The Identity Man

  Shannon looked through the snapshots briefly. Some were close-ups of the figures. Some were taken from far enough back that you could see the whole thing.

  "What is it?"

  "It's a reredos," said Frederick Applebee. "An altarpiece from a church."

  "Oak, it looks like."

  "That's right. Made in England about one hundred fifty years ago but in the fifteenth-century style. It was damaged in the flood. The angel's head and wing are gone. I've looked everywhere for the pieces, but they must've been carried off in the water."

  "Too bad. You a preacher or something?"

  "No. No, not at all. It just came with my house when I bought it. It's not even very valuable, really. I've just always been fond of it."

  Shannon handed the pictures back to him. "What do you want me to do?"

  "Well, I've asked around. The carving is obviously very fine, and I understand oak is a difficult wood to work with. It'd be more than I can afford to get someone who could actually repair the archangel, the one in the middle. I was wondering if maybe you could just remove him and somehow take out the center of the piece, match the tracery of the two halves together, and make the whole thing smaller with just the two heralds on it, if you see what I mean. That's the only solution I can come up with. I hate to lose the central piece but..." He gave a self-deprecating chuckle. "I find the idea of a headless archangel a bit disturbing."

  Shannon smiled at that. He liked this old guy. "Let me see those again." Shannon took the photos back. Studied them more closely. Shrugged. "Y'know, I could probably just fix this middle one for you. Probably be easier. Smooth down the breaks, drill a couple holes, slap some dowels in there. Put a piece on for the wing, a piece on for the head, carve them right into the shape of it. I could hide the breaks in the wing feathers and in that part—the folds there—of his clothes. You wouldn't even be able to see where I fixed it unless you looked really close."

  Frederick Applebee narrowed his eyes at him, doubtful. "You'd have to make a new head, a new wing. You'd have to carve them."

  "Well, yeah. That's what I'm talking about."

  "The original carving was ... very fine."

  "Yeah, it's good. I can see that." Shannon handed the pictures back to him. "I'm pretty sure I could copy it, though, working from the pictures." He was pretty sure he could, in fact. The wing would be easy and he was already beginning to see the head in his mind's eye. It was just a question of finding the right piece of wood for it. It'd be fun. He could do some sculpting and get paid for it into the bargain. Hell, he would've done it for free.

  Still, this Applebee character went on giving him that doubtful look, narrow-eyed. He smiled, embarrassed. Gently, he repeated, "I'm told this sort of wood is quite difficult to work with."

  "Yeah. Well ... listen," Shannon said. "If it's no good, I can always cut the angel out, right? Do like you said. But why don't you let me try to fix it? Then, you don't like it, I'll just take it out and make the whole thing smaller."

  "I haven't got a lot of money..."

  "You don't like what you get, you don't have to pay me. I gotta kick a hundred back for the moonlight. Take care of that and, one way or another, you'll get something you can use, and you can pay me what you think it's worth."

  Frederick Applebee was shorter than Shannon by a good few inches. He had to look up at Shannon to search his face. That's what he did, standing there for a long moment in silence. It made Shannon kind of uncomfortable: those mild, intelligent eyes going over him, judging the make of him. He had to tell himself again not to be so paranoid. The guy just wanted to make sure he wasn't going to mess up his altarpiece, that's all.

  Applebee came to his decision. "All right," he said in his mild voice. "Give it a try. Do you want me to bring it to you somewhere?"

  "I haven't got anywhere to bring it. I don't have anyplace to carve."

  "Well, we have a small yard out back you can work in. Here, let me give you the address. You can come by on Saturday."

  "Saturday," Shannon repeated slowly. That was the day Joe Whaley wanted him to do the job.

  When the old man was gone, Shannon stood for a few moments, rubbing his arm, thinking. He was thinking about the job Joe Whaley wanted him to do. He thought he could probably do the sculpting work during the day and do the break-in for Joe Whaley at night. But something else bothered him, something on the edge of his understanding. He couldn't even put it into words at first. Then it came clear to him. His crawly feeling was gone. The minute he found out he'd be doing some sculpting work, the crawly feeling had receded. He knew from experience it would go away completely once the work was underway. He didn't have to do the job for Joe Whaley now. Not if he didn't want to.

