The Shadow Catcher

  Nevertheless here I am, one hour after midnight, paralleling the Strip, as Mandalay Bay, the Four Seasons, the Luxor, Excalibur, New York-New York and the Monte Carlo sail by on a filmy sheen of megawatt-enhanced reality and the intoxicating shuck of all this human folly filters through my open sunroof in the moonlight.

  I exit at Flamingo.

  Not the shortest route to the hospital, but Flamingo is a street I know, having driven it in daylight on previous visits and the truth is even though I like to think I talk the talk of a road warrior, I’m really a pansy and driving alone in the West on an unknown road after midnight isn’t a trip that I seek out on purpose. To my way of thinking right now Flamingo feels safer than the Desert Inn exit because Desert Inn winds past the Wynn golf course and the Las Vegas Country Club, both of which might be deserted and spooky at this time of night but who am I kidding. I’m acting like this is Los Angeles, weighing which exit I should take when in fact this is a town where the concept of “night” has no impact on traffic.

  But Flamingo is jammed.

  There are people, in shorts, mobbing both sides of the Strip like it’s lunchtime on a crowded beach and the air, still hot, smells of automotive exhaust, popcorn, baked cement and beer. You could read, if you needed to, in the ambient light. You could perform vascular surgery.

  It takes twenty minutes to thread through the Strip intersection, past Bally’s to Koval, and then the light dims and the flat grid with strip malls and one-and two-story buildings takes over and the Strip’s specificity trails behind me leaving me with the sense that this scene could be Anywhere—Phoenix or Tucson or Bakers-field—any place where the shadows of mountains can’t reach, flat and hot.

  I pass the Atomic Testing Museum, spectrally dark, on the right, then the UNLV campus. At Maryland Parkway I make a left and the Stratosphere, tallest structure west of the Mississippi, looms like a giddy launching gantry. All nite carnitas, all nite tattoos, all nite check cashing, all nite drugs—you would think that this part of the city doesn’t exist at all in daytime. All nite pawn and all nite easy credit—Casa de empeños, facilidades de pago. Traffic is light, but the buses are full, transporting kitchen staffs and hotel crews back home to the rundown adobes and cheap seats north of Bonanza in West Las Vegas. I pass the sprawling Boulevard Mall—Dillard’s, Sears, Macy’s—shuttered for the night, the cleanup crews waiting by the bus shelters under the feline green and purple Citizen Area Transit (CAT) logos for their numbered buses to arrive—109, 112, 203, 213—poor man’s roulette. Then, crossing Desert Inn, I see it, high-rise buildings on both sides of Maryland Parkway, Sunrise Hospital, largest public health facility in Nevada. Largest parking lot, too, and for a couple of confused moments I circle, looking for the right entrance until a wailing ambulance turns in from Maryland and highlights the route. I find a space under an orange-burning sulphur lamp and get out and stretch. At the back of the lot, under another lamp, two late-model station wagons are parked back to back, tailgates open. Hospital workers, some smoking, all in pastel scrubs, lounge in lawn chairs. Two of them are camped out in sleeping bags in the back of the station wagons—the scene looks like a pastel-themed NASCAR tailgate party, and I take note that if I need to catch some shuteye in my car tonight, this could be the place.

  Emergency Receiving is surprisingly small, and therefore fully populated. There are whole families here and I’m reminded how much misery can come down in any given household after supper. Mothers, brothers, sisters, uncles—everybody has that oh, shit look, except the kids, and there are plenty of them, playing Game Boys on the floor. There’s an ATM against the wall next to a flower-arrangement machine with sprays of pink and white carnations on rotating shelves, a machine dispensing Get Well cards, a Coke machine and posters warning about sexually transmitted diseases. And there’s the smell. That HOSPITAL SMELL—three parts disinfectant, two parts fear. Five parts institution food. Chemically enhanced “beef”-flavored gravy.

