Shakespeare's Champion

Cleve glanced from me to Jack and back again, and said, "Reckon ole Jared got lucky."



Immediately the tension eased. Jack slowly looped his arm around me. His fingers bit into my shoulder.



"Well, you were being a gentleman," Darcy said approvingly.



"Now you got your question answered, can I get in my apartment?" Jack said, making an effort to sound amiable. But I could hear the anger pulsing in his voice.



"Sure, man. We're going this very minute," said Darcy, a broad grin on his face that I wanted to wipe right off. I promised myself I would if I got half a chance.



Jack stepped between Darcy and Cleve, put his key in the lock, and turned it as they started down the stairs. He automatically stood back to let me enter first, then shut the door behind us. Jack relocked it and went over to the window to see if his "friends" really left.



Then he swung around to face me, his anger open now and misdirected at me.



"We talked about this," he began. "No one was going to connect us."



"Okay, I'm gone," I said shortly, and started for the door.



"Talk to me," he demanded.



I sighed. "How else could you have gotten out of that?" I asked.



"Well, I... could have told them I'd driven to Little Rock to see my girlfriend."



"And when they said, 'Then why was your car parked here all night?' "



Frustrated, Jack brought his fist down on a little desk by the window. "Dammit, I won't have it!"



I shrugged. No point in all this now. If he was going to act like a jerk, I'd go downstairs and get my mop. I had to work.



When I was on the top stair, he caught me. His good hand clamped down on my shoulder like iron. I stopped dead. I turned very slowly and said to him in my sincerest voice, "How about saying, 'Thanks, Lily, for bailing me out, even though you had to stand there and be leered at for the second time in twelve hours'?"



Jack turned whiter around the mouth than he had been, and his hand dropped from my shoulder.



"And don't you ever, ever restrain me again," I told him, my eyes staring directly into his.



I turned, and with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, I went down the stairs. When I came up with the mop, I stood on the landing for a second, listening. His apartment was silent. I went into Deedra's to work.



So much drama, so early in the morning, left me exhausted. I scarcely registered the unusual order in Deedra's apartment; it was as if she was trying to show she'd changed her social habits by keeping her apartment neater. As I put away her clean underwear, I noted the absence of the pile of naughty pictures of herself she had kept underneath her bras. I expected to feel good about Deedra's changed lifestyle, but instead, I could barely manage to finish my cleaning.



As I dumped the last waste can into a plastic bag, I admitted to myself that even more than tired, I felt sad. It would have been a pleasant treat to have had a morning to think of Jack in the relaxed warmth of good sex, in the glow of - what could I call it? Happiness. But, thanks to his pride - as I saw it - we'd ended on a sour note.



There was a pile of pierced earrings on Deedra's dresser, and I decided to just sit there and pair them up. For a minute or two that was simple and satisfying; after all, they match or they don't. But my restless mind began wandering again.



A pretend robbery during a mysterious meeting at Winthrop Sporting Goods, in the middle of a most inclement night. The blue flyers that had caused so much trouble. The long, heavy black bags that the Winthrop house had been burgled to get - where were they now? The three unsolved murders in tiny Shakespeare. The out-of-place Mookie Preston. The bombing. I couldn't make sense of all the pieces at one time, but the shape of it was wrong. This was no group of fanatics with a coherent manifesto at work; it all seemed very sloppy. For the first time, I considered what Carrie had said about the timing of the bombing. If the goal had been to kill lots of black people, the explosion had come too late. If the goal had been to "merely" terrorize the black community, the explosion had come too early. The deaths in the church had enraged the African-American people of Shakespeare. Whoever had planted the bomb did not represent white supremacy, but white stupidity.



As I locked Deedra's apartment - scorning to even cross the landing and listen at Jack's door - and descended the stairs to drive to Mookie Preston's modest rental, I thought about the unexpected, normally concealed aspects of the people around me, the part I was seeing the past few days. It was like seeing their skeleton beneath their outer flesh.



