The Shadow Catcher

After a bag X-ray, a body screening followed by a full bag search in which every item in my bag is scrutinized, including the Bible, I’m directed toward a reception desk and then a woman in an Air Force blouse and skirt comes to get me and leads me down a gray-carpeted hallway to a closed door. She knocks, discreetly, twice, opens the door and I find myself in a large office, tastefully appointed in the Spartan manner, face to face with a tall fit man in his mid-forties who I can only conclude must be the Colonel.

My experience with military men above a certain rank is that they are very clean, almost impeccably clean in their comportment, as if training for the possibility that they might have to kill someone or at least order others to that duty, has had a compensatory effect of demanding of them unwarranted but perfect manners so before the Colonel can begin to charm me with his sugared brass I draw out the picture of him in elementary school and hand it to him with the Bible. This is how I found you, I explain. He takes these from me and points me toward a chair facing his desk. There’s a sofa and two armchairs in the near corner of his office but he directs me, instead, to a place where his large desk will be between us. I slide the Polaroids of his father with Ann-Margret and Dean Martin across the surface and tell him, “There are more like these.” I watch him read the newspaper clipping in the Bible and look at the photographs. I watch him as he starts to piece years and this new knowledge together and at a certain point, through his ensuing silence, I begin to feel that watching him invades the privacy he needs at such a moment so I look away. I let my gaze travel over the things he’s chosen to display: Maps. There are maps on all four walls, framed topographical projections of the Earth, three dozen of them, with detailed isometrical pictographs and color washes defining rising elevations, mountains, ridges, canyons, flats in smooth concentric circles — maps drawn looking down on earth from somewhere high up in the air — and I’m reminded that this man across from me, by the very nature of his job, has seen the Earth in ways, at heights and speeds, that Da Vinci only dreamed of.

The Colonel breaks his revery by reaching behind him to a bookshelf and bringing forth a twelve-inch plastic model of a dark green painted helicopter transport with two rotors, the kind I recognize from the Wagnerian beach scene with Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now.

“It was my birthday,” the Colonel says. “I was ten years old.” He spins one of the little model’s rotors with a finger. “…and I loved making model airplanes.”

He looks at me.

“Pop had gone to F.A.O. Schwartz — that famous toy store in New York. To buy me this. And he’d been driving all night, straight back from New York City, to bring it home for me, in Virginia, as a surprise. It’s an Apache,” he explains.

“The rotors move.”

He demonstrates.

A long silence passes between us. And then I have to ask, “—what happened?”

The Colonel, elegant, almost, in his controlled composure, shakes his head, as if to shake the question.

“He was in the house when I got home from school. What a great thing, for a boy. To have his father home, I have to tell you. Pop worked for the railroad on the coast-to-coast service, kept him away from home, on the job, sometimes, two, three, four weeks at a time. But those were great, great days, the ones when he was home. Nothing like it. He didn’t have to do a thing — he could be sleeping in the hammock — the house was lit when he was there. Mother was all lighted up. But that day — something was wrong about it, not the same. He gave me my present and we ate my birthday cake but there was a thing unspoken, some thing I couldn’t understand. I remember I stayed up late, working on this model. And I knew he was sitting in the kitchen, all alone. That night, and then the next. I could hear him. Two days later he was gone.”

We stare at each other.

“I was a kid,” he says, “I thought he had gone back to work. On the rails.” He makes a pyramid with his hands and leans back in his chair. “When I figured out he wasn’t coming back I gave my mother a hard time, went on for years. God bless her.”

“I did the same. These dads who disappear get away with—”

“She died in 1982.”

“I’m sorry.”

“—saw me graduate. I brought her out to the Academy. That’s when we finally had the Talk.”

He looks at me again with something urgent in his eyes that makes me hold my breath.

“Do you know — can you imagine—what it must have been like for a black man of my father’s generation to be driving home one morning on a lonely road down South and find somebody hanging from a tree?”

I feel the room grow small around me.

“That is a black man’s nightmare. Lynching,” he enunciates.

I hold his gaze.