Shakespeare’s Champion

Chapter Three

Driving home from my last job of the day, I became acutely aware of how tired I was. I’d had little sleep the night before, I’d had a full working day, and I’d observed a lot of puzzling behavior.

But Claude’s personal car, a burgundy Buick, was parked in front of my house. On the whole, I was glad to see it.

His window was rolled down, and I could hear his radio playing “All Things Considered,” the public-radio news program. Claude was slumped down in the driver’s seat, his eyes closed. I wondered how long he had been waiting, since someone had stuck a blue sheet of paper under his windshield wiper. I could feel a smile somewhere inside me as I pulled into my carport and turned off the ignition. I’d missed him.

I walked quietly down the drive. I bent to his ear.

“Hey, hotshot,” I whispered.

He smiled before his eyes flew open.

“Lily,” he said, as if he enjoyed saying it. His hand went up to smooth his mustache, now more salt-and-pepper than brown.

“You going to sit out here or you going to come in?”

“In, now that you’re here to offer.”

As Claude emerged from his Buick, I pulled the blue flyer from under his passenger-side wiper. I figured it was an ad for the new pizza place. I glanced at the heading idly.

“Claude,” I said.

He’d been retucking his shirtail. “Yep?”

“Look.”

He took the sheet of blue paper from me, studied the dark print for a moment.

“Shit,” he said disgustedly. “This is exactly what Shakespeare needs.”

“Yes indeed.”

TAKE BACK YOUR OWN, the headline read. In smaller print, the text read:

The white male is an endangered species. Due to government interference, white males cannot get the jobs they want or defend their families. ACT NOW!! BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!!! Join us in this struggle. We’ll be calling you. TAKE BACK YOUR OWN. We’ve been shoved around enough. PUSH BACK!

“No address or phone number,” Claude observed.

“Dr. Sizemore got one, too.” I remembered the color, though naturally I hadn’t extracted the sheet from the dentist’s garbage can.

Claude shrugged his heavy shoulders. “No law against it, stupid as it seems.”

Northern Arkansas had hosted several white supremacist organizations over the past few decades. I wondered if this was an offshoot of one of them, one that had migrated south.

Everywhere I went, in the grocery, in the doctor’s office, the rare occasions I worked at one of the churches, people all complained about not having enough time, having too much to do in the time they had available. It seemed to me after reading “Take Back Your Own” that some people just weren’t busy enough.

I crumpled the thing in my hand, turned and went up the stepping stones to my front door, my keys already out and ready to turn in both locks. Claude stretched. It was a large stretch for a large man.

He followed me in. I tensed, thinking he’d try to kiss me again, but he just began a rambling monologue about the trouble he was having scheduling enough cars on the streets during Halloween, when the fun tended to get too rowdy.

I was occupied in emptying my pockets onto the kitchen counter, a soothing little ritual. I don’t carry a purse when I’m working-it’s just one more thing to tote in and out.

“Thank you for the flowers,” I said, my back still to him.

“It was my pleasure.”

“The flowers,” I began, and then stopped to take another deep breath. “They are very pretty. And I liked the card,” I added, after another moment.

“Can I give you a hug?” he asked cautiously.

“Better not,” I said, trying to sound matter-of-fact.

On the card, he’d written that he missed my company. Of course, that wasn’t true. Claude might enjoy my conversation, but his fundamental goal was getting me in bed. I sighed. So what else was new on the man/woman front?

I was more convinced than ever that intimacy wasn’t a good idea for either of us.

I didn’t say so, not just then; and that wasn’t normal for me. But that evening, I wanted a friend. I wanted the company of a person I liked, to sit with me and drink coffee at my table. Though I knew it would prolong Claude’s expectations, I temporarily bought into the illusion that it was only my companionship he wanted.

We did have coffee and a piece of fruit together, and a casual sort of conversation; but maybe because I was being in some sense deceptive, the warmth I’d hoped to feel didn’t come.

Claude objected when I changed for karate class, but I never miss it if I can help it. I promised him that when I returned we’d go to dinner in Montrose, and I invited him to stay at my place and watch the football game on my TV while I was gone, since it had a bigger screen than his little portable. As I got in my car, I had a weary conviction that I should have told him to go on home.

I strode through the main room at Body Time, trying to look forward to the stress-reducing workout I was about to get. But mostly I felt… not very pleased with myself.

Though I’d been in there many times since Del had died, I always glanced at the corner where Del’s body had rested on the bench. A smaller copy of Del’s second-place trophy from the Marvel Gym competition the year before was still in its prominent position in the display case by the drinks cooler, since the gym where a winner trained was always recognized along with the winner.

