Shadow of the Lions

by Christopher Swann

  I stood up and started for the back door, and then nearly cried aloud. Lester Briggs was peering in through the back door window. I darted a glance at the back hall, but I didn’t see Kevin. Now Briggs gestured at me to open the door. I looked again at the back hall, the thought of that knife causing my skin to crawl. I got up and went as quietly as I could to the back door and turned the bolt to unlock it, letting Briggs in. He wore a heavy red-and-black-checked wool coat and a black knit cap, and his nose was red with cold, although he grinned at me.

  “How the hell did you find me?” I whispered.

  He actually chuckled. “Think I don’t know how to follow a car?”

  “There’s a man in here, Kevin Kelly. He’s got a knife. He’s on the phone with Pelham Greer and coming back any second.”

  Briggs shook his head. “I doubt he’s talking to Greer. State police should have him in custody. I called in a favor.” He peered around the kitchen. “You say he’s got a knife?”

  “A big one.” I looked back down the hall but still didn’t see Kevin. I could still hear that low, throbbing hum from somewhere in the house. When I looked back at Briggs, I saw he had a revolver in his hand.

  “Did he have a gun on him?” Briggs murmured.

  I shook my head. “Don’t know. Didn’t see one.”

  Kevin had to have heard us by now. Where was he? The rest of the house was silent, dark.

  “Let’s go,” Briggs was saying.

  I shook my head again. Kevin hadn’t said anything about where Fritz was. Now that Briggs was here, I felt together we could persuade him to talk.

  “Matthias,” Briggs said.

  “He’s in here somewhere,” I said, stepping into the back hall. I could barely make out something in the hall—a slightly open door. The throbbing sound was louder. Behind me I could hear Briggs bite back a curse. I reached the door, looked down the hall again, and still saw no sign of Kevin. I pulled the door all the way open. That hum grew louder—definitely some kind of machinery—and I saw a set of stairs leading down to a basement lit by a dim light. Quickly I went down the steps, keeping an eye out for any hands reaching for my feet.

  The room at the bottom was small, about fifteen by fifteen, with a concrete floor and a bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. A set of metal shelves lined one wall and reached to the ceiling. The shelves held plastic containers with labels I couldn’t read. There was a closed door across the room—the throbbing hum I heard was coming from behind it. Between me and the door were a pile of junk and bric-a-brac, moldering boxes, and more broken furniture.

  “Anything down there?” Briggs said from the top of the stairs.

  “There’s another door,” I said. “Maybe—”

  I heard a sharp scuffling on the stairs. I turned to see Briggs seem to launch himself down the stairwell, arms out in front of him as if he were diving. He hit the floor like a sack of wet cement, and there was a muffled crack, like an old tree branch snapping in two.

  Kevin Kelly came down the stairs, the knife in his hand. Backpedaling away from him, I stumbled over the pile of garbage in the center of the room. Frantically I looked around me for something I could use as a weapon. Damp boxes of magazines, blooming with mold. A disintegrating rattan side table. An empty, rusted paint can. Broken pieces of terra-cotta pots. A sagging leather golf bag, stained and worn through at the bottom. Groping inside, I grasped and then withdrew a golf club, its head a flat-faced wedge. Kevin had nearly reached the bottom of the stairs. I continued backing away from him, holding the golf club up in front of me like a sword. Then I bumped into the door on the wall opposite the stairs. As Kevin stepped over Briggs, a snarl on his face, I threw open the door and ran over the threshold.

  The sound and the dank heat hit me simultaneously. That throbbing hum I had been hearing was now sharper but still muffled, like the sound from a lawn mower encased in bales of cotton. In front of me was a long room full of brightly lit bulbs hung over a small forest of spiky green plants. The marijuana seemed to be growing out of large trays of water arranged neatly in rows down the length of the room. At the far end of the room, on the left, was another doorway, this one with no door, and the hum seemed to emanate from there. A generator. There were no other doors or exits.

