Shadow of the Lions

by Christopher Swann

  I gave up. Fritz was hiding, or he had run faster than I thought. I’d apologize to him later, somehow. We would fix this. It would be okay. So I tried to convince myself as I began walking, slowly, up the Hill and to the dorms.

  I DIDN’T APOLOGIZE TO Fritz that night. Not because I changed my mind or didn’t need to. I still need to, all these years later. I didn’t apologize to him because he wasn’t there to apologize to. No Fritz at dinner; no Fritz at study period. He was gone.

  By lights-out, the sheriff had been called. By the next morning, searchers were combing the campus—every building, every subbasement and attic, every shed and grove and hillside. We weren’t allowed to join in the search. Dr. Simmons, the headmaster, insisted that we continue with classes, maintain our routine. I think the sheriff probably didn’t want us involved, anyway, especially if—as the prevailing theory came to be at the time—Fritz had killed himself. No one wanted a student to stumble across a classmate’s corpse.

  It would have almost been better to find his body. Instead, Fritz ran into those woods and off the edge of the earth. Police and search-and-rescue groups descended on Blackburne, upending everything. In a way, it was almost exciting, except for the reason they were all there. I was questioned four separate times, including one painful time by Fritz’s father, who was almost unhinged with rage and grief. And it was all useless. Every lead, every possible trace, went nowhere. It was like Fritz had been deleted, erased. We didn’t even get the scant comfort of a funeral service. We grieved, sure. Boys cried; I was one of them. But at night, alone in my room—our room—for those last terrible weeks of school, it wasn’t grief that kept me awake until the deep hours of the night. Two feelings, each contradicting the other, swept through me. First, I was afraid that, because of what I had done and could not confess to doing, whatever gods there were had taken Fritz as punishment. But more than that, I felt jealousy, a bitter jealousy mixed with anger at the fact that Fritz had gone, without me. He had left me behind.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Years later, I stood again in front of the lions, hands in my pockets as I looked up at them, one defiant, the other coldly reserved. My car—a red Porsche Boxster, my last personal asset of any value—sat parked before the entrance, its driver’s side door flung open like an aimless wing. I could smell on the air the sharp tang of cow urine, like cider that has turned. The heat lay heavily on me, and my shirt clung to my back. Summers were always like this here, so warm and humid that you felt you would lie down and sleep forever come evening. But summer was ending, and it seemed as if everything—the trees, the fields, the sky itself—was pausing in anticipation, quietly gathering itself for the leap forward into autumn.

  I reached out and ran my hand across the snarling lion’s flank. It was rough and surprisingly cool to the touch. My fingers traced the lion’s tail, ran up to its mane. I touched an ear, avoided its smooth, perfect eyes, and paused, my finger barely pressing against the tip of a tooth. The lion did not budge. I removed my hand, took a last look at it and its one-eyed partner, and returned to my car. It was getting late, and Sam Hodges was expecting me.

  I drove between the lions and into the trees, winding my way slowly up the drive, and remembered something I’d learned as a student at Blackburne. The school’s founder, Colonel Harold “Harry” Blackburne, had planted these trees, mostly oaks, upon his resignation from the Army of Northern Virginia following Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. As I drove, I noticed how pristine the ground was for fifty yards on either side of the road. No virgin wood ever looked like this one, with mown lawns at the feet of the trees. It was a minor detail, but it reminded me of how attentive Blackburne was to appearances.

  Returning to a place from your past is unsettling. You expect to find the place altered somehow, different in some essential way. Many alumni who return to Blackburne say that the school hasn’t changed a bit, and they find comfort in this, a constant in the rapidly shifting, twenty-first-century world. Some, however, return to campus and look disturbed, as if searching for something they cannot find. I’d always rolled my eyes when I’d seen older men gaze wistfully at the oak trees on the Lawn or at the empty football field. It had seemed somehow pathetic. But now I understood why they had looked the way they had. The unchanging school had reminded them of how they had changed, and conjured in them sorrow at the loss of intangible things, innocence and youth and time.

  I’d lost all three in the nine years since I had graduated, and I’d lost more besides. Money, for one, a lot of it. A girl, too, Michele, a long-legged pouty blonde—a model, of course. She was poised to get her first magazine cover shoot, and I was a debut novelist with a starred review in Publishers Weekly. We careened through New York City like lost partygoers from one of Gatsby’s soirées, occupied with getting reservations at the hottest restaurants and being seen at the newest nightclubs and searching for the perfect designer-casual blazer—all the things that I thought were important in my new life as a Young Urban American Novelist. And after the fancy cocktails and the empty brushes with celebrity and the mounting bills and festering insecurities and the small, petty arguments with Michele that turned us into small, petty people, the one thing I’d had and could depend on—a talent for writing, one that had led to a well-received novel, a big advance for book two, and an even bigger payment for the film rights, which were now languishing in some Hollywood studio office—well, that talent had dried up, gone, vanished. It seemed like the most important things in my life vanished.

