Shadow of the Lions

by Christopher Swann

  I stood in the visitors’ stands among the Blackburne students, cheering and yelling along with them, lost in the primal will of the crowd. For the past week, I had brooded over my meeting with Lester Briggs and what he had said about Fritz and the Davenports: I suggest you start looking at his family. While grading papers and eating in the dining hall, while covering Gray’s dorm duties as payback for covering mine, and even when I was trying to fall asleep, Briggs’s words nagged at me, unraveling any other thoughts in my head. I was nearly sick from lack of sleep Monday night after meeting with Briggs, and it was something of a shock on Tuesday morning to realize that the Game was only four days away. Part of me felt that it would be wrong to attend a football game just days after Terence’s death. Now, shouting a Lion cheer at the faceless mass of blue-and-white Manassas fans, I embraced the whole idea of the Game, welcomed it with all my heart, even if it granted me only a temporary respite from my thoughts.

  The football captains walked to the center of the field to shake hands before the coin toss. All eyes were on them. Henry “the Duke” Duquesne was a Manassas linebacker, with an action-hero jaw and a chest and shoulders that Michelangelo would have immortalized in marble. The Duke was the most dangerous defensive football player in the Old Virginia League. I’d heard Coach Gristina describe the Duke’s ability to evade blockers and tackle runners as a kind of lethal ballet.

  At midfield, the Duke lined up across from Blackburne’s hero, Jamal “Bull” Bullock, our star running back. Bull was broad as an ox and would explode out of formation, battering his way through a defensive line. No matter what happened, Bull almost always carried the ball at least three yards on every run. I’d seen him run for nearly ten yards, carrying on his back two defensive linemen, who would be hanging on to him like so many koala bears, before a third player finally tackled him and brought him down. Diamond, who was Blackburne’s football demigod when I had been in school, had danced between linemen; Bull plowed straight through them.

  On the Manassas field, the Duke and Bull gazed at each other stoically, like gunfighters at high noon, while in the stands hundreds of students went berserk.

  “Duuuuuuuuke,” the Manassas side called, waving blue-and-white flags.

  “Bull! Bull!” retorted the Blackburne side, speeding up the chant like a locomotive. “Bull! Bull! Bull!-Bull! Bull!-Bull!-Bull!-Bull!”

  Blackburne won the toss and elected to receive the kickoff. Both teams huddled on the sidelines, getting final instructions from their coaches, before lining up in formation on the field. The referee consulted his watch, blew the whistle, and the Manassas kicker began his slow-motion trot toward the football, accelerating forward. Then snap! The ball was kicked and flew into the air to deafening cheers and a chorus of vuvuzelas.

  I had been so intent on watching the action on the football field that it took me a moment to realize someone in the aisle was tugging on my sleeve and shouting my name. I turned, and there stood my classmate Trip Alexander, in a Blackburne tie and tweed overcoat, grinning in my face. His hair was a bit shorter but still threatened to spill into his eyes, which now sat behind rimless glasses. “Hey, Matthias,” he said casually, as if we were passing each other on the way to class.

  “Trip! Jesus!” I had not seen Trip Alexander since graduating from Blackburne, but seeing his unexpected, smiling face lifted my heart so that only now I realized how low it had been. I gave him a bear hug by way of greeting, nearly knocking him down along with the poor Blackburne student in the row in front of me, and I started laughing so hard, it was close to sobbing. For his part, Trip pounded me on the back and told me to calm down before somebody made us get a room.

  Since no one was sitting in their seats, we stood half in the aisle and briefly exchanged information in between plays on the field. Trip said he was a financial reporter for the Washington Post. I had always figured Trip would become a lawyer, but I could see how his shrewd analytical skills would be a great asset for a journalist. Trip had read The Unforgiving and made me promise to sign a copy for him. I sidestepped his questions about any new novel I might be writing and instead spoke generally about teaching and working at Blackburne. As perceptive as he had always been when we were in school, he understood that I was avoiding the topic of writing, and he turned our attention to the field. While we had been talking, Blackburne had converted our initial possession into a field goal, but Manassas was now marching downfield, looking to score a touchdown.