I stopped to admire the shiny cup on its wooden stand, read the engraving. In the glass front of the display case, I could see the reflection of other potential champions as they went through their evening routines. I moved my hand up and down slightly to make sure I was there, too.

I shook my head at my reflection and continued down the hall to the open double doors of the aerobics/karate room. I bowed in the doorway to show respect, and entered. Janet Shook was already in her gi, its snowy whiteness setting off her dark hair and eyes. She was holding onto the barre, practicing side kicks. Marshall was talking to Carlton Cockroft, my next-door neighbor and my accountant, whom I hadn’t seen in at least a week. There was a new woman limbering up, a woman with very long blond hair and a deep sun-bed tan. She was wearing a gi with a brown belt, and I regarded her with respect.

Raphael, who hadn’t set foot in Body Time since the morning he’d left in a huff, was practicing the eight-point blocking system with Bobo Winthrop. I was glad to see Raphael, glad that whatever had eaten at him had eased up. As I watched the two spar, I noticed for the first time that Bobo was as tall as Raphael. I had to stop thinking of him as a boy.

“Yee-hah, Lily,” Bobo called cheerfully. I hadn’t thought Bobo’s naturally sunny nature would keep him down for long, and it was reassuring to see him smile and look less troubled. He and Raphael finished, and Bobo walked over to me as I finished tying my obi. I had time to think that Bobo looked like an all-American action hero in his white gi, when he simply reached over to place a large hand on each side of my waist, squatted slightly, and picked me up.

I had not been handled like that since I’d become an adult, and the sensation of being lifted and held up in the air abruptly returned me to childhood. I found myself laughing, looking down at Bobo, who was grinning up at me. Over his shoulder, I glimpsed the black-haired stranger, standing in the hall. His eyes were on me, and he was smiling a little as he patted his face with a towel.

Marshall, nodding at Black Ponytail, shut the double doors.

Bobo put me down.

I made a mock strike to his throat and he blocked me too late.

“Would’ve gotten you,” I warned him. “You’re stronger, but I’m quicker.”

Bobo was grinning at the success of his horseplay, and before I could move away, he gripped my wrists with his strong hands. As I stepped closer to him, I turned my palms up, bringing my hands up against his thumbs, and was free. I pantomimed chopping him in the neck with the sides of my hands. Then I patted him on his big shoulder and stepped away before he had any more ideas.

“Someday I’ll get you,” Bobo called after me, shaking his finger.

“You get Lily, you’re going to be sorry,” Raphael remarked. “This gal can eat you for breakfast.”

Bobo turned dark red. I realized he’d read a double entendre into Raphael’s remark. I turned away to hide my grin.

“Line up!” Marshall said sternly.

The blond woman was the highest-ranking student present. She took her place first in line. My belt is green, with one brown stripe. I took a deep breath, warned myself against unworthy feelings, and prepared myself to be pleasant.

“Kiotske,” Marshall said. We snapped to attention, our heels together.

“Rei.” We bowed to him, and he to us.

We worked through the familiar pain of three minutes in the shiko dachi position-pretty much like sitting on air-and calisthenics. Marshall was in a tough mood tonight. I didn’t want to be petty enough to think he was giving us extra work because he was trying to impress the new class member; but he extended our sit-ups to one hundred. So we also did a hundred leg lifts and a hundred push-ups.

I was paired with the new woman, instead of Janet, for sit-ups. Her legs, hooked with mine, felt like bands of iron. She wasn’t breathing heavily after eighty reps, though the next twenty were a little work. She broke into a light sweat after leg lifts, and was breathing a little hard after a hundred pushups. But she had the energy to smile at me as she rose to her feet. I turned slightly to Raphael and gave him a look. He wiggled his eyebrows at me. We were impressed.

“Sanchin dachi blocking posture for jodan uki,” Marshall instructed. “Komite!”

We assumed the correct position, right foot sweeping inward and forward, stopping when its heel was parallel with the toes of the left foot. I watched the blond out of the corner of my eye, wondering if she was from another discipline. She was, but she was also a quick study; watching Marshall intently, she swept her right foot in the correct half-arc and turned her toes in at a forty-five-degree angle to her body, her knees flexed slightly. Her left hand moved into chamber by her ribs, and her right formed a fist, as her right arm bent so that the fist faced her body at shoulder height.

