by Morgan Wade
This fresh insult brought tears to the rims of his narrow eyes as he sat down, tucked his limbs under his body and moaned. More than anything he wished to be back in his leafy cocoon, hidden, a crafty Briton, made euphoric by the ingenuity of his own escape. Sadness soon became mouth-drying fear, as Laurentius and Sylvanus returned, with a group of children following close behind.
“We’ve got you now Marcus,” they said.
“But I was the last to be caught. I win.”
Laurentius caught him roughly by the elbow, wrenched it behind his bony back and hoisted him up.
“Oh yes,” he said, “you win. You’re king of the Britons!”
“And you know what Romans do with the king of the Britons?”
Marcus didn’t answer. His baleful eyes scanned the other kids, searching for a possible ally. Those who weren’t encouraging the bigger boys, who weren’t fetching them switches from the nearby thicket, the silent ones, they wore expressions of curiosity. “What happens next?” they asked with their wide, unblinking eyes, as though it was a staged tragedy they were watching, not the real assault of a boy they actually knew. They would remain spectators.
One face was apologetic. Annaeus, Marcus’ brother. He, too, had been there. Not to join in the beating, but also not to stop it. Sorry, his trembling lips seemed to say, what can I do? There are two of them, both bigger than I. Later, it would be Annaeus who applied the cool, damp moss to the lash marks. Marcus’ would lean on Annaeus as he hobbled tearfully home.
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With the fifth strike from the soldier’s bullwhip the man in the ditch began to stagger and sway. With the seventh blow, the pick fell from his hands and he did not try to retrieve it. With the eleventh blow he dropped to his knees. The legionary had his whip raised for the twelfth when Marcus finally dared to intervene.
“Stop!” he cried, his voice sounding far more childish than he had intended, “Stop it!”
The legionary paused. He looked back at Marcus, now with a look of confusion on his face. I thought we had an understanding, he seemed to say.
Marcus stared back utterly unsure of his next move. He was relieved that the flogging had ceased, at least temporarily, but the following uncertainty was excruciating. The digger was still on his hands and knees, whimpering. Many of the others around the prone man had stopped their own activity, to assess the new situation, this new man, a stranger who had enough clout to command a legionary. They looked up from the ditch in wonderment. The legionary scrutinized Marcus’ face, trying to read his intentions, to ascertain his standing, to determine whether he should be obeyed, challenged or dismissed. All eyes were now on Marcus, waiting for what was to come. Marcus dreaded that his insecurity was displayed for all to see in the interminably long time it was taking him to say or do something else. And he thought he could detect the look in the legionary’s eyes change from confusion, to annoyance, to defiance. The soldier was straightening up and looked like he was about to make a move. Marcus knew he had to act fast, to head off the coming insubordination. He opened his mouth to speak.
“Pluto’s ass! What in Hades is going on here!”
Gus had returned.
Marcus, with three long, deliberate strides drew up to the soldier and before the man could protest he twisted the whip from his grasp. Not yet acknowledging Gus’ presence, he cocked his head and trained one narrow eye downward at the shorter, stouter man. With a trembling hand he hoisted the whip, never taking his eye from the soldier. He brought the whip down with as much power as he could muster from his extended, slender arm, just as he had when he helped his grandfather to break the most savage, feral horse. The iron teeth of the lash end chewed deeply into the digger’s matted back. The wretch thumped to the dusty ground. Marcus handed the whip back to the surprised soldier.
“That,” he said, nearly screaming, “is how it’s done.”
Marcus stepped backward, pivoted, and faced Gus. For a moment, all was quiet.
“What is all this standing around!” Spittle launched from Gus’ lips when he spoke. “Who said you could stop? If we don’t have two more miles by the calends, you’ll be digging us a mass grave. The emperor is not a patient man!”
The diggers, all except the flogged man, returned to their work.
