“The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct them to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.”
– Nietzsche
March 1996
On a rainy afternoon in front of his house, Marcus DuPree picked a wet paperback lying on the sewer grate. He was coming home from school, troubled more than usual by the four boys who gathered around him during recess to pick on him. Teasing had progressed toward bullying: rabbit punches on the arm, shoves that knocked him to the ground. The worst part of it was that he knew three of the boys because they grew up in the same neighborhood. He didn’t understand why they’d turned on him now that they were all in sixth grade at the same elementary school.
He wiped off the rain-sodden cover and tried to sound out the title across the front page: Coriolanus by William Shakespeare. He did all right with the playwright’s name but stumbled over the tongue-twister of the title. In his mind, it sounded something like “coral-anus,” which intrigued him because he’d never seen letters of the alphabet arranged that way before. He didn’t like reading in class and had never showed interest in it beyond comic books, which were too expensive anyway.
He guessed some high-school kid walking past had tossed it into the sewer. That, for some reason, intrigued him even more to learn about it. He stuck it between his science book and a three-ring binder of lousy poems his English teacher gave all her students. His mother never checked his book bag to see if he kept any drugs or porn in there like one of the older boys down the street named McGinnis. He had some skin disease which turned him white as snow even in summer. Marcus’s mother had no interest in doing much of anything since his father left them. She sat around all day drinking fizzy wine and looking at her cell phone. His image of her was engraved in his head of a sad woman sitting on a couch bent over holding her cell phone like one of the church hymn books in pews, although they’d stopped going to church on Sundays long before his father took off.
His first foray into Elizabethan English wasn’t good; in fact, Marcus was half-convinced he wasn’t reading English at all, certainly not the slangy, rap-laden English he grew up with. He quit trying after ten minutes that first night and left his bedroom to go downstairs to watch television with his mother. He stayed through half of Hoarders until his angry comments about the people who surrounded themselves in clutter and filth upset her and she ordered him back upstairs.
“I guess that means no supper, too, right?” he yelled down at her. He could see the top of her head, the ragged line of gray bisecting her head where the dye wore off. She didn’t answer; he didn’t expect her to.
Out of sheer boredom, he took another whack at the play. By the end of the first scene of the first act, he wasn’t sure he wanted to continue. He didn’t understand why some words had tiny little circles above them at first. Then he realized they were supposed to explain what the words meant in modern English at the bottom of the page. What the hell kind of reading is this? He thought and hurled the book across the room where it slammed into the wall like a pigeon hitting a house.
Embarrassed at being defeated by a soggy book plucked from a sewer grate, he decided to give it another chance. Most of the circles didn’t help at all so he quit reading them and concentrated on the play. By the end of the second scene, he had a slight headache and decided to give up for the night.
At school the following day, his only friend Billy Fortney came over to him at recess to tell him that his trio of bullies were planning something against him.
“I heard them talking in the lavatory,” he said. “When I walked in, they stopped talking but I heard your name, man.”
He made a V of two fingers at his eyes like combat soldiers on a mission: Stay alert. Billy loved war movies. His dad served in Afghanistan and spent time in the psych ward.
“They haven’t bothered me today,” Marcus replied. “Maybe they were told by Mister Johnson to lay off.”
“You’re dreaming, Marcus,” Billy said. “Johnson’s a pussy. He won’t do jack about them three. Reggie McEndree’s old man came, he’s an ex-con, you know, and showed up instead of his mom for the parent-teacher meeting. He told Johnson what to do with the detention he gave Reggie for acting up during music class.”
Mister Johnson taught music for three public schools; he came in once a week to teach the flutophone and didn’t like students talking in class. Kids mocked him at recess for his “Pax” whistle he blew to quiet them down—a shrill three-beats from his harmonica and made the peace sign above his head. It meant total silence. The kids all ran around doing it, snapping fingers, flashing the peace sign, most giving the finger.
Two weeks passed and every night he read a scene or two more of his Corri-Anus. Damn, he thought one night after struggling through the aftermath battle speeches of Caius Marcius’ great victory over the Volscians at Corioli, there’s music in this crazy talking!
