Four Years from Home

Larry Enright

Copyright © 2010 by Larry Enright

All rights reserved. This material may not be reproduced, displayed, modified or distributed without the express prior written permission of the copyright holder. For permission, contact larryenright@rocketmail.com.

This is a work of fiction. So don’t get upset if you see your name mentioned. There are thousands of people with the same name as you. And if you think anything in this story is an incident from your past don’t be paranoid. It is not about you, really.

For Cicely, Dan, and Tom

Chapter 1

My name is King Thomas of Ryan, so crowned as firstborn of Daniel, Earl of Ryan and his consort, Helen, and ascendant to the royal throne upon my birth September 12th, 1946. My domain stretches from horizon to horizon, my power is absolute, my word law.

Load of crap, you say? Maybe… But as the firstborn child of five and male, I was special, and my parents, being allegedly of sound mind and body, recognized that. I was the culmination of their union, the be-all and end-all of their existence. I always got the biggest and best of everything, and as for whatever was left over? Well, that went to the others. Examples? Who got all the new clothes and who got the hand-me-downs? Who had the only complete baby photo album and who got maybe a couple dozen snapshots each? With me went the Ryans’ highest expectations, with them, only vague and unspoken hopes for the best.

The others — that's how I had always thought of them — they were an amorphous mass of humanity whose sole purpose was to annoy me. I had never asked for them, nor was there ever the slightest intimation on my part that I preferred some demeaning power-sharing arrangement to absolute rule in my kingdom. I was totally at ease with having two loyal and subservient subjects to do my bidding.

Life was so simple and so right. Life was good. When I was too young to talk, I would simply point and they would fetch. It was a thing of beauty that only got better when I was learning to speak. I could say anything from “goo, goo” to “uh, uh” and they would go to ludicrously extreme lengths to try and figure out exactly what I wanted. “Does Tommy want his bottle?” No, don’t you understand? I want that. “Does Tommy want his Clancy doll?” Poor Clancy, he deserved a Purple Heart for the wounds I inflicted on him. “Does Tommy want to play with his ball?” Bingo! Bring it here, Mom Servant. King Tom wants to take a shot at that lamp over there.

Yes, all was going famously. They seemed overjoyed with me at the center of their world, and I was definitely happy with the five-star service. That was why I was so surprised when Mary came along. First of all, I don’t recall ever granting my permission for her to enter my realm. And second, a sister? Why would anyone want a sister? A dog maybe, a bird possibly, a fish — that was a stretch — but a sister? Why would anyone want something that came with a built-in Guard-all shield? You don’t get it? Just try and hit a girl and you’ll see what I mean. Nowadays we’d call it an invisible force field, but back then, a Colgate metaphor was the best we could do.

Her appearance on the scene was so inexplicable an occurrence and so completely defied all logic that it took me a good ten minutes to figure it out. I had immediately ruled out an act of God since, after all, I was the only God in my universe. An act of the devil? I didn’t think so — I was also the devil in this world. Just ask my parents after I had made my true aspirations known at age two. No, she was clearly a mistake and, in my infinite mercy, I would allow my parents one mistake. After all, they were only human, and I had no choice.

But to my disappointment, the mistakes continued in Sam and then Kate. Royal pains in the butt they were, I being the royal and they the pains. Yet somehow I survived them and their various assaults on my authority. My shining armor bore no permanent dents. I was, after all, the future king of the Ryan family and my siblings would bow down before me. Or else…

Eventually, I came to enjoy having the others as indentured servants to do my bidding and, more importantly, to take the blame for my dirty work. I could easily bully my weakling sisters and get away with it (though I still had trouble hitting them) and Sam was not physically powerful enough yet to stand up to me. And they realized early on that their sheer numbers were no match for a real king. They knew that I could do whatever I pleased to them and get away with it. And the icing on the cake was that I could just as easily implicate them in whatever scheme I hatched, thus transferring the blame and punishment. I had perfected the "who me?" look quite early in life and had a long list of patented excuses which always worked like a charm. God, life was good then.

But then Harry came along on Christmas Day in 1950 and everything changed. With Harry it was different. My usual tactics didn’t work on him. Mom and Dad took his side in everything. Even my best-selling publication, The Book of Tom, A Field Manual of Dirty Tricks and Assigning Blame, was totally useless. It baffled me. Why was he any different than the others? I mean, I could push Mary down the steps, blame it on our blind cat and get away scot-free. But do the same thing to Harry? Dad would instantly produce the results of DNA testing (which didn’t even exist back then) along with a fingerprint analysis proving the culprit was me and boy would I get walloped. It was unbelievable how far Dad had advanced scientifically and technologically after Harry’s untimely birth.

In desperation, I enlisted the aid of Mary, negotiating a temporary non-aggression pact with her for her help in torturing Harry. Of course I never called it that to her face. I’m not stupid, you know. I called it “The Alphabet Bombing Campaign,” or “ABC” for short. I told her that it was all part of making sure Harry grew up to be smart; that we were really doing him a big favor teaching him the alphabet; that it was all part of the “big” picture. The part I left out was that the “big” picture was actually that now there would be two to share all blame, two for Mom and Dad to choose from when trying to figure out the intricacies of my grand scheme. We were golden, or so I thought.

It just shows how wrong royalty can be. I had developed intercontinental ballistic building block missiles that were effective at an incredible range. I called them ICBBBMs. They were the perfect weapon and left no evidence since the missile ended up where building blocks belonged anyway (in the playpen), leaving no trace of anything out of the ordinary. Any minor injuries caused could easily be explained with a lie-detector-proof “I guess he hit his head on something,” which was true in a manner of speaking – at least my manner of speaking. It was the perfect campaign.

Mary and I positioned ourselves within sight of Harry's playpen and commenced our vigorous and historic bombardment, scoring direct hit after direct hit. It was inspirational, fun, even educational, spelling out things like "Take that!" and "Bye bye, Harry" with a cleverly sequential barrage of wooden blocks.

Mom caught us in mid-victory. It wasn't because Harry was crying, which he wasn't. He was simply watching us and laughing, probably because we were such lousy shots. It was because Mom and Dad always seemed to be keeping a special eye out for Harry with their newly developed state of the art parental radar. They told me that he was a special child, a gift from God, and I had to learn to deal with that.

Oh, I dealt with it. I used every weapon in my arsenal to deal with it. But every dismal foray against Harry's impregnable position, even with reinforcements in the form of my conscripted siblings, turned out to be worthless. My best diversionary tactics, picked up from years of watching Combat! on TV were useless, making me wonder what Vic Morrow and Sergeant Saunders had that I didn't. All this led me to the inevitable, sinking feeling that I had been deposed.

But this is not about me. This is about Harry. Oh, I hated him all right. I hated the threat he represented to my world. I hated his lack of reaction to my attacks and his better-than-thou attitude. In short, I hated his guts. I was bent on his destruction. But my parents were right — there was something about Harry that was different, special; I just didn't realize it at the time.

It wasn't his sandy hair or his slightly crossed eyes or even his thin, bony frame or that stupid smile I couldn’t wipe off his face. It was his attitude about things, about everything. Nothing ever seemed to upset him. And believe me, if I couldn't upset his applecart, nobody could. I’m not bragging, but Mom didn't name me the "Holy Terror" for nothing. I remember when he was five, I covered him in cooking oil and chicken feathers and was busily tying him to the porch banister. I was all ready to run him out of town on a rail when I was caught by the parental torture-detector and summarily banished to my room to await further punishment from Dad. Even then Harry only smiled at me and laughed when he saw his tarred and feathered self in the mirror.

I joined a "gang" in fifth grade. Well, it might be more accurate to say I formed a gang in fifth grade. It consisted of every boy in my class who I could beat up. Harry was just starting first grade at Saint Catherine’s. As our collective initiation into the Gang of Seven, we ran Harry down on the playground, dragged him off under cover of a clever nun-diversion (which I devised, naturally), and buried him up to his neck in the dirt on the edge of Miller's field, telling him he would be resurrected if his faith were strong. He believed us and remained quietly entombed until Jean Mykita dimed us out to the principal, Sister Concepta, and she sent the goon squad to save him. I can now tell you just how hard the good Sister can hit one-handed with a belt and just how many nail heads there are on the floor of the sanctuary of the church. My friends and I had to polish every one of them to her liking while she walked among us preaching the gospel and taking her best shots.

As he grew, Harry became the shining star in our family. He was the smartest, the funniest, the most successful at everything he put his mind to. He was, hands down, the best. And when I finally gave up trying to kill him, I must admit I actually liked him. You see, I finally realized that he represented no threat at all to me since his success was of the non-material variety. I could rest easy on my laurels as the secular king of the family.

Of the five children, he was the one Mom and Dad saw as most likely to become a priest. In their Roman Catholic eyes, this was the highest calling for a young man and any material success was entirely secondary for one with “a vocation.” They would settle for material success for their other children. (Well, actually, for me they would have settled for my keeping out of prison, I think.) This, their Irish immigrant ethic looked upon as exemplary, having come from very little to a comfortable middle class life the hard way. But this was not the case for Harry. Harry was special, important. His life was their blessing, and for fifteen years it was just that.

Grandma Ryan always said that she saw "the light" in Harry's eyes, "the light" being the calling to become a priest. She was very old and very Irish and we could hardly understand a word she said, but we all respected her (and, more importantly, the back of her hand). After Sunday dinners at her house and a rousing game of Five Hundred, we would sit on the sofa while she talked on and on about God's calling and the "divil." Harry was the only one who really listened to her. Maybe he was the only one who understood her. I don't know. I had a hard enough time with Five hundred comprehending Grandma when she called out "hearts are the good ones." I never saw what was so good about them. But we could all see that Harry was destined to be a priest. This was the absolute highest calling a boy could aspire to, the dedication of one's life to God and the salvation of others, including me I guess. Mom and Dad prayed every night with us, and in their prayers, we all saw our futures. “God bless Tom (please, dear God, bless Tom) and Mary and Sam and Kate and give them all long, happy and successful lives. And God bless Harry and make him the holiest priest ever.”

I'm sure the words were not exactly like that. Years have a way of clouding the memories. But that is my recollection of it, and Harry did indeed grow in God's grace and gentleness throughout his years at Saint Catherine's. He went on retreats all the time, spent hours on end with the parish priests and nuns being disgustingly helpful, became an altar boy, and even spent a summer after sixth grade at a seminary to get himself acclimated. He did it all. It was nauseating. The nuns talked in stage whispers about the first saint to come out of Saint Catherine's and the girls idolized Harry to the point of making me want to puke. Of course this made the school bullies torture him relentlessly. I was in the ex-bully category by then, having graduated from grade school "bully cum laude." But I saw it all and Harry was totally oblivious to it. Ultimately, the decision was made that he would skip the eighth grade and go right into seminary, so seventh grade was to be his final, crowning year. That was the year Grandma Ryan died. That was the year she made him promise on her deathbed to become a priest. That was the year Harry changed.

I doubt if my parents realized it at first, but I knew. I still had quite an intelligence network in the parish even though I had moved on to high school, and I was the first to know that Harry was skipping daily mass and going to the park. And it wasn't like he was meeting a girl there. That I could understand completely. He would sit on a bench alone, seemingly enjoying the day — very weird for a seventh grader. He started doing that the week after Grandma's funeral. Then he started skipping Sunday mass, lying to Dad about having to serve an early service. Midway through seventh grade, Harry announced at the dinner table that he had changed his mind about going to seminary; that he wasn't ready for it; that he wanted to finish eighth grade at Saint Catherine's and go to South Catholic and maybe do seminary after that. That bombshell took weeks for my parents to come to grips with. Dad had Father Harkins, our Methuselahn pastor, talk to him. Mom had Sister Jean Lorette, his sixth grade teacher and most trusted confidante on matters of utter holiness and penmanship, talk to him. Both were usually quite influential with Harry but not this time. I even offered to come out of retirement and intimidate Harry into going. I told Dad I wouldn't even charge them for the service. Oddly enough, I think that is what finally did it for my folks and made them give it up. But it might also have been a major conference with a seminary counselor from Saint Anselm's. I never actually heard what went on in that meeting between Mom, Dad, Harry, and the priest, but when I asked Harry later, he just said that the priest understood about his calling and explained it to the folks. So seminary was pushed off for four years until high school graduation. I had an uneasy feeling about all that.

Mom eventually accepted this as just a little bump on the road less traveled. To her way of thinking, Harry was still destined for sainthood but, like Paul, had to endure some hardships along the way. (You know Paul, that guy who wrote all those indecipherable epistles in the Bible in a secret code unbreakable even by my Captain Midnight Decoder Ring?) And I could not agree with her more that South Catholic High School was a hardship, having endured more detentions with Mr. Baracco than I could count.

Dad, on the other hand, seemed to take it harder than Mom. He actually became friendlier with me after that, and we did things together without Harry there to bug me. I suppose desperation drives people to do crazier things, but I can't say that regaining some of my former stature with him was much of a plus. Dad and I had little in common at that point. I loved him but I was a deposed king and he a workaholic engineer. And being a junior in high school, I was more interested in girls and in making trouble than in baseball games and grabbing a bite to eat at the diner to talk about life.

The road less traveled became even bumpier after I left home for college. God, I was hell on my parents, even from hundreds of miles away. And Harry? Well Harry was now officially a fallen away Catholic. He traded in his clarinet for a guitar, spent all his free time teaching himself to play folk music, let his hair grow long, and began frequenting the coffee houses in Oakland and Shadyside — Pittsburgh's dreaded hippy districts of the sixties. He was never into drugs — I knew that for sure from my Pittsburgh-based spy organization — but he had definitely gone weird. To say that he had joined the fringes of society would have been a major understatement. Harry was out there, way out there.

So, it was no surprise to me when he chose the seminary-avoidance route again and applied to only one college — Kenyon — some non-sectarian place in the middle of Nowhere, Ohio, that I had never heard of. I mean, they had zero computers on campus, no mainframe, not even a mini-computer. Zero. Even in the late sixties that was a sign of a totally backward institution. Mom and Dad were crushed, absolutely devastated, and totally against it. I wanted to kill him for going back on his promise to go to seminary not only because he was threatening my rule by refusing to move quietly into the non-aggressive realm of the religious, but also because he really hurt Mom and Dad with this one, him and his damned independent thinking. What a jerk!

But Harry had received a full scholarship and was going. He wouldn't argue about it. There was no fighting, nothing to talk about. He simply said that this was the next step on his life's journey. Believe it or not, Dad even had me talk to him at one point toward the end of the summer after high school, right before he went away, but I confess that metaphysics has never been my strong suit. I freaked on him when he lost me in the distinction between rationalization and conceptualization, and that was that for my “talk.” To me there were good guys and bad guys, black and white, Vic Morrows and Sergeant Krugers. Harry simply couldn’t understand this at all.

When Harry left for school for his freshman year at Kenyon, he almost left without saying good-bye. I remember to this day the last thing he said to Mom and Dad. I know you're expecting something profound and flowery from the boy who cut his own path through life, but all he said was, "Don’t worry about me, Mom, Dad. I'll see you later. I love you." And that was that. He was gone.

For four years Harry never came home, and Mom and Dad never went to visit him. He wouldn’t let them and he always had some lame excuse for it. He rarely wrote, never called, and invariably found a job there over the breaks and summer vacations. His letters were overly formal typed, report card-like messages — “Got all As, very happy with classes, people are great, miss everyone…” Even I realized they were emotionless and not like Harry at all. He had transformed into someone so completely different that he was unrecognizable as Harry to any of us. No one spoke of him at the dinner table or wondered aloud how he was really doing or why he had changed. His picture disappeared from the living room mantle. It was as if he had ceased to exist, had never existed, that the shining star had in fact been but a passing comet lost in time and memory. It hurt Mom and Dad a lot, so much that even I realized it. It hurt everyone — except me. I didn’t care.

But enough of that… Me? Miracle of miracles, I was headed to grad school at M.I.T. My parents had tolerated well my rebellious years and apparently it paid off. I turned a corner my junior year, my ship came in, my star rose in the East, and the king was reborn. Actually, it wasn't quite that dramatic but I'll take what I can get.

I had lucked into getting partnered with Kelly Erickson for our junior honors Computer Science project at Pitt and we (well, actually she more than me, but who's keeping track?) invented "in concept" a punchcardless computer that would revolutionize the industry. All we had to do was build it. Kelly and I continued the project through our senior year and were both accepted at M.I.T. on full fellowship with the expectation that we would continue the grandiose plan, making us famous and them richer. So when Harry left, I left, too, though my departure was with far more fanfare, pomp, and circumstance.

But believe it or not, I somehow missed that boat, as big and unstoppable as it appeared, and ended up a designer for a board game company that was looking to the computer as the future of its business. They sent a recruiter to campus the first week of school, he found me, and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I accepted on the spot. All I had to do was work with them to develop games and my invention and get it patented before Kelly did the same at M.I.T. Piece of cake. I had their resources behind me and Kelly had nothing. No contest.

That was the last I saw of M.I.T. and it was good riddance — what a bunch of over-achieving dopes. I didn’t have to leave if I didn’t want to, though. I could have stayed and gotten my degree and enjoyed torturing the nerds. The company didn’t care. They would have paid for it. They just wanted the technology and the games. But it was better that I left then — it never sat well with Kelly that all our work had somehow been mysteriously lost in the move to M.I.T.

In one of those spur of the moment decisions, I made up my mind not to tell anyone in the family that I had left. After all, it was none of their business and it made for better dinner conversation. “Oh yes, Tom is at M.I.T., you know. He’s working on a fellowship with... What’s her name, Tom? Judy? Kelly? How is she doing anyway? Any future plans for you two?” It was just so much more convenient for them to think I was still there. Actually, the company told me I could work from anywhere as long as I kept in touch and fed them work on a regular basis. I could have set up shop in Hawaii, or Alaska, or even Nowhere, Ohio.

There had been so much snow the Christmas Eve of Harry's senior year that I was lucky I had gotten in several days before. My drive home had taken me twice as long as usual. The roads were a mess. The Pittsburgh airport had been shut down around midday and all flights canceled in and out. But the entire family had made it, well, everyone but Harry. We weren’t really expecting him, so it was no big deal, at least not for me. I had pretty much written him off and assumed everyone else had done the same. It was easier that way, less painful. Just forget about him.

The world had bigger problems. It was a real mess. Nixon had just been reelected in November, him and his stupid silent majority. I had voted for George McGovern. George was our only hope for getting us out of Vietnam. Nobody liked that war, not even me, and I’m not exactly a peacenik. Army was my favorite game to play and picking on other kids my favorite pastime. You’d think that going to war would be a perfect fit for me, but along with millions of other draft-age young men I desperately wanted us out of that war.

Everything seemed subdued to me on Christmas Eve. I guess it was the snow. There was a lot of staring out the windows at the wonder of a white Christmas by Mom and Dad, not much singing of carols (thank God), and plenty of punch and cookies. But the holiday warmed up Christmas morning with the traditional opening of presents and continued to build in spirit throughout the day. It was almost like old times. Sam opened a present that I promptly commandeered and broke accidently when he tried to get it back by putting me in a headlock. Kate mysteriously misplaced a bracelet that we later found dangling from the dining room chandelier. Just like old times.

We were at the dinner table Christmas night, laughing and joking about all the crazy things we had done on Christmases past, filling in the cracks with pumpkin pie and coffee when Kate started retelling a memory, “Remember when Harry…” She stopped; everyone stopped. But once the lid to the forbidden box had been opened, there was no going back. Pandora was out, Christmas was officially over and we all knew it.

Mom had begun clearing the dishes when the phone rang. Dad answered it in the kitchen with his usual, "Yallo." You have to elongate the first syllable to get the full effect of Dad’s patented greeting, something like “eeeeee-allo.”

None of us paid much attention to the conversation until we all heard him say "What? What did you say? Dear Lord…” He paused. I think he was crying, but Dad never cried. Mom stood frozen to the terrazzo floor with a stack of dishes in her hands. Kate was studying her in horror. Sam and Mary were looking at each other. I looked out the window. The snow was pounding on the window like a hammer… no, that was my heart racing.

“No, that will be fine. Tomorrow then… Yes, good-bye." We heard the click when he hung up the receiver and the creak of the third step as he headed upstairs to his bedroom. I had doctored that step myself to create the telltale creak so I would know when the enemy was approaching my bedroom. This came in very handy when I was shooting my BB rifle out the window at the neighbors. A chilling dismay spread across the room. The blue-white ice collecting on the windows as the snow melted and refroze on them bore the face of a cold, heartless death.

"Mom?" Kate whispered hoarsely.

She ignored the little brat and whispered, "Tom, make sure your father's all right." Mom set the dishes on the table, sat down and tried to take a sip of tea. Her cup rattled on the saucer. I made a mental note that this would make a great lie-detector test at some point. I would call it the “Rattling Cup” and copyright it.

Instinctively I wanted to respond, "Who elected me?" but for some odd reason I simply nodded and left the table. Even I, with my usual insensitivity, knew that something was really wrong — really wrong. My mind jumped at once to thoughts of death. After all, it was the Christmas season and that was usually when old relatives kicked the bucket. Maybe Great Aunt Nola had finally passed. She had to be at least a hundred. Or Uncle Bill — he had been battling cancer for years. It's amazing how many names of potential candidates can crowd into one small corner of your brain in those thirteen steps from the first floor to the second floor of the family split-level home. There’s probably a Guinness World Record for it. And the more names I filled my pea brain with, the less room it had for the dread we had all felt. The list grew until I knocked lightly on Dad's door and entered.

"Dad? You okay?"

He was sitting on his bed rummaging through an old Thom McAnn shoebox. He pulled a black and white photograph from the box and slowly ran his thumb over it. Physically I was there in that time and place with him, but when I glanced at the photo I was suddenly eleven years old again and was standing beside Harry in front of our house on Gaylord Avenue. The six-year-old Harry was holding a leg brace bravely in one hand, staring stoically at the camera. I was smiling and packing a snowball to throw at Dad when he was done taking the picture.

Harry had just come back from the hospital with Dad after the doctors removed his brace — the last vestiges of his yearlong bout with a broken leg. When he was five, Harry's leg had been crushed under a car when the wagon he had been riding in hit a bump and flew into the street, putting him directly in the car's path. But after one year and three operations and months in the hospital, he had triumphed. Even I had to admit, it took a lot of guts for a kid his age to pull through that ordeal.

"He was so brave..." Dad's voice trailed off.

"He wrecked my wagon," I answered angrily, without thinking, realizing I had just replayed my eleven-year-old response when I had seen my Radio Flyer in pieces on the pavement, totally oblivious to my brother lying under the car screaming.

Dad looked up at me, his eyes glistening with moisture. A faint smile crossed his face. "Yes, I remember that. You weren't a happy camper for the longest time."

Something I had not remembered in years came back, "And that story you made up about it being insured and not to worry — that was a good one.” He had replaced the wagon a week after Harry’s accident. That sort of made it right, but it was not the same.

"You were such a damn brat, Tom. I knew you'd be whining for weeks if I didn’t get you another wagon. And I didn’t want you to feel bad about your overreacting." Dad's voice softened. I could barely hear him. "But, you turned out okay. You're a good boy, Tom. A good man... And I'm proud of you." His gaze returned to the photo and he kissed it lovingly. This was one of those awkward moments normally requiring an appropriate response from me, something attributing all my success to him, but he gave me no opportunity to reply. He was crying. Dad never cried.

"Dad?" I sat beside him and surprised myself — I put my arm around him. It was then that I noticed that the shoebox was full of photos. The box lid, which lay on the floor, had one word written on it in red magic marker: "Harry." My journey into the forbidden reaches of Mom and Dad's bedroom was always one of revelations and here was yet another. Harry had not ceased to exist these past four years. He had merely been put away in Mom and Dad's closet into a shoebox to be brought back at the appropriate time, that time when he would be returning to the family. And that time was now. The phone call — it had been Harry.

"Dad? Is Harry coming home for Christmas?" I asked, certain then that Dad's tears were of joy. I had only ever seen my Dad cry once before, and only then for a moment, when I broke his arm playing touch football by cruelly piling on him after he had slipped, so I was not really experienced at the nuances of fatherly tears. But that would explain the phone call, the shoebox, the tears, and the joy at his favorite prodigal son finally returning to the fold. I immediately began devising a plan to ruin the homecoming.

"Yes, Tom. Harry's coming home." He didn't sound overly happy. Parents were such odd creatures.

"That's great! I'll tell the others. If you want to take a nap, I'll wake you later when we have the punch and cookies, okay?"

I had work to do before Harry got home. I got up to leave but Dad grabbed my arm. "Wait," he rasped. "There's something I want you to tell everyone and then, yes, I will lie down for a bit."

"I know, Harry's coming home; roll out the red carpet. When, anyway? Probably not till after Christmas with this snow and all unless he's already in town. Harry's in town, Dad?" My excitement grew and I realized that I, too, might have missed Harry these last four years. He was a part of the family whether he wanted to be or not, and that made him a part of me. His leaving had just been a phase in his growing up, a phase which none of the other children fully understood, but one which we all tacitly accepted. I was still going to ruin his homecoming. Something smelly perhaps… "Is he at the train station? If the streetcars are still running, he can be here in a few hours. He can still make it for Christmas."

"Stop!” Dad didn’t yell often, but when he did it commanded attention and obedience. I’d worked hard on mimicking that technique, but in the end it was easier for me to use deception and cleverness to get my way.

“Harry's dead, Tom. That's what you have to tell them. He's dead.” He said it as if it were just sinking in for him, too. “They just phoned from school. He had an accident or something at the college and was killed. I... I don't remember any more except that someone is coming here tomorrow. Please, just tell them. I don't think I can face them right now." Dad lay back on the bed, dropping the shoebox to the floor, and rolling onto his side to face the wall.

I left him sobbing in the dark room and walked back down those thirteen interminable steps to the first floor. I didn't want to be the one to face the others. I didn't want to be anywhere near the others. A part of me, a part of my life, had just been ripped out of my scrapbook, crumpled up and thrown in the trash. I was at once angry and despairing, sad and afraid. How dare you run off like that and die without saying good-bye? Oh God, Harry, I miss you. What will happen to Mom and Dad? You bastard! Do you really think Kate will understand? She's too young, too vulnerable. Please, God, make it all a lie, an ugly horrible lie, and make Harry come home alive and well.

By the thirteenth step I realized I had been praying. I can't remember the last time I prayed, or if I ever really had prayed and meant it, but I meant it then. And I felt ashamed. All those years of shunning God and religion and now, like some damned hypocrite, I was praying like the kid who had just been told that the world was ending tomorrow unless we all repented. I stopped at the bottom of the steps and cleared my throat, tried to clear my head, and walked quietly into the dining room and took my seat.

Mom took my hand, saying nothing, looking at me quietly. It was that look. I remembered it from that time when I was in eighth grade and had been caught throwing snowballs at cars on Connor Road. We had just nailed our second victim when our neighbor Mr. Welty walked up behind us and marched the four of us to his car and, one by one, dropped us off at our homes. I don't know what he told the other parents but the only thing he said to Mom was, "Hello, Helen. Tom here has something to tell you about what he has been doing."

Mom took me into the kitchen and sat me down and held my hand in just the way she was now, waiting for me to confess to my crime. Total denial was out of the question — Mr. Welty was too reliable a witness. Coercion by the others? Not a likely tack. Mom would see right through that one. Temporary insanity? I had seen that one in action on a Perry Mason episode, but I was sure she had seen the same show. We all used to watch Perry Mason together, even Harry. No, there was no getting around it. The only safe plan was the truth. I lied most of the time anyway, so maybe she wouldn't believe the truth and I would then counter with a superbly concocted, believable lie. If she checked with Mr. Welty, I could always then claim that she didn't believe me when I told the truth, so I resorted to the next best thing.

“Dad got a call from Harry's school.” I couldn't get another word out. It was just like the time Nicky Amendola had grabbed me by the throat in the locker room after Saint Catherine’s grade school basketball team had gotten trounced again by Saint Bernard's. He threatened to stuff me in my gym bag if I ever showed my face anywhere near him. I wanted to protest that I wasn't the only one who had missed every shot he took, that just because he, Nicky, had made our only four points in our twenty four to four loss didn’t make him the only kid worthy of playing. I wanted to reason with him and explain to the big thug that he couldn’t be a one-man team, but he was crushing my windpipe and all I could do was grunt and nod assent.

Mom saw the tears welling in my eyes and my flushed face. My hands trembled. I fought back a desire to up and quit just like I had quit the grade school basketball team in eighth grade rather than spend the rest of my life in a gym bag. I have absolutely no idea how she knew, but she knew.

All Mom said was, “Oh my Harry, dear God, not my Harry.” She covered her mouth with her hands and began to sob, then cry. My heart broke. For the first time in my life I clearly saw the pain my mother had endured and the heartache, and the deep love she felt for my brother. But, more importantly, when her eyes met mine, I saw that she loved me, too. She'd always loved me. I was just too blockheaded to see it.

Chapter 2

We stayed up most of the night, which was not unusual for us on Christmas. When we were younger, we'd play with our toys and Mom and Dad would sit together on the sofa watching us, trying to figure out who would be the first to break one and start crying. I think they had some sort of bawl-o-meter to measure the degree of brokenness versus decibel level and thereby judge the winner. Funny how I never won that contest, but then I was always the breaker, not the breakee.

Mom always made our favorite punch of grape juice and ginger ale. And Dad would get out his old violin and scratch out all eighteen verses of Tura-lura-lura, the Irish sandpaper ballad that made my hair stand on end. I know you know what I’m talking about. They used to play it in the Irish Concentration Camps to educate those who doubted that Saint Patrick drove out all the snakes from Ireland. Saint Patrick had a fiddle too. And we never had a snake problem at our house.

Playing the board game Risk was one of the things we always did. Always — it was a Ryan tradition. Every year, after we’d all outgrown our urges to eat the shiny dice and the pretty game pieces, we would drag out that time-honored game of global conquest, set it up on the dining room table, and settle in with our cookies and punch to begin the epic fighting and arguing.

Sam always holed up in Japan, building his forces up for one massive sweep across Asia. I called this the “Kamikaze” strategy since it invariably never worked for him but did have the effect of softening up Asia for my onslaught. Mary insisted on controlling the United States regardless of the losses involved. After all, she could not let such famous landmarks as the Washington Monument, Mount Rushmore, and Hollywood Boulevard fall into the wrong hands. I called this the “Stupid Landmark” strategy since it involved protecting positions that were useless and indefensible. Kate had very little interest in the game and didn't care where she was, usually winding up in the totally indefensible Europe. She would have been the first eliminated from the game every year had she not been the baby of the family, not in age, but in maturity level. I never had a term for her crybaby strategy since she apparently had none. Harry invariably went for Australia. His was the “Hide Out” strategy — hide out in Australia and let the world destroy itself while he watched from the safety of his four-marker stronghold. He never attacked anyone and no one dared attack him because there was only one way in and one way out. He just built up his forces and watched.

And me? I always took Africa, the birthplace of civilization, my civilization. From there I could strike out at South America, Europe, or Asia. South America was always unclaimed territory and therefore an easy conquest and usually my first target. Then came North America. Boy, did that make Mary mad.

“Why do you always attack me first?” She would predictably fume when I threw her pieces into the box as I easily overran her. “You jerk. Let me arrange them neatly. I want my dignity in defeat.”

I never quite understood her point. But her response was always so predictable. She would quietly get Sam’s attention and nod to him to meet her in the living room. There they would conspire against me while I made rude gestures that kept Harry and Kate in stitches. When they returned, Sam would announce to the world that the time had come for his hordes to sweep the world clean of evil and his march across Asia would begin. Things would always seem desperate for me as Sam’s forces pounded their way into Africa and took my home continent, bringing Mary’s triumphantly wagging tongue into my face. Once he even got as far as North America before running out of men. But his defeat was inevitable. You see, I had attrition and numbers on my side. He had to leave at least one marker in each conquered country, and all I had to do was bump off a few along the way until he ran out of men. You’d think he’d never had a day of math. I mean, I slept through most of math, and even I could count how many men I had and just how many countries I would need to take to wipe someone out. Plus, I had my secret weapon — I always held back a matched set of Risk cards until the right moment when I would play them and recover a zillion men to thoroughly erase Sam and his minions. Every year it was the same. You’d think they’d remember. They didn’t.

That invariably left Harry and me, and I owned the entire world except for Australia. But usually by then everyone was tired and we called it a night without a resolution except to say that I won. I always won — just ask me. Or at least I would have won had we fought it out. Except that one time I actually did attack him. I forget why — he probably pissed me off, or more likely Sam and Mary pissed me off. For some odd reason, I was losing way more guys than him and I knew he was going to beat me. I had him three or four to one and still he held fast to his Australian hideout. That was the one time in a Risk game that I used Plan B. Plan B was my fallback plan in any game where I knew the outcome would be my defeat. It involved a clever, fully deniable tipping over of the board so that no one could ever get it back together again. Thus, I could not lose. I didn’t win, but at least I didn’t lose. I was always so good at games.

What a stupid game, but it was a family tradition that none of us dared break. It was the glue that held us together each Christmas night; this Christmas night too. After Mom went upstairs to be with Dad, Sam brought out the Risk game and we mechanically set it up. Kate set a place for Harry. Well, it was an empty chair, but we all knew it was for Harry. Talk about morbid… She arranged his cards neatly and, after passing a knowing look around the table like the one who is holding the Old Maid but wants you to think she isn’t, set his blue men up in Australia. When the board was arranged with all of our forces we sat and stared at it for an eternity. I took the dice, pulled my first three red pieces from my clear plastic tray, and fingered them thoughtfully. It was the first time I can remember that none of the others claimed the right to go first. Still the king after all these years… I decided to pounce on Madagascar and work my way north.

"I don't understand why Harry always wanted Australia," Kate whispered. "What's so special about Australia?"

“He didn’t like to fight so he picked the one place no one wanted to be in. He wasn’t exactly a brilliant tactician, you know.” That was easy.

Sam challenged me with a glare. "It only has one way in and one way out. It has a tactical defensive advantage. And there’s nothing wrong with that, is there?”

“And I guess you would know, being the five star general that you are. Remind me again when the last time you won this game was?”

“The last time you didn’t cheat.”

“Sounds like sour grapes to me there bucky.” I always enjoyed a good argument.

Good old Mary, though — she should have been a bomb technician. She really knew how to diffuse a family disagreement with inanity. Maybe she was smarter than I gave her credit for.

"There are too many poisonous snakes in Australia," she shook her head in a way that actually made me think she was being thoughtful. "I could never live in a place like that. I'd much rather be in the United States. Far more civilized…"

"It's just a game, stupid," I said without thinking. I usually led with my mouth — not always the best plan, but it was one I generally employed. I made a note to think about alternatives in the future.

I guess my expression was one of apology after that for Mary just smiled and said, "It's okay, Tommy."

Why was I always so quick to be nasty? Was it all those years of training as a child terrorist? Or maybe it was something I’d picked up from the Finnerty boys. They had been my gang idols when I was ten. I wondered if they could surgically install a zipper on my mouth and then almost immediately wondered why in the world I had wondered such a stupid idea.

“But it was always the same. Why did it always have to be the same?” Kate was crying. “Why can’t it be the same again?”

And that was a typical Kate-ism — a mashing together of several thoughts into a compound utterance that left you sorting through pronouns and doing mental fill-in-the-blanks to insert all the missing words and phrases just to make her statement actually make sense. I was usually pretty good at it, but my mind was tired so I gave up and took her hand and patted it — something I remembered seeing old Grandma Ryan do when she was trying to console Kate after I had done something particularly mean to her.

But I had no clue what to say, since I never understood much of what Grandma Ryan ever said in her thick, Irish brogue. When she lectured me I just usually grinned at her and nodded, hoping she would give up and go away, that I would not get to hear her famous words, “Woipe dat smoile offn yer foice, Tommy me boyo,” before she smacked me. That was an Irish dialect that even I understood. But what do you say when your family’s life has been torn apart and a piece of it thrown in the trash? I considered a Plan B but tossed that idea aside summarily.

Sam squirmed in his chair. "Did they say what happened, Tom?"

I just shook my head.

"Well, who was it that called?"

"I don't know, Sam. It wasn’t me on the phone, remember?” I always enjoyed making Sam feel stupid. “I can only tell you what Dad told me."

Mary began to cry, too. "It's not fair. Harry would never do anything to hurt anyone. He doesn’t deserve to die. It’s just not fair.” Mary was always so air-headedly mathematical in her assessment of things. To her, everything could be put on a scale and weighed to determine right or wrong, better or worse, stylish or dorky. She had a lot to learn about things. I made a note to give her a lesson in life someday when I had nothing better to do. ”I don't want Harry to be dead, even if he didn’t like us anymore.”

Kate stopped crying long enough to scream at her, “He liked us. He loved us!”

“He sure didn’t act like it.”

Mary was right, but this was going nowhere and I wanted to be somewhere else. It was giving me a headache. “If you ask me, he dumped us,” I said.

The dice would push this morbid discussion along. There was an inevitability and momentum in every turn-based game that served to keep people moving along during even the dullest of conversations. That’s why people played games — not to win, not to do something inherently interesting or wonderful, but to pass the time without getting stuck on any particular, depressing moment in their lives. That was my theory in designing them, and that’s why I was successful. I could design a game whose objective was to trim fifty nose hairs without cutting yourself and make it a winner. Wild Bill Striker, my sophomore high school history and health teacher and basketball coach, knew all about that. And yes, I was able to continue playing basketball after grade school — Nicky Amendola mysteriously never made it to my high school — something about his grades being too low. One day Wild Bill spent an hour showing us the proper way to trim nose hairs. The demonstration was given during our final exam in history — while we took his test, he trimmed his nose hairs.

I rolled three sixes and impatiently motioned to Mary, who currently owned Madagascar. Not for long…

Sam’s face was red and he blurted out something that I would have pounded him for when we were younger, but he was bigger than me now. “Shut up, Tom. He didn’t dump us. It’s just something he’s going through.”

Before I could launch my return salvo, Kate whispered, staring at the Risk board, “He shouldn’t have died. If anyone should have died it's..." She looked up. Her voice trailed off as our eyes met.

"Me? It should have been me?" I was, after all, voted by my high school class the most likely to be dead by twenty. And I was certainly the most paranoid of the Ryans. And I suppose they all had reasons to want me dead. I had a few myself actually.

"I didn't mean that, Tommy. I meant old people. Old people. He was just a kid.”

Sam was positively furious. “But Mom and Dad are old. I don't want them to die, do you? I don't want anyone to die."

Stupid Sam. Everyone dies, but it did seem like Harry had been cheated out of his life. And it was a major bummer that we all had to die someday. Did it make a difference when? I know I didn’t want to die, but did it really make any difference? Fortunately, scary thoughts like that never lasted more than momentarily for me, and this one was long gone and forgotten when I changed the subject. "Do you guys remember when we set up that war in the side yard? D-Day. Remember?"

Sam remembered. "The one with all the ships and the model planes and the armies on the beaches in the woods? You got in so much trouble for lighting that Flying Tiger on fire and crashing it into your battleship. That was classic." He laughed. Sam always laughed when I got in trouble.

Oh well, I guess after all those years of domination by King Tom he deserved a laugh once in a while. I made a note to get him back for that later. "Harry and I were the allies attacking the beaches, and Mary and Kate were the Germans. And setting that plane on fire was Harry’s idea, not mine."

“But it was you that covered it all with glue so it would explode into flames. And as I recall it was Harry who had no hair on his right hand for a month after that.”

And all this time I had thought I’d successfully laid the blame on Harry for that one. “Yeah, well…”

"I didn't want to be the Germans. I wanted to be the French. I just love French bread and I absolutely loathe sauerkraut." We all laughed at Mary’s feigned pouting. It felt good to laugh. Why do people laugh when something has gone wrong? Is it because there isn’t much else to do but cry?

"Someone has to be the bad guys. How can you have good guys without bad guys?" One of my more cosmic statements. I fingered my little red men sitting idly in East Africa, an amorphous section of the Risk continent that doesn't show on any real map. I wondered if perhaps the Risk map were drawn long ago when the political makeup of Africa was different. I really should have listened to Miss Melluci during geography class in fifth grade instead of staring at Bonnie Shoedel.

"Harry was always a good guy," Kate said softly. “It never made sense for him to be anyone else.”

Harry was no saint. That I knew. But for once, I stifled my comeback. What was the point?

"He sure was," Sam nodded. "I wish he hadn't left home like that. Four years is a long time."

Kate’s look turned quizzical. That always spelled trouble. "Tom?"

"Yeah?" I smiled. Kate was such a sweet person. She was growing up into quite a pretty girl too, so seemingly naïve yet so insightful. Her long reddish hair gave her an air of devilishness that her innocent manner belied. Kelly Erickson was a lot like her. I guess that’s why Kelly and I had hit it off so well. Too bad I was such a hardcore jerk. We might still be together. Oh well.

"If there has to be a bad guy to have good guys, who is the bad guy who killed Harry?"

“Huh?” It took me a second to follow her line of thought, but she was drawing a conclusion from my statements about good and bad guys. Thinking that the things I said always made sense was a big mistake, but I didn’t let on. It was too important a tactic for me to give up. Confusion enhances the fog of war and that gives me the strategic advantage. You would expect no less of a king. "They said it was an accident, Kate."

"Harry didn't have accidents," Sam cut in. "He said himself there are no accidents, only people who cause things that we call accidents."

"That's stupid, Sam. Everyone has accidents."

"Are you saying Harry was stupid?" Sam rose from his chair. I could see I'd ticked him off. Over the years he had grown much bigger than me and beyond my ability to physically dominate or intimidate him. He could have picked me up and thrown me across the room if he wanted to, but I'd never let him know that. I’d have to fight dirty if he came at me. That was my only hope. I’d kick him in the nuts. I decided not to get up — that would be a response to his challenge. I’d play it cool for the time being.

"No, all I'm saying is that I think he was wrong. There are accidents. Shit happens. Like that time Kenny Alpern and Ben Philips beat up Harry down by the streetcar stop. It was dark and they thought he was me. That was an accident, a case of mistaken identity. After all, lots of people who don’t know us get us mixed up, ever since high school." Actually, the nuns at Saint Catherine’s thought I was Harry’s evil twin, but it didn’t seem right to mention that just then. We did look pretty much alike. Change the haircut a little, lose a little weight, and we could easily be twins to the unknowing.

Sam sat down again. “They’ll never get us confused, I can tell you that.”

My fists relaxed. The imminent threat had passed. But that did not stop me from taunting him. “Guess not, Beanpole.” Sam was probably six foot three. I was five ten, well five ten and a half if I stood up straight.

“Midget.”

“Dork.”

“Look, Tom, everyone knows you egged those two on and then dared them to meet you at the streetcar stop that night. And Harry told me you’d asked him to take your paper route that evening ‘cause you weren’t feeling well. You knew they would be there. You set him up.”

“Prove it.” How did he know that? I thought I had been particularly clever about that one. “Those were lies spread by my enemies.”

“How about I flatten your face?”

Ouch, that would hurt. “Unlikely.”

“Stop it, you two!” Mary yelled.

Sam looked directly at Mary, his anger silencing her. That was new. I knew they had always been close — a bond developed from when it was them against me — but I hadn’t realized that Sam was the one in command. I had always thought it was just another failed power-sharing alliance. I would have to reevaluate my tactics with the change in fortunes of war.

The stiff tenseness in Sam’s jaw created by his anger was also something I’d never noticed before. I guess I had been away too long myself. His words focused his rage on me. “All I’m saying is that I agree with Harry. Things just don’t happen. Not important things. They happen for a reason. Someone or something causes them. And Harry has never had an accident when it came to something that mattered. Never.”

Kate traced the boundaries of Harry’s holdings on the Risk board with her finger. “That’s why he always played Australia. He avoided trouble. He avoided accidents and people who caused them. He wasn’t stupid and he wasn’t reckless.”

It was true. Harry did have a way of staying out of the line of fire, of laying low. I wondered momentarily myself how he could have had such a drastic accident. But in the spirit of never admitting I was wrong I went back to my argument that accidents happen. “What about when he was run over by that car?” I had to vindicate myself somehow.

“He was only five.” Mary’s glance was withering. For one weaker than me, it would have been devastating. “And you shouldn’t have lent him your wagon.”

