Legacy of Masks

by Sallie Bissell

  Deke Keener sat up in bed, his blankets coiled around him, his sheets damp with sweat. For an instant, he didn’t know where he was, and he sat staring at the dresser that faced his bed, his heartbeat loud in his ears. Then a nuthatch chirped a loud bit-bit-bit outside his window and he remembered. He was Deke Keener, it was Wednesday, June tenth, in Pisgah County, North Carolina, and the dream that had haunted him since he was eight years old had just taken on a new wrinkle.

  He untwisted his sheets and stumbled into his sleek spa of a bathroom, peeing loudly into the toilet. His torrential stream of urine reassured him. Though his little wiggle worm was, he supposed, a pretty sick puppy, at least it still did most of what it was supposed to do. His uncle Mark’s worm hadn’t wiggled in years—not since the night somebody cut the brakes on his black Corvette and he’d skidded off the bridge over Buttersop Creek.

  “Got you back, Uncle Mark,” Deke muttered as he flushed the toilet. “You’d probably give your eyeteeth to be able to fuck a rat now.”

  He crossed the room, to a shower that cost more than most people’s automobiles. He turned the water on hot and stepped into a sizzling deluge that issued from twelve different jets. Dreams about Uncle Mark always made him feel dirty. When he was little he used to scrub himself until the water ran cold, hoping he might emerge from the shower a normal boy with normal desires. The years, though, had proved that hope false. However hard he scrubbed, soap and water could not touch the stain inside him.

  Still, he loved bathing his body, and a hot shower might give him a new perspective on Bethany Daws. He stood under the water, soaping his arms and legs, a belly that was, thank God, still flat. If he’d had any sense at all, he would have dumped Bethany five years ago. She had always been the single most troubling girl of his career. Staying skinny when his other little hillbilly chicks swelled like porkers, remaining zit-free when the others looked leprous with acne, she had sailed through her adolescence gracefully, growing from a child to woman without losing an iota of her allure. Though he’d had to constantly remind her of his power and keep her always afraid, she had endured his caresses with compliant, if sullen, resignation. Then a year ago, when just the sight of her turned his dick to lead, she’d met Ridge Standingdeer. Her sullenness had soured into spite; she’d become hostile and argumentative. Now here she was, threatening him with tapes.

  Tapes! He turned off the shower and grabbed a thick Turkish towel from the warmer. Where the fuck had she come up with that? Probably it was just a bluff to protect her stupid little sister. But what if she had taped him? God knows in the past six years she could have recorded hours of stuff. The very idea of it made him sick to his stomach, then her words began to ring in his head. Before I leave for college, you’d better believe that a lot more people than just me are going to hear it!

  “It’s her monthly meltdown.” He tried to calm himself with that thought as he crossed over to the sink and lathered his face with shaving cream. “One week out of four, all of them go nuts.” Still, she’d never done anything like this before. As he scraped his razor down the left side of his face, he considered his odds. He was, by anyone’s account, a huge success. He’d turned his father’s small golf-course construction company into a huge development firm. He was a deacon at the First Baptist Church, president of the Hartsville Chamber of Commerce, chairman of the United Way. He’d been married long enough to quiet any gossip about possible homosexuality, and he’d bought his ex-wife’s silence about that time she’d found him behaving “inappropriately” with their daughter Stephanie. He lived as the Prince of Pisgah County, doling out playgrounds and ball fields to his grateful little subjects, accepting the mayor’s kiss on his ring. Nobody would consider him less than a God-fearing man; nobody would believe that he took anything more than a benign interest in the prepubescent daughters of his employees. Still, as he finished shaving, his hand was shaking so badly that he nicked his chin.

  He stuck a piece of tissue on the tiny cut and walked into his closet, a room almost as expensive as his bath. His clothes hung with haberdashery precision—suit jackets hung high, their matching trousers below them. The sight of them made him smile. He loved to go to New York, where he would pick out the wools and cashmeres that complemented his freckled complexion and then stand exquisitely still while an Italian tailor measured everything from the length of his inseam to the circumference of his wrists. How he loved his life! Pulling out a pale blue shirt that countered the sallowness of his complexion, he thrust his arms into the sleeves when Bethany’s words reechoed in his head. Before I leave for college, you’d better believe that a lot more people than just me are going to hear it!

