Dig Two Graves

by Kim Powers

  If he is Hercules, the strong, then I’m Iphicles, the weak. The twin brother to Hercules.

  He punched up all the other monitors, and the room was now filled with his brother, in every language of the world. Ethan “Hercules” Holt, at the Tower of Babel, as every country saw him. Chants and cheers coming from the Olympic stands, the play-by-play narration from a sportscaster.

  The pictures and sound took over the room, and they took over Iphicles.

  They became one, sight and sound, then and now, brother and brother.

  In that moment, Iphicles became his brother.

  Hercules and Iphicles. Ethan and Aaron. One and the same.

  If one could do it, they both could do it. That’s what twins did. That’s what twins are.

  We’re the same, just look at us!

  Iphicles grabbed his metal crutch that was leaning against a wall and used it to torque his body out of his chair. Ready. Prepared. His crutch aloft, just as his brother positioned his running pole in front of him, for perfect balance.

  On those screens, Ethan started running, gathering wind, the pole an eighteen-foot extension of his arms. Faster and faster he went, the pole bouncing in sync with every step, already vibrating at the miracle that was about to happen.

  He was about to fly.

  He was about to conquer man’s greatest dream.

  If Ethan can do it, I can do it. Become a bird. We came from the same egg, didn’t we? Eggs turn into birds. Birds have wings. Birds can fly.

  I can leave my crippled body behind, and soar.

  Aaron got in position, his crutch aloft, ready for liftoff, trying to conjure a muscle memory he never had.

  He looked at Ethan for courage, waiting for his little brother to tell him what to do.

  Let’s go, my twin. It’s time. You’ll finally be free.

  On screen, all the screens, Ethan went arcing into the air.

  He flew.

  Aaron, completely lost to the moment, lost to the dream of a happy family and a brother and a body that worked, tried to do the same. He planted his crutch solidly against the floor, using the strength of his upper body to catapult himself out of his wheelchair . . .

  . . . their eyes met, just as they once did in the womb, just as they did when they were forced to say goodbye to each other at just three years old . . . a few visits after that at the home . . . after Mamarie told him he had a twin brother.

  A soon-to-be-famous brother.

  Fly, brother, fly, join me in midair, oh, what fun we’ll have . . .

  Aaron closed his eyes to the dream, his eyelids trembling, a vision of perfection, of ecstasy, of weightless euphoria on his face . . .

  I can do it.

  I can change all this.

  I can be forgiven . . .

  I can . . .

  At the very moment Ethan “Hercules” Holt went sailing over the bar, to the cheers of the crowd . . .

  . . . his brother, this brother, collapsed in a heap on the floor.

  Iphicles. A mass of dough and flesh, of hardened stick bones and atrophied muscle that could no longer do what his mind commanded.

  Except hurt.

  Himself, and everyone around him.

  “This is it,” Mamarie said, sidestepping shelves of art supplies and displays, pegs full of little coats and scarves.

  “What?” I said, crowded into the tiny closet with Mizell.

  Mamarie pulled on a dangling chain that turned on a bare light bulb. “This.”

  “Oh my God.”

  I crouched down in the tiny room, but the power of what I saw knocked me back on my haunches, just like when I’d found that very first note on Skip’s bed.

  On the very back wall was a faded mural of Hercules and his Eleventh Labor—stealing the golden apples of the Hesperides.

  This was where the Labors had begun, a million years ago.

  It looked like some outsider artist had done it, primitive and childlike. Bold primary colors and heavy outlines, with a three-dimensional bas-relief of apples, spray-painted gold, hanging from a tree. I reached toward one; it was a real apple or had been, once upon a time, even though it had long since caved in on itself, shrunken to the core.

  In the lower right corner, a signature. The beginning of the end, left over from all those years ago.

  Aaron “Iphicles” Holt.

  “Who the hell is Iphicles?” Mizell blurted out.

  I reached toward the mural, tracing the strokes of my twin brother’s handwriting. “The twin brother of Hercules. Twins, but with different fathers. Iphicles is on the human side. Hercules is a product of the gods.”

