SHADOW
of the
LIONS
A NOVEL
CHRISTOPHER SWANN
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL
2017
This novel is dedicated
to my sons, Whitaker and Sullivan,
and to my wife, Kathy, for everything.
Contents
Prologue
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Acknowledgments
About the Author
About Algonquin
PROLOGUE
The two lions crouched on top of their pedestals, frozen in preparation to leap. One was snarling, its stone teeth menacing in the late-afternoon shadows, while the other stared out with disdain at the broad sweep of empty soybean fields that lay just across the state highway, a disdain made all the more pointed because the lion was missing its left eye.
The missing eye was their only major flaw. A myth of swift and terrible justice falling on those who harmed the lions had shielded them from further disfigurement over the years. Blackburne legend had it that the student who chiseled out the left eye as a class prank in 1947 died that same week, drowning in the Shenandoah Creek when his canoe tipped over. Since then, the lions had been revered by the students, and although time had worn away at these guardians of Blackburne’s front entrance, the lions remained fixed to the spot where they had sat for more than a century. The columns of Raleigh Hall, the freshman dorm, might be painted pink; a faculty member’s car might be placed inside the dining hall in the dead of night; the headmaster might open his office one morning to find every square inch filled with balloons. But the lions were left alone.
Jogging in place to keep from cooling down, I stared up at the lions, breath issuing from my open mouth like steam. It was half a mile back to the track, and the temperature was unusually cold for the middle of March. I didn’t want to cramp up. But I didn’t leave, either, just jogged in place and tried through sheer willpower to lower my heart rate and slow my breathing. Running from the track to the school gate and back was a typical warm-up, but I was alone. My teammates were running in the opposite direction, to the old closed bridge over the Shenandoah. I had asked Coach Meier if I could run to the gate, knowing he would say yes. I was a team captain and a senior—he had every reason to trust me. So when he nodded absently at me, I ran hard, sprinting away from the track and putting distance between myself and my team. Living at Blackburne, in close quarters with four hundred other boys in the Virginia countryside, could be claustrophobic. But that wasn’t why I had run away from the others, feet pounding the road even after I reached the broad belt of trees that surrounded Blackburne’s campus like a forest wall.
My father had told me the previous fall at the annual Blackburne–Manassas Prep game that in times of crisis, a man’s instinct is to do one of two things: retreat to a place of safety, or gather up his strength and hurl himself headlong into the fray. We had been talking about football—Blackburne was down ten points in the third quarter—and I had been all for the headlong hurling into the fray, in this case a grand and sweeping gesture, a trick play like a flea flicker. My father had shaken his head gently—he was always gentle when he disagreed with me—and said that we needed to stick to basics, trust our defense and our running game instead of trying to be something we weren’t. “Y’all keep throwing the ball and going nowhere, Matthias,” he said. “Play to your strengths. It may be boring, but it works.”
This had angered me, as my roommate was one of the wide receivers. Granted, he had uncharacteristically dropped one pass, but my father’s words had sounded treasonous. “Fritz is doing his best,” I told him sullenly. My irritation only deepened when Blackburne started running the ball and slowly but inexorably marched downfield, scored a touchdown with six minutes left, and then forced a turnover, running the ball back to win twenty-one to seventeen.
Looking from one lion to the other while I ran as if on an invisible treadmill, I did not know whether I was retreating to a place of safety to lick my wounds, or trying to gather myself together before heading back to school and facing what I had done.
The Blackburne School, like most boarding schools in America, has its own fiercely held traditions. Some are idiosyncratic, like the bonfire torches that freshmen—third formers in Blackburne parlance—must construct out of burlap, wire, and two-by-fours. Others are born out of a fundamental belief in certain core principles, a belief that borders on fervor. The honor code at Blackburne is rooted in such a belief. Its rules are stark as barbed wire against snow: you will not lie, or cheat, or steal, or tolerate those who do. The punishment for being found guilty of violating the honor code is expulsion. And I had violated the code.