As we went through kihon, practicing our strikes and blocks, I found myself distracted by my new neighbor. I made a determined effort to block her out of my consciousness. From then on, I felt more comfortable, and class went better. Marshall paired me with Carlton for practice. Between breaking free from each other and restraining each other, Carlton and I exchanged neighborhood news. He’d heard we were going to get new streetlights, and that the ownership of the empty lot at the corner-which I’d always thought was waste ground-had been decided among the five children of an elderly lady who’d passed away four years ago. What the new owner would do with the area, which would certainly be a challenge to fit a house on, Carlton hadn’t yet discovered.

As I used one finger to jab the pressure point in Carlton’s upper forearm, the one that made his knees crumple, he told me that he’d found a sheet of blue paper on his car when he’d come out to get his mail that afternoon. “Nuts,” he commented.

I hoped everyone would dismiss the flyer so thoroughly. Then Carlton took his turn and pressed too hard, and from my position on the floor I looked up at him with my eyebrows raised.

When we had been dismissed, the blond drifted over to Marshall. Her hair flowed down to her butt, thick and straight, and though the youthful style didn’t exactly match her apparent age, the effect was definitely enough to attract lots of attention. Janet was scowling as she sat on the floor to tie her shoes.

I was ready to go, having grabbed my gym bag and keys, when Marshall beckoned me over.

“Lily,” he said, with a broad smile, “this is Becca Whitley, Pardon’s niece.”

Pardon Albee, the owner of the apartment building next to my house, had passed away the previous spring. Becca Whitley had taken her own sweet time in coming to check out her inheritance. One of the tenants in the apartment house, Marie Hofstettler, a very old woman who was one of my favorite clients, had told me the same lawyer who’d hired me to clean the halls had been collecting the rent for the past few months. And Deedra had told me that when her lease had expired her rent had gone up.

“I know I’ve been slow to get to Shakespeare to see to settling Uncle Pardon’s estate,” the blond said, chiming in on my thoughts in a way that focused my wandering attention firmly. I looked at her directly for the first time. She was narrow-faced, with strong but scaled-down features. The deep tan was freckled. Her eyes were a bright I-wear-blue-contacts sapphire, and heavily made up. She also wore candy-pink lipstick and lined her lips with a darker shade. The effect stopped short of vampiric; but it was definitely predatory.

Becca Whitley was saying, “I had a divorce to settle in Dallas, and an apartment to clean out.”

“So you’re moving to Shakespeare?” I asked, hardly able to conceal my amazement. I took in her long mane of Lady

Clairol hair, and the cone-shaped breasts bulging at her gi, and thought she would surely stir the local roosters up. Marshall was strutting around practically wiggling his crest and crowing. No wonder tonight he’d spared me most of those wounded looks he’d been casting me the past two weeks. I had to repress an impulse to snort.

“I think I’ll just live in Uncle Pardon’s apartment, at least for now,” Becca Whitley was saying. “It’s so convenient.”

“I hope Shakespeare isn’t too quiet for you after such a big city,” I said. I realized that when I thought about Marshall’s interest in Becca Whitley, the pang I felt was very small, almost negligible, which was only right.

“Oh, I’ve lived in Austin, which is really just a big town,” Becca said. “But the past few months I’ve been in Dallas, and I couldn’t stand the traffic and the pressure. See, I just got divorced, and I need a new life for myself.”

“Any children?” Janet asked hopefully. She’d come up behind me.

“Not a one,” our newest Shakespearean responded happily. “Just too busy, I guess.”

Marshall was trying to conceal his relief just as hard as Janet was trying to conceal her chagrin.

“I’ve been cleaning the apartment halls since Pardon died,” I said. “Do you want me to keep on, or have you made other plans?”

“I expect I’ll be doing it,” Becca said.

I nodded and gathered my things together. The extra money had been pleasant, but working late on Saturday hadn’t.

Our sensei was still telling Becca how much we wanted her to come back to class as Janet and I bowed at the door on our way out.

“Screw her,” Janet said quietly and viciously after we’d reached the parking lot.

It seemed to me it wouldn’t be too long before Marshall tried to do just that, and Carlton, longtime most eligible bachelor in Shakespeare, had seemed interested, too.

I liked Janet pretty well, and I could see she was chagrined at the sexy and striking Becca Whitley’s appearance and Marshall’s obvious approval. Janet had been waiting for Marshall to notice her for a couple of years.

“She’ll never last in Shakespeare,” I told the disappointed woman. I was surprised to hear my own voice.

