Shadow of the Lions

by Christopher Swann

  “No, I just need to—I’m looking for a friend of mine—”

  The men around the coffee looked up.

  “You need to get out,” said the clown, “or you’ll be escorted out, your choice.”

  I wanted to laugh aloud at the absurdity, the man in the melting clown face demanding that I leave while Fritz was back here somewhere. But the laugh died in my throat as the blond man who had rescued the bull rider looked around from the coffee and stepped slowly forward. His hair was short and thatched, his face tanned and roughened and slack with surprise, but I knew him.

  “Pete?” the clown said, addressing the blond man. “You know this guy?”

  I looked at the man the clown had called Pete. “Ho,” I said.

  “Ho,” said Fritz.

  WE STOOD IN A trailer that served as a changing room for the rodeo clowns—bullfighters, Fritz had called them. The trailer held a rack of various colored shirts and overalls. A heap of straw hats lay on a counter next to a small round mirror and a flat box containing what I guessed was greasepaint. A shabby green sofa sat propped against the wall at this end of the trailer. The room smelled of sweat and mildew and the sharp tang of dipping tobacco.

  “Sorry about George,” Fritz said. He was referring to the tall clown. “He’s protective. Thought you might be trying to serve a warrant or something.”

  “A warrant?”

  “Happens sometimes. Last week a stable hand got served divorce papers.” Fritz leaned back against the counter with the hats. “We try to take care of one another.”

  The pause after this stretched on, the tension taut in the air. I felt that if I spoke a moment too soon, something would irrecoverably break. All those years since that March day in the trees at Blackburne, all the choices I had made or avoided—it all seemed reduced to this moment in a trailer, standing across from Fritz. I found myself looking at a Far Side calendar on the wall, the picture of a cow standing at a microphone reading something. The calendar was too far away for me to read what the cow was saying.

  “So, what’s with the ‘Pete’?” I said. Some distant part of me registered the anger in my voice but elected not to do anything about it. It was beyond unimaginable to find Fritz here, with blond hair and a new name and identity, with friends.

  Fritz shrugged. “It’s simple. Easy to remember.”

  “So, what, you’ve got a driver’s license, Social Security number? Whole new life?”

  “How’d you find me?” he asked. He placed his hands down on the counter he was leaning against and looked at me. “Did my family send you?”

  I stared back. “Your family had you declared dead,” I said. “Last year.”

  I am not proud to admit that I took some small pleasure in seeing his reaction. His face drew into itself, and he dropped his head slightly. I noticed a smudge of dirt on his forehead, just above his left eye. He took in a breath. “Are they okay?” he asked, looking at his boots.

  “Sure. Great,” I said, pacing in the narrow space. There wasn’t much room—I had to turn around after two steps. “Your sister quit Juilliard and can’t listen to classical music anymore, let alone play it. Your mom doesn’t want to stick her head in the oven anymore. Your dad lives at his goddamn company. Your uncle—well, shit, at least he’s got something going on in his life.”

  “You’ve seen my uncle?” Fritz said, still looking down at the floor.

  “Yeah. He’s pretty torn up about . . .” I waved a hand vaguely at the trailer, unable at the moment to conceive of an appropriate word.

  Fritz stood up off the table and lifted his gaze. “Did he send you here? Does he know where I am?”

  “No, he didn’t send me—”

  “Please don’t lie to me, Matthias.” It was the first time he’d called me by my name.

  I gave a sharp bark of laughter. “Lie to you,” I said. I wanted to shout, to rage. Anger and bitterness and sorrow flowed through me like separate dark rivers, a flood of emotion carrying me off to whatever happened next. “I’m not lying to you, Fritz,” I said. “Your family has no idea where you are. Honest to God. They think you’re dead, remember?”

  Fritz picked up a straw hat and toyed with the brim, turning the hat slowly round and round in his hands. “I’m sorry I hurt you,” he said. “I know how upset you must be.”

  I wanted to snatch his hat and throw it out of the trailer, watch it sail across the lot and fall into the mud. As if reading my mood, he laid the hat back down on the counter. “So how did you find me?” he asked.