Running in place between the two lions, I didn’t hear Fritz coming down the drive. One moment, I was alone; the next, Fritz appeared from out of the trees that were beginning to soften with shade as the sun lowered to the horizon. He ran up, gasping, and stopped by the lion with the missing eye. “Ho, Matthias,” he said, and then bent at the waist, sucking in air through his mouth, hands at his hips.
“Ho, Fritz,” I said halfheartedly. It was our typical way of greeting each other, almost a call-and-response. Both of us had been teased about our Germanic first names when we started rooming together our fourth form year. The Huns, some of our classmates called us. At first we ignored the nickname, and then we gave in to it. Apart from being a rather mild joke at our expense, it was now an identifying label, another thread in the fabric of our class. Daryl Cooper was called Diamond, Jay Organ was Beef, and Fritz and I were the Huns. Such tags were a sign of acceptance, even approval, and they often had odd effects on those who bore them. One morning when the clock alarm went off and I was slow to hit the snooze button, Fritz looked over the rail of his upper bunk and stared blearily down at me. “Ho, Matthias,” he said. I looked up at him. “Ho, Fritz,” I said. And that was that. People outside of all-male boarding schools might snigger about the close relationships that develop between boys, imagining some sort of fervid buggery in the basements of the classroom buildings or the shower stalls of the dorms. While this wasn’t true, at least in my experience, students at Blackburne did establish intense, long-lasting friendships with one another, something that on a platonic level was most likely not experienced again until marriage. Fritz and I had that bond. We weren’t brothers; we were beyond that. He was perhaps the one person whose counsel and opinion I held higher than my own.
Facing Fritz at the lions, I realized with a soul-biting irony that I could tell him anything except what I had done, because aside from possibly being furious, he would also be ashamed for me, and I wouldn’t be able to bear it.
“You really ran here,” Fritz was saying. He was looking at me, waiting for a reply.
“Just needed to,” I said, still jogging in place, hands flopping at the end of my arms. “Wanted to see how far I could push it, you know?”
Fritz
wasn’t buying it, I could tell, but he just looked off at the fields and gave a knowing nod. It was one of a hundred slight, deliberate gestures boys granted to one another at Blackburne. A warning shake of the head meant Watch out, as in Watch out for Mr. Downing—he’s on the warpath. A one-shouldered shrug was a studied gesture of indifference. Cutting your eyes away from a classmate you passed in the hall could be as cruel as sneering in his face. Fritz’s nod meant he didn’t believe me, but he affected understanding—he knew I wasn’t telling the truth but accepted my lie all the same. That nod about did me in. I had to blink away tears, which thankfully I could blame on the sharp weather. My emotions welled up and threatened to spill out of my throat, but I choked them down with an effort.
“Mail came,” Fritz was saying.
I was taken aback, and then relaxed. This was familiar territory. “And?”
“Nothing.”
“It’s early yet.”
“True.”
“Look, you’re gonna get in, Fritz. If not UVA, then Georgetown, or Washington and Lee, or William and Mary.”
Fritz stared over the fields. They were brown and rutted—nothing had even been planted yet. “Okay, but . . . ,” he began, and then sighed.
Since the start of the school year, Fritz’s anxiety over getting accepted into college had grown until he was muttering to himself between classes, in the dining hall, and when he plodded to the bathroom to brush his teeth. At night he twisted and turned, so by morning his bedsheets were an absolute wreck. It didn’t matter that his grades were excellent, that he was a shoo-in for the Latin medal, and that his family was rich and could trace its lineage back at least to the Jamestown colony. It didn’t matter that included among his relatives were one grandfather who had been a Pacific combat veteran in WWII, another grandfather who had been a shipping magnate, and an uncle who knew everyone of importance in Washington, D.C. Despite all of this, whenever college was brought up, Fritz looked panicked, as if he couldn’t get enough air.