  Sam Hodges, the academic dean at Blackburne and my former advisor, had called me in New York a month before. I hadn’t spoken to him since graduating. But when I heard him on the phone saying, “Matthias, my boy!” I could see him as if he were standing in my cramped apartment: prematurely white hair, upturned nose, and the beginnings of a potbelly, all combining to make him look like a spry elf who had his eye on the reindeer and sleigh when Santa retired. Many boys, myself among them, had made the mistake of thinking that Mr. Hodges, with his bow tie and suspenders and jolly smile, was some sort of dim, amiable hick. We hadn’t made the same mistake twice.

  I couldn’t fathom why Sam Hodges would be calling me. And the reason was a genuine compliment. He told me the school had an unexpected opening in the English department—one teacher had gotten married and was moving to Atlanta, and the man they had hired to replace him had been diagnosed with cancer and had chosen to remain where he was in Milwaukee, leaving Blackburne with a spot to fill less than two months before the start of school. Sam Hodges said he’d read an interview with me in the Blackburne alumni magazine in which I was quoted as saying I would be taking some time off from writing. He asked me, if I was still taking time off, whether I would consider spending some of it teaching for a year at Blackburne.

  I remembered the interview, which I’d given the previous January, just a couple of months before my agent had dropped me and things with Michele had really started falling apart. I’d been tentative about doing the interview in the first place. It would be my first real connection with Blackburne since graduation, for one thing. For another, I worried about what the interview could reveal, as if I would be submitting to an interrogation. In the end, all it involved were some e-mail exchanges and one longish phone call with a woman in Blackburne’s alumni office. It wasn’t an investigative piece by any stretch of the imagination, but more of an overview of my writing career and a few standard questions about my novel and how I’d come to write it. And now Sam Hodges was offering me a job to teach at Blackburne. Jesus.

  If I hadn’t been desperate, I would have laughed at the irony. But there wasn’t anything left for me in New York, except a propensity for accumulating debt, both financial and emotional. There was no new novel coming, Michele was most definitely out of the picture, and I needed to get my shit together. I actually had some teaching experience, too—a couple of comp and lit courses while I was in grad school, nothing extensive, but I hadn’t been horrible at it. Also, at some level, I felt I ow
ed Blackburne. I’d grown up there, written my first fiction there. And I had turned my back on the place. I had not been to my five-year reunion, nor had I seen any of my classmates since graduation except for the handful that had gone to UVA with me, and even then I’d consciously avoided them as much as I could without being openly rude. I’d cut Blackburne off like pruning a blighted branch from a tree. And now I, the product of that school so dedicated to rigorously training its students to achieve success, had soared out into the wider world, briefly scaled the empyrean heights, and then plummeted to Earth. In short, I had failed. Perhaps by returning to Blackburne I could start over.

  Downshifting around the final turn before the edge of the wood, I almost didn’t see it in the fading daylight. But as the fields beyond became visible through a glimmering arch in the trees, I glimpsed movement among the gray trunks to my left. It was as if someone had suddenly shouted in my ear. Everything else fell away. I slammed on my brakes, my seat belt locking across my chest. Something next to a tree raised its head and gazed at me. I registered a long neck, a black nose, ears wide and alert above a pair of dark, cool eyes. I stared at it for a few heartbeats, and even as I thought the word deer it turned and leapt gracefully between two trees, then bounded away into the woods, its tail flashing into the dark.

  I let out a shuddering breath, and as I drew air into my lungs I felt a pang of anger so fierce that I had to squeeze my steering wheel. I told myself it was because I could have hit the deer, that I could have seriously damaged my car, or killed the deer, or me. After taking a couple of deep breaths and peering carefully into the trees on both sides of the drive, I drove on, finishing the final curve. I resisted the urge to glance in my rearview mirror.

  My car burst out from the protective cover of the trees onto the hard, flat playing fields. I slowed to bump gently over a speed trap, stopped briefly at the new security booth to give my name to the guard, a polite and efficient stranger, and then rolled on when the gate lifted. I cruised past the soccer goals, skeletal without their nets, and then the newly refurbished track that ringed the old football field. Next came the low field house with its roof proclaiming, in red and yellow paint, “Lions Number One!” While I had braced for it, seeing Blackburne after all that time was almost a physical shock, as if I were standing under a great bell that had just struck the hour. And then I saw up ahead, past the boxwood shrubs that lined the upper part of the drive, the gleaming white columns and Colonial brick of the Hill, and as I watched, the setting sun touched the front of the buildings with a departing glow, melting against the windows and setting them afire with a golden light.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Almost fourteen years earlier—half my life ago!—I’d stood in the center of my new room at Blackburne, holding a suitcase in each hand and staring around me in disbelief. The room was empty save for a bunk bed, two desks, a wooden dresser, a closet alcove with a single rail but no door, and a window that looked painted shut. The window was covered on the outside with mesh wire, presumably for security or to keep the glass from breaking. To me it looked like a cage.

  My father, hands in his pockets, was doing much the same thing as I was, but I could tell, even without looking at him, what he was thinking. His first words confirmed it: he was going to look at the bright side, find the silver lining. “Well, your roommate’s not here yet,” he said. “Looks like you get to choose which bunk you want.”

  I just looked at him. My parents were going to leave me here, abandon me in this cell, and my father was cheerfully offering a choice of beds. “Doesn’t matter,” I muttered.

