The Shadow People

by Joe Clifford

  The freeway west out of state was a long straight shot. Transportation vehicles of all sizes kicked up pebbles and coughed exhaust. Produce freighters, trucks lugging loads, banged-up, battered cars mixed in with this year’s newest models, the pipeline of commerce. Food had to be delivered, comfort shipped in. There was a lot of ground to cover. That was what I thought about as I watched these truckers barrel along, how this was the start of a journey, a commitment; anyone making the trek was in it for the long haul.

  At the start of this trip, I felt like I did most mornings when I woke and hadn’t yet put on my glasses, the outline of everything and everybody wobbly, the world out of focus, a radio station that needed finer tuning. Now, tooling along the freeway with Francis in his big ol’ Buick, the outlook shone clearer. I was tuned in.

  We continued on Interstate 80, not talking much. Turned out Francis wasn’t much of a talker unless he had a point to make. With all that blue Rosemary Kennedy nonsense, he’d been a veritable chatterbox. Now? Not so much. Tight-lipped and stoic, this current incarnation closer resembled a two-dimensional character chosen by a casting director who sought to fill the part of “grizzled old man of few words,” a vehicle to deliver sage advice in between making casually racist remarks you excuse because he’s from a different era, saltiness downright endearing in its earthiness.

  More than once I questioned why I was even in the car with the man. I didn’t know him. Nor did I share his enthusiasm for the cause. I couldn’t accept a fantastic scenario where a person would murder, for all intents and purposes, a shut-in. I also had to admit that particular element—Jacob’s reclusive status—piqued curiosity. Jacob never left Utica or its immediate environs. What drew him out here?

  While the details of his death were bizarre, there had to be a simpler explanation. Detective Lourey never returned my call regarding the money and diamonds, or whatever those jewels were. If those jewels were. I didn’t have a cell anymore to follow up. Despite expressing hunger for the truth, Francis did not display any urgency. Like taking a Sunday drive, he steered his gigantic boat of an automobile one-handed, wrist draped over the wheel, Winston burning in his fingers, cracked tall boy sitting in his lap because Francis didn’t concern himself with silly laws about open containers or the dangers of driving drunk. Although I doubted a single beer made a dent in such a seasoned drinker.

  He’d said twenty miles but we’d traveled a lot longer than that. We’d had to exit the freeway and backtrack up winding, twisty trails that delivered us deeper into the cuts. The questions were mounting, Francis’s relationship to the Balfours topping the list. Mrs. Balfour claimed he’d been cut off, estranged from the family. Francis made it sound like he and Jacob were best buds. Someone was lying.

  Despite my interest in probing backstory and getting a better handle on the man, initiating conversation was tough. My attempts were met with clipped, terse responses. Which left me a lot of downtime. No music on the radio—Francis preferred talking heads. Anytime I suggested music—I didn’t care what, put on Lawrence Welk or Glenn Miller—he only said no. He also didn’t like the volume too high, leaving dialogue a whisper, rendering whatever program we were listening to background filler, more white noise than news program. Sometimes a word or phrase would cut through but never loud enough to allow me to follow a narrative. It was all I could do to identify a topic or subject matter. Programs changed. One was a car show, another religious, political. Then a catchall, its host fielding calls covering an assortment of topics, from UFOs to WMDs. I wished I had the call-in number. Maybe he could answer these questions plaguing me. Not that I would’ve been able to hear the response.

  Francis pulled off well before I saw any city, a farming village in the middle of nowhere, a rural Western New York town called Wroughton.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “Why are we stopping here?” There was nothing but old, small, spread-out houses with sagging roofs and collapsed wooden fences, mangy dogs looking extra hungry.

  Francis kicked opened his door, spat, and called me along with his greased white head.

  He’d parked far away in the dirt lot, by the high weeds and reeds, still a good fifty yards removed from a shack stuck in the shadows of the sun. We started walking toward it, the nearest building on the immediate horizon, stepping around the occasional shredded tire or empty Coke can, plastic rings and candy wrappers. When we got to the loose gravel, the ground covered with old losing scratch-offs and bottle caps, I realized we were at a bus station, one of these anonymous stops along America’s great wasteland. I saw a syringe, a needle, like the kind used for insulin or drugs, right there on the ground, for any kid to find and pick up.