That I had been accepted early to UVA didn’t help. Fritz was not petty or shallow—not once did he openly express anything but congratulations for my early acceptance. And yet I knew it had to be eating away at him. At Blackburne, seniors taped their college acceptance letters to the doors of their rooms, icons of our devotion to academic achievement. When I got the UVA letter, my first thought, after experiencing a fierce pang of delight, was to look in Fritz’s mailbox. It was empty—he hadn’t gotten a letter. At the time, I didn’t resent how his disappointment might cast an unwelcome shadow over my success; instead, I worried how I would break the news to him. I even considered hiding the letter. Of course, I ended up telling him that evening during study hall in our room. He gave me his typically lopsided grin and even hugged me, slapping me twice on the back, and then stood expectantly in the middle of the room. “Well?” he asked, and I got some tape out of my desk drawer and affixed the letter to the door, leaving room next to it for its twin when Fritz got his own letter. Every day, Fritz had to pass by that letter and the blank space next to it. Only once did I see him react to it. He was coming into the room—I was at my desk, working—and he paused in the doorway, a hand lifted in greeting, and glanced at the letter on the door. The look on his face was like watching the sun disappear behind a cloud. It passed and then Fritz entered, complaining loudly about a Latin test, but that momentary glance had been all I needed.
Standing by the one-eyed lion, Fritz looked out forlornly over the empty fields. He fingered the Saint Christopher medal he wore around his neck, a gift from his grandfather who’d fought in WWII. Watching him fiddle with that medal, I was annoyed. It was something of a shock to realize that. It felt like a betrayal, but it was also liberating. Tamping down my excitement about UVA had created a resentment that now swelled and threatened to burst. Fritz was being neurotic and self-indulgent and attention-seeking. I knew any minute he would sigh and talk in a defeated tone about college. And I couldn’t take it. Not then, not while I was consumed by my own guilt, wrapped up in my own garbage.
Oblivious to all of this, Fritz shook his head. “It’s stupid, but it’s just—there are all these expectations,” he said. “I mean, I go to Blackburne, so I’m supposed to be set, right? But what if I’m not? When I was a kid, I told my father I wanted to be a cowboy. He handed me a copy of Lonesome Dove and said that was as close as I’d get, that I was meant for things. But what? Granddad got a medal at Okinawa. Grandpa Joe built a shipping company out of nothing. My father is a defense contractor who minored in English. He built his own company from the ground up, and he can quote Shakespeare and Tennyson at the drop of a hat.” He stopped, grimaced, and then shook his head again. “Jesus, listen to me,” he said. “I’m sorry. After all you had to go through today with the J-Board and everything, here I am bitching about college and all the crap in my life.”
The J-Board, or Judicial Board, was the school’s organization of student-elected prefects, the students who embodied the honor code. When a student was accused of violating the honor code, the J-Board determined whether or not that student was guilty. Fritz was a prefect, and I had appeared before the J-Board that morning.
“It’s okay,” Fritz said, mistaking my silence for feeling awkward about the hearing, having had to sit across from a group of my peers, including my roommate, and be judged. Fritz shrugged with that half smile of his. “I knew you couldn’t have done it.”
The moment stretched and took on weight like a branch bowing under a load of snow. Long past the point when I should have affirmed my innocence, I said nothing. Fritz stared at me, his eyes widening. It must have been all over my face.
“Fritz,” I said, and then stopped. What could I possibly say?
“Jesus Christ,” Fritz said. His face was pale. “You fucking did it, didn’t you?”
“Fritz, I—”
“I stood up for you. I said there was no way you would’ve—”
“I know,” I said, rushing through my confession. “I know, I’m sorry—”
“Do you get what you’ve done? What kind of position you just put me in?” His voice rose, tightening like a screw biting into wood. “I have to turn you in, Matthias!”
“You can’t do that!” I said. “Please, Fritz. It was an accident, I swear.”