The fact that the main guy was named Marcus, too—or close enough—and was obviously the hero of the story gave him incentive to keep on pushing through that thicket of bewildering words. When his mother slept on the couch after her wine binges, he read aloud, sounding out the tougher words, and putting some kind of meaning to them that made sense to him, fuck that so-called “Glossary” thing at the bottom of every page. It was like a miniature electric fence that threw off his comprehension whenever he was tempted to drop his eyes down to the bottom of the page. Some of that Shakespeare guy’s rhythm got through. It had a definite beat to it, although not the hip-hop or rap he heard on the street or booming from lousy sound systems in passing cars going back and forth in the hood.
“You all right, William,” he said, closing and patting the frayed book cover before slipping it under his pillow.
All day in school, whenever he wanted to tune out his teachers, he thought of his play. Certain words and phrases stuck in his craw, like “crows to peck the eagles,” which he mulled through science and language arts. He was puzzled by that because his Marcus was obsessed with loyalty yet he was a called a traitor, especially by those two guys Brutus and Sicinius.
He renamed them for street cred: Da Brute and Sin Boy. They were the crows pecking at an eagle. “Snitches get stitches, you dumbasses,” he said to their wily phantoms staring back at his reflection in the bathroom mirror the next morning.
“Who the hell you talkin’ to in the mirror, boy?” his mother asked, barging in the way she always did when he was in there.
“I’m practicing for a school play,” he said.
“You said you was tryin’ out for football like I asked you,” she said, shaking her head in dismay. “Now you want to be in a sissy play.
“It ain’t sissy, Ma,” he exclaimed. “These two guys, see, betrayed the General—”
“Spare me that boring shit,” she said, grabbing her hair dryer from the shelf behind him and leaving the room. Whenever she was hungover, she was short-tempered with him no matter what he said. But it bothered him nonetheless, not so much his mother’s interruption but her dismissal of his Marcus. Sin Boy said he betrayed Rome and some dump called Antium. It bothered him to think of his hero being great on the one hand and a bad dude on the other.
You can’t trust anyone, Marcus . . .
Marcus shivered. It felt as though the General had slipped through a wormhole to whisper to him in his ear.
After school on the way home past derelict fields and that sad row of abandoned houses off Joy and McDougal Streets, he was cornered by Davontae McCorkle, Carlos Gardel, and Aref Bazzi. Walking alone with his thoughts, the three appeared from nowhere walking behind him, matching his stride. He thought of making a run for it and decided that would be worse. Maybe he could bluff his way out of it.
Araf grabbed his arm to stop him and let go. They didn’t invade his space the way they did at school but he was hemmed in. All three were bigger. Billy said that Araf was “big enough to eat apples off his head,” whatever that meant. He had a wispy moustache that made him look ominous and silly at the same time. The few times he was called on to recite, Araf’s voice cracked. Nobody dared to make fun of him the way they did Danny Blackthorne, whose voice could hit a ceiling fan and then drop to the basement in one breath.
“Hey, Marcus,” Carlos said stepping up and grinning. “We want you to join our gang.”
“Yeah,” Davontae added. “You’re the only kid from school we’re asking into the club.”
Marcus felt his stomach drop about a foot. He was sure he was about to get jumped, an excuse to beat him up. Gang? Club? Which was it, Marcus wondered.
Aref dug Carlos in the ribs with an elbow.
“Ain’t a gang, fool,” he said to him. “We don’t do that shit, right, homie?”
“You don’t believe us?” Aref said, laughing. “C’mon, man, we just messin’ with you at school. That don’t mean nothin’.”
Davontae stepped a half-foot closer. He wore his football jersey. Talk at school was that he was already being scouted by high school coaches around Chicago.
“You’re cool, right?”
“What do I have to do?”
“They ain’t no initiation crap,” Carlos said, stepping up, smiling big. “None of that. We just, like, hang out, you know, and stuff.”
Carlos’ brother was training to be a boxer; he was currently doing time in a juvie facility for beating up a kid and peeing on him.
“You down, bro?” Aref said. His eyes had a sheen that made the skin on Marcus’ back and arms prickle with tension.
“Meet us at the Chimney tomorrow after school,” Davontae said. “I’ll bring the smokes.”
They disappeared into the vacant back lots behind the football field. They must have been following him as soon as he turned down McDougal.
Marcus was exhilarated they didn’t beat him to a pulp in the road. Part of him, however, wanted desperately to be in the club with them. His brain told him that was foolish, they were plotting something bad.