  Up close the structure resembled a photo-processing hut you see in pictures, a service rendered obsolete in the digital age. Bigger, but not by much. Nothing about the peeling mustard exterior screamed transportation hub, save for the wood-stamped sign. A small rectangular block dangled from a nail above the door: Wroughton Depot.

  No buses waited in port, no other cars in the lot. I didn’t see a soul killing time till the next ticket out of this dump. I couldn’t imagine who’d catch a bus at this station anyway. To get here, you’d need a car. And if you had a car, why would you need a bus? The high country sun told me it was two or three o’clock in the afternoon. It bothered me not having my phone. I didn’t know if Mrs. Balfour was trying to call me back. I had no way of knowing if Sam was reaching out, able to clear up this mess.

  “Why are we at a cornfield bus stop?”

  Francis didn’t answer, instead lighting a smoke. He took a drag, strode forward, stirring up dust, a cowboy arriving for an overdue showdown. I found the adoptive posture strangely confrontational. I figured the guy must’ve really hated bus stations.

  Without discarding the cigarette, he pushed through the front door. No one waited to greet us. An overhead fan whirred, pushing tepid air. Three empty folding chairs perched against a map of the United States, Dr. Seuss’s nightmare, circuitous routes to all the places you’ll never go. Next to the map, an actual payphone on the wall.

  What I thought were running times turned out to be an empty chart. There were rows for departures and arrivals, just no dates or times filled in. Took me a moment, but I did find an actual schedule. Several feet away. A single sheet of yellow notebook paper, thumbtacked askew, handwritten. The bus route didn’t go through Wroughton daily. Twice a week. Tuesdays and Fridays. Eleven a.m. going east, two thirty p.m. west.

  Even though the depot was abandoned, the doors had been unlocked. We didn’t break in, and we weren’t trespassing. Someone had to have opened up. Décor sparse, chunks of flooring ruptured, dusty allergens clogging the air. Could’ve used a bum sleeping on a bench with a newspaper blanket to add local color.

  I heard the flush of a toilet from deep behind a thick wall. A few seconds later, a large man—stocky and scowling, with a slab of concrete gut, forty or so—emerged from a side door I hadn’t noticed, the interior painted the same shade of filthy hospital green. He wore an unbuttoned grey bus shirt. The nametag read Gustavo, a funny name for this part of the country. It also made me think of that goofy old Paul Simon song, Hop on the bus, Gus… I remembered hearing it play often on my parents’ tiny radio in the kitchen.

  Gus glanced our way, moving toward a door that would deliver him behind a plexiglass wall with a mouth hole. Which struck me as hilarious, given the traffic this place invited, the self-imposed exile.

  “If you’re looking to catch the bus,” he said, hand on handle, “you’re late.”

  The man hadn’t finished the sentence before Francis was on top of him. Under normal circumstances, I’m not giving a man Francis’s age the upper hand against a guy that size. But you would’ve thought their ages were reversed the way Francis grabbed the back of the guy’s neck, pinching it hard, making him squeal until Gus took a knee.

  “Francis!”

  “What the—?” the man eeked.

 
“What are you doing?” I hollered. But Francis wasn’t paying attention to me.

  “You hung up the phone on me,” Francis said. “Made me drive all this way.”

  “Jesus. You’re that crazy old guy who called about that kid—” The man twisted and writhed beneath Francis’s grip. Understanding this was the result of a previous encounter made Francis’s violent introduction less random but no more sane.

  “We’re going to skip hello,” Francis said. “Get to the part where you help me.”

  I wanted to pull Francis off but I didn’t want in the middle. Francis was foaming at the mouth, gnashing teeth, his well-toned forearm a rope of vein and sinew. Would’ve been like trying to take away food from a feral dog.

