by J L Aarne
“Jake,” Ezekiel said, gently shaking him. A low, frightened cat growl strained at his throat and Ezekiel shook him again, saying, “Jacob, come on. It’s only a dream, wake up.”
Jacob shook his head, but his eyes fluttered open and he stared, unseeing for a moment into Ezekiel’s face. He blinked and his eyes still didn’t clear, but they focused. He said something in a soft whisper that Ezekiel didn’t catch.
“What?”
Jacob frowned and said it again and Ezekiel realized why he hadn’t understood him at first; it was Comanche.
He said, “They sold me for three horses and two blankets that winter.”
Ezekiel felt his jaw clench, but he shook the anger away and put his hands on Jacob’s shoulders. Jacob stared back into his face and he remembered him malnourished and bruised, his hair oily with buffalo fat, his eyes huge and blue in his sunburned face, the ghost of the thirteen year old brother he remembered cracking and peeling at the edges. He should have known when Jacob started talking about it earlier that this might happen.
“You’re here with me now and no one’s selling you for anything and you’re not going anywhere,” Ezekiel said.
Jacob nodded. “I’m all right,” he said.
“You sure?” Ezekiel asked. “Maybe you shouldn’t go to Utah.”
“No, I’m okay. I’m fine,” Jacob said, swiping his hair out of his face. He sat back against the headboard. “Sorry.”
“You know, I can put someone else on this case for a few days and come with you if you want me to,” Ezekiel said.
Jacob shook his head. “No.”
He said it in Comanche again and Ezekiel frowned at him. He understood him well enough, but he didn’t like it because often when Jacob got really bad, like right after his breakdown when he had gone away, if he wasn’t catatonic he was delusional and rarely spoke in English.
“Jacob, don’t do that,” he said.
“Do what?” Jacob asked.
“Speak English,” Ezekiel said.
Jacob stared at him for a minute without speaking. Then he turned his head to gaze back across the bedroom. “You can’t come with me. You have your own work to do and you’re obsessed with this case. Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”
“I get obsessed with every case.”
“No, you don’t.”
Ezekiel let that go. He didn’t, but there were times that it all probably looked like obsession to someone on the outside looking in. “If you’re going to lose your shit over this though, maybe it’s too early for you to be doing it,” he said.
“I am fine,” Jacob snapped. He took a deep breath and let it out on a sigh. “Sorry. But I’m fine. It’s nothing. I just have to talk to her, build rapport, help them understand what she’s trying to tell them and get her to tell it. She doesn’t trust anyone and who can blame her? A year is a long time to be held in captivity by a stranger. Anything can happen. She should be dead.”
“You are not fine, but okay,” Ezekiel said.
“Look, Zeke, I appreciate it, but even if you went with me, you’d only be there in body,” Jacob said. “You’d go stir-crazy and I’d want to kill you within a day.”
Ezekiel smiled. He was undoubtedly right, but it still worried him to let him go on his own when he was so obviously upset by it. Jacob was a professional though. He would get it under control or at least lock it up tight behind a mask and fake his way through it. Unless something set him off, but it had taken a lot of years and something really awful to finally make him snap like that. Interviewing a witness, even a witness like he had described, was unlikely to trigger another psychotic episode.
“I’ll go if you need me though,” Ezekiel said.
“And that’s sweet of you,” Jacob said. He leaned against Ezekiel’s side and closed his eyes. “I’ll just be there a few days. I’m not even going anywhere really. I’ll be fine. It was only a nightmare.”
Ezekiel lifted his hand to pet him. Jacob began to relax into it and purr. It made Ezekiel smile; it was so like a cat, but more like a domesticated housecat than the cougar he was below the surface.
Ezekiel distractedly typed one-handed until he decided Jacob was asleep again. He was limp and heavy against his side, his cheek resting on Ezekiel’s shoulder, breath softly puffing on his neck. He wasn’t dreaming; he was still as a stone. Ezekiel stroked his head, murmured goodnight to him and continued typing with both hands.
