The Shadow Catcher

I get out of the car, take a deep breath and stretch my muscles, grab my ditty bag and head through Receiving to the public bathroom. Receiving has become more crowded since the middle of the night, there are more families with more kids, most of them still in their pyjamas, and when I push through the door into the Ladies there’s a woman in there with a toddler outside a stall. I’ll be right here, Tiff, she’s telling the child. I lock myself inside the next stall and sit down on the toilet when Tiff says, Mommy, close the door, and I hear the woman pull the stall door shut. Then I think I hear Tiff ask her mother where flat daddy is and the next thing that I know a life-size cardboard head and shoulders of a grinning man in an Army uniform looms up above my stall and looks at me then bounces over like a friendly puppet to Tiff’s side. This is going to make for interesting dream time tonight, I tell myself, and flush. If not for me, at least for Tiff.

“Sorry, did we scare you?” the mother asks as I walk by her to the sink.

“Not in the way you think.” I had heard about these cut-out family members on the radio, cut-outs of service men and women missing-in-family-action, that the Army and the Guard offer to their loved ones at home, but I’d never seen an actual flat daddy doing duty. The Army’s version is a full-body photograph mounted on piece of foamboard cut out along the real dimensions of the real soldier in question. But this type of artificial dad is hard to keep upright, he blows over in the wind and can’t go mobile, can’t travel in a car to soccer practice or McDonald’s and seems ominous, standing there in uniform, at bathtime and at breakfast. The Army wants us all to call these one dimensionals FLAT SOLDIERS, but FLAT DADDIES has the cultural cachet that flat soldiers can never have. “Can I see him?” I ask and the woman holds the cardboard up so it’s facing me but Tiff immediately screams, “Gimme back flat daddy!” Theirs is the National Guard version, a HALF FLAT, a daddy from the head down to the chest, a portable flat daddy who can be propped up in a chair at dinner and travel in the backseat of the family car when duty calls.

“Where’s the real one?” I ask this woman and she mouths Iraq. She leans toward me and whispers, “But we tell Tiff he’s somewhere else.”

“Philadelphia,” I conspire, and she looks at me real funny.

“Reno, actually.”

Your dad’s in Reno, Dad’s in Philadelphia, Dad’s at work, your dad’s with Teddy Roosevelt, he’ll be back someday but this week he’s with Red Cloud, he’s learning the Ghost Dance, he’s on the space shuttle and orbiting the moon. He’s taken someone else’s name and gone to Vegas.

Outside, I see Lester waiting for me on the lawn beside the parking lot — doing something with some sprigs of vegetation. As I watch him I call my sister from the car—Hey, bird, I say when she picks up.

“Where are you?”

“Vegas. I got in last night. Listen — this guy. He’s not daddy.”

“Well I coulda toldya. Next time you want to take a trip to Vegas, Cis, just go. Without the drama.”

Lester lights the sprigs of vegetation with a lighter and waves them in the air until they start to smoke a thin blue smoke.

“Who is he, then?”

“Some poor old guy who had a heart attack. No one thinks he’s going to make it, which is sad to watch. Still, he’s using daddy’s I.D. so I’m gonna stick around a while and try to find out how he got it.”

“—and check out all the restaurants on the strip in your spare time. Check into the Bellagio.”

“No, that’s your other sister. I spent last night in my car…Look, I’m sorry but I gotta go. The Indian I’m with is about to tangle with Security.”

“—another Indian? — again with the security?”

An obscure reference on my sister’s part to my previous relationships with men.

“—ha ha,” I say. “I’ll callya later.”

“—always an adventure,” she acknowledges.

I intercept the security guard before he gets to Lester. “He’s harmless, sir. I can vouch for him.” I realize I look like I slept in my clothes, I don’t have a spot of polish on and I’m definitely a ringer for that lady who comes to Vegas, craps out at the tables and camps out in her vehicle before going crazy. Lester, on the other hand, looks like the guy doing that weird Kevin Costner pas seul thing in Dances with Wolves.

“What’s he doin’—?”

“I think it would be safe to say that he’s invoking spirits, sir.”

“—oh that’s not good. — with smoke? — in front of a hospital?”

Lester raises both arms and starts to hum. Then he stands on one foot; holds the pose. Takes a big step forward, lifts the other foot. Repeats. And hums.

“—now what’s he doin’?”

“I think it would be safe to say that what he’s doin’ is a little dance, sir.”

“—with the smoke. Again.”