  Watching the game, I found myself following the progress of a Manassas wide receiver. Most high school football games rely heavily on running plays, but this Manassas player had already made one difficult catch and evaded two Blackburne tackles before finally being brought down inside our forty-yard line. He was tall and rangy and could cut around the Blackburne cornerback like a basketball player heading for the hoop. I wasn’t sure at first why this player, whose name I didn’t know, captured my attention. Then it struck me, just as the Manassas quarterback passed to him and he stretched out his hands and snatched the ball out of the air before being tackled. He looked like Fritz, the way he moved and ran, even the way he wiped his hands on his hips before the ball was snapped. The similarity was so strong that I stood silent for a moment among the screaming Blackburne fans as the wide receiver executed another play, drawing the cornerback and a safety after him, which opened a hole in the defensive line that a Manassas halfback took advantage of. As the fans around me groaned and shouted in disappointment—the Manassas halfback had made it to our twenty-yard line—the earlier, raw joy I had felt while immersed in the crowd began to withdraw like a tide, leaving behind a cold stone bank of resentment. I had wanted to ignore this growing obsession with Fritz, with what had happened to him, for one day. I glared murderously at the Manassas wide receiver as he lined up for another play, as if it were all his fault.

  “You okay, Matthias?” Trip said. He was looking at me with concern. I clenched my jaw, put on a smile, and said I was fine.

  Manassas scored a touchdown on a sideline pass to the wide receiver, who skipped untouched into the end zone to great rejoicing from the Manassas side. The extra point was good, and then Blackburne’s offense took the field as we cheered with a hint of desperation now, as if we were watching soldiers go over the top in a WWI movie. On our first play, the Duke waltzed through the offensive line and clobbered our quarterback, a senior named Bobby Craw. I could feel the impact from my seat in the stands. The referees’ whistles signaling the end of the play sounded like a dismayed alarm. But the quarterback rose to his feet to cheers from the Blackburne side and went on with the game. On the next play, Craw handed the ball to Bull, who ran straight up the middle, making up the lost yards from the sack and more. The following play, he again handed it to Bull. First down. A Blackburne student gleefully set off a deafening air horn in the row behind us. Craw threw a pass, which bulleted past the receiver and out of bounds. Then Bull again, for six more yards. The Duke was clawing to get through the offensive line for another sack. Once again a handoff to Bull, who ran with Manassas defenders clinging to him for five yards and another first down.

  “He’s good!” Trip said, and I nodded, beginning to feel buoyed up again by the crowd’s energy.

  Then on the next play, Bull took the ball around the right end, where he found the Duke waiting for him. The Duke spread his arms wide as he lunged toward Bull, who lowered a shoulder and plowed forward, the ball cradled in one arm. For an instant I thought about the hypothetical meeting of an immovable object with an irresistible force. Then the two players collided, Bull rearing upward as the Duke hit him square in the chest. Their feet scrabbled for purchase in the torn earth, each perfectly balanced against the other. Both the Blackburne and Manassas sides hollered and blew their horns. Then players from both teams leapt onto the two boys, burying them in a blur of thrashing arms and legs as the referees blew their whistles. After hauling players off the pile, the refs discovered the ball still in Bull’s arm, but he had not advanced one
inch. Mayhem erupted, especially on the Manassas side. Duke had stopped Bull! “Duuuuuke!” they crowed. “Duuuuuke!”

  “That fucking sucks,” Hal Starr said, two seats down. I didn’t have the heart to reprimand him.

  On the next play, Craw took the snap and handed the ball to his fullback, who ran to the left end. The Manassas defense shifted to cover him and then seemed to stall. We gaped: the fullback had handed the ball to Bull, who was running in the opposite direction. A reverse play! The Duke, having been pulled away by the feint, sprinted to catch up, but the Bull was gone. He didn’t slow down for the entire eighty yards, shrugging off two ineffective tackles and crossing the goal line to ecstatic gyrations and cheers from the Blackburne side. Someone threw their Coke up into the air, drenching a couple of third formers. Trip let out a rebel yell and thrust his arms into the air in victory. I high-fived him and bellowed with joy along with the crowd.

