Shakespeare’s Champion

ground at Sweet Rest Cemetery, and here was Lindy, alone and lonely.

After my solitary supper that night, after the dishes were washed and everything neat, I paced the house.

I took another shower and washed off all my makeup. I made sure I was shaved smooth and my eyebrows were plucked, and I put on all the usual lotions and a tiny dab of perfume.

I stood in my bedroom, naked and irresolute. I looked in my closet, knowing before I looked what I would see: blue jeans, T-shirts, sweats. A couple of dresses and a suit from my former life. Even thinking about a seduction seemed incredibly stupid as I saw how ill-equipped I was for one.

Suddenly I jettisoned the idea. It felt wrong. Claude deserved someone more-malleable, someone with a silk teddy and a Sunday dress.

I valued control over my life more than anything. With Marshall, and now with Claude, I was not willing to relinquish that control, to bind my life to either of theirs. Neither of them was necessary enough to me for me to take that frightening leap. This was a bitter acknowledgment.

Angry at myself, at Claude, I pulled on dark clothes and went out to walk. I wouldn’t sleep much tonight. The light in Claude’s window was on, a glance up at his apartment told me. If I’d found it in myself, I would be up there sharing that light with him, and he would be happy… at least for a little while.

I drifted through Shakespeare, merging with the night. In a while, I began to feel the chill and the wet. After shivering in my jacket for a few blocks, I was on my way home when I saw I had company.

On the other side of the street, walking as silently and darkly as I, went a man I didn’t know, a man with long black hair. In the silence we turned our heads to look at each other. Neither of us smiled or spoke. I was not frightened or angry. In seconds we were past each other, continuing on our ways in the chilly sodden night. I’d seen him before, I reflected; where? It came to me that he was the man who’d been working out with Darcy Orchard the day Jim Box had been out with the flu.

I went home to work out with my punching bag, which hangs from the ceiling in the middle of my empty extra bedroom. I kicked kogen geri, a snapping kick, until my instep burned. Then mae geri, the thrusting kick, until my legs ached. Then I just punched the bag, over and over, making it swing; no art, just power expended.

I slumped down to the floor and dried my face with the pink towel I kept hanging from a hook by the door.

Now, after I showered, I would probably sleep.

As I pulled up my covers and turned on my right side, I wondered where the man was, what he was doing, why he had been walking the night.

I felt too draggy to go to Body Time the next morning, even though I was due to do chest and biceps, my favorites. I forced myself to do fifty push-ups and leg lifts as compensation. While I was on the floor, I had to notice that my baseboards needed dusting, and after I patted my face with the pink towel, I used it to do the job. I pitched the towel in the wash basket and went through my usual morning preparation.

My first job on Fridays was Deedra Dean’s apartment in the building right next door, which coincidentally was upstairs by Chief of Police Claude Friedrich’s. At the request of a local lawyer who represented the estate of Pardon Albee, I had been cleaning the public parts of the apartment building until Pardon’s heir made some other arrangement. So I noticed all the mud the tenants had tracked in after the recent rain, and decided I’d have to work in an extra vacuuming before its regular late-Saturday cleaning. Unclipping my work keys from my belt, I went up the stairs quickly.

But Deedra’s dead bolt was on. She was still home. She’d be late for work again. I pocketed my key and knocked. There was a kind of scuffling noise on the other side of the door, then a sharp exchange between Deedra and someone else, an exchange I couldn’t decipher.

I went on alert. Not because Deedra had company; that was no surprise. Deedra believes in the joy of indiscriminate giving. But scuffling, harsh words, these weren’t things she was used to. As Deedra yanked open the door and stepped back, I saw that her guest was her stepfather, Jerrell Knopp. Jerrell had married “up” when he wed the widowed, well-to-do Lacey Dean. Jerrell was attractive-lean, gray-haired, with dazzling blue eyes-and he treated his wife with courtesy and tenderness, if the little interaction I’d observed was the norm. But Jerrell had a mean side, and Deedra was bearing the brunt of it now. She had a bright red mark on her arm as if Jerrell had been holding her with a squeezing grip. He wasn’t too pleased she’d let me in. Tough.

“The chief is right on the other side of this wall,” I lied. Claude was sure to be at work by now. “He can be here in a split second.” I looked from the red mark to Jerrell. I’d cross him if I had to, but I didn’t look forward to it.

“This here’s a family talk, Lily Bard. You just butt out,” Jerrell said, very firmly. I thought it would make me feel pretty good to hit him.

“This is Deedra’s apartment. I think she gets some say in who stays and who goes.” I was always hoping Deedra would show some backbone-or some sense-and I was always disappointed. This morning was no exception.

“You better start in my bedroom,” Deedra said in a small voice. There were tears on her face. “I’ll be all right, Lily.”

I gave her stepfather a warning look and carried my caddy of cleaning materials into Deedra’s bedroom. It had a dismal view of the parking lot, and beyond that the embankment and the railroad track, and a bit of the Winthrop lumber-and-hardware business that backed onto the other side of the track. The most interesting thing about the view this morning was Deedra’s beautiful red Taurus in the parking lot, halfway out of its stall. Someone had taken a can of white spray paint and carefully scripted, “She fucks niggers” on the hood.

I felt sick and old.

Deedra had apparently pulled out of her parking spot before she saw the writing. Then, I supposed, she’d run inside to call Mom, but Stepdad had come instead.

A tide of rage and fear rolled over me. My primary rage was directed at the bastards who’d ruined Deedra’s car, and most likely her life. The story would be all over town in no time, and there wouldn’t be any discreet lid on it, like there was on Deedra’s bad reputation.

And then, less to my credit, I was angry with Deedra. She had been sleeping-from time to time-with Marcus Jefferson, who also lived in the apartment building, across the hall from Claude. And she’d told me it wasn’t for any noble reason, such as love, or even a bizarre reason, such as a desire to cement race relations. She was screwing him for the fun of it.

You couldn’t do that in Shakespeare unless you stood willing to pay the price. Deedra had received the bill.

I pointedly crossed through the living room a couple of times as Jerrell and Deedra continued their encounter. I couldn’t call it a dialogue, since what one said made no difference to what the other responded. Jerrell was bawling Deedra out, up one side and down the other, for dragging herself (and her mother) through the mud, for polluting herself, for exposing all of them to the glare of gossip and the threat of danger.

“You know what happened to that black boy not two months ago?” Jerrell said hoarsely. “You want something like that to happen to you? Or to that man you’re going to bed with?”

I was polishing the mirror over Deedra’s nine-drawer dresser when Jerrell said that, and I saw my reflection in the mirror. I looked sick. He was referring to Darnell Glass, who’d been beaten to death by person or persons unknown. I’d known Darnell Glass.

“But, Jerrell, I didn’t do it!” Deedra persisted in stonewalling. “I don’t know where anyone would get that idea!”

“Girl, everyone but your mother knows you’re just a whore that don’t take money,” Jerrell said brutally. “Lacey would kill herself if she knew black hands had been on your body.”

I made a face into the mirror as I dusted the top of the dresser. I dropped a pair of earrings into Deedra’s earring box.

“I didn’t do it!” Deedra moaned.

Childlike in many ways, Deedra believed that if you denied something often enough, it actually hadn’t happened.

“Deedra, unless you change your ways right now, I mean this minute, worse things than that paint job are going to happen to you, and I won’t be able to stop them from happening,” Jerrell said.

“What do you mean?” Deedra asked, sobbing. “What could be worse?”

Childlike and stupid.

“There’s lots worse things than a little bit of white paint,” Jerrell said grimly, but with a somewhat milder voice.