My palms were moist. I put my hands in my lap. Mary’s was, of course, a totally unfair assessment of what had happened when Harry stole my wagon and tried to ride it down Gaylord Avenue. He couldn’t control it when he hit the curb crossing the alley and was thrown into the street and under the wheel of a car. It was six months and three operations on his leg before he came home. I had seen him take my Radio Flyer and head for the sidewalk. I could have stopped him, but I knew he would crash and I wanted to teach him a lesson. I just didn’t think he would crash into a car. “That was an accident.”

“Caused by you.”

I felt myself being cornered, accused, on trial. This was not unusual for me, but for some reason I was happy playing the role of the child criminal, for now we had someone to take out our combined frustrations on, someone to vent on. I was a hero of sorts, actually. I was saving us all from breaking down and crying over the loss of Harry. That realization made it easier for me to continue. “Look, what do you want me to say?” I don’t believe in E.S.P. or predestination. Never have. But I knew what was coming. I welcomed it, because I believed it, too, despite my words. We all believed it now.

Kate’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Say that you agree that something happened to Harry on purpose. That it was no accident. Say it.”

“Someone’s supposed to be here tomorrow to tell us what happened.” The Tom from long ago would not let me admit I was fighting the truth. Harry had met with some evil — we all knew it. It was just that none of us could understand why, not even me.

Sam replied, “Yeah, right.” We all laughed. He could make the funniest faces. His look could also be deadly serious. “They’re predicting another storm and it’s a three-hour drive from Kenyon on a good day. No one’s coming tomorrow or any time soon.”

“We should at least wait and see.” Kate could be so sensible when she wanted to, but she turned it on and off like a spigot.

So could I. “Okay then, how about we say I won the game like I always do, and we can call it a night?” I started to clean up the game and, one by one, we all put our cards and pieces away until all that was left were Harry’s blue men in Australia. Something held me back, held us all back from touching those sacred little blocks of painted wood. The shared smile of the four of us at that moment will remain with me always as a memory that we actually could function as a family when we put our minds to it.

I have to tell you that, even though I usually have no trouble at all getting to sleep, I slept very little that Christmas night. No visions of sugarplums, no Dasher, no Dancer… My favorite toy had been broken, and I was plotting revenge on the one who had broken it. No, I’m not crazy. I just found it easier to think of Harry’s death in a more impersonal way. He was such an idealist, such a fool, such a great guy. And putting it in the context of something I understood — paybacks — made it somehow more palatable.

Frankie Marx — now there was a kid deserving of paybacks. And I got him. I got him good. Every day he would do something obnoxious, something to get me in trouble. I was in marching band with him my freshman year at South. Every morning we would practice before school and every morning I would be late for homeroom. I had a good excuse — most everyone in the band was a few minutes late for homeroom.

But not Frankie. No, not that brown-noser. He would run (something which I could have gotten him in trouble for, but that was too easy) from band to Brother Henry’s homeroom just to be on time. Since I was the only other boy in Brother Henry’s homeroom who was in the band, I was of course dead. Frankie can make it. Why can’t you? Frankie has no problem being on time, why do you? Frankie’s a brown-nosing little wiener, why aren’t you? Yes, I made that last part up. Brother Henry would never say that out loud, but I knew in his heart that he felt it and used it against me. He was known school-wide as a cruel and heartless person who took every opportunity to punish students. I admired him for that, even thought of him as a perfect candidate to head up the secret police in my kingdom. Every morning he made me do deep knee bends in the back of the room for being late, often holding a textbook in each hand, arms stretched out at my sides. God, that was painful. My only comfort in those painful minutes was the knowledge that I would get Frankie back someday.

For years I plotted against him, chalking up many minor victories, but it was not until our senior year that I finally scored the big one. It was graduation night and the school had booked the Civic Arena in Pittsburgh. We all went by bus from South Catholic, dressed in our caps and gowns. It was a long ride and a warm, June evening. It was stuffy in the smelly, old school bus. I was feeling good, having taken a nap during the afternoon rehearsal, but Frankie had spent a grueling day in front of the school’s television cameras practicing his speech. He was the class valedictorian, a.k.a., biggest brown-noser in the school. From the seat behind, I could see his head nodding. I always sat behind him just in case an opportunity arose, and this was just such an opportunity.

God, Super Glue is a wonderful thing — one of modern man’s most significant inventions. Anything can be glued with it: wood, metal, glass, paper, and, yes, even hair. I calculated the angle of deflection (a physics term for determining which way his head would bob) and the prevailing winds (there being none), pretended to look out the window at the river, and applied a liberal amount of glue to the seat back. I remember how he rubbed his nose slightly at the irritating smell of the glue as the right side of his head met the seat with a soft squish, but that was quickly replaced by a blissful smile as he nodded off to sleep again, dreaming no doubt of his wonderfully important and meaningful speech. All that remained was for me to sit back and close my eyes. No one usually sat with me on school trips so no worries about witnesses.

When the bus stopped in the Civic Arena parking lot and the students began piling out, I quickly got up and into line ahead of my place, and ahead of Frankie’s row, clinching the appearance of innocence. After all, how could I have done it if I had been seated in front of him? Once outside, I hustled to the side of the bus so I could get a good look into the window at his face. Without seeing the look on his face, my victory would have been hollow indeed. I was not disappointed. His expression was of sheer terror and the bus windows were open, so I could see and hear clearly his scream when he immortalized forever “Frankie’s Furry Seat” on bus 25. He required immediate medical attention and a rather large bandage on his head where the hair had been torn away. And no amount of calming or soothing, no amount of “it’s okay” and “it will be all right” could negate my triumph. Mr. Band-Aid Head’s speech was a total disaster, but lucky for him, brief. He forgot most of his lines. We all clapped and cheered him. Even me. It was perfect.

I had gotten up for a drink of water and heard Sam stir in his room. Growing up in that split-level house, I had always had my own room. Mary had her own room until Kate came along, and Sam and Harry had always shared a room. And even though I had long since moved out, my room was still my room though my “Keep Out or Die” sign had come down. But even I respected the others’ privacy and I knocked lightly at his door before sticking my head in.

“Hey,” I whispered. “You okay?”

“No.”

“Can’t sleep?”

“I feel sick.”

I thought about it for a second and let myself in, closing the door behind me, crossing the palely moonlit room to Harry’s dresser. I opened his sock drawer, still containing about a dozen balled up pairs of sweat socks, and pulled out a likely well-rounded pair. Walking deliberately to the foul line, I took a shot and swished it. Two steps and a little jump and I had retrieved the sock ball from the curtain rod and returned to take another shot. This one banked off the ceiling and fell perfectly through the top rod to the bottom where it awaited retrieval.

“You stepped over the line,” Sam scoffed.

“Did not.”

“Did too. The line is right where the light is attached to the wall and you went over it.”

“Did not.”

“Did too.”

“Is there anything you don’t cheat at?”

It didn’t take long for me to reply. “Nope.”

Sam laughed. “Harry really sucked at sockball. Remember how he kept breaking the curtain rods with his dunks? Boy, did Dad get mad.”

“And remember when he filled the hole in the wall with bubble gum and attached the bracket with scotch tape?”

“Yeah, that really held the bracket in tight, didn’t it? The next dunk and he brought the whole thing down on himself. The hole was even bigger then. It’s a shame Dad never knew that was your idea.”

“Was not.” How did he know that?

“Was too.”

“I suggested it as a possibility. It was his decision.”

The winter night sounds of the woods next to our house filled the silence. An owl hooted from somewhere in the distance, and I could hear the crunching steps of animals making their way across our yard to our neighbor’s, the Ioli’s. Their place also bordered the woods, but Carmen Ioli, their only son, never went into them. There were no cars, no burger joints, and no chicks there. Carmen was as likely to be found in those woods as it was likely to find me at an opera.

It had to be deer. They were the bane of her fruit trees, eating them down to the trunk in the hard winters and crapping on them in the spring. I had offered her my services once when I was fifteen, but she squirted me off her property with the garden hose and threatened to call the “radio cops.” I wondered why she called them that. I know they all had radios, but they also all had badges and she didn’t call them the “badge cops.”

Despite the fact that housing developments had sprung up all around those woods, it remained ours. It was our private playground. Our hideouts were there (we had several of them). The cherry tree, the tallest tree in the woods, was ours to climb and claim as our crow’s nest. Our foxhole, cleverly concealed, was there on Pork Chop Hill. We were the ones who had found the infamous Pink Lady’s pink Corvette when it had been stolen and dumped in the woods. And we were the ones who terrorized anyone who tried to move in on our territory. Well, actually, that last part was me. Harry and Sam never terrorized anyone. I could never sleep with all that “nature racket” in the background, so I kept my window closed. But Harry and Sam always had theirs open a crack, even in winter. Thank God, Mom and Dad had shown the good sense to make sure my room did not face the woods when they built the house.

“The snow’s coming in,” I said closing the window.

“Leave that open. It’s stuffy in here.”

I cracked it again. “Should I go get you a shovel then?”

“Look, I appreciate you’re trying to cheer me up, but I really just want to be left alone. Night, Tom.”

With that summary dismissal, I closed the door behind me and went back to my room. It was stuffy, so I opened the front window a crack. The three deer had ventured into the Ioli’s and were fighting over a sapling they had broken off. It was so odd how they never made a peep, at least not that I could ever hear. I imagined they did actually talk to each other in some way, maybe a secret code of nods and grunts and pawing the ground. I mean, I did see Bambi, you know. I’m not totally illiterate.

Chapter 3

I’ve never liked the day after Christmas. Being raised a Catholic, I suppose I should have been joyous about the birth of Christ. After all, he did save a wretch like me. And I suppose that joy should have carried through to at least one day after the blessed event, but the day after Christmas was always more like a hangover than a continuation of celestial bliss. All those presents, those piles and piles of toys and games, the boxes and packaging that seemed to have much more imagination put into them than the toys themselves, all those things, were simply intoxicating. We had to play with every last one of them on Christmas Day and we had to play with them until we all got sick. I was not the throwing up kind. But you should have seen Harry. He probably had the weakest stomach of us all. I called him the Vomit Comet.

Any good Irishman will tell you that the only real way to fix a hangover is to have another drink. Of course, my knowledge of this comes from my Granddad Ryan, who used to take us for “walks” on Sundays, which meant his dropping us off in Frick Park and heading to Clancy’s pub for a pint of bitters. We never minded. We all loved the park and I loved the little “nip” he gave me afterwards. My backwards-thinking parents, however, never saw fit to dispense even a medicinal dose of liquor on the morning after Christmas. They did, however, somehow stumble onto what I thought was an even better plan. For a few years after Kate was born, the family started having a Christmas-plus-one celebration — the relatives, who were never invited over Christmas day, would come over the day after with more loot. It was fantastic. I can’t begin to tell you how satisfying it was to have even more of my underlings’ things to break. But somewhere along the line, through some sick twist of fate, our day-after celebration evolved into a morbid clothing-fest that was worse than being dragged to Gimbels by Mom to look for new pants. At least there you could change in a dressing room instead of in the living room in front of Aunt Clara.

Sleeping late was generally never an option at the Ryan’s. Dad was an early riser, five-ish usually, and the first thing he did was start the coffee. This had no effect on me until fourth grade when coffee began to smell interesting. Then it became my alarm clock. It was impossible to stay in bed with the heavenly aroma of Chock-Full-O-Nuts filling the house. But what I could never figure out was how Dad’s coffee could taste so awful. It wasn’t until after college when I started making my own that I concluded that it took no effort to make any coffee smell good, but it took Dad boiling it to death to make it taste like an old sardine.

I finally rolled out of bed at seven and went downstairs. He handed me a cup of his finest. It had been brewing for two hours. How could I refuse?

“I want us all to go to church today, Tom.”

My lips curled as the vile liquid washed over my tongue. I needed caffeine. “I haven’t been to church in years.”

“I don’t care. I want us all to go to church.”

“It’s snowing.”

We’ll go to the ten o’clock service.”

Stubborn as ever… Dad would never change. One winter Sunday when I was in high school and we were still going to church as a family in the Nash Rambler (this was after I’d claimed the front window seat from Mom on a permanent basis), I remember that it was one of the worst storms I’d ever seen. We didn’t even have our paper route that day because the trucks couldn’t make their deliveries. But Dad had insisted on us going to church because it was our holy obligation to freeze to death in a snowdrift.

“Dad, do you remember the time you made us go to Mass in that snowstorm and you tried backing the car up Oregon to get a head start going up the other side?” His expression was blank. Our house was at the bottom of a valley and Oregon Trail, the main street out of our development, climbed steeply up both sides of the valley. It was never well plowed and sometimes Dad would back up one side of Oregon to get a running start up the other. “The windows were all fogged up so you opened the door to see out the back?” I could tell no bells were ringing yet so I pulled the cord harder. I had a point to make and he wasn’t going to stonewall me. Not this time. “And there was so much snow that the door shaved off the top layer and buried you in the front seat?” We had all laughed so hard it hurt… until Dad had started swearing, which he never did. Then we were all very silent for the rest of the trip to church — a trip that took so long that we missed Mass anyway.

Dad’s expression changed. He smiled. That was a surprise. My memory of that fiasco was that he was so upset about the whole thing that Mom had forbidden us to even mention it. “You kids laughed about that for weeks.” Well, we did do a lot of laughing behind his back, or at least we thought it was behind his back. Apparently not. I made a mental note to add that to the evidentiary file I was compiling to prove my theory that parents possess a radar system that allows them to detect things behind their backs, around corners, through walls, and behind locked bedroom doors.

“Dad, this is the same thing. It’ll take an hour to shovel the driveway, then at least another hour to get to church if we’re lucky.” It was a ten-minute drive on a clear day, but during the winter the side roads in the south hills of Pittsburgh were no place for the faint-hearted or the inexperienced driver. Unfortunately, Dad was neither. He could make it. There was no doubt in my mind about that. I just didn’t want to go.

“Then you’d better get everyone up now and we’ll leave at eight thirty just to be sure.” He turned back to his coffee and newspaper, Dad’s signal that he had made his decision. Further discussion was pointless. Actually, any discussion at all was usually pointless, but I usually felt obligated to press him to this point of finality.

Overnight, the wind had blown a sizable pile of snow onto the floor of Sam and Harry’s room and the forced-air heat had melted it enough to make it nicely packable. It was too tempting. I never was much for resisting temptation. That and my impulsivity are probably the two things that get me into the most trouble — my only two tragic character flaws.

Just ask Brother Patrick. In my sophomore year, his Latin II class was a persistently annoying series of detentions and parent-teacher conferences. It was one of the few classes I couldn’t cheat my way through, not having the eyes in the back of my head that my parents had and having not yet developed any long distance peripheral vision. Seating me in the corner facing the wall with no one to copy answers from except Derrick Dietz, the only Latin student worse than me, was Brother Patrick’s way of condemning me to the hell of failing and having to repeat Latin with him next year.

My desk was there for various minor infractions — throwing spitballs at the class nerds, sticking wads of gum to Brother Patrick’s robes during his patrols of the aisles, coughing obscenities while his back was turned. But the main reason was that I had tried to sell “grace points” on the black market. The good Brother handed out “grace points” during class to any student who excelled. “Conjugation correct! Fifty grace points,” he would say, proudly patting the accepting student on the back. Being ever the practical, realistic one, the first week of class I asked him how many grace points equaled a grade point. That was my first detention and the beginning of the end of our amicable relationship. From then on, I was nothing but a troublemaker.

Naturally, I had to live up to my preordained reputation, so I stole a handful of blank diplomas from the main office one day while waiting to see the principal. I couldn’t resist. They were begging me to take them. “Take me! Take me!” These I doctored up to look like “grace point” certificates, properly signed by Brother Patrick. Since I had never seen his real signature, I assumed no one else had either, so I didn’t even bother trying to fake it. I just signed with my left hand so it would look different from my own chicken scratch. Each certificate had a different value, the highest being a one million point note. I hand wrote a “grace point” translation chart on a piece of “from the desk of Brother Patrick” notepaper. (One million grace points were worth ten grade points, by the way.) I started selling them the next day during lunch, charging fifty cents per ten thousand grace points. Being a real whiz at math, I had not calculated out that it would cost fifty dollars for the million pointer. I never sold that one, but its effect was startling and a super selling tool. I had almost ten dollars before the Latin II Hitler Youth Corps turned me in for their reward — one hundred grace points — a whopping thousandth of a grade point.

It’s amazing how startlingly effective a little snow is on the exposed neck of a sleeping person. I remember sneaking into Sam and Harry’s room one cold night with a spoonful of snow from my windowsill and dropping it on Sam’s neck. Just a spoonful… I was hunched down between their beds so he couldn’t see me. Sam screamed bloody murder — loud enough to bring reinforcements. But the cavalry was too late. By the time my parents got there, I had already slid under the bed, only at the last second noticing Harry watching me. I scowled at him with a threatening fist. He smiled, rolled over, and went back to sleep. Sam always suspected me of that one but never came out with a direct accusation. So I guess Harry never finked on me. Big deal. I could have beaten him to a pulp anyway, Sam, too, for that matter.

That was then. This was now. This time there was no hiding under the bed. I was way too big. And this time there was no escaping the fact that Sam was more than a match for me. Actually, we had never really come to serious blows since he’d gotten bigger than me, but my kingly senses told me that he was now the physical superpower in the Ryan family and I the waning monarch; that, and the fact that he once pushed me so hard that I fell over a chair and nearly wet myself. Me suicidal? I actually thought I had been very quiet when I scooped up a handful of snow from the pile by the window, and I thought I had been extremely quiet, padding soundlessly to his bedside, and I also thought… well that didn’t matter much when his hands closed around my neck and he threw me down on Harry’s bed.

“What the hell are you doing?”

I could see that reasoning with him was the only way out — the last resort of the weak and deposed. I pointed to my watch and rasped, “Time to get up.”

We sat quietly around the kitchen table while Mom and Dad busied themselves with making breakfast. When we were growing up, Sunday breakfast was the one and only day that we all ate at the same time without rushing off to do something. We weren’t allowed to do much on Sundays anyway, so no one was in any hurry to get to it. There were no sports, no work, just a day of rest. But something was not right this time. Breakfast was supposed to be after Mass, not before. We were supposed to be fasting for Holy Communion like good Catholics, weren’t we? The glances we exchanged told me that Mary, Sam, and Kate also realized this but somehow having our world turned upside down by Harry’s death made it all irrelevant. So why was Kate staring at me like that? She looked first at me, then at the fridge, then back at me. I twirled my empty orange juice glass in my fingers…

“Oh, right.” I said awkwardly. Harry’s job was always the orange juice and Mom and Dad were waiting for it to mystically appear, thus proving that Harry was still alive. I got up, accepting the mantle of orange juice-making succession, and made the worst orange juice I have ever tasted.

“Too much water,” Dad grimaced.

“He used tap water, Dad. Harry always used water from the fridge. This tastes like chlorine.”

“Shut up, Mary. What do you know?” Another eloquent defense on my part — I should have been a lawyer.

Mom started to cry. I took her hand — so unlike me that I embarrassed myself. “Sorry Mom, I’ll do better next time.”

Sam and I made a go of shoveling the driveway, but we both knew it was hopeless. If we busted our butts we would have it clear in an hour. That would give us about an hour to drive the mile or so to church through a foot and a half of snow on unplowed roads. Now I’m usually not a staunch proponent of totally hopeless causes unless losing benefits me in some way, and I’m pretty sure Sam isn’t either. Why didn’t we stop? I thought about this for a moment and also about heaving a shovelful of snow at him but let this death wish pass quietly unfulfilled. I always envisioned myself burning in hell for my crimes, not freezing to death like a Popsicle. Sam turned my way, apparently reading my mind, his shovel ready to defend. There was no doubt his could have easily picked me up, stuffed me head first into a show drift, and left me there to freeze to death, forever altering my destiny of ending my days in Nicky Amendola’s gym bag.

Had we been twenty years younger, we could easily have dug ourselves a really cool tunnel system like the one we’d made that one winter when the snow was higher than we were. I was ten or eleven, I don’t remember. But I will always remember that year because we had a record number of snow days off from Saint Catherine’s. Some people said it was because a kid had fallen into a snow-filled window well at the school and died, but it always seemed to me that this was just another example of my inevitable triumph over those things I hated the most — school being near the top of that list. Or, more likely, God probably saw how bad a year I was having and decided that I needed a break.

That was also the year of the Nazi’s Devastating Defeat at the Foxhole — which is what I called the near death experience of that dope, Kevin Shannon. Sam, Harry, and I had been on patrol in the snow-covered woods beside our house. The woods were quiet — no Germans for miles around. We were between battles and our mission was to make sure the perimeter was safe. One of the key points in the Allies’ defense line was the foxhole, a position we had claimed in the early days of the fighting. It was clearly marked on my map as ours — after all, we were the ones who had dug it and dragged the plywood I had stolen from the Ioli’s under-construction house over to it, and the ones who had labored to conceal it with that and a few inches of dirt. It was a ton of work for us… well for Harry and Sam. I was of course working hard ordering them around. But we were the ones who used it as a hideout. It was ours… well mine. In any case, no one else was allowed in it and anyone caught in it was the enemy.

I stopped the others when I saw the footprints in the snow leading up the slope to the secret entrance. “Someone’s in the foxhole,” I whispered.

It was one of those days when so much snow was coming down that sounds hardly traveled at all, when the idyllic peace of the forest is actually more akin to having the Get Smart Cone of Silence lowered over you. Would you believe?

“What?” Sam protested as I grabbed him and Harry and ducked down, shoving them into the snow. Those were the good old days when I could still push them around.

“Listen! Someone’s in the foxhole. And tracks! There!” I pointed at the indentations in the snow leading up the hill. “Nazis, I’ll bet. They’ve taken our position. I knew this would happen. That dumb West Point Lieutenant should never have left it unguarded.” I was the master of fantasy, even then, taking any situation, absurd or otherwise, and turning it into my own personal wonderland… The Adventures of Tom Ryan, starring Tom Ryan as Tom Ryan. Produced and directed by…

“I don’t hear anything.”

“Then you’re deaf, Sam. You don’t hear that?” Sam actually was hard of hearing in one ear, but I never let that get in my way. And, just in case you’re wondering, I had nothing to do with that loud explosion that broke his left eardrum.

Harry shivered. “I’m cold.”

“Maybe they’re our prints.” Sam was clearly not the soldier I was. Vic Morrow would have kicked him out of his squad his first day and Combat! would have been a much better show.

“We should check it out.” It was easier to ignore Sam than to try and reason with him.

He groaned.

“Just do what the man says.” Harry laughed, still shivering.

“Zip it, private! That’s my line. I’m Sergeant Saunders, and if you don’t want to be busted to yard bird, you’ll shut your yap.”

“Yes, sir,” Harry saluted smartly.

I remember really wanting to slug him then, but I let it go and we circled around the knob, our recon mission coming up blank.

Harry was studying the holes in the snow. “Those prints are less than a half hour old.”

“Who are you, Tonto or something?” I reconsidered my earlier decision and was about ready to really pound Harry for his stupid observations when I realized he was probably right. The snow was falling heavily, already filling up the footprints. They had to have been recently made or they would have been gone in that storm. I whispered, “Let’s fan out,” motioning for Sam to take the left and Harry the right. I, of course, would take the middle. It was only fitting for the hero to be in the middle, where the battle would be won.

On my signal we fired a warning shot on top of the covering. There was so much snow that our snowballs barely made a thud. I yelled, “Come out with your hands up, you Nazi cowards! We know you’re in there!” We fired another round.

It was quiet, too quiet. Maybe they couldn’t hear us? Maybe we couldn’t hear them? I thought back through the Combat! episode that had been on the week before and remembered how Sergeant Saunders’ squad had flushed out the enemy by creating a diversion, a loud noise, a hand grenade — that was it. When the Nazis rushed out of their bunker, they walked right into the waiting B.A.R.s of the good guys. A perfect plan… There was a large rock, about the size of my head, lying at my feet. That would wake them up. I chucked it onto the top of the foxhole and it hit with a thunk that I’ll never forget.

I honestly never saw Kevin’s head pop out of the entrance and look around after my yelling to come out. I was too busy looking up at the rock I was holding over my head, steadying it for one, momentous heave. I never heard Sam or Harry yell for me to hold my fire. That snowstorm muffled everything… well almost everything. I jumped back in horror at the bloodcurdling scream Kevin let out when the rock crashed down on his skull. I never saw so much blood at one time, not real blood anyhow. I’d covered myself in fake blood many times for the cool effect it had on my sisters, but even that was nothing compared to this. I was so grossed out I threw up in the snow.

The important thing was that we had defeated the Nazi invasion and that our position was secure. Casualties from friendly fire or otherwise were a part of war, regrettable to be sure, but a part of war nonetheless. And their horror was far outweighed by the deterrent value of our victory. They would think twice before attacking us again.

Anyway, that was my official position at my court martial, presided over by Mom and Dad and Kevin’s parents. But it wasn’t going well for me. Kevin had a concussion, a really cool knot of stitches on the shaved part of his head, unlimited ice cream and the rest of the month off from school. I had no sympathy for him. I had toyed with the idea of self-inflicting such a wound, but couldn’t bring myself to do the bonking.

“It was an accident, right, Tom?” Dad was doing his best to lead me into an admission that I didn’t mean to hit Kevin with that rock. I guess he was representing me at the trial, but with him, you could never be sure.

There was no way I would admit to that. No way. “It’s soldiers like me and my boys that stand on the walls of freedom protecting you from the things you don’t want to talk about at the dining room table. What happened was no accident. He was in our territory, behind our lines. He was the aggressor, not us. We were defending our country, your country. You should be thanking us for our patriotism, not condemning us.” I gave them some of my best stuff. I can’t remember which TV show it was from, but I was beaming with pride.

“Oh my God, you little monster,” Mrs. Shannon gasped, covering her face in her hands.

“I don’t want that boy of yours anywhere near my son again, ever,” Mr. Shannon wagged his finger at Dad. “He’s a menace and the only reason we’re not pressing charges is because we are Christians. Your son needs help, Dan, serious psychiatric help, and you should see that he gets it before anyone else gets hurt. Too bad he didn’t turn out like Harry. Then none of this would have happened.”

Like Harry… Dad didn’t believe in shrinks, and I found out later that evening that he didn’t much like Mr. Shannon either. He used all adult words to explain this to Mom, but it sounded to me like “If that snot-nosed, booger mouth, pimple-pushing jerk could get his head out of his ass, he’d see that this is just boys being boys.” My level of admiration for Dad grew greatly that day.

I never saw Kevin Shannon again, well more accurately, he never saw me. I kept constant surveillance on him through my network to make sure he wasn’t saying anything about me that I would have to cream him for. Nothing really came of it. About the only thing I did find out was that Harry went to see him every day after school. Every day! I guess he felt guilty about it though he had nothing to do with it. He’d sit and play with him for almost an hour before he had to do his paper route. What a dope. I hated him for that, the traitor…

NASA’s final and most successful, moon landing, Apollo XVII, had returned to Earth a week or so before that Christmas in 1972. Harry would have loved the photos that they was releasing daily, especially the one the Post-Gazette said was the only human-witnessed full Earth view showing the African and Antarctic continents. It was summer in the Southern hemisphere and winter in the Northern. Boy, was it winter here. By the time Sam and I had dug our way to the end of the driveway, there was at least an inch of snow blown off the yard covering Sam’s hard work. We never made it to church. Mom wouldn’t get out of bed. I could hear her crying from my room as I stared out the window at the Ioli’s house across the street. I hated Mrs. Ioli. She was a pain in the butt and did everything in her power to make life miserable for everyone around her, especially me. It was no wonder everyone hated her.

“Tom, phone.” Kate poked her head around the door.

“Okay, thanks,” I drew myself back from the threshold of a newly hatching plan to torture Mrs. Ioli one more time for old times’ sake.

The phone in the upstairs hall was just outside my room. This wasn’t particularly convenient since I never bothered to answer it. It was never for me. It was just annoying that I was closest to it. Fortunately I had long ago figured out the exception to the “closest to it” rule — it was never for me. I wondered who could be calling me at home, or anywhere, for that matter. No one ever called me. Maybe it was the guy from the school calling to say he couldn’t make it. Now that would be totally unexpected. “Hello?”

“I know what happened.” The voice was a whisper. I couldn’t tell if it was male or female.

“What?” I was sure what was said but the shock of someone mimicking my patented harassment tactics caused my uncharacteristically inane response. “Who is this?”

“I know what happened and I know what you did,” the voice repeated. It could have been a girl, or maybe a wimpy guy with a girlie voice. I couldn’t tell. There was a click at the other end.

“If you’d like to make a call, please hang up and dial again…” I hung up, staring at the black rotary phone. Why would I like to make a call? My parents really needed to invest in Touch-Tone technology.

“Who was it?” Kate asked. “You don’t look so good.”

“I don’t know. Wrong number, I guess.”

Who would call and say such a thing? Was it one of my many enemies playing a joke on me? Did it have some connection to Harry? This last thought passed through my mind quickly but was immediately ushered out by the memory of a series of crank calls I had made to Mrs. Ioli when I was fifteen. Her stupid dog had disappeared and she had put up signs around the neighborhood with a number to call if anyone knew anything. Naturally, I had to call the number repeatedly, using several of my “disguise” voices to make sure she didn’t know it was me. The classic from that adventure was, “Hello Mrs. Ioli. This is Franny from McDonald’s. A customer found your pet’s dog tags in their hamburger.”

Either this was someone who really knew what had happened to Harry or some kid just making the calling rounds on Christmas. I had a lot of enemies who would love to ruin my Christmas, but it was probably just some stupid kid.

Everyone pretty much stayed in his room until dinnertime. I think they were all waiting for someone from Kenyon to magically appear at our front door and hand them a sealed envelope with the secrets of Lourdes and Fatima and the answers to their questions about Harry’s death. Now that would have been a real miracle. I was just watching TV and waiting for the stupid snow to stop. It finally did and the sky cleared before the sun set, highlighting the woods in a warm yellow glow. Woodsy snow scenes were my all-time favorites, but only when viewed from indoors. I have a hard time appreciating anything when I’m freezing to death.

It’s amazing how many meals can come from a single Christmas turkey — reheated turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, cold turkey sandwiches, turkey tetrazzini, hot, open-faced turkey sandwiches, turkey and vegetable soup, turkey blah blah blah, turkey ad infinitum, turkey ad nauseam. The list was endless. For a food event of such biblical proportions, I had a name — the “Miracle of the Turkey and Gravy.” Tonight, we had turkey, rice, and vegetables in some sort of gooey, yellowish mix that no one had a name for. My name for it, of course, could never be spoken at the Ryan dinner table because strangely enough they didn’t care to think of puke and food at the same time.

Dad was the first to speak, a feat in itself, considering the gooeyness of the dinner. “Did someone call?”

No one answered at first. I was busy trying to prevent the congealing of the turkey mess on my teeth when Kate caught my eye. “Oh, there was one call I took, but it was a wrong number,” I said.

“What did they say, Tom?” Kate pressed. “You looked really weird after you hung up. Was it someone from the school?”

“Kate, how could it be someone from the school if it was a wrong number?”

My irritation drew Sam’s pointed, turkey-laden fork in my direction, clearly a prelude to some threat he would utter if he could ever get the goop off the roof of his mouth.

“Okay, okay. I’m sorry. All they said was something stupid. It was probably some kid making crank calls.”

“But they asked for you.”

“So it was someone who knows me yanking my chain. How should I know?” There were a million possibilities and they all knew it — every kid I’d ever tortured, every kid I’d ever been mean to — a million possibilities, and all of them believable.

Mom’s voice was softer than usual. I liked her voice. It was always so soothing and gentle, except when she was yelling at me. “What did he say, Tom?” It was the kind of voice you knew you had to answer politely.

“Nothing, Mom. Just something dumb and vague, like ‘I know what happened and I know what you did.’ Ooooooo, scary, huh?” Wrong answer. I could see that immediately. But I was the master of recovery. “Just kidding. Sorry, I just thought it was funny.”

“It wasn’t,” Mary snapped. She was more the vegetable eater, which explains why she was able to respond so quickly despite the turkey glue. She never ate much meat and always finished every vegetable at the table. This was handy since I hated vegetables of every kind except ketchup and French fries. I used to call her Bean Sprout, but she didn’t much look like one right now. She looked more like an artichoke, as in she was ready to practice the art of choking me good for saying such a stupid thing.

Kate put her hand on Mary’s to stop her. “What did you do?” she asked me pointedly.

Having no clue what she was talking about I immediately took evasive action. “I hung up the phone.” Oh, that was a great comeback. I’d have to remember later to record that one in my annals.

“No, you said the person said they knew what you did. What did you do?”

Years of actually being guilty of everything are hard to get over. I guess I will always be the guilty one in the family, even when it’s an accident. “I ate all the leftover pumpkin pie?”

Sam laughed derisively. “You’re such a jerk. Can’t you ever be serious?”

“Maybe, but I don’t feel like being serious, all right?”

I saw their hesitation. Now I had them and my escape from their intrusive grilling was assured. It usually came to me if I could just keep them going for a while. “I’m tired of being serious, okay? This whole thing stinks and I’m depressed. I need to be happy for a while. I miss Harry, too, but all this depressing depression is making me depressed.” God, I am so profound, so slippery. The Adventures of Tom the Eel, starring Tom Ryan, as Tom Ryan. Produced and directed by…

Chapter 4

Another day of leftovers and another day without word from Kenyon College — this waiting was getting harder and harder to take for everyone, especially me. I considered burying what remained of the turkey in the side yard, but there were two problems with that. First and foremost was the fact that all of my good burying spots were already filled with incriminating evidence from years past and probably didn’t have the space for a turkey of such gothic proportions. A yard is a wonderful place to hide things — like my BB rifle. I used that old rifle that I’d borrowed many years ago from my Uncle Kenny’s farm to put out many an annoying street light in the intersection of Caswell and Oregon Trail. I don’t know who the brain trust was who decided it would be a good idea to put a blinding light outside my bedroom window without my permission, but it was in my kingdom and I was well within my rights to remove it anytime I saw fit. Besides, it was a clear shot from my window at night and a piece of cake to drop the rifle into the bushes below to hide the evidence temporarily before Dad could reach my room and ask what the noise was. Then, next morning, I’d retrieve my gun, wrap it in a trash bag, and bury it in the soft ground under a bush in the side yard near the woods. I wondered if it was still out there and what condition it must be in after all those years in the ground. It was actually close to where I kept my rifle that I’d prepped a spot big enough to hold a dead body — I had a few choice enemies in mind for that one — but that’s another story.

The second and probably more significant reason for not disposing of the killer turkey from Mars in the yard was that the ground was solidly frozen and snow-covered. I suppose I could have tricked or convinced Sam into helping me but Harry would have been much easier to recruit. Harry was always so easy about everything. I hated him for that. He would do pretty much anything I wanted without complaint, without being the least bit annoyed… maybe that was why I kept trying to break his impenetrable shell.

Conner Road was a street that amounted to a superhighway for us as kids since people would drive fifty miles an hour on it. There was no traffic light, stop sign, or crosswalk, and we had to cross that road every morning on our way to Saint Catherine’s. It seemed like no one ever wanted to stop for us. As king, it was my duty to get my subjects all safely to school. And it was extremely annoying and humiliating for me to walk out in front of oncoming traffic, raise my arm just like the cops did to tell the cars to stop, and have them gun it and laugh as I jumped out of the way. They acted as if they had no idea who I was or what I was doing.

Of course, as you might have guessed, I had my ways of getting them to realize just who I was and what exactly they were dealing with. There was a hill overlooking Conner Road that was the perfect high ground for a snowball bombardment. It was sparsely wooded, enough to conceal us, yet not enough to interfere with our fire. I recruited Tom Braithwaite, Pete Kulzer, Bobby Fey, and Harry. It was a perfect plan. The squad thought their mission was to fortify the Allied position on Pork Chop Hill. No mention was made of the bombardment to follow. They were on a need-to-know basis and they didn’t need to know that part.

I was walking point with Harry on the way there when he asked, “What are we going to do once we build the fort, Tom?”

“We’ll stock it with ammunition, of course.”

It didn’t take Harry long to come up with his next question. “And what then? We’ll have a fort, ammunition and the perfect place to use it.”

“I don’t know. I guess we’ll figure that out when the time comes.”

“You’re going to throw snowballs at the cars on Conner Road, aren’t you?”

“Don’t be stupid. Those aren’t my orders.” Technically, I wasn’t lying. I wasn’t planning on throwing any snowballs. I wasn’t that dumb. I was planning on them doing all the throwing. I was just going to be an innocent tag-a-long when the heat caught up with us, which it undoubtedly would. Little old me throw snowballs at cars? Why I would never do such a thing.

“You know Dad will be mad.”

“So? You’re not backing out, are you?”

“If that’s what you want me to do, that’s what I’ll do, Tom. I just wanted you to know it’s wrong and we’re going to be punished.”

Now, see? That’s what I hated about him — so damn smug all the time. I was using everything in my arsenal of trickery and deceit to get revenge and avoid punishment, and he went in knowing he would be punished and did it anyway. And he rubbed my nose in it! As if life were some simple cause and effect scenario that could be accepted and dealt with on the most basic of levels without all the trappings of emotions, complications, or sneakiness. Nothing in life was that simple. It wasn’t only good and bad. There was a lot in between that Harry never saw or understood, including me.

The fort was a two-foot high wall behind which we stockpiled hundreds of rounds of ammunition. I even made a couple of “specials” — iceballs with rocks in them — that I tucked away in case someone I recognized came along. Like that guy with the Chevelle that I knew took great pleasure in swerving right at me when we were trying to get across the street — I had one with his name on it. When we were ready, I took out my binoculars and scouted the terrain.

I dropped to one knee, letting the binoculars dangle from my neck and addressed the squad. “All right, men. The Nazis are using this corridor to resupply the Third Panzer Division — the one that’s been hammering us for weeks. Our mission is to disrupt that supply line so our boys can hold them off until reinforcements arrive. I’ve got to be honest with you. There’s little chance we’ll come out of this alive, but I’m counting on each and every one of you to do your duty. We’re soldiers and we represent our country and our way of life. If we let them down and quit now we might as well jump on a grenade and end it all.” Vic Morrow, move over. Tom Ryan was in command now.

“Tom, there were no Nazis at Pork Chop Hill. Pork Chop Hill was in Korea. There were Chinese and Koreans there.”

I was getting ready to carve Harry’s name into one of my specials when Private Braithwaite chimed in, “Weren’t there two Pork Chop Hills? I think there was one in Action Comics, too.”

A dirty look in Harry’s general direction silenced further comment. I took Braithwaite’s cue. It was as good a lie as any for the time being. “The one in Korea was named after the one in World War II. The World War II one was the first one. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the Nazis must be stopped and we’re the only ones who can stop them. But if anyone here has a big yellow streak down his back, you have my permission to desert. I’ll only guarantee that I won’t shoot you now. But if I ever lay eyes on you again in my country, you’re dead.”

I stared them down, one after the other until my eyes met Harry’s. He was looking at me and smiling. He wouldn’t look away. The “special” in my hand broke apart; I squeezed it so hard. I should have beat the crap out of him right there, but I needed him. He was the best shot in the squad. “Fine, then we’re all in this together. I’ll call out the targets.” I pointed to an imaginary spot on Conner Road near the intersection. “When I say ‘fire,’ aim for that spot. Any questions?”

The first convoy crested the hill, a slow-moving group of three vehicles — two trucks and a command car. I focused the binoculars on the driver of the lead car, a female. I didn’t know the Nazis had girl officers. I made a mental note to change my History of the Nazi Empire that I was writing. It was a fine art to judge the speed and distance of a car and determine the correct firing point. I was extremely adept at it, having had so many years of practice. They were moving up Conner Road pretty slowly because of the snow. Piece of cake…

“Fire!”

The volley fell well short of the target, landing somewhere between the lead car and the first supply truck. I half expected as much from their first try at it and was actually pleased that they had followed orders at all, even Harry. But I would never let them know it.

“What the crap was that? I could have done better left-handed, standing on one foot, with both eyes closed.” I had their undivided attention. “I wouldn’t let you losers pitch whiffle ball to my little sister. You knuckleheads couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn.”

“C’mon, Tom. Give us a break. We didn’t do that bad. Nobody’s perfect, you know.” Bobby Fey was a jerk then and, as far as I know, is still a jerk. The one good thing about him was that, despite his mouth, he was easily intimidated.

“Zip it, soldier,” I barked. “We can’t afford to miss. If they spot us, we’re dead. We just got lucky that time. Next time, we could all be pushing up daisies.” I pointed again to the imaginary spot on the road that I wanted them to aim for. “There, you aim for that spot and fire when I say ‘fire.’ Don’t aim for the cars; you’ll never hit them that way. I can’t make it any simpler than that.”

We waited for the next convoy. A single vehicle crested the hill… a Chevelle. It was him! The dirty Nazi who’d tried to run us down. This was going to be good. I had watched my boys fire off the last round and figured that there had been a second delay between when I called the shot and when they actually fired. I would take that into account this time. I reached for my special and let it rip before remembering that I wasn’t actually going to throw any snowballs so the blame could be squarely placed on the shoulders of the others.

“Fire!”

It couldn’t have been more perfect. My iceball hit the passenger-side door with a loud thud and three of the four snowballs hit the trunk. The Chevelle skidded to a stop and the driver got out, looking straight up at us. I gave him the finger and yelled, “Run!”

We spent the afternoon basking in our glorious victory before splitting up and going home for dinner. Dad stood in the hallway waiting for us.

“Jack Billups stopped by today,” he said, watching for a reaction from me.

“Billups?” I knew the name from somewhere.

“He’s on my paper route,” Harry offered.

“Oh, right.” Now I remembered. When I had divided the paper route up into three smaller routes, I got the houses right around ours so I could be done in ten minutes, Sam got the heaviest route because he could carry the most, and Harry got the two streets that were a mile away before you got to the first house on the route. I wondered if they knew just how badly I had screwed them over. “What did he want? Was he here to pay his bill or something?”

Dad had a way of ignoring any question that was designed to evade an honest answer. “How many times have I told you not to throw snowballs at cars? He told me that you caused him to drive off the road and into a ditch. You’re lucky he wasn’t hurt and his car wasn’t damaged.”

“What makes him think it was me?” This was usually my first response, designed to uncover the evidence against me, before I decided which facts needed to be refuted, which could simply be ignored, and what lies were required to get me out of trouble.

“He said the ringleader was wearing a Pirates jacket and a yellow watchman’s cap.” Dad looked squarely at my Pirates jacket and then frowned at me.

Positive I.D. is hard to overcome, darned hard. An alibi would be required. “I was with Harry all afternoon. It must have been some other kid.”

Dad focused on Harry. “Were you with him, son?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“So you were both throwing snowballs at cars?”

“Yes, Dad.”

That sniveling little jerk. Nobody likes a snitch. I should have hauled off and smashed his face in. The potential consequences of Dad’s retaliation killed that thought quickly.

With my alibi gone, I needed a justification for my deed. It was my last defense. “We only did it to get back at him. He’s been trying to run us down all year. Plus, he’s lying. He never drove into any ditch. He’s a dirty rotten liar.” I explained in great detail how I was only protecting my brothers and sisters from the cars on Conner Road and how this jerk always gunned it and headed our way whenever he saw us trying to cross. I also was quite eloquent in detailing how I could see him laughing as we jumped out of his way. This, I followed with a summation of why we were perfectly justified in getting revenge on him.

There is something very wrong with the American criminal justice system. It is supposed to rely on evidence, facts, arguments, and conclusions. From this a measured judgment is supposed to be made. Dad’s reply was my first realization that things didn’t work that way; they didn’t work that way at all.

“I don’t care what he did. That’s his problem. You were wrong to disobey me.”

That left me nothing to defend. I had to throw myself on the mercy of the court. “I’m sorry, Dad. I won’t do it again.”

“One of these days someone will get hurt, or worse. And when that happens, saying you’re sorry won’t be good enough, Tom.”

Dad was right. He always was.

I can’t remember exactly what punishment we got, but I do remember that mine was much, much worse than Harry’s. It was as if I were more to blame for the whole thing, as if I were the ringleader and he just a willing stooge following my lead. You’d think I was Adolph Hitler or something. Well, actually, he was the stooge, but he knew what he was doing and knew that we’d get it if we were caught. And the more I thought about it, the more I believed that he also must have known that I’d get it worse than him and he was probably looking forward to that. I think he enjoyed watching me get it. I remember making a mental note of this at the time in my “People to get back at” journal.