Gus looked questioningly at the legionary. The soldier in turn glanced back toward Marcus, who had returned to the shade of the mastic tree. Gus followed his gaze and understood. He waved off the legionary and strode toward Marcus in his compact, efficient way. At the legionary’s behest, four men rushed over to carry the casualty from the work site and ferry him back toward the encampment. After several moments of glaring over the remaining labourers, he was again satisfied with the work rate. Marcus could hear his laughing above the resumed noise.
Gus, standing a pace from Marcus, was laughing too, mirthlessly.
“First job site? I thought you looked a little green. You look green now.”
Marcus didn’t say anything.
“Don’t worry, our financier has hundreds like him. We have a casualty allowance. One or two a week per overseer. He’ll be ok. A couple of weeks in the infirmary and he’ll heal over and be back to work. It doesn’t pay to kill them, but you need to set an example. Best to pick the biggest and strongest to really get the message across. Motivation.”
Marcus smiled weakly. Gus studied him a while longer. Marcus could feel the colour rise to his cheeks as he remembered his daydreams just before the lashing. He felt compelled to say something.
“Yes, it’s true,” he said finally, “we must make it clear who’s the Roman.”
NINE
Patrick spent his last twenty dollars on a bottle of Wild Turkey and a thirty minute phone card. The bourbon, obscured by its paper bag, was already more than half empty while the phone card remained in his jacket pocket, unused.
Where the hell am I? What am I doing here?
From the moment of his arrival in the city, Patrick had spent his time scouring the streets for any trace of his quarry. He’d been through every neighbourhood, through every major intersection, through the downtown and the suburbs, he’d tried the phone operators and the utilities, but had turned up nothing. On this day, he found himself on a park bench half a block from a pair of busy cross streets, consoling himself just as his father would have done: bemoaning his bad luck and consuming a good deal of liquor.
Patrick Sr. had a lot to say about his family’s tainted Irish luck. A Patrick Considine had come ashore from the blighted, emerald isle in 1741, escaping the first great famine of 1740. And for a while the Considines managed to stay ahead of Fortuna. That first Considine pioneer did well for himself, as the new nation was born and took shape, eventually establishing a dry goods business in the bustling Ohio valley. His son changed his surname to Constantine, a name considered better for business, and married into a prominent English family. By the turn of the nineteenth century a Constantine owned several coal mines in Pennsylvania, another Constantine owned a shoe factory in Cleveland, and another was making prescient investments in some of the new railroad projects springing up all across the heartland. By the time of the Civil War, the Constantine family was known throughout the Union as a family of wealth, power and prestige – a clan to be reckoned with.
Where did it all go wrong? Was it the turmoil of the Civil War? Poor business decisions made by the family elders? Or was it, as whispered by some in the family long ago, the eccentric Fingal Constantine’s decision to take a young Iroquois woman as a wife, bringing scandal and disgrace. Patrick Jr. knew from painful experience not to mention the so-called “squaw” in his father’s presence, or risk a blow to the head. The rumour was so mysterious that Patrick Jr. accepted from an early age that Fingal’s mistake had to be the catalyst for the woes of later generations. There must be powerful black magic, he reasoned, in a shame so vile that it is literally unspeakable.
Whatever the cause, the Constantines had fallen far. The coal mines were exhaust
ed and auctioned off for a pittance. The shoe factory, now a teetering, hollow shell at the city’s sooty edge, awaiting demolition, went under when the cheaper imports began arriving. The shares in the railroads were sold prematurely and the profits squandered. Nothing was left except the military traditions, but even those were dwindling, with Constantine men no longer making the officer class, never dreaming of one day making lieutenant, let alone captain, aspiring no higher than common grunts. Patrick Sr., the last regimental son, struggled to get by on the meager disability provided by the army. He was addicted to rye and ginger and Patrick’s Xbox, playing Halo III for stretches of eight consecutive, bleary hours, falling asleep each night in a stupor and waking in the middle of the night, bathed in sweat, trembling from the self-loathing and other torments known only to him.