  There’s a single woman on duty behind a sliding glass partition and I tell her why I’m here and she tells me, “No visitors until nine tomorrow morning.” I repeat that I’m here at the hospital’s request and that I’ve driven all the way from California and that if she could only call the cardiac nurse on duty in the cardiac department we could get to closure here and make this work between us.

  She makes the call and after asking me my name again tells me someone’s sending someone down to come and get me. “You can wait in there,” she says, indicating the open door across the hall from us marked CHAPEL.

  Just what I need right now: a moment alone with MY THOUGHTS with visual prompts from OUR LORD. But the Chapel is that rare attempt at interdenominationalism that succeeds, in a quiet but weird way. Two pews deep, it’s a pentagon-shaped blue-tinted refuge featuring an altar, of sorts, which is more of a lectern on which there are some candles, some pre-printed card-sized excerpts from the Gospels. Please God, one line in the ledger reads, I give up drinking and I give up women then you help my little girl. Milagros, pinned to the altar cloth with safety pins, rattle when I brush against them. Pictures of children, those photo-booth standards of our public schools, are stuck in the frame of a portrait of the Virgen, while on the less Catholic side of the shrine a pebble sits on a starched linen doily next to a glass Shabat light. You for the cardiac? a voice sounds behind me.

  I turn and nod at the security guard, armed and not dressed in pastel.

  Let’s go, then, she tells me and leads the way down the hall to the steel doors of an elevator which she opens with a key on a chain on her belt.

  I step inside.

  She inserts her key in the touchpad and hits the 5 button, steps back and tells me, “You have a good night,” and the doors close.

  When they open again, they open on quiet.

  Most of these hospital floors, wherever you are, are the same: nursing desk faces the traffic. Nursing desk faces the elevator.

  I approach and state my name.

  The place is so very quiet I can’t help being aware that this is the floor where the heart patients sleep or lie awake listening for things like their pulses. Sign in, please, Miss Wiggins, I’m told and I sign a sheet on a clipboard and note the time: one fifty-two. He’s in five-oh-nine down the hall, I’m instructed. “The door’s open, it’s a semi-, but he’s all alone.”

  I turn and face the dim hallway.

  One of THOSE MOMENTS when walking seems surreal, when the force propelling me forward seems to exist somewhere outside my body, when what I am doing seems to be at the behest of some other me, a me who is watching all this and cursing her shoes for the sounds that they make, the only sounds I can hear that might be described as sounds that are human, the only sounds audible over the beeps that percuss through the doors like the pings of lovelorn dolphins’ code. And the rhythm, the steady rhythm of my steady steps keeps me from stopping outside his door, keeps me going for fear of breaking the spell and then I’m there in the room, in the weak light, facing him. His eyes are closed and there’s no comfort in watching an unconscious human attached to his guardian monitors, no sense at all of who he might be on his own, inside, behind the closed eyes and the lax-jaw expression. His arms are placed on top of the sheet and I lean down to look at the name on the blue plastic strip on his wrist and notice he’s wearing a thin yellow-gold wedding band.

  I pick up my pace heading back to the nurse and I’m sure now my footsteps sound louder. She’s waiting for me but she doesn’t stand up.

  “You know,” I remind her, “I’ve just driven all night to come here all the way from L.A.”

  She has steady eyes, which I reckon might come with the job.

  “Don’t you think you might have mentioned to me when you called that your John Wiggins is a black man?”

  Those steady eyes do not flicker.

  “And I know this is the twenty-first century and we don’t make these racial assumptions anymore about parents and children,” I say, “but that is a very old black man i
n there and when he was born and when I was born it was the previous century and people in hospitals were not as cool as we are today about mixed race families so I just think somebody might have asked me oh by the way aside from being dead was your father by any chance African American?”

  “So what you’re saying is—?”

  “The guy’s not my father.”

  “But he has your father’s name. And your father’s date of birth and Social with you listed as his closest relative.”