  “Jesus,” he whispered, fumbling with the buttons on his shirt. If she truly had tapes of him, she could bring his life down around his ears. Even the Prince of Pisgah County had enemies. Drop one tape off at the mayor’s, or with Turpin, or with that idiot Cochran and the sharks would smell blood. And if Bethany squawked long enough and loud enough, someone would eventually believe her.

  Quickly he buttoned his shirt and pulled on his trousers. Though he usually liked to luxuriate in his clothes and relish the feel of fine cotton and linen against his skin, now was not the time. He needed to figure out how to stop Bethany Daws, and he needed to figure that out fast.

  He knotted a yellow paisley tie around his neck, then hurried downstairs. Too antsy to sit still, he got in his car and headed for Big Meat’s Pancakes, a small diner between Hartsville and Cherokee that served breakfast twenty-four hours a day. Though Big Meat’s was frequented mostly by noisy families of tourists, he found the happy clatter of the place soothing—waitresses shouting out orders, the tink of coffee spoons against coffee cups, the jukebox that Big Meat refused to stock with anybody other than Johnny Cash. He sat at the counter, ordered black coffee, and wondered what to do about Bethany. Even if she was bluffing, he couldn’t allow such a gravely mutinous act to go unpunished. Still, even that was a secondary concern. His first order of business was protecting himself from those goddamn tapes.

  Big Meat’s wife, Ora May, slid a cup of coffee down in front of him, then hurried over to serve an order of strawberry waffles. Pondering his Bethany dilemma, Deke watched the line cook pluck eggs from two large cartons, opened side by side next to the grill. The remaining eggs looked like chess men scattered across a board, and suddenly he saw his life as a game of chess. He was the king, about to be mated by a lowly pawn. Though he had a good many of his own pawns around him, he needed something powerful—a queen or a rook—to protect him from the infiltrator. As he took a tentative sip of his scalding coffee, the answer came. There was a black queen recently arrived in Hartsville who was easily capable of protecting him from this pawn. She was smart, she was fast, and he had it on good authority that she might be needing some work. All he had to do was enlist her on his side before Bethany went public with her damn tapes.

  “Oh, Bethany.” He laughed as he rose from his stool and left Ora May five bucks for a single cup of coffee. “You’ve no idea how badly you’ve fucked up. No idea at all.”

  He pulled up under the magnolia tree in front of the Baptist Church, directly across from the hardware store. It was just past eight in the morning. He would give his black queen half an hour to show up. If she didn’t appear by then, he’d go over to Cockroach’s office and ask him about her. Nothing swelled the new sheriff’s pathetic little ego more than being asked a question.

  Anxious for his champion to appear, he opened his newspaper, attempting to both read the stock market report and keep watch out the window. Butch Messer drove by in the new Crown Victoria that Randy Bradley sold him, while Sylvia Goins strode out of Sutton’s Hardware, carrying a thirty-pound bag of peat moss as it if were a feather pillow. Hastily, Deke slumped down in his seat. Christ, how he hated to see Sylvia Goins. He’d started a game with her the same time he’d started with Bethany, but he’d lost interest when over the course of one summer Sylvia sprouted dark hair in places that had prev
iously been bare and began bursting out of a 34DD bra. He’d tried to disengage himself gently, but for months she’d clung to him like cheap cologne. Finally, when she started high school, her interest in him waned. He’d heard she’d gotten pregnant by some young thug, dropped out of school, and moved away. Then, last spring, he’d gone to Sutton’s to order new Kats uniforms and there she stood at the cash register, fifty pounds heavier, with a Mexican boyfriend who looked just like a chimpanzee. From then on, he sent Glenn Daws in to order the uniforms.