  With two minutes left in the half, Blackburne had the ball on Manassas’s forty-two-yard line. Craw faked a pass up the middle, then pitched it to Bull, who had built up a head of steam and shot around the right end. The Duke loomed, arms wide again, and Bull crashed into him. Again the two struggled, throwing up clots of mud and grass around them. Then their teammates fell on top of them to a shrieking of whistles. Again a referee began hauling players off the heap. Then he suddenly blew his whistle, crossed his hands over his head, and placed a hand on top of his cap.

  “What is that?” I said. “Ref time-out?”

  Trip craned his neck to try to see the field better. The referee was waving frantically at the Manassas sideline. “Somebody got hurt.”

  The last players scrambled up from the ground to reveal the Duke lying in the mud, writhing in pain. A moan rose from the crowd. The Duke’s right leg bent sharply outward below the knee.

  “Oh shit,” a Blackburne student said behind me. A lone voice in the Manassas stands screamed in anguish.

  A pair of trainers with a stretcher hustled onto the field, followed by two coaches. The Manassas players, heads bowed, stood around their fallen comrade. Alabama, Michigan, and North Carolina had been courting the Duke. Now he wouldn’t play anywhere next year, if ever. I could imagine football scouts in the audience shutting their notebooks and looking for the exits. We stared at the field, stunned at witnessing a dream cut down before our eyes. The Blackburne players milled around uncomfortably. I saw Bull pull off his helmet and stare at the Duke, who was now lying very still as the stretcher was put down next to him. Bull was crying. Then he was among his teammates, grabbing them by their shoulder pads and elbows and hustling them to the side where they knelt in a ragged circle, Bull leading them in prayer. In silence, the crowd watched as an ambulance, lights revolving, backed onto the field. When the paramedics lifted the stretcher and aimed for the open doors of the ambulance, the crowd stirred as if waking and began clapping solemnly. Someone blew a vuvuzela and was almost immediately silenced. The Manassas players all knelt now, heads bowed as the ambulance slowly drove off, taking the Duke with it. The clapping tapered off and then died, the crowd murmuring ominously in its wake. Rising to their feet, the Blackburne and Manassas players were awkwardly slapping one another’s shoulders in an attempt at encouragement, while Coach Gristina conferred with his Manassas counterpart before both nodded their heads and trotted back to their sidelines. The Game would continue.

  Trip let out a low whistle. “Poor kid,” he said bleakly. “What a goddamn shame.”

  I pictured Terence Jarrar lying on the river rock, blood running into the water from his shattered head. The image was like being plunged into ice water, and I almost gasped at the force of the memory. Something close to rage was building in my chest. “He’s alive,” I said brusquely.

  I could feel Trip tense next to me, uncertain. “Yeah, but his scholarship chances—”

  “Fuck his scholarship chances!” I shouted. Students jerked their heads around toward me. Trip blinked in shock, too startled to even step back. “He broke his leg—it’s not like his life’s over. He didn’t die or—”

  Trip’s mouth dropped open. The student to my left shrank away from me as if I had sprouted bat wings and a pair of horns. I closed my eyes to shut them all out. Then I pushed past Trip and walked up the concrete steps of the aisle to an exit tunnel. Behind me, the referees blew their whistles to signal the start of play again, although to my ears it sounded as if the whistles were directed at me, calling foul.

  I MADE MY WAY outside of the stadium and looked around for the red Blackburne alumni tent I knew would be somewhere nearby, thinking mean-spiritedly that Blackburne would never miss an opportunity to suck up to its alumni. I found the tent sitting off to the side on a grassy lawn between the parking lot and a brick Manassas classroom building. Few people were under the tent at that point—most were still in the stadium, commiserating over the Duke’s broken leg or impatiently waiting for the game to start again. Platters of cold cuts and bread and fruit-and-cheese trays lay waiting to be consumed, while a scattering of small circular tables and folding chairs gave the sense of an abandoned wedding reception.

