"Have you seen this man?"

He began searching when he was seventeen. He started in San Antonio, following whispers, rumors. He followed an invisible trail to Los Angeles, then to Miami, then Boston and from there to smaller and smaller places, towns that weren't even on the maps, squatters trailer courts and ghost towns built around decaying gas stations.
Always the same question.
"Have you seen this man?"
Always the same answer, a dozen different ways.
"He stopped here yesterday."
"Yep. Here yesterday, day 'fore. Gone now though."
"Yeah, I remember that guy. Strange fella."
Stranger that everyone remembered him, but no one could ever describe his face. No one ever sold him anything, no one ever spoke to him. No one saw him eat or drink. The man in the blurry black-and-white photograph had been there recently. That was all anyone knew. The boy wasn't surprised.
He found the photo in Grandpa's journal a few weeks after the old man died. He was ten then, a quiet, husky kid with glasses that didn't fit.
He remembered that night, the footsteps going up to Grandpa's room, soft, measured footsteps he was now sure had been meant for his ears alone. The man in the photograph had meant him to hear. And then Grandpa was dead.
Some people said Grandpa was crazy when he was young. He was a hobo, a bum some said, especially family members left out of the old man's will, when they didn't know the boy was listening. The boy knew better.
He remembered. The footsteps leaving Grandpa's room, still whisper-soft, still measured, coming down the stairs and past the doorway where the boy stood, inside the parlor door, deep in the shadows where no one could see him.
The man knew. He paused for a brief moment on the worn-out Oriental rug at the bottom of the stairs. He took two steps into the frame created for him by the parlor doorway. The shadows seemed to creep out to meet him. He looked into the darkness. He looked at the boy, standing with his arms tightly folded over the front of his red-striped pajama top, staring wide-eyed out at him.
They looked at each other. Then he was gone without a sound and the shadows returned to the boy.
That was when Mama started crying upstairs.
He couldn't remember the face himself. He tried that night, curled up in his bed, wide-awake, knowing Grandpa was dead, but feeling that crying wouldn't change it. He remembered the black coat that almost touched the floor, and the shadows hiding underneath, the black hat that shouldn't cast a shadow big enough to hide a man's face. He remembered the way the coat hadn't moved, as the man stepped into the doorway. The face was gone.
He tried to remember the face standing with Mama, watching the big funeral home men lower the ebony casket into the hole in the earth. And every night afterward, until he could see the clothes every time he closed his eyes.
He was sixteen when he found the journal hidden in Grandpa's Navy trunk. The picture was stuck between January 17th and 18th of 1959, stuck in so carefully that it didn't fall out when he opened the pages. It was old, dog-eared and yellow around the edges. His heart missed a beat when he looked at it.
He was walking toward the camera down an empty industrial district street, head high, black coat blowing in the wind, hat set squarely on his head. When the boy looked closer he thought he saw a nose, eyes, a mouth. Then it became a blur again, as if the photograph couldn't remember either.
He studied the photograph and the journal for weeks. Grandpa never wrote about the man in the photograph, but somehow the boy knew. He knew that Grandpa hadn't gone to all those places just to see them. He was looking for the man in the photograph.
The night he finished the journal was two nights after his seventeenth birthday. Grandpa was writing about Philly when the entry abruptly stopped. The only entry on the next page was scrawled in excited print.
"I found him!"
It was the last entry. The boy had closed the journal and walked to the window, staring out into the twilight. He saw what he thought was a movement and glanced down.
There he was. He was standing in front of the house.
He never meant to follow him. He just did. At the window all he only wanted to know why the picture was in Grandpa's journal. At the top of the stairs he wanted to know his name. By the time he reached the front door, grabbing his jacket, turning the coat rack over, he just wanted to see his face. Then he was out the door, running after the retreating figure as hard as he could, down the street and into the night, still holding Grandpa's journal, wondering as he ran how anyone could walk so fast. He never went back.