The Shadow Man

                  The Shadow Man

I looked up to admire a pale blue San Francisco sky, and quickly inhaled the crisp, cool air—but I might as well have been back in the humid jungles of war-torn Vietnam.

A car had just backfired, shattering my fragile nerves. Almost daily, a sound or a scent could cause me to turn to stone—forcing me to recall the ugliness of the battles I’d survived. Over the many years, I’d conditioned myself to freeze, to breathe, to focus on something beautiful. It became my salvation.

After a long moment, I looked down at my fancy wrapped packages and inhaled a final deep breath. In a few minutes my wife would join me, and we’d go to lunch around the corner on O’Ferrall Street.

While I waited, shoppers, tourists and office workers, enjoying their midday break around Union Square, rushed by me. I could overhear snippets of their cheerful exchanges. The much-anticipated spring weather seemed to make everyone happier.

Periodically, the faint sound of a siren would echo among the high-rise buildings as an emergency vehicle raced through big-city traffic. A few yards away, a group of street vendors eager to make every sale, were chatting as they hustled their wares to gawking pedestrians. Hand-crafted jewelry, cheap sunglasses, and assorted toys were among the many choices offered today.

Off to my left, sitting in a cold shadow, I noticed a sorrowful man wearing dirty clothes. Next to him was a small rust colored dog. Both man and beast appeared to be malnourished and filthy. They huddled together, blind to their surroundings, as they rested on a scrap of wrinkled cardboard. It was impossible to tell which creature was more defeated.

The pair blended-in with a blur of street-signs plastered with flyers offering free information about young sexy escorts, two-for-one drinks, and various store promotions. The dejected duo sat resting at the edge of a curb painted red near an illegally parked car.

As I looked closer, I saw the downtrodden drifter had a small sign made from an old shoe box scribbled with uneven black letters. His sign sat in a flattened garrison cap leaning against a rumpled backpack. The sign asked for money to buy food.

A degree of cynicism crept into my mind. Over the years I had seen hundreds of men, women, and even children, along with all manner of pets—used as bait—to separate shoppers and tourists from their money. Was this guy just another hustler? An alcoholic? It was impossible to know. 

On the bottom of his sign, almost too small to read was scrawled, I‘m a veteran. Those words hit me like a punch in the gut. They commanded my attention. By a tragic twist of fate, his grim journey from honorable service to horrible sadness placed him here while mine took another path. If he was indeed a vet, this cheerless picture would be even more tragic.

Slowly, I shook my head from side to side. I sighed softly and turned my face towards the blue sky once more. How many comrades have I seen in similar situations over the years? Too many. My mind drifted to another time, another place, as my eyes began to close ever so slightly to block the light.

In my minds’ eye I saw myself as a young newly minted veteran standing in the lobby of a crowded Veteran’s Administration office 500 miles to the south. I was far from home with a few hundred dollars in my wallet and the ink still wet on my discharge papers. I hadn’t a clue where my life was heading.

A kindly older man with a large grin—and even larger ears—wearing a name badge with Buck engraved on it greeted me from behind the green marble counter.

“Where ya’ from, son? And, more importantly, where ya’ headed?” At that moment, Buck unknowingly lifted a ton of anxiety from my shoulders. As he pumped my hand, I felt like I had just made a new friend. He was easy to be around. His aw-shucks manner and his ability to explain how to get through the forbidding maze of government red- tape helped me begin my new life.

Thanks to retired sergeant Sam Buckles, the transition back into civilian life via the G.I. Education Bill was positive and successful. A sheepish grin began to form on my face as the memory of Buck and his big ears appeared.

While in college I heard dreadful tales about other veterans who couldn’t get the help they needed. In fact, most of my friends were enraged with the VA’s legendary impersonal treatment and rampant inefficiencies.

A barking dog abruptly ended my daydreaming. I turned to see a short, affable street vendor talking with a twangy southern accent standing over the beggar.

“Hey Sarge. Ya’ll lookin’ good today, man. Say, where’s your glasses?” He bent down to pet the dog and with a knowing and friendly voice I heard him say, “Yo Top, how ya’ doin’ today, boy?”

The beggar, apparently named Sarge, wore a face that screamed sorrow. He looked up towards the cheerful southerner and replied, “What’s up, Curly?”

“I’m okay. Seriously, where’s your specs, man?”

I heard Sarge say, “The damn VA clinic wouldn’t give ‘em to me. They said I was missin’ a form, some stupid government paperwork. It’s always something with them assholes.”

“How you gonna’ get off the sidewalk and back with your family if you can’t see, man? Shit, you ain’t never gonna’ get off this concrete.” Then as suddenly as he appeared, the street-savvy vendor stood up quickly turned. He strutted back to his small stand. Over his shoulder I heard him say “Take care of yourself, man. I got a buyer. You want to help me load my jewelry later?” He didn’t wait for an answer.

