by Kim Powers
“I can’t. It’s . . . it’s not enough . . . ten more Labors . . . I can’t . . . let me talk to Skip, please. Is she okay? Tell her I . . . ”
And then, a sound none of us could mistake. The phone being hung up. The mad poetry at an end, but so was my connection to Skip. I couldn’t put the receiver down; I kept holding it like I was holding Skip, like I wouldn’t lose her as long as I didn’t let go.
The cop at the equipment barely had to say anything for us to know it was a no-go. “He’s tapped into router boxes somehow . . . I can’t trace it . . . maybe, if he calls again . . . ”
“Oh my God . . . who was that? He’s insane . . . is that who took her . . . ” Dana was going as crazy as I just had.
I put the phone down, and immediately, the landline rang again. I grabbed it, not waiting for Mizell’s signal or anything else this time.
“WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT WITH ME?”
“Daddy?”
It was Skip. And then it wasn’t.
Click.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Skip’s prayers—one of them—had been answered, because she got to speak to him.
“Daddy?”
The kidnapper had held up the phone to her mouth, touching it to her lips so she could feel it, then yanking the phone away the second she said his name. She kept yelling it even though her father couldn’t hear it, even though she knew the kidnapper had cut off the connection.
“Just let me go. Please. I haven’t seen you, I can’t tell anybody anything. He knows you have me. He’s suffered. You’ve made your point.”
He was behind her. “And just what. Do you think. My point. Is?”
She didn’t answer.
“That’s what I thought. Until he knows. The game continues.”
From behind, he put the blindfold back on her, then began moving forward on his crutches. Now that Skip knew what it was, the sound made sense. But the next sound that he made didn’t: fiddling with something in his lap. A cap coming off something, then another sound, something hollow and plastic. A rattle, and then a sort of shhhhhhhh. It wasn’t an exhale, or him telling her to be quiet . . .
Skip smelled it first, then she knew.
Spray paint. That was the whoosh, the aerosol coming out of the can. She’d exploded a whole can of it in her face once, when she stuck a screwdriver in the little nozzle to get the spray unclogged. She’d be blind today if the mustard yellow colored spray hadn’t gone all over her glasses, instead of in her eyes. She looked like somebody with a bad tan, a real burn, most of her face yellow, except for the perfect squares of her glasses around her eyes. It had been murder getting the paint off her face and her hair. Scrubbing at her skin, having to cut off some of her hair.
Did he know that? He knew everything else about her. Is that why he was using it?
Skip relaxed her face so the blindfold would go just a little bit slack and she could try to see more, from where there was a little gap between her eyes and her nose. If she leaned back slowly, he wouldn’t know she was looking at him, and besides, his back was to her. Just a sliver she could see in front of her. His hunched-over shoulders, sort of shrunken looking; a thin, pale neck; tendrils of dark hair that were sweaty and clumped together, causing them to stick out like a bad wig. The only kind they could afford in the drama department at the college. At least from behind, nobody she remembered ever seeing before, despite him saying he’d seen her.
He reached up with the hand holding the can and narrated as he sprayed through two of his murals, his voice at the pressure point, just like the spray paint.
“One down, the Nemean Lion. Two down, the Lernaean Hydra.” Four long exhales of the aerosol, the metal ball inside the can rattling away, to keep the paint coming. Doing what, she didn’t know. “I hate to ruin my artwork, but you know what they say. You have to ‘kill your darlings.’ Just as he killed me.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
“‘What the fuck do you want with me?’ If that’s the last thing she ever hears from me . . . ”
I couldn’t let it go, as I sat at the dining table with Sig and Mizell, trying to make sense of the latest poem, which one of the cops has transcribed onto paper right after the call came in. This one was too long, too complicated, to keep it all in my head. There were too many moving parts to it, and I couldn’t afford to overlook any of them. Especially now that three and a half hours were gone out of the forty-eight he gave us, and we’d made no progress.