  “Am I just a dumb cop, or does everybody know that?”

  I was lost to the past. My past. His. Ours. Theirs. Hercules and Iphicles.

  “In mythology, two snakes come into the babies’ room. The weaker twin, Iphicles, screams his head off. But Hercules picks up the snakes like toys and wrings their necks . . . and that’s . . . that’s pretty much the end of the story. At least the only story anybody knows. After that, Iphicles just disappears. He’s just . . . gone, like he wasn’t a good enough character. Like they got tired of him.”

  One brother becomes a part of mythology, a name for the ages; the other becomes a mere footnote. Just because he was afraid of snakes.

  “Let’s give you some time in here.” Mamarie took Mizell out, sensing how lost to the thrall of the room I was.

  My brother, my twin, had made this. Before.

  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry . . . ”

  I couldn’t say it enough. Whatever else he had done, I couldn’t say it enough, to make up for this.

  What my parents had done to him, by putting him in here.

  What I had done, by forgetting. Maybe that was the worst sin of all.

  That was how I had broken the code.

  I put my own palm over his tiny little handprint; I dwarfed it, as he must have always thought I did. This must have been where Skip got her artistic talent; it wasn’t from me. She got it from her uncle . . .

  . . . the uncle, who had been a part of me, and then hadn’t.

  The uncle who was now holding Skip and Wendy hostage.

  The uncle who had said he would kill them in just four hours.

  I plucked one of the golden apples off the mural and slipped it into my jacket pocket, seeing my watch as my wrist went by.

  I reached up to pull on the tiny chain that controlled the lightbulb in the closet and . . .

  There. Wait. A lightbulb moment, at the lightbulb.

  At home once, on a break from college. I’m snooping around. Reaching up in a closet in my parents’ bedroom, for something up on a shelf. A single light bulb you turned on with a chain. That metallic click, the light bulb, swinging around . . .

  I reach up onto a shelf, behind a stack of sheets and towels. Behind them, an upright metal safety box.

  I pull it down, and open it; it’s not locked, how valuable could the things inside be?

  Inside, two pairs of bronzed baby shoes, one set normal, the other twisted and bent over, but both sets perfectly frozen as they’d been, shoelaces askew.

  I don’t hear my mother come in behind me. She doesn’t say anything, just yanks everything out of my hands.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Are these my baby shoes? Both pairs? The crooked ones too?”

  “Of course they are. That’s why we got you into those gymnastic classes. To correct your feet. Don’t you remember?”

  No, I didn’t.

  No, I do.

  When my parents died in that house fire, my mother was found trying to crawl out of the room, her charred body wrapped around the crooked pair of shoes.

  Protecting them.

  Now I remember.

  I crawled out of the closet to Mizell. From the look of things, she’d filled Mamarie in on what was going on. There were tears in her eyes. Shock.

  “It can’t be. He wouldn’t . . . ”

  “We do
n’t know for sure . . . ” Mizell started in, trying to make it better.

  “Yes, we do. It’s him.” It was the first time I’d said it. Now I knew, for sure.

  “If you were him,” I asked Mamarie, tears forming in my eyes too, at what I knew I had to do, “where would you go?”

  “I’d go to the place I loved the most. For him, that was the Somerset School . . . where he could get away from here. If it’s him, this is the place that made it happen.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY

  The classroom looks better now. The walls are painted and decorated; not with murals from the mind of a madman, but with the stuff of a real grade school education: relief maps of Switzerland, growth charts and posters showing the different parts of the human eyeball, stencils of the letters of the alphabet in cursive. There’s a stanchion holding an American flag, and a square wooden box above the blackboard, a “squawk box” from which their principal speaks. Miss Moore’s big wooden desk isn’t yet battle-scarred or carved up with initials, but is still freshly varnished; a gleaming gold beacon at the front of the classroom. There’s even an apple on one corner, which young Aaron Holt has brought in that morning.

