Shadow of the Lions

by Christopher Swann

  The blood drained from Fletcher’s face so quickly that I thought he might faint, and then it came rushing back so his entire head flushed brick red. “How do . . . what . . . the fuck is that?” he managed to say. I have to admit that a tiny part of me danced at seeing Fletcher Dupree reduced to choking, enraged impotence. Then Fletcher was standing and walking toward Kevin, his fists balled. He’s going to hit him, I thought with a kind of wonder, but I couldn’t seem to make my body move.

  Fritz stood up, his chair squalling across the tiled floor, and then he was standing in front of Fletcher, arms out and palms raised like an umpire who had just called a runner safe at home. “Don’t, Fletcher,” Fritz said. “He’s not worth it.”

  “Get out of my way,” Fletcher sputtered, trying to step around Fritz.

  “Yeah, Fritz, let him take a swing at me,” Kevin said.

  Fritz, his arms held wide to keep Fletcher at bay, looked over his shoulder at Kevin. “I’m not doing it for you,” he said. “You might even like it, for all I know.”

  Kevin actually leered at Fritz. “Nazi,” he crooned.

  A hot, red rage flooded me. Insults were a time-honored art form at Blackburne, and while the line between cleverly one-upping a classmate and denigrating him beyond what was admissible could be hard to find, it existed, and calling someone a Nazi wasn’t clever but offensive and stupid. Kevin Kelly had just stepped over the line, unzipped his fly, and pissed all over it. But before I could do anything, Diamond was standing in front of Kevin, seizing his upper arms and lifting him bodily off the counter. “Hey,” Kevin managed, his glasses askew on his astonished face.

  Diamond leaned his face close to Kevin’s. “Leave it, douche bag,” he growled, and with those words, it was as if a spell had broken. Fletcher gave a short bark of laughter, and Fritz grinned. I felt like laughing myself, especially at the sight of Diamond holding Kevin in the air as if he were a naughty child.

  “Leave my friends alone,” Diamond said.

  “Fuck you,” Kevin said, his voice quavering only a little.

  “Boys!” Dr. Booth appeared, a Burberry scarf around his neck, and he stood in front of Diamond and Kevin, his eyes flashing. “What in God’s name are you doing?”

  “Having a little disagreement, sir,” Diamond said, his eyes still on Kevin, who looked positively murderous.

  “Put him down now, Mr. Cooper,” Dr. Booth said. Diamond promptly let go of Kevin, who dropped to the floor and staggered but did not fall. Dr. Booth chastised both boys roundly and dragged them off to see Mr. Manning, then the assistant headmaster and disciplinarian, who would put both boys in detention for the next three weeks. But as Diamond left the Brickhouse, he glanced at me and winked. That single gesture was enough to bridge the gap that had yawned between us. And from that moment on, our classmates referred to Fritz and me as the Huns almost triumphantly, as if bestowing a hard-won title upon us.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The afternoon after I taught the Anna Akhmatova poem to my fourth formers, I walked to the gym to check out a minibus from the athletic director’s office. Blackburne masters have various extracurricular activities they must chaperone, especially on the weekends. My weekend duty was coming up, and I had to drive students to a mixer at Saint Margaret’s School that Saturday. I wasn’t excited about driving a dozen or so boys halfway across the state to watch them bump and grind in the dark while I drank watery Sprite out of a paper cup, but I shrugged off my discontent and headed to the gym, the memory of Fritz and Diamond and Kevin Kelly still fresh in my mind.

  Coach Gristina wasn’t in his office, but his secretary, Mrs. Wrenn, a lady with her white hair in a bun who had been at Blackburne since the mastodons, let me sign out a minibus and gave me a set of keys, admonishing me to return it with a full tank of gas. Then, having nothing to do until dinner, I decided to walk around the gym and revisit a few other memories.

  Farquhar Gym had the same red brick and white columns as the other buildings on the Hill, but it was bigger, with broad concrete steps down from the portico on the front and enormous vertical windows on both sides, allowing sunlight to shine through and onto the varnished basketball court within. A first-class wrestling arena was buried in the bowels of the gym, along with squash courts, a weight room, a trainer’s room that was almost a well-stocked medical clinic, and the requisite locker rooms and showers.

