by Bruce Barber
she never saw it, but now there’s a chance that everybody who... who cares about her can make her see how blind she’s been. It mustn’t happen to her again – she’s too fine a person to waste herself over and over again on men who mistreat her or don’t understand her – ” She stopped suddenly, and flushed more deeply. “I didn’t mean you, of course!”
“I understand,” Keyes said. “You are talking about the late Mr. Wales?”
Keyes saw an expression derange Grace Lockhardt’s face which he was becoming increasingly accustomed to; it was a cruel tightening of the facial muscles which said that Alan Wales being slowly roasted over a fire with split-bamboo slivers shoved under his fingernails would have been a fine sight indeed; that his death was an occasion for dancing and singing; that with his passing a small sun had returned to many people’s darkened worlds.
“I’m glad he’s dead!” Grace said, vehemently affirming the obvious. “Maybe now Sandra will have a chance to find real love. Please, Mr. Keyes, be her friend again. I have to go now. I’m sorry if I’ve bothered you.”
Keyes shook his head slowly as Grace Lockhardt left the store; even her slight swaying walk resembled a distorted mirror-image of Sandra’s. “Now Sandra will have a chance to find real love...”
And who will that love be with, in your secret dreams, Grace? Keyes thought. He continued browsing distractedly through books, wondering if perhaps one of them contained answers to such questions, or even some small hint of elusive truth.
After another fifteen minutes, Keyes could find no such truth, nor anything else to hold his interest, no hefty volume in which he would be able to hide temporarily. This mental state of his was serious indeed, he told himself, when the healing power of books was ineffective. But Keyes couldn’t spend much more time in this hazy half-world of questions and doubts, especially doubts which refused to be articulated – it was the current foggy quality of his thoughts which he resented most of all.
The bookshop had failed; stronger measures were obviously required.
(3:3) The Gilded Lily, a strip-joint
Keyes believed himself to be, at heart, a simple man, and believed the world itself was simple at its core – only the surface was complex and gaudy, and the simplest thing was often the most sublime. Following this philosophy, he decided to treat his glooming with a loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and by cowering in a dark corner where his regular compatriots would never stumble upon him.
“Now I’ll away,” he whispered as he walked along, unsure if he was remembering lines from last night’s Macbeth or not, it having been such an unusual performance in so many ways.
Withdraw my countenance and consciousness,
Like unto –
Like unto what? Something about toads? No, that was As You Like It... turtles? Yes, that was it, turtles.
Like unto the crafty tortoise, pulling
Self into his armorèd Self,
There to await less mortal hours...
A hundred yards ahead along the sidewalk he spotted the place he’d chosen to wait for said safer hours, a dingy bar largely unfrequented by Festival types unless they were slumming, but that he knew from accidental experience served up a great T-bone along with the entertainment of “exotic” dancers. It was the kind of bar where too few people drank too much booze, where just enough happened to keep it in business but not enough to make the owner wealthy. It did not intimidate or threaten, nor did it plead or pimp; it simply occupied space and moved through time, and occasionally was a nondescript painted backdrop for those one-act dramas which no one would remember or record, or even remotely care about; it was not a good place or a bad place – it was just a place, where steel and dreams went to rust, and where once in a while a lonely and confused man might even glimpse a flash of newer metal, or of the Islands of the Blessed.
He left behind the misty dolour of a Stratford fall day for the smoky funk of The Gilded Lily Bar & Grill. Through a grimy window looking out onto the parking lot, Keyes saw a boom-crane For Hire truck parked outside, with the motto WE GET IT UP FOR YOU emblazoned in poor calligraphy on the door. “That just about says it all,” Keyes said quietly.
He skirted the pool table inside the door, where a tall young man with a great deal of hair and very little grace scratched on a shot, cursing the ball loudly while his equally hairy girlfriend laughed hoarsely around the cigarette planted in the gap left by a missing front tooth. Keyes stopped at the bar to order his steak and a bottle of beer, then threaded his way among closely packed tables to the back corner. He passed the stage, a twelve-foot square platform of rectangular panels which flashed on and off in various neon pastels, and was raised about three feet from the floor. Around it ran a shelf or counter, and a dozen stools. Several men sat there,
eating their lunch, waiting for the next entertainment to sidle through the door in the back wall.