  He’s stolen it from the cafeteria at the home, but Miss Moore doesn’t have to know that.

  In the middle of her desk is his latest, greatest creation, a paper-mache volcano mounted on a square of wood, for the science fair. The volcano’s surface is contoured with crags and ridges and screaming villagers made out of Play-Doh. Inside the volcano, baking soda and vinegar are ready to be set off, with an electrical cap battery charge. Tiny orange twinkle lights will flash on at exactly the same moment, in tandem with the “lava” flowing over.

  Aaron teeters on his crutches for just a moment, and his hands shake. He’s nervous that he didn’t have a chance to test it out first, because once he did that, he’d have to start all over, and they’d barely given him enough materials for one good explosion. He’d had to sweet talk the cook at the school for what he got.

  Two copper wires carefully blend into the lava and snake off the edge of the wooden mount. He just has to touch them to the battery cap—negative and positive, coming together—to set off an explosion.

  It’s time.

  The whole class joins in with their teacher, counting down to the moment of destruction:

  “Five, four, three, two, one!”

  He touches the battery cap with a strand of wire and gets a little shock. That sets him off balance, but he doesn’t think anybody notices. They just think he’s excited, like they are.

  The charge takes, and a sort of hissing whisper starts, as the chemicals mix together inside the cheesecloth and chicken wire and old shredded newspaper. Deep down inside the crater, the bubbling starts, then thickens, filling up the inside tube—a paper towel tube in disguise. The goo gathers volume and speed, and it’s more than Aaron could have hoped for.

  A sulfurous flow of lava erupts over the tip-top edge and pours down the serrated wall of the volcano, and the kids in the room cheer.

  Boom.

  Miss Moore seems just as surprised as Aaron that he’s actually pulled it off. Before she remembers that she’s not supposed to show favoritism, she throws her arms around him and gives him a squeeze.

  That throws him off balance, but he doesn’t mind.

  “You did it! You made an explosion! You made a volcano! You’re our winner for the science fair!”

  Aaron could still hear his teacher, still remember his happiest time, even though the only sound in that same room now was Skip crying, softly, just like the baking powder and vinegar as they began to bubble up and gather steam.

  He could feel the same thing happening in his body now; something inside, his blood and nerves, bubbling up, gathering steam; tremors, the explosions in his muscles like little bombs going off inside the volcano, hitting against the inside of his skin, causing his arms and legs to jump on their own. Each tic was a cell dying off, and exploding. A supernova. The cells going necrotic, one by one. How he used to love that word: necrotic. Necrosis. A college word, even though he’d never been. But now . . .

  It was a word that told him he didn’t have much time left.

  He wheeled into the main classroom. “Have we packed our bags, ladies? It’s time to go. Haste makes waste.” As he spoke, he maneuvered himself over to the mural that contained the twelfth and final Labor.

  Skip nudged closer to Wendy on the floor; even though they were tied up, they were able to hold hands, and that gave Skip courage. Wendy’s bleeding had stopped, but even in the dark of the room, Skip could tell how pale she was. Her eyes were open, but just barely. Skip kept having to knock into Wendy, to have her keep them open.

  And as weak as Wendy was, she still pleaded with him. “Please, let Skip go. She’s just a little girl, she didn’t hurt you. I’ll stay here, do whatever . . . ”

  “Oh, we’re long past . . . whatever. ‘Whatever’ says there’s no plan, no thought. And all I have is . . . thought. No, we’ll all stay together, to see if your father remains the hero.”

  “But what if he can’t?” Skip asked.

  “Then all his other . . . labors . . . will have been in vain. Love’s . . . labors . . . lost,” he said, punctuating each word as he stabbed in a new picture to the final mural.

  All his other photos had been of Ethan, but this was of some other people. They looked familiar to Skip, but she couldn’t place them, not at first. A handsome man and a pretty woman, dressed up. In front of a small aluminum-sided house. Skip had seen that too, but she couldn’t remember where; if it was in person, or just in a photograph.