  “Sure it does,” Dad insisted. “Bottom bunk’s easier—you don’t have to climb in and out of bed—but then you’ve got somebody sleeping on top of you, and you’re staring at the bottom of a mattress all night—”

  I tuned him out and continued to stare miserably around me. I couldn’t believe they’d talked me into this. “Blackburne will be a whole other world,” my mother had said. “You’ll have so many opportunities.” Words like opportunities and education and personal growth had floated around my house for months. My teachers had been highly impressed that I was applying to Blackburne. Even my small group of friends, who I thought—with a tinge of desperation—would miss me if I went to boarding school out of state, had started looking at me the way I imagine people who wait tables in L.A. look at one of their waiter buddies who finally lands a small TV role: with a combination of amazement, suspicion, and mute respect. All this had been wrapped up in the kind of mumbled good wishes fourteen-year-old boys give to one another. When I’d gotten my acceptance letter from Blackburne, I had thought, like an idiot, that this was a good idea.

  As my father listed the pros and cons of bunk beds, my mother unzipped my bags and started hanging shirts and pants in the closet. Dad was a pediatrician, much beloved by his patients back home in Asheville. Mom had been a nurse’s assistant and now managed my father’s practice. They were both good, decent people, obvious in their care and love for each other and for me, their only son. At fourteen, I thought they were completely mortifying. I even hated them a little, not just for threatening to drop me off here and drive away, but because, deep down, I loved them fiercely and was stunned to realize this as I stood in that room, imagining our good-byes.

  I probably would have started weeping, maybe even thrown myself onto the floor at their feet, pleading to go home with them, if my roommate hadn’t shown up just then. I was suddenly conscious of a tall, muscular boy standing in the doorway, his hair in cornrows and a tiny diamond stud in his left ear, a duffel bag slung over one arm. “Hey,” he said to me, jerking his chin up in greeting. “ ’S’up.”

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Guess we’re roomies, huh?”

  “I guess. Yeah.”

  He grinned, a warm, bright smile that lit up his face and even made the room a little less barren. “I’m Daryl,” he said.

  “Matthias.” We shook hands. I remembered my parents and introduced them. Then Daryl’s parents came in, tall and slim and dressed as if for church, his dad in a three-piece suit and his mom in a dress and hat. We shook hands all around. I remember being astonished once again at how easily my parents, especially my father, could talk to anyone. Daryl took the opportunity to ask if I cared which bunk I got, and when I shrugged, he tossed his duffel onto the bottom bunk. “Got to get up early for football workouts,” he explained. “Don’t want to be climbing down out of bed and waking you up, shaking the bed frame.”

  Eventually, our parents left. Daryl shook his father’s hand and then hugged his mother, telling them not to worry because he would be tearing up the place soon. He punched me on the arm when he said this, as if for emphasis, and I gave a sickly grin. I was too embarrassed to cry in front of Daryl, and a little in awe of him, so I screwed my face on tight and suffered my mother’s tears and my father’s proud smile. Daryl and I watched our parents drive off, their taillights flashing red as they neared a curve on the road around the Hill, and then their cars slipped around the curve and vanished. I cried into my pillow that night—fierce, silent, jagged sobs. If Daryl heard me, he didn’t say anything, for which I was grateful.

  It was our hall prefect, John Cole, who gave Daryl his nickname when he told him to take his diamond stud out. As a prefect, a member of the student-elected Judicial Board, John was in charge of our floor as a kind of resident advisor, or RA, making sure we woke up on time, made our beds, behaved somewhat better than caged animals, and went to sleep at lights-out. Our first week of school, he also talked to us about Blackburne’s honor code, which had been in existence since Colonel Blackburne began his school in 1876. My parents had sung high praise for the wonders of such a code of conduct, which, to me, seemed only to offer more reasons for which I could be expelled.

  That first week, John Cole took everyone on our floor outside onto the Lawn, where we sat in a ragged circle under one of the oak trees. John was from New Hampshire, and for that alone I held him in some respect,
having never been farther north than Virginia. John was fair-skinned with bright blue eyes and straight brown hair neatly parted to one side. If he’d worn glasses, he might have been pegged as a geek, but he was self-assured in the way only high school seniors can be. A wrestler, he also displayed a kind of monastic discipline, an economy of movement and expression that made him seem older and wiser than seventeen.

  When we had all sat down underneath the boughs of the oak tree, John asked us if we knew about the honor code. Dutifully, we murmured yes. We’d all been given a small white pamphlet outlining the honor code and the role of the Judicial Board. John nodded thoughtfully. “The honor code is the oldest institution here at Blackburne,” he said. “Older than some of these trees, probably. It has not changed since it was first implemented. Think about that. Over a hundred and twenty years.” He looked each of us in the eye as he said this last part. I glanced away, slightly embarrassed.

  “It hasn’t changed because it’s simple and it’s effective,” John said. “Don’t lie. Don’t cheat. Don’t steal. Don’t permit others to do those things, either. Simple.”

  Miles Camak raised his hand. “So, you just get kicked out if you do one of those things?” he asked.