  It was also where Pelham Greer lived, although I hadn’t known that. Or, more accurately, I had forgotten it. Everyone had known that Greer lived in the gym, but that Greer actually lived and slept somewhere on campus had seemed odd when I was a student—he was just there, like the oak trees on the Lawn and the spire rising above Saint Matthew’s, a permanent and unchangeable part of the campus.

  After walking across the basketball court, the sunlight pouring through the windows like honey onto the floor, I headed down a flight of stairs and walked past the locker rooms with their miasma of sweat and steam. I stopped to glance at the caged-off room where students had received their gym clothes and towels from the Slater brothers, Ned and Ted, two more Blackburne institutions. Ned, who had grizzled gray hair, was folding shirts at a table behind the counter and gave me a bored nod. I wondered how many Blackburne graduates wandered past him every week, finding him in the same position, folding yet another gray gym shirt.

  After poking my head into the trainer’s room—and seeing, with a slight tug of sadness, that the old hydrotherapy whirlpools had been replaced with brand-new stainless steel tubs—I headed back past the locker rooms to the stairwell, intending to return upstairs. Just then, I noticed a door tucked in the space back behind the stairs. I had never really noticed that door before, probably because it had always been closed. It was now ajar, with a weak light spilling out of the doorway, along with a strange sound—a breathless, inarticulate grunt, like the sound you make when lifting something heavy. This was accompanied by an almost indecipherable noise, a shifting of leather, perhaps, or the kind of release a chair makes when you stand up out of it. The sounds repeated themselves, and then again.

  I must have stood in the stairwell, head bowed, listening for about thirty seconds. I wasn’t intending to spy on anyone, but I couldn’t quite understand what I was hearing. This is none of your business, I thought as I walked toward the door, drawn by a powerful curiosity. I crept up to the door and then peered through the narrow opening between the door and the frame.

  The room beyond, from the narrow slice of it that I could see, had a high ceiling from which hung a tangle of pipes snaking in various directions. The walls were a dull mustard yellow, though clean and lit by lamps and sunlight filtering through what looked like narrow skylights at the top of the back wall. About ten feet from the door, in the middle of the room, sat Pelham Greer in his wheelchair. He was turned about three-quarters away from me so that I mostly saw his back and the side of his long, lean jaw, but I could see that he was shirtless and glistening with sweat. Hair sprouted from the tops of his shoulders in ragged patches. He was curling dumbbells, one in each hand, releasing a grunt each time a dumbbell passed the apex of its curl. The right bicep would swell into a round, compact mass beneath the skin and then relax. Each time he lifted a dumbbell, he rocked slightly in his wheelchair, which creaked.

  Then, just as he started curling his right arm again, something happened—the dumbbell fell out of his hand, causing his rising arm, which had been straining to lift the dumbbell, to jerk upright so that he barked his hand across the spokes of the right-hand wheel of his chair. “Fuck!” he said aloud, and he turned to examine his hand. As he turned, he faced toward the partly open door, and for an instant his eyes swept the doorway. I jerked back so he couldn’t see me. I thought I heard a slight hiss, a sharp intake of breath. Was he in pain? Or had he seen me? I swallowed and waited a beat, and then called out. “Hey, everything okay in there?” I reached for the door, knocked on it twice, and slowly pulled it open. “Hello?”

  When I stepped into the room, Greer looked
up at me, startled. “What do you want?” he asked. I relaxed slightly—it seemed that he had not seen me spying at the door.

  “Sorry, Mr. Greer,” I said. “I was walking by and heard you cry out . . .” I paused, staring at his hand. It was bleeding from the knuckles, blood tracing the back of his hand to his wrist and forearm.

  He shook his head in disgust. “Doing some curls and the fucking dumbbell slips out of my hand,” he said. “Smashed it on the side of the goddamn wheel—” He stopped abruptly, as if he had just revealed a secret, and then sighed. “Get me a rag over there, by the sink. Please.”