Fiery Irish pride still burned hot in the junior Patrick Constantine. He was aware of his family’s past, just enough to know that the Constantines once lived in mansions. And he deeply resented the fact that he was born in an era when foreclosure on their shambling bungalow in New Ravenna was an open question every month. What happened, he often wondered. How did we become such losers, when we once had it all? We built this country and look at us now. Foreigners and immigrants buy our land, take our jobs, whore themselves to us. For the Constantines, he thought, it started going downhill when that fur-trapping mental case Fingal married a red woman.
Patrick Jr. had hitched and hijacked his way over a thousand miles south hoping to elude the Constantine curse. Now, penniless on this park bench, without direction, and without prospects, he sensed the return of its embrace. Near the corner of the intersection, almost directly across the street from Patrick’s park bench, a man in battle fatigues wearing a camouflage cap sat motionless in a wheelchair. A lit cigarette hung precariously from the side of his mouth and clouds of yellow smoke hovered around the matted, grey hair of his goatee. Both of his legs were cut off at the knees. There was a sign where his shins should have been, just above a wooden bowl sitting on the pavement, that said, “Vietnam Vet – Need Money For Food.”
Patrick Sr. had served in Vietnam, as an enlisted member of the Second Battalion, Fourteenth Infantry Regiment - the Golden Dragons. The spectre of Patrick Jr.’s father lingered still.
Patrick Jr.’s forebears had served in the Fourteenth as long as there had been a Fourteenth. His grandfather had been a Golden Dragon as well, fighting the Nazis in the Rhineland during World War Two, achieving the rank of sergeant major. His great-great-grandfather had served as a young man in the same regiment at the turn of the century. He had seen action as a second lieutenant during the Spanish-American War, but missed out on World War One, the one conflict in which the Fourteenth did not participate. Another prolific Constantine had been a captain for the Fourteenth when they formed part of the Union forces in the U.S. Civil War, and he’d seen action at Fredericksburg and Gettysburg. Patrick’s grandfather would speak of an ancient relative who fought against the British forces as a lieutenant colonel during the War of 1812, also for the newly formed Fourteenth regiment. He claimed that this Constantine was instrumental in the regiment’s founding, contributing substantial sums of money for its outfitting. The Constantines had been associated with the U.S. Army in general, and with the Fourteenth Regiment in particular, for as long as anyone could remember.
Patrick looked again across the street at the veteran sitting in his wheelchair. A woman clutching to her chest a large, striped shopping bag of thick paper with rope handles hurried past the man, taking care to carve a wide path around him. From the other direction, a man holding a cell phone to his ear nearly kicked over the old soldier’s bowl. In his boozy ill-temper Patrick fumed at the injustice of it, that a disabled serviceman, like his father, should be treated so shabbily, reduced to begging on the street like a bum, passed over so consistently and arrogantly. That’s why I’ll never join, he thought. I’m not going to get kicked around like my old man.
His father, Patrick Sr., had never achieved a rank higher than sergeant. He entered the Vietnam War as a private and emerged as a sergeant unscathed and without distinction. He stayed with the regiment throughout the seventies and eighties and even served again in the Gulf War yet still never advanced, for reasons that were unclear to everyone, including his son. Typical of a Constantine, Patrick Sr. was injured during Operation Desert Storm, an engagement that brought the U.S. military less than one hundred and fifty combat-related deaths and less than five hundred additional casualties. When a jeep he was traveling in overturned, one of his legs was crushed, his left eye was punctured, and he sustained a severe concussion. It seemed like every second man from the regiment had Gulf War Syndrome. Whatever happened to him, the man who returned from Iraq wasn’t the same man that had left in 1990.