  As she speaks she takes a transparent plastic bag from the lower shelf of a rolling cart behind her and withdraws a brown leather billfold from it and lays it on the desktop between the two of us. On one side is a Nevada state driver’s license with a picture of the slightly younger-looking man down the hall identified as John F. Wiggins and on the other side is an organ donor card with the word Daughter and my name written in the space following Nearest Living Relative. From within the billfold itself she withdraws a yellowed newspaper clipping.

  “—you, no?—once upon a time? I can still see the likeness…”

  “—jesus,” I can’t help muttering.

  The clipping is from a 1965 Lancaster New Era article announcing a production of the play Our Town at Manheim Township High School and there are two thumbnail pictures of the play’s leads, me (EMILY WEBB) and Dennis Landis (STAGE MANAGER), a kid I went to high school with.

  “—how the hell?”

  I make a point of memorizing the street address on the license before she snaps the billfold closed and seals it back up in the plastic bag.

  “I’m really sorry,” I tell her. “I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know how this man came to have that picture of me in his wallet.”

  “Well maybe Mr. Shadow can help shed some light on this.”

  I blink.

  “—Mr. Shadow.”

  Maybe she’s been talking to the dying for too long.

  “He’s down the hall.”

  “—Mr. Shadow is?”

  “Yes.”

  “—is that your way of saying Death?”

  “My way of saying ‘death’ is d-e-a-t-h but if you want to find out more about our Mr. Wiggins you should go and talk to Mr. Shadow down there on that bench at the end of the corridor. The Indian. He was with our Mr. Wiggins when he had his cardiac event.”

  I stare down the hall and notice for the first time a single figure sitting upright on a bench against the wall, presumably asleep.

  “Hasn’t budged for hours,” she whispers. “Won’t leave. Some sort of tribal thing…”

  At my approach the man doesn’t move and I’m convinced that he’s asleep so I kneel down to where our faces are parallel and touch him lightly on his sleeve. “—Mr. Shadow?”

  Immediately his eyelids open and I’m instantly his focus. “Lester,” he tells me. I introduce myself and we shake hands, his more callused palm engulfing my smaller, softer one.

  “Are you the daughter?”

  “—no, but he seems to be using my father’s old identity.”

  Lester frowns as if the concept makes him sad.

  I sit beside him.

  “I understand you came in with him,” I say.

  “The medics wouldn’t let me in the ambulance. I followed in my truck.”

  “What can you tell me about him?”

  He looks at me and says, “He’s going to die.”

  I hold his gaze for a long moment and there is nothing uncomfortable about it, merely two unrelated strangers recognizing an apparent binding truth.

  “How long have you known him?”

  I can see him count: “Sixteen hours.”

  “I presumed you were—”

  “He came into my daughter’s store just after ten o’clock yesterday morning—the first customer. My daughter and her husband run a native craft cooperative in a building on Sahara that used to be a pawn shop. People come in with their pawn because they think my daughter’s place is still a trading post.” He grins. “I came across from Tuba City to mind the store while my daughter and her husband are in Teotihuacán, Mexico. She’s working on her Ph.D. in indigenous societies.”

  “You’re Navajo,” I venture.

  “What gave it away—?”

  He flashes another grin and pulls his single silver plait forward from his neck so that it falls across the placket of his denim shirt. Then he lets his hand drop to an object wrapped in jeweler’s felt beside him on the bench which he moves onto his lap and carefully unwraps. “He came in and I could tell he was there to try to pawn or sell me something and the first thing he puts in front of me is this. Museum quality,” he says and with both hands holds up a headdress made of beads and quills and silver coins.

  “I’ve seen one of these before,” I say and he, again, focuses his dark eyes on me. “In a photograph. By Edward Curtis.”