  There was an efficiency kitchen on the wall behind me, next to the door, and a stack of dishcloths sat on the counter. I ran some cold water over a cloth and brought it and a dry one to Greer, who dabbed at his knuckles with the wet one, wincing once, and then wiped up the trickles of blood before awkwardly wrapping the dry dishcloth around his hand. I didn’t offer to help—he hadn’t asked, and I got the sense that he would resent such an offer—so I glanced around what was obviously his apartment. Aside from the kitchen, there was a bed, a workbench, a card table with a single chair, a small television on top of a trunk, two white fiberboard cabinets, and a large footlocker at the foot of the bed, and not much else. At the far end of the room was a slight ramp leading up to a door that led outside. As bare as the room looked, especially under the exposed pipes overhead, everything was neat and orderly, including the made bed.

  Greer used his teeth to finish tying the dishcloth around his right hand, flexed his fingers, and seemed to think it would do. Then he turned his eyes on me. “Thank you,” he said. “Like a beer?”

  I hesitated. It was hot outside and a beer would have tasted really good right then, but I already felt guilty for having spied on the man; more practically, I also thought about running into students with beer on my breath.

  As if anticipating this last thought, Greer said, not unkindly, “Kids are going to be at practice for another hour or so. If you don’t have to go coach . . .” He paused, waiting.

  “Okay,” I said. “Sure.”

  He rolled himself to the kitchen, easily maneuvering around the two dumbbells on the floor. He got two bottles out of the refrigerator and returned, handing me one. I couldn’t help but notice how deftly he handled the wheelchair. “Nice moves,” I said, twisting off the bottle cap, and then I froze, unable to believe I had just said that aloud. But Greer just nodded, gave me a strange little smile, and raised his beer, and I gladly drank along with him. I could smell his sweat, hot and a little rank. It suddenly struck me that Greer was wearing soccer shorts, with what was left of his legs sticking out from the shorts and rounded off near the knees, like a battered pair of baseball bats.

  “You like teaching so far?” Greer asked me.

  I tore my eyes away from his legs and shrugged. “Yeah,” I said. “I like it. Working with kids is fun. Sometimes.” I said this last word ruefully.

  Greer gave a short chuckle. “When they aren’t yanking your chain?”

  I smiled. “Something like that.”

  “Different than when you were first here.”

  “Yes.” I couldn’t help thinking that Greer must feel the same way. Aside from the passage of time, both of us had experienced loss, and we had both returned to Blackburne irrevocably changed. It must have been that thought that prompted me to put my beer down on the card table and say what I said. “I actually wanted to ask you a question about . . . Fritz.”

  Greer looked at me blankly.

  “Fritz Davenport,” I said. “He was my—”

  “I know who he was,” Greer said. His blank look had been replaced by one of wariness. “He went missing. Ran off and nobody’s seen him since.”

  Something had changed in the room, a tension that displaced the earlier geniality. I plowed forward. “I heard that you saw him, coming out of our dorm that night.”

  He nodded slowly. “I did. He had a backpack over one shoulder.”

  “What—what was he wearing? His track uniform?”

  “No. Jeans and a sweater. A dark blue sweater.” His eyes narrowed slightly. “Told the police that.”

  And then I remembered. The Virginia state police had interviewed several faculty and staff members in the days after Fritz’s disappearance. The rumor was that the state police suspected Fritz had disappeared of his own volition because of all the money he had taken out of the ATM the previous weekend, and that meant that he might have had help from a faculty or staff member. The police had grilled several Blackburne employees, including Pelham Greer. One of the cooks, a black man named Tofer, had grown upset, even belligerent during his interrogation. He’d had a legitimate alibi of some sort and felt the cops were questioning him because he was black and because he had a record, shoplifting or some other petty theft. Even though the police cleared him, he eventually quit, aggravated by the discreet glances and open stares that students and faculty alike had turned his way. Others, too, had resented the questioning, and for Pelham Greer, the memory still seemed to be fresh. I could imagine a proud ex-soldier resenting any implications that he could have been involved in Fritz’s disappearance.

  Greer ran his hand back and forth over the top of his right-side wheel. He didn’t look upset, just preoccupied, as if he were considering how to get rid of me politely. I cleared my throat. “Look, Mr. Greer —”

  “Pelham,” he said.

  I smiled weakly. “Okay, Pelham. Thanks. I don’t mean to imply anything. I just . . .” I sighed. This was far harder than I had thought. “He was my best friend,” I said simply. The words hurt to say, as if they confirmed that I had failed as a friend. Which I had.