The day dragged on. The sun had come out, the snow had begun to melt, and I spent most of the afternoon lounging on the sofa watching football with Dad. It didn’t matter what was going on in the world and how bad things got — there was always the TV. It offered an escape into a mindless, gawking world of action and non-stop droning announcers. Idiots. They were talking about the field conditions, on and on about the field conditions. Who cared? I know I didn’t. I decided that they must have been paid by the word, no matter how stupid, and penalized for every precious second of non-billable dead airtime. A brief fantasy of being trapped in a windowless room with a bald sports announcer passed through my mind. The fantasy ended with my filling his mouth with concrete mix and water and zipping his lips shut.

The TV was always on in our house. It was more like another member of the family than an electronic device. I think Dad worried more about how it was doing than he did me. I wondered if he ever really worried about me, beyond my getting myself, or everyone around me, killed. The Steelers were getting their heads handed to them on a platter by the Giants. I suppose I should have been upset, but I enjoyed watching Dad boil while his team got beat. He never said a word but I could tell by the way he gripped the chair arms and ground his false teeth that he was in agony. I was instantly a Giants fan. Another victory for me…

A distant alarm disintegrated a vivid dream about my quarterbacking the Ryan Giants in an absolute slaughter of the hapless Pittsburgh Steelers. We had a five-touchdown lead in the fourth quarter, and most of Pittsburgh’s starting lineup had been sent to the hospital with injuries personally inflicted by me. We were all standing around watching the paramedics put Harry on a stretcher. I had hit him pretty hard, too hard I guess. He looked dead. All the Steelers had left now to stand against me were Dad, Sam, Mary, and Kate. Dad was their quarterback. Mom, their coach, was on the sidelines crying. With the alarm came the ambulance that screeched to a halt on the fifty-yard line and turned off its siren. I felt sick to my stomach and woke up. The football game was over and Dad was gone.

“Get up, Tom. There are two people from Kenyon here.” Mary was shaking me.

“I’m sick. I need to hit the bathroom. I’ll be down when I can.”

She looked at me like I had two heads. “Fine.”

The family room in our split-level house was on the middle floor along with Mom and Dad’s bathroom and bedroom, and of course, Dad’s buddy, the TV. This floor was their domain and we, even me, had to be careful what we touched. We never went in their bedroom and we never, ever used their bathroom — at least not when they were looking. The hallway, living room, dining room, and kitchen were on the first floor. All the kids’ bedrooms and our bathroom were on the third floor. As I passed the stairs on my way toward Mom and Dad’s bathroom, I saw everyone in the living room. There were a man and a woman with the rest of the family. Both were dressed very officially in business suits. Mom was seating them on the sofa. They looked up when they heard me. I turned away, deciding that if I were going to throw up, I’d better do it in the kid’s bathroom on the third floor.

Our bathroom was one of my favorite spots in the house. It had a sink with two faucets, one for scalding my siblings and the other for freezing them — a nice feature I put on my list of things I definitely wanted in my dream house. The tub had sliding doors for slamming when I was mad at something or someone. They were unbreakable (as far as I could tell anyway — which is saying a lot since I take pride in being able to break most anything) and you could hear them slam from anywhere in the house — another dream house feature. The toilet was nothing special, but behind it was the coolest laundry chute. It led to the basement laundry room. We never had to carry our dirty clothes anywhere but to the bathroom and stuff them into the chute. It had other, more interesting uses, too. When Harry was still pretty small I stuffed him into the chute and let him fall. I remember doing it as an experiment, but can’t for the life of me remember what the point of the experiment was. It didn’t matter. It was something I wanted to do and that’s usually all that matters. Lucky for him, and probably lucky for me, there was a week’s worth of dirty clothes in the chute to break his fall. It took us hours to find him since he never cried. It was actually Mom, whose consternation led her to start a load of whites, who pulled Harry out of the chute with the dirty sheets. Not a scratch on him, but I took a little heat for being the one who had searched the bathroom to no avail, but, hey, I was a kid. What did I know?

There was also a narrow window, a gun slit, from which I could spy on the Palermos next door, throw water balloons, and even fire off a few shots with my trusty BB rifle. I hated their dog. It hated me. I was happy when it died. I heard it had eaten a bad piece of meat that someone had thrown into their yard. Fancy that.

Sitting on the edge of the tub, I couldn’t really hear what was going on downstairs. My stomach had settled a bit, but I didn’t particularly want to go down to meet the Kenyon people. I basically knew what their message was. Harry was dead. We all knew that. What was the point? I decided to head to my room and lie down for a bit.

Sam poked his head in as I was nodding off and asked, “Don’t you think you should get your butt downstairs and meet these people? I think Dad is wondering what happened to you.”

“I don’t feel so good. Tell him I’m sick, okay?”

“You should hear this, Tom. It’s pretty strange.”

I rolled over, facing the blank wall. I never decorated my walls — no posters, no album covers, no catchy sayings. Everybody knew how I felt about things. There was no need for further advertising. Harry and Sam, on the other hand, were always putting things up on their walls. The only use I ever saw for their stupid wall trappings was that they were a convenient place for graffiti, but that usually got me into more trouble than it was worth. Except the time I altered a “Vote for Kennedy” poster to read “Vote for Kennedy or go to hell…” That gem was worth being grounded for a week.

“Fill me in later.” I closed my eyes and Sam left.

I awakened to the smell of brownies baking in the oven. They have a distinctive odor that was almost as delicious as their taste. I like the fudgy ones with nuts best. You can faintly smell the nuts mixed with the rich, chocolate aroma. I was salivating thinking of them. I put brownies in the same category as coffee — one of those things whose smell makes you want them before you’ve ever tasted them. On the other hand, broccoli, spinach, cauliflower, in fact all vegetables, could never make that claim. They smelled more like someone had thrown grass clippings into the oven to roast, and they tasted even worse. Duncan Hines was definitely going to be the court cook in my kingdom. There is no way he’d ever make a vegetable anything for me if he knew what was good for him.

It was getting dark outside. A three quarter moon shone in the clear frigid sky, reflecting off the snow-covered yard. It was one of those nights that would never get fully dark, one whose shadows would be long and deep, one of those nights made for slinking around and getting into trouble. This would have been the perfect night to spray Mrs. Ioli’s Cadillac with water. It would be a solid block of ice come morning. I smiled, plotting the details in my mind. She would be afraid to chip the ice away from her poor little baby —she might chip the paint — and would be stranded until we had a day above freezing. She would starve to death over there in her evil fortress. I got up and looked out the front window at her darkened house. She was in bed by now and her son, Carmen, was no longer there to protect her from me. Such a perfect plan — one I owned the patent on, by the way. I wondered what would happen if I went out tonight and did it. Would she remember that I had tried to do exactly the same thing back in the good old days? She was probably senile by now. Of course I was much younger then and had been caught. She wouldn’t have a prayer of catching me if I went out tonight, though. I have gotten so much better at hiding things I’ve done… so much better.

I wandered downstairs after hitting the bathroom. Dad was watching a game show with Mom in the family room. I heard voices in the kitchen and decided to head there. I didn’t feel much like listening to Mom and Dad giving wrong answers to their stupid little TV’s questions. It was humiliating and reflected poorly on the family name. I couldn’t understand why they liked it so much, liked it better than me. I felt a sudden anger well up when I heard Dad say, “I think its Bangor. Bangor, Maine.”

“It’s Augusta,” I muttered, continuing down the steps. “Augusta is the capital of Maine.” My arch-nemesis the TV confirmed my answer and I smiled to myself. I would always be smarter than them and smarter than their boob tube.

Kate, Mary, and Sam were sitting at the kitchen table drinking coffee.

“You missed dinner, Tom,” Kate smiled. “I can reheat your plate if you like.”

“Maybe you should reheat the food instead of just the plate,” I smirked. “It might taste better.” Opening the door to the fridge, my slight nausea returned. They had apparently had some kind of turkey casserole and, from the looks of it, Mary had attempted some bastardized version of an old favorite Mom recipe. I had no appetite anyway so I grabbed a Coke. Without thinking, I groaned.

“Are you ever not a smart-ass, Tom?” Mary asked. Harsh words from her, but true, I guess.

At one point during high school Mom and Dad had sent me to a behavioral psychologist who told me that my snappy comebacks, my zingers, my bon mots, were actually a defense mechanism to hide my fear of seeming inadequate or stupid in front of others. That came of low self-esteem, he said. I got him good for that one. I told him that it was really his opinions about me that were a defense mechanism. They were his attempt to hide his total lack of ignorance because he was afraid of looking stupid in front of me and his psycho-crap not worth the money my parents were paying him. I guess I showed him who was insecure and who knew what was what.

“Sorry, Mary, I’m not feeling that great.” Actually I didn’t feel that bad, but I wasn’t in the mood for a fight, and I wasn’t ready to attempt to stomach one of Mary’s dishes. I ventured a smile at Kate. “Thanks, Kate, but I’m not really hungry.” I sat next to her and bumped her playfully.

She laughed and pushed me back into my own space. “Get back where you belong.” Air space was important at the Ryan table and infringing on another’s was tantamount to an act of war. And once started, the war would not end with Dad’s telling us to stop. That would merely force the war underground, or in this case, under table, where kicking and toe-poking became the generally accepted methods of attack.

“Got you last…”

Naturally, the “got you last” rule would inevitably determine who won the conflict. As Kate had pushed me away, I brushed her arm lightly. It was an old trick. You wait for the enemy to strike and once they have made their move, you get them in the act of running, when they are unable to fight back. “Got you back.”

“Did not.”

“Did too, and besides you only got my sleeve. That doesn’t count.”

“It counts. Whatever is touching your skin counts if I touch it.”

Sam smacked the table with his fist and we all jumped. “Your elbow is on the table. I just hit the table. Therefore I just hit you. You lose.”

“That’s not what I meant and you know it.”

Sam’s expression was unyielding.

Kate shot me the raspberries and laughed, “Loser.”

I had definitely softened in my old age. There was a time when I would have dealt swiftly with them. I guess all ruling monarchs eventually lose some of their fire the longer they are in power. They become benevolent, which is another word for worn out. That’s why they need to get all their important accomplishments done in the first few decades of their reign. After that, it’s all downhill and resting on laurels. Aren’t they trees? I made a note to change the dictionary on that one. I couldn’t see myself resting on tree branches. Pillows seemed much more comfortable.

“So, what happened with the Kenyon thing?” I asked to no one directly. I figured that they had already decided who was going to tell me, so it was easier to send out a non-directional inquiry and let the appointed person respond.

Sam cleared his throat. Figured it would be him. “Well, like I was trying to tell you earlier, Tom, when you totally blew me off… It was all a little weird.” He paused and looked around the room.

Sam had some agenda I couldn’t figure out at the moment. Dramatic pauses, knowing looks, what the heck was that all about? Just spit it out! I stared at him briefly, and then answered, “Okay?” What did he want — an invitation to continue? I never enjoyed etiquette and right now was no exception.

We all watched him until he seemed to come to a decision and began to speak. “There’s a river near Kenyon. A railroad crosses over it on an old trestle bridge. Trains still run there but not very often. It’s pretty dangerous for anyone to get across because you have to either walk on the rails or jump from tie to tie and hope that a train doesn’t come along while you’re out over the water. Apparently it’s a tradition that all the fraternities make the pledges cross it as part of their initiation. Mr. Caplets — that was the Kenyon guy — said that a student died there a long time ago. It had been raining and the boy slipped on a wet tie, hit his head, and fell into the river and drowned. That’s when they officially banned the activity.”

Sam took a sip of his coffee and I just waited. I pretty much knew what was coming and saw no need to jump in with superfluous questions.

“Of course, that didn’t stop the frats from doing it. You make something illegal and that just makes it more exciting to do, no matter how stupid it is, like gambling or smoking or drinking.”

I thought about that for a second. Sam was absolutely right. I made a note to make sure smoking, drinking, and gambling were outlawed in my kingdom so that people would find it more exciting. And, of course, I would own controlling interest in the illicit clubs that operated under the official radar. We would even arrest a few people once in a while to give the thrill seekers a greater sense of danger. A nice profit in that… I thought about that a second, then made a mental note to make fewer mental notes.

“Caplets wouldn’t say so, but it sounded like the college took an unofficial position of looking the other way. As long as nobody got hurt, everybody would be happy.” Sam’s voice trailed off and he was lost somewhere in grief. Odd, but I could feel his grief and understood it. I shared it. When his eyes refocused, he whispered, “He said Harry died the same way. The trestle was covered with ice…” Sam stopped again, waiting for my reaction. I took a sip from my Coke and belched in his general direction. “You son of a…”

“Pig,” Mary cut in.

“So that makes you a pig’s sister? Which makes you a… pig?” Zing. Score one for me.

“Harry’s dead, for pity’s sake. Can’t you be serious for once in your life?”

“It won’t bring him back, will it?”

“I hate you.” Mary glared at me.

I shrugged. “So what else is new?”

“The only problem is…” Sam’s voice became louder, drowning us out. “Harry would never belong to a fraternity or even pledge one. He didn’t like them. And he hated the cold. And he wasn’t stupid, like some people.”

I ignored that last crack, obviously directed at me. “So, you think the whole story is bull?”

“There’s no body, Tom.”

“Nobody what?” I knew this would irritate him.

“No body, no corpse. Idiot.”

I liked him mad and frustrated. It would probably contribute to his later life high blood pressure and heart condition. “How do they know he fell then? There must have been a witness, someone with him who saw the whole thing. Something. Why didn’t you ask the Kenyon dopes about that?”

Sam faltered. I guess he wasn’t as smart as he wanted us all to believe. He wasn’t anywhere near as clever as me when it came to creating alibis, establishing witnesses, and disguising motive and opportunity. I had years of experience incriminating them and knew all the angles. I had learned to think like Sherlock Holmes from my years of being the Moriarty in their lives. They, on the other hand, were too naïve and stupid, and would remain Inspector Lestrades forever. They didn’t stand a chance. I guess that’s why I will always the king and they just ordinary people.

“I told you, Sam. That’s why we need Tom to go there and figure this out.” Kate’s remark came from so far out in left field it wasn’t even on the field. I turned to her. She focused on me and continued. “You’re the only one smart enough to find out what really happened, Tom. You’re clever and resourceful. You have all those years of acting like a little hoodlum and treating us all like stupid, ordinary people. You know all the angles, all the lies and excuses. You have to do this. You’re the only one who can. You have to go to Kenyon, Tom, please.”

Was she a mind reader? Okay, so maybe she wasn’t as stupid as the rest of them. Maybe together they had somehow pooled their collective stupidity and had channeled it into a Frankenstein-like intellect in Kate that could dimly perceive my true power. Maybe… Maybe I’m so full of shit my eyes are brown and I’m just as ordinary and dumb as them. No. No way. That possibility didn’t exist in my universe. “What the hell can I do there that they can’t?”

With an outspoken ally in Kate, Sam rejoined the fray. “For once in your life, do the right thing.”

Chapter 5

The right thing… Who decides what the right thing is anyway? Is there some good-and-evil-o-meter that points to right when you give five bucks in church and wrong when you chuck a water balloon into a car on Lover’s Lane in a 2:00 a.m. drive-by attack on prom night? You might think that was the wrong thing, but what would have happened if I had left Frankie Marx alone that night and he had gotten Bonnie Shoedel pregnant? What if I did it to save him from a fate worse than death? A teen marriage, a kid, a sure divorce, a ruined life? I could have performed that seemingly evil act for all the right reasons. Of course I didn’t, but that’s beside the point. The little jerk deserved a fate worse than a water bath with his tux on, but that was all I could muster on the spur of the moment. Word had it that I was pissed because Bonnie wouldn’t go with me to the prom and had vowed revenge. But who are they to judge my motives? Who are they to say what I did was wrong?

Do we judge a person by their intentions and motives or by their actions? Why is it that people say that actions speak louder than words? That’s one of those philosophical questions that prompted me to avoid the philosophy/religion electives in college and take psychology/sociology instead. There was no question in my mind that people were too dumb to figure out why anyone did anything, let alone figure out what the right thing to do about it was. It’s way easier for them to hear the shouting actions than to make out the whispering intentions. But I am more interested in people’s motivations because I want to be able to exact revenge equally on those who hate me and are pretty good at getting me back, as well as those who hate me but are too incompetent to pull off any kind of successful retribution. The competent and incompetent alike should pay for their sins.

Take Harry for example. With all the times I had tormented him, hurt him, bullied him; with all the nasty things I had done or tried to do to him growing up, surely he knew I hated his guts. And given this, I was perfectly justified in getting back at him at every opportunity — after all, he had every reason and the perfect motivation for getting back at me — so why wait for him to make the first strike? A pre-emptive strategy is always the best in war. You take far fewer casualties when you have the initiative and the plan being followed is your plan, not some half-baked, reactionary scheme brought together at the last minute, but a well-thought out plan of action that can take two, three, four years to devise until it is perfected. But none of that mattered now. Harry was dead and the war was over. I had won. Why didn’t I feel victorious?

There weren’t many cars on Route 19 heading south toward U.S. 70 West. It was two days after Christmas, after all, and not everyone had a crazy family like me. Road crews were still out clearing the snow and I was stuck behind a dumb salt truck methodically spreading his briny contribution to the overall mess. Surely he could go faster than twenty-five miles an hour doing that? Salt is salt. You get it on the road and it melts what it touches. How hard could that be? I couldn’t tell which was worse — the crappy roads and being stuck behind a slow-moving jerk, or caving in to the crying and whining of my sisters and the logic of my younger brother. How could I let them bully me into going to Kenyon and doing the right thing anyway? This wasn’t the right thing. This was stupid. I was probably just sick of them and the whole ordeal and needed to get away from it. That was it. This was really my decision to leave them in their idiotic squalor and take six hours to make the normally three-hour drive from Pittsburgh to Kenyon in the aftermath of the worst snowstorm in years. My decision…

Enjoying the sights really isn’t my bag. When I’m driving, I’m only interested in one thing — getting to where I am going as fast as possible, or possibly even faster than that. Speed limits, after all, are for losers. Lieutenant Frank Bullitt — that’s who I was behind the wheel, and one of these days I would catch that bad guy, the one with the nerdy glasses and black gloves. If only I could get him before his car blew up, maybe I’d get a few pointers on the proper screeching of tires. I was good at it, but whoever he was, he was the best. Because of him, I had long ago decided that in my kingdom it would be illegal to go through any intersection with all four wheels on the pavement. I would make it a ticketable offense; despite the fact that it had taken me years of practice on my family to be able to take the neighborhood roads at dangerous, tire screeching speeds, and even though I was still working on the flying through the air thing. My subjects would all have to comply or suffer the consequences (which I had yet to detail in The Book of Tom).

Mom called me a holy terror behind the wheel when she had the pleasure of being in the car with me. I took that as a compliment, and having her there made it easier to judge how well I was doing by the sound of her screams. But, in all honesty, she did more damage to the car than I ever did. It was her constant death grip on the passenger-side armrest that had finally broken it off, not my driving. As if that would save her from the crash she expected every time I swerved around some knucklehead in my way. “The Post-Gazette reported this morning that a car carrying two people flew off Cochran Road, crashing into the woods. The driver was killed instantly but the female passenger survived because she was hanging on to the armrest.” I don’t think so.

This salt truck had to go. I was getting ready to make my move around it when I noticed the sign to Mayview State Hospital. In the instant before I pulled out and around the truck I debated stopping at the loony bin to see crazy Aunt Lucy. I’d never gone with Mom and Dad to visit her after that first time. I was too freaked out by all the crazies. But that was okay — they didn’t visit her much either, maybe once a year. Dad said she wasn’t really Aunt Lucy anymore. I was curious what they had done to turn her into someone else and considered a pit stop to use the men’s room, check it out, maybe torturing the helpless patients in the process, but the buzzer sounded, the debate closed and I gunned it. It had nothing to do with this fear I had that someday it would be me stuck in there, sitting by the window, drooling, staring out at nothing in particular, hoping for a visitor who remembered my name and could remind me of it. I didn’t need anyone to confirm that I was indeed Tom Ryan and not someone else. I just wanted to get this over. I floored it.

Route 70 was the main interstate between western Pennsylvania and southeastern Ohio. It was one of the few four lane highways around with a reasonable speed limit — doing seventy on 70 was what the kids used to say, though for me it was more like eighty-five on 70. It was always one of the first cleared whenever there was a snowstorm. I knew this because it passed through West Virginia, where we used to go drinking in high school because the legal age was eighteen there, and even that was not enforced unless you really screwed up. I know, because I was caught three times when I was only seventeen and never spent a day in jail. They never even called my parents. That may have been because they recognized their true king in my young punk disguise, or it may have been because they believed my stories, but it was more likely because they liked the color of my money. I tried to imagine how far a ten-dollar bribe would get me today. Inflation was a bugger.

Perfectly skidding around the entrance ramp, I regained control and merged into the light traffic heading west — mostly truckers — poor suckers, out on a day like this. I felt their pain, having been forced out in this weather like me. Maybe they were out because of their stupid families or maybe it was their bosses who decided that taking a chance on making more money outweighed the potential danger of being anywhere other than home in that kind of weather. Maybe it was both. Maybe they were doing the right thing, too and were getting paid for it. Now why didn’t I think of that? Rental cars aren’t usually much to speak of but the Pontiac I had gotten was a V8 and its weight made it a good handler on slick roads. I eased into the left lane and let her rip, keeping it at a consistent eighty. I didn’t want to push it, what with the slick roads and all.

The more miles I put between Pittsburgh and myself, the better I felt. No more nagging family, no more snow shoveling, no more turkey leftovers. But it wasn’t just them I was leaving behind. I was also leaving Harry back there in Australia while I conquered the Risk world. Crazy thoughts. Being in a car alone on a long drive with nothing to keep your mind occupied brings them on. That’s when you start to think of things like how sorry you really are for some of the nasty stuff you’ve done and how much you actually miss someone despite how long you have worked at hating them. What good is a BB rifle with nothing to shoot at? Why would anyone, apart from me, want to kill him? Would I undo any of my dirty tricks if I had known it would turn out this way?

I cranked up the radio and as the distance grew between my rifle and me and all the things I had done to Harry, he took his place as just another memory buried in the side yard. Maybe I wouldn’t stop at Kenyon at all. Maybe I’d just keep driving. Maybe I’d stay lost for years. Four years from home would just about do it. I glanced at the speedometer. I was doing ninety-five. I unclenched my clammy hands and let up on the gas. Maybe four years wasn’t enough. Maybe it should be longer.

There wasn’t much of West Virginia to go through on the way to Ohio. I guess the scenery was pretty. I didn’t care. If you’ve seen one snow-covered mountain, you’ve seen them all. And then there was Wheeling. The only thing I could really tell you about that city was that the bars there served watered down beer to minors. They paid for that transgression often in broken windows and deflated tires. Not that I had anything to do with that, it’s just something I heard. I was hungry, but decided to blow through that unpleasant memory as quickly as I could and stop for something to eat once I crossed the border into the Buckeye State.

Buckeyes — great ammunition — small, light, and deadly; I could carry a bag of them in one arm and easily do a strafing run of the streetcars that had the misfortune of crossing Caswell Drive after school. Streetcars are great. They run on rails, are powered by electricity, and the way they jostle about on their wobbly suspensions makes everyone riding them sick. They can also crush coins, rocks, and other valuables. I have yet to test just how big a rock, but that is on my to-do list. Streetcars will definitely be the primary means of transportation in my world and no one will be allowed to call them trolleys either. The world will all call them streetcars or suffer my wrath.

The scoring system for a buckeye run was easy: one point for a direct hit, two for an open window shot, three for an audible cry of pain from one of the sick passengers. And a curse word? That was not only a five-point shot, but it also came with a bonus of two hundred grace points. My top score was twenty-four points in one afternoon. It would have been more but the streetcars were only running every fifteen minutes and, with my attention span being not much more than a one hour episode of Combat!, I get bored easily. There was just not enough danger in disrupting enemy supply lines, and Sergeant Saunders was too valuable a weapon to waste on that kind of mission. The Nazis never fought back and the streetcars never stopped, not like the convoys on Conner Road. Streetcars had a schedule to keep and weren’t about to back up, stop, and chase a bunch of stupid kids around on foot.

Finally through West Virginia without seeing a single hillbilly or state trooper, and without a single shot being fired (miracle of miracles), I entered the great state of Ohio, or as the locals pronounce it, Ahia. A sign for a Pancake House caught my eye and I took the exit for it. Pancake House was a chain of dinky little joints that made greasy, smelly, smoky breakfasts all day long for truckers who slept in their greasy, smelly, smoky cabs and carried their own personal time zones with them from state to state. Truckers and Pancake Houses were a match made in heaven.

Situated among several hundred-foot high gas station signs, this particular Pancake House looked like one even a trucker would avoid. Maybe I was in luck and it was too clean for them. Or maybe it was closed. I saw no trucks at all when I pulled into the lot, and I was the only car. Was this trip worth it? Was anything really worth it when you came right down to it? Just what was the point of it all? I rarely pondered questions like that long enough to matter before they found their way to my mind’s trashcan. Why worry? Those incredibly tall, turnpike gas station signs were actually alien-constructed monoliths, homing beacons of an advanced civilization and someday they would return, realize their mistake in creating us and totally obliterate everything on the planet except me. I would be king of the planet and none would be left to challenge my rule, not even Harry.

The entrance to the restaurant reminded me of an airlock — an outer door led to a glass-enclosed, airtight confine, and then an inner door that opened into the restaurant proper. Was the concern letting the foul air in or out? Pulling the outer door open I got a whiff of things to come and stepped inside. I looked around for the green light that would flash when it was safe to open the inner airlock door. There was none. The odor was an overwhelmingly delicious combination of bacon and sausage. This was definitely not the irresistible smell that those disgusting fast food places pump into the air around their restaurants; you know — those artificial chemicals that remind you of charbroiled hamburgers? Whatever those certainly deadly concoctions are, they attract the passersby, who, if they are dumb enough to be enticed by the smell, and stupid enough to enter and actually order lunch, find out too late that the burgers are the same old greasy, fried, preformed mystery meat served at every fast food place since the dawn of McDonald’s. No, this was not that smell. This was truly the rich, greasy smell of honest to goodness griddle-fried, home cooked, dead animal. No pretense. No deception. This Pancake House was the real deal. I went in.

Both walls on either side of the door were lined with empty booths. No one was sitting at the counter either. No greeter. No waitresses. A lone cook was fiddling with a few strips of bacon on the griddle. I couldn’t see her face but I guessed she was unhappily pushing them around with very little kindness, with a total uncaring indifference appropriate to her meaningless task. The door creaked closed behind me.

I waited until she waved her metal spatula over her shoulder, “Sit where you like. I’ll be right with you.”

She sounded cheery enough. Maybe she enjoyed bacon pushing. I stared at her back for a second and took a seat in the booth nearest the door. More or less knowing what I wanted to eat, I passed the time flipping through the jukebox selections. Most of them were old, piece-of-crap songs. Didn’t they ever update their song list? Here was one from 1968 — four years ago and still it made the Pancake House Top Forty. Impressive. I dropped a quarter into the machine and pressed I8.

As the sickeningly sweet lyrics of Hey Jude began, the cook stopped fiddling and looked my way. She was actually kind of pretty for someone who had obviously been overexposed to the Pancake House. Her dirty, blonde hair was slick with bacon grease and stuck to her forehead where she had pushed it out of her eyes. Her smile wasn’t all that bad either, except for that missing lower tooth, or maybe it was just a hunk of bacon stuck there. I immediately crossed her off my list of potentials. I couldn’t have a bacon-smelling beauty for my queen.

She was still smiling when she turned back to the griddle. With one quick motion, she swept away the bacon ashes she had been tending to oblivion and threw a few fresh pieces on the griddle. I heard the crack of a couple of eggs and the enticing sizzle as she dropped them onto the hot surface. She was good. Her free hand was pulling two pieces of white bread out of a loaf of Wonder and dropping them into a toaster while she scrambled the eggs. Who flipped her on switch?

It must have been the extended na-na-na-na version we were listening to because she was at the booth with a plate of freshly scrambled eggs, three strips of bacon done just the way I like them, and two pieces of toast before the last “Hey Jude.”

“Hi,” she smiled again. “I did them scrambled, just the way you like them. Everything’s just the way you like it.” I looked at the plate in front of me. It was true, everything was just the way I liked it. She even brought me a glass of orange juice after setting down the food.

One of my cardinal rules is one I call DLS — Don’t Look Stupid — not in front of anyone, ever, no matter how stupid you really feel. In order of precedence on my list of rules that one comes right after: Do unto others before they do unto you — the theory being that if I can’t do unto them, that’s when I need to not look stupid.

The DLS rule has gotten me through many tough scrapes like the time Brother Friar Tuck hit me on the head with a book for not having my homework. He had a real name, but no one could remember it once they saw his haircut, and he always hit his students on the head with a book when he was mad at them. That was back when every Sergeant Teacher in the Christian Brothers had a powerful right-hand man in their squad to do their dirty work — Corporal Punishment. It was hard to argue with the book so I reminded him that he had excused me from the assignment because I had been sick. The good Brother had a terrible memory.

So instead of saying what I wanted to say, which was “How the hell did you know what I wanted?” I applied DLS and simply said, “Thanks, this is great,” I read her nametag, “Amy.”

However prepared I thought I was for anyone or anything, however cool I thought I was in every situation, I was neither prepared enough nor cool enough for what happened next. She slid into the booth, sitting across from me, and held my gaze with eyes that pleaded for me to take her outstretched hands. I couldn’t help myself. I slid my breakfast aside and reached across the table to her, wrapping my hands around her slender, warm, greasy fingers.

“I’m glad you came back. I knew you would,” she whispered, smiling in an odd way.

Whatever had been caught in her teeth was gone. Her hair didn’t seem gross at all. I got out my eraser and searched for that list of potentials. It was like the ending of that sappy movie Casablanca, where Rick says good-bye to the girl. No matter how sickening that movie was, it always made me swallow hard and clench my teeth to avoid crying. I learned that technique the first time I had been beaten up on the playground. I was only in first grade, but smart enough to know that showing any weakness to the gang that had bested me would only make them come back for more. Dumb movie — the ending was all wrong.

The tires screeched as I swerved out of the parking lot and headed for the entrance ramp to U.S. 70 West. In addition to being the king of the realm, I was also master of the escape. No, I didn’t say, “Here’s looking at you, kid,” and watch her head back to the grill to return to her noble life of bacon pushing without me. It was nothing as clever as that. Clever doesn’t cut it in most situations where escape is necessary. Clever is best used when subterfuge and cover-ups are required because there is no alternative. No, in this case, I simply said, “I have to hit the restroom. I’ll be right back.” The window in the restroom wasn’t all that convenient an exit, but it did the trick.

The few sentences of conversation before my abrupt departure made no sense. None of this trip made any sense…

“It’s funny how my life is still the same since you left, but things mean so much more to me now. I mean I still cook here all day and still smell like bacon when I get home at night, but now I feel like I make a difference. I feel important. You taught me that. Everyone has their place in this world and their job to do, and everyone is important.”

“That’s… super. I couldn’t be happier for you.”

“Those few hours we spent together… I will keep them and you in my heart forever. I love you, Harry. I know nothing can ever come of it, but I want you to know that. I love you…”

Freaked out? Totally. Beyond totally, actually. I had to book. Immediately. I’d often been mistaken for Harry by people who didn’t know us, but in an obscure Pancake House off Route 70 in Looneyburg, Ohio? Never in my wildest dreams. Harry must have stopped there on his way to Kenyon just like I did, but what the heck had happened between those two? If they had made out, you’d think she’d have known I wasn’t Harry. I was sure he couldn’t be as good a kisser as me. I had at least three girls-worth of experience more than him since, as far as I knew, his count was zero. So they must have just sat and talked in the Pancake House over eggs and bacon… once…four years ago. Harry always did have that kind of impact on people.

Sister Concepta, the meanest, toughest, most feared nun at Saint Catherine’s, never gave an inch, never let up in her quest to purify every grade school kid of his mortal and venial sins, and beyond that, she never, ever, smiled. She was the principal and set the standard of cruelty that the others followed — willingly or not. I almost admired her for that. She was the one who had lined up the entire seventh grade one year to paddle each and every one until they cried because someone refused to confess to the crime of puking in the hallway. Everyone else in grades five through eight had to witness the brutality. I probably should have told her it was Derrick Dietz because it was me who had punched him in the stomach so hard he threw up, but it was more fun to watch them all suffer. And Derrick knew that diming me out was pointless. Sister Concepta wouldn’t believe him anyway, and I would find him later and make him really sorry.

Each year, a Mass was celebrated to honor Sister Concepta. One year, Harry had the privilege of serving as one of the altar boys at her Mass and the misfortune of fainting while kneeling under the hot spotlights. It was priceless. Father Sherer carried him to the sacristy for the nuns to care for him while he went back to finish the service. When I saw Sister Concepta get up and head for the sacristy, I knew there would be more than Christ’s blood shed for our sins that day. It was easy enough to slide out of my end seat in the pew and hit the exit. Everyone was watching the spectacle and no one cared about little old me. I circled around to the back of the church and came in to the sacristy from the outside door. I was fully expecting Harry to be dead and the good Sister wiping the blood off her hands with the shreds of his white vestments. With a little sharpening, that big cross she always wore around her neck would make a great sword. She could easily run him through quickly, but hopefully not painlessly. I slid behind the cabinet so I wouldn’t be seen. I didn’t feel like testifying at a murder trial that day. I just wanted to watch, maybe pick up a few pointers. But it wasn’t a murder I was witnessing. It was a disgusting scene of the good Sister hugging and kissing Harry on the cheek, asking him softly if he was all right and — this is the worst part — crying. It was then I began looking for another leader for my kingdom’s secret police.

Disturbing, twisting thoughts tore at me — thoughts I couldn’t make sense of and didn’t particularly want to. Everything that had happened since Christmas had been dumped into the same can that held my world, taken to the MAB paint store, put into one of those paint can shakers and mixed into a gooey, gray mess. Whoever was behind this was pure evil — worse than Frankie Marx, Carmen Ioli, and Nicky Amendola combined. This clever mastermind even had the nerve to paint over the Tom label that clearly marked it as my realm and replace it with a blood red Harry. Someday I’d find whoever had done this and get even.

The signs for Zanesville solidified in the mist hanging over U.S. 70 as I drove that poor Pontiac and myself relentlessly westward. I felt sorry for myself being thrust into such a stupid situation by my siblings, but I didn’t feel any sympathy for the car. Cars were made to be driven, and driven was what I did to them. If they couldn’t take it, they got traded in or junked. People are like cars in that respect. A sudden panic swept over me with the realization that I had been passing the time daydreaming and had probably missed the turnoff for Kenyon. Damn it. Why couldn’t they make cars that drove themselves? I reached for my mental notebook to make an entry to go back in time and punch Henry Ford in his “better ideas,” but it, too, was covered with the same sticky, gray slop from the inside of my paint can world. Oh, I’d get even.

I waited for the next sign. And waited. And waited. I fumbled for the map Sam had drawn for me. I’m not sure why — I could still clearly see its image in my photographic memory, and what I saw would not have helped me just then. It wasn’t like I was taking a multiple choice exam and had to simply run down the image of the answers in my mind gleaned from my brief glimpse of Jean Mykita’s test when she got up to turn it in. This was different. A map is only helpful if you know where you are on it.

When I saw the sign for “Mount Vernon” it became the little yellow star labeled “You are here” on the map, and my world again fell into place. I decelerated onto the exit ramp. This was the part of the drive that I knew I would hate. The roads were too windy and twisty to get up much speed, and they had gotten a ton more snow than Pittsburgh. And, of course, the destination was Mount Vernon, which I had pre-ordained as a crummy little town that didn’t even have a McDonald’s and whose only claim to fame was that people came through it to get somewhere else. It was a good hour before I entered what was apparently the town, judging by the subtle increase in density of the houses and numbers of people, and of course, the Welcome to Mount Vernon sign. My assessment was right on target. In five minutes I was through the nearly empty town square and back onto an even more desolate highway, leaving Mount Vernon behind, skidding and sliding my way up the steeper hills toward Kenyon.

Kenyon was a small college of about fifteen hundred young punks with no future (at least not in my kingdom), a hundred or so faculty, and a town that wasn’t much more than a speed bump at the end of the campus. It called itself the Harvard of the Midwest, but this dump was nothing like Harvard. I’d spent many nights drinking at Harvard and Kenyon was about as close to this as the moon is to Uranus. I know what you’re thinking and, no, I didn’t go to Harvard. I merely drank there because it was the place to drink in Cambridge if you wanted to pretend to be a student, and pick up women who knew you weren’t a student but played along anyway.

In the aftermath of the storm you could easily have missed Kenyon and headed down the other side of the hill toward some even smaller and more obscure Ohio town. But my years of leading patrols through the woods and looking for tracks and signs of the enemy had honed my senses to the point where I immediately knew I was in Gambier, Ohio, the town that was home to Kenyon College.

I stopped at the Kenyon College, Gambier, Ohio, sign and looked around. It was cloudy and dark, and the wind whistled through the Pontiac’s worn insulation. To my right was the main campus of the college and to my left the town, if you could call it that. I turned left and circled the one block that was Gambier — a restaurant, a bookstore, a pizza place, a grocery, a post office, a bank, a couple of houses that looked like they had been converted to offices, and my next destination — the Alumni House. The sign out front said Vacancy. I pondered the foresight and depth of planning that had sent me more than a hundred fifty miles in the aftermath of a winter storm with no reservation for the night, but I was too tired to make any notes on getting back at the trip planners so I parked the car, grabbed my bag, and headed inside.

The lobby was fairly nondescript except for the Kenyon paraphernalia all over the place. I gravitated to a wall of class photos with a drawing in the middle. The photos were of the last twenty years or so of graduating classes, and the drawing was of a holy-looking guy (at least insofar as he was dressed in a black frock with a stiff white collar and was carrying a Bible). He was surrounded by a small group of people who were kneeling and apparently praying. The artist had added some light ray lines coming from the clouds above. Obviously the sun or God or both was shining down on them all. The handwritten caption read: They climbed a hill and said a prayer, and founded Kenyon College there.

I glanced around the room. Ice had formed on the inside of a window and framed the bleak, soulless night. This was the answer to their prayer? Example number three hundred sixty four of why I never pray: the answer is never good. Sister John Anne had told me once, while she was repeatedly hitting me on the head with her fist, that God hears all prayers. He just doesn’t answer them all. I was convinced that He never answered mine, considering that I didn’t get that nuclear missile or even the one with the conventional warhead. I mean, I did give him options and giving me nothing was not one of them. In the case of the drawing, this dreary place called Kenyon seemed more like a “No, but how about this booby prize and we’ll call it Kenyon?” than a “Sure — here you go, this is the answer to all your prayers.” Kenyon was the Gulag Archipelago of Midwest Siberia, Ohio. Remind me again why Harry would want to come here? Why I would want to come here? Why anyone would want to come here?

Mom and Dad knew I had given up on praying — I had pretty much told them as much — but they also thought that Harry had stopped too after he quit going to church. I secretly knew otherwise, but I wasn’t about to tell them. I caught him at it many times, mostly outside and in the woods for some odd reason. I never understood that. Praying was bad enough, kneeling worse. Why would you do it outside? I’d asked Harry that only once and his answer had enraged me — he said he couldn’t explain it to someone like me — that I wouldn’t understand. Someone like me? Wouldn’t understand? What the hell did that mean anyway? My Revenge notebook had pages and pages of hash marks beside his name. I think I added ten of them for that crack.

The clerk’s atonal incantation, “Your room is ready now,” brought me back from my suppressed unforgotten anger and I snatched up the room key. The Alumni House only had two floors and my room was at the top of the stairs. It was chilly in the room, but I could hear the hopeful snapping of the radiator as hot water warmed up the cold cast iron. I really wanted a shower, but I needed to lie down for a bit. My muscles were still vibrating from the long car ride and I had an enormous headache. The shower would just have to wait…

“Are we there yet?”

“No.”

“Are we there yet?”

“No.”

“Are we there yet?”

“Shut up, or I’ll kill you, you little dweeb.”

“Tom! What an awful thing to say.”

I could hear the shock in Mom’s voice and I elbowed Harry hard before turning to look out the car window.

“He’s being a pain.” And how the hell did I end up in the back? My place was in the front window seat, not here with the losers. Somehow this was Harry’s fault, but I couldn’t figure out how yet, and he was torturing me. He knew what a humiliating demotion this was for me and was rubbing it in — hard.

“Want to play a game?”

A game? With him? “Sure, how about my fist and your face play hide and seek?”

Dad usually ignored any commotion in the back seat while he was driving but he always made a special exception for me. “That’s enough, Tom. You two just sit quietly there, or there will be consequences.”

I looked at Harry’s shit-eating grin and gave him the finger. I could have killed him.

Chapter 6

The cold glare of morning pushed rudely through the window and washed away a dream I couldn’t remember. It had been quite a while since I’d remembered my dreams — four or five years easily. When I was growing up, they had always been so vivid and real, usually in Technicolor by Deluxe with Dolby sound, but one day they just stopped. I’d wake up, knowing I had been dreaming but unable to remember anything at all about it. Like now. Hungry, smelly, pasty-mouthed, head still pounding; for an instant I couldn’t decide which of these problems to fix first.

That grip of indecision often strangles lesser folk — too many things have gone wrong to know where to start making them right. It freezes the weak-minded in an inertia that becomes overwhelming — but not me. I had been using my bag as a pillow, mounding it into a little hill of comfort during my sleep; so I climbed that hill (but said no prayer) and found my aspirin bottle there. Catchy — maybe I’d graffiti that over the drawing downstairs. I popped a couple with no water and grimaced a swallow, just like the tough guy in the movies who takes his pain meds after the big fight. Nothing to wash it down, no reason to call him sissy. That wouldn’t be enough. I took two more. With that out of the way, the other problems fell one by one like outposts on the Maginot line.

“That’s not how it happened, Tom.”

“It’s Sergeant to you, Private, or do I have to remind your face with the butt of my rifle?”

“The Maginot Line was French, not German, and the Americans didn’t defeat them one at a time. The Nazis just went around them and they eventually surrendered when they were cut off.”

“Maybe in some other war, but not this war. In the big WW II it was our squad that bumped them off one by one.”

“You ought to rewrite history books for a living. You’re so good at it, a regular 1984.”

“That just shows how stupid you are. It happened in the 1940s, not 1984. And obviously, Harry, you didn’t pay attention in class when they covered the Maginot Line. Obviously, the Germans skirted around it and obviously the French surrendered it, but — and here’s the part where you look like a total idiot — it was the Americans that retook it, one outpost at a time from the Nazis. Numbnuts.” History is a fluid thing, changeable in the mere retelling of it. And as the stories evolve and are retold, they continue to rewrite the history that will someday be remembered as fact. Or, as I am more apt to say, the more you tell the lie, the truer it gets.

Breakfast, the last of the unretaken outposts, fell before my knife like a sentry in the way of my infiltration mission. The thought crossed my mind that the waitress at the Alumni House was some relation to the waitress at the Pancake House, given that Ohio was actually the Indian word for inbreeding, or so I thought I had read on some diner placemat somewhere. So I tried to ignore her for the most part by reading a copy of the Alumni Bulletin that had come with breakfast. I really didn’t want another bizarre scene like that one, especially not knowing my escape route. I could have kicked myself for not reconnoitering the area before advancing into enemy territory. It wasn’t like Sergeant Saunders to head into enemy territory without knowing his way back to friendly lines. Fortunately, she had as little interest in making conversation with me as I had with her, and the meal passed uneventfully into my digestive system.

Most times, this time included, I don’t take much pleasure in eating — it’s just something that has to be done, like sleeping or going to the bathroom or dying. It’s far more enjoyable and satisfying to do things that involve danger and the possibility of getting caught and being punished. I reached for my notebook and jotted down a few random thoughts about hiring scientists to develop foods that either contained adrenaline or some other like chemical that would introduce fear and anticipation into the eating ritual. Another thought occurred to me and I added, “Can they also find a way to make other people sleep, piss, and die for you?”

By my cosmic calendar, it was 9:00 a.m. Monday, though it wasn’t clear to me that the quaint folk of Gambier had yet awakened and begun their trek to work, school, or whatever other rustic endeavor they were involved in. There was no activity outside the Alumni House except for a constant wind blowing snow across Wiggin Street, piling it up on the campus side of the road against an old fence. I was glad I had remembered to bring my army boots and parka. The snow-covered path onto campus, marked only by a break in the fence, was undisturbed by human traffic. But, then, I am always prepared for any eventuality. I always have a Plan B. That’s why I am king and they are just “the others.”