The Chimney was a hundred feet high. The only thing higher in town was the water tower, which taggers slathered with graffiti. Some said it was an old grain silo that never came down back when the suburb hadn’t yet reached the countryside. Davontae told his class the Ku Klux Klan used to form circles around it with torches and burn crosses in front of it back in his grandfather’s day. It shared space in a field of concrete rubble from a demolished factory nearby. The rusted iron ladder leading to the top had missing rungs and was loose in places where the bolts had popped out of the cement. The doorway into it was a black oval in summer that kids claimed to see ghosts popping out of . Few kids from Marcus’ neighborhood had ever climbed to the top and actually gone inside. One urban legend claimed there were piles of skeletons from rotting corpses at the base of missing kids.
It never occurred to him to climb to the top. Last summer, halfway was as far as ever got on the ladder. Looking down between his feet at the jagged blocks of concrete, Marcus knew he didn’t want to go higher no matter how much they double-dog dared him.
He had a day to think about it. He thought of his unfinished play under his pillow. He thought of treachery and betrayal. How a good man like his Marcus might be led to do a bad thing out of pride. But wasn’t pride another word for survival? When you’re surrounded by enemies, whether in ancient Rome or in a shithole outside of Chicago like his town, wasn’t it the same thing? Marcus believed it was.
For readiness and to test his reflexes, he bounced from a crouch to a standing position on the balls of his feet with the bookbag on, adjusting his feet for the shift in gravity. It wasn’t exactly a plan but it was something to do to keep terror from overwhelming him.
His mother heard the floorboards creak in the kitchen below and shouted upstairs: “Marcus, what the hell you doing up there? Stop jumping before you bring the damn house down!”
He couldn’t say how he saw it like that in his mind but he knew that’s how it would happen when he was up there with them. He caught them doing rock-paper-scissors in front of Davontae’s locker in the hallway after the bell. Choosing the winner of the lottery, he thought. Twice he caught Aref grinning at him from his desk in homeroom. That was the moment he realized Aref had won the lottery; he’d be the boy to shove him out the door so he’d fall to his death. They’s all have alibis and excuses the cops wouldn’t break. None of the three spoke to him all day.
At 3:15, with his bookbag weighted with every book he had and two he borrowed from Billy, he walked out the door of his public elementary and blinked in the sunshine poking through ragged clouds overhead. It was one of those “in-between” days of spring in the North, neither hot nor cold. He left his windbreaker his mother handed him that morning in his locker. He wanted to have as much freedom of movement in his arms as possible when the time came. That was how he thought of it.
Before he reached the turn at Joy Street for the last leg of his walk back, he found himself escorted by Carlos and Davontae like a pair of jets linking up with a slow-moving puddle jumper. Aref hung back a few paces.
“Hey, man, what’s up? We missed you today on the playground. That old bitch Poncie kept us in detention.” Mrs. Poncell was the assistant principal and hall monitor. She’d seen at least two generations of kids from Marcus’ neighborhood pass through the school.
“Nothing,” Marcus said. “Same old.”
“We goin’ to the Chimney, yo,” Carlos crooned. “Yeah, got us some loosies, some real fine weed from my brother’s stash. We gonna have us a high old time.”
Aref snickered from behind. An inside joke, Marcus knew immediately: I’m the high old time. I’m supposed to go flying . . .
They had to pass through a dozen vacant lots, climb under a barbed-wire fence, and wade through knee-high dockweed that never seemed to die off in winter. In summer, the cockleburs would feather their pantlegs, but it was too early in the season. Everything had a pungent smell of decaying vegetation and “fart gas,” according to Carlos.
A drainage ditch nearby blew a stronger odor of swamp rot in their direction. Davontae said his older brothers took baseball bats out here to brain muck rabbits, skin them, and sell them in the neighborhood for three dollars apiece. He and Carlos argued over whether you could eat the cattail cobs from the swamp they passed by. “Make good torches for burnin’,” Davontae said. “Me and my brother threw ‘em through the broken windows of those abandoned houses on Decatur Avenue, went up like that.” He snapped his fingers. Carlos nodded, said, “Uh-huh.” Even when Davontae told lies, you didn’t call him out because he had an explosive temper. He said he needed to let it out on the football field.
“There it is, homies,” Carlos sang out. He lifted his arms as though bequeathing it to them.
The Chimney, abandoned silo, whatever it was, loomed before them beyond the cyclone fence which could no more stop four agile boys from climbing it than it could stop four mosquitoes. Bits of rotted plastic from one-use store bags clung to the razor tips.
“Who’s going up first?” Aref said, his first words since they’d joined up in the road.