  He found Joe Whaley in his trailer. He stood around and waited for Joe to get off the phone. Joe hung up and tilted back in his swivel chair behind the mess of papers on his gray metal desk. He put his hands behind his head and lifted his chin as if to ask what was up.

  "Listen," said Shannon. "That thing Saturday."

  Whaley looked around as if he thought someone might overhear them, even though there was no one else in the trailer.

  "Listen, thanks a lot, Joe, but I don't think I want to do that," Shannon told him.

  "What do you mean?" said Joe Whaley.

  "I mean ... I don't want to do that. I don't think I'll do that."

  "We talked about it," said Joe Whaley. "You said you were interested."

  "Well, I thought about it. I don't want to do it."

  "Man, that's not right. I was counting on you. You said you were interested."

  "I didn't say I'd do it," said Shannon, though he knew he'd said as much.

  "Well, man, that's not right. That's not the way it works. I mean, when you say something, you gotta walk the talk."

  Shannon didn't answer. He felt a powerful impulse to just give in, just go along. It would be so much easier than starting trouble. But he didn't want to.

  After the silence went on a few seconds, Joe Whaley said, "You know, this is a big development here. There's a lot of work around and for a long time. Handsome Harry listens to me about who to hire."

  So that was the way it was. If he didn't do the job for Whaley, Whaley would screw up his work life. It was always something like this, Shannon thought, pissed off. People were always tangling you up in things. He didn't have enough money to leave town and he knew he could get blackballed pretty easily in a city like this. He hesitated. But still, something inside was telling him, Don't do this job. Once you do this job you'll be tangled up forever. Identity like stain.

  "You gonna get me fired, Joe?" he said. He gave Joe Whaley a hard look. If Joe was going to do this to him, let him say it to his face. "I don't do this job, you gonna blackball me?"

  Joe looked back. Then, after a moment, he backed down. He averted his eyes. "Ah. You're a good carpenter," he muttered. Then, more forcefully, he said, "But don't come crawling back to me when you need extra money. Know what I'm saying? I gotta be able to count on people. You're out now, you're out for good."

  "I got you. I won't come back. Sorry, Joe." He felt the need to make an excuse. "It's a personal thing," he said. "I got—personal things going on."

  Joe Whaley waved him off, disgusted. Shannon left the trailer sheepishly. Part of him was sorry to let Joe down, but was he ever relieved to be out of that situation! He hadn't realized how tied up in knots he was about it until now.

  On Saturday, he drove to the address Frederick Applebee had given him and he couldn't believe what he saw. Amazed, he sat in his car, parked at the curb, looking out at the place through the window. He thought: What are the chances of that?

  It was the white house—the white clapboard house with black shutters on H Street—the same house where he'd seen the woman crying in the window.

  FREDERICK APPLEBEE MET HIM at the door, holding the barred door of the security cage open. As Shannon stepped inside and followed the old man through the house, he looked around him. Si
nce he knew this was where the crying woman lived, he was looking for signs of her and for clues about what she was like.

  The house, he found, was kind of old-fashioned. Shabby and musty but very... respectable was the word that came to his mind. Respectable and homey. It made him think back to the hero's house in the black-and-white movie about the angel. The furniture was worn, but very proper-looking: straight-backed chairs and a tidy little sofa—and one big old armchair next to a table stacked with books. There were white napkins on the lamp stands in the living room, and a fireplace with framed snapshots on the mantel. As he tromped behind Applebee in his jeans and sweatshirt, the whole place seemed to watch him with disapproval like some old gray-haired lady looking over the tops of her spectacles.

  It was the old man's house, Shannon concluded, not the young woman's. It had been decorated by the old man's wife a long time ago. For some reason, he got the feeling the wife was dead now. He found she had no presence in the place except for lingering traces from the past. At one point, he spotted some ladies' magazines in a basket in the corner, but they were the sort of magazines a younger woman would read—the crying woman maybe, not the old man's wife.