“Okay, this is what we say. When Mom asks us why, we tell her that we were only trying to help. We wanted to weed the garden for her as a surprise.”

“But you dug up all the flowers, Tom.”

“We dug up all the flowers, not me.”

“You were pulling my hair. You made me do it.”

True, but irrelevant. “Shut up, Mary. You’re not listening. This is only going to work if we stick together. We tell her we didn’t know they were flowers. We thought they were weeds. Get it?”

“Weeds don’t have pretty yellow flowers on them.”

“Dandelions do.” I could always count on Harry to say something useful, although I was sure he wasn’t trying to help me.

It didn’t matter. “There you go. We thought they were dandelions so we dug them up.”

Mary was ever persistent. “They were daffodils and Mom and I planted them. She won’t believe you. She won’t believe me.”

In the end, I went with Harry’s dandelion idea, though I knew he was trying to trick me. I just had no other options at the moment — probably the last time I had no Plan B. And I paid for it; oh I paid for it. I had to replant Mom’s garden by myself. If you ask me, Dad’s punishment was far worse than the crime. They all knew I hated working outside. But the lesson was learned. I had a Plan B ready for his punishment; a payback plan that was totally untraceable, a thing of beauty. For every flower, a dandelion was also planted. Plan B… always have a Plan B.

The snow was over a foot deep along the path into the main campus. “Middle Path,” they called it in the Alumni Bulletin. There was a section in the magazine titled “Along Middle Path,” a collection of whimsical memories submitted by graduates recounting their stupid college years. “Oh, I remember the pristine beauty of the leaves in the fall… blah, blah, blah.” And, “We used to have the most intensely personal classes outside sitting by Middle Path and watching the students meander through campus on their path to blah, blah, blah knowledge.” Meander? The path was a straight line in the photos. Of course, now there was no path. It was a barely visible indentation in a foot of unplowed and unmarked snow. But maybe it would be my path to knowledge of what had happened to Harry.

I headed in. I didn’t feel anything special walking on the path they treated with such reverence and remembered as if magical. It made me wonder how something could be so special when its only claim to fame was that it happened to be in the middle. Most things stuck in the middle were there for a reason and it wasn’t exactly a good one — monkey in the middle, middle class, middle of the road, and middle aged came to mind. None of these was anything to cherish or aspire to, but maybe that is what attracted Harry to this place. I never thought of him as mediocre. Had I, he never would have been such a threat to my kingdom. On the other hand, he might have seen in Kenyon an opportunity to get out from under my rule and start his own little country. What made him think this was out of my reach? He must have known that I would find him eventually and put an end to his insubordination. After all, he wasn’t stupid.

An ivy-covered church on the left stood silently in the snow, a testament to the architecture of some other time. It had weathered many storms worse than this. They didn’t build ‘em like that anymore. I, of course, could tell, being an expert on such things as structural fatigue and just how much stress you could apply to instill the maximum amount of fear in your siblings with the just mere threat of breaking their G.I. Joe action figure or Barbie doll without actually destroying it. No breakage, no evidence. Sam and Mary lost that argument in front of Mom and Dad many times. How could it have gone otherwise? Funny, Harry could somehow always make them believe that something had happened worthy of punishment despite the lack of tangible evidence. He was definitely not stupid.

It was then I stopped. The quiet world became the more silent, allowing voices carried on the wind to become audible. I hadn’t been paying attention — not a good thing for a sergeant to do with his platoon depending on him.

“Stop, you’re being silly.”

“Come on, you’ll have to finish it. I can’t do this alone. I can only get the snow packed around me so far. I can’t do my arms. Here sit on my chest and cover the rest of me up.”

“Oh, all right, but you are really being such a silly ass.”

The thump of sitting on packed snow… a grunt and a screech of surprise as the snow exploded… “And now, my dear, I am going to kiss you for trying to bury me.”

“You cad, you bounder, you tricked me!” A shared laugh… silence.

I turned to face the direction of the voices. They had been coming from the side of the church, but there was no one there now, only a small clump of snow-covered trees. No tracks in or out. A diversion? A Trap? I was startled from behind.

“Can I help you?”

It was a trap! I turned back to the path expecting a fight only to face a large bear of a man bundled up against the cold. He said again through a thick, bearded smile, “Can I help you? You look like you’re lost.”

I could hear voices again and looked back toward the trees. Two students were walking along a path on the other side of the church, holding hands. Obviously they preferred the privacy of Left-of-Middle Path, so named by me. I decided that the bear was a friendly. “I’m not lost. I’m heading to Ransom Hall,” I said absently. Being back on a college campus reminded me of Kelly Erickson for some reason. I wondered how she was doing. She was probably okay and probably still hated me.

“Well, isn’t that a coincidence. I happen to be going that way myself. I’ll walk there with you.”

He grabbed my arm and dragged me along with him. Bears are pretty strong. I didn’t remember inviting him but maybe being pushy was the Ohio way, or the Kenyon way, or perhaps just a bear’s own way of being obnoxious.

The bitter wind had picked up and shifted and was now blowing directly at us, hurling powdered snow in our faces, trying to convince us that we were going the wrong way. I would have gladly taken its advice and bagged the whole thing, but John Kodiac wasn’t having any of it.

“Get in behind me. It’ll break the wind a bit. Sometimes being an overgrown lummox has its advantages.” How about that? Not only was he pushy, he was perceptive, although I still think he was more of a bear than a lummox.

Ransom Hall was a dark silhouette on our left behind the opaque shower curtain of snow, lit only by eerie lights coming from its stained glass windows. It reminded me of the man I was hunched behind. The similarities were remarkable — both were big and dumb looking, dark and foreboding. Maybe he was the spirit of Ransom Hall come to gather me safely into its mysterious college abode. Or more likely, he was Long John Brown Bear, the infamous pirate. He was going to keelhaul me and send me away to a life of slavery. Once he realized who I was he would undoubtedly hold me hostage for the amazing ransom that would be paid for my release. That had to be why they called it Ransom Hall. As we climbed the few steps to the front door, I was disappointed to see that he had no peg leg. Too bad I didn’t have the time to arrange the accident that really would have improved his image. I’m sure he would have thanked me for that.

Inside it was nothing like I had imagined. It looked more like the inside of some Tudor mansion than the deck of the Bounty. As I shook off the snow, I saw hanging on the wall by the door the mural of John Crowe Ransom, poet, teacher, and founder of the Kenyon Review, or so it said. The building had been named after him, but he was nothing like what I had imagined him to be. He should have had a bushy beard, a patch over one eye, and a parrot sitting on his shoulder. And he was way too skinny. I penciled in the appointment on my calendar to have the required changes to his portrait made ASAP. The bear man removed his overcoat, revealing himself to be a truly enormous man dressed in a gray flannel jacket with unmatched pants and plaid suspenders. Wardrobe furnished by Professor Marvel, hairstyling by Fess Parker and Grizzly Adams. Clearly he had never been to a dentist for a teeth whitening and he smelled of stale tobacco. I liked his style.

He extended his hand. “Welcome, young man. Hayward’s the name. I’m Provost. I oversee all the academics here at the college.”

He paused. I flipped back through my copy of Etiquette 101 and found the correct response on page ten: What to say when someone only gives you his last name. Removing my gloves, I shook his hand, trying not to wince under his crushing grip. “Ryan, Sir.” I pulled back the hood of my jacket and he got his first look at his Highness, Tom Ryan. I must say his response was unexpected. I was looking for awe and reverence, but got shock and amazement instead. He looked like he had seen a ghost.

“Ryan? Is that you?” he said slowly, shaking my outstretched hand first tenuously, then exuberantly. “Thank God, you’re… Dean Edwards will be... We’re all…” The puzzling old bear was either the master of the incomplete sentence or at a loss for words. I hoped that didn’t mean he was going to eat me. His fat wagging finger gave me no clue. “Could you excuse me for a moment? Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

That was an unexpected welcome. We purposely hadn’t called ahead to let them know I was coming. I had convinced the others that it would be better if I just showed up. That way, they wouldn’t have time to make up any cock and bull stories or hide any of the facts. They all knew that’s how I work best — the element of surprise, shock and awe, and all that. But, apparently, one of my siblings had broken ranks and let them know. Traitor! It wouldn’t take me long to find out which one it was and pound him. I didn’t care if he was bigger than me. Sam was going to get it. Hayward backed toward an office door, almost tripping over the one step up, before entering the office marked with a sign: “Dean Edwards.”

Portraits lined the wainscoted walls — past dignitaries no doubt. Not a pirate among them. They looked more like bankers and business types. So this was a school founded by bankers and businessmen? That would soon change. History would show that this was a school started by pirates and scoundrels, and this room would be hereafter known as the Poop Deck. I was scanning the room for other ways in and out. This would be a difficult mission. There was only one other obvious way out — a door with an exit sign over it, and the windows were mostly stained glass. I’d have to return with my camera and take a few photos to complete the planning — difficult but doable.

An older woman came out of Dean Edwards’ office and over to me. “Mr. Ryan, would you come with me, please?” she asked, beaming so broadly I could see her gum line. So many happy people here — there had to be something wrong with that, something I could take advantage of. They must have put two and two together and concluded that I was the official representative of the Ryan family come to the scene of their crime, and that they would now have to treat me with the deference and respect I deserved. This would be fun and I was certainly going to make the most of it. Miss Old Lady Blue Suit led me through her modest office (a continuation of the portrait gallery) into the inner sanctum of Dean Edwards. Nice room, but it needed something to break the monotony of the wainscoting, coats of arms, and apparently endless array of portraits in this building that encircled every room like a force field of stuffed shirts. Dean Edwards’ office needed something — maybe an Andy Warhol, that one of the can of tomato soup. Nice touch.

Edwards, a short, thick man whose hair had departed for greener pastures some time ago and whose chin was now in its replicating phase, stood up when I entered. His face went as white as his shirt. “What in the…?” His surprise turned to anger, either that or his high blood pressure was about to make his head explode, because his face became as red as the tomato soup cans that I was planning on adding to his wall. A little coaxing and he’d do the decorating for me. So many possibilities here...

“Sit down, sit down, you two,” Hayward coaxed. “I’m sure there’s a logical explanation for all this. Eh?”

Logical? When did that ever enter into this stupid trip to Loserburg, Ohio? “That’s why I’m here.” I reached forward and shook Dean Edwards’ hand, smiled briefly, and sat in the overstuffed leather chair across the desk from him. “How’s it going?” He, too, sat down, regaining his composure slowly, staring me down as only an authority figure can do. I looked away and feigned indifference to his hollow victory. Live to fight another day… Along with the painting of the tomato soup can, would now be real tomatoes everywhere.

Hayward started, “You can well imagine our shock having you literally show up on our doorstep today, Mr. Ryan.”

I wasn’t quite following him. Sam had ratted me out. They knew I was coming. I guessed I should have made an appointment and now they were taking out their righteous indignation on me. That rarely worked. “Really? Well, here I am.”

“Don’t be so smug.” Edwards was up again and shouting. “How could you do this? After all you have done here, all you have accomplished, how could you stoop to this? To what end? What possible good could come from this? You have really let us down. You’ve let Kenyon down and you are in serious trouble, my boy.”

“Campbell, please… Sit down.” Hayward, I guessed, was either somewhat higher on the food chain here than Dean Edwards or was the one in charge of the tranquilizers. Campbell sat down. Ironic — that he should be named after the very thing I was planning on doing to his office. The students would forever call him “Soup Edwards” after I was done with him.

Edwards muttered something. I rolled my eyes. This was turning into a good cop, bad cop, B movie and I’ve never liked them. It might have helped had I understood what the big deal was. I was just here because my stupid siblings had coerced me into it, but these two were acting like I had done something wrong. Did they have some sort of new fangled school administrator radar that foresaw what I was planning on doing to their precious Ransom Hall? If they did, the technology could only have derived from parental radar.

Not likely — that was Mom and Dad’s best-kept secret. Had I violated some obscure code of conduct that forbade anyone from walking on Middle Path in a snowstorm? Had I forgotten to tip the waiter? There was that little gift I left under the seat in the dining room of the Alumni House, but they couldn’t have known about that yet. Mashed potatoes will hold a glass in place much longer than a few hours.

There was a student directory on Dean Edwards’ desk that I hadn’t noticed before. It was open to a page of snapshots and, on first glance and upside down, I could have sworn I was looking at a photo of me. But it was more like me in an oxford shirt and tie. It was Harry. Weird, seeing him after four years like that… It finally dawned on me. They thought I was Harry Ryan, perfect student, and they couldn’t believe that their wonder boy had done such an awful thing as to embarrass the school of bankers and businessmen by faking his own death and then brazenly coming back to the scene of the crime as if nothing had happened. They wouldn’t have been so shocked had this really been a school of pirates. Then it would have been just another scurvy knave doing his scurvy deeds. I added that to my list of justifications that I might need if caught redecorating Ransom Hall.

The only decision left unmade was whether to turn this case of mistaken identity against them or Harry, and that was an easy. I broke in on Dean Edwards’ ranting, “I didn’t do anything.” A great line… It rarely worked on Mom and Dad, but it stopped the dean in his verbal tracks. I guessed he didn’t have any children of his own. I had the initiative and, in combat, that is often the most important thing. Move over, Vic. I’m taking Point. “I don’t remember much of what happened, but I do remember being hurt,” I paused reflectively. “But not much else; I might have had amnesia. Or maybe I was drugged and kidnapped. The first thing I do remember is waking up in a Pancake House off Route 70 down near West Virginia.” Give them plenty of options and let them choose the most logical. Then run with it.

“Who could have done this to you?” Hayward asked earnestly.

The obvious answer, of course, was me. I could easily see myself doing that to Frankie Marx to get back at him.

“Who hates you that much?”

He was actually concerned for my, well Harry’s, well-being. I tore out the page from my notebook that contained preliminary plans to trash his office, too. His would not be touched. That might create the impression with the police that he was behind the attack, but he was a big boy and that was his problem. Collateral damage is inevitable in war.

I tried to look a little confused, but not too confused. “I’m not sure. I can’t remember much about that night.”

Behind that flabby, bald, deanish exterior lay a deadly, bald, deanish tiger that saw an opening and pounced on its prey. “The police say the accident happened in the afternoon. You just said “that night.” How do you explain that?”

Unfortunately for him, the tiger was an old, balding, flabby one. He was so inept. I didn’t even need my big guns to fend off his pitiful attacks. “I’m confused. What happened? I don’t remember.”

“You faked your own death at the railroad bridge over the Kokosing. That’s what happened. You’ve been missing for two weeks. We all thought you were dead. President Caplets even drove to Pittsburgh to inform your family.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The truth was so easy to relate and even easier to remember. None of the intricacies of trying to remember what web of lies you had woven to cover up a crime. And the beauty of it was that it allowed them to come to their own conclusions about what had really happened. All I had to do was agree with whatever they thought seemed logical to their pea-brained minds. And if it were proven wrong later, hey, they said it, not me.

“So…” Hayward began, plodding through the events in his mind, “Some person or persons unknown faked your death or tried to kill you that afternoon and then possibly drugged you and kidnapped you and left you at a restaurant for reasons unknown? Why would anyone do that?”

“Unknown,” I shrugged, repressing a laugh. Hayward sounded like an actor who had tried out for the part of Perry Mason but was turned down. He was struggling with the why and needed a little help. “Considering your reaction here, I’d say they got what they were looking for — whoever they are — embarrass the school and make you all look like silly asses when I show up again. Maybe a frat you’ve recently disciplined that is bent on revenge? Maybe the SDS? Who knows, maybe it was the Young Republicans.” Okay, maybe that was going a bit too far.

Hayward nodded thoughtfully but Edwards wasn’t buying it. “You don’t remember anything? Anything at all?”

“There was a waitress at the Pancake House who took me in and was kind enough to let me stay with her until I came to my senses. Amy was her name. Amy something… Ask her if you don’t believe me.” I had this weird feeling about my encounter with Amy that led me to believe she would say anything for me, well Harry, that is.

“Could you tell me anything that happened that might help me remember?” This was absolutely perfect. I could tool them around and find out everything I needed to know about Harry’s death to satisfy my pest siblings. Well, maybe not perfect. What would I do when they actually discovered what had happened to Harry? They still had not found the body but it was only a matter of time. I would have time to work on that one.

I had faded out of the conversation, working through the permutations of how this scenario would play out. It would have probably been best to have allowed Harry die in peace and not resurrect him in what would turn out to be a cruel joke in the end. I was having trouble focusing on what exactly my goals were in this campaign. What were my objectives anyway? My strategy? Their mention of potential trouble brought me back.

“We should bring the police in on this,” Edwards replied calmly.

He didn’t like me. I could tell. I didn’t really care, but if he didn’t like me, did he also dislike Harry? That would have been odd. There wasn’t anybody I could think of who knew Harry that didn’t like him. Maybe Edwards didn’t really know Harry.

Hayward agreed with him, “I think you’re absolutely right, Campbell. They will want to question Harry, and we shouldn’t color that by telling him things he does not remember.” Hayward turned to me smiling. He must have really been a fan of Harry’s. “You’ll be needing these, son. They found them in the river.”

He handed me a set of keys and a thin wallet. There were three keys. One, the largest, was probably Harry’s room key. It was stamped “Farr 208.” The second was a small key with A-2 on it. It looked like a trunk or suitcase key. The last was a skeleton key and had no markings. I remembered passing by “Farr Hall” in town on my first drive through and decided to head there after these bozos dismissed me, which is undoubtedly how they got rid of students when they were quite done with them. Screw it — they had no idea who they were dealing with here.

I stood up and dropped a potato masher in their laps. “Okay, then. Thanks for this and I’ll guess I’ll go back to my dorm and get cleaned up. Let me know when you want me to talk to the cops.” I regretted saying, “cops” but hid my wince by turning and letting myself out. I should have said “policemen.” Harry would have said “policemen.” Oh well.

As they closed the door behind me I heard Dean Edwards say tersely, “He’s lying.”

Perceptive. I wondered if he realized I had taken the pen from his desk stand while he was ranting. Sometimes people who figure out the most incomprehensible of things miss seeing the totally obvious ones.

The weather had cleared and the sun was pushing through some residual clouds, reflecting off the untouched, pristine snow, making me wish for my sunglasses. It was beautiful in a stark way but beyond my appreciating it. I was too busy cursing the blinding brightness to care, and trudging through the snow seemed too much like work. I redoubled my efforts to get back inside and warm up over a cup of coffee in the Alumni House, stopping only to catch my breath at the main road. The town was coming to life — a car was parked in front of the grocery store, a couple students were throwing snowballs at each other in front of the post office, a woman was shoveling the walk in front of the bank. I guess this was the bustling metropolis of Nowheresville, Ohio. I didn’t even bother to look both ways — sorry, Mom — crossed the road and went into the Alumni House. There were two older couples seated together at one end of the dining room. I took off my coat and sat as far away from them as possible. Coffee, scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast — I actually had to tell the waitress, who was not a mind reader like Amy from the Pancake House. It wasn’t warm enough for my liking and their coffee was terrible. Could it be that they had stolen Dad’s recipe for lousy coffee? I switched to tea out of desperation and laced it with a couple bags of sugar. The one redeeming thing about it all was that they were able to bring a phone to my table. Fancy.

The voice bubbling “hello” at the other end could only be Kate’s. “Hi, kid. It’s me.”

“Tom!” Her loud excitement oozed through the phone line invading my ear. I had to hold the receiver away a few inches. It didn’t seem like the people at the other end of the room could hear her, at least they weren’t acting like they could, but I put the phone back to my ear anyway.

“I can hear you. It’s not like I’m in another country, you know.”

She replied more softly, “Sorry. I’m just so glad you called. Have you found out anything yet? Have you met with the school people? Is there any word of Harry?”

Naturally, there were many more questions and of course I answered them all. No, I hadn’t found out anything specific yet. Yes, I met with them. No, there was no word on Harry. No, they pretty much had no clue what happened. No, I had no specific details yet. No, they haven’t found him yet. Didn’t I already answer that? Yes, I would be meeting with the police soon. She was like that quiz show host, spouting out questions until the contestant either couldn’t answer them anymore or gave up trying. But then they had never had the pleasure of quizzing me. I was a difficult interrogation.

Bob Barker: “Tom Ryan, for twenty thousand dollars, what will it be? Truth or Consequences?”

Tom Ryan: “Gee, I don’t know, Bob. I’m kind of at a loss here. What do you think I should pick? I mean neither one seems very appealing at the moment. Which would you choose? The truth is, I really don’t like the consequences.”

Bob Barker (after a blank, expressionless pause): “And we’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors.”

I would have had a field day with him, and on national TV.

“Oh, your mystery caller called back,” Kate said.

“What? What are you talking about?” Playing Dumb 101 — almost as good as Playing Deaf 101, and usually more effective with siblings. Kate was not amused.

“Mr. I know what you did? Don’t act like you don’t remember.”

“Oh right. What did he say this time?” I actually was curious; maybe he knew something.

“He asked for you and I recognized his voice, so he never got a chance to say anything. I laid into him and told him about Harry and all. He apologized.”

“Let me guess. Was it Frankie Marx?”

“Yes, how did you know?”

“Oh, just a hunch.” That and the fact that he was a sniveling little weasel who still had it in his mind that he could get back at me after all those years of losing, but who would naturally cave at the least little pressure — and from a girl no less.

“How are Mom and Dad?” I thought I could almost hear Kate’s silence but it was phone static.

“They’re okay. I know they’re happy you went to Kenyon to figure this all out. Father Meyers said they need closure.”

I was always so good at closing things — doors, windows, books. “Well tell them I said “hi” and give them a kiss for me.”

I could tell she was laughing. “A kiss?”

“Yeah, well. You know what I mean. Just tell them I’m here and that I’ll figure this out.”

Chapter 7

After at best a mediocre breakfast, I hung around the Alumni House sitting room, catching up on my Kenyon-related reading. It seemed some English guy named Philander Chase had made his way to Ohio in 1824, no small feat before Interstate 70 was built, and, under specific instructions from God, had founded the town of Gambier and the college called Kenyon, each named after some obscure British Lord who must have agreed to fork over cash and land. Chase was the hill-climbing, prayer-saying guy in the drawing. “He climbed a hill and said a prayer and found a wad of money there.” That’s how the song should go.

Among the piles of other useless historical information, though, were a couple of real gems. During World War II the military had used a cross on top of a dorm called Old Kenyon as a practice bombing target for training missions. There were many complaints from the students and administrators but the Army Air Corps had denied everything. The other gem was that Old Kenyon had burned and been rebuilt twice in its glorious history as the oldest dorm on campus. Now that was interesting. Sergeant Saunders would have been proud of them.

I got tired of reading and checked out of the Alumni House, leaving the Pontiac tucked away behind the building in their parking lot. It seemed like a fairly innocuous place where cars came and went all day, where no one would notice a car sitting for hours. After all, I didn’t want to draw attention to my getaway car. And the Pontiac deserved a rest. It had done a respectable job on those winding roads and it really did have some nice power to it. I suddenly felt like a cowboy bonding with his horse. “Old Pete and me? Why we’ve been through a hell of a lot together.” (This is where the chewing tobacco comes out, is wadded into the corner of the mouth, chewed, and then spat onto the ground in a gross, brown puddle.) I made a note to drive the car into the river after I got home and claim it had been stolen.

I wasn’t looking forward to trudging around in the snow, but colleges don’t just let people park anywhere on campus, even in a legal spot, without a college parking sticker. I hadn’t noticed any Permit Parking Only signs at the Ransom Hall lot, but I had no reason to believe Kenyon would be any different from any other college I had been to. They had the monopoly on parking and it was a simple matter of the exertion of authority and the generation of income — business concepts even I understood and would be implementing in my kingdom. I personally called it the “First, let them know who’s boss, then make money off it” rule. I guess I could have stolen someone else’s sticker but wasn’t in the mood to further complicate an already complicated day.

A few more people, mostly students by the look of them, were out and about, probably because, as the clock in the pit of my stomach was telling me, it was lunchtime. I figured I would find Farr 208, drop my things in Harry’s room with as little fanfare as possible and follow the lemmings to wherever the food was. My plans, no matter how ill-conceived or poorly thought out, always involved a few basic principles — where to strike for maximum effect; where to hide the evidence if caught; and where to get a good shake, burger, and fries.

The main drag through town was actually two parallel main drags, separated by a tree-lined island protecting a continuation of the hallowed Middle Path. The drag twins started at the edge of campus and ran the two blocks that comprised the entire town. From there, they headed north in parallel into the unknown farmlands of Ohio. Something fishy about that — why the parallel roads? It was a straight run from Old Kenyon at the south end of campus, along Middle Path, and north through the town. Was it a guide for the bombers making their runs, leading them to a high value target to the north? I would need the full squad with me, a battle plan and direct orders from Command before I took any recon patrol into that occupied territory. Sergeant Saunders was no chicken, but he wasn’t stupid, and he had read the situation reports about Knox County, Ohio. Mount Vernon was its county seat, Kenyon was its only college, and the county’s only notable statistic was that it was home to the largest per capita pig population in the state. Only in Ohioland, U.S.A.

I wondered as I approached the first street sign if it would say “Big Drag” and the other “Little Drag,” a more appropriate choice for a town that should have been named Dragburg, but which, through some accident of history, had gotten stuck with the name Gambier. What kind of name was Gambier anyway? Sounded like something you’d order in a bar, “I’ll have a Gambier for myself and a white wine for the lady, please.” Disappointingly, the streets were named Chase and Gaskin Avenues. Chase, the philanderer, must have had a secret mistress named Gaskin and the two of them were together forever, holding hands across their beloved Middle Path in Dragburg, Ohio. I didn’t feel like going back to the Alumni House to confirm this; I knew it was true.

Farr Hall, as I had discovered from my first drive through town, was a second floor of dorm rooms sitting on top of the town’s thriving retail center — the college bookstore, a pizza place, and a grocery store. It made sense that these three strategic industries would do well in a college town. Students love pizza, need books, and crave munchies. The pirate businessmen of Kenyon had made a good choice in dorm placement. All the students had to do was fall down the stairs and hand their money over. The one thing I would have changed was the location of the bank. It was across the drags and a good three minutes from Farr. Why not put the money where their mouths were?

The outside door of Farr wasn’t locked so I went in and headed upstairs. I was more used to the security paranoia of a city school and had expected otherwise. This place was a pushover. The Redecorating of Ransom Hall became a more coalesced and viable plan in my mind. The stairwell smelled of stale mozzarella and sausage, and the pizza place was deserted, not surprising for Christmas break. Once on the second floor, I found room 208, unlocked the door and let myself in. My first impression? I was in the wrong room. There wasn’t anything about that room that made me think of Harry. For one thing, the bed was unmade, the covers pushed down to the foot. Harry always made his bed.

“I’ll give you a dollar if you don’t make your bed today.”

“But I like making my bed; Mom likes it. It helps her.”

“Don’t you want to be different just this once?”

“Not really.”

“How about I punch your face if you make your bed today?”

“I guess if that’s what you want, Tom, I can’t stop you.”

Even at ten, an angry kid can pack a wallop. I had almost broken his nose. There was blood everywhere. I hated the little freak. Unfortunately for me, Dad packed an even bigger wallop and I couldn’t sit without squirming in pain for the rest of that day. And that made me hate Harry even more.

There were no books to speak of on the bookshelf above the desk, no papers, no typewriter. This was definitely not Harry. This had to be the wrong Farr 208. The white painted block walls were totally bare — no posters, no photos, no art, not even a nail hole, nothing. Where were Harry’s drawings? He used to plaster his stupid room at home with them, to the point where I had to step in and do some interior decorating of my own. I remember that plan having only one flaw — disposal of the evidence. Oh well, I was young and the laundry chute seemed so inviting. Mom and Dad didn’t think so. But war is fluid and the battle plan ever changing. A new plan was formed and carried out; my only regret being my having to use up valuable yard space.

I would have thought Harry would have rejoiced in his newfound Tom-free gallery and continued the idiotic displaying of his current drawing over his desk, the piling up the old ones on his shelves, and the hanging the ones he treasured most on the walls. Maybe he had finally seen what a colossal waste that was. He wasn’t much of an artist — so I had determined early on — but for some stupid reason he kept at it, as if his persistence would somehow overcome an innate lack of real talent. I guess I should give him credit for that. But you want to talk about talent? Take the Father Harkins Sucks black, spray-painted logo that someone had christened the west wall of the new school at Saint Catherine’s with, stylized to look like the Monkees’ guitar logo. You know what I’m talking about. That was real art born of real talent.

Other than the bed, the desk, a chair by the window, and a set of drawers, there was no furniture in the room. I walked into the bathroom. Farr 208 was, as I found out, a suite, sharing a bathroom with the adjoining room. I wondered who the suite mate might be, but not enough to do any more than jiggle the handle on their bathroom door to determine that it was locked from the other side. Well, there was some paranoia in Dragburg.

The dresser drawers were empty, as was the desk. It was as if Harry had moved out leaving nothing but an unmade bed. The sun was shining through the window, adding warm incandescence to the stark scene. The windowsill glistened and I touched it. The cops had been here — the telltale residue of black graphite powder came off on my finger. Whoever had done the cleanup hadn’t been very thorough. Fingerprint powder is incredibly hard to get up without leaving some trace behind. I would know, having vast experience in the art of fingerprinting my siblings and friends, well actually I did nose printing, face printing, and ear printing too. That powder simply does not come off things easily. It made me wonder why the Catholic Church didn’t use fingerprint powder instead of ashes on Ash Wednesday. At least that way, the sinners couldn’t wash the cross on their foreheads off as easily as they like to think they can wash their sins away. Or, as I like to say, you can’t take a bike through a carwash unless it’s at gunpoint.

I didn’t like it, but there wasn’t much I could do about the unwanted intrusion by the police. Sam especially wouldn’t like it, being an insane advocate of a person’s right to privacy — as if my using a periscope from the side yard extended up to his second floor window to see into his room was any of his damn business. I had my rights, too, didn’t I? The cops had probably cleaned out all of Harry’s stuff; after all it was evidence and all that crap, and there was probably some Ohio law that granted them the right to search the room, loot the goodies and stop at the Dunkin’ Donuts on the way back to the station. And complaining about it wouldn’t help anyway. It would only draw attention to myself, and I always try to keep a low profile where crimes are concerned, even on those rare occasions when I’m not the guilty party. Too many skeletons in my closet… This was definitely going in my notebook under Things to figure out. I made the entry How to get back at the Ohio cops just after How to get out of a mess you really didn’t mean to get into and How to shrink someone’s laundry to midget size and make sure you’re around when they try on their underwear. I’d work out the details later.

I was cold and clammy for some reason — a feeling usually reserved for times when my trial was about to begin and my parents were delaying the proceedings to make me sweat, or as they called it, “Giving me time to think about what I had done.” I needed food. I definitely needed food. I hit the bathroom, washed my face and dried off using a towel that smelled of obnoxious men’s cologne. A mental picture was forming of Harry’s suite mate and the picture included my fist in his face. People who use cologne are stupid and make easy targets on the field of battle. You can smell them a mile away. It wouldn’t do to leave my bag in Harry’s under-investigation room, so I picked up my things and left.

It was actually pleasant outside now that the wind had died down and the sun was out. And Gambier had almost scored enough grace points to make my list of quaint little towns that might survive the purge. So the day was looking up. I headed back toward campus, having studied the map on the hallway wall in Farr beforehand, memorizing the terrain for vantage points and probable spots where the enemy could lay a trap. I knew where Pierce Hall, the dining hall, was and took a left at Wiggin, the road separating the college from the town, to avoid Middle Path and come at Pierce from a side street. Middle Path was probably the worst way to take your squad. It offered too little cover and there were many places of possible ambush. The few students out and about were blindly taking that unfortunate route, but I was not about to warn them. I wasn’t all that sure where their allegiance was anyway.

An old, gray-haired lady was walking slowly toward me. She limped a little, supported in part by a metal cane. She was blocking my way and coming right at me. I saw no weapons, but I instinctively mistrusted that cane. It could be hiding a sword or more likely a dagger for close-quarters combat. Two feet in front of me, she stopped. I tensed up; ready to take her down if she made one false move.

She smiled, “Harry! Why, wherever have you been? We’ve been worried sick about you.”

She gave me a hug and almost fell down in the process. I braced her and looked her in the eye. A smile forced its way to the surface, but I stopped it before it turned into a silly, toothy grin. She was old enough to be my grandmother. In fact, she reminded me of my grandmother, though my visual image of Grandma Ryan at this point was pretty vague. I remembered her more for her chicken dinners and the crazy Irish conversations that I understood so little of.

“Did you go home for Christmas? Off visiting friends? Come now, you can tell old Mrs. Hoople.”

Hoople? That didn’t sound Irish at all. I wondered what her connection with Harry was and decided that I could use her being blind as a bat to my advantage.

“I’ve been away — no place special.”

“Well, you can tell me all about it at lunch. I was just on my way to the market to get some things. We’ll have grilled cheese and tomato. Did you want me to pick up some Coke while I’m there? I think you drank the last of it.”

Harry never drank soda as far as I knew or anything with sugar or caffeine in it. He wasn’t so debased as someone like me who took every opportunity to pollute his body with the nectars of the gods — soda and coffee. My lost brother must have changed into someone else since coming to Kenyon. I concluded that Ohio must be the culprit and vowed to make sure I didn’t stay long enough for its effects to make some unwanted alteration in me. “Coke would be great, and chips if you can. Did you want some money for that?”

“Oh, don’t be an idiot. You know your rent covers all your meals. I’ll see you back at the house.”

With that, she left me, which was convenient since I was probably standing there with my mouth open, looking pretty foolish. Harry rented a room from her? Why would he do that when he had a perfectly good, though ridiculously small, dorm room with free food at the cafeteria? At least it explained the lack of any signs of life in his dorm room — except the unmade bed. To discover the insanity behind this, I would need to find my way to her house, a feat that would undoubtedly have proved too daunting to the lesser mind. But I was a hardened veteran of combat and tracking the enemy, and, most importantly, I was skilled in following trails.

The lack of traffic on the sidewalk made it easy to trace her footprints back to 123 Wiggin, the location confirmed by a sign over the wrought iron fence: “Hoople.” Pushing the gate aside, I walked up to the front door. It was one of those old-time ornate wooden doors with a big pane of thick glass that allowed you to see everything and anybody in the hallway within. Not much for security, but it was locked and I wasn’t really in a B&E kind of mood, though I could probably have forced the door pretty easily. It had an old skeleton key lock.

My hand slipped into my pocket and withdrew Harry’s keys. His skeleton key was a perfect fit and the lock clicked softly. I let myself in and closed the door behind me. The only sound was the ticking of a clock somewhere off in another room. Everything was spotlessly immaculate, too clean for her to have had any student borders other than Harry. There weren’t many as obnoxiously neat as him, especially among the college population. The hallway smelled overwhelmingly of leather and polish, and the wood glistened from the wide-board oak floors to the dark wainscoting. Apparently, her house was built in the same generally Gothic style as Ransom Hall, except that the hallway was wallpapered above the wainscoting in a hideous floral pattern instead of lined with portraits of businessmen and bankers. I liked her choice better.

So as not to look like a total fool when Mrs. Hoople returned, I explored the rest of the downstairs. The living room was a collection of old, never-used furniture. It was the kind of sitting room people invited their pastor into when he came by for Sunday tea and a “chat” after church. That only happened once that I could remember at the Ryans, and it was a meeting held between Father Harkins and Mom and Dad to confirm that crucifixions were still legal in cases of extreme juvenile misbehavior. At least Mrs. Hoople’s furniture hadn’t been shrink-wrapped in plastic. I had seen that once on a B&E mission into Mrs. Ioli’s to retrieve a ball of ours she had stolen. Unbreakable glass should really be the standard in new homes. I know I have a note to that effect somewhere under Construction Laws.

The plush of the rug in the living room had been vacuumed meticulously in one direction and remained undisturbed, an obvious sign that she had no husband or juvenile delinquent children living with her. It almost looked suspicious. Indians used to cover their tracks to avoid being followed by the cavalry by dragging brush behind their ponies. I’m sure they would have appreciated the vacuum cleaner technology.

I skirted this room to avoid leaving any tracks of my own and headed toward the back of the house and the kitchen. Another spotless room, though this one clearly was used. There were a couple of pieces of paper in the wastebasket, the smell of coffee in the air, and a big orange cat sitting on the sideboard staring at me. I decided not to approach it. I didn’t particularly like cats and they didn’t like me much either. I didn’t trust any animal that tried to stare me down like a high school principal or a college administrator. The Ransom Hall Plan now included the stranding inside of as many well-fed and likely to crap all over the place animals as I could round up, starting with the orange cat.

The kitchen back door led to a porch with two rockers on it, and beyond that a postage-stamp backyard shaded by trees whose canopy was thick enough to shield the yard from the brunt of any storm. It didn’t look like there was much of a lawn under the thin coating of white. Now that was a plus. I could see why Harry would like this place. It came with privacy, a built-in cleaning woman, and a yard that didn’t have to be mowed. This was looking more and more like one of the only smart decisions the little pain had made.

The last room on the first floor was the dining room. I guess you would call it quaint. I had a different word for it. The center of the room was dominated by a monstrous wooden table around which they must have constructed the rest of the house because there was no way it would have fit through any of the doors. The only other furniture was a china cupboard containing shamrock-covered cups, saucers and plates, and a sideboard. The six-seater table was covered with old-looking papers and maps. I picked up one — Gambier, circa 1872 — a map of the college and environs. A hundred years ago and it didn’t look too different than the map I had memorized earlier that day. The town in 1872 had a bank, a post office, a market, a few buildings, and down over the hill behind the college was the same Kokosing River and the same railroad line and bridge — probably the same bridge from which Harry had jumped or fallen or been pushed or whatever.

The odd thing was — they had only found his wallet. What had become of the rest of him? I had this strange image flash in mind of Harry’s body washing up downstream and of some Ohio farmer fishing him out of the water and burying him in their side yard. After all, side yards were great for that kind of thing. Who knows? Dead bodies washing up in the farmlands of Ohio could be so common an occurrence that people around here don’t bother to notify the police when it happens. But what do they do when all their good spots in the yard are filled?

With the downstairs recon mission over, I headed upstairs, taking the wooden steps two at a time, holding the banister for support, not wanting to take the chance that in her enthusiasm Mrs. Hoople had waxed them too. But that would have been too much like me in the good old days when the destruction of Harry was my main goal…

“That’s not exactly true.”

Dad was fuming. “What do you mean ‘not exactly’ true? You put the floor polish on the laundry room steps and tricked your brother into walking on them. He slipped on the polished steps and cracked his head on the concrete floor. What’s not true about that?”

“I didn’t polish the steps. I accidentally spilled the polish.”

“Then why did you let him walk on the steps? Why didn’t you warn him? He said you told him to go to the garage and get the basketball so you two could play.”

“That was a coincidence.”

“It happened right after you poured the polish out on the steps. You wanted him to take those steps. You wanted to see what would happen. You wanted to see him fall. You go around hurting people and then you change the facts to fit your own little scheme of things. You twist the truth until it’s in such a tight knot that it makes you look like the innocent victim. You need to stop lying about things, Tom. It will only get you into trouble.”

That was all true, of course, but he had no evidence and I should have gotten off scot-free. But, I didn’t. My ridiculous conclusion was obviously made before I had learned that Dad didn’t actually need evidence to convict me. His justice system was more like Perry Mason’s than the fair and impartial system of the United States. Sometimes life is so unfair, other times it just plain stinks.

The second floor was four rooms and a bath. And I do mean a bath. There was no shower, just a tub. If there’s one thing I can’t live without, it’s a shower. That’s why I’ve always hated camping, hiking, or any other kind of roughing it. A hot shower and a warm bed are two of the most important inventions of modern man, that and the BB rifle. The idea of bathing in my own filth and calling myself clean after it was disgusting.

I turned left to the two rooms on that side of the upstairs hall. The one on the front side of the house looked like it was set up to be a sewing room; the back side room was clearly a woman’s bedroom, all pink and lacy and such. Fairly disgusting, but it seemed to fit my current image of Mrs. Hoople. The two rooms to the right of the filthy swill parlor were locked. My key opened the front one, revealing a small bedroom that smelled ancient, like a tomb. Unoccupied, I decided, and closed and relocked the door without further need for investigation. The back room, the only one left, was obviously Harry’s.

Harry’s room was fairly large with enormous windows on the two outer walls, too much open space for a sniper, but great for an observation post. An old, wooden double post bed, positioned on the north wall, was made up properly. There were two small desks, each with a typewriter and each with piles of books on them. There were also two dressers. And the faint scent of cologne hung in the air, a woman’s cologne. This was why Harry did not live in his dorm room — he hadn’t been living alone, and the room in Farr Hall was way too small for two, especially two people living in mortal sin. That took way more room than it did for one person to go straight to hell. Trust me on that one.

Harry had come a long way down the long and winding road since leaving home. In four years he had gone from guaranteed saint to hell-bound sinner. I wondered if he had had time to make one last act of contrition to secure his spot in heaven, or if I would be seeing him some day in hell where we could share a rock of burning brimstone and talk about old times. I dismissed the thought since I knew I would be there soon enough and would know the answer then.

I flipped through the books on the desks. One of them was into religion and by the looks of it, a religion major. I would have guessed Harry but the other desk was piled with books on drawing and painting, some art history, some on technique. The telltale drawing tacked to the wall over the desk gave it away — Harry had apparently become an art major. His drawings hadn’t gotten any better; in fact they looked worse to me. It looked like something I could have done and I have zero artistic talent. It was a drawing of a woman but everything was way out of proportion. It made me wonder for a moment if Harry’s roommate was a man, because if she was a woman she never took off her clothes around him. After all these years he still had no idea what a woman really looked like underneath. In the end, I gave Harry some credit and guessed it was probably some artsy style that had a fancy name like cubism or impressionism or stupidism.

My attention focused on a framed photo on Harry’s desk — a guy and a girl bundled up against the cold, hanging on to each other, standing beside a stupid-looking snowman. In the background was a building that could have been the church on campus that I had passed. The two in the photo had hooded jackets and the snow was blowing everywhere, so it was hard to tell much about the girl, but the guy… I was looking at a photo of myself. Granted, I hadn’t seen Harry in a while and, granted, the photo was taken in a blizzard, but it was uncanny how much he looked like me in that picture. My first thought was — he had not aged well at all — but then I realized how poorly that reflected on me, and dismissed the notion as ridiculous. It was just a bad photo.

I heard Mrs. Hoople in the hallway downstairs, and decided that I knew almost all that I needed to know at this point to handle any conversation with her except Harry’s roommate’s name. Mrs. Hoople would have to be tricked into revealing that to me. And once I found the roommate I would probably find out more from her than anyone else I could question. But I’d have to come clean with her. There would be no fooling her with impersonations. I found it interesting that the police obviously hadn’t uncovered her yet — Harry’s real room had not been fingerprinted or disturbed in any way that I could see. My “devious plan” machinery was working full throttle by the time I got to the first floor hallway. It was a classic battle plan, worthy of Patton — to develop a strategy that could be changed as battlefield conditions evolved; a plan that was fluid enough to fulfill the original objective no matter what the original means got changed into. And, of course, the objective was to find out what happened to Harry while creating the most trouble possible for the college that had killed him. Oh yes, I was convinced that the killer was more than just a person or persons, it was a way of life, an archaic system created by the businessmen and banker pirates in Nowheresville, Ohio, to make them rich. Harry just got in the way somehow and had to be eliminated.

I went into the kitchen, where Mrs. Hoople was making grilled cheese and tomato sandwiches. I had this urge to sound her out on my theory that Harry had seen something he shouldn’t have seen and had to be removed clandestinely by the administration, but I knew she wouldn’t understand — especially since she thought I was Harry. I took a seat at the table and the orange cat that had been rubbing around the old lady’s leg wandered over and started rubbing around mine.

Despite disliking cats, I agreed with their overall philosophy on life — people are here to be used, like tools or furniture, until a more suitable scratching post came along. When they were of no more use, they were discarded. Most people viewed cats as fickle for this, but I saw it more as being utilitarian. This one had probably worn out Mrs. Hoople’s leg satisfying its need to rub against something, and was now using mine. I pulled my leg up under me. It looked up in disdain and lay down in the spot where I would need to put my foot back down if ever I were to move. It was a classic, annoying cat-test of wills. Who could last longer? Would it become bored and wander off first? Or would my leg fall asleep forcing me to put my foot down first? I saw it as win-win for me. It would either move or when I needed to move my leg, I would just step on it by accident of course.