He turned on a media player to listen to some music, selected “Phantom Green” by a band called Agents of Oblivion and turned it up. Jacob didn’t even stir. He could not only lie down and sleep in a cold wet ditch if need be, but he could do it while surrounded by screaming children and exploding firecrackers. Ezekiel did not share that talent. It was something he had never learned to do.
He felt something wet on his shoulder and looked down to find Jacob’s mouth had come open and he had drooled a little on him. Amused and faintly disgusted, Ezekiel nudged him and coaxed him until he got Jacob to lie down with his head on the pillow. He kissed his forehead, wiped the spit off his shoulder, took a drink of his cold coffee and went back to work.
Chapter 14
By Friday, Rainer had given up on Agent Herod and stopped watching the news. It only made him angrier. The reporters with their regurgitated information, if they twisted it this way or colored it like that or added a buzz word here, it might sound like an update, but it wasn’t. They knew nothing and some thirty-something square jawed type with a vacant expression took the place of the old guy in the bad suit and if Rainer didn’t stop watching it he was going to break something. Probably his television.
Friday morning he taught interpreting literature to freshmen. It was a large class he taught in an auditorium across the campus from where his office was. He drove there, his mind on Ezekiel Herod, tumbling the question What now? over and over in his head, worrying at it like a hangnail until it was bleeding. The only answer really was to let it go, of course, but that rankled.
His students had a paper due and there was a large stack of them on the corner of the table when he entered the room and another one growing beside it. He really needed to see about getting a TA. Someone to grade the multiple choice part of his quizzes and tests if nothing else.
Rainer looked at the stacks of essays with a sick feeling of dread at the prospect of a whole weekend spent reading them.
Cosra walked up to the table and said, “Good morning to you, Rainer.”
Rainer glared at the stacks of student papers. “Not really,” he said. “Isn’t it a little early for you?”
“I have office hours,” Cosra said.
Rainer raised an eyebrow at him. “This isn’t your office.”
“Don’t get cheeky with me,” Cosra said. He was carrying a large plastic cup from a 7-Eleven convenience store and he smelled strongly of whiskey. “I’m in hiding,” he told Rainer in a stage whisper.
“From your students?”
“Of course from my students. Who else?”
One of Rainer’s students reached around Cosra to set her paper on top of the shorter stack of essays, drawing his attention to them. “Ah, what have we here?”
“Student essays,” Rainer said. “Short fiction. We’re about to start poetry.”
“Oh, goodie,” Cosra said, looking around the room. “Your students look more stupid than mine. I would not have thought such a thing possible.”
Rainer had once been one of Cosra’s students so he knew that Cosra was only half serious. It was still early in the semester, he hadn’t weeded out the bad ones and the lazy ones and the genuinely incompetent ones yet. Eventually he would and he’d have a class of exceptional students and he would still occasionally accuse them of being stupid.
“They’re freshmen,” Rainer said. “They’ll learn.”
“By the time they get to me, they better learn something or I might have to wonder about you, young Bryssengur,” Cosra said. He took the smaller stack of student papers and a red pen of
f the table. “I’m going to sit here in the front and have a look-see at this nonsense.”
“Go ahead,” Rainer said. He fully supported anything that might free up his weekend a little bit.
Rainer turned away and unpacked his books and papers. He did it mechanically, mind once again straying to Ezekiel, a habit that was becoming maddening. He didn’t like that one bit either. The way Ezekiel Herod had worked his way so quickly under Rainer’s skin. It was because he had honestly thought Ezekiel was different. It had seemed like there was a divine spark of something akin to whatever it was Rainer had inside himself. Or missing from himself. He never had quite decided which it was. But he’d seen it in Ezekiel or heard it roaring silently between them as they spoke in rings around each other.
It had coaxed Rainer into the open a little, but a little was all it took to ruin everything. If it was a mistake, then things were in danger of going completely sideways, but he’d thought it worth the risk when Ezekiel was standing before him, like calling to like. Now he was sure he’d fucked it up and whenever Agent Herod got around to it, he was going to be sticking his agent nose in Rainer’s unsavory private business.
