Dig Two Graves by Kim Powers

Author:Kim Powers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: F+W Media

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

It was another country, the Canaan gym, an ivy-covered building as grand and glorious as the chapel on campus, because they were both built in homage to something bigger: the ability of the body to transcend the mind and what it thought of as pain. They were places of worship and history, these old New England gyms, where boys became men and gloried in the call of brotherhood, the call of sportsmanship, where ghosts were still trapped from their earliest days in the 1850s. The fists that pounded punching bags. The thwack of ropes, interlaced with rhythmic, jumping feet. The smell of resin powder and leather gloves, liniment and sweat that had dripped off bodies and been ground into the floorboards for decades; it was all still there. The sounds from all those years ago trapped there: hits and grunts, falls on sparring mats that had lost their cushioning, water trickling down in old showers.

It was a strange refuge for someone as scrawny and ill-equipped, in every possible way, as TJ Markson. Pumping away on exercise equipment he could barely control, listening to an iPod through earplugs, it was as if TJ were learning another language by even stepping inside, a forgotten language. But it was the place TJ went when he wanted to hurt himself, when he wanted to remind himself of his teacher and what he’d set out to do to him. It was the place TJ went to remind himself of his father, the person he was doing it for. He didn’t need the ghosts of all the athletes who had come before to haunt him; the ghost of his father was never far away.

The image of him, hanging from that goal post.

TJ didn’t know if his father had meant for him to find his body, when he was just seventeen years old, his senior year in high school. That would remain one of the great mysteries of TJ’s life, and Mark Casey’s death. That would be the one little thing about his father that TJ was willing to give him a break on, that the discovery just might have been the worst bit of coincidence ever, like his father had always said the worst coincidence in his life was being on the same Olympic team as Ethan “Hercules” Holt.

That was the one great story of Mark Casey’s life; he repeated it to his son, every chance he got. He drank and repeated it. He ate hamburgers at the Dairy Queen or the Sonic and repeated it, as little Troy Jefferson Casey tried to hide his Illustrated Classic Comics in his lap and read them, while pretending to listen to his father. They had a lot of meals at the Dairy Queen and the Sonic, before his father would have to go off and find another job when he’d lost the one he just had, always thinking he was better than everyone else. Maybe that’s the one way father and son were so much alike; Troy

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