Mrs. Hoople brought the sandwiches and two glasses of Coke over to the table and sat down across from me. She was staring at me and I gave her a quizzical look.

“You seem different for some reason, Harry. You don’t look the same. Did you get a haircut? Maybe it’s just that you didn’t shave today. Oh well, I’m sure Beth will fix that when she gets back from break.” She chuckled, then coughed.

For a second, I thought she was going to choke on her drink and that I’d have to administer my version of the Heimlich maneuver, but she recovered and kept laughing. “You know the girls don’t like a scratchy face.”

I felt an odd warmth in my cheeks and just smiled, glad that I didn’t have to Heimlich punch the old biddy in the stomach. It was a technique that worked well with twelve-year-olds who were choking, or whom I suspected of choking, but I doubted it would go over big with a hundred-year-old lady. At least I knew her name now — Beth.

“Did Beth say when she’d be back?” I asked innocently.

“That’s an odd question to ask of me, isn’t it? After all, she is your friend.”

This was one of those times when the emphasis put on a word conveyed the entire meaning of the statement. Beth was my friend, my roommate, she was my lover. Well, Harry’s, that is. “I guess she said she’d be back when everyone else showed up. I don’t remember.”

Mrs. Hoople glanced at the calendar on the wall. It was a Kenyon calendar with all things Kenyon marked on it, such as the all-important dates of when students came and went. I guessed that watching that periodic spectacle was how the locals got their kicks on Route 66, although it was Route 229 that passed by Gambier, and the excitement probably kept their pacemakers charged for months. December must have been stuffed shirt month at the college — there was a picture of Ransom Hall above the calendar portion, obviously taken in the fall, and quite pretty in its own stupid way. Removing Ransom would have improved the splendor of the old oaks and maples on campus dramatically. I made a note in the Ransom Hall Battle Plans to consider the removal of the structure entirely. It would save me the hassles of getting in and out unnoticed, after all.

“I guess that will be tomorrow, then. I was wondering, Harry, if you could help me clean out that shed today. I know you just got back, but it really does need attending to and you did promise.”

This woman had no idea who she was dealing with. Me? Promise to help? With anything? I had to do a major recalculation of the pluses and minuses of this little charade, a veritable cost-benefit analysis on the fly, and unfortunately, I still came up with the same overall result. “Of course I’ll help. I can get started right after lunch and if you don’t feel like it, you can just watch a real man do his thing.”

We both laughed and those laughs turned out to be prophetic as the real man was still at it, alone, two hours later. There really wasn’t much to the shed — your basic lawnmower, rake, shovel, and other junk — but I wasn’t motivated to clean, straighten up, or otherwise help make this crapshack look any better than it already was. As the clouds rolled in again, promising another round of weather I finally surrendered, and worked like a demon to straighten up the mess. It turned out to be a half hour job. I guess in terms of my time management I could have learned a lesson there, but I’m not into lessons much; never have been.

When I got back inside, the wind had again picked up and flurries were in the air. Mrs. Hoople was waiting with hot chocolate. Now that’s a treat not available in Farr 208. And marshmallows just the way I like them, the small ones, not those big, messy ones. Harry didn’t have it so bad here, not bad at all. A man could get used to this — one woman to live with and another to cook and take care of the house. I could get used to this. I wouldn’t even have to become a Mormon. Harry had really lucked out. He had always been lucky…

“Okay, look, we only have time for one more play and we need a basket. So I want Petey to inbound it to Harry and you, Harry, you alley-oop it to me under the hoop. I’ll nail the reverse lay-up and we all go home winners.” Whenever we played basketball in our driveway I was the team captain. How could it have been any other way?

“What if I can’t get it to Harry?” Petey was a low wattage bulb for sure.

“Harry will get open, right, kid?” I punched him in the meat of his shoulder for emphasis and to make sure I had his complete attention.

“Sure, Tom, whatever you say. I’ll get open.”

There was something about the way he said things that told you what he really meant, even when Harry didn’t put what he meant in the actual words themselves. It always made me uneasy and usually took me a minute to figure out. It was one of those things I wished I had been quicker at. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the luxury of a minute. Leo, the other team’s captain in our three-on-three game, was already yelling “forfeit.”

Petey slapped the ball, starting the imaginary five-second clock and Harry faked right and stepped back and left. Leo stumbled, leaving Harry open. Petey tossed him the ball and, as Harry turned, I realized what he had meant. He had confirmed part of my orders, but had omitted the last of them — the one where he was to pass to me. That bastard! “I’m open!” I yelled as he turned toward me, smiled, and swished a fifteen footer to win the game. The streetlight at the corner of Oregon and Casswell came on, signaling the end of the game. It was dark and dinner time, and time for Harry to pay. Only I had trouble justifying killing him in front of the others when it was Harry who had won the game for us and Harry who was the hero, even though he had not followed his captain’s orders. He was lucky… But he was a dead duck and I would see to it that his luck changed….

Mrs. Hoople prepared a nice chicken potpie for dinner and we talked about nothing in particular for a few hours. My interrogation of her would be but a footnote in the overall report. The more important witness was yet to come. I excused myself and headed upstairs, making sure I let the cat know who was boss before I left the kitchen. Then I spent the rest of the evening in Harry’s room, relaxing. It had been a long, tiring day. Sometimes days are like that, especially when they are full of the unexpected. Surprise has a way of taxing the brain. Battle plans have to be revised, new contingencies formulated in the face of idiotic orders from above; it wasn’t easy leading a squad in a war with a godless enemy on one side and inept leadership on the other. I had to do all the thinking and planning for myself. There was no other sergeant like me, and they should be damn happy I was out here fighting their war for them. I thought about calling the family and reporting in, but I was still angry with Sam for ratting me out to the Kenyon people, and I knew it would make him suffer more if I didn’t.

I was really beat. At one point in my life, I had the theory that tiring the brain tires the whole body, a theory supported by the evidence that Frankie Marx was never tired, therefore he had no brain. But then I later learned that this was a logical fallacy called affirming the consequent. It was like saying that all idiots take baths, you take a bath therefore you are an idiot, ignoring the fact that people other than idiots take baths. Like me, for example, I was about to take a bath in scummy, dirty water polluted by my own filth and, even though I felt like an idiot, I knew I was the farthest thing from one. As expected, the bath was fairly disgusting and it wasn’t until I was totally dry and sitting at Beth’s desk that I felt almost normal again.

Beth’s collection of books included a yearbook, which I naturally went through hoping to find something that would help me. Lots of black and white photos of the campus and the students, and the teachers, all living black and white lives. Boring. I didn’t see Harry or Beth in any of them. When I came to the senior class photo section I paid more attention. Several of the senior portraits had little idiocies scrawled under them. “Remember me always — Carrie.” Unlikely anyone would forget hair like that. It was long, brown, and stood straight up. It looked like someone had dropped her from the roof of Old Kenyon and had snapped the photo on her way down. I found it amazing that anyone could get her hair to stand up that like. I had experimented with the use of fear and glue to get Harry’s hair to do that, but I’d never considered something as simple and effective as dropping him off a building. I liked the hair and the concept. She made her point. I wouldn’t forget her.

“Friends forever — Josh.” Not likely, unless he planned on maintaining that friendship from his jail cell. He definitely had that “most likely to be convicted and sentenced to life” look written all over his mug. I flipped to the “R’s” and stopped. There it was again — where Harry’s photo should have been — a picture of someone who was nearly a dead ringer for me. My search had gone beyond the bizarre, passed the signpost up ahead, and entered the Twilight Zone. Harry had, in four years from home, grown up to look like me. And the writing under the photo? “Roses are red, violets are blue. When I grow up, I want to be just like you.” Harry was looking right at me. He was talking to me. He had in four years hatched a bizarre plan to become me. He had finally become a worthy adversary. Too bad he was dead.

Chapter 8

I tossed around in the unfamiliar bed throughout the night, my sleep a broken mix of odd dreams of the adventures of Harry the Kenyon student, followed by periods of awakened restlessness, and then, finally, endless staring at the wall. Harry had changed, so much so that physically it was almost impossible to tell us apart. All those years of torture and my countless attempts on his life and well-being had turned Harry into my doppelganger. But that wasn’t quite right. He might have looked like me but he could never be me. The stuffed shirts had said that Harry had done some good things at Kenyon, many good things. Not things I would do. And he was apparently nice to old ladies, something that would never have occurred to me in a million years, though having met Mrs. Hoople I could see why he had taken a liking to her. She was a nice old bat. No, he was not my evil twin, but he was nearly my twin, from the handsome looks down to the smart-ass remark in the yearbook. That must have been why he never came home, rarely wrote, and never, ever sent pictures of himself. He was becoming me and he knew that I would have had a field day with that. He knew his turning into the thing that he and everyone else had feared and hated for a lifetime would have been years and years of material for me. I could have built several major battle campaigns on it and filled many seasons of Combat! with Emmy-winning episodes. In a way, it was a pity he had been cut short in his metamorphosis. I would have been my own greatest challenge.

Bells ringing in the distance awoke me from the first dream I’d remembered in years. A gray light, filtered by the thick glass windows, washed across the bed. I looked at the clock – 7:00 a.m. It was a tune they were playing, but one I didn’t recognize, and it was coming from the church on campus. Obviously either there was a seven o’clock service for which I was late or it was the Gambier wake-up call. The pirate businessmen had hoisted the main sail on the good ship Kenyon and called all hands to battle stations. Classes would start in one hour. They had no idea who they were dealing with. The notebook was out and the entry was already made: “Attach device to bell ringer. If rung before 8:00 a.m. discharge ten thousand volts through the hull.” I had seen that on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. It always worked on that giant squid attacking the Seaview.

After a quick washcloth cleaning of the night’s sweat from my upper body, I got dressed and went downstairs. Mrs. Hoople and the cat were already working on breakfast. She was putting together eggs and bacon and the cat was making toast, swatting the steam coming out of the toaster, waiting for it to pop. I tried to remember back to high school physics... The transference of electricity to heat in a toaster was accomplished by providing huge resistance and thus friction that built up heat, but couldn’t you still get electrocuted by it? Mom never let us poke knives into the toaster to remove stuck toast, and always made us unplug the device before getting the burnt items out. There was still hope then that we would be having fricasseed cat for supper.

“You’re up early. What time’s your first class?” That was a problem. I was missing both the “when” and the “what” on that one. “Oh, you’re not awake yet. Here, let me check.” The old lady put down the spatula and stepped over to the fridge, poking one of the many papers magneted to the door with a greasy finger. “Looks like studio art — landscapes at eight. Since you’ll be going that way, can you check my mail, please?”

With her pinky, she gingerly picked her keys off the magnetized hook on the door and handed them to me. A skeleton key and a key that looked like it probably would fit a trunk… or a post office box. “301” was stamped on it. “Sure, I’ll stop there before class.” I wandered into the hall, fingering Harry’s keys in my pocket. When I was out of sight of Mrs. Hoople, I took them out and compared the keys. The odd key on his key ring was not the same kind. It was about the same size, but definitely not the same. Dropping both sets into my pocket I returned to the kitchen with the newspaper, a substantial hunk of wood pulp called the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The Kenyon pirates apparently had no printing press of their own and so were forced to import their news to keep the breakfast table crowd amused, which probably kept the swashbuckling to a minimum before lunchtime. Mrs. Hoople delivered my favorite breakfast and I dug in, giving her the “Mm, mm, good” with such enthusiasm that her face lit up like that Mom handing out the Campbell’s soup in the commercials. If nothing else, the trip had been filled with plenty of bacon, and you can’t go wrong with bacon.

Cleveland Plain Dealer — that seemed like a stupid name for a newspaper. Cleveland was a hundred miles north of Kenyon and there were no plains there and nothing plain about a place that was so loaded with crap that by rights it should have tipped over and fallen into Lake Erie. Nobody from Pittsburgh likes Cleveland. Nobody. From birth we are taught to hate the place. From the video highlights of the Steelers revenge battles against the Browns, year after year, game after endless game, to the football pacifiers for babies and the Steel Curtain towels for everyone else, it was all about whipping up a frenzy of hatred over some stupid football rivalry. Nobody knew what started it and nobody really cared because it was the hatred that united a city and gave it purpose and identity, the same kind of hatred that had united a country under Hitler. I had devoted an entire section to it in The Book of Tom.

I’d only been to Cleveland once back in high school with some gang friends looking for trouble after a Steelers-Browns game, but the place was just plain dead. In fact, it was just plain deader than dead. The masthead must have been a misprint — they really meant Cleveland Plain Deader. And the paper was just as bad as the city. How can you have a comics section without “Peanuts?” I found plenty of lingerie ads but nothing about Kenyon, Gambier, or Harry’s accident. I wasn’t surprised. A gang of pirates wouldn’t air their dirty laundry in public. A pirate would rather die before telling you where his secret hideout is and what sinister things are going on there. They have a code they follow, you know.

I asked Mrs. Hoople why there was no local paper. “Silly boy, nothing ever happens in Gambier. You know that.” Her sugary sweetness reminded me of a play the Christian Brothers had made me read in high school — Arsenic and Old Lace. In it, two, sweet old ladies poisoned lonely old men and buried them in the cemetery next door. Somehow they made money off that, but I couldn’t remember how. Did they have a tool shed like Mrs. Hoople? She certainly had the shovels for it, and there was that cemetery just down the street. Had I unknowingly done away with the evidence of Harry’s death when she had me clean out that shed? My palms were sweating. I couldn’t remember the symptoms of poisoning. Did arsenic smell like garlic? And cyanide? Was that almonds? I could only smell my own panic. I felt sick. How could I have been so stupid? The eggs had seemed pretty much just like eggs, but the cat wasn’t eating his; neither was Mrs. Hoople. They were just staring at me, the Old Lace killer of Gambier and her accomplice cat, Arsenic, staring at their next victim.

“What’s wrong, dear? You don’t look well.”

No, it couldn’t be. Her concern was genuine. It had to be; otherwise I was a dead man and my trip to Ohio would end in the Gambier cemetery beside Harry. Mrs. Hoople simply could not be the Mata Hari of old ladies. I had no logic to explain it, no fancy arguments to prove it. All I had was my hunger. I was starving. A new hypothesis formed and I ate the rest of my scrambled eggs to prove it, staring the cat down in case he was thinking of making a move on my breakfast.

The Kenyon pirates were far more clever and dangerous than I had first given them credit. In fact their setup was pure genius, and I actually came to admire them for it. They had erected a shield of innocents surrounding their position, people in the line of fire who were totally unaware of the true goings on at the institution behind them — the perfect cover. The king’s soldiers could question them, torture them, even kill them, but they’d never get from them the location of the hideout because they didn’t know there was a hideout. It was so perfect I found myself frantically taking notes before I forgot all the details of their scheme.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Hoople. I guess I’m not myself today.”

I felt better for having eaten and, with no specific plan in mind for the day, I decided to just go with the flow and see what happened. I was sure that, at some point, I would reconnect with the authorities. Maybe then I would tell them who I really was, maybe not. I hadn’t decided. My motto is: “If you aren’t smart enough to figure it out, I’m not dumb enough to tell you.”

I remembered a couple of buildings — former houses I’d guessed — between the Alumni House and the post office that were marked with an “Art Department” sign, so after breakfast I headed that way. The street population had grown dramatically. An army of students with the occasional Lieutenant Professor type in the column was headed through town toward campus from the north; which I had discovered from a map was where the freshmen dorms were. These fresh recruits looked rested and energetic and were therefore a force to be reckoned with — fresh troops, large numbers, every general’s dream before the big battle. And freshmen are young and have pliable minds. They are easily brainwashed and will follow even the most foolish order without question. That makes them dangerous. I had been right all along — north of town was not the kind of place to venture into without a full squad.

I was tired. I made a note to remove all numbers under nine from every clock in my kingdom. I also considered making the sun not come up until nine, but that seemed a bit complicated for the technology at my disposal. Maybe just add sleeping pills to the penny candy shelf in the drugstore — get kids started on the habit of sleeping late at a young age. My first year at college was the only year I had been stupid enough to sign up for an eight o’clock class. But to my credit it only took ten minutes before I realized that only losers or freshmen took the early classes, so with some creative rescheduling, it was nothing before ten for me for the next four years. Yet here I was, up before eight, looking for Harry’s stupid eight o’clock class. But it was Harry’s eight o’clock class, not mine. And, given that Harry was a senior and not a freshman, Harry was the loser, not me. Q.E.D., which, for those not lucky enough to either have had Brother Patrick for Latin twice, or ten minutes of their own eight o’clock symbolic logic course in college, stands for quod erat demonstrandum. If you need more than that; look it up in your Funk and Wagnalls.

I walked by the Art Department, reconnoitering the two old houses thoroughly; deciding that the one with paint splattered out a second floor window and down the wall was the one I would be headed to after my little errand. The paint was a mess of earthen tones with a trail of odious green through it. I got the impression that it was no accident the way the colors were arranged, that this was some knucklehead’s idea of art. Oh boy, I couldn’t wait. A student waved to me from the second floor window. I waved back and moved on, cataloging for future consideration the idea of adding a green turd swimming in a sea of brown crap to the wall of Soup Edwards’ office. Not such a bad piece of art after all.

The Gambier post office. My first question was: Why? But the answer was obvious to the bureaucratic mind, which I had long studied. It was all about money. It always was. There was far too much mail for the U.S. Postal Service to handle without incurring the undue expense of hiring more people who actually had to work. Therefore a percentage of the letters had to get lost every day to keep expenses down. And lost mail had to go somewhere, so why not build a post office in the middle of nowhere, ship it there in bulk, and give it to the poor college students in Gambier? It was perfect. Delivery was easy and cheap, no sorting, no thinking; just drop any piece in any box and you’re good. It didn’t matter who got what. So isolated from their families, these homesick kids were starving for communication, any communication. So Billy got the Acme flyer and was happy with the sales. Kevin got the birthday card that strangely had someone else’s last name on it and didn’t care that it wasn’t his birthday. Sara became Our Neighbor at… and got the book of local store coupons for Sewickley, Pennsylvania, and started planning her hardware purchases. And Harry received the dunning letter from the Sears outlet in Wisconsin for that refrigerator he never paid for, and dreamed of the food he could store in it. It was an ingenious, efficient alternative to raising postal rates. At least, I thought so.

The post office was a reasonably modern brick building, in clear violation of the Gambier code of quaintness and collegiate gothicnicity, which must have been frustrating to the stuffy, old Kenyon people. I liked that. It meant I wasn’t alone behind the lines. There was a resistance movement somewhere. The lobby’s inner walls were covered in bronze systematically numbered mailboxes flanking an empty business window — all very Maginot line-like. Posted hours – 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. That also appealed to me: no freshman or losers here. At the bottom of every bank of boxes were a few, larger ones that were marked with a letter followed by a number. Harry’s key didn’t fit in A-2, not even close. I checked Mrs. Hoople’s box. There was an electric bill for her from Mount Vernon Power and Light and a piece of mail for Harry from the Kenyon registrar. I opened it. Harry had gotten all As for the semester.

I had considered a job with the post office at one time. The regular hours, good benefits, and little work were enticing. The uniforms were a plus, too. I forget why I had abandoned that career path. It might have been when I was voted most likely to go postal by my fellow classmates, or maybe it was when I was handed that big pile of money by the game design company and told to steal what already belonged to me. More likely, I had just thrown it in the same discard pile as policeman, fireman, and astronaut when I realized that dying of boredom belonged in the same category as getting shot to death, burnt to a crisp, or incinerated by cosmic rays.

A white-haired old man was struggling with the door, trying to get in. Under his brown overcoat he wore a gray flannel suit. For such a small place, Gambier had more than its share of old timers. I pretended not to notice him, calculating instead the distance from Mount Vernon to Gambier, the road conditions, and the time it would take find a phone and call an ambulance when he had a heart attack. He would be dead before they got there, so there was no point in doing anything. Besides, he was probably one of them.

The epic battle ended in his victory and he entered the building. Apparently, there was still some fight left in the old geezer. I continued to pretend to read Harry’s report card, watching him walk slowly to his box, every step seemingly painful to him. Even turning the key and opening his box was an effort. Stubborn old coot — his palsied hands shook while he tried to read a letter. It was time to go. There was only so much old age I could take at a time. He cut one, a really loud one. I couldn’t stifle my laugh even if I had wanted to.

He looked up from his reading and smiled at me, his oversized cataract glasses magnifying his eyes to bug size. Was there anything on him that wasn’t broken? “Someday the ravages of time will catch up to you, too, and you might remember this moment with something less than fondness.”

Apparently, his mind was all that was left still in working order. “Poetic justice, huh?”

“Some folks call it that.” He was staring at me, trying to remember something.

The old goat looked awfully familiar to me, too. “Do I know you?”

Had Harry been that unobservant, I would have pounded him. I knew I had seen this old guy before. My mouth must have been set to auto-pilot. I blurted out, “Friends are not sent in order of our choosing, they come unsuited like the gifts of God. John Crowe Ransom.”

He just stared at me, his weird bug eyes narrowing.

“John Crowe Ransom? That’s you. You wrote that, right?” I was staring at the Pirate himself, Captain Blackbeard Ransom, the man who had a building named after him. I’d skimmed one of his books of poetry in the Alumni House. He didn’t look much like a pirate in person.

The light bulb lit up over his head and he nodded and smiled. “Yes, I wrote that one; “Friendship” it is called. It has been a long time since I’ve heard those words spoken. And you are?”

His poetry stunk, but I was headed down the path of inevitability. What I was saying and doing was out of my control. I hated that feeling. “Ryan. Pleased to meet you. Look, I’m sorry. I really meant no offense. It’s just one of those things.”

“I thought I recognized you from your photo. A pleasure to make your acquaintance. Your apology is accepted.”

My photo? The police at work undoubtedly. Ransom’s hands were shaking and his lower lip quivering. Whatever was affecting him must have been a fairly constant thing, a palsy that was probably getting worse with age. My opinion of old age wasn’t much different from my opinion of poetry. I would never grow old — I had decided that a long time ago.

He continued, “But… It is accepted only on the condition that you agree to join me this evening for dinner at my house. Six thirty shall we say? You may bring a guest if you like. Here…” He tore his address off an envelope and handed it to me, “Six thirty then, Mr. Ryan?”

“Deal, captain,” I replied and shook his shaking hand. It seemed cold and frail, as if death were trying to get in and he was straining valiantly to hold back its tremendous weight. I liked this old buzzard. He was a mess. And though obviously unable to do anything to anybody physically, his presence and his keen mind commanded immediate respect. I took copious notes on this for, despite my recently enacted law that I was never to grow old, someday I just might be there myself and would need to be able to bully the weaklings about without actually beating them up. But where’s the fun in that?

I tucked Ransom’s address into my wallet and began the short walk back to the Art Department. I was annoyed that the police must have been showing Harry’s photo around and asking questions, but I guess it was their job. Obviously, Ransom was intrigued by it all and wanted to pump me for information. Maybe he wrote mystery poems, too, or detective poems and was looking for some good material. Roses are red, violets are blue, I don’t know where Harry went. Do you? I would pump him at dinner for information on what the police knew. And then I would figure out how to restore the good name that those damn college businessmen had taken from him and plastered on the wall of a stupid building.

“The evidence against the College of Stuffed Shirts and Businessmen is overwhelming, your honor. They have taken the famous pirate John Crowsnest Ransom prisoner and debased and defamed him by stripping him of his glorious deeds of derring-do on the high seas, erasing them from history books and replacing them with — I shudder to say — poetry. They have dressed him in a suit and hung him on a wall with businessmen, and they have allowed this mighty sailor to languish in the prison of old age. These are capital offenses, your honor, and we demand the death penalty.”

“I object, milord. We were only doing what was best for the school. Our endowment was low and enrollment declining. We needed Mr. Ransom’s name.”

“Captain Ransom, Mr. Stuffed Shirt. Please address the Captain with his proper title. It is a matter of respect to him and this court.”

“Yes, milord. Sorry milord. But the fact of the matter is, we needed the good captain’s name to enhance our share equity in the Barron’s College Guide. Our rating would have dropped below the top one hundred and we had been notified that we would be losing the title ‘Harvard of the Midwest’ in favor of, dare I say it, ‘Parsons of the Midwest.’ We needed this boost, milord. And I have the facts and figures to support my claim. We have since turned around our shrinking enrollment by twenty-five percent, attracted ten percent higher degreed faculty, five percent more students of income, and will soon be in the top twenty on the charts.”

“It’s got a good beat, but can you dance to it?”

“Milord?”

“You certainly know your numbers, Mr. Shirt, and I am duly impressed by all the waving around of important papers.”

“Thank you, milord. I try.”

“Yes, you are trying. But the fact of the matter is, you have stolen this good man’s name, hung him by the yardarm along with others of lesser ilk, and altered history to your own ends. How do you plead?”

“Well, guilty, milord, but…”

“Then there can be only one sentence…”

Case closed…

A couple of students walked into the art building ahead of me. I didn’t even bother to try and figure out the odds of there being two classes here at this ungodly hour of the morning, so I followed them to a second floor classroom. One of them, a cute blonde, turned and smiled, “Hey, Harry, you modeling nude for us?” They giggled. “I heard we were working on minimalism today,” she added.

Rules of the sea — A salvo fired across the bow requires a return shot. “There’s not enough ink in your pen to draw me nude.”

They laughed and she looked at me coyly. “I don’t think Beth would like that, but then, she isn’t here, is she?” The blond stopped, standing in my way invitingly. “And what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her, will it?” I just smiled and brushed past her, taking the steps two at a time.

Harry, you cad… You had become a lady’s man, a regular tiger, pent up in the cage of an all-boys high school for four years and then released into a jungle where the collegiate women roam wild and free. Who could have imagined it? I decided that this part of the story would be best not told to Mom and Dad. It would break their hearts to see how far down the ladder their favorite son had come. Of course, that would immediately elevate me back to my rightful position, but I was headed in that direction anyway. I was the good son who had dropped everything and come to Kenyon to unravel the mystery of Harry’s death. I was the one who would tell them all what really happened. They were all depending on me. I would be the hero. And I wouldn’t even have to lie, cheat, steal, or hurt anybody. Oh well, everything has a down side, I suppose. But in the end, they did not need to know all the unsavory details. I owed at least that much to Harry… or at least I would not tell them just yet. This part might come in handy someday. I simply cataloged it all and filed it away under future battle plans.

The classroom looked like an old bedroom, or two old bedrooms with the wall between them knocked down. The windows on the west, north, and south sides let so much natural light into the space that artificial light was unnecessary. Everywhere there wasn’t a window, there were either tables or shelves filled with supplies, paintings, drawings, and, from what I could tell, a lot of junk. The center of the room was half-ringed by easels, facing the one thing that really seemed out of place in all this — a government-issue gray desk with a four by eight model of the college sitting on it. Someone, probably some loser art student who lacked the imagination to do a real art project, had taken a piece of plywood, spray painted it green, and built an exact duplicate in miniature of Kenyon College on it. I picked up the folded index card that was resting in the corner like a placard – “Kenyon College circ. 1972. Harry Ryan.”

“They haven’t finished the real nameplate, Harry, but don’t worry — it will be done and in place before they move it to Ransom.”

I looked up and a red-bearded man wearing wire-rim glasses was smiling at me. He wore a smock that was so paint-stained that it was hard to tell its original color, but the embroidered name was still readable. “Thanks, Mr. Fecklan. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

Harry couldn’t possibly have put this model together. He couldn’t even put together a simple Revell P-40, let alone get the decals in the right place. Every time he bought one, it was me who ended up finishing it for him. I remembered the last one I ever made for him. He was laid up in bed and some idiot had given him a Sikorsky as a get-well gift. He whined about that helicopter model every time we were in the hobby shop, and I guess he finally yammered long and loud enough to the right person. But that was like giving a crossword puzzle to your dog. He’ll wag his tail in happiness because he finally has what he wants but in the end will just slobber all over it and ruin it. So after ten minutes and finally giving up, I was recruited by Dad to “help” Harry, that is to say, it was all mine. Not that I didn’t enjoy putting it together. It was a real challenge and I was great at model building. Always have been. When everything was perfect, down to the last detail, Harry thanked me and then proceeded to launch it over the balcony railing because he thought it could fly. It did, actually — straight down, crashing in a terrible crunch of plastic on hardwood. I swore I would never make another model for him again.

This model wasn’t actually that bad. I was admiring the detail of the trees and bushes outside the Chalmers Library when Mr. Fecklan said to the class, “Okay, folks, let’s get started. We need to get finished on these projects soon. The senior honors library show is fast approaching. They will be moving Mr. Ryan’s work to Ransom Hall this week most likely so we will have more space, but we really to get a move on, so tempus fugit and carpe diem and all that, okay?“

“Vita Brevis, Ars Eternis,” I added, gesturing to the class. Apparently the Latin II answers I had written on my arm for Brother Patrick’s last Latin test were still intact.

I waited for the others to pick an easel and took the only one that remained. The canvas propped on Harry’s easel had paint on it, I will give him that much, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what he had been painting. I cocked my head sideways, thinking maybe someone had turned the painting upside down. No, that was not it. Rule number three thousand four hundred twenty seven in The Book of Tom — all ambiguous paintings will require a “this side up” arrow. The earthen tones and swipe of green through the middle looked disturbingly familiar — it was the same as that mess on the outside of the art building. What I was looking at was either the model for, or a miniature of, a larger work. And parents paid good money to send their kids here?

I stepped back, pretending to look at Harry’s work from a longer perspective, and scoped out the paintings nearby. The cute blond was doing a traditional landscape centered on the dorm at the far south end of campus, Old Kenyon. A pretty good copy but very unimaginative, very uninspired — where was the B-52 dropping the bombs along Middle Path?

Her friend was doing exactly the same scene but you could hardly tell. Neither had talent to speak of but hers was clearly negative on the scale. Impressionism? Expressionism? Impossible to determine, except to say that her gifts lay elsewhere — assuming she had any.

On my other side, a hippie type, wearing a tie-dyed shirt and purple sunglasses, had transformed nature into a psychedelic array of block-shaped objects that appeared to be Middle Path and Ransom Hall. I watched his unsteady right hand try to apply Day-Glo orange to a tree. The yellowish stain on his thumb and forefinger was a dead giveaway — this was the view of Kenyon through the eyes of a heavy pot smoker. No, that would never do. I’d be back later to toss his work in the dumpster. I might even poke around in his art box for his stash. I had noticed a bit of poison ivy on a tree in Mrs. Hoople’s backyard that would blend nicely with his weed. Can people drink Calamine lotion?

Harry also had an art box not much different than the rest. It had a lock, but a quick fingering of the keys in my pocket ruled out a match with the third key. I flipped open the lid and pretended to look for something. If there were any clues in that collection of brushes, pencils, paints, and chalks, they were not jumping out at me. I picked out a worn black crayon and I focused on Harry’s painting. Apparently Fecklan’s class had no guidelines on style; their only commonality was in that all the works were supposed to be landscapes. So what was Harry’s? More to the point, what should I have been adding to the painting?

“It will fit perfectly with the others, Harry, the perfect conclusion to your ‘Along Middle Path’ series,” Fecklan said from behind me. “If you’re done, put your John Hancock on it and I’ll make sure it gets over to the library today.”

“The library?” Done? Yeah, it looked pretty well cooked to me.

He looked at me puzzled. “Your one-man show? Your senior honors project? Hello?”

“Oh, right. The library. Sorry, not enough caffeine yet.” I was more concerned with how I was going to forge Harry’s signature. I hadn’t done that in years and there was no guarantee that he would sign a work of art the same way as he signed his checks anyway. So I gave it the old college try, pausing for a second to ponder whether that meant that the college was old or the attempt was old. Probably both.

“You have to sign the pact or the treaty isn’t valid.” I was insistent on that point. Any non-aggression treaty required the non-aggressors to all sign it.

But then Harry was Harry. “Can’t you sign for me?”

“Then it wouldn’t mean anything.”

“But it doesn’t mean anything. I wouldn’t attack you anyway.”

The rules of Risk are quite clear — winner take all. I needed Harry to agree to not attack me as my armies spread through Asia mopping up Sam. I needed Harry to do more than just say he would not attack me. I needed him to sign the treaty. That way, if he broke it, I could flaunt it in front of the others. In fact, I just might flaunt it anyway. And once Sam was gone… I could hear the others clamoring from the dining room. This negotiation had to end. They might be cheating, and the only one who was allowed to cheat in the Kingdom of Tom was me.

“I’ll sign for you, but you have to promise me that you will never tell. Promise?”

“Okay, I promise, if it will make you happy.”

I smiled as I signed the painting “H. Ryan” just the way I had signed that treaty with Harry. It had made me happy. I had obliterated Sam. But even after Sam was gone and I had numerical superiority and broke the treaty (after all — he never actually signed it), I still could not wipe out Harry’s stronghold in Australia. He led a charmed life. Maybe he really was blessed and destined for sainthood; maybe he did have the “call” like Grandma Ryan had always said. But, if that were true, how could he be dead? Maybe he had died the way all the good saints died — he’s been murdered in some bizarre fashion that the Catholics would term “martyrdom.”

“Great,” Fecklan smiled, delicately picking up the painting and moving it to his office. I wondered if he had even looked at the signature. He probably didn’t care. He was just another assembly line worker happy to be done with it so he could move on to the next student and get them “finished.” I looked at Psychedelic Bob staring at his painting, lost in his drugged stupor. It would be a service to Professor Fecklan and my distinct pleasure to finish Bob’s art career at Kenyon. I added this footnote below the entry I had already made for him so there would be no doubt of my intentions when the historians discussed my memoirs.

“You aren’t by any chance headed that way, are you?” Fecklan asked when he had returned.

I was fairly bored with this dead end, so I said “sure” and offered to take Harry’s painting with me and drop it off. I had already decided to cut any remaining classes Harry had that day. If they were anything like this one, there wasn’t any relevant information to be obtained from enduring their stupidity. I really needed to locate Beth and, not knowing her last name, her class schedule, or anything other than what she looked like in a blizzard-obscured photo, the best I could do was wander around until she found me.

The day had warmed and, was fairly tolerable, except for the persistent cold wind blowing from the west and the sun glaring rudely off the snow. Since I had not yet figured out how to convince the sun that I was king of the universe, I decided to pick up a pair of sunglasses instead. Using Harry’s painting that Fecklan had wrapped in brown paper to protect it from the elements, I tacked my way back across the Drags to the college bookstore.

The bookstore wasn’t fancy, but it was functional, and by functional I mean that it was staffed minimally, had no security cameras that I could see, and there were plenty of shelves to block the view of those who might object to me shoplifting the sunglasses. Back in my own college days I had been outraged by the price of textbooks and supplies, and had made the decision that they should all be dispersed more fairly to the students, starting with me of course. The savings to my parents who were footing the bill were enormous. Plus, I made a little income on the side selling stolen books to other students who thought they were getting a good deal on immaculately preserved used books. The habit continued after I graduated. Prices everywhere were outrageous. It only made good business sense.

I was making my move for the glasses when something caught my eye — a book display with a little purple “Kenyon Authors” sign over it. I could only imagine the scope and breadth of the works by Kenyon’s finest: A History of Stones from Middle Path, The Art of Gravlery, and Polished versus Unpolished Stones — the Controversy for the Ages. Nonchalantly, I picked up the shades, snipped off the price tag with my pocketknife scissors — already open in my hand — and put the sunglasses on top of my head just where they would be if they actually belonged to me. That was the most important thing of any plan of deception — making it look like things were the way they were supposed to be so no one would suspect a thing.

A quick look around told me I was clear, so I wandered over to the Kenyon authors rack. It wasn’t the collection of Middle Path geo-historical works I was expecting at all. It was a mildly interesting mix of works by professors, former professors, former students, and one book, A King in a Court of Fools, by H. Ryan. On the hardback’s cover was a painting of a guy dressed in fairly normal clothing, surrounded by people that looked like they had come from the backs of a deck of cards. A gold sticker affixed to the cover read: “Winner of the prestigious W.H. Smith first novel award and excerpted in the Kenyon Review.”

“You really did okay with that one, Harry.” The voice from right behind me startled me, and I dropped the book expecting the cuffs any second. It was a sales clerk whose name tag said he was “Grabber.” Or, maybe that was his job in the bookstore — grabber of shoplifters. I panicked for a moment, but after going through my available options, selected the “play it cool” button, and bent down to pick up the book.

“Hey, Grabber. How’s it going?”

“Good, dude. It’s cool. Hey I heard that your book signing had been cancelled, that you were like going to be away or something. They said they weren’t sure you’d even be back.”

“Really? Who’s they?” Harry had been a busy little beaver in his four years from home. I thought I was beginning to see why the school administrators were so upset by his disappearance. They had come all the way to Pittsburgh in the aftermath of a snowstorm to make sure we knew they were concerned and caring people. After all, they could have just called the local police and had them come over and break the news to us. I made a quick note to try and patch things up with the dean. It was probably more useful, though definitely less enjoyable, to have him on my side. But I stopped in mid-note and began erasing. What if they were playing their little game to make sure they got a cut of the proceeds from Harry’s book and Harry’s art? Why didn’t they mention that in Pittsburgh? I put a big red star next to the note about redecorating Soup Edwards’ office. That would be a priority.

“Oh, I don’t know. That’s just what I heard people saying. We still have it scheduled for next week as far as I know. And I unloaded like two boxes of them and had to stack them up, so, dude, they’d better have it or I’ll be royally pissed.” Grabber ended his little explanation with a heh-heh kind of chuckle that I found annoying. If he was trying to say something funny, he should have let me do the laughing. He must have been raised on sitcom TV where they added the canned laughter to let you know when you were supposed to laugh because you were too stupid to know when they had said something hilarious. Sitcoms had long ago been banned from my kingdom.

“Hey, would you mind if I took this?” I asked, showing him the copy of Harry’s book. I was going to take it anyway, but I thought I’d try asking first. “I’m having dinner with John Crowe Ransom, and I’d like to give him a signed copy.” Two parts fact, one part fiction, mix thoroughly, let stand for ten seconds, no one knows the difference.

“Old John Crowe? Woah, dude. That’s heavy duty. Sure, be my guest. Woah. Yeah, I’ll just write it off as a lift. Heh-heh. Know what I mean?”

Apparently Grabber had his own little business on the side. Convenient. Almost ingenious. My opinion of him rose slightly. “Thanks, I owe you one.” I pocketed the book, and Harry’s painting and I sailed off into the bounding main.

The Chalmers Library was on the other side of Middle Path from Ransom Hall. It was a newer structure comparatively, but fit with the campus battleship theme and was weathering nicely in its own right. I walked up the few steps and entered. It had been a lot quieter outside where the white noise of the wind had made the snowy campus seem silent. The library was a typical gathering place for students, and even in hushed tones, their voices filled the building with a tangible energy. It reminded me of the one year at college that I actually thought I cared about education.

I went over to the front desk and plopped the painting down beside me. “Hey,” I said matter-of-factly to the girl behind the counter.

She looked up and smiled. “Hey, Harry. Are you looking for Beth?”

“Eventually, but I’m actually here to drop this off.” I pointed to my ship’s torn sail. The brown paper wrapping had served its purpose and would soon find everlasting comfort in a landfill somewhere in Ohio.

“I can take that up to the gallery if you want.” She started to work her way out from behind the desk but I stopped her. Getting help from a girl was out of the question.

“Thanks, but I’ll do it. I want to take another look at the setup anyway.” I smiled and winked.

Her laugh was nice, not the cackling-like-a-chicken laugh that a lot of women had. “I’m telling Beth that you were flirting with me, Harry Ryan. You’ll be in so much trouble.” What was it with all these girls wanting to tell Beth on me… Harry? The finger wagging didn’t work for me either. But she was a sweet kid. Reminded me of Kate. She was probably the brat in her family too. I’d have to find a phone soon and call home.

“Mea Culpa, mea culpa,” I bowed outlandishly in mock apology. “Oh that this too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew.”

She blushed.

“Later,” I smiled, heading up the stairs to the gallery, following the signs, and searching my notes for some record of having ever taken lessons in how to be charming.

The second floor gallery overlooked the entrance to the library and was basically a doughnut. I saw no sign saying “Chalmers Library, architects Dunkin’ Donuts,” but I was hopeful of finding a good cup of coffee; maybe a glazed donut, too. I pictured Harry down below in his playpen and me bombing him from up there. Perfect. Too bad he hadn’t discovered Kenyon earlier. Glass-paneled railings protected the gallery goers from falling down into the donut hole. That ruined the overall ambiance, in my opinion. I would have preferred the occasional surprised screams of people plummeting downward. It would have provided a nice counterpoint to the otherwise sedate atmosphere. But that’s just me. All throughout the gallery there were freestanding works — the feverishly completed labors of the honors art students on display in an impressive array of crap. The outer walls of the gallery were filled with paintings — more crap. I spotted Harry’s work immediately. It was hard not to. You pretty much walked into it when you got to the top of the stairs. It was a series of seven paintings very much like the one I was holding. How they were “Along Middle Path” was beyond me. His work was a con. I was impressed.

I leaned the painting up against the wall in the one open spot in Harry’s series. Each of the others was mounted on a swiveling pedestal, but pushed up against the rounded walls. There was an empty pedestal, but I decided that the art gallery people could do the final placement. I walked along Harry’s Middle Path — it still made no sense to me. I never could understand abstract painting. It was like an unclear idea that hadn’t quite formed, that needed to be rehashed or shifted around somehow, and it would make no sense until that happened; which was never for me with that kind of art.

Something in the third work in the line made me stop short, though. I stood there staring blankly at the bottom corner of it as if my notebook had been torn from my hands and ripped to pieces. There were no pages to flip through, no battle plans to pick from, no guidance, no answers. I checked the bottom corners of the other paintings; sweat beginning to form on my forehead and palms. I felt sick; had to sit down. Finding a weird-looking chair among the displays, probably some poor sap’s idea of a work of art — I didn’t care — I collapsed into it, staring at Harry’s paintings.

I released my death grip on the chair and my hand fell into my side jacket pocket… Harry’s book… Harry’s book with the photo of the painting on it. I grabbed the book and pulled it out, peering at the stupid painting on its cover. I flipped the book over. On the back was an old photo, a photo of Harry and me taken when he was six. He was smiling and holding over his head the leg brace that had just been removed by the doctors after a year of his wearing it. He had broken his leg and my Radio Flyer in a tragic wagon versus car accident. After three operations and a leg brace, he was finally victorious and free. I had never forgiven him for that. It was my perfect plan that had goaded him into riding the wagon down the sidewalk and across the alley in the first place. The sacrifice of my wagon was the price I was willing to pay, but he had survived and my plan had been ruined. Why had he picked that photo?

The sticker — the W.H. Smith first novel award sticker — I picked at it with my thumbnail and peeled it off. Underneath, exactly like the signature on each painting in the “Along Middle Path” series, exactly like the one I had signed in the art room, and exactly like the forged signature on the Risk treaty with Harry so many years ago was my own “H. Ryan.”

Chapter 9

One of the things about my world, the world according to Tom, is that it is perfectly designed, perfectly ordered, and perfectly understandable to me. I know this because it was one of the first rules I wrote down in The Book of Tom, along with its obvious corollary — anything not so perfectly designed, perfectly ordered, and perfectly understandable to me becomes a search and destroy mission for Sergeant Saunders in a new episode of Combat! But I wasn’t sure even Vic Morrow could clean up this mess. I needed answers. I had to find Beth.

Wandering outside, I crossed Middle Path, passing between Ransom Hall and another, much larger building that looked more like a castle than a school building. It only lacked a moat. That had to be Ascension Hall, one of the main classroom buildings. It carried a lot of student traffic that I avoided, heading instead toward the dining hall — Peirce. I needed a drink. Peirce Hall was a building with a square bell-less bell tower and windows that reminded me of a church. I was beginning to wonder if the suits that had put this place together had trouble finding architects who knew anything about what a school was supposed to look like.

I walked inside into a slate floored room with winding stone steps up and down, an open door to the right — to the dining hall — and glass doors leading to a paneled room filled with comfy chairs. Inside, a student was banging away on a piano — something classical-sounding but, thankfully, partially muted by the closed doors. Classical music and poetry belonged in the same dumpster. I peeked into the dining hall. No one was there, so I wandered into the huge paneled and raftered room with polished wide-board wood floors. It was filled with wooden tables and benches, and had chandeliers lit just enough to give a warm, yellow glow to everything in the room. It had the same strong leather and polish smell of Mrs. Hoople’s, probably the only brand sold at the one and only grocery store in town. Sunlight filtered through a stained glass window behind a raised alcove where stood the head table of the high and mighty captains of the school, a fine galley for the pirates and crew, but not my style. I preferred Formica and plastic.