  Kevin Kelly came through the doorway behind me, knife raised with the tip up. The golf club forgotten in my hands, I ran down the middle aisle away from him, knocking marijuana plants over to try to slow Kevin down. He gave an angry cry as I threw down an entire tray of plants, leaves thrashing and liquid spilling onto the floor. He kicked the tray out of the way as I continued to run down the aisle. “Where you going?” he asked, waggling the knife at me. With my left hand, I grasped the top of another plant and flung it backward at him. He ducked and batted it away with a forearm. He was laughing. Fuck this, I thought, and I raised the golf club and swung at him. Kevin spun to the side, and my club smashed another tray of plants. There was a searing pain on my right arm just above my elbow. I stepped back and saw blood welling through my sleeve.

  “That’s for the damages,” Kevin said. The tip of his knife was wet, and although he was smiling at me, his eyes were furious. “I’m going to hurt you down here. No one will find you. You’ll just disappear like your precious roommate.”

  I swung the club again, backhanded, and struck his left knee. He cried and stumbled, but didn’t fall. Instead, he jabbed at my face with his knife. I backpedaled and swung at him again. He bobbed out of the way, and instead of hitting his forehead, my club smashed a low-hanging lightbulb with a spectacular pop of light, showering him with glass. Raising his hands to protect his face, Kevin staggered back and tripped over another tray. I tried to angle around him for the door, but he scrambled to his feet and swung his knife in a vicious arc, forcing me to leap back. Gripping the club, I swung hard and up, as if hitting down the fairway, and he sidestepped, the club missing his chin by inches. The follow-through of my swing made me lose my balance, and I planted a foot to regain it, but my foot splashed down into a puddle of liquid from the overturned grow trays. Something hit the back of that foot near the heel, and pain flared up my calf, my ankle suddenly numb. My leg crumpled beneath me and I fell, crushing yet another tray of marijuana, the heavy, pungent smell of the plant, like citrus and skunk, filling my nostrils. I lay on my back on the floor, the club gone from my hands and my foot aching—I could already feel the swelling. Kevin Kelly stepped forward, looming over me, the blade of his knife now reversed and pointing down at my chest.

  “This will hurt,” he said.

  There was a loud bang like a detonation—I thought something had happened to the generator until Kevin, who had frozen in the act of plunging his knife down into me, opened his mouth. Blood stained his lips. He fell forward onto his face just beside me, his body no longer obstructing my view of the doorway, where I saw Briggs leaning against the door frame. A revolver was in his hand, smoke curling lazily from the barrel.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  As it turned out, Kevin Kelly had had more than five hundred plants growing in his basement. Had he lived, he could have easily earned a million a year on the pot alone—that wasn’t counting all the oxy and the E and the Vicodin. I was a key witness for the police investigation into Kevin Kelly and Lester Briggs’s shooting of him, but I had asked to be allowed to convalesce at my parents’ house in North Carolina. I had ruptured my Achilles tendon when I stepped down into that puddle in Kevin’s underground grow room, and surgery was required. I turned over my passport to the court and agreed to commute back for the trial.

  Briggs, in the UVA hospital for a broken arm and ribs and a herniated disc, said the DA was making a circus out of it because he had his eyes on a bigger desk. “Big bust, lots of press, why wouldn’t the DA make hay out of it?” Briggs said to me as I stood on crutches beside his hospital bed. “Probably run for office one day. They all do.” He assured me that everything would be fine, especially as Pelham Greer was cooperating.

  THE S
URGERY ON MY Achilles was amazingly quick, only about an hour and a half long, for something that was so debilitating. One ruptured tendon and I was on crutches, banging off the walls of my parents’ house, unable to carry anything unless it was in a backpack, unable to drive to the store to buy milk, unable to do much of anything except sit and prop my foot up and think, which I did not want to do. I had had enough intrigue and adventure, thanks—I didn’t want to relive it in my head. I was having occasional nightmares in which Kevin Kelly chased me with a knife that sometimes became a machete, sometimes a broadsword. The dream always ended with me on the ground looking up at him as he raised the blade and swung down. That was when I would wake up.