Three and a half hours, and I still couldn’t get out of my head what I had yelled at Skip. I wasn’t moving forward; I was completely stuck back there, more than three hours ago.
“You didn’t know it was her. You thought it was him calling back.” Sig was trying to make the best of a completely fucked situation.
“It doesn’t matter . . . it’s still what she’ll keep hearing in her ears . . . just like me . . . ”
“She’s alive. That’s all you need to know right now. She’s alive,” butted in Mizell. “We know that one thing we didn’t know before. Plus the FBI’s sending us one of their code guys now. Your TV appearance got their attention . . . ”
“I didn’t do it for that.”
“I know, but it worked. Whatever you did it for. But until they get here, you’ve got to figure out this poem. That’s your only job now. Labor number three. We know what it is, but where does he want you to go to do it? You’re the professor in the room, so start professing.” Mizell was no-nonsense now, barking out her orders to me.
I read it aloud, for the umpteenth time, thinking if I just kept saying it, over and over, I’d hear something different. I’d find the key to translating it.
So far so good, but you’re still in the wood.
The Arcadian Deer is next; where is in this text.
Tame the deer, don’t hurt the body,
To keep me from getting much more naughty . . .
That’s the part that stopped me, every time. My brain seized on that, and wouldn’t let go, just like the “What the fuck do you want with me?” that I’d screamed at Skip. “‘Much more naughty . . . ’ More. Does that mean he’s already been naughty? Oh my God, what has he done to her?”
“Here.” Mizell pointed at a section of the poem. “Focus.” Her skin looked ashy now, except for an almost bluish-purple tinge right under her eyes. Even against her dark complexion, I could see it along with a smattering of skin tags I hadn’t noticed before. She was as exhausted as the rest of us. She’d seen pictures of how this could turn out; she’d lived through something we hadn’t. Not yet. “You’re the only one who can do this part. You’re the only one smart enough. That’s what he’s counting on. He wants you to get it.”
“I can’t. I can’t stop thinking how I yelled . . . ”
“You want me to start yelling? Then yes you can.” She pulled her wig straight. “Let’s do it together. Play like you’re in class, and I’m one of your students. This Arcadian Deer thing. What the hell is that?”
“In the real Labor, Hercules has to capture a hind . . . ”
That exasperated look she gave me. “A really dumb student . . . ”
“A hind. It’s a female deer. But the one in this Labor . . . it’s special, with golden horns. The favorite of the goddess of hunting, Diana. But the trick is . . . Hercules can’t kill it. For once, the Labor’s about not killing. He’s already proved he could do that, with the lion. This one’s about his skill. His control. Getting so angry he could kill, but then stopping short of it. He’s got to outrun the deer. Capture it alive. Then bring it back. The kidnapper knows the Labors as well as I do.”
“I’ve got my guys on all your former students. The ones who’d know the Labors as well as you do.”
“But there are hundreds of them.”
Sig jumped in. “Not the ones who majored. Who went on to grad school. The really serious ones.”
“But whatever he wants you to do, it seems like it keeps coming back to the Olympics.” Mizell used one of her French
tips to stab at a phrase as she spoke. “It’s the first time he’s specifically referred to it. ‘If a mere two days seems unduly cold, it’s what you had to win the gold.’ Mark Casey. He threatened to kill you.”
“But I already told you,” I said, sick of going over it. “It can’t be him. He’s dead.”
“Yeah, it checks out. Four years ago,” Mizell answered back. “Suicide. But what if somebody killed him and made it look like suicide, then that same person took Skip . . . ”
“Slow down, Perry Mason. Nobody killed Casey except himself.” All the noise in the room stopped, even from the cop still working with the recording equipment. I didn’t think I’d said it that loud. I didn’t think I’d said it with such a sneer.
And Sig couldn’t resist adding in, “An asshole to the very end.”
“Well, if it can’t be Casey, then there are plenty of others you beat,” said Mizell, returning to her dead horse theory, which so far, was the only one we had.