  It was startling to look at my friend after all these years, to see his old face, which had always been on the edge of a lopsided smile, half-hidden within the face in front of me now, which was weathered and keen and sad. The same, but different. I wondered how he saw me, if my face was as changed from what it had been, and for a piercing moment I had a glimpse of what it might be like to grow old. “It’s a long story,” I said. Suddenly, I was bone-tired. “Remember Kevin Kelly, from school?”

  Fritz frowned, remembering. “That kid who called us Nazis?”

  I nodded. “He saw you out here, last year. I figured, what the hell, it was worth a shot.”

  “He told you? Are you guys friends?”

  I laughed at that, an ugly sound. “He was selling drugs at school. At Blackburne. I’m teaching there—well, I was, anyway. I found out about it, the drugs, and heard he knew where you were, so I went to try to get him to tell me. Didn’t quite work out the way I had planned.”

  Fritz considered this. “Is he here with you?”

  “No. He’s dead. A cop shot him when he tried to stab me in his grow room. Ex-cop, actually.”

  Fritz stared at me. “Oh-kay,” he said, and his guarded look of confusion actually made me smile.

  “Needs some more explanation, I know,” I said.

  Fritz spread his hands out. “I’m not exactly in a position to demand explanations,” he said. For the first time, a small, lopsided smile hovered on his face.

  That look, that acknowledgment of debts unpaid, dislodged my anger enough to make me sit down and tell him, from start to finish, the story of the past year, from getting the job at Blackburne to confronting Kevin Kelly. I left out nothing, including what I’d learned from Trip and Diamond. He leaned against the counter, listening, his face intense and hard. Twice he raised his hand halfway to his neck and then put it down. The second time he did it, when I was explaining how Briggs had helped me realize what Kevin had meant by clown, I stopped talking and waited expectantly for him to look at me, and then I slowly drew out from my pocket the Saint Christopher medal on its chain.

  “I thought you might want this,” I said.

  Fritz stared at it, and for the first time since I’d begun my story, something shifted over his face, a look of longing. He reached for the medal, but I closed my hand around it.

  “I’ve told you my story,” I said. “Now tell me why I should give this to you. You left it under my pillow, Fritz. Before you walked off the map. Tell me why.”

  He looked at my closed hand, and then at me, but before he could speak, there were two short knocks on the trailer door, and it opened to reveal George, still wearing his greasepaint. “Show’s over, Pete,” he said, ignoring me. “You okay? Tommy’s asking for you.”

  His eyes on me, Fritz said to George, “Tell Tommy I’ll be there in a minute.”

  George hesitated, glancing at me. “Need me to cover for you?”

  I’ll admit George and I had not gotten off on the right foot, but my patience was worn thin. I was on the verge of getting answers to a mystery that had shadowed my life, and George was acting like a jealous prom date. “Who’s Tommy?” I asked, interjecting myself into the conversation like a dog lifting a leg on a rival’s rosebush.

  George’s sour look was replaced by alarm as a commotion broke out behind him. He turned toward the door. “You can’t —” he started, and then a small dark-haired boy, three or four years old, ran past him into the trailer. He
was wearing jeans and a sweater. A frayed straw cowboy hat on a string around his neck bounced against his shoulders. He grinned and ran up to Fritz, ignoring both me and George.

  “The show’s over,” the boy announced to Fritz.

  “Yes, it is,” Fritz said. A slow smile spread across his face.

  The boy turned to look at me like a curious bird. “What’s in your hand?” he asked.

  I looked down at my closed hand, the Saint Christopher medal in it and a loop of the chain hanging from my fist. “Something that belongs to my friend,” I said.

  The boy’s eyes widened. “Can I see it?” he asked.

  Fritz stirred. “Can I see it, please,” he said. He nodded at George, who, with a final suspicious glance at me, withdrew and closed the door to the trailer behind him.

  “Please,” the boy said.

  I opened my hand, and the boy looked at the medal, his mouth slightly open. “Oh,” he said.

  Fritz put his hand on top of the boy’s head. “This is an old friend of mine. His name’s Matthias.”