In the quiet of the Peirce dining hall I became aware of a distant clicking noise back in the entry. I retreated and followed the sound up one flight of steps and down a short hallway to an open door. Standing in the doorway, my eyes adjusted to the dim interior lights of the windowless room. It was a pool hall — four tables and a counter with a rack of cues behind it. A lone white-haired old man was shooting straight pool on the back table.

There is a certain code of conduct in a pool hall, a real pool hall anyway, like the ones Minnesota Fats and the Hustler played in, and I honored that code. I picked up one of the barstools positioned around the room for players and spectators, and sat down a respectful distance from him, not wanting to cramp his style.

He ran fourteen balls before looking up at me. “How’s Mrs. Hoople?” he asked, racking them up and preparing to break again.

I could feel my cheeks reddening. I was getting tired of people thinking I was Harry and was considering blowing the whole cover. It was like the stupid jerk had stolen my face and was flashing it all over Gambier like a credit card. Will that be Visa, MasterCard, or Tom?

“She’s doing well.”

“Good.” He broke and sunk the two ball. “What about you? I haven’t seen you in a while. What’s your story? You quit playing?”

There was a flat, matter-of-factness to his voice that took any sting from what could have been pointed questions usually associated with the Parental Gestapo. He sounded like the type that just laid out the facts and let you draw your own conclusions. It was then I realized that of all the people I had run into, I liked the old coots best. They didn’t have time for the crap that everyone else was shoveling. They were making the most of what time they had left knowing that time is always short, and sometimes it runs out sooner than you expect. Too bad it takes young people so long to catch on.

I couldn’t remember ever having seen Harry play pool. It wasn’t one of those things our family ever did — too expensive and not particularly wholesome. Of course, that didn’t stop me from hanging out at the Brunswick with my not-so-wholesome friends. I was more into the hanging out part, though. It wasn’t my kind of game — too hard to cheat at it without getting beat up and too easy to get beat up when everyone in the place was carrying a club.

“I stink and I don’t like losing,” I replied, smirking.

The old man laughed, causing him to lose his concentration and miss. “You never could beat old Potsy, could you? It used to piss you off mighty fierce.”

Harry could never beat anybody at anything, but he also never got mad about it. I noticed a Coke machine and pulled some change from my pocket.

Before I could get it into the coin slot, Potsy stopped me with his cue, tapping it on my chest. “You know the rules — players only. Gawkers get their Coke from the cafeteria.”

I shrugged. I didn’t remember that part of the pool hall code from The Hustler, but who was I to argue with a man pointing a stick in my face?

He smiled, “Aw, go ahead, just this once — for old times.”

“Thanks, Potsy.” Coke in a glass bottle for only a dime — now that was my kind of drink. I took another long pull from the bottle and decided to start making a list of those who would be saved from the inevitable destruction of Ohioland with the sinking of the pirate ship, The Kenyon.

Back to his game, Potsy sunk three quick shots without changing position. This guy was good.

“How’s that girlfriend of yours?” He paused a second to remember her name, “Beth. She’s probably why you quit. Not enough time for nooky and pool, eh?”

I laughed, spraying Coke all over my sleeve. “You bastard. I ought to whup your butt up and down the table for that.”

Before I had even a second to consider regretting my comeback, Potsy slammed a dollar down on the table. “You’re on. Go get your stick. I’ll break.”

My dollar was on the cushion beside his, my cue was chalked, my hands were powdered, and… I was going to lose. This wasn’t like a chessboard that I could just accidentally tip over and say “oops,” calling the match a draw. This was a five hundred pound slate table. This wasn’t a war game where I made all the rules. This was pool. Oh yeah. I was going to lose big time. At least it was only a dollar and not my Coke-soaked shirt that the old man was going to take from me.

The old geezer broke, artfully sending two balls off the cushion and leaving the cue ball awkwardly on the other side of the pack. “There. I gave you a shot. Let’s see if you remember anything of what I taught you.”

Well, that wasn’t happening since I had never been his student, but it looked like I had a chance at one of the balls he had dislodged. Fat chance. It would require a lucky bank shot and I hated bank shots. I bent over the table under the overhanging light, lining it up, and looked up at him. “Do I seem any different to you? Or look different? Or anything?”

He considered me for a minute. “Nope. You been sick?”

“Do I look sick?”

“No. I just never figured out why you stopped coming around. Mrs. Hoople seems to think it’s because you’ve been busy finishing up things. Me? I thought we were buddies. Seemed like a funny thing to do to a buddy — leave him high and dry like that.”

Homespun ethics — something I never understood. I eyed up the shot. No way I’d ever make it, but I didn’t have much choice. “I’ve had something… going on.” A smooth stroke — the cue ball banked off the side and tapped the thirteen perfectly. We both watched it roll slowly into the corner pocket. I smiled and put my hand on his shoulder. “Did you miss me?”

Sometimes, it’s better to be lucky than good, but not this time. I missed my next shot miserably and he ran the table. I looked up at the clock and whistled softly. It was noon and I was hungry.

He racked them up again. “You ain’t giving up already, are you? I’m not done with your whupping. Three in the corner,” he said, tapping the pocket three times with the cue. Potsy sunk the one ball in the corner, dislodging several others. Maybe he wasn’t as good as he seemed. I moved to the table to respot the ball he had mistakenly sunk, but he was bending over to line up another. “What are you up to there, sonny? I’m not done yet.”

“You sunk the wrong ball.”

“I called one in the corner and I sank the one in the corner.”

“You called the three ball.”

He stood up, tapping the soft rubber of the cue on the floor thoughtfully. “There is something different about you, boy. You don’t remember how to play pool.”

“You said ‘three.’” Old man or no old man, I was going to slug him. He was a bigger cheater than me. But that wasn’t why I was here.

“Three taps, three in a row, same pocket. Even you should know there’s only one ball that can go that way from where I was. What’s wrong with you, anyway?” He bent over and proceeded to sink the next two balls into the same corner pocket.

“Oh.” I supposed that was possible. I had gotten bored during the second half of The Hustler. I sat on the stool, thinking, while he proceeded to run the rest of the rack. “Let’s say that I have forgotten how to play pool; that I’ve forgotten a lot of things. Let’s pretend that I’m someone else who has no idea what’s been going on here for the last four years.”

Potsy was watching me, an odd look on his face, like fear but not quite. I got up and put my hands on his bony shoulders, looking him squarely in the eye.

“Let’s pretend for a minute that I don’t even remember you. You know, like amnesia?” I was that guy in the Alfred Hitchcock movie with amnesia and a fear of heights.

Potsy wasn’t biting. “You’re not getting your dollar back.” He laid his cue on the table, signaling the end of the match, and snatched up the money. He walked over to the Coke machine and took out a bottle without depositing a dime. “So you don’t remember things; is that what you’re saying?”

“Right, like the fact that the Coke is free to players, you old skinflint.” I laughed. The old fart had snookered me on that. I liked him a lot, but I couldn’t see how he could have liked Harry. Now him and me? We could have done pretty well together. “I don’t remember much about myself at all. Hell, I’m not even sure I’m even me anymore.”

I didn’t want to give him a heart attack, especially having already calculated that the Mount Vernon ambulance would never get here in time to save the famous John Crowe Ransom, let alone a nobody pool hall proprietor named Potsy, but I really needed to ask him some questions without blowing my cover. So I told my story, starting with the Pancake House, embellishing it as needed to suit this situation, (but keeping it consistent with things I’d said earlier in case the police questioned him, too) and ending it all with a plea for him to keep it all under his hat. After all, we didn’t want to scare anyone, especially Mrs. Hoople. It was one of my best performances. He watched me the entire time, his expression changing from fear and uncertainty to concern. This was art — not that crap that Harry had put together for his classes.

“So you don’t remember me?” He seemed disappointed.

“I remembered that you’re my friend. That’s why I came back.”

Potsy and I spent an hour or so talking. It turned out he was what they called a “townie,” which was the looking-at-you-down-my-nose kind of term that the college students and staff used to refer to the local population. It was something he and most of the other townspeople resented and had complained to the school officials about, but couldn’t do much to stop. I would definitely need several planks to accommodate all the idiots who would be walking them when the time came. Potsy knew Mrs. Hoople from church and it was there that he had met Harry during his freshman year. From what I could tell, Harry had almost immediately taken up residence with the old lady, making him the ideal in absentia roommate for any student who really wanted a single but couldn’t afford it. He and Potsy had struck up an immediate friendship and that’s when Harry started playing pool once or twice a week, spending the afternoon with Potsy drinking free Coke and talking about the world’s troubles as seen from Ohioland.

Not many students came to the pool hall any more, and it was scheduled to be closed permanently after the current school year to make room for more dorm space — a financial decision, nothing personal. I jotted that down to make sure I didn’t forget to add it to one of Soup Edwards’ walls. “It’s a personal decision, nothing financial.” Potsy was doing this basically for free so it wasn’t like he would be out of a paying job, but it was clear he would have pretty much nothing to do with himself once the Brunswicks were hauled away. They weren’t even going to let him have his favorite table, not that it would have fit in his apartment. They were being sold as antiques. I doubted there was a gold watch in it for him either. I felt sorry for the guy. It was a strange feeling, one I didn’t often have to deal with because it usually meant I liked the person, and that always complicated things.

About a month ago Harry had stopped coming to the pool hall for no apparent reason. Harry had also stopped going to church so Potsy wasn’t able to ask him directly what was going on, and Mrs. Hoople would only say that she hadn’t seen him and was worried but thought that he must have been busy finishing up schoolwork. Potsy didn’t see it that way at all. People came first, always did, and there was no changing that. Funny, I would have thought Harry would see it that way, too, making it all the more crazy that he should just abandon his friends for nearly a month and then turn up dead; not that a body had been found yet, but it all seemed to be heading in that direction. I really needed to find Beth.

After promising that I would be back in a couple of days, I headed downstairs to the dining hall to get something to eat. I would have gone back to visit the old guy again, really. It was one of those things you mean to do, want to do, but know you will never do. Once I left Kenyon, I was never coming back.

I entered the Great Hall. It wasn’t so great, just a big, noisy room filled with the clinking of aluminumware on cheap food service dishes. I waited an appropriate amount of time in the doorway for people to notice me, but everyone’s attention was either on their food or their friends at the table. A couple students looked up briefly but none apparently recognized me. Well, they would get their chance to pay their respects to me someday, just not today. The cordoned-off Captain’s table was empty. Just as well — I wasn’t ready for them yet. I took my place at the end of the food line and waited with the common folk for my shot at a lunch of mystery meat and overcooked vegetables, swimming in gravy that was probably more a cover-up than a flavor enhancement.

It was actually comforting to know that not everyone at Kenyon knew and worshipped Harry. Not one person in the Great Hall had so much as smiled at me. The conclusion was obvious — either Harry ranked lower on their rating scale than this god-awful food or Harry wasn’t on their list at all. In either case, it was a winner and helped to erase the emerging complex I was getting that somehow Harry had become more popular, and hence more powerful, than me. He had done a lot of things in his four years at Kenyon, things that Mom and Dad would be proud of; not the least of which was that he had become a regular churchgoer again. I’d have to remember to tell them that when I called later. Even I was impressed. He’d come a long way back from the division cellar and was a definite threat to my league-leading position with so few games left in the season. He was like the guy in the movie who commits suicide to save his family because he is worth more dead than alive. I’d have to do something about that. I’d have to make sure they knew all the bad things, too. I made a note to make sure I uncovered a few of them before heading out. So far that page was empty.

Someone touched my arm. It wasn’t the casual touch of a friend. It was something else. I turned and it was a really cute girl — light brown hair, blue eyes, tanned skin, a few inches shorter than me, and a killer smile.

“Hey,” I said, smiling back. This was Beth. It had to be her.

There is a code among guys, an unwritten code that even I usually follow. Guys keep it simple. You don’t squeal on a buddy, you never mess with his car, and you absolutely never, ever steal his girl. You follow these rules and your buddy is your buddy for life. You break the rules and you end up like Frankie Marx with your head glued to the school bus seat. I considered whether Harry was covered under the code. After all, he was only my brother, not my buddy. All that hanging out we had done together as kids didn’t really count. I only kept him around to have someone convenient to beat up if the need arose. And he had squealed on me many times, which I was certain should disqualify him. And, most importantly, he was dead, or at least gone. The jury was deadlocked.

“You’re back,” she said softly, taking my hand and squeezing it. There was an electricity between us that I found myself unable to resist. I squeezed back. She kissed me lightly on the lips. “I was worried about you. Why have you been gone so long?”

Evasive maneuvers, evasive maneuvers, dive, dive… “Just got in. How was the sun and surf?” It wasn’t hard to guess that she had been somewhere warm and sunny. She was way too tanned for Ohioland in winter, and there were sun-bleached streaks in her hair.

I heard a giggle in the line behind us. It was that blonde from art class. “Hi, Harry. Hi, Beth,” she waved. “I see you two have finally found each other.” She crossed her hands over her chest and batted her eyelashes. There was no buddy rule protecting her, but I wasn’t the least bit interested — too many girly mind games that I had no inclination to play. I looked at Beth and rolled my eyes.

She laughed a laugh I could have gotten used to easily. “Kerry likes you, you know,” she whispered to me.

“That makes one of us.”

Her look became earnest again. “Where have you been?” I gave her a regrettable, sheepish grin and shrugged. I may have been the best sergeant the army had to offer, but when it came right down to it I knew nothing about women. I checked my scorecard. Most of my battlefield victories were typical — recon, search and destroy, frontal assault, things I understood. The loss column was littered with failed missions involving women I had known. I put the card away.

Beth and I didn’t sit in the Great Hall. She led me through the line and to a smaller dining hall called Dempsey that was more my speed — far less pretentious and a nice view of the side of the hill on which Philander Chase had said a prayer so long ago to launch his pirate fleet into the uncharted seas of education. I wondered if the building had been named for Jack Dempsey, the boxer. I hadn’t remembered seeing his portrait in Ransom Hall, but I probably wouldn’t have recognized him in a suit. I had only ever seen him in Everlast trunks with blood all over his beat-up face. It didn’t matter. All of the Ransom Hall portraits would look like Jack Dempsey soon enough. We sat by a window next to each other. It was more or less the tail end of lunchtime, so there were only scattered students in the hall, affording us some degree of privacy. Beth inched closer and I could feel the warmth of her leg through her jeans. Harry was a lucky guy.

I took a bite of the mystery meat and almost choked. “What is this? Deflated footballs?”

She laughed and I used the moment to slide away a bit on the bench, then angle sideways to face her. I saw her look down at my leg. I had pulled it up on the bench and tucked it under my other, blocking her from getting too close. She looked up and into my eyes questioningly. The jig was up. She had to know I wasn’t Harry. Pushing the plate away, I cleared my throat, trying to think of the best way to approach this.

I had originally planned on continuing the impersonation to see if she would be fooled like the others. It hadn’t seemed likely, though no one else seemed to see any difference between us. But this was his girlfriend. Surely she would know the difference between her lover and someone who just looked like him. And if she kissed me, really kissed me, not just a peck on the lips; that would be the giveaway. There was just no way Harry was a good a kisser as me. After all, I had learned the fine art from Bonnie Shoedel in sixth grade. Granted, I was doing it on a dare and for money, but I had gotten plenty of practice after that while Harry was still wallowing in the celibacy of his calling to the priesthood.

Beth asked, “What’s wrong? You seem different. Did everything go okay at home? You left without even saying good-bye. I was so worried.” She took my hand again. She wasn’t going to make this easy.

“Home? Sure, it was fine.” The amnesia story was probably a good place to start. I could delay any intimate contact with her for the time being, and by the time she finally did figure out that I was not Harry, I would have another lie ready to explain why I had deceived her. I had just gotten out the words, “Do I look…” when she said,

“What did your parents say when you told them we were engaged?”

“Unexpected” is defined in The Book of Tom as a barrage of water balloons raining down on you while you are trying to make out in your car on Lover’s Lane. I know because I wrote that definition and carried out the strategy many times during high school. Ask Frankie Marx. And I had never seen anything to cause me to even think about redefining that term… until now. Harry had become an artist, a writer, a local celebrity, deeply religious again, an all-around good guy on campus, and now, I found out, he was going to do the one thing that would carry him to the top of the parental-approval charts. He would be the one to carry on the Ryan family name. I was glad he was dead. The bastard had royally screwed me… after all I had done for him. But somewhere in the black depths of my heart I believed he was still alive. He had to be alive or I wouldn’t be able to undo all his good deeds.

“Harry?” Beth’s eyes were tearing.

I stood up, pulling her up with me. A fine mess Harry had gotten me into. I hugged her. I didn’t know what to say. “Let’s get out of here.”

Beth and I wandered silently down the hill, finding a path through the woods. The day was fading fast, clouds were rolling in, and Ohioland was in for another storm. I should have been a weatherman. It’s a lot easier to look up at the sky and tell what is going to happen with the weather than to understand or predict people. In four years, Harry had filled his crappy little existence with everything I had tried my best to deny him at home. He had taken all those things the nuns and Christian brothers had told him were possible for him and had actually done them. I hated and loved him. I loved him and wanted to kill him. I hadn’t yet decided what I would do first once I found him, but it would be fitting, even if it meant digging him up and killing him again. But that was not for me to figure out now. That was a future episode of Combat! Today’s episode had Sergeant Saunders and a female French resistance operative following the tracks of a German spy into the dark woods of France where danger lurked around every turn. She was an exotic beauty from the hills of Alsace, and he a simple American falling in love during the worst war in human history. This was not the time; this was not the place. There was a war to be won and this had to be a simple matter of using the Frogs to get to the Krauts… nothing more.

There was a crackling nose — the sound of someone stepping on a branch and it breaking under their weight. It had to be the enemy — only the enemy was stupid enough to give their position away like that. We both stopped and looked in the direction of the sound. Something was there.

“Did you see that?” I asked in a whisper.

“It looked like a man,” Beth replied. I could feel her trembling. Was it from the cold?

A shadow seemed to move in the distance and fade into the trees. I had no idea how safe these woods were and it had probably been a stupid idea to wander off like this — after all, Harry had wandered off and was never seen again.

“Hey! Who’s there?” I yelled, the logic being that if it was an animal I would scare it off, and if it was a person, they would either identify themselves or we would run like hell. My yell died without echo or response and the woods became quiet again. I quickly flipped to the notebook page marked Really stupid things to do and added this boneheaded idea to that list, right below Telling the truth when there are other options. Beth and I waited and heard another, more distant cracking sound.

I exhaled slowly. “It must be an animal or something. I guess I scared it off.”

She looked up at me but said nothing.

The path switched back several times down a steep, slippery slope. Holding hands wasn’t my idea — I didn’t like getting help from a girl — but it did steady us both. When we finally reached the bottom, I tried to let go, but she was having none of that, so I led her along the nearly frozen-over river toward a railroad bridge upstream.

Harry believed that everything happened for a reason, that nothing was an accident, that our fate was our own doing. I always thought he was full of crap, yet there it was looming before us — the infamous Kokosing River trestle bridge from which Harry had supposedly fallen and drowned. We walked until we were standing under it and stopped. It was pretty high up and if Harry had been stupid enough to try and walk across it he could easily have slipped and fallen into the river. There were plenty of rocks he could have hit his head on. And he could have been knocked unconscious and drowned while he was carried away by the vicious current. And his body definitely could have washed up way downstream in the farmlands of Ohioland where I was sure there were cannibals and vultures to devour it. It all made perfect sense to me.

“What are you thinking about?” Beth asked. This abruptly ended my logical extrapolations.

“Nothing.”

She faced me and pulled close, way too close. Thank God for heavy jackets. “Kiss me,” she whispered, looking up at me and closing her eyes.

Sometimes my plans are so well thought out in advance that I can’t imagine why I haven’t been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for them, sometimes they are made and adapted on the fly and I pat myself on the back for being so resourceful, and sometimes I just do things based on the “what the hell” theory. Those don’t usually work out so well. So I kissed her.

Our mouths seemed to fit together perfectly and I felt myself drawn into her like I had never been to any woman. I was waving good-bye forever to Bonnie Shoedel by the time she finally let go, and I had already rewritten the buddy’s code so that only “never squealing” and “never messing with a buddy’s car” were mandatory. “Never stealing his girl” had become a non-binding rule, more of a guideline actually. I looked into her eyes. There was not even a glimmer of a doubt there — impossibly, she believed I was Harry. I closed my eyes…

In that split second, I thought of a million lies I could have told her that would end up with us in bed together, but I knew I didn’t need any of them. She wanted me and I wanted her. It was that simple. All I had to do was keep my mouth shut and make love to her. Or, I could have told her the truth.

“I’m not Harry.” And… I’m an idiot.

“What?” Beth’s look modulated through several emotional states, beginning with oddly amused and ending with uncomprehending.

“I’m not Harry. I’m his brother, Tom.” She looked at me dumbfounded while the diarrhea of truth continued to spew forth from the lips that would never again kiss Beth’s, recounting the sad tale of Harry’s demise, starting with the fateful call from Kenyon, to my crazy impersonation of Harry, to my finally meeting her. When I was done, I looked down at my feet like the ten-year-old caught with a Playboy magazine in his room. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

“Why are you doing this?” she cried again and again as she beat on my chest with her clenched fists, “Why are you lying to me like this?”

I took her hands and held them. “I’m not lying… now. Beth, I’m not Harry. I’m sorry.”

“No,” she shook her head. “No, you’re Harry. You’re lying. Why? Why are you lying to me? Why?”

I tried to pull her close to hug her and calm her, but she pushed me backwards. “Don’t you touch me. Don’t you ever touch me again. I can’t believe I ever loved you, and if this is the way you want to get out of our relationship then fine. You… you bastard!” She turned and ran back along the river and up the path towards school.

I opened my eyes. Well, so much for the truth. I needed to take another path or risk losing her forever. I exhaled slowly.

Beth was smiling up at me. “So what did they say?”

“Who? Oh, my parents…” My hands were sweating and I felt a chill on the back of my neck. I didn’t want to lie to her and I couldn’t tell her the truth. I couldn’t remember ever having been in this kind of pickle before. I shrugged and laughed nervously. “Well, the fact of the matter is I didn’t tell them.” I ran the banner of a misleading truth up the flagpole and waited for the expectant salute or flag burning.

Beth frowned at me. “You spent all that time at home and never said a word about it?”

Avoidance. Stop, drop and roll. Duck and cover. “I’ll call them when we get back to the house,” I grinned stupidly. “It will be easier for them, I think. Let’s go back now. I’m cold.”

Sliding her hand behind my neck, Beth pulled my face close to hers. “Do you love me?”

There was no point in lying about this one. “Yeah, I do.”

Chapter 10

The woods, made sparse by the days of German shelling, were cold and quiet. The expected lull in the fighting had finally come, and while the Nazis regrouped and reloaded, Saunders was using the time to reposition his men. They had gotten beaten up pretty badly during the night and morale was low. Complaints, usually kept quiet, were heard in murmurs meant to be just out of the sergeant’s earshot, but close enough that he would get the message. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t right that they should be the ones left behind to bear the brunt of the Nazi push, their only orders to slow down the assault enough to give the Allies time to get reinforcements to the regrouping area. Saunders and his men were expendable pawns and they all knew it. But Saunders wasn’t like them. He didn’t fear death. He just didn’t like it. It was just another punk to beat up. And he was going to make it damn miserable for those stinking Nazis.

Kenyon, which had forever been an all-boys school, had finally entered the twentieth century in 1969 by building a coordinate college of women, thus doubling their enrollment and their yearly booty of doubloons and pieces of eight. But they built it apart from the main campus, on the other side of town, to keep it separate and distinct. Any fool could see that this was an interim move to appease the alumni, and that the ultimate goal of the campaign was to change Kenyon to a full-blown coed institution. It seemed like a convoluted step for a pirate to take, but I guess businessmen pirates are different when they are sailing the high seas of Ohioland and not the wilder waters of the Caribbean. Beth wanted to get a few things from her room in McBride, one of the girl’s dorms north of town, so we parted ways at Mrs. Hoople’s, agreeing that I would call home and then we’d have dinner with John Crowe Ransom.

I opened the unlocked door to the Hoople house and went in, closing my eyes and taking in the smell of cinnamon. There was something comforting and reassuring about walking into a home filled with the smell of goodies baking. It reminded me of a time when things were a lot simpler and decisions were based more on what I wanted rather than on what I had to do. Somewhere around fifteen when I realized that things were changing, that my childhood was waving good-bye and I was being forced into becoming a responsible adult, I tried to stop it. I did everything in my power, pulled every string, called in every favor, and swore on every book I could lay my hands on that I wouldn’t grow up and become like them. I even went out of my way to do things that were insanely impractical and downright stupid for the sake of proving that I was doing things because I wanted to do them. Peter Pan would have been proud of me. Captain Hook, too. But even they grew up, didn’t they? I couldn’t remember. It was just another fairy tale during which I had fallen asleep.

“I’m home,” I called out, heading upstairs to get cleaned up. I threw my jacket on the bed and collapsed in a chair. Beth’s faint scent was still with me when I cupped my hands over my face and inhaled. Dinner with her and Captain John would be nice. Maybe I could actually get to know her a little better, maybe him, too. Two good people, in my book, just a different goal in mind for each.

Who was I kidding? A shower was really what I needed and I knew just where I could get one. So back down the stairs I went and to the kitchen. I poked my head in the doorway. “Hey, Mrs. H. I have to run over to Farr to get something.” Keep it vague. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings over having crappy, inadequate plumbing facilities. Mrs. Hoople looked a little tired when she turned from her cooking but she had a smile for me anyway. She would definitely be the queen mother in my kingdom. But the cat? Well, that was another story.

“Don’t be late now, dear. I’m making sticky buns. They’ll be out of the oven and cool in a half hour. If you come back too late, though, the icing will be hard, and you know how you don’t like that.”

“I’ll be back long before that happens. Oh, and Beth is on her way over. We can have coffee and your delicious sticky buns together and then she and I are going out to dinner. How does that sound?” I called back on my way to the door. I stopped when I heard her shuffling after me.

She was holding a towel and a shaving bag. “Why do you always have to be so secretive about this, Harry Ryan? Lord, after four years of sneaking over there to get your shower, you think I don’t know what you’re up to? I know you like your showers and you know I can’t afford to have one installed here. So I got you a Christmas present. I should have done this years ago, but there you have it.”

I took the leather bag and clean towel and thanked her. “Nice job of gift wrapping.”

“Yes, well, you know cats. He had other plans for that lovely wrapping paper.”

So practical, so straightforward… I gave her a big hug and kissed her on the cheek.

I wasn’t really in the mood to be back in the cold again, so I jogged over to Farr Hall. It was snowing lightly as I had earlier predicted but, thankfully, there was no wind to speak of. I quickly scanned the list of professions needed in my kingdom to make sure meteorologist was not among them. Any weathermen would be retrained as garbage collectors. There was always a lot of crap to clean up.

Gambier was quiet and almost picturesque. It seemed like such a safe little haven in a world so deeply troubled by violence and war. Nothing ever happened here. Mrs. Hoople had confirmed that. That was why it was so odd to see a police car sitting across the main drags in front of the post office, its lights off. Nothing ever happened here, except to Harry. Were the cops here for me? No, it was dinnertime and even cops ate dinner, maybe even dinner at the Alumni House. Maybe the cop lived in town. Maybe Gambier actually had one cop, maybe a deputy like Barney Fife from the Andy Griffith show who was allowed to carry an unloaded gun and only one bullet that he had to keep tucked away in his shirt pocket for emergencies. I couldn’t remember if he ever loaded that gun. I doubt it.

I couldn’t tell if Barney was inside the car. It was too far away and too dark. But as I neared Farr, I saw why the cop car was there — a small group of twenty or so students, some holding signs, some holding candles, was gathered on the north end of Middle Path. I could hear them singing one of those protest songs, one I really despised.

…Gonna lay down my sword and shield

down by the river side

and I ain’t gonna study war no more.

What a dumb thing to do — drop your weapons by a river and leave yourself defenseless. What if the Finnerty gang came along, picked them up and beat the crap out of you with them? You couldn’t even run home to hide. The river would be blocking your escape. Anyone who was crazy enough to do that was suicidal in my book.

Harry had done that once. Kids from a block over had invaded our neighborhood, starting an afternoon-long snowball fight. We had control of the fort in the McKinley’s back yard and the invaders were taking heavy casualties. But as the battle had worn on and more and more of them gave up and went home, Harry decided out of the clear blue that he felt sorry for the ones left behind to fight us. He convinced three of my best boys to join him and they put down their cardboard shields and iceballs and walked out of the fort with a white flag of truce. That left the gate wide open, and the Huns from Wainbell Avenue poured in behind them, grabbing the shields and iceballs. They slaughtered us. That’s what happens when you let the diplomats try and run the war.

The week before Christmas, just a week before we heard about Harry, President Nixon had ordered the bombing of Hanoi by B-52s because the North Vietnamese had backed out of some peace talks. I guess Nixon was trying to convince them that talking was better than having the crap bombed out of you. The Post-Gazette was calling it the “Christmas bombings.” But I really couldn’t say I blamed the North for leaving. I couldn’t stand Henry Kissinger either. He reminded me more of a weasel than a diplomat, and I found that gravelly voice of his really annoying.

The only two signs I could make out in the group of protesters were “Stop the bombing” and “Get out of Vietnam.” What did they know of war? They’d probably never beaten anyone up in their lives or ever fought to protect anything they held dear. If I said “Pork Chop Hill” to them, they’d probably think I was talking about the leftovers from last night’s dinner. They were just like all the other anti-war activists who lived in their little vacuum of false security and thought they could tell everyone around them, including the people protecting them, what to do. If they were so against war, they should go find themselves a country that hadn’t been founded on a war, had not started a war, and didn’t have a government of idiots that insisted on jumping into a war that we didn’t belong in and couldn’t possibly win. Good luck with that.

Drawing up a battle plan, I slowed to a walk and crossed over to Middle Path. By the time I reached them, they had finished their obnoxious song and were standing quietly in a circle, their heads bowed, silently praying. One of them stepped into the middle of the circle and held up a piece of paper. The others looked up. One girl, holding a candle in front of her face, was crying. Reading by flashlight, the leader slowly intoned a list of names, following each name in the litany with “killed in action in Vietnam.”

I was sitting in the back pew of Saint Catherine’s again, trying not to pay attention to Mass but unable to ignore the Gregorian chant: Kyrie Eleison, killed in action in Vietnam. Christe Eleison, killed in action in Vietnam, Kyrie Eleison, killed in action in Vietnam. Carmen Ioli was hitting me in the chest with a two by four, yelling at me to get off their property. I cried out. I couldn’t remember the strategy of my attack plan. I was going to do something to the protesters; it involved the snow but I couldn’t remember what. Lieutenant Hanley was yelling and slapping me, “You’re hit! Get back behind the lines and find a medic! That’s an order, soldier!” But Sergeant Saunders never ran from anything. My hands became cold and clammy. I wasn’t sure I was even breathing anymore.

One thing about throwing up — you know when the urge is too strong to resist and it’s just a matter of seconds before it happens. It’s when your mouth fills with saliva and you can’t swallow it anymore. I’ve been there many times before and I was nearly there then. I clasped my hand tightly over my mouth, turned away from the peace rally, and headed toward Farr Hall and the trash can that would soon smell of regurgitated mystery meat. Who knew? Maybe this was how they resupplied for the next day’s meal at the cafeteria.

Fortunately for me, unfortunately for the food service people, I hadn’t quite reached the point of no return and the gripping sensation in my chest eased, and the urge to vomit left me by the time I got to Farr. But I didn’t feel well at all. I took the stairs two at a time and headed for Harry’s dorm room.

The door to the bathroom was open on Harry’s suite mate’s side, and I could hear Stairway to Heaven playing so I took the liberty of checking it out. I stuck my head in first and did a quick reconnaissance. It looked more like a warehouse than a dorm room. There were stacks of neatly piled and shrink-wrapped records and books on the desk, a mini-mart of art supplies on the dresser, and a candy outlet in the open closet. Grabber, the spacey kid from the bookstore was busy sorting through the candy. He turned when he finally heard me call his name for the third time.

“Dude, you freaking scared the shit out of me. Heh-heh.”

“How’s business?” I counted five copies of Harry’s book on the desk.

“Outstanding.” He followed my gaze to the books and asked, “Some Ryan signage on those would undoubtedly up the resale value.” He held a pen out in my direction, smiling, “Something fairly generic would be most fortuitous — that widens the market. Batchelder taught us that in Econ and he rocks.”

I took the pen and set it down on the desk by the books. It was hard to imagine someone like Grabber running the U.S. economy one day, yet here he was in Dragburg, Ohio, in charge of a thriving black market. “I’m going to catch a quick shower first. That will give me time to think of something creative and make them really worth a pant-load.”

“Heavy duty,” he nodded thoughtfully. “Something non-specific, yet creative.”

With that I left Grabber to ponder the meaning of life amid a warehouse of stolen property. I hadn’t had a shower since my stay at the Alumni House so I took my time and enjoyed it — a double soaping, enough steam to fog the mirrors — my kind of medicine. I was feeling much better. A hot shower is a good time to think through things and get organized. Just let the water beat mindlessly down and it drowns out all confusion, leaving only essential thoughts. Give it enough time and it even washes away the complications of a tough day. It’s easy to lose track of time in a hot shower.

I twisted the faucets off and grabbed my towel. Once I was preliminarily dry, I stepped out of the stall and found my watch – 6:00 p.m. I dressed with urgency. John Crowe Ransom was expecting us at six thirty. I hated rushing like that but I was determined that Beth and I were going to have a relaxing evening listening to pirate tales, drinking rum, and yo-ho-hoing into the wee hours. “From a good friend and lesser writer” — that’s how I would sign Harry’s book for him. I would have to remember not to use that one on Grabber’s copies.

The battlefield is an ever-changing landscape that requires any successful plan to remain fluid. Static positions are the weakest and maintaining rapid movement capabilities the most critical. So said Erwin Rommel and, like General George Patton, I had read his book, the magnificent bastard. Dressed and feeling much better about life in general, despite the lack of progress in finding Harry and still feeling a bit rushed at the moment, I returned to Grabber’s room prepared to apply some “Ryan signage” and head back to Mrs. Hoople’s to pick up Beth.

When I stepped into Grabber’s Emporium of Stolen Merchandise, I realized something was wrong. He was standing at attention in front of his closet, blocking the view of his candy store. A towel was clumsily draped over the inventory on his desk. And standing by the window, starting at me was a man dressed in a trench coat and fedora hat, a cigar stub stuck in the side of his mouth. He was the cliché of a cop. I immediately revised my theory on why the police car was outside. They had come looking for Harry.

Play it cool. What choice did I have? “Hey there, are you Grabber’s dad?”

“Michael,” Grabber coughed. “Michael.” It was one of those fake coughs boys use to disguise insults like “asshole” and “shithead” and warnings like “shut up” and “zip it” when they don’t want someone present to know what they are saying, except that they really do want them to know, don’t they? They just want to be able to deny that they said it if it ever came to trial by fire, water, or parents.

I walked over to the cop, continuing to feign ignorance. It’s easier to get information when you play dumb. People don’t think of you as a threat and they more readily drop their guards. “Nice to meet you, Michael’s dad.” I extended my hand but the cop didn’t take it. I leaned closer to him and could smell alcohol on his breath. I whispered, “Sorry, we call him Grabber because he likes the girls, if you know what I mean.” I winked.

“Are you done?” The cop pulled out a badge. “I’m Detective James, Mount Vernon P.D.”

I backed up, more from the stench of his breath and his B.O. than what he had said. This guy had obviously never made it through Brother Richard’s health class. If there’s one thing you learn from a Christian Brother in health class, it’s how not to smell like you just came out of a bar after an all-night drinking binge.

“Of course you are. Nice to meet you.”

“We heard you were back. Dean Edwards phoned me earlier and I’ve got a few questions for you.”

Apparently, James hadn’t gotten to the chapter on exchanging pleasantries in his Dick Tracy Handbook. As far as I could tell, he was still working his way through the direct intimidation section. He had no idea who he was dealing with.

This would have been a golden opportunity to find out what the police knew about Harry’s disappearance, but Dick James Tracy’s timing stunk. I was looking forward to spending a nice evening with Beth and Old John Crowe, and at this rate I was going to be late. I didn’t want to be late. “Tell you what, officer…”

“Detective.”

“Right. Detective. Tell you what — give me your card and I’ll call you tomorrow and we can sit down and talk.”

“Tell you what,” I could hear him saying the word “punk” but it didn’t come out of his mouth. “How about you come with me now and we get this all straightened out downtown. You have a lot of explaining to do.”

“You’re not…? You don’t…?” Grabber almost stepped away from his cabinet of illegally obtained merchandise but caught himself in time. The pathetic kid was scared shitless. He’d thought the cops were there for him. Maybe it would scare some sense into him. I didn’t need to make any notes on that. I already knew the value of fear in keeping my subjects in line.

James shut him up with a wag of his fat finger. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to. If I weren’t busy with your buddy here, you and me would have a nice go around. Word of advice — clean it up. Now.”

That was three words, but I hadn’t figured him for a mathematician so I didn’t bother to correct him.

“Yes, sir. Right, sir. Important safety tip noted.” Grabber melted into the closet, becoming part of the room’s furniture as the detective’s focus recentered on me.

“You got two choices…” Once again, I heard him say “punk” but the word never came out of his mouth. I knew he was saying it, but he never actually said it. That was a clever little trick. I’d have to figure out how he did that and use it myself sometime. “Either you come downtown with me for questioning voluntarily, or I arrest you and you come downtown for questioning. Either way…”

This guy was tough. I liked his style even if he was an ass. “Yeah, I know… either way, I’m coming downtown. Just out of curiosity, what would you be charging me with?”

His eyes flashed and his nostrils flared. Clearly, I was standing in the streets of Pamplona on the wrong day. I backed away from his direct line to the door just in case. I didn’t really want to go to dinner bull-trampled and full of holes from where his horns had gouged me.

“I’ll think of something. I have forty-eight hours to figure that out before I officially charge you with anything.”

“I was on my way out to have dinner…”

A step in my direction and he had me by the sleeve. James was bigger, stockier, and a lot stronger than me. He yanked me out the door. “We’ll stop for something on the way.”

I barely had time to call back to Grabber, “Hey, Grabber, let Mrs. H. and Beth know I’ll be late, okay?” I didn’t particularly want him getting in touch with John Crowe. I’d apologize to him tomorrow.

The anti-war demonstrators were gone and Gambier was just another quiet little town in the middle of nowhere by the time we had gotten outside. It was probably better that Beth not see me this way. I still hadn’t figured out how I would explain all this to her. My feelings about her and for her were all confused and I didn’t like that. Like a nightclub bouncer, James directed me across the main drags. I wasn’t resisting, but he wouldn’t let go of my sleeve.

When we got to his car, I reached for the passenger front door handle but he stopped me and grunted, “Back seat,” opening the rear door and pushing me toward it.

The squad car smelled like an exaggerated version of him — booze, B.O., and fried food. I resisted, mainly to air the car out a bit and give the stench a chance to dissipate, but James was too strong for me and he shoved me inside, laughing when I hit my head on the doorjamb. I took that as a challenge and decided at that point that his punishment would have to be severe. Perhaps there would be evidence linking him to the impending redecoration of Ransom Hall. Perhaps something worse.

His car was obviously his home away from home and I was unfortunately in the bedroom. Disgusting. I pushed aside a yellowed pillow and a wool blanket that were lying on the seat, deciding to take my chances with the seat cushion fabric. Although I didn’t know why I bothered — I would be burning my clothes later anyway — but just the thought of sitting on his bed made me sick. The front passenger seat, his dining room, was littered with crumpled fast food bags and sandwich wrappers. James only ate at the best restaurants — Wendy’s, McDonald’s, and Burger King. On the floor were a half-eaten Big Mac, a bottle of Jack Daniels, and a handgun. No happy meal toys — what a shame. The driver’s seat, now occupied by His Royal Smelliness’ big butt, could only have been his living room, if you could call existing in that filth and debris living. The cage that separated us reminded me of Harry’s playpen. I couldn’t imagine he liked it in there. I certainly didn’t like it here.

James drove us north out of town, following the right-hand road past the girls’ dorms and into the wintry darkness of barren farmlands that lay beyond the college. We were really into the wilds of Ohioland now, so I kept my mouth shut, not wanting to provoke a loose cannon like him. After all, he might dump me at some crazy local’s where they would string me up in the barn for the enjoyment of the wild dogs and coyotes. The darkness around us was complete — no road lines, no street lights, no house lights — not something I was used to at all. If I were writing a horror story, this would be the setting. I half expected him to turn around and there I’d be — face to face with a werewolf or vampire. Maybe the cage wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

We reached a crossroad marked only by a reflecting sign that read Mount Vernon, and James turned left onto it. I felt more comfortable — at least it had reflective lines marking its boundaries and a double line down the center — a sure sign that we were headed back toward civilization and that he wasn’t going to abandon me to the locals after all. My sense of horror-movie dread subsided a bit. It was time to break the ice and find out if he really was a monster driving me to my death. Maybe that’s what had happened to Harry... No, he was just a cop doing his job. I had to keep telling myself that.

“So, where are we going… exactly?” I asked. He ignored me. “I could do Wendy’s. Did you know that Dave Thomas opened the first Wendy’s in Columbus, Ohio? Not that long ago either.” I saw the back of his hand as he reached for the car radio. It wasn’t all hairy and gnarled. I ruled out werewolf, leaving only vampire. “Columbus, that’s not far from here, is it?”

“Dispatch, this is Denver 312. I’ll be code 7 at 321 Coshocton Rd. for thirty minutes and will be returning to base after.”

A crackly woman’s voice responded, “10-4, Dick. Can you pick me up a six-piece meal? I’m starved.”

So the dick really was a Dick. Fitting. “What? No happy meal?” I muttered.

I thought I saw James crack a half-smile, but his look was hard when he glared back at me in the rear view mirror. “Roger, and out, Dispatch.” I ruled out vampire — they have no reflection in a mirror. The final credits for “How I Was Abandoned to Werewolves and Vampires in Ohioland” ended and the curtain came down. The second flick in the double feature would be starting soon: “I Was Kidnapped by a Goon in Ohio Who Turned Out to be the Monster that Devoured Cleveland.” I’d have to work on the title. It would be hard to fit that one on the marquee.

I could see the golden arches growing in the distance under garish parking lot lights. So much for my requesting Wendy’s… The McDonald’s was at the end of a dark, ten-store strip-mall. None of the other stores was open at this hour, not even the pizza place. Odd, considering it was dinner time or thereabouts… James pulled into the empty lot and parked in a handicapped spot. Without looking back, he growled, “What do you want?”

“We could eat inside.”

“Not an option.”

“I guess you’re right. Allowing a dangerous criminal to mingle with the public in an empty fast food joint in a deserted strip mall probably would be a breach of security protocol, wouldn’t it?”

His face flushed. “Are you always a smart-ass? Do you think I enjoy chasing down dipshit kids who run away from home and cause other people a world of hurt?”

Well, he had a point. I wouldn’t like that job much either, but then I wasn’t a dipshit kid and I hadn’t run away from home. “We could do takeout.”

“Last chance — what do you want?”

In the split second it took me to conclude that I was either going to have to go hungry, have a Big Mac, or eat greasy, fried everything from McDonald’s, my last chance with James ran out. He got out of the car and went into the restaurant. Great.

I watched him snake through the empty roped-off line like a B-movie zombie. How about: “The Zombie that Devoured Cleveland?” That sounded better. That would even fit on the marquee. The guy had no class whatsoever. It would have been a lot easier and a lot less silly looking for him to just walk directly to the order-taker. No one would have been hurt by his shortcutting it, but in this B-movie, the law was the law, and the line was the line, despite there being no law to arrest me and no line to follow. I knew I was in for a rough time of it. And I was tired.

I was awakened by the zombie cop’s rudely dropping a warm Happy Meal bag in my lap. James handed me a Coke. “I hope you wanted the Jetson toy and not the Barbie one. They were all out,” he said, slamming the door and getting into the front.

Funny guy. I had been dreaming but couldn’t remember which episode of Combat! I had been dreaming about. It didn’t matter. They were all good. James had a cup holder for his drink. The prisoner end of the vehicle had no such amenities. I set the Coke between my legs, trying not to freeze my crotch. The detective grunted, unwrapped his first Big Mac and took a huge bite out of it.

