Shakespeare’s Landlord

Chapter Five

The room was suddenly airless.

“You don’t really want to know,” I said.

“Of course I do,” Marshall said. “We’re never moving beyond where we are now unless I know that.”

I looked at the mirror beyond Marshall’s shoulder. I saw someone I didn’t recognize.

“People never feel the same about me once they know,” I said. My mouth was suddenly so dry, it was hard to speak.

“I will,” he said.

He wouldn’t. It would ruin the unspoken bond between us-a bond with which, evidently, he was no longer content.

“Why do you want me to talk about it?” My hands were clenched and I could see them shake.

“I can never get to know you better until I know that,” he said with patient certainty. “And I want to get to know you better.”

With one quick movement, I jerked off my T-shirt.

Under it, I was wearing a plain white sports bra. Marshall’s breath hissed as he got a good look at the scars. Not meeting his eyes, I turned a little so he could see the ones that crossed my shoulders like extra bra straps; I rotated back to show him the ones that striped my upper chest; I sat up straight so he could see more thin white scars in an arc pattern descending into the waistband of my pants.

And then I looked him in the eyes.

He did not blink. His jaw was fixed in a hard line. He was making a heroic struggle to keep his face still.

“I felt them when I gripped your shoulder in class last week, but I didn’t know they were so…”

“Extensive?” I asked savagely. I would not let him look away.

“Are your breasts cut, too?” he asked, with a creditable attempt at keeping his voice neutral.

“No. But all around. In circles. In a pattern.”

“Who did this?”

What had happened to me had cut my life in two, more deeply and surely than the knives that had traced bloody festoons on my skin. Unable to stop, I remembered once again, descending into a familiar hell. It had been hot that June…

It had already been hot for a month. I had graduated from college and had been living in Memphis for three years. I had a nice apartment in east Memphis and a desk job at the city’s largest maid and janitorial service, Queen of Clean. In spite of the stupid name, it was a good place to work. I was a scheduler.

I also did spot checks on site and made courtesy calls to customers to see if they were satisfied. I earned a decent salary, and I bought a lot of clothes.

When I left work that Tuesday in June, I was wearing a short-sleeved navy blue dress with big white buttons down the front and white leather pumps. My hair was long and light brown then, and I prided myself on my long, polished fingernails. I was dating one of the co-owners of a bottled-water supply company.

My worst problem was the transmission of my car, which had already required extensive repairs. When I left work, I began to worry that it was going to eat up more of my money.

The car made it down the freeway to the Goodwill Road exit before I had to stop. There was a service station in sight on Goodwill, and lots of traffic, people everywhere. I walked down the exit ramp, nervous about how narrow it seemed when it had to accommodate a woman on foot and cars. Unexpectedly, a van coming slowly down the ramp stopped beside me. I thought, They’re going to offer me a ride to the service station.

The passenger door was thrown open by someone sitting in the back, who immediately retracted into his crouch behind the passenger’s seat. The man in the driver’s seat was holding a gun.

When I accepted it for what it was, rather than trying to imagine it was something else, my heart began racing, its thud so loud, I could hardly make out what he was saying.

“Get in or I’ll shoot you where you stand.”

I could jump off the exit ramp and get hit by a car speeding on the road below, or I could tell him to shoot, or I could get in the van.

I made the wrong decision. I got in.

The man who had picked me up, I found out later, was an accomplished kidnapper named Louis Ferrier, called “Nap” by his customers in acknowledgment of his expertise in stealing women and children, most of whom vanished forever. The abducted victims who did resurface were without exception dead, either mentally or physically. Nap had done jail time, but not for his specialty.

I was handcuffed the minute I got in the van by the man crouched behind the passenger’s seat, an occasional accomplice of Nap’s named Harry Wheeler. Harry reached around the seat, grabbed my hands, cuffed them, and held the chain that led from the cuffs. Then he blindfolded me. The windows of the van were heavily tinted. No one noticed.

During that dreadful ride out of Memphis, they just talked as if I wasn’t there. I was in such a state of terror, I hardly knew what they said. I could feel death sitting in my lap.

At the end of the ride, which had led north from Memphis, Nap and Harry exited the highway and met with a representative of a biker gang at a prearranged rendezvous. Nap had rented me to the gang for one night, though I didn’t know that.

Four men and one woman took me to an abandoned shack in the middle of some fields. One of the men had grown up around there and was familiar with the place. They attached the chain through my handcuffs to the metal head rail of an old cot. I was still blindfolded. The men drank, ate, and raped me. When that got old, they used the knife on my chest. They cut a circle around the base of each breast. They cut zigzags in the flesh covering my chest. They cut a target on my stomach, with my navel as the bull’s-eye. They laughed as they did this, and I, chained to a dilapidated bed, screamed and screamed, until they slapped me and told me to stop or the knife would go deeper. And they raped me again.