The broken man with the sorrowful face slowly sank back into himself in a pool of pity. He sat hunched-over with his legs crossed. Absent mindedly, he stroked the dog with a rough, grimy hand. In his other hand, he held a short smoldering cigarette between two stiff fingers. Both hands looked as if they had recently spent time rummaging in a dumpster. His sad eyes were half-shut most of the time. Bushy brows ran together above his dark hollow sockets.

I began to study his gloomy but poignant face for a clue, for anything that might help me understand how he got here. What could have happened to Sarge to reject society? Or was it the other way around?

My mother was fond of saying, “The eyes are the windows to the soul.” Without staring, I started to examine his haunted eyes. A small pair of white, deep indentations on either side of the bridge of his weathered nose told me he normally wore glasses, probably heavy glasses. Yet today he sat here without them.

His sunburned neck just above the frayed collar revealed a series of thick, disjointed scars—five of which trailed off into his shaggy hair line.  

He appeared to be between twenty-eight and thirty-eight years old. The exact age was impossible to determine. Hard living had sucked much of the life out of his abused body. When he turned his frail body to throw the cigarette into the street, I noticed that the fingers on his right hand couldn’t open all the way.

After years of reading newspapers and watching television reports about the middle east wars, it was easy for me to imagine a hideous chapter from his altered life. Without effort, I pictured Sarge as a victim of a devastating blast from a roadside bomb.

I saw him, half-a-world away, in some non-descript littered alley in an ancient no-name village, just doing his job with his squad. With his buddies, he was walking in a random pattern while attempting to win the hearts and minds of locals. Then, on his final patrol, it all ended in a horrific body-breaking explosion of agonizing misery. His life was irrevocably changed in a split-second.

I imagined him in a jarring race back to his FOB in the back of a Humvee, alternating between unconsciousness and unending agony. He was paralyzed with panic and pain with no sound except the constant ringing in his ears, not knowing if he’d live or die—then a long, cold flight to Germany. After spending a week in a drug-fueled fog, onto Walter Reed where he hung-on for months, existing in two frightful worlds simultaneously: the painful physical and the raw emotional—neither of which provided him with any hope or happiness.

The rest of the story wasn’t too difficult to piece together either. A future lost, a family split, and then, an all-consuming hatred imposing its will over what was supposed to be a fulfilling life of happiness.

But then again, was it just my over-active imagination playing tricks on me? Did I just create a fantasy life for what might be yet another good con artist? I didn’t know. I wanted to know. Hell, I needed to know.

I looked over at the man with the friendly drawl, evidently named Curly. He was busier than the other street merchants. A small group of potential buyers were fingering his various pins, necklaces, and rings spread out on the crushed black velvet draped over his wobbly wooden table. 

Joining the gawkers, I put my packages down between my feet and picked up a small ring with blue-green glass artfully set in silver. As the crowd thinned, quietly I asked Curly what he knew about the beggar.

“You a cop or somethin’?” came the quick, cold, and suspicious reply.

I assured him I wasn’t. I was just a vet saddened to see a fellow vet sitting on the sidewalk.

With penetrating untrusting eyes born of a lifetime of hustle and hard luck he took my measure and weighed the tone of my voice. After what seemed like a full minute of personal appraisal, Curly looked down and began straightening and shining his jewelry.

Softly, the slow drawl came. “Yeah, man, he’s the real thing alright. I was in his unit. We rode together. I was pretty tore up when I first saw him out here. I help him out when I can but, you know, he’s a proud guy.”

I asked Curly about the scars on his neck, his unbending hand, and the detached manner about him.

Curly stopped moving for a moment, dead still, as if trapped in time, carefully assessing his response. He turned and stared at me. Curly’s voice was softer now, like he had to go back somewhere to find answers to my questions. I saw his lips purse. His shook his head as he inhaled. His shoulders inched up near his thick neck. And then let out a deep long breath. “It was a goddamn IED, man, a goddamn IED. Hell, that coulda’ been me sittin’ over there.”

I turned and looked down at Sarge and noticed his lips moving. There were no discernable sounds. He was talking, but apparently very softly. Maybe he was talking to his dog. Maybe he was talking to himself. Or maybe he was talking to the people walking by, asking for spare change.

My suspicion was that he was talking to the ghosts who lived within him, the ghosts who beat him and haunted him. The ghosts who shouted into his ears night and day about what might have been, what could have been, and what will never be. Ghosts from a horrible past, a past filled with powerful pains and shattered promises.

I picked up my packages and put them under one arm. I walked over and handed the broken, wounded, fellow veteran sitting in the shadows a $20.00 bill and said, “Good luck, Sarge.”

He looked up. His eyes met mine and they squinted just a bit. During that one brief moment, we were just two GI’s again, two different wars, but both linked together by a common bond—and somehow, even without talking we both knew it. At least I did.

With a subtle almost absent smile, he nodded, then lowered his head and continued to pet his sleeping rust colored dog—a prisoner of his past, begging for his future.

I looked up to admire a pale blue San Francisco sky, and quickly inhaled the crisp, cool air—but I might as well have been back in the humid jungles of war-torn Vietnam.

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