“Broes before hoes,” Carlos chirped. “That means you last, Raffy.” Their old joke.
The warmth of the walk had not dispelled the fear climbing up Marcus’ esophagus. Twice he had to choke back a guttural sob and covered it with a fake cough.
“Ya’ll OK?” Davontae asked him.
The light from the sunshine fading in and out and filtered through the canopy of scrub trees and sumac they walked through to get to the fence reminded him of his crazy grandmother before she was swept away into a nursing home for senile folks. She used to chant and call out bible verses at random wherever she was. One stuck in his head, a verse from Matthew about hypocrites she quoted the most, something about “whitewashed tombs” clean on the outside but filthy and full of “dead men’s bones” inside. Davontae’s big white teeth exposed in the grin and the light falling on his face gave his expression an ominous leer.
“I’m good, Davontae,” Marcus replied.
“Then let’s go, men! What we waitin’ on?”
Carlos and Aref were already standing on the other side. Carlos aping a jailbird clutching the bars of his cell, screaming, “Let me out! Let me out!”
“I ain’t been up to the top in years,” Aref said.
“No time like the present,” Davontae said. “Move aside, pussies. I’m going first.”
They watched him climb effortlessly to a height of twenty feet or so and then grip a bar and swing outward, legs tucked in, making monkey sounds.
“Look at him!” Carlos shrieked. “Hey, monkey, I’ll throw you a banana!”
“I’ll show you a banana, motherfucker,” Davontae called down and mimed unzipping.
“He’s crazy,” Aref shouted in admiration. “Look at him go!”
“Me next,” Carlos said. He climbed fast, his hips shifting as his legs pumped up the rungs and his speed of ascent increased. Davontae had doubled the distance by then.
“You go next,” Aref said. “Better leave your book bag down here.”
“That’s all right,” Marcus said. “I can handle it.”
“You better,” Araf said. “That thing drops on me and you’ll be picking up your teeth out of them rocks down here.”
The grin on his face was gone. In its place, Marcus saw a look he’d never seen before. One that mixed emotions he could not name but which extinguished the last flickers of desperate hope fluttering in his brain.
He’s going to do it, Marcus knew. He’s already seen me lying here smashed to pulp in his imagination.
Marcus climbed, didn’t look down. By the time he’d counted the fiftieth rung, his palms were wet. The air was cooler the higher he went. Wind swirled between his body pressed to the rungs and washed tiny bits of grit or rust over his wrists. His forearms strained with tension, and he felt tremors in his back muscles from the monotonous climb upward with his vision fixed straight ahead. It seemed to go on forever with his world confined to the cement in front of his face and the rungs disappearing beneath him one by one. He heard Aref behind him with his casual grunts and calls upward for Marcus to “Move it!” and “Go faster!” laced with the occasional expletive or an Arabic curse borrowed from his Lebanese grandmother.
As his head cleared the top rung, Davontae and Carlos sat on opposite sides, backs to the round cement walls of their confined rotunda. The rumor about the wooden platform jerrybuilt onto the top seemed true except that it wasn’t a single piece of planking but two large pieces that overlapped in the middle and rested on steel crossbars. Marcus wondered whether four bodies packed into a narrow space—now that Araf had clambered up and rolled onto his back—was excessive weight. He thought about those stories of kids flying through a black abyss to crash atop one another on the bottom and rot there in a heap of bones. He saw no drill marks or reinforcement, which told him everything, including their weight, was dependent on something as ancient and rusty as the outer ladder where wind and rain blew constantly through the openings. Unlike the steel sheeting or checkered brickwork of farm silos he’d glimpsed on bus drives to see his grandmother in her facility in Calumet, this was too narrow for the storage of anything. Yet a rusted pulley with a frayed rope end hung from the outside of the other doorway for hauling up something.
“We’re the only people up here in years, I’ll bet,” Carlos said.
“Yah, check out all the pigeon shit on the floor here, dude,” Araf said.
“They don’t count, Raff, you asshole.”
“Shut up, you two,” Davontae said.
He took out a cigar out of the pocket of his hoodie and a Bic lighter; the cigar had zipper-like suture down its length. “This baby is packed with the good stuff,” he said, lighting up. The wind coming from the opposite doorway was stronger and chillier than the one at their backs on the climb up. The lighter’s flame danced at the blunt’s tip as Davontae inhaled.
“Take the backpack off, man,” Carlos said. “Nobody’s gonna rip off your damn school books, idiot.”