“Thanks, Lily,” Janet said, sounding equally surprised. “We’ll have to wait and see.” To my amazement, she gave me a half-hug before unlocking her Trooper.

When I came in through the kitchen door, I could hear my television. Claude was parked in the double recliner watching a football game. He looked unnervingly at home. He waved a casual hand when I called “Hello,” so I didn’t hurry as I showered and dressed. When I emerged, once again made up and polished, Claude was in the kitchen drinking a glass of iced tea.

“What do you think of your new landlady?” I asked.

“The Whitley woman? Looks like a raccoon, don’t she, with all that eye makeup?” he said lazily.

I smiled. “Ready to eat?” I asked.

Soon we were driving toward Montrose, the nearest large town. It lay west and slightly north of Shakespeare, and it was the retail hub for many small towns like Shakespeare. Montrose, which boasted a population of around forty thousand year-round, more during college sessions, was where Shakespeareans went when they didn’t want to make the somewhat longer northeast drive to Little Rock.

I’d never been enthusiastic about Montrose, a town which could have been dropped anywhere in the United States without its visitors knowing the difference. Montrose had no character; it had shopping. There were all the usual fast-food places and all the usual chain stores, and a five-screen movie-plex, and a Wal-Mart Super Center. In my view, the main attractions of Montrose were its superior library, its one good independent bookstore, and perhaps four fairly good non-chain restaurants. And a couple of decent chain ones.

In the months I’d been seeing Marshall, I’d spent more time in Montrose than I had in the four years I’d lived in Shakespeare. Evenings at home had little charm for Marshall.

We’d tried every restaurant, sat through Jackie Chan and Steven Seagal movies, visited every sporting goods store to compare their prices to Winthrops‘, and done our weekly shopping at the Super Center.

This evening, Claude suggested a movie. I almost agreed out of courtesy. But remembering the uncomfortable hours with Marshall, I admitted, “I really don’t like going to the movies.”

“That so?”

“I don’t like sitting with a lot of strangers in the dark, having to listen to them shift around and rattle paper and talk. I’d rather wait until it comes out on video and see it at home.”

“Okay,” he said. “What would you like to do?”

“I want to eat at El Paso Grande and go to the bookstore,” I said.

Silence. I looked over at him out of the corners of my eyes.

“What about Catch the Wave and the bookstore?” he countered.

“Done,” I said, relieved. “You don’t like Tex-Mex?”

“Ate there last week when I had to come to Montrose to the courthouse.”

As we waited on our order in the seafood restaurant, Claude said, “I think Darnell Glass’s mother is going to bring a civil suit against the Shakespeare Police Department.”

“Against the department?” I asked sharply. “That’s unfair. It should be against Tom David.” Tom David Meicklejohn, one of Claude’s patrolmen, had long been on my black list, and after the Darnell Glass incident, he’d moved to the number-one spot.

Suddenly, I wondered if this was the real reason for the flowers, the evening out: this conversation.

“Her lawyer’s also naming Todd Picard. You think you could remember the timing just once more?”

I nodded, but I heaved an internal sigh. I was reluctant to recall the warm black night of The Fight. I’d been interviewed and interviewed about The Fight: That’s what all the Shakespeareans called it. It had taken place in the parking lot of Burger Tycoon, a locally owned hamburger place that competed valiantly with Burger King and McDonald’s, which were both down Main Street a piece.

I’d only come in on the crisis, but I’d read and heard enough later to flesh out what I’d actually seen.

Darnell Glass was sitting in his car in the Burger Tycoon parking lot, talking to his girlfriend. Bob Hodding, trying to pull into the adjacent parking space, hit Glass’s rear bumper. Hodding was white, sixteen years old, a student at Shakespeare High School. Glass was eighteen and in his freshman year at UA Montrose. He had just made the first down payment on his first car. Not too surprisingly, when he heard the unmistakable grinding crunch of the two bumpers tangling, Glass was enraged. He jumped out of his car, waving his hands and shouting.

Hodding was instantly on the offensive, since he knew the reputation of the young man whose car he’d just hit. Darnell Glass had attended the Shakespeare schools until he enrolled in college, and had a reputation as a bright and promising young man. But he was also known to be aggressive and hair-trigger sensitive in his dealings with white peers.

Bob Hodding had been raised with a Confederate flag flying in front of his house. He remembered Glass overreacting to situations at the high school. He wasn’t afraid, since he had three of his buddies in his car, and he wasn’t about to apologize in front of them, or admit his driving had been less than adequate.