  The boy tore his eyes from the medal and looked up at me, smiling. “That’s a funny name,” he said delightedly.

  I smiled back. “It is.” I looked at Fritz.

  “This is Tommy,” Fritz said. “My son.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The next morning, I returned to the rodeo lot with two coffees. Tommy sat at one end of Fritz’s trailer, armed with a stack of coloring books and waiting for Sesame Street to come on. I sipped my coffee gratefully, and Fritz looked tired, but he just cupped his hands around his coffee and let it slowly grow cold as he told me about Tommy’s mother, Shanna.

  There were a few other things I wanted to know besides the story of Tommy’s mother—why Fritz had run away and was now a rodeo bullfighter, for instance—but it was clear that Fritz needed to tell me the story his own way. And I was here to listen.

  He had met Shanna five years ago when he’d been working as a stable hand outside of Houston and a horse had reared up and clipped Fritz in the head with its hooves. “Shanna was an EMT at the hospital,” Fritz said. “I come into the ER, blood running down my face, and this little girl on the bench sees me and asks her mom in this loud whisper, ‘Is he gonna die?’ But Shanna just took me off and stitched me up. Got a great scar just above my hairline. I asked for her number, right there in the ER, and she just laughed and said that horse must’ve hit me harder than she thought. But I went back and asked her out. We dated for a while, and then she told me she was pregnant.” He turned the cup around in his hands. “Thing is, I liked the idea of having a family,” Fritz continued. “I’d been alone for a long time.” He glanced at me, but I just sipped my coffee, refusing to take the bait. “I was half in love with her, so I asked her to marry me. She said no, but she stayed with me through the pregnancy. Or might be more accurate to say she let me stay with her. Right after Tommy was born, I started working the rodeo, so we traveled a lot. Shanna thought it would be a big adventure, and they need EMTs everywhere. For a while she worked for the rodeo, too. But it was hard with a newborn baby—crying, feeding, diapers, all that and you get no sleep. Everything is twenty-four-seven about your kid. Once I held that baby, though . . .” He looked across the room at Tommy, who was talking to his coloring book as he scribbled in it. “It’s a cliché, maybe, but I didn’t know how much I could love someone else until I had him.”

  When he had paused for a good while, I said, “Shanna didn’t feel the same way?”

  He shook his head, glancing at Tommy, who was now playing with his stuffed animals. Fritz lowered his voice. “She liked to go out, have fun. Not a party girl, not like that, but staying at home with a baby wasn’t what she wanted out of life.”

  “But she had a baby.”

  Fritz sighed. “She could’ve had an abortion, but she was a little nervous about it, and I convinced her to keep him. I thought she’d change her mind once he was born. But we started fighting instead.” He glanced at Tommy again, but Tommy was engrossed with his animals—they were all apparently pirates because he was having them say things like “Argh, matey, walk the plank!” and then marching them off the edge of the television. Fritz lowered his voice even more. “When Tommy was about a year old, she talked about giving him up for adoption. I knew that was it. I kept Tommy and she left. She’s back in Houston, sends him cards, calls every few months. It’s okay.”

  I watched Tommy show one of his coloring books to a teddy bear, pretending to read him a story. “No, it’s not,” I said quietly.

  Fritz sagged a little in acknowledgment. “No,” he said. “Dammit.”

  “Daddy,” Tommy said solemnly, not looking up from his teddy bear, “that’s a bad word.”

  “Sorry, buddy,” Fritz said. He hesitated, and then said, “Tommy, I’m gonna turn on Sesame Street—”

  “Yes!”

  “Hold on—Mr. Matthias and I are going to step outside and leave you here to watch TV. We’ll be right outside if you need us.”

  “Okay, Daddy,” Tommy said.

  It was cold and clear outside, the sky an immense brilliant blue. The Tetons ranged along the horizon. I stretched, enjoying the sun on my face after being closed up in the trailer, but Fritz hunched his shoulders in his jacket. We walked slowly around in the cold mud and gravel of the lot, keeping the trailer in sight. A man in a shearling jacket and skullcap walked past and nodded a greeting, though Fritz barely noticed. He seemed to be deciding something. I held my breath, waiting and walking in silence.