  Francis removed the cigarette from his mouth, pinching it like he was considering which patch of Gus’s exposed skin to use for an ashtray. For a second I really thought he was going to extinguish the lit smoke on the guy’s arm.

  “I told you on the phone,” Gus whined. “I don’t know anything.”

  Francis dropped the cigarette to the tiled linoleum, quashing the burning ember with his heel. Then he nodded at the office behind the plexiglass. “Let’s double check, eh?”

  The big man held up his hands. Francis let go of the back of his neck, allowing him to stand, the threat of violence implicit. The man opened the door and Francis followed inside. I debated whether to stay, since this was now shaping up to be, at the very least, an assault and battery.

  I peeked through the open door, where, against a far wall, Gus hunched over the bottom drawer of a cabinet. I could hear the poor bastard mouth breathing from here. Gus extracted a shoebox full of tapes, the old-school VHS kind, which no one used anymore, Wroughton Depot slow to enter the twenty-first century.

  What I thought was an old computer, a first-generation model from a time when the internet was in its infancy, turned out to be a small video monitor. Gus inserted the tape and the picture fuzzed to life. The footage was from a couple weeks ago, date and time stamped in the lower box.

  “Fast forward to two p.m.,” Francis said.

  The man fiddled with big red knobs, dialing in the frequency, making the picture dance, and soon the screen was filled with the large shape of my dead friend.

  The image, black, white, and grainy, proved unsettling. The man in the picture no longer existed. Jacob was a memory on a monitor, the real version six feet under, and that grim reality produced indescribable sorrow.

  I walked over, and the three of us huddled around the screen, studying the scene, watching the action develop in real time, which, like Gus maintained, didn’t show much. Jacob waited at the tiny depot, disappearing from the frame as he went outside to smoke, cigarette and lighter in hand. I wasn’t sure what Francis hoped to glean from the footage.

  Then things turned strange.

  In the video, Jacob began to fidget, whiplashing over his shoulder, spooked, like someone had crept up behind him. He ran inside, craning his neck toward his assailant. But no one was there.

  “Who’s behind him?” I asked.

  Gus shrugged. “I told your grandpa when he called. I didn’t see nothing. No one catches the bus here anymore. This depot won’t be open next year. This town used to have mills, jobs, reasons to stay. Families have been leaving by the truckload.”

  “Stop the tape.” Francis pointed at the screen, where Jacob, again, could be seen at the window, shuffling uneasily. I saw it too. We all did. A brief flash. A shadow…

  “Who’s that?” Francis said.

  “I’m sorry,” Gus said. “I don’t remember seeing anyone.”

  “You see now?”

  “I’m sorry, sir—”

  “Hit play.”

  On screen, Jacob jolted, making a straight shot through the lobby, brisk walk, slow jog, side door to back, to the waiting bus, one would presume, given the proximity to the departure time.

  “Was the bus early that day?”

  “No.” Gus shook his head. “Never is. Late a lot.”

  “This day?”

  “Best I can remember? Late.”

  “Who else got on the bus?” Francis asked.

  “Like I told you on the phone. No one got on the bus that day.”

  “My grandson did.” Francis turned and pointed to the payphone on the wall. “He called me from that phone.” Francis pointed at the monitor. “That’s him, walking toward the bus.”

  “I didn’t see anything—”

  Francis turned out the window. “Where’s the next stop?”

  “On the bus you think your grandson caught?”

  “No, the bus the goddamn president caught.” Francis’s eyes squinted nasty mean. “Yes. My grandson.”

  The man fumbled with a map. With shaky fingers, he traced the bus route. “Up here, the routes aren’t regular. Each week is different.”

  “I don’t give a shit.”

  Gus hurried his research. “Maybe Mount Pioneer. Forty miles northwest?”

  “You don’t sound too sure.”

  “Depends on if anyone purchased tickets or needed to get off.”

  Francis seemed to consider this, weighing the truthfulness of the statement, or maybe deciding whether shutting Gus’s head in the door would yield a more favorable answer.

  “Where is the next guaranteed stop?”

  “That would be Jamestown.” Gus swallowed. “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?” Francis said.