A couple of witnesses told Claude later, privately, that Hodding pushed every emotional button he possibly could to further enrage Darnell Glass, including a jibe about Glass’s mother, a junior high school teacher and well-known activist.

It was no surprise to anyone when Glass went ballistic.

And that was where I came in. I hadn’t ever met Darnell Glass or Bob Hodding, but I was there when The Fight began.

So were two policemen.

I’d just pulled into the parking space on the other side of Glass’s, having picked that night of all nights to buy a hamburger instead of cooking for myself, an event so rare it later seemed to me that a cosmic joke had placed me at the punch line. It was a very warm evening in early September; of course, in Shakespeare we have to mow our yards until well into November.

I was wearing my usual T-shirt and baggy jeans, and I’d just finished work. I was tired. I just wanted to get my carry-out food and watch an old movie on television, maybe read a chapter or two of the thriller I’d checked out of the library.

Off-duty Shakespeare patrol officer Todd Picard was in Burger Tycoon picking up his family’s supper. On-duty patrol officer Tom David Meicklejohn had pulled in to get a Coke. But I didn’t know there were two serving officers of the law present.

Not that their presence had made any difference. Though, of course, it should have.

I’d seen wiry Darnell wisely get in the first punch, and I saw the taller, more muscular Bob Hodding gag and double over, and then I watched his friends swarm over Darnell like angry bees.

If I’d had a gun or a whistle, maybe the sudden noise would have halted them, but I only had my fists. These were strong high school boys full of adrenaline and I had my work cut out for me. Not wanting to seriously hurt the little bastards made my job more difficult: I could drop them fairly easily if I was inclined to cause some lasting damage. Since Bob Hodding was temporarily out of the picture, puking his guts out in the crepe myrtles lining the parking lot, I concentrated on his buddies.

I moved up behind the tallest boy, who was raining punches on Darnell Glass. First I pinched a pressure point in the upper shoulder of the boy, who was standing between the other attackers, with my right hand. With my left, I pressed a point in his upper arm. The boy shrieked. Though he began to crumple, he still provided me with cover from the black-haired kid on my right, who was swinging blindly at me, but standing legs a-spraddle… someone who’d never fought in the street. I kicked him in the balls, just a glancing blow, a pretty neat kogen geri.

That took care of him.

The boy I’d disposed of first finally hit the ground wailing. He tried to scramble back, out of the way, to figure out what had happened.

From the corner of my eye I finally noticed the patrol car. I saw Deputy Tom David Meicklejohn climb out of it. He did nothing but smile his mean redneck smile and extend his arms to bar spectators from joining in the brawl. A man in civilian clothes, a bag and a cardboard tray with five cups in holders bogging him down, was yelling at Tom David. I later learned this was off-duty officer Todd Picard.

Meanwhile, the third boy grasped Darnell around the waist and tried to lift him off his feet, a wrestling move. Losing patience and temper, I hook-kicked him behind his knee, and of course his legs folded. But the parking lot sloped, and he brought Darnell down with him. Darnell rolled rapidly to the side. I slipped on a wrapper on the pavement and hit the ground myself, and the boy’s flailing foot, shod in a boot, caught me painfully right at the joint of my right hip. I rolled away and jumped to my feet before the pain could get its teeth into me. When the wrestler struggled to his knees, I pulled his arm up behind him. “I’ll break it if you move,” I said. Most people recognize absolute sincerity. He didn’t move.

Being on the ground is most often bad in a fight, but Darnell, though bleeding in several places on his face and badly bruised, had not lost his spirit. Bob Hodding, slightly recovered from the punch to the stomach and frantic with rage, staggered toward Darnell for another try. Darnell kicked up at Bob, who staggered back into the arms of a Marine who happened to be on leave and visiting his family. This huge young man, right out of basic training, stepped around Tom David to grip Bob Hodding with a hold like handcuffs and give him some sound, if unprintable, advice.

I stood panting, scanning the group for another adversary. I was feeling pain in my lip, and I noticed a few spots of bright blood staining my gray T-shirt; an elbow had caught me in the mouth somewhere along the way. I straightened up, evaluated the remaining fight left in the boy I was restraining, decided it was practically nil. The Marine, whose name I never learned, caught my eye and gave me an approving nod.

“Sorry I didn’t get out here earlier,” he said. “That Tae Kwon Do?”

“Goju. For close fighting.”

“My drill sergeant would love you,” he said.

I tried to scrape together a smile.

At that point a noise like a siren went off a few feet away.