  "We were lucky in the flood," Applebee told him as they walked through. "This area was hit hard, but we're on slightly higher ground."

  "How come your angels got broken then?"

  "The reredos? It was in the cellar. When my wife was alive, she always said it made the house look too much like a church, so she put it down there. I'd completely forgotten about it until I came back after the evacuation and went downstairs to check the damage."

  Applebee led him to the broken altarpiece. It was on a mantel in the dining room now. Shannon ran his tape measure over it so he could get the wood he needed. Applebee watched him, standing nearby with his hands in his pockets. After a while, a little boy wandered in and stood next to him. Applebee put his hand on the boy's shoulder.

  "Mr. Conor, this is my grandson, Michael."

  "Hey, how you doing, little man?" Shannon said over his shoulder. The kid was a solemn little fellow for—what?—a six- or seven-year-old. He was skinny and small with short hair and big sad eyes. Shannon worked it out in his mind: if this was Applebee's grandson, then that meant the woman crying in the window was probably his daughter, not his chippy girlfriend or second wife or whatever. What about the boy's father then? That was the question that came into Shannon's mind. Was the boy's father still around?

  Shannon went on measuring the broken places on the altarpiece, but he asked the boy over his shoulder, "You live here?" Trying to find out what was what.

  The boy was too shy to answer, but Applebee said, "Michael and his mom are staying with me for a while."

  Michael and his mom—so the father was out of the picture for now anyway.

  Then the boy suddenly spoke up. "My daddy died in the war."

  Well, that answered that. "Oh, hey, that's sad," Shannon said. "I'm sorry, little man."

  "In Iraq. He was a very brave soldier," said Frederick Applebee—speaking for the boy's sake, Shannon guessed. "He died saving the lives of two other people. Didn't he, son?"

  The boy nodded solemnly. Shannon felt a pang of jealousy. He didn't know why. What was it to him if the woman in the window had a hero husband? The guy was dead for one thing, so he was no competition. And what difference did it make if he was competition? Shannon didn't even know this woman.

  He thought about it later after he left the house. He thought about her, about the woman he'd seen crying in the window. It wasn't that he'd fallen in love with her at first sight or anything. She'd just made an impression on him, that's all. He didn't know what it was about her exactly. The image of her standing there crying just stuck in his mind.

  He had to drive a long way to find a specialty wood store. The nearest one was set up in an old barn about fifty miles outside of town. After a couple of minutes looking around the place, he picked out a piece for the angel's wing, but the match for the head was much harder to find. He wasn't expecting to get anything perfect, just a good match for color and grain. But then he stumbled on a real piece of luck. In a dusty corner behind a repro pine table that was on display, he found a beautiful block of red oak that seemed tailor-made for the job. When he picked it up and turned it over in his hands, he got a real rush of pleasure. He could practically see the angel's face hidden inside it, waiting to be brought out.

  He went back to the white clapboard house the next Saturday morning, walking up the front path carrying the canvas bag he'd bought to hold his sculpting tools. He felt good. He felt excited. He told himself it was because he was glad to get back to carving. But it was the girl, too—he was excited about meeting the girl.

  She wasn't there this time again. Neither was the kid. Frederick Applebee was in the house alone. As Shannon approached the front door, he saw the old man through the mullioned sidelight. He was sitting in his armchair, reading the newspaper, smoking a pipe. Shannon thought he looked just like the kind of professorial dad who was in the black-and-white movie about the angel.

  Shannon and the old man set up a workplace in the backyard. It was a narrow strip of ground closed in by a diamond-link fence. Before the disaster, there must've been other houses on either side of this house and other backyards alongside this one, but there was only ruination now: empty lots, some strewn with garbage, some overgrown with weeds; lopsided houses, battered and shifted by the floods; blackened shells of houses that had been burned. In the near distance, there were other streets lined with old cars. There were surviving structures and the frames of new buildings just rising from the mud. Farther away, the city's damaged skyline rose black against the blue sky.