  I found the cash bar and paid for two whiskey sours, drinking the first in one long gulp and then wandering off with the second. My plan was to remain in the alumni tent for the rest of the game and get drunk, and then take a cab to some dump of a motel and sleep it off. Fuck this school, I thought, taking a sip of my drink. Fuck football, fuck the Game, fuck Ren Middleton. And fuck Fritz, too. I swallowed the rest of my drink to drown the protest my conscience made at that last thought.

  This was what being with Michele had been like near the end, a long, deliberate war against my conscience, with my sobriety as occasional collateral damage. Early on I had stopped trying to keep up with Michele’s cocaine use and just drank when we went out. Regardless, at least once every couple of weeks I had woken up with my mouth tasting like the bottom drawer in my fridge and my head feeling as if it had been used as an anvil. Finally, after one all-night party, Michele collapsed on a fashion runway, her heart misfiring from arrhythmia, while I was throwing up in a nearby toilet. Her agency sent her to the hospital and then to rehab. Our relationship ended when she finished her thirty-day program and told me I had to move out of the apartment. Since then, I had avoided getting truly drunk. Right now, I wanted to do nothing else.

  I had just bought my third whiskey sour, and the bartender was eyeing me dubiously, when someone called my name. I turned around to see Abby Davenport, standing in dark pants and a green sweater set and looking at me with a raised eyebrow.

  “Hello,” I said, trying to cover my surprise. “What are you doing here?”

  She brushed a strand of hair back over an ear. “I took the weekend off, came back home. My uncle’s visiting.” She glanced at the whiskey sour in my hand. “Celebrating early?”

  “It’s five o’clock somewhere,” I said. “Can I get you a drink?”

  She held up a Diet Coke can.

  “Ah,” I said, as if she had satisfactorily answered a question, and because I couldn’t think of anything else to say, I took a sip of my whiskey sour. The sour mix coated my tongue unpleasantly. “So Uncle Wat’s come to town?” I said.

  She shrugged. “He lives in Georgetown now. But he’s coming over to dinner.” Her expression suggested that this required her attendance at the family manor.

  Seeing her now in the sunshine instead of in the dim light of a school dance, I was surprised to realize that she had aged. Not any more than I had, and probably less, but there were worry lines around her mouth and the first faint indication of crow’s-feet by her blue eyes. For some reason, this softened me a bit.

  Unbidden, Lester Briggs’s words rose to mind. If you want to find your friend, I suggest you start looking at his family. I took another drink as if swallowing the thought.

  Abby said, “I also thought you might be here.” She said it almost as a challenge, as though defying me to take it personally.

  I stared at her.
“You wanted to find me?” I said.

  She nodded. “I heard . . . about the boy last week. At Blackburne. I wanted to see if you were okay.”

  We stood looking at each other. Abby was one of the only people who might appreciate how Terence’s death had upset me, how it had shaken the wall I’d constructed around the memories of Fritz’s disappearance. No, I wanted to say. I’m not okay.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “But thanks. Thank you for asking.” I took another drink. “So, teaching,” I said, gesturing to include both of us. “Who knew?”

  Abby smiled. A tired smile, granted, but a smile nonetheless. “Yeah,” she said. “All that studying in France finally paid off.”

  “You studied in France?”

  She nodded. “In college. I spent two summers in Paris, and then a semester in Lyon.”

  The whiskey sours had begun to rise to my head, creating a warm glow. “They let you do that at Juilliard? I didn’t know they let you all out of the music hall.”

  Abby’s expression was still. “I didn’t go to Juilliard,” she said.

  A bit too late, I recalled the dance at Saint Margaret’s, me asking Abby if she still played the cello and her redheaded friend—Kelly? Kerry?—laughing in disbelief. Music? Abby hates music. Embarrassed, I rubbed my eyes. “Sorry,” I said.

  Abby shrugged. “Things change. How’s the writing going?”

  I shrugged back. “Things change,” I said, smiling. It wasn’t convincing. Abby looked disappointed, as if I’d failed to live up to her expectations. Which I probably had. “Did you read my book?” I asked, and then immediately regretted the question. I never, ever asked people if they had read my book.