It was coming from the mouth of Darnell Glass’s girlfriend,

Tee Lee Blaine. She’d watched the fight from inside the car. Now she scrambled out to help Darnell rise. She was floundering through a spectrum of emotions, from fear for her own safety and Darnell’s, to anger over the dent in the car, to rage that Darnell had been ganged up on. She knew each of the white boys by name, and she gave each of them a few new ones.

I caught Tom David Meicklejohn’s eye. I wanted powerfully to kick him.

He smiled at me. “Keeping back the crowd,” he said succinctly. By then, Todd Picard had deposited the food in his car and was standing by Tom David’s patrol vehicle. Todd looked ashamed. I’d finally recognized him, and if I’d had the energy I’d have slapped him. I expected no better from Tom David, but Todd could have given me a hand.

For the first time, I realized there was quite a crowd. Burger Tycoon is on Main Street (Shakespeare’s not too imaginative about street names) and the restaurant had been full. It was true that if Tom David had not kept the crowd back the incident could have turned into a full-fledged riot; but he had allowed most of this to happen, as I saw it.

Suddenly the hip that had taken the kick began to throb. I’d run out of adrenaline. I eased myself down into a sitting position and leaned my head back against the car.

“Lily! You okay?” a voice called from the crowd, and I saw my neighbor. Carlton, neatly groomed as always, was accompanied by a bosomy brunette with a headful of curls. I remember thinking about his companion for longer than the topic deserved, trying to recall where the woman worked.

It had been nice to have someone ask about my welfare. I was feeling distinctly flat and a little shaky.

“I’ll be fine,” I said. I closed my eyes. I would have to get up in a minute. I couldn’t sit here looking hurt.

Then Claude was bending over me, saying, “Lily! Lily! Are you hurt?”

“Sure,” I said angrily. I opened my eyes. “Having to do your cops’ jobs for them. Help me up.”

Claude extended his hand and I gripped it. He straightened and pulled, and I came up. Maybe not gracefully, but at least I was steady on my feet once I got there.

Darnell Glass was standing by that time, too, but leaning heavily against his car, Tee Lee supporting him on his other side. The Marine let go of his captive, and the white boys were getting into Tom David’s patrol car.

“You have a problem with your officer there,” I told Claude.

“I have more problems than that right now,” he answered quietly, and I observed that the crowd was restless, and hot words were being exchanged among a few young men in the parking lot.

“Get in my car,” he said. “I’ll get the boy and the girl.”

So we all took a ride down to the police station. The rest of the evening was completely miserable. The white boys were all juveniles. Their parents descended in a cloud of buzzing, like angry African bees. One father snapped at me that he ought to sue me for hurting his boy-the one I’d kicked in the groin-and I used his prejudice against him. “I would love to tell the court how a woman beat up your boy and two others,” I said. “Especially when they were ganging up on one young man by himself.” I heard no more comments about suing.

Until now. And I wasn’t the target of the lawsuit.

As our waitress left, Claude spread his napkin in his lap and speared a shrimp. “Tom David was there and did nothing,” he said, just a hint of question in his voice. “Todd was there and did nothing.”

I raised my brows. “That’s right,” I said. “Do you doubt it?” He shot a look at me from under his heavy brows. “Tom David says he had to keep the other people from joining in. Todd says he was afraid he wouldn’t be recognized as an off-duty officer and would be seen as joining in the brawl.”

“Of course they’re going to say that, and there may even be some trace of truth to it. But they also let two other people do their job, me and the Marine. Tom David, for sure, wanted Darnell Glass to get beat up. At the very least, Todd didn’t care if that happened.”

Claude avoided my eyes, clearly unhappy with the idea that a member of his force would let violence go unchecked, even though to my certain knowledge, Claude bore no love whatsoever for Tom David Meicklejohn.

“And Darnell struck the first blow,” he said, again in the tone of one confirming an unpleasant truth.

“Yes. It was a good one.”

“You never met any of those boys beforehand,” Claude said.

“No.”

“Then why so partisan?”

I stared over at him, my fork suspended midway to my mouth with a bit of flounder impaled on the tines. “I didn’t care until they all jumped him,” I said after a moment’s thought. “I would have done the same if Darnell had been white and the other guys black.” I thought about it. Yes, that was true. Then the familiar tide of anger surged up. “Of course, as it turned out, I might have saved my strength and let them go on and stomp him.”

A dull red flush crept up Claude’s face. He believed I was accusing him of something. But I wasn’t, at least not consciously.