Bluff, hearty good ole boy Darcy Orchard, for example: I'd worked out with Darcy for years, and seen only the good-natured sportsman. But last night I'd seen him tracking a man, at the head of a pack of hunters. Beneath his yard-dog exterior, Darcy was a wolf.



I'd always known that about Tom David Meicklejohn. He was naturally cruel and sly, naturally an able and remorseless hunter. He was reliable in what he undertook, whether good or bad. But Darcy had kept this facet of his character buried, and something or someone had unearthed it and used it.



For the first time, I allowed myself to imagine what would have happened if the pack had caught Jack.



And I found myself almost sure they would have killed him.



I began work at Mookie's house in a grim mood. Of course her place couldn't be as dirty as it had been the first time I'd cleaned it, but every week she did a grand job of retrashing it. I scrubbed the bathroom in silence, trying to ignore the little questions and comments she tossed to me as she passed by the open door.



Mookie showed me her cuts from the bombing. They'd been caused by flying splinters, and they were healing well. She inquired after my leg. Would the woman never shut up and settle down to her work?



Once I got the bathroom decent again, I moved into the bedroom. This old house had big rooms and high ceilings, and Mookie's low modern bed and chest of drawers looked out of place. The bare wooden floors made a bit of an echo, footsteps clacking unnaturally loud. Maybe she liked the noise, maybe it kept her company.



"You know," Mookie said, making one of her abrupt appearances, "they haven't got a clue who planted that bomb." She'd been reading the papers. I hadn't.



"Is that right?" I asked. I really didn't want to talk.



"The device that started the explosion was a wristwatch, like the one you've got on," Mookie said. She was very angry, very intense. I'd had enough angry and intense already today. "All the chemicals in the bomb were things you could order from any chemical supply house. All you'd have to do is not order everything from one place, so they won't get suspicious."



"I wouldn't know," I said pointedly.



"It's in books you can check out of the library here!" she said, her hands flying up in a gesture of complete exasperation. "It's in books you can buy at the bookstore in Montrose!"



"So it's probably almost as easy to make a bomb as it is to buy a rifle," I said, my voice calm and even.



The rifle was not under her bed any longer.



"A rifle's legal."



"Sure." I was careful not to turn and look her in the eyes. I didn't want any kind of confrontation. That, too, I'd had enough of already today.



After I changed the sheets and dusted the bedroom, I looked around for an empty bag to dump the contents of the plastic garbage pail, which was full of soiled tissues, balls of hair, and gum wrappers. There, next to a Reebok shoe box, was a dark red plastic bag, and it bore the distinctive logo of Winthrop Sporting Goods.



I tried to persuade myself that there was nothing odd about this. People did mostly buy their sports shoes at Winthrop's, because the store carried a great selection and would special-order what they didn't have in stock.



But I'd seen another red plastic bag the week before. And I remembered seeing yet another crammed into the kitchen garbage. Mookie was going to Winthrops' very frequently.



Slowly I dumped the garbage pail into the bag and went to the bathroom to empty another one. Mookie barely glanced at me as I cleared the one by her desk. Her coarse reddish hair was braided today, and she was wearing wind-suit pants and a turtleneck. She was tapping computer keys with great energy. The same charts were taped to the wall behind her.



There was a pile of library books on the desk, studded with slips of paper marking pages she wanted to refer to.



"How does a genealogist work?" I asked.



For once, she'd been engrossed in what she was doing, and she took a minute to focus on my question.



"Mostly by computer these days," she answered. "Which is great for me. I do work for a company that advertises in small specialty magazines, or regional mags, like Southern Living. We trace your ancestry for you if you give us some basic information. The Mormons, oddly enough, have the best records; I think they believe they can baptize their ancestors and get them into heaven that way, or something. Then there are county records, and so on.



"Did you want your folks traced?" she asked me now, a hint of amusement in the set of her mouth.



"I know who my family is," I said, and spoke the truth, for my mother's idea of a great Christmas present was a family tree ready-framed for my wall. For all I knew, she'd hired Mookie Preston's company to do the research.