“I’ll bet you were hoping for either Daughter Judy or Jane his wife, right? You look like the Judy type.”

James laughed, nearly choking on his mouthful of burger. Better luck next time. After washing down his regurgitated lump of meat, he looked back at me. “You’re a funny bastard. You seem like a nice kid. Why the hell would you pull a stunt like that?”

“Like what?”

I looked in the Happy Meal bag. Chicken McNuggets. I picked one out and started to chew, grease oozing out onto my lips. The chicken tasted like fish. I looked longingly at the fries — they had probably been cooked in the same oil. What a shame – McDonald’s fries were always my favorite. The toy was Astro, the Jetson’s dog. The evening was looking up after all.

“Like that fake disappearance crap.”

I decided not to tell James that it was impolite to talk and chew at the same time. “Like I told Dean Edwards, I really don’t remember what happened.”

“Yeah, he told me. You mysteriously ended up in a diner on Route 70.”

“A Pancake House, just over the line from West Virginia. The food was a heck of a lot better than this crap.” I tossed the nugget back into the bag and tried a fry. It was unfishified, so I downed a handful of them.

“And the girl who helped you was…?”

“Amy. Amy something-or-other. She was pretty nice.”

James had pulled out a notebook and after wiping his hand on the seat, jotted down a few points. I had this sinking feeling he was going to check out my story and find that I’d been lying all along. I tried another bite of chicken from the last meal I’d probably have outside of prison, wondering what the sentence would be for being convicted of impersonating a brother. At least there wouldn’t be McDonald’s chicken there.

“How’d you get back to school?”

“I rented a car.” I should have said that I hitched a ride back. Renting a car is leaving a trail. Too late — he was writing that down, too.

“From…?” His pencil was poised at the ready.

“Avis.” That would slow him down. I had rented from Hertz and back in Pittsburgh, not in Ohio. I could probably squeeze in another couple weeks of fast food before he figured it out. I considered suicide by hamburger.

“Were you injured in any way?”

“I don’t think so, at least not that I remember.”

James grunted. It didn’t look like he was choking on his second Big Mac, but I didn’t understand “gruntese” so I asked, “What’s that?”

“Seems to me that if someone fell thirty feet into an ice cold river that they’d have broken a bone or two, or gotten a few bumps and bruises, or gotten frostbite, or something, assuming they could survive the fall.”

All that from a single grunt — maybe the hamburger was making him smarter. Was that possible?

“What makes you think I fell from the trestle bridge into the river?” I felt uneasy. I was just a piece of evidence to him, part of a puzzle he was solving.

“We found one set of tracks leading out onto the bridge and none returning.”

So much for the theory that someone had intentionally hurt Harry, he must have walked out there on his own and fell; and so much for Harry’s stupid theory that everything happens for a reason. It sounded like an accident pure and simple. I made a note to tell Sam about that one.

“We also found your wallet and keys in the water under the bridge.”

“Isn’t that what they call circumstantial evidence? I mean, anyone could have made those tracks. And the keys could have been dropped upstream somewhere and carried with the current.”

“Are you saying you didn’t fall from the bridge? That something happened upstream?”

“I’m saying I don’t remember, but I’m also saying that you might have jumped to a false conclusion here. Like you said, wouldn’t I have been hurt pretty badly if I had fallen? And what proof do you have that the footprints belonged to Harry?” An unfortunate slip but my recovery was immediate. “…Ryan? And not Joe Blow from Idaho?”

I could feel him peeling away my protective skin, looking for the rotten onion underneath. “Let’s take that little ride downtown.” He started the car and pulled out onto the highway.

“You mean Mount Vernon has a downtown? I’m impressed.”

James belched. I wanted to tell him he was nasty, brutish, and short, but settled instead on leviathan. He ignored me for the rest of the ride to the police station. My thoughts returned to Beth. I was feeling stupidly protective, hoping that Grabber had let Mrs. Hoople know I would be late and that Mrs. Hoople would in turn tell Beth.

Chapter 11

Mount Vernon wasn’t a bad looking place once you got past the strip malls, fast food joints, Quicky Lubes, and 7-11s that lined the highway into town. Why any place as small as that would need two 7-11s and two Quicky Lubes within a couple miles of each other was beyond me unless it was the lube and go capital of Ohio. It was depressing to see the tentacles of modernity tightening around the old, well-kept neighborhoods we passed after we left the highway on our way to the town square and the police station. This seemed like a place that just wanted to be left alone to live the “good old days,” and I respected them for that. I just wanted to be left alone myself right then. But there wasn’t anything I could do about what was happening either to Mount Vernon or myself, so I made a few notes that would remind me that it should be looked upon favorably when my reign began. Even Detective James would have a place in my society. After all, I could use a few good bullies.

James pulled up to the curb in front of the police station, and he hustled me out of the car and along to the front doors of the old, bastion-like building, grabbing the remains of my Happy Meal from the back seat. Had he turned into a neat freak all of a sudden? He looked into the bag and then at me. “Where’s the dog?” Astro was in my pocket.

“Roh roh.”

He held out the bag. “Just drop the dog in the bag, wise guy.”

I complied unwillingly. Jerk. I was going to give Astro to Beth.

Inside the station, a policewoman, Officer Williams, greeted us at the front desk. She smiled broadly at James and then at me. That was a mouthful of teeth. I guessed she was in her forties. “Hi Dick. Did you bring my dinner? I’m famished.” She didn’t look famished. She looked like she could go a few weeks without food and be none the worse for it.

James handed her a Coke and her bag of a six-piece and fries. He also gave her my Happy Meal bag of disgusting, uneaten nuggets, and Astro. “Here you go, sweetie. I got you a toy, too. Take good care of it.”

She looked in the bag, ignoring the mess of my leftovers. “How cute. Thanks, Dick.”

I glanced over at him and he gave me a shit-eating grin. Dick the dick wasn’t being very nice. He’d make a great bully in my kingdom.

“You must be Mr. Ryan. I’ve heard a lot about you. You’re a regular celebrity at the college. Nice to meet you.” She extended her hand and I shook it. “I hope Detective James has been nice to you.” She leaned closer to me and said in a stage whisper, “He can be such a dick, if you know what I mean.”

James laughed gruffly and pushed me toward an office in the back of the station. “I’m treating him like a regular visiting dignitary, Jane.”

She was wagging her finger at James as he slammed the door behind us. “You know the Captain doesn’t like it when you mistreat our guests.”

“Sit down,” the detective motioned to a chair in front of his desk. At least I assumed it was his desk. It had that trademark appearance of the front seat of his car, though it did smell better. He removed his trench coat and hung it on a nail on the wall and sat down in his seat. It looked a lot more comfortable than mine. That was probably intentional to make the grillee more uncomfortable than the griller. When he leaned back, pressing his hands to his temples as if to quell a massive headache, his sport coat opened enough for me to see his shoulder holster and the gun resting in it.

“I hope I’m not the reason for your headache,” I said innocently, taking my appointed seat.

James said nothing, staring at me with that look I had come to dislike, the one that made me feel like I was being violated.

“I’m just curious, but what made you come looking for me anyway?”

Leaning forward and folding his hands on the desk, James never took his eyes off me. A staring contest ensued. I won. He looked down at a folder on his desk and opened it, pretending to flip through the pages to find the answer to my question. Loser. Score one for the big guy.

“Well?” I persisted, now holding the upper hand.

“The school called us. Said you’d been missing classes and the other crap you kids do and that no one had seen you in over a week. They called your home and your parents said they hadn’t seen you…” He closed the folder and looked up. “…in four years.”

The bell had rung for round two of the staring contest. I was totally unprepared for it and looked down at my boots. Damn. Now it was one to one. “Oh.”

“So, you haven’t been home since you left for school four years ago? Seems kind of odd, doesn’t it? I’m guessing they still pay your bills… still take the heat for your young, impetuous actions.” James had closed the file and was tapping his fingers on his desk.

He was ready for round three. I wasn’t. I didn’t even look up. “Maybe, but I don’t see that my relationship with my family is any of your business.”

“It is when a crime’s involved.”

Now I was ready. I looked up and met his gaze squarely. “What crime? What have I done wrong?”

“Maybe nothing. I don’t know at this point. But when the school called us in on it, it became an official police matter.”

“Well, I’d say case closed then, wouldn’t you? I mean, here I am, alive and well.”

James grunted and reached for his phone. He blinked. I won round three. “Have you been able to roust Doc Miller? Good. How’s the chicken? Great. And what about the dog? Did you get Billy?” There was a pause while James’ face turned red. He was fuming. “I don’t give a shit if he’s not on duty. Tell him to get his ass over here. I need him now. Offer him overtime if you have to.” He slammed the phone down.

“Is there anything I should know?” I asked innocently again while his color returned to its dull white.

“Nothing special, we’re just going to have Doc Miller give you an examination. It’s routine in cases like this… To make sure you’re not suffering any post traumatic injuries.”

“I’m flattered you care.” He didn’t seem to be particularly averse to questions, so I asked another. “Why did you look for me at the bridge? Isn’t that one of the college’s dirty little secrets? How’d you know to look there?”

His laugh was unnerving. Clearly, he held the college in low esteem — another reason to hire him on when I ascended to my rightful throne. “That place has a lot of dirty little secrets, but I know them all. And that trestle is the first place I’d look for trouble. They ought to tear it down and reroute the railroad.”

My thoughts returned to Beth. She must have been frantic when Harry disappeared, but she didn’t show it. She only showed her happiness at Harry’s being back and in one piece. Harry was a lucky guy, damn him. He could have died a hundred times over from the things I had done to him, yet somehow he always pulled through. A charmed life — that’s what Dudley Do-Right led — until this. Could it be that he had finally been bested by a Snidely Whiplash more powerful than me? It didn’t seem possible… all those dastardly deeds I had done to Harry… it just didn’t seem possible. If anyone could have killed him, it was me. It was my right. And I wasn’t averse to picking up the pieces with Nell…

“You look a little old for college.” James pulled out a cigarette, lit it and took a long drag. He exhaled in my general direction.

I remembered the first cigarette I had snuck out in the woods by our house — a Winston. It was Dad’s brand. Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should. It was supposed to make me look cool, but it made me sick to my stomach. “If you want to sear your lungs, why don’t you become a fireman? I hear it takes a lot less time. Or better yet, if you want to poison yourself, I know some things way more effective and painless.”

“Really, Mr. Know-it-all? Like what?”

He was baiting me and I was like a stupid fish on his line biting harder on the hook to try and get away. I really needed to shut up and just get this over with, although my only clear plan at this point was getting out of there and back to the college. I was at a loss as to what to do about finding out any more about Harry. I wasn’t even sure I wanted to know any more. “There’s arsenic in that thing you’re smoking. Why not just drink a cupful and get it over with?”

“Arsenic?” He looked at the cigarette and the lazy whiff of smoke trailing from its end. How could anything so cool looking be so poisonous?

I picked up the pack of Marlboros from his desk and read, "Warning: The Surgeon General Has Determined that Cigarette Smoking is Dangerous to Your Health, and it causes coughing, wheezing, emphysema, bad breath, B.O., and death.”

“You’re full of crap. I feel fine.”

I shrugged. “If you throw a frog into a pan of boiling water it will jump right out. If you throw it into a pan of cold water and then turn on the heat, it will stay in the water as it warms and eventually boil to death.”

“Huh?”

“Haven’t you read any murder mysteries where the poison is administered over time, and the victim slowly dies without even realizing that he’s been poisoned?”

Detective James scowled at his cigarette like a kid who’d been told that his favorite candy was rotting his teeth. He smashed the thing out in his ashtray and got up and left. Through the window I could see him heading toward the restroom. The battlefield conditions had changed and a new plan of attack evolved. I grabbed the file on Harry and opened it.

Stapled to the left side was a brief chronology of the case beginning with the call from the school. Dean Edwards had made the first call to report Harry missing. Williams had taken the call and forwarded it to James for follow-up. Each notation on the list identified the person making the entry. Police were very efficient that way. James called Edwards back the next day — apparently a missing person wasn’t of any particular priority that required an immediate call back — and Edwards was “excited and distraught.” James’ handwriting was terrible — worse than mine. Something about “hasn’t been seen in a week, missed an important event...” That figured. Edwards was more interested in what Harry was doing for the school than in Harry himself. I considered making my own entry, but I was pressed for time. I quickly scanned the rest of the list. “Met with Edwards.” “Met with Hayward.” “Met with Caplets.” James had written “asshole” next to his name. I saw no mention of Mrs. Hoople or Beth — not very thorough police work. I reconsidered my decision to hire James on when I became king, but instead figured I’d just lower his pay. He’d catch on soon enough with a little training from me. There were several motel names listed, each with the word “no” written next to it. The last entry was “Pancake House — see report.”

A yearbook photo of Harry was clipped to the right side of the folder, and the rest of the case file contained loose papers and notes in no particular order. There were a few photos of the footprints on the trestle showing them leading from tie to tie to a point out over the river and all facing in one direction. James was so stupid. Apparently he’d never been an Indian scout who could cover his tracks by retracing them exactly. I used that trick all the time when we played in the woods next to our house. Sucker the enemy into thinking you were hiding in a spot by making obvious footprints leading to it and then retrace and hide in ambush while they walked right into the trap. The area of railroad ties where Harry had stopped was tramped down pretty well, as if he had turned around in a circle, but nothing I could make out indicated he had fallen.

Stapled together were a shot of Harry’s keys and a page of fingerprints. The word “inconclusive” was written at the bottom of the fingerprint page. Then a stapled set of photos of Harry’s dorm room and another fingerprint page. “No match” was written on that page. I guess Harry wasn’t a known criminal in their files.

I found the Pancake House page. Amy Sillborn was the girl’s name. Yes, she remembered Harry. Yes, he was hurt and she helped him out. Yes, she would make a formal statement to the local police. It wasn’t attached. “Call Saint Clairesville police” was written sideways by this. The next part was scribbled quickly and hard to read, but it looked like “He was trying to get home.” Odd.

“Having fun?” Detective James stood over me menacingly, which was apparently the only way he ever presented himself.

I closed the folder and slid it back toward his half of the desk. “Just curious.”

“That’s what gets people in trouble.” James walked around to his side of the desk and picked up the file. After a cursory examination, probably to make sure I hadn’t taken anything, he slid it into his center drawer. I could feel a speech coming on, but a commotion in the outer office caught his attention. I looked over my shoulder. It was a young, punkish looking kid working his way to us, muttering obscenities at no one in particular. James yelled to him through the open doorway, “Get your ass in here, Billy.”

Billy came to the office and leaned on the doorjamb. Both forearms were covered in tattoos. “Do you know what freaking time it is?”

“What do I look like, a clock? I don’t give a crap what time it is. Fingerprint Mr. Ryan here and get a boot cast while you’re at it.” I looked back at James but he was ready for me. “Just trying to nail down some loose ends. You got some objection to that?”

“Do I have a choice? It’s not like I’ve done anything wrong.” Well, that was the end of my little charade. Once they checked my prints against Harry’s the jig was up, but telling him now would not be a good idea. I should probably call him from Pittsburgh. I needed to get home anyway. Mom and Dad were probably worrying about me.

“Well, sonny, you can either do it voluntarily or we can arrest you and do it anyway. One way you walk out of here a free man tonight and I take you home. The other, you spend the night in jail.”

“Arrest me on what?”

“I’ll think of something. And when morning comes and I drop the charge, you’ll have nothing to show for it but black fingertips, a sore back from sleeping on a jailhouse cot, and blisters on your feet from the walk home. So what’s it going to be?”

I didn’t exactly like either idea and it was a long walk back to the college. That’s often how things get decided in my life. Not that one choice is better or right or even noble — it just hurts less. I got up and gestured to Billy.

“This way,” he pointed. This will only take a minute and we can both get out of here.”

I had never been fingerprinted before. I had always been the one doing the fingerprinting. The newness of the experience did little for the humiliation of having a punk kid grab my hand and press my fingers on a stamp pad and then onto a police sheet. I thought about grabbing him by the hair and twisting his silly head back until he cried uncle — just like I had done to many a kid I’d bullied on the Saint Catherine’s playground — but he had backup. And his backup was packing heat. Billy gave me a cleaner to use when he was done and I did my best to get the ink off. For some reason I was thinking of Beth while I was doing that. The ink stains where unmistakable. I would need something to cover them up. I made a note that next time I was unexpectedly dragged in for interrogation and fingerprinting to stop at the Golden Arches and pick up a few blueberry pies for the ride home. But what if McDonald’s only had apple that day?

The boot cast was a fairly innocuous procedure. I handed him my boots. I waited. He came back in a few minutes with my boots. When he was done with me, Billy escorted me back to James’ office, gave James the finger, and left.

“Nice kid,” I said, sitting down again. “Nice tattoos.”

James scowled at me. “You never get tired of being a jackass, do you? It might interest you to know that Billy used to be a dealer. He was fifteen then and he kept those college buddies of yours supplied with whatever they wanted.”

I didn’t react — they weren’t my buddies.

“Only he got a hold of some bad shit and didn’t know it, and he unloaded it at the school to the wrong people. Some jocks. One of them almost died. The others beat the crap out of him and their parents brought in the cops to take care of the rest. Billy took the fall and went to the state pen in Columbus. He got twenty years. He was out in four on good behavior and I gave him a job here. Nobody else would hire him. He’s been clean for five years now. He’s done his time, paid his debt, so shut the hell up.”

So Billy was thirty years old. He looked seventeen, maybe eighteen. I had thought the punk look was self-inflicted, but the piercings, gashes, and burn marks must have come from those years in prison. I could definitely find a place in my army for Billy. “Can I go now?” It was getting late and I was a little worried about Mrs. H, well actually more about Beth, but I was worried. It was an odd feeling — to be worried about someone other than myself.

“I want Doc Miller to check you out, just to be safe.”

I knew what he really meant, but I wasn’t worried. There were no incriminating marks or wounds on me. “Suit yourself. You are taking me back to school, right?”

“You’ve been such a model prisoner.”

“Prisoner? Does that mean I am being charged with something?”

James waved off my concern. “Just a figure of speech. Yeah, I’ll take you back when we’re done here.”

Had he suddenly mellowed or did I miss something? The doctor walked in and my thoughts moved back to my immediate concern of getting back to Gambier.

James came around his desk to greet Doc Miller, an elderly gentleman — that was really the only way to describe him. He reminded me of my granddad. He wore a beat-up sports jacket, dark wrinkled pants, and carried a small black doctor bag. Maybe more like Robert Young as Marcus Welby, M.D. than my granddad — Granddad was always a little soused and this old gent had clear, scrutinizing eyes that were examining me before he ever laid hands on me.

“How’s it going, Marcus?” James asked. “Sorry to drag you over here so late, but we finally found the Ryan kid and need you to check him out for us.”

So I was the Ryan “kid” and James had “found” me, eh?

“It’s no problem at all, Dick. I was done for the day at the office anyway.” The doctor looked at me again. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Ryan. How are you feeling?”

“I’m fine, Doctor Welby, and nice to meet you, too.”

He laughed. “I love that show. Martha and I watch it every week. Robert Young is a heck of an actor, isn’t he?” Doc Miller had already opened his bag and was retrieving some standard doctor things. Nothing to be alarmed about… no needles. I really didn’t like being stuck with a needle. “Why don’t you just sit back down and I’ll see what’s what, okay?”

The exam was about as thorough as the one I had gotten every fall in high school that qualified me to be tortured in phys ed class. Stick out your tongue. Say “ah.” Look left. Look right. Follow my finger. G.P.s were so non-intrusive in their checkups. I wondered if they ever did find anything wrong with anybody. When was the last time someone died from saying “ah” the wrong way?

“Hmmm, this feels a little odd,” he frowned slightly, feeling around my scalp. Parting the hair he fingered an area that was slightly sensitive to his touch. I didn’t even flinch. “See this, Dick? Looks like Mr. Ryan had a nasty bump here and not too long ago either. It’s still a little swollen. The cut’s healed over though, and no sign of infection.”

Funny, I couldn’t remember when I’d gotten any nasty bump, at least not recently. I must have run into something and not even realized it. It couldn’t have been that bad — I hardly felt it.

“When did you get this?” James asked me.

There was no point in making something up. The truth was just as good in this case. “I honestly don’t remember. I didn’t even know I had it until just now. I must have bumped my head on something, but I don’t remember what.” James reminded me of Columbo the way he gestured, scratching his head quizzically. I guessed he was a regular viewer and probably got some of his best techniques from Peter Falk. “Just one more thing…” that was the line Columbo always used. How they managed to find so many stupid criminals for the show was beyond me.

I half expected James to come out with the trademark Columbo line, but instead he said, “Maybe from something like a railroad tie?”

“I think I might have remembered that, detective.”

James just grunted. Doc Miller continued his examination. He spread my hair farther, pulling it tightly, exposing the wound I could not see. I hated when people pulled my hair. Always have. It hurt like hell, but I just gripped the chair arms harder. “You see this, in the slightly inflamed area?” James nodded, but I could tell he didn’t see. If he kept that up he’d be demoted to Yes Man. “This dark spot. It looks like a little splinter that’s under the skin surface, irritating the area around it.” Just like James, I thought — irritating. “I’m guessing that tissue is building around it and eventually it will be either dissolved or encapsulated.”

“Any chance you could pull it out? I’d like Billy to take a look at it. Run some tests.”

Doc Miller’s hand was in and out of his bag before I could say anything. He was pretty deft for an old country gentleman. I felt a slight pinch and the pull of the tweezers on my skin. The sweat beaded up on my hands. I braced myself for the Chinese water torture that I was sure would follow. But just as quickly as I had prepared for the worst, he released my hair and held the tweezers up to the light. “There’s the little guy that was causing all the trouble. Let me set this up on a slide for Billy.”

James and the doctor left me alone. I relaxed my death grip on the chair and wiped the sweat off my hands. Now my head did hurt, those bastards. I stood up and, gathering my dignity, walked out of James’ office. Officer Williams was not at her post, and James and the doctor were in another room. Perfect. I was done here. I zipped up my jacket and left.

It was dead cold out and the possibility of making it back to Gambier alive seemed remote at best. I needed a Plan B. I’d missed my dinner with Beth and Ransom and it wasn’t all that late but Mount Vernon was filled with a quiet punctuated only by my footsteps crunching on the packed snow. I got to the corner of the town square and began to reconsider my decision to leave the police station. Could I take a few more hours of James’ questioning? The choice was between that and a long frigid walk back to the college. A bench at the corner had been swept clean and invited me to sit and think this through. Why not? I wasn’t going anywhere. The seat was cold. I sat on my hands. My hands became cold. Could Plan B be go back to the police station?

I barely noticed a car quietly pull up to the sidewalk in front of the bench. I looked up when I heard the click of the passenger side door opening. The interior light came on and a woman in her thirties smiled, “Can you get in before we both freeze to death, please?”

So Plan B had become accepting a ride from a woman who I didn’t recognize, in a car going who-knows-where, on a night that was freezing? I hopped over a piled of snow and got into the car. “Thanks. It is pretty cold out.”

She cranked up the heater and drove off as if she knew where I wanted to go without ever asking. I didn’t really care, as long as it was anywhere but here, but I did feel some obligation to determine exactly where that would be. “So, where are we going?”

The woman glanced up briefly before her eyes returned to the road. We seemed to be heading away from Gambier, but I couldn’t be sure. It was all residential and all looked the same to me. “That depends. I can drop you at the bench, or if you’d prefer, I can drop you at your dorm.”

“Do I know you?” I really needed to get rid of that sign on my back that said: “This is Harry Ryan.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so, although you do look familiar for some reason.”

“If you don’t mind me asking, why did you pick me up?”

“You are a Kenyon student, aren’t you? And you were sitting on the bench, weren’t you?”

“The bench. Of course.” What a loon. Of course, I was sitting on the bench. Why didn’t I think of that?

“Don’t they tell you kids about the bench anymore?” She laughed, a nice laugh, not like Detective James’ laugh where you expected a fist in the face to follow close on its heels.

“I must have cut that class. What are you talking about?”

“You’re a silly one. You really don’t know the tradition of the bench?”

“The one where Philander Chase climbed a hill and said a prayer and founded Kenyon College there and then put a bench down to mark the spot?”

She nearly swerved off the road laughing so hard. “Stop teasing me. The bench. There’s one in Gambier and one here in Mount Vernon. You know, whenever a student sits on the bench it means they are looking for a ride? That bench?”

“Oh…” I feigned remembering. “That bench. Sorry, I did hear something about that but I’ve never bothered with it. I just stay in Gambier.” So the lazy rich kids didn’t even have to stick out their thumbs when they hitchhiked. They just planted their fat asses down on a bench and waited for their chauffeur to roll by. Nice. Maybe Harry had hitched a ride from a townie who resented him enough to drop him in the river.

We had reached the end of the residential section and turned onto a two-lane road heading out of town. “I’m Karen Edwards,” she said, “Dean Edwards’ wife.”

She had a lot more hair than him and was much easier to look at. I hadn’t noticed her photo on his desk. That, in itself, was suspicious. And what was Soup’s wife doing in Mount Vernon alone, at night? The possibilities all seemed good from my point of view. “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Edwards. I’m Ryan.”

“Oh, Harry Ryan. I knew I recognized you from somewhere. Don’t you remember? We met at a luncheon last year?”

“Sorry, I don’t, but I do appreciate your stopping to give me a ride.”

She laughed again. I liked that, but it would have no effect on the Ransom Hall Plan. “It’s so refreshing not to be bullshitted to because of who my husband is. I was at that event, but we never actually met. So nice to really meet you, Mr. Ryan.”

“You, too.” Mrs. Edwards was only making it harder for me to feel good about destroying her husband’s office. She was cool; he was definitely not, thus proving the theory that opposites attract. Too bad.

“So what were you doing on the bench if not looking for a ride?”

“I was just… thinking.”

As we left Mount Vernon and its dull incandescence behind, the uncivilized lands became lit by the eerie glow of moonlight reflecting off the snow. The wind had picked up and the fields of wild grass moved noiselessly, giving the impression of a multitude running across them. Memories of Saturday afternoons spent watching B Horror movies hosted by Chilly Billy Cardille suddenly filled me with an uncharacteristic sense of dread. In the anticipation of some unnamed, horrible event happening, I began to sweat. Stupid. This was stupid. I used to laugh at those inane movies. To me, it was funny to see a zombie chew its own arm off and try to attack people with it, and absolutely hilarious to watch Bela Lugosi pretend to be a scary Dracula who “vanted to suck my blood.” Unable to move or bend my mind from its course through these memories, I watched as the night around the car melted and the fields filled with zombies carrying their arms, aimlessly walking around, swinging at everything, or nothing, like a field of tall grass blowing in the wind. The scene shifted and I saw Harry standing among them. I tried to look away and break the spell that held me staring at this nightmare out the car window. I was gripping my legs so tightly they hurt. I wanted to chew my own arm off to make it stop. The zombies converged on Harry, arms raised to strike. I wanted to yell, “Stop the car!”

“Are you okay?” I felt warmth spreading through my left arm and my grip relaxed. I turned my head toward Mrs. Edwards and the night faded to a blackness held at bay only by the dashboard lights. “Are you going to be sick? Should I stop the car?” She touched my forehead. “You’re as cold as ice.”

Finally able to breathe again, I replied, “I’m okay. I just felt sick there for a second. Probably that junk food I had earlier.” The field was empty and moonlit. The zombies had taken Harry.

She saw me look out the window again. “Is there something out there?”

“No. It’s nothing.” I looked back at her and tried to smile. I didn’t have a very nice smile — probably from lack of practice. I felt like I was coming unglued. I felt drugged. It must have been that damned Billy. Somehow he must have slipped me something. James probably told him to: a truth serum, something like that. They would indeed both be valuable additions to my empire, but I would need someone I could trust to watch them at all times.

“Maybe I should take you to the infirmary.”

We were climbing a hill now and passed a sign for the Alumni House. We were almost back to Gambier. Things looked so much different in the dark — this was the same road I had taken a few days ago to get to Gambier. “No, I’ll be okay, thanks; if you could just drop me in town that would be great.”

She stopped the car in front of Farr Hall. “How’s this?”

I was never going back into Farr. For all I knew, James was waiting for me in there, though I saw no sign of the police car. “This is great. I really appreciate the ride. I was beginning to wonder if anyone would come along there. And it was nice meeting you.”

She smiled as I got out of the car. “Maybe we’ll meet again sometime, Mr. Ryan.”

I watched Mrs. Edwards drive away. There was no way we’d ever meet again. I was leaving. Now. I just needed to pick up my things from Mrs. Hoople’s house. It was time to go home and let the family know of Harry’s fate. By the time I got to Pittsburgh, I would have that story all worked out, using a fine mix of fact and fiction as only I can do. My only regrets being leaving my Ransom Hall redecoration plan unfulfilled… and Beth.

Chapter 12

I took the alley beside Farr Hall to the parking lot and worked my way back to Wiggin Street and Mrs. Hoople’s backyard. There was a light on in the kitchen, but the only sign of life was the cat sitting in the window. It was looking at me, passively still, expressionless and serene. At this point, a lesser person would have envied that cat, oblivious to the troubles of man, concerned only with which of them would next serve its needs. But not me — I didn’t like sitting around doing nothing, always at the mercy of a cruel taskmaster. I controlled my own destiny. And I didn’t particularly like cats. Then why was I running? At least I felt like I was running. The battle had turned against me and I had no plans at this point other than retreat. Not the most honorable of resolutions, but I would live to fight another day. Wasn’t that all that mattered?

I leapt the fence and went in the back door. The house was quiet except for the ticking of the hall clock. The cat followed my movements but remained on the window ledge, knowing that there was nothing to be gained by sucking up to me. Too bad I really had no use for them. Cats are perceptive and would make a nice alternative to surveillance cameras if only they could translate from cat to human. There was a note on the table. Half expecting it to be from Beth, I opened it.

I put some leftovers in the fridge for you if you’re hungry. I wasn’t feeling well, so I went to bed early. Beth was worried when you did not make it back for supper, but I assured her that something quite important must have come up. She went to the library to study.

I do hope you are all right. You haven’t been yourself lately.

Amanda

So much for Grabber’s relaying my message. I went upstairs and looked in on Mrs. Hoople. She was asleep. There was a glass of water and an aspirin bottle on the nightstand and an empty pot on the floor. Old-fashioned medicine — drink liquids, take aspirin, and throw up as needed. Mom was like that, too…

“Harry needs to be left alone, Tom. He’s sick and has to rest.”

I was only eight and didn’t yet understand the concept. “Doesn’t he need more happy medicine?” Happy medicine, I later found out was Kool-Aid laced with some liquid aspirin that would have been otherwise odious-tasting.

“No, he’ll be fine. You needn’t worry.”

“I’m not worried, Mommy, I just need Harry to test out my new cannon.” Which, when translated, meant I was going to use Harry as the target…

I closed the door softly and went to Harry’s room. It didn’t look any different or disturbed in any way so I guessed neither Beth nor the police had been there. Gathering up my belongings I also took a sketchbook, the photo of Harry and Beth, and the drawing tacked to the wall. I remembered the book in my coat pocket, pulled it out and stuffed it into my bag. A King in a Court of Fools by H. Ryan. The family would want to see that. It would all be part of the story I would tell to bring closure to the loss of Harry.

Feeling suddenly sick, I sat on the edge of the bed. Something was gripping at my gut, twisting my insides, something that would not let go. It must have been what little I ate of the fast food coming back on me. One last look at Harry’s room and I headed downstairs and back to the kitchen. Mrs. Hoople had left a plate of cold chicken in the fridge. I looked at the chicken, then down at the cat staring up at me blankly. We shared one final meal before I closed the front door and left the Hoople house and Gambier behind forever.

I paused at the gate. Wiggin Street was empty and quiet, and all I could hear was my own breathing. Detective James was probably in bed having dreams about tracking me down and cuffing me. That’s what I would have been dreaming of had I been him. Across Wiggin, the campus was a serene and stately bastion, a fortress deep and mighty that had withstood the ravages of time for hundreds of years.

It was time to change all that before I left. With little forethought, I crossed Wiggin and took Middle Path toward Ransom Hall. The entirety of my plan was to break into Ransom, trash the place, get my car, and leave Ohioland in my dust. Stealth and deception were not an issue at this point. My only regret was that I wouldn’t be around to see the reaction. Maybe that story would make the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Though it was late, students were still about, but they didn’t even show up on my threat assessment radar. As I passed them, they were quickly scanned and determined to be either a) stoned, b) drunk, c) afraid of the dark and anything that was moving, or d) simply too unaware to have a clue what I was up to. I recognized one of the girls from the cafeteria line but she was so busy taking evasive action that our eyes never met. Beth stood at the verges of my consciousness trying to hug me.

Damn it. The trashing would have to wait. My convoy of one changed direction and set a course for the library. I had to say “good-bye” to someone I didn’t even know. How stupid was that?

The student at the library front desk was reading and looked up when I came in. He returned my smile and pointed upstairs, “She’s in the carrel area.”

One more person who knew Harry, and one more person to be forgotten when I dusted off the dirt of that one-horse town; I was looking forward to going back to Pittsburgh and not being mistaken for my idiot brother who had somehow gotten himself killed and misplaced. Even from his stupid grave he was taunting me with the fact that he had done this, and he had succeeded at that, and everyone knew him and the stupid details of his stupid life. But the result is always in the bottom line, isn’t it? And the bottom line was that I was still alive and he was dead and therefore I had won. The epic battle for supremacy in the Ryan family, the battle I had waged for years against him, from the day he was born, was finally over. I had won.

Then why didn’t I feel like I had won?

Not being entirely sure where the carrel area was or even what a carrel was, I stopped at the top of the stairs. The art exhibit was complete, and Harry’s last work was in place. My hatred for the brother who had intruded on my life by being born my unconquerable rival was becoming a tangible entity, an entity that wanted to trash this place and then trash Ransom Hall and anything else that got in my way. Trash everything! He had some nerve succeeding at so many things behind my back! How dare he sneak off for four years and accomplish so much without me around to destroy his dreams and dash his hopes! The story I would tell the family had suddenly changed in my mind. No longer would I make them proud of Harry and his accomplishments. Now the tale would be one of the sordid behavior that had ultimately led to a suicide on a lonely bridge over the Kokosing River. I reached for the first painting that I was going to chuck over the railing. Someone touched my arm.

“Harry.” A soft, pleading voice… It was Beth. As quickly as the tide of my anger had risen, it ebbed in her embrace. “I was so worried about you. I thought that something had happened to you. I called the infirmary. I called the Mount Vernon hospital. I even called the police…”

“The police? What did they tell you?”

She looked up at me. There were no accusations in her eyes, no anger at my leaving her high and dry, nothing but concern… and if I didn’t know better… I squashed that thought like the thousands of tent caterpillars we had destroyed one year when we were kids. They had attacked and infested the neighborhood and it was our sworn duty as soldiers of the United States of Tom to destroy them. It was one of Sergeant Saunders’ first campaigns. The lone traitor had been Harry. He thought that their eating everything in their path must have a hidden purpose, that it was wrong to slaughter them without knowing what that purpose was, that all life was sacred or some such crappola. I was more interested in the cool, green stains they made when we smashed them on the brick walls of our house.

“Harry?”

I had to look away. Looking into her eyes just then would have been admitting defeat. My jaw tensed. “I wish you wouldn’t call me that.”

“What?”

I pulled away and steeled myself. She wasn’t prepared for this. I wasn’t prepared for this. I didn’t care. I needed to go, to run away from this Bizarro World that Harry had created and dragged me into by dying, this world that mocked me by its very existence. “I’m not who you think I am. I’m a bad person, Beth. And I’m leaving tonight… for good.”

“They told me you might have done something wrong, but they wouldn’t tell me what.” She was trying hard not to cry.

I was too. I took her in my arms. It felt right. It felt… normal, whatever that was. It felt like a place I had been before, many times, though I had never really been there. “I’m sorry. Maybe if things had been different, maybe if I had been different…” Maybe if you hadn’t been Harry’s girl. Damn that stupid code of honor.

“Whatever you’ve done, you must have done for a good reason. I believe in you. You’re a good person and I love you.”

I’d never held or kissed a girl like Beth before. It was… nice. And “nice” was something I didn’t get a lot of in my line of work. There was Bonnie Shoedel but that was sixth grade, so that didn’t count. And there was that one girl in high school, but that was pretty much her liking me and me only liking her because it made Frankie Marx furious. And Kelly Erickson? She was probably the closest I’d ever come to liking a girl, but it just didn’t work out. The others? Forget them. They were all too needy: I need this. I need that. I want this. I want that. But Beth was different. I could tell. All she needed, all she wanted, was me. My train had been derailed and there was no stopping the crash.

“I love you too, Beth.” Why the hell did I say that? It had come out as easily as “Go jump in a lake” or “Bite me.” Those things I said easily because I meant them. Did I mean this, too?

She smiled. “That’s the first time you’ve ever said that like that to me. I think I like it.”

That seemed odd for someone who I thought had been so close to Harry. Maybe I had jumped to the wrong conclusion. Maybe there was really nothing “serious” between them. Maybe they really were just friends. Maybe the code didn’t apply in this case. That was the only explanation for why she didn’t realize at once that I was not Harry. How could you possibly be so close to someone and not know when you were kissing their brother? What was I saying? They were engaged and I was an idiot.

We could run away together. Forget Pittsburgh. We could head north — maybe Canada. I’d never been there and it was supposed to be nice, well, except for the polar bears and the funny way people say “eh” after everything. And I could do my job from anywhere. That was the beauty of it. Game design didn’t require being in any particular office. You just had to have an office space somewhere to work in, just one little room really. All I needed to do was send my new address to the company. The perfect plan.

Beth was reading my mind, “You can’t run away from whatever this is. It will follow you wherever you go. But I can help. We’ll face it together.”

So much for that plan… And who appointed her General George S. Patton? “You don’t understand.”

“Then make me understand.”

She wasn’t going to make this easy. She wasn’t just going to run away with me. It would take logic, and that wasn’t my strong suit. “It’s not that simple.”

“Use little words.”

The hell with it… My plans of lies and scheming and deception hadn’t done a damn thing to help me through this. That left only one thing — the truth. “I’m not Harry. Harry’s dead. I’m his older brother, Tom.”

“We know that.” The unmistakable, battering ram voice of Detective James crashed through the awkwardness like a SWAT team breaking down the door on a drug bust. And he wasn’t alone. There was an armed officer with him. “We just don’t know why you killed him.” I instinctively made a move toward the steps. James grabbed my arm. “I wouldn’t do that, if I were you, Ryan. This fellow with the .38 has a friend waiting downstairs. Cuff him, Bob.”

The cop with James was about my age but looked like he worked out a lot. That wouldn’t have helped him against me had I decided to resist. I fought dirty, and that always won out over strength. But, I hadn’t really done anything wrong (at least not yet) so kneeing him in the crotch would not have been a good move. I was pretty sure assaulting a police officer was a still crime, even in Ohioland. I let him put the handcuffs on me. The bumpkin locked my hands together in front of me — a classic movie mistake.

Beth wouldn’t let go of me and James had to pull her off. She was in shock. I hated him for that.

The bastard pushed her aside and said in a monotone voice to me, “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to have an attorney present during questioning. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you.”

I fully expected her to turn and run and that would be the end of it. I know I would have. But she didn’t. So I kept going, ignoring James, speaking only to her. “We got the word on Christmas that Harry had died here at school, so I was appointed by my wonderful family to come here to find out what happened. Harry must have had an accident or something on the trestle bridge. I think he fell into the river and drowned, but they can’t find his body. That’s all I can figure… I don’t know.” My voice left me, choked off by a sudden hatred of myself. I was such a stupid idiot. Everything I had ever done was a contrived campaign of lunacy based on a character in a TV show. Everything I did, everything I was, was fake, my whole life. I’d never been particularly sorry for it until now.

“Do you understand each of these rights as explained to you, Mr. Ryan?”

I really wanted to smash his face in. “Yes, I understand them, you prick, and I don’t care about them.”

But I also wanted Beth to understand, to forgive. “I didn’t want to hurt you. It was just that they all thought I was Harry so I figured I’d play along for the heck of it and maybe find out more about what happened. I never expected him to have a girl. And I never expected you to think I was him. I… I never expected you…”

“Do you waive these rights, Mr. Ryan?” James was like a pit bull with its jaws locked on my leg.

Beth rose above his droning legalities. “But you are Harry.”

She said it with such force, such conviction. How could she be so wrong? Why couldn’t she see that I was a different person? I wanted to scream my name out so everyone would know. I took my anger out on James. “Of course I waive them, you idiot. I didn’t do anything.” Then, reaching out to Beth, “I’m not Harry. I wish I were, but I’m not.”

She pushed James out of her way and wrapped her arms around me tightly. She was crying and I tried to comfort her. I saw James wave off the cop before he could step in and separate us. Maybe he wasn’t such a dick after all. No, he was a dick. He was just taking advantage of my waiving my rights to get all the admissible evidence he could. He was observing and taking notes.

He looked up from his scribbling and asked, “So why were you there that night?”

“I wasn’t. I already told you that.”

“No, what you told us was that you didn’t remember. Now that we have physical evidence tying you to the scene, maybe your memory will work a little better.”

“What evidence?”

“Let’s see…” I knew he was just looking at his notes for effect. He knew damn well what he wanted to say. “We have a match on your boot print and the prints found at the scene. We have the sliver of wood taken from your head. According to the lab, it contained creosote, which is commonly used to treat railroad ties. We have your fingerprints in his dorm room. There’s more,” he said perfunctorily, flipping the notebook closed. “But I don’t want to bore you with details.”

Beth’s grip on me tightened. “How can you think someone was killed if you don’t have a body? This is insane. This is Harry, right here.” For the first time in my life I had someone who was on my side and fighting for me. It was a good feeling, like beating Sam in chess without cheating more than once or sticking up for Kate when bullies roughed her up on the playground without having to pay them off. Beth was defending me against this bully and doing a pretty good job. Too bad she’d picked the wrong side.

“I don’t know what planet you came from, or what you’ve been drinking, kid, but the man you’re defending isn’t Harry Ryan. Of that, I am certain. And we’ll find the body, all right,” James smiled. “It’s just a matter of time before it shows up somewhere.”

“So leave us alone and come back when you find it. We’ll be right here,” she snapped. “Harry and I aren’t going anywhere.”

“I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way, miss. We could hold your buddy here for forty-eight hours on suspicion without even charging him. We’ve got enough evidence to justify that to any judge. A little warning to you — keep this up and we might decide to hold you, too.”

Beth was crying. I wrapped my handcuffed arms around her and held her. “Beth,” I whispered. She looked up at me. “I’m not Harry. Really. I’m so sorry.”

Our eyes met. “I don’t believe that. Maybe you’re sick or have amnesia or something. Maybe you got hurt. I don’t know. I don’t understand this, but I don’t care and I’ll never leave you.”

Washing over me was the same feeling, only a million times stronger, that I’d had in sixth grade at my first party with girls present when Bonnie Shoedel had kissed me on the cheek and told me she loved me. We had been awkwardly slow dancing to Stay by the Four Seasons and when the music stopped there was electricity sparking between us that I’d never experienced before. It was amazing. But as powerful and electrifying as that feeling was, it was abruptly shut off when she cut the juice the next day, pulling the plug and informing me that girls didn’t like playing army in the woods. Girls did more refined things like play house, go out on dates, and go steady — in other words, nothing that was fun. I was crushed and it took me hours to get over it. But I knew my two-day-old relationship with Beth wouldn’t end that way. And it wasn’t because I didn’t play army in the woods anymore. It was because I would do anything to have this relationship not end.

“Show her your driver’s license, sport,” James said. “I’m assuming you do have one, after all it would be a crime to have driven that Pontiac here from Pittsburgh without a valid license, wouldn’t it?”

He’d found my car and I was now without a getaway vehicle.

“That’s right. It was just a matter of asking a few questions around town. It’s not a very big place, you know. What? No more wiseass remarks?”

Sarge hadn’t trusted the man from the beginning. He didn’t look like an American. He didn’t act like an American. But nobody had believed him when he said the guy was a Nazi spy, not even Lieutenant Hanley. But his plan would flush him out…

“Private! Get over here!” We were crouched down, hidden by the garbage cans in the alley behind the Mead Drugstore. The squad was in position, except for Harry, who was balking at the idea. I grabbed Tom Braithwaite and hissed in his ear, “Get him over here now, before he gives our position away. Drag him if you have to.”