Darnell Glass hadn’t lived long after that evening in the Burger Tycoon parking lot.

Four weeks later, he’d been beaten to death in a clearing in the woods north of town.

No one had been arrested for the crime.

“If the rumors are true and Mrs. Glass does bring a suit, you’re sure to be called as witness.” Claude felt obliged to point that out to me, and he wasn’t happy about it, any more than I was.

“I wish we hadn’t started talking about this,” I said, knowing it was futile to say. “If you’re really worried about the future of your police department, thinking it’ll rest on my testimony… I can’t change or shade what I saw. You may not want to be around me.” This wasn’t the right place. I said it too bluntly. And I felt a funny pang when the words left my mouth.

“Is that what you want?” Claude said. His voice was very quiet.

Truth time. “I want to see you if you’re going to be my friend, but I don’t see us becoming lovers. I don’t think that’s right for us.”

“And if I do?” I could see the distance growing in his eyes.

“Claude, I feel comfortable when I’m in your company, but if we have sex that’ll be ruined. I don’t think we can carry this to another dimension.”

“Lily, I’ll always like you,” he said after a long pause. “But I’m at the age and disposition where I’m thinking, I can’t be in law enforcement forever. I want a wife, and a home, and someone to go camping with, someone to decorate the Christmas tree with. That was what I was thinking might happen with you. As I hear it, you’re telling me it’s not gonna.”

God, I hated explaining my emotions.

“I can’t see my way to that, Claude. I just can’t make that leap with you. And if I use up your time trying, you might miss something better.”

“Nothing can be better, Lily. I may find something different, something good. But nothing better.”

“So,” I said quietly. “Here we are in Montrose, have to drive home, have to be with each other. We should have done this in Shakespeare, huh? Then you could go over to your apartment and I could lock my door and we could lick our wounds.”

“I wish I could believe that you have wounds to lick, Lily,” he said. “Let’s go look at some books.”

Of course after the restaurant discussion, the bookstore wasn’t much fun.

I read biographies, mostly; maybe I’m hoping I’ll find the key to making my life lighter by finding out how someone else managed. Or maybe I loved company in my miserable past; I could always find a tougher life than mine. But not tonight.

I found myself thinking not about Claude and myself, but about Darnell Glass.

I glanced at the true crime books, which I cannot stomach any more than I can watch the news on television.

No one would ever write a book about Darnell Glass.

A beating death in Arkansas, especially the beating death of a black male, was not newsworthy, unless whoever’d killed Darnell got arrested and generated some lurid publicity-if the murderer was one of the local ministers maybe, or if Darnell’s death was the first escapade of a flamboyant serial killer.

I had managed to make my way through the newspaper account. The Shakespeare paper did its best to defuse tense situations, but even its brief references to the young man’s long list of injuries made my stomach lurch.

Darnell Glass had suffered a broken jaw, five broken ribs, multiple arm fractures, and the blow that had mercifully killed him, a crushing strike to the skull. He had suffered massive internal injuries consistent with a determined beating.

He’d died surrounded by enemies-in rage, in terror, in disbelief-in an unremarkable clearing in the piney woods.

No one deserved that. Well, I had to amend that thought. I could think of a few people I wouldn’t weep over if they met an identical end. But Darnell Glass, though no saint, was a very smart young man with no criminal record, whose worst crime (apparently) was a bad temper.

“Let’s go,” I said to Claude, and he looked surprised at the shortness of my tone.

All the way back home I kept silent, which Claude perhaps interpreted as regret. Or sulking. Anyway, he gave me a brusque cheek peck on the doorstep that had a sort of chilly finality to it. It seemed to me, watching his broad back retreat, that I’d never see him again. I went inside and looked at the flowers, still beautiful and sweet. I wondered if Claude regretted sending them now. I almost pulled them from the vase to throw away. But that would have been silly, wasteful.

As I prepared for bed, thankful to be alone, I wondered if Marshall’s charge was true. Was I a cold woman?

I could never see myself as cold; self-protective, maybe, but not cold. It seemed to me that underneath the surface, I was always on fire.

I tossed and turned, tried relaxation techniques.

I got up to walk. It was chilly outside now, midnight in late October, and it was windy; before morning it would rain again. I wore a T-shirt, a sweatshirt, sweatpants, and Nikes, all dark shades: I was in a hateful mood, and didn’t want anyone to see me. The streetlights at each corner of my street, Track Street, were dispensing their usual feeble nimbus. Claude’s window was dark, as was every window in the apartment building; an early night for tenants old and new. The Shakespeare Combined Church, or SCC as the members called it, was dark except for some security lights. There was very little movement in the town, period. Shakespeare rises early and goes to bed early, except for the men and women who work the late shift at one or two of the fast-food places, and the people who work nights at the mattress factory or the chicken processing plant, which run round the clock.