There was a very simple solution to the problem of Agent Ezekiel Herod though. Easily solved with a needle, some rope, a scalpel and a match. It would be poetic in its way, though even Rainer admitted, slightly overdramatic. Better to catch him alone and off-guard and slit his throat. What it lacked in finesse it made up for in efficiency.
“Why hello there, Mr. FBI Man,” Cosra said behind him.
Rainer turned and there he was. Ezekiel Herod sat in the front row near the aisle, relaxed back in his chair, eyes on Rainer with piercing intensity. His gaze flicked briefly to Cosra as he took the seat beside him and he looked annoyed. Then he returned his attention to Rainer, their eyes met and Rainer smiled.
Ezekiel frowned at him, but Rainer continued to smile as he walked to the table and looked out at the faces of his students. His days of pent-up frustration and anger drifted away and he found himself in a much better mood.
“If you haven’t already turned in your essays, they’re due by the end of this class,” Rainer told the class. “Since it’s Friday, I’ll let you all go a little early, so if you went out last night instead of doing your homework, you’ve got about thirty minutes to work through the hangover.”
“Or it’s an F,” Cosra muttered. He was scribbling with his red pen in the margins of a paper.
“We’re going to start poetry today,” Rainer said. He walked around the table to stand in front of it and leaned back against it on one hip. “Who read the assigned reading?”
Nearly every hand in the room went up, including Cosra’s. Rainer doubted that all of them had actually read the poems. He doubted even more that Cosra knew what the poems were.
“Miss Hanover, will you please read for us?” Rainer asked, singling out a girl who had been texting.
“Uh…” She quickly made the phone disappear and tried to look like she had been paying attention. Which was difficult since her book was still in her book bag on the floor by her feet. “I’m sorry. Um… which poem?”
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost, if you please,” Rainer said.
Several students around Amelia Hanover laughed as she fumbled the book open and everyone waited. She blushed bright red, but finally found the right page. When she began to read, she stuttered at first, but recovered and read the short poem through in a rush.
“Thank you, Miss Hanover,” was all Rainer said when she finished.
They discussed Robert Frost. A girl who was convinced it was about someone traveling home for Christmas got into a rather heated debate about it with a boy who was equally convinced that it was about suicide. Another girl broke in to point out that woods were significant in a lot of fairy tales and usually sinister. Rainer noticed Ezekiel’s lips quirk in a faint smirk of amusement.
“Who would like to read for us next?” Rainer asked when the discussion had died down. A student named Adam Blake raised his hand. Rainer nodded and said, “Go ahead, Mr. Blake.”
Adam read The Emperor of Ice Cream by Wallace Stevens. He read well, but he read the way most people read aloud; without emotion. Just the facts, ma’am.
“Thank you, Mr. Blake, but this is poetry,” Rainer said when he was finished. “It’s not a newspaper article or a recipe for bread pudding. It’s about feeling. What do the words and phrases make you feel?”
Ezekiel was staring at him now with his eyebrows lifted and an expression of amused expectation on his face.
Rainer reached around on the table for his copy of their anthology textbook and held it open on his knee. “The substance of a poem is the emotion that it brings out in you, the images the author brings to life in your mind. Poetry is more than the words themselves.”
A couple of his students nodded, but most of them just looked at him waiting for him to continue. Rainer flipped through the anthology, came to a poem by Keats and began to read. His voice filled up the room and he read like he was speaking the words in confession. He didn’t need to read it though and finally put the book aside as he spoke, his eyes straying automatically to Ezekiel, who watched him with interest.
Rainer smiled and the tone of his recitation changed and became more intimate. “Darkling I listen,” he said. He did not speak extremely loud, but the acoustics in the auditorium were meant to make sound carry. “And, for many a time I have been half in love with easeful Death. Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme, to take into the air my quiet breath…”
Ezekiel sat forward and rested his elbows on the desk. Rainer held him with his eyes for a moment. Then looked away and finished the poem while looking out across the many heads of his young students.