“You cheated by accident?” Fritz looked at me as if I were a stranger, someone contemptible. The pain I felt from his look was so bright and immediate that I was unable then to consider whether or not he was right to judge me that way. He was right, of course. But at the time, all I could see was a rejection of nearly four years of friendship. “Was it an accident when you lied to the Judicial Board?” he said. “When you lied to me?” He raised his hands to his head as if he would pull out his hair. “Jesus,” he said. “It’s too much. It’s too goddamn much. I can’t trust anyone.”
Something in me gave way, a floodgate opening to vent my fear and self-loathing. “Don’t give me that holier-than-thou crap,” I said. “You’re telling me you haven’t ever made a mistake?”
He stared at me. “I’ve never cheated,” he said. “Not once.”
“Because you haven’t had to,” I said, warming to my ugliness as if I were holding my frozen hands over a fire, gathering comfort from its heat. “You’re a fucking genius who’s going to get into college. Yes, you are,” I said as he opened his mouth. “You are. And so am I. But the difference is that you don’t have to worry about paying for it, or even getting in. You’ve got the grades and the extracurriculars and all that shit. I mean, Jesus, look at your family. You think your father and your uncle won’t pull strings for you if they have to? Stop being such a fucking drama queen about it. God.”
For a few frozen seconds, we stared at each other, stunned and hurt, but only one of us in the wrong. A jay cried in its harsh voice from the darkening wood. Aside from that, we were alone, locked into a terrible moment at the edge of our friendship.
Fritz made the first move. He let the Saint Christopher medal
drop from his fingers to dangle on the chain around his neck; then, without a word, he turned and began running up the drive, back to school. Within ten seconds, he was among the trees, and then the drive curved and Fritz curved with it, vanishing from my sight.
After a few more precious seconds passed, I, too, began running, trailing my roommate. My breathing was harsh in my ears as I ran down the drive, leaving the lions behind. I entered the trees, the air beneath the boughs dank and dim and slightly chill. There was a damp, organic smell to the oaks, an earthy scent like ground coffee. I glimpsed Fritz ahead, his tee shirt a white blur, and then he was gone again. I ran after him, my feet and legs registering each impact with the pavement. I felt uneasy, as if I were missing something, or about to. I couldn’t see Fritz. Ahead of me, the drive straightened into a short stretch before the final curve, and after that curve, the trees would fall away before the playing fields. The road was empty—no Fritz, no anybody. An invisible hand threatened to squeeze my heart, my stomach. My lungs began to burn as I started sprinting. It wasn’t just that I wanted to catch Fritz. I had the distinct feeling that I was chasing him, that I had to catch up with him, before something caught up with me. The trees loomed around me; the road seemed to buckle at my feet. I would have sworn something was behind me, but terror seized me at the thought of turning around to look. To say that I thought the lions had finally leapt off their perches and come bounding after me would sound insane. But I ran up the last hundred yards of that driveway as if I had to outrun whatever imagined thing was pursuing me, or be caught and suffer some horrific fate.
I burst out of the trees and into the wide, sheltered bowl of the playing fields, gasping like a man emerging from a forest fire. I stopped and bent over, trying to catch my breath, hands on my knees. My pulse sledgehammered in my temples. I looked up to see the drive stretch before me and up the Hill, a good quarter mile of asphalt bordered by the track, the golf course, and various dotted stands of trees. Fritz was nowhere to be seen. I turned back to face the wood, half afraid of what I might see, but it was simply a belt of trees that stood there, silent, unrewarding, a dark green forest wall shaded with black as the sun fell. “Fritz?” I called out. “I’m sorry. Where are you?” Nothing. There was no way he could have already made it up the Hill. I could see a few people at the track, but none of them was Fritz. Where the hell had he gone? Maybe he was in the trees behind me, hiding. Or maybe he had made it to the track and I just couldn’t tell—the light was dim, fading moment by moment, except for the bright red bars of the clouds overhead, glowing like a grate in a forge with the light of the setting sun.
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