I went as far as the lower-middle-class neighborhood in which Darnell Glass had grown up, one of Shakespeare’s few mixed-race areas. I passed the little house Glass’s mother, Lanette, had bought when she moved back to Shakespeare from Chicago. It, too, was dark and silent. None of these homes had garages or porte cocheres, so it was easy to see Lanette Glass was not at home.

But I found out where she was.

She was at Mookie Preston’s house.

While I’d been thinking about my curious cleaning stint at Mookie’s that day, I’d drifted in that direction without conscious thought. So I was opposite the house when Lanette Glass emerged. I wasn’t close enough to see her expression, which the deep shadows of the streetlight behind her would have made difficult anyway, but from the way she walked- shoulders hunched, head shaking slightly from side to side, purse clasped hard against her side-Lanette Glass was a woman in trouble, and a troubled woman.

More and more I wondered about the purposes of the mysterious Mookie Preston.

As a cold breeze stirred my hair, I felt some of its chill creep down my spine. Something was brewing in Shakespeare, something sick and dangerous. I’d always felt comfortable about the state of race relations in my adopted town. There were still taboos, plenty of them, probably several of which I wasn’t even conscious. But there were also blacks in managerial positions, blacks who owned comfortable homes. Several clubs and one church were integrated. The public school system seemed to be functioning with little friction, and Lanette Glass was only one of many black teachers.

The habits and prejudices of over a century weren’t going to vanish overnight, or even in thirty years; and I’d always felt that progress, quiet and slow, was being made.

I wondered now if I’d been in a fool’s paradise. I had assumed that my approval of this change was shared by most people of both races, and I still thought so. But something evil was slithering through Shakespeare, had been for months.

Perhaps three weeks after Darnell Glass had been killed, Len Elgin had been found shot dead in his Ford pickup, on a little-traveled country road just within the city limits. Len, a prosperous white farmer in his fifties, was a genial and intelligent man, a pillar of his church, father of four, and an avid reader and hunter. Len had been a personal friend of Claude’s. Failure to solve Len’s murder had been eating at Claude, and the rumors that spread like wildfire had made handling Len Elgin’s death investigation even more delicate.

One school of thought had Elgin being killed in retaliation for the death of Darnell Glass. Of course the guilty parties, in this version, would be black extremists, even as Glass’s death was ascribed to white extremists.

Another rumor had it as fact that Len was being unfaithful to his wife, Mary Lee, with the wife of another farmer. According to this rumor, the murderer was either Mary Lee, the other farmer (who was named Booth Moore), or Moore’s wife Erica. Those who accused Erica were assuming that Len had terminated their relationship.

Somehow the fight-The Fight-in the Burger Tycoon parking lot had triggered all this.

We were all losing our sense of community; we were subdividing into groups not only by race but by the degree of our intensity of feeling about that race. I thought about the ugly scrawl on Deedra’s car. I thought about Tom David Meicklejohn’s scarcely concealed glee that September night in the parking lot. I remembered glimpsing, through the windows of the limousine following the hearse, Mary Lee Elgin’s face as the funeral cortege passed by. And then, banal in its wrong-headedness, but no less vicious for its banality, the sheet of blue paper under Claude’s windshield wiper.

Surely it was stretching credulity to think that Del Packard’s death in the gym was totally unrelated to the deaths of Darnell Glass and Len Elgin. How could three men be done to death in a town the size of Shakespeare in a space of two months and the killings all be mysterious? If Darnell Glass had been knifed behind a local bar during a fight over a girl, if Len Elgin had been shot in Erica Moore’s bed, if Del had been in the habit of lifting alone and maybe had some undiagnosed physical weakness…

I was making another circuit by the apartments. I looked up at Claude’s window, thinking sadly about the man inside. Would I change my mind about what I’d said, given another chance? I was genuinely fond of Claude, and grateful to him, and he had a lot on his shoulders.

But that was his chosen job. And Darnell Glass’s death had taken place in the county, so that investigation was Sheriff Marty Schuster’s headache. I didn’t know too much about the sheriff, except that he was good at politicking and was a Vietnam veteran. I wondered if Schuster could calm the rising storm that was rattling Shakespeare’s windows.

I had to walk another hour before I could sleep.