  Tapping out an edgy tattoo on his steering wheel, he watched Sylvia. She hauled out a dozen more bags of peat moss, piled them neatly in a sidewalk display, then went back inside the store. Then George Turpin waddled out of the snack bar and headed toward the courthouse. Watching him in his rearview mirror, Deke sat up straighter in his seat, wondering if Turpin was actually going to risk a coronary with the hundred-step climb to the courthouse. Suddenly a green pickup truck loaded with office furniture pulled up in front of the hardware store, blocking his view. Two people got out. He blinked in astonishment to see Ridge Standingdeer emerge from the driver’s seat, then gaped further at Standingdeer’s passenger. She was pretty—taller than average, with an olive complexion. Her shoulder-length hair was definitely Cherokee, but cut with an urban panache rarely seen in downtown Hartsville. He watched her walk to the back of the truck. When she turned to Standingdeer and smiled, he recognized her immediately. Though not dressed as a fashionable teenager circa 1987, the hair, the walk, and that killer smile belonged to the same girl who’d beaten him in debate so many years ago. His black queen had arrived. Quickly, he ditched his newspaper and rolled down his window.

  “Mary? Mary Crow?” Deke called, getting out of his car and grinning broadly. “Is that really you?”

  8

  Mary jumped at the sound of a male voice calling her name. Dressed in shorts and a tattered blue sweatshirt, she’d been up since daybreak, dragging a bookcase and several chairs down from Irene’s attic. Now she was hot and dirty and smelled like lemon Pledge—in no way the clean, fresh-from-Peru woman she wanted Jonathan to see. She turned, mentally scrambling for some excuse as to why she hadn’t called him, when she saw with great relief that it wasn’t Jonathan at all, but a man with thick auburn hair, getting out of an expensive black SUV.

  “Hi.” She smiled, hoping he would say some revelatory thing that would tell her who he was. “How are you?”

  “I’m great.” He loped across the street like a big, friendly dog. Up close she saw that he had bright brown eyes that seemed to seize upon everything at once and skin bronzed by freckles rather than the sun. “I heard you’d moved back.”

  “Yes, I have.” The man looked her age. She must have gone to high school with him, but she didn’t have a clue as to who he was. “Hartsville’s really grown, hasn’t it?”

  The man nodded, then started to laugh. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  Embarrassed, Mary fudged her reply. “I remember your face. I’m afraid I can’t come up with your name.”

  “Deke Keener.” He extended his hand. “Cherokee High, class of eighty-seven. You sat two rows over from me in Miss Cooke’s homeroom, and we were on the debate team together. You beat me three times—at the Lions Club meet in Asheville, at the Western Carolina meet, and the All-State tourney, in Raleigh.”

  Mary didn’t know what to say. She barely remembered debate, much less this man who could still rattle off their records. Slowly, though, she began to recall a thinner, redder-headed boy to whom winning was just slightly less important than breathing. She thought he’d pitched on the baseball team, won some kind of scholarship. She remembered that she hadn’t liked him very much.

  Nonetheless, she shook his hand warmly. “Of course. Deke Keener. How nice to see you again!”

  “I read all about you in the paper. You really put it to old Stump Logan. Did you know that Jerry Cochran is sheriff now?”

  “I heard that.” Mary squelched a sigh, wondering if she would be forever known as the woman who put it to Stump Logan.

  Keener eyed the truck full of furniture. “So what are you up to now?”

  “I’m opening my own office.” She turned to include the Cherokee boy who stood beside her. “This is Ridge Standingdeer. He’s helping me move in.”

  Deke shook hands with the young man, then returned his gaze to Mary. “So where’s your office going to be?”

  “Up there.” Mary pointed to the tall mullioned windows that looked down over the storefront behind them.

  “Over the hardware store?” Deke choked back a laugh. “But aren’t you a DA? Don’t DAs work in the courthouse?”

  “They do when they can get jobs,” Mary replied, trying hard to keep the bitterness out of her voice. “When they can’t, they hang out shingles of their own.”

