The Shadow Catcher

Maybe I stop because my father used to.

Certainly he’s the reason I’m enamored of a passing train, because as well as taking those road trips back and forth between our home in Pennsylvania and my mother’s parents’ home in Virginia, my father used to take me on drives from our home in the suburbs of Lancaster out into the county to the church his grandfather had founded and to the farmland where he had been born, and we used to stop at all the railroad crossings to watch trains.

On those journeys we were alone, the two of us, there was no Mary in the backseat asleep because my mother didn’t like my father’s family’s church, it went against her own Greek Orthodox religion, where there were priests who wore embroidered robes and chanted in a minor key instead of a preacher with a turkey neck in a drab suit fulminating against sin.

Stopped at the railroad crossings I counted cars — it was my job.

Lancaster had the largest stockyards east of Chicago in those days so a lot of cars were cattle cars. Some of the cars were full of coal. None of them read HAN JIN.

Those county journeys of my father’s were habitual, part of how he thought and lived. Most certainly they were how he lit out, if only for a couple hours, from his loneliness and from his marriage.

Even after I left home I believed they were a form of rescue to him, maybe even a form of meditation so it came as no particular surprise one day after I was married and a mother, myself, living in New York, when Mary called to tell me, “I don’t think John came home last night.”

She wasn’t sure.

That was the way things were between them.

Uncertain.

“The boys called from the store, he hasn’t been there yet, to open.” It was noon, and for as long as I could remember John had left the house at six o’clock each morning to open up the store for his employees.

“Has he done this before?” I asked her.

Again she wasn’t sure.

“How can I help you, mom? I’m three hundred miles away.”

“I need someone to tell me what to do.”

“Well, if he hasn’t done this before, then something might have happened to him. I think you should call the police.”

“I can’t do that.”

“It’s only a phone call. You can do it.”

“You do it.”

“You’re going to have to do this, mom. In case there’s been an accident.”

“If there’d been an accident someone would have called by now.”

“They’ll want to know what kind of car he drives.”

“Oh god.”

“They might ask if you were arguing. Let them ask. Just answer calmly. They’re not judging you. It’s what they’re trained to do.”

“—police, for godsake. Do I have to—?”

Somehow, she did. The fact that he was missing moved up the chain of command: State troopers they were called, back in Pennsylvania. Out here the State guys are the CHP — California Highway Patrol — and much to my amazement one of them has set a flamingo-colored flare off up ahead of me in my lane on Route 15 and is signaling the east-bound traffic to pull over for a chat beside the road.

I watch the drivers of the two cars in front of me have brief exchanges with the uniform, then proceed ahead with caution, slowly.

“Officer,” I greet him.

“Ma’am.” His flashlight beam sweeps over me. “I have to ask you to go it slow the next few miles. We got sheep loose on the highway.”

“—sheep,” I marvel. In this age of terrorism. “You need help rounding them up?”

The flashlight beam holds my eyes, then sweeps over to where his car is parked, blocking a gaping hole in the wire fence. “You’re the first to ask,” he says. “If you don’t mind putting your car where mine is it would free me up ’til we get some backup—”

The last time I was out among sheep was years ago in Wales, which was enough to convince me that creatures with that much space between their eyes make a wholly appropriate sound to describe their cognitive spatial dilemma.

It’s a toss, which are smarter: sheep or flounder.