Patrick Jr. put the glass neck of the bottle back to his lips and tipped it, letting the bourbon slide down until his eyes watered. The old soldier met his eye and held it for a brief and awkward moment. They appraised each other warily, as two wayward coyotes might during an unexpected encounter far from the pack. Despite being strangers, the two men shared a sensation of recognition. The vet looked away with a subtle shake of his head. As he brought the crumpled paper bag back to his lap, Patrick frowned. Did he just shake his head at me? He could feel the warmth rise from his gullet to his temples and he caught his breath. With a suddenness that caused a company of pigeons on the ground behind him to take flight, Patrick got to his feet. He paced three steps to the right, swiveled, and then marched three steps back to his bench. You are begging for spare change, he seethed. You have no shins, no feet. You shake your head at me? Patrick turned again, ready to strike out across the street and share his displeasure. But as he took a step forward, he stared hard at the broken man, now lighting another cigarette, and saw his father again. He stopped.
There were a number of reasons why Patrick Jr. had left home. His father’s drunken abuse was one. Not having anything better to do was another. But not wanting to join the Fourteenth was primary. He told himself it was because he wanted to break the mould; he wanted to be a musician or a carpenter or something else. He told himself that he didn’t want to be pushed around and he didn’t want to end up like that loser across the street, or like his intolerable father. But the truth, the main reason he didn’t enlist and why he ran away, was something else entirely, something he didn’t admit even to himself. Patrick Constantine Jr. was afraid.
He was afraid that he wouldn’t be good enough, that he wouldn’t be able to do the drills, to complete his training. He was afraid of going overseas, he was afraid of grenades, and bombs, and IEDs, and sniper’s bullets, he was afraid of getting shot. Despite his bravado, he was afraid of killing someone. Of course, he had envisioned the act many times. He’d imagined what it would be like to shoot his algebra teacher. He’d imagined what it would be like to stab the glowering Filipino that ran the Quick Stop on the corner, near his house. He’d rehearsed strangling his father. And smothering him. And poisoning him. But he would usually feel nauseous to the point of vomiting when the mental images became too vivid, when the pastiche in his head became to visceral. He always stepped back.
But the thing he feared most, what usually kept him up at night, was the mysterious, unnamed, unmentioned malady with its hooks in his father, the debilitating injury that left no visible scars. Patrick Sr. had been deprived of more than full mobility and full eyesight after his last tour of duty in Iraq. He had witnessed something awful. Or, he had done something awful. Whatever it was, a switch had been thrown. Every day the torment threatened to spill out and tar anyone within his range. Having for many years indirectly borne through the cloudy prism of his father’s violence the aftermath of some unknown atrocity perpetrated in a far-off land, Patrick Jr. was unwilling to risk exposing himself directly to that same atrocity. He dreaded facing the consequences in person when they were already too much to bear even when diluted through someone else.
Patrick looked upon the disable
d veteran sitting across the street with both disdain and sympathy. He watched as the business folk rushed past. Why won’t they give him a few dollars? Jesus, don’t just sit there like you’re already half in the grave! They don’t deserve to walk on the same ground. Have some pride, some dignity! When he stood up again suddenly and unsteadily, he was unsure of whether his next act would be one of kindness or violence.
A battered van pulled up to the curb not far from where the veteran was sitting. Emblazoned on the side were the words Caritas and Community Outreach. Patrick watched as a rangy man with a pony tail bounced out of the van, carrying two bundles. He walked past the vet in the wheelchair, crossed the street at the intersection and then stopped in front of a pair of street people, camped out on the other corner, sitting on a mass of blankets and cardboard. The young man undid his bundles and handed them their contents: sandwiches, juice boxes, and fruit. He walked right past!
Patrick made his way unevenly across the street toward the curb. When he arrived, he was almost speechless, made inarticulate not only by whiskey but also by indignation.
“Hello there,” the man greeted him cheerfully.
“What’s wrong with him,” Patrick managed to ask.
“Sorry?”
“What’s wrong with him,” Patrick pointed back across the intersection aggressively, “What’s wrong with a man who lost both his legs defending your freedom. You walked right past him.”
The social worker’s face registered understanding and he smiled.
“Oh yes! Ron. Do you know him? I think I might have something left for him, maybe some hot coffee, if he’d like it.”