“Yeah, but none of ’em threatened to kill me.”
Her cell phone rang; she answered. “Mizell here.”
As I heard her “uh hunhs” and “yes sirs” on the phone, I went back to the poem. That was my Rosetta stone for now. Translate it, and . . .
“Fuck.” With her cell phone in one hand, Mizell was poking around, moving papers on my desk, reading off the number on my fax machine to whoever was on the phone. My desk was piled high with papers to be graded and academic journals, now imprinted with indelible rings from the bottom of coffee cups. Those endless cups of coffee, helping me—and the police—make it through the night. All their heavy surveillance equipment, tape recorders, and call descramblers, plopped on top.
Mizell hung up. “The FBI. They’ve got their first hit.”
“What?” I hopped up to my crowded desk, where she was still standing, waiting for the fax.
“Fuck fuck fuck. Why the fuck didn’t I look at him earlier.” The muted whine of the printer on the fax started up, spitting out a sheet of paper, line by line; a face in pixels, coming alive.
A face I knew.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
It was another country, the Canaan gym, an ivy-covered building as grand and glorious as the chapel on campus, because they were both built in homage to something bigger: the ability of the body to transcend the mind and what it thought of as pain. They were places of worship and history, these old New England gyms, where boys became men and gloried in the call of brotherhood, the call of sportsmanship, where ghosts were still trapped from their earliest days in the 1850s. The fists that pounded punching bags. The thwack of ropes, interlaced with rhythmic, jumping feet. The smell of resin powder and leather gloves, liniment and sweat that had dripped off bodies and been ground into the floorboards for decades; it was all still there. The sounds from all those years ago trapped there: hits and grunts, falls on sparring mats that had lost their cushioning, water trickling down in old showers.
It was a strange refuge for someone as scrawny and ill-equipped, in every possible way, as TJ Markson. Pumping away on exercise equipment he could barely control, listening to an iPod through earplugs, it was as if TJ were learning another language by even stepping inside, a forgotten language. But it was the place TJ went when he wanted to hurt himself, when he wanted to remind himself of his teacher and what he’d set out to do to him. It was the place TJ went to remind himself of his father, the person he was doing it for. He didn’t need the ghosts of all the athletes who had come before to haunt him; the ghost of his father was never far away.
The image of him, hanging from that goal post.
TJ didn’t know if his father had meant for him to find his body, when he was just seventeen years old, his senior year in high school. That would remain one of the great mysteries of TJ’s life, and Mark Casey’s death. That would be the one little thing about his father that TJ was willing to give him a break on, that the discovery just might have been the worst bit of coincidence ever, like his father had always said the worst coincidence in his life was being on the same Olympic team as Ethan “Hercules” Holt.
That was the one great story of Mark Casey’s life; he repeated it to his son, every chance he got. He drank and repeated it. He ate hamburgers at the Dairy Queen or the Sonic and repeated it, as little Troy Jefferson Casey tried to hide his Illustrated Classic Comics in his lap and read them, while pretending to listen to his father. They had a lot of meals at the Dairy Queen and the Sonic, before his father would have to go off and find another job when he’d lost the one he just had, always thinking he was better than everyone else. Maybe that’s the one way father and son were so much alike; Troy couldn’t do sports, but he could be a little snob, reading Illustrated Classics at the Dairy Queen—eating a hamburger basket and tater tots, his hands gooey with ketchup and grease—and still thinking he was superior to everyone around him, even the adults. He got free parfait sundaes twice a year, when he’d bring in his straight A report cards, and from an early age he knew that living in the past and studying it was his way out of a life of hamburger baskets and a father who drank too much and yelled at him for not being strong enough.
Long after the Olympics, Mark Casey went running every night; he kept trying to relive his high school glory days, his Olympic days, from before he got sent home packing for using steroids. He always looked young—even after he’d been drinking for years, the booze didn’t make his face look old and broken; somehow, it kept him young looking. Preserved. Mark Casey liked being mistaken for the high school coach, or better yet, one of the players—although that didn’t happen much anymore. To feed his fantasy, Casey went running every night, wearing the same high school T-shirts and sweatshirts he still fit into. Sometimes, if he was in another mood, an uglier mood, he’d wear his USA Olympic gear.
