely there, then gone. She faced him and smiled. "How boring am I, right? I know how much a man likes to hear a mother talk about her kids." She tilted her head over, shut her eyes, and snored loudly to make him laugh.

Shannon ignored the jokiness this time. "What happened to him? Your husband."

"Oh… please. Don't get me started. Talk about depressing. Just what you need, right? Trying to work with me over here sobbing."

"I don't mind. Sob away. I wondered, that's all."

She gave a big sigh, as if to say, All right, you win. "He was a staff sergeant in the infantry in Iraq, in a little city south of Baghdad. Some Iraqi engineers had been brought into his FOB, his base, to do some work, and the base came under rocket fire. Everyone went scrambling for the bunkers, but two of the civilian engineers sort of froze, you know, out in the open. Carter-he was the fastest man. He could outrun lightning. He could've gotten into that bunker, too. But he turned around and ran to the engineers instead. Grabbed each one by an arm and shoved them into the bunker in front of him. Just as they got there, another rocket came in and Carter got hit by shrapnel. He was just outside the bunker entrance. The Iraqis didn't get a scratch, but Carter…"

She took a leather billfold from the front pocket of her jeans. She opened it and handed it to him. Shannon looked down at a snapshot of her husband, Carter. He was a round-faced man with a grin full of youth and friendliness-nothing like the grim, determined heroes he had seen in the black-and-white war movies in the white room.

"They gave him the Bronze Star with the valor device," she said proudly, "and the Purple Heart and the Combat Infantryman's Badge… and here I go." But there was no sobbing, not at all. Her eyes just grew damp. She touched the corners of them and it was over. "I warned you."

"Sounds like a hell of a brave guy," said Shannon, feeling even more hollow than before. He gave her back the billfold.

"That's what I really worry about," she said. She spoke in her light, jokey tone again, but he could hear the tears just underneath. "How am I going to teach him that?"

"To be brave, you mean?"

"Everything. All the things Carter just was. I try to tell Michael what he was but… you can't even say the words for it anymore without sounding silly. Have you noticed that? Carter had things like honor, things like valor. He was noble. Those used to be good words, right? But somehow they got… stupid-sounding, you know? Kind of- ugh-heavy and overbearing and even comical. How does that happen to a word? He can look on the TV"-she was talking about the boy now-"he can look on the TV, he'll see all these men struttin' around, all muscle and gold and guns. Struttin' around like they somethin' fine, like they tough, you know? Talkin' about slappin' they hos. Carter was nothing like that. Carter was a man. He treated me like…" She didn't finish. She fought back her tears. She shook her head. "Even the word man," she said. "How does that happen to a word?"

Shannon, at this point, felt like absolute shit. How could he ever compete with a husband like that? He didn't even admit to himself that he was competing with him, but he felt bad anyway. He tried to belittle his rival in his mind. Yeah, big hero. Killing people for the government. Lets the government sell him some line about God and country or whatever and sucker him off to some war they're probably making money off of somehow. Lets himself get blown up for a couple of ragheads who didn't want him there and probably would've stabbed him in the back soon as look at him. What's so great about that, killing people for the government and getting killed for some poor ragheads in some lousy war?

It was a nice try, but it didn't work. He knew in his heart it was all garbage, just stuff he was saying to keep from feeling so small because he'd never done anything noble or honorable like that. But he still felt small. He felt like absolute shit.

He began his work on the head of the angel. He used the band saw at his job site again. He shaped that special piece of red oak he'd found at the store so that it would fit the broken place where the old head had been. When he got to the Applebee house, he fastened the block of wood to the broken figure with a dowel. Then he went to work on it with a mallet and gouges, hammering away, chipping the block down to the general shape he wanted.

As he worked on it, his misgivings grew. Or that is: he had had misgivings all along, but hadn't acknowledged them until now. Now they came to the surface. When he first accepted the job from Applebee, he had told himself it would be no problem to reconstruct the angel's face from the photographs he had. But the photographs were small and unclear. It was hard to make out the details. Also, there was the wood, this specific block of wood he'd found. It had its own shape to struggle with, its own angel face buried at its core. He saw this face in his mind's eye, but only vaguely, like the angel in the photograph. Like the angel in the photograph, the details were hard to make out.

During the week, he found himself searching people's faces. The faces of the other carpenters and electricians on the site at work. The faces of people at Betsy's restaurant when he ate dinner there. The faces of passersby when he went running for exercise. He was looking for inspiration for his angel, but he couldn't find it. When the weekend came, he chiseled away at the block of red oak, but he didn't know what he was going to make. He began to dread the moment when he would have to start working on the angel's features.

One early morning, he was jogging through a damaged suburb on the edge of the Northern District, the most crime-ridden district in the city. He was in a runner's reverie, focused on his breath and the flap of his sneakers against the pavement. The bald guy didn't register on his mind until he ducked away around the corner up ahead. Only then, when he was gone, did Shannon wonder: Was that him? Was that the guy from the green Crown Victoria, the drug-thin guy with his cheap suit and his shaved head who seemed to keep showing up everywhere? Shannon had forgotten about the guy for a while, but now he wondered: Was he back? Was he spying on him?

Shannon increased his speed, hurrying to get to the corner. When he did, he scanned the scene, searching for the bald guy. Instead, his attention was caught by something else: there was a crowd gathered on the lawn of one of the houses here. There were police cruisers parked in the driveway and at the curb out front, their red flashers revolving in the still-shadowy dawn. Shannon slowed to a walk, breathless and sweating. He approached the edge of the crowd. He looked through to see what was going on.

A man had been shot dead. He was lying sprawled in his lover's lap with a black hole in the center of his T-shirt. He was about Shannon's age, small and slender. He had a narrow, weaselly face and a thin moustache. He wore only the blasted T-shirt and his Jockey underpants.

His lover-the lover who knelt on the lawn and held his corpse-was also a man, an older queen wearing a feminine quilted bathrobe and a plastic shower cap on his head. He was holding his lover on his lap and screaming-screaming raggedly, wildly, stretching out his hand to the crowd around him as if appealing to them, begging them to make things right.