  “So you’re now going to set criminals free instead of sending them upriver?” Keener gave her a snide little jab, just as he had in debate. The longer they talked, the more she remembered what she hadn’t liked about him. He was pushy and aggressive, and his ego was constantly on the line. He reminded her of a few attorneys she’d known and not loved.

  She shook her head. “I’m not going to do any criminal work.”

  “Then what are you going to do?”

  “Everything else but divorces.”

  Deke looked at her as if she were crazy, then gazed up at the tall windows over Sutton’s Hardware. “Mind if I come up and have a look?”

  She was tempted to tell him yes, she minded quite a bit, that she didn’t have time for all his silly verbal sparring, but she couldn’t think of a graceful way to decline his company. “Sure,” she said reluctantly. “But we have to be quiet. A psychologist holds therapy sessions up there.”

  She turned and led the two men up the staircase. She walked on tiptoe until she noticed that Dana had tacked a small “In Court Today” sign on her door. Thank God, Mary thought, relieved that she and Ridge wouldn’t have to lug her furniture up the stairs and worry about making noise.

  “I leased this yesterday,” she announced as she crossed the landing to unlock her door. “It’s just a closet, but it’s a good address.”

  The opened door revealed the room’s whitewashed plaster walls and pine plank floors. As she stepped across the threshold, the feel of the room made Mary smile. Ridge entered and stood close to the door, silently taking everything in, while Keener buzzed around the space like a fly caught in a jar.

  “Wow! What a view! You can see all along Main Street.” He scurried over to the windows. “There’s Groovy Butch, opening the music store late, and old Margaret Stubbs going to get her hair dyed blue. And you can keep an eye on the Mexicans at the Mercado Hispaño, right across the street. This is cool.” He turned to her. “What kind of law did you say you were going to practice?”

  “Just general stuff. Wills. House closings. I probably won’t go to court at all.”

  “Have you done any real estate work?”

  Mary gave an inward groan at the memory of the lease she’d drawn up for her grandmother’s house in Atlanta. Long-term in exchange for favorable rent. A year ago, when she’d been in love and in Peru, it had seemed perfect. Now she realized what a financial blunder it had been. “A little,” she answered noncommittally. Deke Keener was the last person she’d confess any professional bungling to.

  Deke pulled out his wallet and handed her a business card. KEENER CONSTRUCTION was spelled out in raised gold letters shaped like building blocks. “I bill out about sixty mil in construction every year. I’m always looking for good attorneys. You interested?”

  “Don’t you already have counsel here?” Mary knew nobody could run a business that large without some kind of legal advisor.

  “I have several,” Deke answered coyly. “All are good for one thing or another, but I’d love to find one person who could handle all of it. You want to give it a shot?”

  The thought of having Deke Keener as a client made her stomac
h churn. He’d come up here and stay for hours, pointing out her windows, jabbering like a magpie. She would have to buy aspirin by the case and keep Sapphire Gin in her desk drawer. “I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I’m a member of the North Carolina bar, but I’m pretty rusty on my real estate statutes. . . .”

  “But if you got up to speed—would you be interested in working for me?” he persisted, in dead earnest. “I pay well.”

  “I don’t know,” repeated Mary, feeling the muscles in her neck beginning to tighten. “Let me just get moved in first. I’ll be able to think straighter after that.”

  “Then let’s get at it.” Deke rolled up his sleeves. “What’s that old saying? Many hands make light work?”

  “That’s really nice of you, Deke, but there’s no need for that,” Mary said, looking at Keener’s creamy linen trousers and Italian loafers. “Ridge and I can handle it.”

  He grinned at her. “Not a problem—after all, we’re old school pals.” He thumped Ridge companionably on the shoulder. “Come on, buddy. Let’s get this lady unloaded.”

  An hour later, Mary had learned that Deke had won a baseball scholarship to N.C. State, had been married and divorced, and was the father of a ten-year-old daughter who lived in Colorado with her mother. He’d come back home and expanded his father’s golf-course company into subdivision development. He piloted his own plane, went to New York twice a year to buy clothes, and had built a state-of-the-art house on the top of King’s Mountain.