  “The day I left,” Fritz said. He turned to face me and stopped, and so did I. “I didn’t want you to think I was leaving because of you. I wasn’t. That was why I left that medal under your pillow. Sort of a . . . good-bye, a sign of friendship. I don’t know. Maybe I should have kept it.”

  An invisible hand tightened its hold around my lungs and heart. And then slowly, slowly, it released. Just as slowly, I took my hand out of my jacket pocket and held the Saint Christopher medal out to him. Fritz looked at me, then at it, and held out his hand. I placed the medal into his palm.

  “Take it back,” I said. “Just tell me why you left. Please.”

  Fritz considered the medal in his hand, hefted it, and then raised his head to look across the yard at the door of his trailer, then at the single window, the blinds to which were shut. “I was . . .” He cleared his throat and then grimaced. His hand clenched around the Saint Christopher medal. “When I was eleven,” he said, talking to his clenched hand, “my father started working a lot. He’d always worked a lot, but now he was coming home at nine, ten o’clock at night, driving to work at five the next morning. Some nights he just stayed at the office, slept on the couch. I remember wondering if he was having an affair. I even said something like that to my mother. She just looked at me with a sad smile and said the only affair my father was having was with his work.”

  He glanced up at me, as if to make sure I was listening. I nodded in encouragement, though I wasn’t sure where Fritz was going with this.

  He coughed, once, and continued. “This went on for a while, and Abby kept asking Mother why Father didn’t come to her recital, why Father never took us out to dinner anymore. When he was home on the weekends—and he was even busy working then, bringing home a big briefcase stuffed with papers—he would throw a ball with me or listen to Abby on her cello, something he said he loved. But he still wasn’t always there—part of him was always back at the office. So one day—it was June and we weren’t in school—the doorbell rings and I go to answer it and it’s Uncle Wat, beaming down at me like Santa Claus without a beard. That’s how I remember him that day. Abby came running downstairs when she heard his voice, and he swept us both into a big bear hug and said he was coming to stay with us for a while if that was okay. We thought it was fantastic. We loved Uncle Wat—Mother didn’t have any brothers or sisters, so he was our only uncle. He always gave us great Christmas presents and told stories about hunting trips he’d gone on or how he�
��d once seen a live sperm whale. Wat told us that his town house had to be renovated, so he was going to stay in our guest room until it was finished.” Fritz started walking again—it was still chilly if you didn’t move around—and I kept pace with him as we slowly walked round the yard again.

  “Even then, I figured there was something else going on,” Fritz said. “I think my parents had decided that if Father couldn’t be home much, then Uncle Wat could sort of step in as a replacement dad, someone to help Mother with us. Wat worked hard and spent a lot of time at NorthPoint, too, but he always seemed to have time to do something with us, whether it was attending one of Abby’s recitals or coming to one of my swim meets or just having dinner together, laughing and eating more than anyone else.

  “I could tell Mother liked having him around, too. You know Wat—he’s bigger than life. When he’d walk into a room, it was like someone had turned on extra lights, and you hadn’t even realized until then that it had been kind of dark earlier. Mother craved the company of another adult. She’d been an art history major at Vassar and probably would have ended up curating at a museum, except that she married my father and stayed home to raise us. With Father being gone so much, she’d started reading a lot, hours at a time stretched out on the couch. Sometimes she wore her dressing gown all morning. She was smoking, too, every once in a while going out onto the deck out back for a cigarette. Abby actually yelled at her about it once, and Mother told her that she wasn’t doing it in the house, she wasn’t flaunting it in front of us, and that it was her business.

  “With Wat home, though, Mother changed. She was . . . cautious, at first, protective of what had been her run of the house. That vanished inside of a week. She laughed more, for one thing. Wat told outrageous stories and jokes, and he was always very gallant with Mother, pulling out her seat for her at dinner, complimenting her food, all that. She started wearing lipstick again, too. Abby teased her about it at dinner one night, and Wat told her that beauty was something to be admired, not ridiculed. He was being the dashing gentleman, you know, even gave a little wink to Mother, like she was in on the joke, but she blushed a little.