  Seeing someone killed in front of me had undoubtedly taken a toll. Briggs had even suggested I talk to someone about it. But I didn’t want to see a therapist—that would mean I would end up having to talk about Fritz, and I wanted to brood on him a little while, keep him to myself a little longer. The fact that Briggs had shot and killed Kevin in order to save my life meant a lot to me, but it also meant that now Kevin could not tell me where Fritz was. His “clown” comment stayed with me. Did he mean Fritz had become a clown? Was he in a circus? The idea just seemed utterly ridiculous. But Kevin had said the word in a mocking sort of way, too, so maybe he had just been calling Fritz a fool.

  Blackburne reached out to me in their official sort of way. I received a letter on their trademark red-and-gold stationery, the envelope unmistakable. I opened it and saw with some surprise that it was from Travis Simmons. He did not offer me my old job back, but he did offer his apologies for my being let go due to charges that seemed to be “erroneous,” although “the circumstances at that point had warranted the school’s action,” and he concluded by saying that, if I were found not guilty of those charges, the school would deposit the remainder of my year’s salary as stipulated by my contract into my bank account. My heart actually rose at this gesture until I realized that in all likelihood Blackburne was trying to head off a potential lawsuit. My speech to Kevin Kelly about Blackburne being scared of me turned out to have been a bit prophetic.

  The same day the letter from Travis Simmons arrived, I got an e-mail from Sam Hodges. It was from a Gmail account, not his school one. It consisted entirely of a short block of verse:

  Sir, in this audience,

  Let my disclaiming from a purposed evil

  Free me so far in your most generous thoughts,

  That I have shot my arrow o’er the house

  And hurt my brother.

  It was from the last scene in Hamlet, when Hamlet asks Laertes for forgiveness for the pain he has caused him. I stared at the screen. Sam was apologizing. But he hadn’t done anything with regard to the drugs in my room—which, I realized after a moment, was his point: he hadn’t done anything, said anything, until now. For a moment, I recalled sitting in jail, no one other than Briggs coming to see me, and resentment stirred. Then I remembered that Sam and Gray Smith had packed up my belongings and brought them and my car to Staunton for me, and my resentment vanished. Sam had, after all, done something, although he clearly felt it hadn’t been enough. I sat in front of my laptop, thinking, and then composed and sent the following response, quoting from the point in the play when Hamlet is dying and speaks to his friend:

  But let it be. Horatio, I am dead,

  Thou livest; report me and my cause aright

  To the unsatisfied.

  I figured Sam could help restore whatever reputation I had left at Blackburne.

  Of course, I heard nothing from Ren Middleton, which suited me just fine.

  I’M NOT SURE WHAT led me to e-mail Abby. Boredom would be the easy response, and it’s true I was getting rather tired of staring out the window and watching Matlock reruns. But it’s hardly a satisfactory answer. Love? A need for sympathy? A desire to reconnect after our kiss at the winter dance?

  I typed: Hey. So, I got arrested, fired, and crippled since I last saw you.

  Less than two hours later, while trying to reread a favorite Tim Gautreaux story, I got her response: Is that supposed to be funny?

  Hardly, I typed. Then I attached a picture of the scar from my Achilles surgery, an ugly two-inch pink centipede behind my ankle, and sent the e-mail.

  Three minutes later: Oh my God. Are you okay? What happened?

  Former classmate chased me with a knife.

  And he cut your foot?

  I tore my Achilles tendon trying to get away from him.

  You must have pissed him off?

  I found out he was growing pot and selling it to students at Blackburne. Tried to frame me for it.

  After sending this last e-mail, I sat with my fingers touching my keyboard, uncertain what to type next. I hoped what I had already written wouldn’t make Abby want to close her laptop. Then I received another e-mail from her: Message me on Facebook. She included a link to her Facebook page, abbydabby1983.

  Her page consisted of a blank profile pic, bare-bones info (Lives in Fairfax, Virginia), and nothing else. I saw I had a new friend request—Abby. I accepted, and then messaged her: abbydabby?

  Shut it [she said], you’re lucky I have a Facebook page.

  Is that what this is? Looks like the Internet equivalent of an abandoned condo.