  “There’s nothing around here,” Gus said. “Gas stations and pawn shops. Wroughton is nothing but pawn shops. I told you this region’s dried up. No one comes here.” Gus shrugged. “I’m sorry, sir. I don’t know what to tell you.”

  In the car, I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure what to say. Francis fired up another cigarette, dialing in another murmuring talk show. But he didn’t shift into drive or make any attempt to pull out. Over a crest, the highway whisked by, cars and trucks traversing the plains, splitting rows of corn stalks, damp mulchy scent ragweeding the air. I wished he’d get this thing in gear. I didn’t want to come across scared—I wasn’t—but nothing stopped Gus from calling the police.

  “You were a little hard on the guy in there,” I said. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

  Francis glanced over, disdain painted on his face. “No. I wouldn’t agree, boy.”

  “He said he didn’t see anything.”

  “You saw that shadow crossing, didn’t you? In the video?” He didn’t need me to validate. There was the shadow of something.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I mean, it looked like a person.”

  “Because it was a person,” he snapped. “A person following Jacob.” Francis kept his eyes locked ahead on the mulberry bushes and thorns.

  “Where next?”

  Francis shook his head. Now I realized why he hadn’t already sped off. He didn’t know where to go.

  I tried to gather everything I’d learned about my friend’s disappearance. Which wasn’t much. Jacob last called from this depot, before ending up several states over, a pile of ash in a quarry ditch.

  Except we did have other details of his journey, didn’t we?

  “Jacob tried to cross into Canada?” I said.

  “Dearborn. Near Detroit.” Francis turned to me. “If we couldn’t get a bus station employee to help, I’m not sure the US Border Patrol is taking up the cause.”

  But that wasn’t what I was thinking.

  “Right,” I said. “Canada denied entry. Didn’t they cite a large sum of cash and jewelry?”

  “Jacob cleared out his bank account. He’d been working.”

  “But the jewelry… Where’d he get it from?”

  “How the hell should I know?”

  “You said he had almost nine grand in cash. How’d he save that much?”

  “Your point?”

  “I don’t know what Jacob could or couldn’t save. I don’t know where he’d get his hands on that much jewelry.�
�� I looked back at the bus depot. Enough time had passed that I was confident the police weren’t en route. “But I’m thinking about something Gus said.”

  “He didn’t say anything. Except this is a shit town.”

  “Economically depressed.”

  “Okay, college boy. Would you like to discuss systemic racism next?”

  “He said there was nothing here but gas stations and pawn shops.”

  Francis waited for me to connect the dots.

  “Not many places you can unload jewelry without drawing suspicion.” I eyed up the road, over hill and dale, into town. “But pawn shops might be a good place to start.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Downtown Wroughton resembled a post-apocalyptic horror film. Most of the buildings were whitewashed and boarded up, with for lease signs in the windows, many of which were smashed. Even though it was a pleasant day by Northeastern standards, few people roamed the streets. On the cusp of June, the day was mild, pleasant. Late afternoon, the temps were still cool enough that you could walk without sweating. There was also an undeniable melancholy and drudgery hanging over the town, a collective mood of oppression and hopelessness.

  Gus hadn’t been overselling the squalor of downtown, which consisted of a single main street where all the shops, eateries, and businesses were located, including a disproportionate number of pawn shops. The short stretch had three. Mother necessitating invention, two looked to be newer additions. These pawn shop storefronts were colored brighter, painted shinier.

  I slapped Francis on the shoulder, directing him to follow me across the road to the oldest looking operation, called Ace’s. The cold stares of huddled strangers greeted us. This wasn’t a town that attracted tourists. I didn’t know if Jacob had stolen the jewelry, but my gut said if he had, an old-school broker would be more willing to bend rules and deal on the shadier side of the street.

  Electric guitars hung in the window, alongside other musical equipment—Casio keys, a snare drum, a horn. Made sense. Rock and roll was a one-way ticket to regret. You start out with big aspirations and end up selling your gear to pay rent. I was grateful Jacob and I gave up on the dream before rock and roll could break our hearts.