  Greer’s jaw shifted. He drummed his fingers on the wheel, twice. “I wish I’d said something to him,” he said finally. “Something about him made me think he wasn’t okay.” At the look on my face, he added, “He didn’t look panicked or nothing. Just . . . bothered, like something was nagging at him. But I was busy trying to fix some landscape lights out in front of Stilwell, so I didn’t. Wish I had. Maybe—” He shook his head.

  I realized my mouth was open, as if I were a kid at camp hearing a ghost story. In a strange kind of way, I thought, that wasn’t far from the truth. “What made him look like something was nagging him?”

  Greer shrugged. “He was playing with that chain around his neck, that medal he wore,” he said. He looked almost bashful. “I don’t mean to sound like I spy on you all or anything, but . . . I notice things. And whenever I saw that boy when he looked upset or troubled about something, he was always messing with that medal. What was it?”

  I couldn’t answer him. I was trying to reconcile what he’d said with what I knew to be true. Fritz had left his Saint Christopher medal under my pillow, where I’d found it later that night, just before Sam Hodges and Deputy Briggs had come in. I’d assumed Fritz had placed the medal under my pillow before he had left with his backpack, which was when I was in the dining hall in Stilwell, pushing my dinner around on my plate. Now Pelham Greer said Fritz had still been wearing it when he’d left Walker House. He had worn only the one medal. So when had the medal been placed under my pillow? And who had put it there?

  It took me a few moments to realize Pelham Greer had asked me a question. He was looking up at me, head cocked to one side as if to get a better read on me. “Sorry,” I said. “It was a Saint Christopher medal.”

  Greer nodded thoughtfully. “I read somewhere that Saint Christopher would protect people when they had to travel, ’cause he carried baby Jesus across a stream and all.” He glanced down at his injured hand, as if noticing it for the first time. Still looking at his hand, he said, “I hope for your roommate’s sake that the story’s true.”

  I SAID MY GOOD-BYES and left Pelham Greer’s apartment, climbed back up the stairs, and headed outside to walk around the Hill for a while to let my thoughts settle. If what Greer said was true, Fritz had not left his medal under my pillow before leaving Walker House around six f
orty-five. That meant that Fritz had returned even later that evening, still unnoticed, and placed the medal under my pillow, or that someone else had put the medal there. Or that I did not have Fritz’s actual medal but a clever fake. I didn’t think this last theory could be right—Fritz had shown me the medal more than once, and on the back was stamped “1939,” the year Fritz’s grandfather received the medal from his own father. That someone could replicate the same medal with the same date on the back seemed ridiculous.

  But what if Fritz had returned later, snuck into our dorm, put the medal under my pillow, and vanished into the night again? I had been in our room the entire evening, except when I had gone to the library to look for Fritz. I imagined Fritz crouching behind the boxwoods outside, watching me come out the front door and hurry toward the library, and then slipping inside to put the medal under my pillow.

  I still didn’t know, after all these years, why he had left the medal for me. Maybe it was a gesture of farewell. Or a sign that he was giving up whatever nominal protection the medal could afford him. Or there was an implied message in the medal itself, something hidden in plain sight that I could not see. This seemed too Da Vinci Code, and I wasn’t a Harvard symbologist.

  What’s strange is how little I had considered the question of why Fritz had disappeared. At first, everyone leaned toward the scenario of a pedophile in a serial killer van abducting Fritz and driving away. Then, when the police learned about the ATM withdrawal Fritz had apparently made, coupled with his lie about where he had been the night before, it looked more and more like he had arranged his own disappearance. I had even supplied everyone with a possible reason for his disappearance: stress over college. Unable to handle the idea of not living up to his own ridiculously high expectations, he had stepped off the grid and left it all behind. My own dark secret, that I had betrayed Fritz and possibly driven him away, was one I could never share. But—and how ghoulish it is to say this—the more typical response to such stress is to shuffle off this mortal coil and head into what Hamlet calls the undiscovered country of death. It was possible Fritz had committed suicide after leaving campus; perhaps he hadn’t wanted anyone on campus to find his body. But the fact that no one had found his body argued against this.