  “I was still on my feet then, on crutches . . . and quite the mechanical genius. I could move a few wires, cross them . . . I was the expert on crossed wires, I was born with them.”

  Then Skip remembered. It was her grandparents. Their home.

  “It was after the Olympics, and a celebration was called for. V for Victory! For Victims! Your father was with them, his parents—our parents—showing off his medal. Letting them wear it, taking pictures of them with it. I was hidden in the trees—how many times have I done that?—taking pictures of them taking pictures . . .

  “Then they all got in the car and drove away. Coming to see me, maybe! Finally picking me back up, after all those years. Their car got smaller and smaller, until it completely disappeared, and I could go into their house and do my . . . handiwork.”

  Only now did he look at Skip and Wendy, as if he’d forgotten he was reciting the story to anyone but himself.

  “Didn’t your father ever tell you what happened to your grandparents? ‘Grandma and Grandpa?’”

  “They died. When I was little. A baby.”

  “Not just died. Died together. In their house. In flames. Boom.”

  He didn’t have much power left in his voice, after talking so long, but still, Skip and Wendy jumped, as he stabbed one last photo into the mural.

  A photo of that house, on fire, in the middle of the night.

  “Maybe the smoke killed them first. Who knows? I hope not. I hope they . . . hurt. Just like me.”

  “Oh my God. You killed them? Your own parents?”

  “‘You killed them?’ I had to. They killed me, after all . . . or they might as well have. Giving me away to that . . . place. And your father. He’s not going to die, although he might wish he had. We’re going to trade places. Let his . . . wheels do the walking, from now on.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

  We almost missed it, the turn off onto a hidden side road, from the map that Mamarie had drawn for us, her careful printing more like a grade school teacher’s than the hurried, frantic scribble of a nurse. The Bruckner Home. The Somerset School. The names sounded so good on paper.

  So did Aaron Holt. Iphicles, even. Names of stature. From the Bible. Mythology.

  And then I remembered what he had done. What he was still doing.

  “He said it to me, and I completely missed it. I begged for a clue, and he
told me: ‘What did Hercules do?’ The Labors . . . that’s what Hercules did. He did labors. Going into labor. Having us . . . two of us . . . he gave me the only clue I needed and I completely missed it . . . ”

  “But how could you even think that, if you grew up thinking you were an only child?” Mizell said. “That’s like . . . I don’t know what it’s like but it’s ridiculous. Sherlock Holmes couldn’t have figured that out.”

  Mizell cut her headlights and slowed the car to a crawl. Up ahead, a sort of Norman Rockwell building gone to seed, its windows boarded up. No light. No sign of life.

  “But look at those electrical lines,” she pointed out, parking away in some trees. “An abandoned building, full of juice? Something’s going on in there.”

  “Then what are we waiting for?” I opened my door, as she pulled me back.

  “We wait for backup. I’ve called it in but . . . ”

  “Not with my family in there.”

  Skip, Wendy. Him. My family.

  Nothing was keeping me in that car.

  I jerked away from her and jumped out of the car, crouching down low to cat-and-mouse my way through the trees to get closer, all the way up to the back porch.

  Through the barest crack where the back door didn’t fill out its frame, I could peek inside. Pitch dark, but with an eerie sort of glow at the end of a long hallway. I put my ear against the opening and slowed down my breathing, the same way I’d learned to do years ago, to calm myself before a race, and I heard . . . something. Low and garbled, but noise. People. Voices.

  I put my hand on the doorknob . . .

  . . . and somebody put their hand on me, slapping a palm against my mouth and holding it tight. My heartrate went from resting to heart attack in five seconds flat.

  “Are you crazy?” It was Mizell. “What if . . . ”

  “What if nothing. I’m going inside.”

  “Then so am I.”

  She moved in front of me, her hand on the doorknob. It turned. Open. Waiting for us. We’d come to the right place, like all the others before. She shined a flashlight low to the floor, and we began creeping in.