The woman said very little during all this. I refused to believe, at first, that a woman could be present and not help me. When I realized the softer voice did indeed belong to a woman, I pleaded with her and begged her for help. I got no reply, but during a time when the men all seemed to be sleeping or outside urinating, the woman’s voice came close to my ear and said, “I lived through it. You can, too. They’re not cutting you bad. You haven’t lost anything but a little blood.”

I had not known that Nap was supposed to return for me, that I had been rented, not sold. I expected to die when the men tired of me and were ready to leave; I had had eighteen hours to anticipate my death.

I’d attached the name Rooster to the largest man. Rooster had a wonderful idea as they packed up their gear the next day. He had a cheap little revolver he’d picked up on the street, and he left it with me. He also left me one bullet.

“Now, you can use this on yourself,” he said genially. “Or you can save it for Nap, when he comes back to get you, and use it on him. I figure it’ll take you from now till he gets here to learn how to use it.”

“Be better if we killed her ourselves,” said a voice I hadn’t attached to a name or weight.

“But look at it this way,” urged Rooster. “If she kills Nap, we can always say she wanted to have sex with us, if worse comes to worst and somehow she finds us, though that ain’t likely. But if we kill her, Nap’ll come after us when we least expect it. Ain’t you kind of sick of him? I know I am.”

This made good sense to the rest. Leaving me with a gun appealed to their sense of humor, too. As they left, they were laughing over Nap’s surprise, and placing bets over whether or not I would choose to kill him or myself.

For some minutes after I heard the motorcycles buzz down the dirt road to rejoin the blacktop, I lay in a stupor. I could not believe I was still alive. I didn’t know if I was glad or not. I wondered how long I would survive, with the wounds I had. My vaginal area was at best badly bruised; at worst, I had internal rips. I was oozing blood from the cutting, and the pain was dreadful, though I knew the cuts were not deep.

Very gradually, I realized I really was still alive, still alone, and the sense of what Rooster had said began to filter in. I raised my cuffed hands and worked off the blindfold.

The man who had kidnapped me was coming to retrieve me, to rent me out again for more of the same.

I had a gun and one bullet. It was so tempting, the thought of being out of all this. But what stopped me was the thought of my parents. They would know by now I was gone; people would be looking for me. I might not be found for years out here in this shack, and in all that time they would worry about me, pray for me, refuse to believe I was dead.

It suited me better to kill the man they called Nap. After a moment, I began to look forward to it.

Every moment cost me pain, but I figured out how to load the revolver, though the handcuffs made it difficult; at least there was enough slack in the chain to move my arms. I loaded, emptied out the bullet, and reloaded several times, until I had mastered it and knew the bullet was in the chamber that would fire. Then I tucked the gun down by my side and waited in the stinking, hot shack for Nap to come for me. I could see the sky through a hole in the roof; when the sun was almost overhead, I heard a van coming down the dirt road. I remembered the second man, and prayed he hadn’t come this time.

I shut my eyes when the footsteps came close.

“How you feeling this morning, honey?” Nap asked jovially. “Where did Rooster leave that key? Shit, they messed you up. It’s gonna take you a while to get over this…” I could tell he was angry that I was too damaged to be useful for a while. I opened my eyes and looked at him, straight at him, and what he saw made him stop in the act of picking up my discarded blindfold.

I raised the gun and pointed it as carefully as I could, then fired.

It caught Nap in the eye.

He died far too quickly to suit me.

Of course, I had no idea where the key to the handcuffs was. Nap had said he’d left it with Rooster. I slid off the cot, then hitched myself across the floor, dragging the cot behind me. With incredible difficulty, I searched Nap just to make sure it wasn’t on him. It wasn’t.

It seemed to me there must be a way I could get out of the shack, but trying to get myself and the cot through the door was too hard for me. By that time, I was weak.

So I got to lie on the bed in the shack with the dead man for another day. Bugs came, and my cuts got infected, and the body began to smell.

By the time a farmer working in the adjacent field came to investigate Nap’s van, maybe twenty-four hours later, I was running a high temperature, but not high enough to make me delirious. I longed for unconsciousness the way people in hell want ice water. The farmer saw the body of Nap lying on the floor inside the open door and ran to call for help. The flood of people who arrived after that had no idea a live person was inside the shack. The horror on the faces of the men who came to investigate the body told me that I had gone beyond some boundary.

I had passed; I had become the thing that had happened to me.

No one who saw me chained to that bed would ever be able to imagine that I’d had a dog named Bolo when I was little, that I’d enjoyed playing with dolls, that I’d gotten three raises in the past two years, that I came from a home as clean and orderly as any of theirs.