"Then you're lucky. Most Americans can only name as far back as their great-grandparents. They're shaky after that."



I tried to think of myself as lucky.



I failed.



I wanted to sit in the battered armchair in front of her desk and ask her what I really needed to know. Why was she here? What trouble was she getting into? Would I come to work next week and find her dead, for sticking her nose into a hornet's nest and getting stung?



Mookie laughed uneasily. "You're looking at me funny, Lily."



Bits of information slid around in my head and rearranged into a pattern. Lanette had come looking for Mookie secretly one night. Mookie had moved to town right after Darnell Glass had been killed. Mookie had an Illinois license plate.



Lanette had returned to Shakespeare after living in Chicago for a time. I studied the round line of Mookie's cheeks and the strong column of her neck, and then I knew why she seemed familiar.



I gave Mookie a brisk nod and went back to work on the kitchen. Mookie was Darnell's half-sister. But there seemed no point in talking to Mookie about it: Strictly speaking, it wasn't my business, and Mookie knew better than anyone who she was and what she had to mourn. I wondered whose idea it had been to keep silent. Had Mookie wanted to do some kind of undercover work on the murder of her brother, or had Lanette been unwilling to admit to the town that she'd had a liaison with a white man?



I wondered if Lanette had left for Chicago pregnant.



I wondered if the father was still alive, still here in Shakespeare. I wondered if he and Mookie had talked.



The rifle, black and brown and deadly, had spooked me. I hadn't seen loose firearms in anyone's house since I began cleaning. I'd polished my share of gun cabinets, but I'd never found one unsecured and its contents easily available; which didn't mean the guns hadn't been there, in night tables and closets, just that they hadn't been quite so ... accessible. I felt I hadn't been meant to see the rifle, that Mookie's carelessness had been a mistake. I had no idea what Arkansas gun laws were, since I'd never wanted to carry a gun myself. Maybe the rifle was locked in Mookie's car trunk.



I remembered the targets. If they were typical of Mookie's marksmanship, she was a good shot.



I thought of the pack of men who'd been after Jack. Darcy knew Mookie's name and address. I thought of him thinking the same thoughts about Mookie that I'd been thinking.



I gathered up my things and told Mookie I was leaving. She was coming outside to check her mailbox at the same time, and after she'd paid me we walked down the driveway together. I thought hard about what to say, if to speak at all.



Almost too late, I made up my mind. "You should go," I said. Her back was to me. I already had one foot in the car.



She twisted halfway around, paused for a moment. "Would you?" She asked.



I considered it. "No," I said finally.



"There, then." She collected her mail and passed me again on her way back into that half-empty echoing house. She acted as though I wasn't there.



When I got home that night, all the sleeplessness of the night before and the emotional strain of the day hit me in the face. It would have done me good to go to karate, blow off some tension. But I was so miserable I couldn't bring myself to dress for it. Waves of black depression rolled over me as I sat at my bare kitchen table. I thought I'd left death behind me when I'd found this little town, picked it off the map because it was called Shakespeare and my name was Bard - as good a reason as any to settle somewhere, I'd figured at the time. I'd tried so many places after I'd gotten out of the hospital: from my parents' home to Jackson, Mississippi, to Waverly, Tennessee... waitressed, cleaned, washed hair in a salon, anything I could leave behind me when I walked out the door at the end of the workday.



Then I'd found Shakespeare, and Shakespeare needed a maid.



When Pardon Albee had died, it had been a small thing, an individual thing. But this that was happening now, this craziness ... it was generated by a pack mentality, something particularly terrifying and enraging to me. I'd experienced men in packs.



I thought of Jack Leeds, who would never be part of any pack. He'd get over being mad at me ... or he wouldn't. It was out of my hands. I would not go to him, no matter how many grieved girlfriends and widows passed through my mind. Sometimes I hated chemistry, which could play such tricks with your good sense, your promises to yourself.