  I just set it up, okay? Easiest way to IM. E-mail too slow.

  You set up an FB page for me? I’m touched.

  Says the prep school pot dealer. Tell me again—were you framed, arrested, or crippled? Oh, right, all three. Do tell.

  Somehow, telling Abby via Facebook messaging was cathartic, almost therapeutic. I could cast events in a brighter light, gliding past the dark horror of the basement and the wild stink of fear from Pelham Greer as he tried to fight me for the keys. But behind the snarky joking lay the fact that, once we had exhausted my adventures in drug busting, I would have to find something else to talk about, something that wouldn’t drive Abby away again. For the moment, though, it was enough to message her about the joys of being on crutches and having her reply by calling me Gimp.

  IN APRIL, AS FLOWERS began to bloom from the spring rains, my cast was removed, and I began walking around in what looked like a space-age ski boot, complete with inflatable balloons on the inside to support my ankle. I handed my crutches to my mother and asked her to throw them in a Dumpster. Tutting, she placed them in a coat closet, saying you never know when they might be needed. I reveled in my newfound freedom of movement, in my ability to walk from the kitchen to the dining room carrying my own dinner plate.

  In the midst of congratulating myself on recovering the ability to walk, I received another letter from Blackburne. This one was a reminder of my tenth class reunion in June. I almost tossed it in the trash before I noticed that Trip Alexander was one of the reunion cochairs. I stood in the foyer, the glow of the late-morning sun falling through the sidelights by the front door, and thought of Trip and Diamond and the rest of my classmates whom I had cut off like someone going deep undercover. I hadn’t even called Trip or Diamond since I’d last seen them in that hotel room in Culpeper. Before I could change my mind, I ticked the “Yes” box that I would attend, shoved the invitation into the return envelope, and stuck it in the mail.

  That spring rolled on, sometimes swiftly and sometimes like watching ice melt. Rehabilitating my Achilles, and my calf muscle, which was ridiculously atrophied, took only a couple of hours a week with a physical therapist. The rest of the time I spent lounging around on my parents’ couch, reading old issues of the New Yorker and goofing around on the Internet. Lester Briggs and I started e-mailing, mostly comparing hospital stories and empathizing with each other on the indignities of recovery. But no official business. Neither of us was in the mood for it. Abby and I still exchanged e-mails and messaged on Facebook, usually about her classes at Saint Margaret’s or how her mother was doing better. We avoided talking on the phone altogether, although there were times I wanted very much to hear her voice. The closest I got to it was taking out
the CD she had sent me and listening to it, her voice announcing what she was about to play.

  Eventually, my father, ever the pragmatist, made a pointed reference to my seeking gainful employment. Truth to tell, I had found myself gazing at online job postings in the Asheville area. UNC-Asheville wanted a creative writing teacher for two summer sections. Abby, thinking it was a great idea, messaged me: You’re too good a writer not to do something with it.

  I replied: Says the girl who never read my novel. (Boom!)

  Actually, not true now.

  What?

  I read it.

  You did?

  There was a brief pause, two minutes that felt like an hour as I stared at the laptop screen. Finally, she typed: Like I said, you’re too good a writer not to do something with it.

  The phone rang. I looked away from my laptop and stared at the phone. It rang again. My palms suddenly moist, I picked up the phone and nearly dropped it. “Hello?” I said. “Abby?”

  “Next guess,” Lester Briggs said in his honey-graveled voice. “Got some news for you—an update on Kevin Kelly’s business deals. You busy?”

  I looked back at my laptop screen. Abby had signed off Facebook. I hesitated, and then said, “No, I’m good. What’s up?”

  “They keep finding more on Kelly. He had dealers in other private schools in Virginia. Manassas Prep was one of them, if you can believe that. Spent a fair amount of time out west, too, in the past year or so. California, Colorado, Nevada.”

  “What was he doing out west?”

  “The DA thinks he was meeting with other pot growers, maybe planning to branch out.”

  “He said something about medical marijuana being the future. That was before he threw you down the stairs. How are you doing, by the way?”