  At the end of the yard, there was a good flat portion of ground. Shannon and Frederick Applebee put a bench there to hold the altarpiece and a three-legged stool for Shannon to sit on. They carried the altarpiece out together and set it on the bench. Shannon had brought a canvas tarp. He laid this on the ground and arranged his tools and his wood on top of it. He'd used a band saw at work to shape the new wing piece to his measurements. He put the piece to one side on the tarp.

  Shannon went to work. He smoothed a surface for the wing attachment. He drilled a hole for the dowel. It was a pleasant, involving business. He could focus on it but still enjoy the sweet, energizing spring air. Applebee wandered into the house for a while and Shannon lost himself in fitting the wing to the broken angel. Then Applebee wandered back out again to watch. He smoked his pipe as Shannon smoothed the new piece onto the old. Now and then, he made what Shannon thought of as "old man conversation."

  "Look at this," he said, peering out over the weeds toward the skyline. Biting on his pipe stem. Shaking his head. "It's a shame. It's like we've gone back to the jungle out here. I had to buy a gun. I did. A forty-five. I keep it in the closet in my bedroom. Half the time I'm terrified my grandson'll find it and blow his head off. But what else can I do? We have packs of predators roaming the street at night. Attacking anyone that moves. Breaking in and attacking women right at home in their own beds. Setting cars on fire, houses on fire. The media don't even report half of what goes on. How can they? They're too busy glamorizing slut actresses and gangster music stars. It wouldn't be good for business if they told people what really happens in a neighborhood when morality breaks down. We've got girls here getting pregnant at thirteen without husbands. The fathers taking no care of them or the children. And the sons become predators and it starts again. So help me, all it takes for the world to crumble to nothing is for women to lose their virtue and men their honor."

  Shannon gave a sort of smile to himself. It was the usual old man complaint: the world's not what it used to be. It's all going to hell. Back in the day, everything was better. Blah blah blah. As if there was ever much honor or virtue in the world. Holding the angel's new wing piece on his lap now and sanding the edges, Shannon tried to humor him out of it. "I thought you said you weren't a preacher."

  But Apple
bee didn't get the joke. He just went on. "A high school math teacher. Retired now. You can't teach children if they have no discipline. They won't let you discipline them yourself and they get no discipline at home. So it just gets worse. My daughter found that out—yes, she did, for all her idealism."

  It was his first mention of his daughter and it turned Shannon's attention. He wanted to find out more. "Your daughter—is she a teacher, too?"

  "Teaches the little ones. At least there's still some hope with them. But she finally gave up even on that. In the neighborhood, the thugs come younger and younger. Even the little ones can't be controlled anymore. Now she teaches on the west side, in a private school. That way, Michael can go there free of charge."

  Shannon nodded. He liked the image of her teaching little children. It struck him as very womanly. It touched him somehow.

  "Oh," said Applebee then, "a preacher." He suddenly got Shannon's joke. He gave a good-natured chuckle. "No, no, no. I guess I was going at it though, wasn't I? But no."

  "A teacher not a preacher," said Shannon with a laugh.

  "Exactly. This house did used to be a rectory, though."

  "Oh yeah?" Shannon wasn't exactly sure what a rectory was.

  Applebee must've picked up on that. "It was a preacher's house. The church used to stand right there." He pointed with his pipe stem to a field full of garbage. "It burned down years ago. That altarpiece—it was the only thing that was saved."

  "Well, I guess the house must've had an effect on you," Shannon kidded him. "Cause for a teacher, you preach it pretty good."

  Frederick Applebee laughed. "I'm just a cranky old man, that's all. But cranky old men know a thing or two. That's what makes them so damn cranky. Fact is, I'm no churchgoer and never have been but..."

  Shannon had risen from his stool and was attaching the wing again. He took a pencil from his pocket and began to sketch an outline of feathers on the wood so he could carve them to join properly with the broken stump. He didn't notice that Applebee had gone into a fugue state and fallen silent.