I was undersized, over-bright, and prone to causes. My glasses hid the fact that I was more myopic about people than things. Recently I had fallen under the spell of a local pacifist guru who was protesting American involvement in Vietnam even before Americans were aware we were involved. While my friends were playing football and discussing baseball stats, I was standing in protest lines or standing silently in vigils in the middle of the bridge over the Saugatuck River. I even took to writing poems, full of angst and schoolboy passion. One ended:
Death you do not frighten me,
Only the unknown is frightening.
which the guru’s group published in their mimeoed newsletter. It was my first by-line, which my father, a staunch Republican, refused to read.
It was while I was standing next to Bert Koop, the pacifist guru, basking in his praise of my poetry and wishing—not for the first time—that he was my father, that I noticed the man in black. We were used to onlookers, who usually shouted something at us, then walked away. But he was different. Wearing a long, ankle-length black coat and high boots with the pants pushed into the tops, he stood in the shadow of the town library’s front door. He had an odd cap pulled down to his eyebrows that effectively hid his face, though I could tell he was staring at us. He didn’t move for long minutes, and I thought he was watching the entire line of us. It was only much later that I understood he had been staring at me.
“FBI?” I whispered to Bert.
“CIA,” he told me. “But remember—we have rights.” He turned his face toward the man in black, as if defying him.
I did the same. And then, as bravado took over—sixteen is the high point of bravado even today—I slammed my fist against my chest, shouting across the noise of the traffic: “Doug Yolen. American. I have my rights.”
At that, the man in black nodded at me, or at least he tucked his chin down, which totally obscured his face. I turned to gauge Bert’s reaction. He was smiling proudly at me. When I looked back, the man in the doorway was gone.
The next time I saw him, I was at a basketball game, having been persuaded by Mary Lou Renzetti to go with her. I had had a crush on Mary Lou since second grade, so it didn’t take much persuading. She thought of me as her little brother, though we were the same age, give or take a couple of months.
The man was on the other side of the gym, where the Southport crowd sat in dead quiet because their team was losing, and badly. I didn’t see him until the second half. He was wearing the same black coat and cap, even though it must have been 100 degrees in the gym. This time, though, it was clear he was staring at me, which gave me the shivers, bravado notwithstanding. So I turned away to look at Mary Lou’s profile, with its snub nose and freckles. Her mother was Irish and she took after that side.
Jack Patterson made an incredible basket then and we all leaped up to scream our approval. When I sat down again, I glanced at the Southport benches. The man in black was gone.
It went on like that for days. I would see him for a minute and then look away. When I looked back he wasn’t there. Sometimes it was clear where he had gone, for a nearby door would just be closing. Other times there was nowhere for him to have disappeared.
At first I found it uncomfortable, spooky. Then when nothing at all happened, I tried to make a joke of it.
“So—you see that guy over there, Mary Lou?” I asked. “The one with the black cap?” We were standing outside in the parking lot after school. I gestured over my shoulder at the running track, now covered with new-fallen snow. “He’s been following me.”
She put her hand on my arm, so I enlarged on the story, hoping she’d continue to hold on. “He’s probably heard my dad is rich or something and wants to kidnap me. You think my dad will give him anything? I mean after the report card I brought home? He’ll probably have to send my dad one of my fingers or something to prove he means . . .”
“Douggie, there’s no one there.”
I felt her hand on my arm, the fingers tight. I liked how they felt, and grinned at her. Slowly I turned my head, careful not to jiggle her hand loose. He wasn’t there, of course. The snow on the running track was unbroken.
I thought about saying something to my father then. Or to my mother. But the more I rehearsed what I could say, the sillier it sounded. And though I had made a joke of it with Mary Lou, the truth is that the report card I’d brought home the week before hadn’t really put me in my parents’ good graces. It was “Douggie—you’re too bright for this!” from my father. And a searching, soulful look from Mom. To make matters worse, the twins brought home all As. But then so had I at age thirteen.
So I shrugged the whole thing off as nerves. Or glands. Or needing new glasses. Or someone playing a bizarre joke. Or a hallucination. Only I had never joined the drinking crowd at school. Wine gave me headaches and I hated the taste of beer, especially when it repeated up my nose. Drugs had yet to hit high school—or at least to hit our crowd. They filtered in slowly over the next few years so that by the time the twins were seniors, Todd had experimented with everything in sight, and Tim joined an anti-drug crusade. But that’s another story entirely.
Finally I spoke to Bert Koop about it and he was, predictably, sympathetic. And—as it turns out—totally wrong.
“Definitely CIA,” he said. “They’ve been bugging my phone, too. Probably going to try and get to me through you.”
“Well, if they think going to war is brave,” I said. “I’ll show them what real courage is. I won’t say a word.”
“Death. . . ,” Bert quoted, “you do not frighten me.”
“Right,” I said, and really meant it. After all, I had never actually seen anyone dead. Jews don’t believe in open caskets. So death didn’t frighten me. But the man in black was beginning to.
It was about a week after I first saw him that the man in black turned up at our house. Not in the house, but at it, walking slowly down the road. Grounded on weekdays ’til my grades improved, I had been working on my homework curled up on the sofa in the living room. I was pretty involved in writing a term paper on War and Peace. Tolstoy had been a pacifist, too, and I was writing about the difference between a war in fiction and a war in real life, especially Vietnam. I don’t know what made me look up at that moment, but I did. And through the picture window I saw him walking along Newtown Turnpike toward the Weston line.
I leaped off the sofa, scattering my notes and the AFSC pamphlets about war resistance all over the floor. Sticking my feet quickly into boots without lacing them, I ran out the door after him. By the time I got down the driveway and to the main road, I was shivering uncontrollably. It was late November and we’d already had two snowfalls; I hadn’t taken a coat. But I walked way past the Hartleys’ house, at least a quarter mile on up the road, right to the Weston line.
There was no sign of him.
That night I came down with a raging fever, missed a whole week of school, an interfaith peace vigil I had helped put together, the start of the big basketball tournament, and the due date for my Tolstoy paper. Evidently I had also spent one whole day—twenty-four solid hours—ranting and raving about the man in black. Enough so that both my mother and my father were worried. They had called the town cops, who questioned my friends, including Mary Lou. A police car made special rounds the entire week by our house. It seems my father really did have a lot of money, and there had been a kidnapping just six weeks earlier of an ad man’s kid in Darien. No one was dismissing it as a prank.