They passed around the joint. Marcus coughing toke, knowing the risk increased with every inhale.
“Stop hoggin’ it, Raffy!” Carlos bellowed. “Save some for our new boy here.”
Araf blew out a halo of smoke, puffed a trio of smoke rings, and stared through them to Marcus.
“Want the last hit, Marcus?” he said, the skin at the corners of his mouth crinkling like a snake’s closed mouth. Had a black tongue come flicking out to test the air, Marcus wouldn’t have been surprised. Duplicity, treachery all around him. He knew what the General faced.
Although the three joked, teased one another, discussed girls they knew through the distorted lens of hormonal frenzy, the mood darkened with the language, became more violent and obscene.
They’re working themselves up to it, Marcus thought Soon now . . .
Now and then, someone made a half-hearted effort to include him in the joking or pay him a phony compliment or ask him questions, as though they gave a shit. It all smacked of pure hypocrisy to Marcus. For the most part, he was ignored. Carlos talked about his old man’s job in the Chicago stockyards, how one animal in the slaughter herd is the judas goat leading them to the kill chute. My pops, man, he took me to a chicken slaughterhouse one time. They hang the chickens upside-down on this conveyor belt and rub a bar across them to fool them before some guy slices off their heads with an electric knife. Cool shit, man!
Marcus’ brain seethed with thoughts and words he couldn’t put a name to. Before the shivering in his muscles incapacitated him, he shut down the noise in his head. What would the General do? What would the General do right friggin’ now?
He stood up, took off his book bag and set it against the wall opposite the three boys, and went to the doorway, his back to them—a castle window big enough for someone his size to walk through but not big enough for someone Davontae’s size.
All or nothing . . . all or—
nothing . . .
“Some view here, guys,” he said. “Check out the pretty sunset.” The words came out in a gargled rush.
The sun clipped a canopy of trees in its descent. The cobalt blue of the Belt of Venus was just beginning to tinge the horizon with its crimson glow. He placed his hands on opposite sides of the open door and leaned out as though to look down.
Snickering at his remark about a “pretty sunset” ceased, chopped off in mid-air. Silence replaced it. One thought left: Araf drew the right to throw him out of to his death by winning scissors-paper-rock that morning.
How did he know without turning around? Did he hear the slightest shuffling noise of someone rising to his feet? Did he feel the air change in the room? Was the air at his back suddenly charged from the onrushing boy coming at him like a bow wave? He’d think about this later many times but never be sure. It was like an all-seeing eye opened up in back of his head.
Before Araf’s hands slammed into his back to shove him out the door, Marcus dropped to the floor in the crouch he’d practiced at home. The brunt of the bigger boy’s momentum carried him over Marcus’ head into open air. The last thing he felt were Araf’s sneakers kicking him in the head and shoulders as the boy twisted, sought helplessly for purchase in air as he flew into open space and the big drop. Marcus looked in time to see Araf’s legs disappear. They all heard his high-pitched scream and the awful Doppler effect of sound waves as he plunged out of their sight. All that remained was a hideous reverberation echoing around the hollow cement walls.
No one moved. No one spoke until Marcus said, forcing out words he’d also practiced a hundred times in his head: “I bent down to tie my shoelace . . . what happened . . .”
The next part was critical. It would determine whether he lived or died. He scurried to the wall and sat against it, tucked his legs up around his book bag. One hand slipping inside out of sight of the others, who were now an agitated mob of screaming and cursing boys.
Carlos hissed to Davontae: “Do it, Tae! God damn it, shove his ass out the window.”
Davontae untangled from his sitting posture with effortless grace like a cobra unwinding. He took a step toward Marcus. Marcus whipped out a serrated steak knife and held it out with both hands around the handle. “Fuck this shit,” Davontae said, looking at the blade pointing at him. “You do it.”
He took two long steps to the door, swung his body over the ladder’s knobbed ends. Marcus and Carlos stared as his head disappeared below the floorboard without another word. They heard the sound of his descent with alternating rings and thuds against the cement.
Carlos looked back at Marcus. His eyes popped with fear.
He scrambled to his feet and headed to the ladder. Before he, too, disappeared from Marcus’ view, he shot him a look of befuddled rage and yelled: “We’ll get you later, fucker!”