They sat there in silence for a few seconds and Rainer could see that they understood, though not all of them knew yet what it was they felt. He had still made his point and there were a few young men and women eyeing him with a new kind of interest. It made Rainer laugh softly to himself as he rounded the table.
“It makes quite a difference, you see?” he said. “For Monday, read page one thousand thirty-three to one thousand fifty-one. I’d also like you to read the exercise on responding to poetry on page one thousand fifty-three. We will be reading Edgar Allen Poe on Monday in class, which you will not find in this particular anthology, but you should be able to find it online if—”
“If you’re not a fucking moron,” Cosra interjected, standing up. He waved the stack of papers he had taken at Rainer and said, “I’ll get these back to you.”
“Right,” Rainer said. He picked up his bag and started packing his books away as his students took their cue from Cosra and began filing out. “I’ll see you all Monday,” he said.
Rainer looked up when the last of his students was going out the door and found Ezekiel standing on the other side of the large, curved table, watching him. He raised an eyebrow at him and hefted his bag over his shoulder. “What can I do for you today, Agent?”
“I thought I’d walk with you to your next class,” Ezekiel said.
“My next class is at two,” Rainer said. He went around the table and walked by Ezekiel toward the door. “But you can walk me to my car.”
Ezekiel smiled at his back and followed him. Outside, he caught up with him and walked at his side. “So, you lived in Europe for a few years. What was that like?”
Rainer glanced at him out the corner of his eye. “Are you still checking up on me, Agent Herod?” he asked. “I had no idea my life story was so interesting. Perhaps I should write a memoir.”
“Two years in France and two more in Germany,” Ezekiel continued. “I always meant to learn to speak German.”
Rainer didn’t reply and they walked for a little while in tense silence. When he did speak, he changed the subject, “Did you enjoy yourself in my class?”
“I did, actually,” Ezekiel said. “Poetry is so revealing. Take Keats, for example. He was
dying when he wrote that poem, you know.”
“I know,” Rainer said. He had always liked that about it.
They reached the lot where he had parked his car and Rainer got a little ahead of Ezekiel. Behind him, Ezekiel cleared his throat and said, “I read this one the other night when I couldn’t sleep. Perhaps you know it: All you’ve left me are the instincts. Be glad I haven’t cut your heart out to see what makes your clock different from mine. I think it might be the holes—”
It was one of Rainer’s poems, published in a poetry magazine the year before he finished grad school. His smile when he turned to look at Ezekiel was sharp. “—But if I open you up and close you enough times I might find the answer is really pegs,” he murmured, finishing the line. “Yes, I know it.”
Ezekiel smirked. “I thought you might,” he said.
They had reached Rainer’s car and he hit a button on his key ring pad to unlock the doors. Ezekiel was standing behind him, so close that he could feel his shadow falling over him.
On impulse, Rainer turned and before Ezekiel realized what he was going to do, he stepped into him and kissed him. He was surprised by it enough that it froze him for an instant. Then Rainer’s tongue was in his mouth stroking and a shock of desire slipped through him right down into the pit of his stomach.
Ezekiel jerked his head back and lashed out. He didn’t pull the punch and caught Rainer on the jaw, snapping his teeth closed. Rainer fell back against the side of his car, huffing for breath.
Only when Rainer picked his head up and looked at him did Ezekiel realize that he was laughing. He turned his head and spit blood on the gravel.
In Ezekiel’s mind, the documentary narrator said, It is well known that psychopaths have poor impulse control. He did not think it was funny this time though.
“Why did you do that?” he asked.
Rainer stood up and opened his car door. “Because I wanted to,” he said. He wiped the back of his hand over his mouth and grimaced. “Tell me something, do you enjoy stalking me?”
“I’m not stalking you,” Ezekiel said. He ran his tongue over the back of his teeth. There was a lingering flavor of tobacco in his mouth that was not like Jacob’s cigarettes. “You’re a person of interest.”