Little Troy—high school Troy—always knew to brace for the worst, when his father wore that.
So that one night—back when he was just Troy Jefferson Casey, before he became TJ Markson, before death and confusion, anger and vengeance made him take on another identity—Troy went looking for his father at the high school football field, to bring him home. The only time his head ever came out of a book. His mother had given up doing it a long time ago.
At first, he thought it was one of the football players down on the field, at the goal post, maybe trying to do pull-ups on it, but not having much luck. The player seemed to be stuck, hanging on by one arm, like he’d gotten up there on a ladder but the ladder had fallen over and he was afraid to get down by himself.
A football player, afraid? Leave it alone, Troy thought; whenever he went out of his way to help someone, it always blew up in his face. Saying “good game” to one of the players—one of the players he had a crush on—got him knocked into a locker.
For just a second, he thought maybe he’d even caught the guy jerking off, out on the dark, lonely field. He knew how good it felt when he climbed up the metal pole in his backyard, the one his mother hung laundry on. The tingling he’d get in his groin, mixed in with the smell of the fresh laundry drying in the sun. Sheets flapping in the breeze, while Troy climbed the pole and did Kegel exercises. Maybe all boys knew that. Maybe that’s what the guy out on the field was doing: he seemed to be banging into the pole, again and again, like he was trying to fuck it.
“Hey, you okay?” Troy finally yelled, walking in the stands, as close to the goal post as he dared. As close as he could get without actually being out on the field itself.
The player banged into the pole some more, and now Troy saw that he was swinging from a rope. He didn’t think he had ever seen anything hang as heavily in his life; if ever anything illustrated the phrase “dead weight,” that was it.
No, that was his heart, because the hanging face suddenly twisted around and Troy saw that it was his father at the end of the rope, his father who could still look so convincingly like a high school football player, who wore the same workout clothes thirty other kids wore to school every day.
&n
bsp; “Daddy . . . Daddy . . . ” Troy didn’t know if he actually said the words aloud. Nobody else was there to tell him, or help him. None of the other boys ever used the word “Daddy” out loud, either.
He ran over the splintering, weather-beaten boards to the end of the football stand, then ran down the access ramp to the chain link fence that surrounded the field. He was up and over it like he hadn’t climbed since he was little. Over the slippery grass of the field that hadn’t been cut in weeks since the team wasn’t in season, that already had a thin coating of late night dew on it, enough to make Troy slide down on one knee before he could get there and . . .
And what? He didn’t know what to do.
He touched his father’s pant leg, and the body swirled around. Troy grabbed a ladder that had been knocked over and righted it and tried to tug at the rope, to loosen it around his father’s neck, but it was too tight. He couldn’t get a single finger wedged under it, to take off the pressure on his father’s neck; he wasn’t strong enough.
Hercules could have gotten him down. Ethan Holt could have done it. He was strong. Troy’s father had always told him that. Troy began researching and found out that his father’s greatest rival taught college just sixty miles away, while his father went from job to job, selling appliances or selling ads in the Penny Saver—working on commission and only getting paid for the ads he sold, and then working as a security guard, and then not working at all, except working out, and planning his big return to the Olympics, for justice, that would never happen.
Or maybe it would.
That’s when Troy started planning; that’s when he changed his name from Troy Jefferson Casey to TJ Markson.
Mark’s son.
Now TJ would find justice for his father, and he would build his body up to do it, in the very same place that Ethan Holt had once built up his very own body. He’d go to the gym and find if some sort of rage got set off there in the body, enough to propel him to take revenge, and hurt people. He didn’t care how long he took. He just knew that one day he’d find the right chance, and he wouldn’t be afraid to take it.