The Shadow Catcher

“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 in 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.”