Keyes found a small table away from the other patrons, and sat facing away from the stage – the girls were not why he was here, and he usually found their poor imitations of burlesque dancing uninteresting, anyway, even anti-erotic. There was a beer-stained copy of The Stratford Weekly News stuck to the tabletop. A headline screamed in larger type than he could ever recall this particular paper using:
FESTIVAL ACTOR MURDERED
So, he thought, they’ve decided, and murder it is. He scanned the article while waiting for his meal, but there was nothing in it he didn’t already know, more or less. Not even the cause of death was revealed; this information was being withheld pending further investigation. Someone of indeterminate sex arrived with his steak, and he set to eating while reading an article concerning disappearing frog populations.
Below it, Keyes read this:
Swan Found Dead in Avon
Parks Board members reported finding the body of a swan floating off Tom Patterson Island early this morning. It had sustained a blow to its head, and the Swan keeper is of the opinion that it was knocked unconscious by the beak of another swan in a territorial dispute, and subsequently drowned.
Probably a mating dispute, Keyes concluded wryly as he got out his pen and began to do the crossword puzzle. As he brought to bear his concentration on the first clue, music suddenly surged out of the speaker directly over his head. So surprised was he by what he heard that he forgot to be grouchy about its volume, and also forgot to remain uninterested. Pounding unnaturally – in this place – was the opening movement from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana; true, a heavy electronic beat had been grafted to it, but even so, the wild pagan music and the Latin chants were not what you would call standard stripping fare. Keyes looked to the stage as the
routine began.
The young woman – perhaps not even twenty – was very beautiful, and already stark naked, which in itself was as unusual as her selection of backing soundtrack. He could not get a good look at her face, as she had very long and very black, straight hair, which she was attempting to manipulate as if the thick strands were the fabled seven veils. She whirled her hair around her breasts, which seemed quite large because she herself was no more than five feet tall, and small-waisted; she did many other things with her hair and body, and Keyes found her attempt at something vaguely artistic endearing. The rest of the men in the bar, however, did not. As they
began to boo and hiss at her efforts, she stopped suddenly and glared out, at first defiantly, but then Keyes saw her begin to play in an agitated fashion with the strands of hair drifting along her left thigh.
He had seen such a motion before, and recently... he leaned forward, and began to dress her with his eyes – it was her: the girl in the sequined outfit who had been kissing Alan Wales not long before Wales died.
(3:4) Along the Avon River
By the time Keyes left The Gilded Lily, the rain had diminished to a fine mist, the kind of gentle but persistent drizzle that he imagined thanes had to deal with on a regular basis. It bothered him that the suffering of thanes is what he imagined. He did not want to imagine or even think any m
ore about Scottish Plays, their weather and their consequences. Unfortunately, Keyes was incapable of getting the bloody business out of his mind.
“The Balls?” he suggested to himself in half a voice, glancing in that direction. It was not yet three o’clock – too early for drinking, even though he had already had what he rounded off not very honestly as “a couple of beers.” He knew what was likely to happen if he went into another pub now.
Instead he set off walking, aimlessly. Almost as soon as he began to move, he felt better, even if he didn’t think much more clearly. As he trudged along, skirting puddles of water and patches of mud, Keyes took note of what he had noticed before about Stratford – how it resembled a theatre itself in a certain way: the storefronts in the core, in almost every case, were very beautiful and well designed; once in a while there were even small masterpieces of consumer-friendly aesthetics. However, once one stepped into an alley or onto a side-street, behind the scenes, so to speak, a more ordinary city appeared: clotheslines hung with laundry were strung between buildings badly in need of renovation, or coats of paint; green plastic garbage bags lay scattered about, some ripped apart by prowling wildlife. Rain-softened earth squished beneath Keyes’ shoes, and his