  He starts playing Indian, looking ancient and severe which kind of creeps me out but then he lowers the headdress onto the square of felt again and touches it. “No one in my family will ever trade in tribal pawn, we will not touch it, most of all the pieces that you see in jewelry stores in Santa Fe and Phoenix have been stolen one way or another, sometimes from burial sites. They tell you in those stores that native people have brought the pieces in for cash to purchase liquor or to make the next support payment but that’s not the truth. A piece like this—how much do you think the Heald Museum would offer? I’d have to ask my daughter but I think this is Plains Indian, perhaps Chinook or Nez-Percé, from the 19th century. But—touch it—it feels as if it’s just been made. Someone’s taken expert care of it. When I looked at it I had to ask myself what is this elder Negro gentleman doing with this artifact? He saw me hesitate and I think he thought I had no interest in it so he quickly showed me this.” He unwraps a second item from the felt, a bracelet. It’s made of very high standard molded silver but the square stone in the center, two inches on each side, is unlike any that I’ve ever seen.

  “—bone?” I wonder.

  “Snow turquoise.”

  “—snow?”

  “White. White turquoise. Very, very rare. But look at it more closely.”

  He passes it to me and I turn it toward the light. A copper vein runs through the center of it, almost in a perfect oval and within the oval shape other copper-colored lines delineate some features while two distinct round shapes of blue turquoise stare out, like eyes.

  “It’s a face,” I marvel.

  “My father called this piece The Shadow Catcher. And he’s the one who made it.”

  He turns the bracelet around and shows me the silversmith’s stamp on the back in the shape of a standing bear. “That’s my father’s mark. ‘Owns His Shadow.’ That was my father’s name. Bear Clan.”

  “So of all the pawn shops in all the cities in the West—”

  “Native craft cooperative.”

  “—so of all the native craft cooperatives in all the cities in the West this guy with my father’s papers and your father’s bracelet walks into—”

  “This is not my father’s bracelet. This one is.”

  He slides up his sleeve and shows me a similar one, not a duplicate, exactly, made of the same stone but with only a trace of the other’s distinct facial image.

  “He made two bracelets from the same piece of snow turquoise. One he kept for himself. That’s the one that I wear. The other, with the face in it, he gave to his friend because the face inside the stone looked so much like him.”

  I stare at the image in the piece of turquoise—copper-colored hair and beard, two piercing blue eyes…

  “Who was his friend?”

  “Edward Curtis. The photographer you mentioned.”

  “Are you messing with me, Lester?”

  I have to ask but I can tell he isn’t.

  “When the man showed me this bracelet I must have looked as if I’d seen a ghost. I couldn’t help it. I looked at him and said, ‘Who are you?’ And his eyes grew round and he parted his lips as if to sp
eak and clutched his chest and then fell down. I went around the counter and I held his head and he looked at me, desperate. I had to leave him on the floor to go call 911 and when I came back I could see he’d had a stroke, one eye was closed but that other eye—” He stops, then tells me—“pleading. I think he knew that he was going to die. He was trying to tell me something. So I had to follow him to here. With these”—he indicates the jewelry—“and these.” He shows me a set of keys and I notice what appears to be a house key among them.

  “He’s wearing a wedding band, so he must belong to someone.”

  “He left his car in my daughter’s parking lot. I was thinking I could search it for his address. Then they told me they had found his closest living relative, and that you were on your way.”

  We stare toward the open door of the room where Mr. Wiggins lies unconscious.

  “I saw his driver’s license,” I mention. “I know where he lives.”

  We exchange another look, and Lester weighs the old man’s house keys in his hand. “Middle of the night,” he mentions. “Can you stay ’til daylight?”

  “Sure.”

  “I don’t want to leave, in case he wakes up.”

  “I can understand that”

  “I have a duty to him.”

  “Yep.”

  “Even if he has a wife, she would be very old, like him. We don’t want to wake her up and scare her. Another heart attack.”

  “—still. I think she’d like to know. Given his condition.”

  “Better that we wait ’til morning.”

  “—okay. You’ve got a point. I know what those unexpected calls are like. The news that you don’t want to hear.”

  He studies me. “—your father?”

  “—for starters.”

  “How did he die?”

  “Suicide.—yours?”