In the slow weeks of recovery, after repeated questioning by law-enforcement officials on several levels, after enduring a media drench that sensationalized what was already sensational, I realized that returning to my former life was no longer possible. It had been stolen from me. My boyfriend was still posing for the newspapers as my boyfriend, but he wasn’t any longer. My parents simply could not cope with the horror of my ordeal or my execution of the man responsible.

I began to suspect that, in their secret hearts, they thought I had made the wrong choice in my use of the bullet.

My younger sister, Varena, was a rock at first, but gradually my slow physical and mental recovery wore Varena’s lighthearted nature down and then defeated it. Varena was ready for me to rise from my bed and walk. Varena was ready to refer to my crisis in the past tense, to have conversations that did not refer to it even in terms of my recovery. After a few increasingly acrimonious exchanges that included such statements as “Pull up your socks and get on with your life” and “You can’t go on living in the past,” Varena drifted back to her normal routine of nurse’s duties at the little hospital in our family’s town, teaching Sunday school, and dating a local pharmacist.

For a month longer, I stayed with my parents, with my belongings stored in their attic and toolshed. There was a healing quality in the house with the big front porch and the rose garden, the known neighbors. But most of those neighbors found it impossible to be natural around me; the best managed it, but the sheer horror of my victimization defeated the rest.

I tried hard not to be a tragic figure, tried desperately to reclaim my past, but I finally acknowledged defeat. I had to leave Bartley, to forget Memphis, to go somewhere new.

“And why did you pick Shakespeare?” Marshall asked me.

“The name,” I said, almost surprised that someone else was with me. I pulled my T-shirt back over my head. “My name is Bard, as in the Bard of Avon. This is Shakespeare.”

“You picked it off the map like that?”

I nodded, stood. “I’d tried a couple of places earlier that didn’t work out, so random selection seemed as good a method as any.” I stood still for a moment. It was such an effort to move.

“I’ll see you later,” I said. “I don’t want to talk any more now.” I lifted the bag with my gi and obi inside and strode out, not forgetting to turn and bow as I reached the door.

I drove home automatically, trying to keep my mind blank. It had been years since I had told my story, years since I had relived it in full. They had been good years, having people look at me quite normally, as if I was a full woman, not a thing, not a victim.

Now Chief Friedrich had indicated he knew who I was, so he knew I’d killed someone. Maybe he’d think I had had some kind of flashback and killed Pardon Albee, too. The pointed question about a personal relationship might mean that he suspected I’d killed Pardon because he’d paid me unwelcome attention. Knowing Pardon, that was a strange idea.

I sat on the side of my bed when I got home. I tried to picture myself as a vigilante, as some kind of- who was the girl who’d been raped in Titus Andronicus? Lavinia… yes, Lavinia, whose hands and tongue had been cut out by her attackers so that she could not reveal their identity. But Lavinia, I remembered, managed to tell her brothers somehow, and served the attackers to their mother as lunch, since the mother had permitted the rape to happen.

I wasn’t set on gaining some kind of vengeance on all men for what had happened to me. But I certainly wasn’t a trusting person anymore, and I definitely never expected much of people, and I would never be surprised to hear of any perfidy again.

I did not believe in the underlying goodwill of men or the unspoken sisterhood of women.

I did not believe that people everywhere are really the same, or that if you treat people kindly you will get kindness in return.

I did not believe in the sanctity of life.

If all the men were lined up in front of me, the four rapists and the man who cuffed me, and I had a loaded gun… I would kill them all, I thought. But I’m not scouring biker bars across America and I’m not standing in the post offices looking at wanted posters to see if they’ve done anything else. I haven’t hired a private investigator to look for them.

Did that speak to my sanity, or did that say I would commit murder only if it was convenient? I felt a tingling all over, like a hand that had been asleep prickling as it woke up. I’d felt that before after the times when I couldn’t dodge remembering. It was the rest of my personality seeping back into the shell I became when I immersed in the memory.

I turned down my covers, checked that my alarm clock was set, and gratefully crawled into bed. I reached over to switch out the lamp.

I’d kill the woman, too, I thought, feeling a wave of weariness sweep through my body. The woman I’d never seen. The bikers I’d never actually seen, only heard, felt.

But Pardon Albee-could Friedrich really believe I’d kill someone like that, someone I knew in the ordinary course of my life?

Of course he could.

I wondered what weapon had been used to kill the landlord. I hadn’t seen much blood, though I hadn’t examined Pardon very carefully. Since I’d been taking Goju from Marshall for two years or more, I thought maybe I could kill someone with my hands if I needed to-that had originally been my reason for studying a martial art.

That, too, would enter Friedrich’s picture of me: a very fit woman… in conjunction with a middle-aged, nosy, presumably heterosexual man who lived very close to me… Put like that, it seemed pretty obvious to me that I must have killed Pardon in my sleep.

Starting tomorrow, I decided as I rolled onto my left side, I have to find out who killed the landlord. In the stage before sleep, it seemed that simple.