Braithwaite scurried over to get Harry as Old Mr. Kleiner came out the back door of the store with a wastebasket in his hand. The plan had been simple. Mr. Kleiner trusted Harry and liked Harry. Harry had helped him many times and had never asked for money. Old Man Kleiner would certainly spill the beans to him. So Harry’s orders were as simple as the plan — ask him if he was a Nazi general. And once he confessed, it was all over. But…

“My stupid brother didn’t take orders too well.”

“Come again, sport? I didn’t catch that last part.” Detective James was squinting oddly, scribbling like mad.

Beth was looking up at me like I was crazy. I started to cry just like the time I had taken a spill from my bike. I had held it in all the way home and it wasn’t until I saw Mom that it all came out. “He’s gone, Beth. He’s really gone. All I ever did was bully him and pick on him and he never did a thing to stop me. He never ratted on me and never fought back. He was such a good kid and all my life I hated him for that. I hated that he came between my parents and me. I could have killed him for that…” I paused, looking squarely at James. “But I didn’t.”

James was unflinching. “Motive has one ‘t,’ doesn’t it?”

I went for him, but Beth was like an anchor holding me back. Good thing — James would probably have beaten the crap out of me. “You stupid, pompous ass… Harry did more in his four years here than you’ve done in your entire petty little lifetime. You could take notes forever and not realize what I have in two days. Harry was special. His soul was pure, not like yours, you black-hearted bastard. So why don’t you just shut the hell up, leave us alone, and find out what really happened to him?”

“Harry.” Beth’s voice was a soft wind, cooling the inferno engulfing the detective and myself. “Maybe you need to see a doctor…”

I shook my head angrily. “There’s nothing wrong with me. You don’t understand. I’d give anything to be able to do one good thing for Harry. One decent, good thing… But it’s too late…”

Beth pleaded with James, “Can we have a moment alone?” James scowled, but she persisted, “He’s not going anywhere. Please…”

James motioned toward an aisle between the stacks heading toward a row of wooden doors along the wall. Beth led me in silence to the end of the aisle and stood in front of the doors, in full view of James and his ever-present scowl, but out of earshot.

“Harry, I believe in you, but maybe we should go with him quietly. Maybe that’s the only way to get this straightened out once and for all.” She thought I was nuts. It was pretty obvious. I didn’t blame her.

The doors were packed tightly together and probably had little rooms no bigger than those sound-proof booths you see on quiz shows behind them. Each door was numbered. We stood in front of A-3.

“What are these?” I asked.

Beth didn’t seem to understand the question and replied with her own, “Carrels?” I felt she was humoring me, but for some reason it didn’t annoy me, when she continued, “Study nooks? Certain students get them so they can work in private.” She pointed. “Yours is right there. Don’t you remember? You got it junior year.” She was pointing at a door with A-2 on it.

“My keys,” I whispered. “Get my keys out of my pocket, please. The left one... And don’t let him see you.”

Beth slid her hand into my pocket and retrieved Harry’s keys.

“Show me the little one.” A-2 was stamped on it. “When I give you the nod, move to the door, open it and we’ll hide in there.”

The final key had a meaning now and the tide of the battle was changing. I had reinforcements and a place to retreat, thanks to Harry — the wine cellar in the old bombed out French chateau, the place unknown to the Nazis and discovered by chance by Sarge and Caje when they were alone and on the run. Caje spoke French, he was French, and his quick exchange with the young French girl from the Resistance had led them here to safety.

“Harry,” she protested.

“Please, just do it.”

The Nazi patrol dropped their guard — James turned to speak to the officer who was obscured by the shelves. I nodded, and Beth and I stepped out of his line of sight and she opened the door silently. I followed her into the darkened carrel and closed the door behind us. “Just wait a bit.” I wanted him to think we had snuck off to another stair or another door. I didn’t know the library layout at all, but I assumed that there had to be other ways in and out. Basic fire code regulations would require it.

I stopped breathing. I couldn’t hear Beth breathing either, but her hand was trembling in mine. She was afraid but controlling it. If a girl could do it, so could I. The slats in the door let enough light in that my eyes adjusted to the dark and I could see Beth’s face. She was looking to me for strength, for leadership. Some things never change. I was always the leader, the born leader. I was always the one with the plan and others knew it — or I would make sure they knew it, the hard way.

James’ yell was a grenade going off outside the carrel door, “Son of a… Bob! Get your ass over here. That little shit and his chippy took off…”

Most of the games of “sniper” I’d won as a kid were won by just sitting still and waiting for some unsuspecting dope to walk into my trap. The trick was to wait long enough and be quiet enough that the pursuer would no longer think it possible that you were still around. It was true when we played “army” in the woods and it was true in life. No matter what the age, everyone always assumes that they have exactly as much patience as you and when theirs runs out, yours must have also run out.

“You and Stan block the exits and call for backup. He won’t get far.” Officer Bob ran off and all became still. I knew James was out there waiting. I could smell the big oaf of a detective standing quietly outside, trying to be quiet. His labored breath and muffled cough would have given him away under any battle scenario and his cologne and B.O. were unmistakable. Neither Beth nor I breathed. He would certainly have heard us, being that close by. I can hold my breath for a minute, maybe a minute and a half. I wasn’t sure about Beth. But it didn’t matter. James’ patience ran out long before our breath and his clodding footsteps receded into the quiet of the library.

As my eyes were adjusting to the half-lit Spartan cubicle I made out a desk with chair and desk lamp. It seemed stuffy in there, probably because the study nook was enclosed with so little ventilation — one vent too high up to help with circulation and too small to escape through. Now that was bad design at its finest. I had had a hard enough time in college staying awake to study — this place would have definitely put me to sleep pretty quickly. The desk was covered with papers and junk. Out of curiosity, I turned on the light. The papers on the desk were taped-together colored drawings on hexagonally lined paper, drawings that were obviously abstractions of hills and woods and rivers. It was a game board. The bottom rightmost paper had the words “Tactics 3” stenciled on it and underneath, a copyright and a name. Stacks of tiny pieces of square cardboard with letters and numbers written on them and drawn symbols of tanks and rifles lined the edges of the game board. Some were green, some blue — two armies.

“What is this, Harry? Were you working on an art project? It looks like a game.”

I knew what it was but what I couldn’t understand was why it was here. It didn’t belong in this place or anywhere near this place. Something was terribly wrong with reality, my reality specifically. The old French farmhouse we were hiding in was being shelled relentlessly by the Nazis, and both the sergeant and the lieutenant were powerless to stop it. There was no air or artillery support this far behind enemy lines — we were on our own. “We have to get out of this place, out into the open where we won’t be a target.”

Beth put down the stack of game markers she had been examining. “Do you think it’s safe yet?”

“We have no choice. The Nazis are moving up more eighty-eights. Caje saw them on recon. We either get out or we’re all dead.”

“Harry?”

The new recruit sounded like a scared girl. The other guys in the squad had made fun of him, calling him G.I. Jane, and all along I stuck up for him, but they were right. He sounded like a damn girl and I didn’t need that right now. I needed my men to rally behind me while we got out of that Nazi death trap. “Just shut up and follow orders. We go single file. I’ll take point. And if you jeopardize this mission, I’ll feed you to the Krauts myself.”

The front door of the farmhouse opened with a creak. I had waited for a lull in the shelling and realized too late what a mistake that was. The cover of the noise and confusion of the shelling would have been far better than the semi-darkness of the moonlit night. I didn’t usually make such rookie mistakes. I was Sergeant Saunders and this was Combat! I lived for this each week at 7:00 p.m. and in daily reruns on the independent channel. This was my job, my life, and mine to give, if necessary, to protect America and the people I loved. To protect Mom and Dad and Harry, especially Harry. God bless Harry and make him the best priest ever. And the residuals from the reruns — that was where the real money was.

What was wrong with me? Nothing was making any sense. My feet were moving, but I couldn’t move. It was like the recurring dream where you are running from someone and never getting away. I looked back at G.I. Jane but it was Beth standing there in horror, but not in horror of me. My eyes followed her gaze and met the business end of Detective James’ fist.

Chapter 13

When I awoke, my jaw screaming at me, I realized that Betty Grable was gone. My service revolver and I never parted company and I felt naked without her. I sat up slowly and looked around. I was alone in a jail cell of some sort with one barred window, one metal door with a slot in its center for serving prisoners food, one cot, one toilet, and one short table with a basin of water on it — fairly standard issue Nazi prison fare from what I had heard. All that made sense to me, but not what I was wearing. I was out of uniform. While I was unconscious, the Nazis had taken my khakis and dressed me in civvies. Now, I was no more than a spy, a uniformless piece of crap that they could stand against a wall and shoot like a dog. Was this the way the enemy really operated? For the first time since we’d hit the Normandy beaches, I was scared. I was glad my men weren’t around to see it.

The men... I wondered if they had made it out or had died in that nameless farmhouse, or if they were being held like me. Probably not that — there was no tactical advantage in holding a front line infantryman captive, maybe a sergeant, but not them. They were a burden because they required valuable resources to guard, rations to keep alive, and never knew anything important beyond their own mission objective anyway. If they were being held, it was just a matter of time before some Nazi signed their execution orders. And I wasn’t worth much more than them. I knew the “why” of the mission but little more than that. Why the hell had they even bothered to move me to a prison camp? Fifteen minutes of beating me to see if I talked would have been enough.

Maybe they had already tried that — my head was pounding. My jaw was probably broken. I lay back down on the cot and closed my eyes. I couldn’t sleep, but I felt tired and woozy. They must have drugged me. Had they been interrogating me? I couldn’t remember clearly. I seemed to remember someone asking me questions. The annoying glare from the bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling was giving me a headache. Sleep deprivation — a standard technique for breaking a prisoner.

I heard heavy footsteps in the hall — probably a wake-up call, the bastards. They’d get nothing out of me.

“Open the door.” The gruff voice was speaking in German. I didn’t speak German and almost regretted not paying attention during those “Everything you need to know in German” briefings before D-Day. But then, Betty knew enough German to get a Nazi to either put his hands up or lie down dead. Too bad she wasn’t with me. I sat up.

“But the captain said…”

“Just open the damn door.”

The door opened slowly and then slammed hard against the wall as a supersized Kraut strode in, pushing past a soldier dressed in military police-like blue. I wouldn’t have ordered him in my Happy Meal. He looked way overweight and out of shape for an elite Aryan. Dressed in plain clothes, acting like he owned the place, knowing that he could have anyone killed who stood in his way — oh yeah, he was Gestapo, no doubt about it. The timid sheep that was following him retreated when Gestapo man stopped him cold with a simple raised hand. This was someone to be afraid of.

The best defense is a good offense, right? “Vic Morrow. Sergeant, U.S. Army. Serial number 37337565. That’s all I’m required to say, and that’s all you’re going to get out of me.”

The men would have been proud of me. Maybe they were all looking down on me from heaven. I’d probably be joining them soon. I wasn’t looking forward to that. I’d take a big ration of crap for leading them into that Nazi trap.

The German scowled and came close enough for me to smell him. Stale tobacco… I could have rolled him up in cigarette paper and smoked him. I really needed a cigarette. I’d lost my last pack in a foxhole when a grenade nearly took my head off. He sneered something in German. But I could only make out the first part of it. If it wasn’t ach tung or sprechen Sie Englisch, forget it. “Vic Morrow? Wasn’t that the guy who was in Combat!?”

“Vic Morrow? I said, my name is Sergeant Chip Saunders.” Vic Morrow — that name sounded familiar. I felt confused and disoriented. They must have drugged me. It was hard to think.

“Look punk, I don’t know what you’re trying to prove, but you are in a world of trouble. Why don’t you make it easy on everybody and just come clean? Or, I could beat it out of you. That would be fun, too.”

I had no clue what he was saying, but I got the message. If I didn’t give him something, my time was up. Problem was — I had nothing. I could make up something about a mission, but truthfully, after months in the French countryside, I had no idea what we were trying to accomplish out there. War was nothing more than sending a bunch of guys into an unfamiliar place to figure out the best way to kill another bunch of guys they didn’t even know. The more you killed, the more medals you got. The more medals you got, the more stripes you got. The more stripes you got, the better the odds you would be the next one killed by the enemy. Some reward system — it was kind of like Father Harkins’ explanation as to why the good suffer more than the bad. The better you are, the greater your reward will be if you make it to heaven. The greater the potential reward, the harder the devil works to make you suffer. The more you suffer, the more likely it is you will just give up and accept hell as your destiny. Why would anyone put themselves in that position? Why would anyone be stupid enough to try and be good, or dumb enough to join the army?

I could feel myself slipping — must have been the drugs…

The Gestapo bastard shoved me awake. “Hey! I’m talking to you.” He was speaking English now — too bad — I was thinking of calling him a stinking little dipstick and laughing at him because he wouldn’t have had a clue what I was saying. Maybe I should go with Pig Latin.

“Ou-ya are-ya at-fay azi-nay aggot-fay.”

For all that apparent flab, the Nazi picked me up like I was made of cardboard and moved so quickly that I was only barely aware of his fist plowing into my stomach and knocking me unconscious.

When I awoke, I knew I was not alone. It was that feeling of knowing that someone was staring at me that gave it away. I’d known it in the field and I’d known it at home — from the stare of Nazis waiting in ambush in the brush to brothers hiding in the bushes when I was “it.” I kept my eyes closed. It was probably not a Nazi, though. The delicate smell of a scented soap told me it was a woman and I couldn’t remember ever having seen a woman Gestapo agent. Maybe they’d captured one of the French girls we’d found in the farmhouse and thrown her in with me. Why waste a perfectly good cell on a woman? Especially when she was going to be shot along with the dumb sergeant who had gotten himself caught.

“Are you French?” I whispered, not moving. It hurt to talk. My chest was aching. When she didn’t answer, I repeated in French, “Et-vous Francaise?” Her breathing was shallow and regular. I opened my eyes. Sitting asleep on a chair next to my cot was a woman dressed in civvies — light brown hair, tanned skin, a few inches shorter than me. Well, she could have been awake and just faking it. I was fully justified in being wary under the circumstances. The guys would back me up on that.

“Hey!” I tried to get her attention.

She stirred and sat up straight. When her blue eyes focused and her awareness included me, she smiled. “Hi. I fell asleep. How are you doing?”

My French wasn’t much better than my German. I didn’t understand a word she said. “Do you speak English?” I asked slowly.

Cocking her head and giving me an “Are you nuts?” look, she just nodded.

“Good. Look, I’m Saunders, Sergeant Chip Saunders. I’m not sure why they tossed you in here with me, but just try and stay calm. I’ll get us out of here somehow. You can count on it. I just need to get my strength back.” I nearly fell trying to get up, but she caught me. There was something oddly familiar about her, not just the farmhouse, something else.

“What’s your name?”

“I’m Beth. Don’t you recognize me?” She saw I was not getting it when she repeated, “Beth.”

High school French was easy after two years of Latin — I had written everything I needed to know on my arm before each test. “Beth. Nice name.”

“You’re scaring me. The police said you might be faking insanity or something, but you don’t have to do that with me. I’m on your side.”

I must have paid attention in at least one class — I understood the last part of what she said. She was on my side. But what side was that? What was I fighting for? My mission… What was my mission again? It was still dark outside but seemed to be lighter than before. Morning was coming, and with it my death.

“We need to get out of here. We don’t have much time.”

I found the strength to stand on my own. Months of trial by fire in the woods of France had made me stronger than any man should be. I was more than a man, I was a squad leader, and there was still hope I would find my men alive in the woods. I had to get to them. Grabbing the French woman by the arm I forced her toward the door. “Scream,” I commanded.

“What?”

“Scream, damn it!” I twisted her arm so hard she did scream. That would do nicely. I heard running in the hall and a key in the lock. I pushed her in front of the doorway and stood aside, waiting for the guard to enter. What happened, happened quickly and without much noise. The guard entered and said something in German to Frenchie. She, still frozen in surprise, just stood there, and I cold cocked him from behind. I grabbed his keys and gun, and shoving her through the doorway, locked him in. We headed down the hallway, then another, then stairs, and another hallway that ended in two metal doors. One apparently led to a guardroom because I could hear the Nazis talking in hushed tones inside. The other felt cold to the touch. Stifling the frightened woman’s protests, I shoved it open. An alarm sounded and we ran out into the darkness.

The Germans had taken me to a town, not a prison camp. And it looked like it could have been any small rural American town. The police station was on a town square with buildings neatly arranged around a central statue of some French hero. Many of the structures were brick. I didn’t see any bomb damage. They’d either been lucky or we were pretty deep behind Nazi lines. The French woman and I ran without talking until we were off the square and several blocks down a side street.

Then she stopped. “Please, this is wrong. You’re only getting yourself into more trouble.”

I really wished she would talk in English but I tried not to be annoyed with her. She was, after all, just an innocent victim of war. “We have to find a vehicle. I have a general idea which way the squad is, but we’ve got to move.”

She was crying.

“Look, everything will be okay, I promise. I’ll get you back home and once our boys push through this area in force, you’ll be safe.”

There was a small pickup parked on the street and I moved her to it. It was unlocked. I helped her into the passenger side and slid over her to the driver’s. It was a Ford — odd thing to find in France. It didn’t matter. It was old enough to be hot-wired. Once I got it started and cranked up the heat, we headed east out of town. I was pretty sure the Nazis had taken me west — the sun had been in our eyes most of the way. I only hoped that we would not run into any enemy patrols on the way back to the farmhouse.

The snow on the fields eerily reflected the moonlight dancing across melted and refrozen snow dunes spiked with the leavings of last summer’s crops, an army of soldiers taken before their time in some senseless cause, a mocking rebuttal of everything I had lived for, trained for, fought for. I had lost the “why” somewhere amid the succession of deaths — squad members, friends, family. No reason… no reason…

I had seen this place before. I was sure of that. And I remembered where Betty was. I had hid her under a rock near where the Nazis had caught us. We had made it to a river but were trapped by its icy waters, unable to get to the trestle bridge to cross in time before they surrounded us. I had abandoned her there in one chivalrous act of protecting my lady from capture — just another stupid move on my part. I wished I had her now, but this road we were on would take me to her and all would be right again. The river was ahead on our right and I knew just where I had left her. The men could wait. The farmhouse could wait. If nothing else, I needed to save that one thing from my past mistakes. At the base of a hill, the road began to wind upward affording a distant view of the dark river. The truck lurched over a hump in the road and I stopped. Railroad tracks. I could follow them to the trestle bridge and Betty. I left the truck running and got out.

“What are you doing?” the French woman cried in broken English. I wasn’t trained in civilian panic. She would just have to deal with it. I had my mission.

“Just wait here. I’ll be right back. If you don’t want to wait, that’s okay, too. Take the truck and head up this road. Your village is at the top of the hill.” I didn’t hang around for her reply. I checked the magazine of the pistol I had taken from the guard. It was empty. I dropped it in the snow and started out at a jog down the tracks. The truck had not moved — she was waiting — probably still too scared. I felt bad about leaving her there — some kind of knight in shining armor complex, I guess — but not bad enough for me to jeopardize the current mission.

Through the dark, snow-covered, silent woods I ran, picking up the pace, warming to the task. I could feel the well-trained muscles in my legs chewing up the distance between Betty and me. The crunching noise of my feet pounding on the hardened snow and my heart beating wildly would have given my position away to anyone within a hundred yards, but I didn’t care. There were no tracks in sight, no lights, no other sounds. I was alone and liked it that way. There was no one to worry about protecting but myself, no one to yell orders to when we came under fire, no one to watch die and have to write home about.

I often regretted taking the squad leader position. It was no fun being a sergeant. No fun at all. So much responsibility, so little recognition, and absolutely no messing around… As a PFC I could sit in a foxhole and play cards or sing songs or curse the idiot officers who obviously knew less than me. But when I was promoted to sergeant, that all went south. I was stuck between the goof-offs and the serious-minded killers running the show. I was the tool of the corps, the implementer, the one who got the job done and made the real life or death decisions in the field.

It’s odd how some memories are stronger than others, how they can intrude on your thoughts at the worst times and there’s not much short of a bullet to the brain you can do to make them go away. And they leave when they are damn good and ready to.

It was happening then as I ran along those tracks, trying not to trip on the slippery railroad ties — the memory of that damned “Dear Mr. and Mrs. Whatever” letter — the one that haunted me regularly, the one I tried to forget, but couldn’t. I couldn’t remember the last name, but I’d never forget the letter.

It was my job to write those letters, and when a boy died for his country, his parents had a right to know and be proud of their son in their hour of grief. But I struggled with that one. I had to write something to the parents of a stupid punk who had only joined the army because he thought it would make his parents and his brother proud of him. He so desperately needed their approval that he gave up his chance to go to college and put his life on the line, not for love of country or freedom or democracy, but because he thought that’s what they wanted.

It was pathetic, actually. He was a little shit that I tortured relentlessly. I was just trying to make him a man. I felt sorry for his parents; they were the ones who would suffer. So I made up some bullcrap about his being a hero, about how everyone looked up to him, about how proud his country was of his sacrifice and how proud his family must be of him, despite their overwhelming grief.

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Whatever,

It is with the deepest regrets that I must inform you that your blah, blah, blah…

Light from behind me pierced the quiet, and the memory, having once again done its job of making me stink with sweat, was gone. I heard voices — the French woman was yelling something, and then other voices — the Nazis had found us.

Three sharp reports of gunfire. A scream — they’d shot the woman! Shot her dead. I knew the cruel bastards were laughing at her as she fell, without even turning to look. Nazi bastards… I leapt from the tracks and found the safety of the woods and winter darkness. If I only had Betty with me I would have found a spot to wait for them in ambush. Killing them wouldn’t help the dead French woman but at least they wouldn’t be laughing any more.

The darkness of the woods was not quite complete, and I could see footprints in the snow, footprints all over the place as if a squad had come through not too long ago. They were not the prints of an orderly patrol though. They circled and backtracked and circled again, as if searching for something. I was near the place where the Nazis had captured me. It wouldn’t be long before Betty and I would be reunited and she would have something to say to those Germans trailing me. The rushing water was to my right, the Germans somewhere behind, and the trestle had to be nearby.

A few more steps and I saw the massive, glistening bridge above me, blocking most of the moonlight. I felt unexpectedly cold and afraid. Something was wrong. Something was behind me, around me, encircling me. Something was out there stalking me. Not just the Nazis. I could feel it — something different, dark and powerful, something that could see me through the opaque night, something I knew I couldn’t hide from. I had to reach Betty before it reached me, so I plunged forward, angling slightly away from the water to where I had hidden my service revolver.

That tree — the one with the rock at its base; it was there. In my haste to hide Betty before I was captured, I had lifted that rock, scooped out some of the dirt underneath and dropped her in — not the best solution, but I hadn’t had much time. I mentally prepared myself — Betty would be dirty and probably as cranky as a woman scorned. And she would undoubtedly complain when I fired off a few rounds into the skulls of the Nazis trailing me, but I would make it up to her later, when I got back to camp, with a nice, warm gun oil rubdown. For the moment, the priority had to be survival. I dropped to my knees, lifted the frozen rock with one hand, reaching under it with the other.

I have never for a minute believed that I would die peacefully in my warm bed with my loving family around me mourning my loss, saying how much they would miss me. I just can’t see myself nodding off quietly and with my last breath telling them something stupid like “it’s okay” or lying about how I’ve lived a long and fulfilling life, and how I’ll miss them all and be waiting for them in heaven. Not me. I have always known that my end would come bitterly in the cold, lonely darkness of some nameless battlefield with Betty at my side, fighting to the end.

But all that I pulled from underneath that rock was a handful of cold, Ohio countryside and an envelope with a letter inside. Moonlight broke through the tree cover. The letter was from the United States Army and it was addressed to Harry. This was all wrong. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. It wasn’t supposed to end like this.

I got up and ran, scrambling up the hillside to the bridge. They would never think to find me up there. Only a man with a death wish would be out on that bridge in those conditions. I stopped halfway across the river. The distant wind was holding its breath. The approaching crunch of footsteps had ceased. We were playing sniper and I didn’t want to give away my position. I knew I could outlast them, so I crouched low and waited. But in the oppressive quiet, the darkness melted in a glistening pool of moonlight around me and compelled me to pull the letter from its protective sheaf and read it.

Dear Mr. Ryan:

It is with the deepest regrets that I write to you this day. This is a task that is the most difficult of my duties as a commanding officer but know that I undertake it with the utmost respect and pride to honor your brother, Sergeant Thomas Ryan, who served both God and country, and who made the ultimate sacrifice of himself on the field of battle as a guardian of our way of life.

Sergeant Ryan listed only you as his next of kin, so you are the sole recipient of this unfortunate news, but please share this with any whom his life touched as he has touched ours. Sergeant Ryan, or “Saunders” as his squad called him after the Vic Morrow TV character in Combat!, was a fierce warrior in battle, a consummate leader and motivator, and a good friend. I was his lieutenant but believe me when I say that I always looked to him for wisdom and understanding when making my combat decisions, and I state without shame that your brother was the better leader and better soldier.

We were on a routine recon of the delta last week when the platoon came under heavy mortar fire. After the initial seconds of confusion, Tom quickly got us spread out and under cover, but it was clear that we were pinned down and it was only a matter of time before the VC blew us to bits. I radioed in for air support but the gunships were ten minutes out. We were dead men and we all knew it. All of us except Tom… He grabbed two satchel charges and a Claymore and started to circle the hill. His last words were, “Give me two minutes and let loose with all you’ve got. When you hear the charges go off, send in the cavalry. If you don’t hear the explosion, you’ll know I didn’t make it.” Before he disappeared into the bush, he turned and smiled, “Oh, and tell that brother of mine, it’s okay.” I will never forget that smile. He was at peace with himself and unafraid of anything, knowing his death was near.

That was the last time we ever saw Sergeant Thomas Ryan. We waited exactly two minutes and opened fire. We heard screaming and a loud explosion and the mortars stopped. When we got to the VC position, we found it totally destroyed. I regret to inform you that there was nothing left of your brother to send home for burial. He must have carried the explosives into the enemy position and blown himself up along with them.

This act of heroism saved the lives of a dozen men, but it took from us the bravest man I’ll ever know. Words cannot serve to express the loss I feel and the loss you must feel at his passing. His courage will forever be a part of us.

With deepest regrets,

Francis D. Hughes, Lieutenant 2nd Army

I had finally found it and it had finally found me. I was such an idiot. All this time I had been running from and searching for the same thing. All this time, and it was as plain as the piece of paper I held in my hand. They call it the debt that all must pay, but everyone is afraid to pay up because no one knows what happens next. But I didn’t care what happened next. I was ready. It was my time and I wasn’t afraid. It was all so simple. Harry was dead and I had killed him, and now he was about to kill me and I deserved it. All the misdeeds, all the missteps, every blunder of my life’s stupid existence had led me to this moment at this spot, and I was ready. No more mistakes, no more hurting people — all I had to do was just die. Even I could do that.

Chapter 14

“This hearing is hereby reconvened and called to order in the matter of the State of Pennsylvania versus Thomas Ryan, Judge Patrick Jones, presiding. All rise.”

“Please be seated. Gentlemen, I am hoping we can wrap this up today if both sides are ready for their final statements. Mr. Jeffreys, are you prepared with the State’s summation?”

“Yes, your Honor. Thank you.

“This matter began in the winter of 1967. Thomas Ryan’s Selective Service status was changed from a 1-S educational deferment to 1-A draft-eligible based on his no longer attending a college or university on a full-time basis. He was immediately drafted into the U.S. Army and ordered to report for his physical and induction. The investigation into his status was apparently prompted by a letter from one Kelly Erickson, his former classmate at M.I.T. The letter also contains allegations of theft of property not relevant to the matter at hand, but we have obtained a copy and submitted it as evidence.”

“I’m not surprised. She hated me.”

“Mr. Ryan, please. We have patiently listened to your long and somewhat unusual testimony. You have had your turn, now it is the state attorney’s.”

“I’m sorry, your Honor. It’s just that I don’t really blame her for hating me. I was a real jerk and I deserved it.”

“I’m sure you did. Please continue, Mr. Jeffreys.”

“Thank you, your Honor. According to the Selective Service Investigator’s written testimony, Mr. Ryan’s initial response to the induction letter was to request a reclassification to 4-F based on a doctor’s report showing he had a disqualifying high blood pressure condition. Unfortunately for Mr. Ryan, the doctor in question was under investigation by the district attorney and known to the service as one with a publicly expressed anti-war sentiment and a penchant for submitting reports alleging service-disqualifying conditions that were overturned almost without exception upon further examination by Army doctors. They rejected his request pending their own examination.

“Mr. Ryan then submitted documentation from an organization called the Church of the People of Peace and Non-Violence showing that he had converted to their religion and was therefore entitled to the status of conscientious objector. What Mr. Ryan did not know was that this fringe organization had lost its tax-exempt status the previous year for, and I quote from the IRS ruling, ‘providing no discernible religious benefit other than draft evasion and no service other than the distribution of illegal drugs.’ So, not only was this claim rejected, but also, by regulation, it precluded his claiming membership in any similar organization for the purposes of avoiding induction.”

“And I never got my hundred bucks back.”

“You were a draft dodger, Mr. Ryan. Plain and simple. Just not a very good one.”

“Hey, I did my part. I served in the Big WWII, protecting ungrateful cowards like you.”

“Your Honor, this, this act is all part of Mr. Ryan’s dodge. It is he who is the coward and it is he who took the extraordinary steps to evade service in Vietnam, the steps that ultimately lead to the untimely death of his brother, Harry. Unfortunately, we cannot charge Mr. Ryan with criminal murder, but it was his cold, calculating mind, his total awareness of his dire predicament, and his manipulation of his brother that resulted in this situation, and the state believes that trial should therefore proceed.”

“And I have sworn testimony from an expert witness, a psychiatrist, whose opinion it is that my client, Thomas Ryan, is legally incompetent and therefore incapable of standing trial.”

“I appreciate your trying to help your client, Canby, but the state has its own psychiatrists who think that he is perfectly sane.”

“There will be order in this court or this hearing will end unfavorably for all concerned. Mr. Canby, it is your responsibility to keep yourself and your client in line. Any further outburst from either of you will be considered contempt of this court for which I will hold you responsible.”

“I am sorry, your Honor.”

“And Mr. Jeffreys, as the representative of the State of Pennsylvania, you have a duty to present the evidence in a fair and honest manner and an obligation to refrain from making allegations that are helpful to no one. Now continue.”

“I apologize, your Honor, but the facts of the case are that, after months of obvious delaying tactics, Mr. Ryan had run out of options and was ordered to report for his physical and induction in August 1968. The official records show that Thomas Ryan reported, was examined and found fit, and inducted into the U.S. Army. His initial orders took him to Fort Benning, Georgia, where he received basic training. He was then reassigned to Vietnam where he served his tour of duty with the Second Army. During that time, he rose to the rank of master sergeant, having been decorated twice. He reenlisted for a second tour and specifically requested assignment to Vietnam. He again distinguished himself during this second tour and, as we know, was killed in action several weeks before Christmas 1972, posthumously receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor.

“The only problem is that it was not Thomas Ryan who had fought and died so honorably for his country. It was his brother Harry. We have medical and dental records from their childhood and the records obtained from the induction physical proving this. These were all submitted previously to the court. Put simply, for reasons the state believes were related to Thomas Ryan’s attempt to avoid military service, and relying on a strong family resemblance and switched identifications to trick the authorities, Thomas Ryan took Harry’s place at Kenyon and Harry Ryan took Tom’s place in Vietnam.”

“So the state’s case is that Mr. Ryan is competent to stand trial for draft evasion?”

“Yes, your Honor, and we intend to seek the maximum five year sentence.”

“I should have picked evens.”

“Excuse me, Mr. Ryan, did you wish to make a further statement before I cite you for contempt of court?”

“My only mistake was in choosing odds. I should have picked evens. The outcome of ‘1, 2, 3 Shoot’ totally depends on your choice of odds or evens at the outset. The rest is all psyching out your opponent, and with Harry, evens is the only way to go.”

“Mr. Canby, I see by your standing up that you have something to add to your client’s outburst?”

“Your Honor, if my client wishes to make a further statement explaining the reason why he and his brother switched places, I would ask the court to listen to him in the interest of making a fair and impartial judgment on his ability to stand trial. At this point, what harm can it do?”

“I object, your Honor. Mr. Ryan has had his opportunity to speak.”

“This is a hearing, not a trial, Mr. Jeffreys, a most unusual hearing, and that allows me some latitude. And Mr. Canby may be correct. It is my responsibility to determine Mr. Ryan’s fitness to stand trial and that determination should include all the available facts.”

“I have not finished my summation, your Honor.”

“I understand that, Mr. Jeffreys, and you will have the opportunity to continue once we have had this little digression. Mr. Ryan, why were you and Harry playing ‘1, 2, 3 Shoot?’”

“The day he was leaving, Harry told me he was skipping college and going into the army. He wanted to fight in Vietnam. College wasn’t important to him — he was only doing it to make Mom and Dad happy. But helping his country and the people fighting and dying over there? That was important. That was something he had to do. He knew it would break their hearts — after all he’d bailed on his promise to become a priest, and now he was bailing on his promise to go to college.

“He asked me not to say anything. He would just go away, off to war, lose touch and come back in four years. All so apparently innocent — that was Harry’s usual modus operandi. Did he think I was stupid? I knew exactly what he was up to. It was so obvious. He was taking one last shot at the title. He couldn’t beat me at anything fair and square so he was pulling an end-around. The little weasel knew I’d never win against a war hero. And he was right — when Mom and Dad found out, and you know they would, they’d crown him king of the Ryans, and upon the triumphant return of the prodigal son, all would be forgiven, and I would be done… finished… another of history’s deposed monarchs. So I did the only thing I could do — I challenged him to best out of three. If I won, he had to go to college and spend four miserable years from home at Loser U. I would go into the Army. Those were my terms. Simple. Obviously, I lost. I should have picked evens.”

“Your Honor, if I may continue?”

“Yes, Mr. Jeffreys, please do.”

“Your Honor, in addition to the account Mr. Ryan has just shared with us, he has at various points during the multiple psychological interviews given at least three distinct versions of why he and his brother switched places. But they all come down to the same bottom line: Thomas Ryan illegally evaded the draft and lived undercover as Harry Ryan for four years. And he was mere months away from successfully carrying out his plan when it all fell apart just before Christmas. It is our belief that he panicked, realizing that there could now be no switching back. Tom Ryan could not come home from the war any more than Harry Ryan could come home from school. Tom was officially deceased and Harry was in fact deceased.

“The convenient news for Tom was that he was the only next of kin listed on his brother’s enlistment papers. He was, therefore, the only one notified of his “official” death. That made it easier to conceal. The complication was that Harry was still in that picture as a soon-to-be returning college student so Tom had to remove him from the picture. That was when he arranged his mysterious disappearance from Kenyon. He faked Harry’s suicide, then went home to his family as if nothing had happened. He even manipulated his siblings into “coercing” him into going back to Kenyon when that was his plan all along. He intended to return to the college, pick up his girlfriend, and leave the country. He was going to start a new life.”

“That’s not what happened.”

“Your Honor, we have Beth Williams’ testimony that they were engaged and that he had asked her to leave school and move to Canada with him. It’s a popular spot for draft dodgers, I hear. We also have the testimony of his sister, Mary and brother, Sam stating that it was Tom’s idea for him to go to Kenyon and investigate.”

“No, that’s not right.”

“For once, I agree with you, Mr. Ryan. It was not right that you somehow made your younger brother serve out your military obligation at the cost of his life. And it was definitely not right that you then killed him again for your own convenience and gain by faking his suicide.”

“I should never have let him go. I killed him.”

“Your Honor, this is a tragedy, to be sure, but not one born of a mental disease severe enough as to make Mr. Ryan innocent by reason of insanity. It was born of fear and cowardice. The state has submitted the reports of three board-certified psychiatrists concluding that Mr. Ryan was fully aware of the consequences of his actions in 1968 and, despite showing signs of severe depression, anxiety, and remorse, is not now and was not then unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of his acts. According to U.S.C. 18, in cases where the defense is insanity, the burden of proof is on the defendant and the evidence must be clear and convincing. The state does not believe the defendant has provided any clear and convincing evidence of either insanity or innocence by reason of insanity and asks, therefore, that the defendant be held over for trial.”

“Thank you, Mr. Jeffreys. Mr. Canby, do you have a final statement to make before I pass judgment?”

“Yes, your Honor. I would like to begin by reading for the record the medical definition of schizophrenia, which is the diagnosis of Mr. Ryan’s condition by the expert witness we have provided. And I quote,”

Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness characterized by a disintegration of the process of thinking, of contact with reality, and of emotional responsiveness. It most commonly manifests as auditory hallucinations, paranoid, or bizarre delusions, or disorganized speech and thinking with significant social or occupational dysfunction. Onset of symptoms typically occurs in young adulthood. Diagnosis is based on the patient's self-reported experiences and observed behavior. No laboratory test for schizophrenia currently exists.

“End quote. The important points are that no laboratory test for schizophrenia exists and that the diagnosis is based on the patient’s self-reported experiences and observed behavior. Thomas Ryan has demonstrated by the lengthy and convoluted story that you so patiently and graciously allowed him to tell that he lives a troubled, delusional life. He is absolutely paranoid of everyone and everything around him. His reality is a constantly changing mix of what is actually the case, what he imagines he is doing as the hero of a TV show called Combat!, and what he perceives from his vantage point as the king of his imaginary universe. There is no connection between one event and another and no rhyme or reason for many of the things he does. That is why the psychiatrist has declared him insane and unfit to stand trial. He has demonstrated classic schizophrenia.

“In addition, while it is true that Tom and Harry switched places and true that Harry Ryan served and died for his country in Vietnam, we do not agree with much of what the prosecution has asserted surrounding those facts. From what we have determined, it was Harry Ryan who approached Tom and told him he was not going to college. It was Harry Ryan who was determined to go into the Army despite the effect it would have on his family. And it was Harry Ryan who Tom tried to save by insanely offering up a boy’s challenge of honor to keep him out of the Army. We do not deny that he had himself tried to avoid the draft for a brief period, but Tom Ryan knew that he had to serve and was ready to serve. And somewhere in that twisted wreckage of delusion and reality, he also knew that sending two boys from the same family to Vietnam would be the wrong thing to do.

“However the deal was done, it was not done from malice or cowardice. It was done out of one brother’s love for the other. I have a section of interview that I’d like to read. This is Tom speaking to the psychiatrist,”

But I wasn’t about to let him get the better of me. He might have won the 1, 2, 3 shoot but I had a Plan B. I always have a Plan B. If I had to be Harry for four years, I was going to be the best damned Harry they’d ever seen. I’d be better than Harry. I’d do more in four years than he could ever dream of doing in a lifetime. I’d take everything he ever wanted to do and do it ten times better. Everything. I’d show him. I’d show them all. Then they could all be proud of Harry again and he could rejoin the family.

What I never told anyone was that I liked being Harry. It actually felt good to be nice to people and have them be nice back — nice to the point where, after a while, I didn’t even have to pretend to be doing it. I had become Harry. I was Harry. I am Harry.

“And we have all heard the account of his exemplary record at Kenyon — one published novel, numerous distinguished art works, some of which are currently on display at the Cleveland Museum, a 4.0 average, on track for highest honors in his double majors of Art and English, and he was still running his game design business from a library carrel. He was a driven young man, yet he was deeply disturbed. And for four years he had lost himself in the persona of his brother, had totally immersed himself to the point where he thought he was his brother. And when he received word of the death of Thomas Ryan, the fragile fabric of his life unwound.

“He buried the letter from the Army under a rock in the woods and attempted suicide by jumping from the Kokosing River Bridge, but all he succeeded in doing was injuring and further disorienting himself. Somehow he made his way south and was taken in by a kind waitress. He stayed with her a week, then rented a car and drove back to Pittsburgh for Christmas, all memory of the past four years gone. He had become Tom again, and only Tom. The psychiatrist’s report indicates that he believes that Tom was suffering from traumatic amnesia, which for you and I means that his mind, no longer able to deal with the memories, simply shut them out. He was just Tom Ryan, game designer, Tom Ryan, the sarcastic oldest sibling who at twenty-six was still the bully in the family and still in competition for the title of favorite son. As far as he knew, his brother Harry was at school having totally ignored his family for the four years he was away from home.”

“I killed him. This is all my fault. I let him go. I could have stopped him. I should have stopped him. It should have been me carrying that satchel charge.”

“It’s all right, Tom. Let me finish, please.”

“Don’t bother. I’m ready for the firing squad. But I’d like to be in uniform for this. I’m not a spy and it’s not right to execute a soldier out of uniform.”

“At ease, sergeant. That’s an order.”

“All right lieutenant. Have it your way.”

“I apologize, your Honor.”

“Continue, Mr. Canby.”

“When the news came of Harry’s disappearance and presumed drowning at school, Tom was just as shocked as everyone else because he truly did not know. His mind had not yet lowered its defense to allow him back into that dark area of his memory that he had been unable to deal with. Ironically, he was the one chosen to go to Kenyon to find out what had happened. The administration people he met thought he was Harry. Though they were not twins, there was a striking family resemblance that would superficially explain the mistaken identity, but Tom knew there was something wrong. Only his mind was not yet ready to let him see why it was all wrong. So he decided to play along with it and pretend to be Harry.

“But with each contact with a person he had known as Harry, the fabric of the wall of amnesia was being torn apart thread by thread: first Mrs. Hoople, with whom he had lived for four years, then fellow students, his friend at the pool hall, then finally Beth. And this was all exacerbated by the confrontation with the local police to the point where he snapped and his mind wandered back into one of his fantasy worlds where he was a soldier in World War II France escaping from the Nazis. But his mind would not let him simply escape. It drove him back to the trestle bridge and back to the letter he had buried weeks before. And after it made him read that letter again, he again tried to kill himself by jumping off the bridge. But this time, the police and his fiancée were there to stop him.

“Your, Honor, these are not the actions of a sane man trying to avoid the draft. These are the desperate measures of a tortured, deluded mind.”

“You’re the one who’s crazy.”

“Tom, please. You shouldn’t say any more.”

“Why not? This is all wrong. Harry died because of me.”

“Tom…”

“Shut up for a minute, will you? I can tell him that, can’t I, your Honor? He is working for me, right?”

“That is correct, Mr. Ryan, but usually it is wise for a defendant to listen to the advice of his attorney. Anything you say now can affect the judgment I am about to pass.”

“Good, that’s the way it should be because this is just so wrong, what you’re saying, the two of you — Mr. State and Mr. Canby. You think you know everything. You think you’re so smart and you can piece everything together, and make it make sense. You think because you got one plus one to equal two that you have the answer? You don’t even know what the problem is.

“Sure I didn’t want to go to Vietnam. But who did? It was a stupid war that we shouldn’t have been in. Every day, the papers had the stories about how many had been killed and how many wounded and how many lost legs and arms and how many had gone nuts. Was I afraid? You’re damned right I was afraid. I was scared shitless. Especially after they sent Bobby Fey home in a body bag. Sure, I did a couple of dumb things to try and get out of it. All my friends did. But one by one, they all went in. I was next and I knew it.

“I never said a word to Harry about it. There was no way I was going to let that twerp know I was a punk coward. But somehow, he knew. Damn him, why didn’t I stop him?

“Anyway, I was headed in around the same time he was going off to school. It’s not like I had a choice anymore. The day he left, all he said to Mom and Dad was, ‘Don’t worry about me, Mom, Dad. I'll see you later. I love you.’ I’ll always remember that, but I’ll never forget what he said to me. It was the last thing he ever said to me. He handed me an envelope and said, ‘You’ll need this where you’re going. Good-bye, Tom.’ I just figured it was some kind of gag he was pulling, you know, something stupid to take with me when I went into the Army, so I just threw it on my dresser.

“I didn’t open it until the next day. I think I was missing that stupid kid already. Inside there was a letter, his driver’s license and his birth certificate. The letter was pretty simple. I remember it word for word.”

Dear Tom,

You’re afraid of what is to come, but you shouldn’t worry. God looks out after us all. I know you don’t believe that, but He does, especially in times like this when you think you are facing death. I’ve been praying to Him for guidance and this was the answer to my prayer. I’m going to take your place in the Army. I’ve taken your passport and birth certificate and left you two pieces of identification you will need when you go to Kenyon. I’ll be you and you’ll be me. Four years from home. That’s not so long. Make the most of it, you big oaf.

Love,

Harry