Marcus slipped the knife into his bag. He tried to rise but his legs were jelly. He used the wall as a brace, tearing his shirt and scraped granules of cement into his flesh. With his left hand he scooped up the book bag, now feeling as heavy as a manhole cover. He went to the open doorway and watched the two heads below bobbing in unison, hands and feet moving in sync down the ladder: Carlos ten feet below, Davontae halfway down by then—a patch of fading sunlight glancing off Davontae’s high-and-tight fade.
Bracing his legs, he extended the book bag out the door with both hands, judged the distance and let it go. It sailed past Carlos’ head like a missile, fluttering the hair on the back of his head from its passing. It grazed Davontae’s face, breaking his nose and slammed into his chest with enough force to jerk his hands free from the rungs. His body twisted in mid-air as he tried to reattach himself to the ladder—now just inches out of his reach. The yodel of his scream reached up to Marcus borne on the upswirling wind.
Carlos, frozen in place, looked up at Marcus staring down from the doorway. He whimpered, began descending faster, snagging his sneakers and nearly slipping a couple times.
Marcus didn’t remember climbing down other than a couple blurry screenshots from the camera in his head. He remembered seeing blood from Davontae’s nose where it spattered the cement. He looked at his rust-red hands when he finally stood on solid ground. He knew Davontae’s body was there behind a pile of rubble somewhere off to his left amid the tangled chunks of concrete with rebar sticking out. He didn’t want to look.
March 2024
They never spoke again. Not through the rest of junior high. The closest they came was senior year of high school when Marcus was an all-city wide receiver and Carlos was a second-string cornerback for a rival South Chicago team. According to the private investigator Marcus hired years later, Carlos became a baker, married one the girls from Marcus’ high school, and had four children with her. He rented a brown over yellow Craftsman in Calumet, attended NA meetings twice a week.
Marcus worried he might not be able to squeeze his high school’s tenth-year reunion in during the week he was scheduled to visit London and then fly to Indonesia. He had been newly promoted to Director of Overseas Operations at the youngest age of any vice president in his international firm. He owned a three-story house overlooking Lake Travis in Northwest Austin.
His secretary was highly proficient and made calls that enabled him to squeeze in his reunion. She rented a Falcon Dassault from a private company and ensured there’d be a car and driver to meet him at O’Hare. He was cordial throughout the reunion, careful not to drink too much despite his old football and track teammates clamoring for him to drink more. One of his old girlfriends, the cheerleading captain, bruised her husband’s ego by insisting on dancing with Marcus during Ashant’s “Foolish” and they remained on the dance floor for Nelly’s “Hot in Here.” He knew he looked good from years of workouts in his understated but expensive Armani suits. His men’s Pasha de Cartier cost more than his mother ever collected in five years of welfare checks.
On his return from Jakarta, his secretary had his coffee prepared and his newspapers laid out on his desk between his Newton’s cradle and the bust of Shakespeare. He bypassed The Guardian, the English edition of Le Monde, and The New York Times International for the two Chicago papers he’d asked her to get and save for him: the Sun-Times and the Tribune. She was puzzled because he’d never asked for those papers before, but being highly efficient, she accommodated his request without demur.
“Is your coffee all right, sir?’
“Please, Janice, call me Marcus,” he said with a smile. “We’re going to be working together from now on.”
“Yes, sir—I mean, Marcus.”
Marcus sipped his coffee he’d had shipped back to headquarters in the same private plane. It was a rare mix called Kopi Luwak culled from partially digested beans passed through the digestive tract of monkeys and civet cats in Indonesia. A luxury few coffee drinkers could afford.
Nothing in the Sun-Times. He turned to the other paper and scanned the pages until he found it in two paragraphs on a back page: a man had been beaten to death with a piece of construction rebar. The steel bar had been jammed through his right eyeball through his brain and embedded into the dirt.
His secretary entered his office with a folder of contracts when she caught him gazing at the portrait of a stoic-looking, bearded man wearing a chest armor and a Roman tunic. He seemed to be whispering to it.
“I’m sorry, sir—Marcus,” she said. “Did you say something?”
“Nothing. Just talking to myself,” he replied, smiling. He quoted the end of the passage he’d just recited, the one that gave him such pleasure after that morning’s reading:
“‘As the dead carcasses of unburied men,
That do corrupt my air, I banish you;
And here remain with your uncertainty!’”
“My, that sounds—poetic,” she said and set the file on his desk. “But I’m not sure I know what it means.”
He glanced up at the portrait on the wall and let his gaze linger.
“It’s a little secret between the General and me.”
* * * * *
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