Looking for Rachel Wallace (4 page)

“Spenser is looking after me on the tour,” Rachel said.

“Yes, I know. John told me.” She glanced at me in the rearview mirror. “I don’t think I’ve ever met a bodyguard before.”

“We’re just regular folks,” I said. “If you cut us, do we not bleed?”

“Literary, too,” Linda Smith said.

“When are we supposed to be in Belmont?”

“Ten o’clock,” Linda said. “Belmont Public Library.”

“What for?” I said.

“Ms. Wallace is speaking there. They have a Friends of the Library series.”

“Nice liberal town you picked.”

“Never mind, Spenser,” Rachel Wallace said. Her voice was brusque. “I told them I’d speak wherever I could and to whom I could. I have a message to deliver, and I’m not interested in persuading those who already agree with me.”

I nodded.

“If there’s trouble, all right. That’s what you’re being paid for.”

I nodded.

We got to the Belmont Library at a quarter to ten. There were ten men and women walking up and down in front of the library with placards on poles made of strapping.

A Belmont Police cruiser was parked across the street, two cops sitting in it quietly.

“Park behind the cops,” I said.

Linda swung in behind the cruiser, and I got out. “Stay in the car a second,” I said.

“I will not cower in here in front of a few pickets.”

“Then look menacing while you sit there. This is what I’m paid for. I just want to talk to the cops.”

I walked over to the cruiser. The cop at the wheel had a young wise-guy face. He looked like he’d tell you to stick it, at the first chance he got. And laugh. He was chewing a toothpick, the kind they put through a club sandwich. It still had the little cellophane frill on the end he wasn’t chewing.

I bent down and said through the open window, “I’m escorting this morning’s library speaker. Am I likely to have any trouble from the pickets?”

He looked at me for ten or twelve seconds, worrying the toothpick with his tongue.

“You do, and we’ll take care of it,” he said. “You think we’re down here waiting to pick up a copy of
Gone with the Wind
?”

“I figured you more for picture books,” I said.

He laughed. “How about that, Benny?” he said to his partner. “A hot shit. Haven’t had one today.” His partner was slouched in the seat with his hat tipped over his eyes. He didn’t say anything or move. “Who’s the speaker you’re escorting?”

“Rachel Wallace,” I said.

“Never heard of her.”

“I’ll try to keep that from her,” I said. “I’m going to take her in now.”

“Good show,” he said. “Shouldn’t be any trouble for a hot shit like you.”

I went back to the car and opened the door for Rachel Wallace.

“What did you do?” she said as she got out.

“Annoyed another cop,” I said. “That’s three hundred sixty-one this year, and October’s not over yet.”

“Did they say who the pickets were?”

I shook my head. We started across the street, Linda Smith on one side of Rachel and me on the other. Linda Smith’s face looked tight and colorless; Rachel’s was expressionless.

Someone among the pickets said, “There she is.” They all turned and closed together more tightly as we walked toward them. Linda looked at me, then back at the cops. We kept walking.

“We don’t want you here!” a woman shouted at us.

Someone else yelled, “Dyke!”

I said, “Is he talking to me?”

Rachel Wallace said, “No.”

A heavy-featured woman with shoulder-length gray hair was carrying a placard that said, A Gay America is a Communist Goal. A stylish woman in a tailored suit carried a sign that read, Gays Can’t Reproduce. They Have to Convert.

I said, “I bet she wanted to say proselytize; but no one knew how to spell it.”

No one laughed; I was getting used to that. As we approached the group they joined arms in front of us, blocking the entrance. In the center of the line was a large man with a square jaw and thick brown hair. Looked like he’d been a tight end perhaps, at Harvard. He wore a dark suit and a pale gray silk tie. His cheeks were rosy, and his eye was clear. Probably still active in his alumni association. A splendid figure of a man, the rock upon which the picket line was anchored. Surely a foe of atheism, Communism, and faggotry. Almost certainly a perfect asshole.

Rachel Wallace walked directly up to him and said, “Excuse me, please.”

There was no shouting now. It was quiet. Square Jaw shook his head, slowly, dramatically.

Rachel said, “You are interfering with my right of free speech and free assembly, a right granted me by the Constitution.”

Nobody budged. I looked back at the cops. The wise-guy kid was out of the squad car now, leaning against the door on the passenger side, his arms crossed, his black leather belt sagging with ammunition, Mace, handcuffs, nightstick, gun, come-along, and a collection of keys on a ring. He probably wanted to walk over and let us through, but his gunbelt was too heavy.

I said to Rachel, “Would you like me to create an egress for you?”

“How do you propose to do it,” she said.

“I thought I would knock this matinee idol on his kiester, and we could walk in over him.”

“It might be a mistake to try, fellow,” he said. His voice was full of money, like Daisy Buchanan.

“No,” I said. “It would not be a mistake.”

Rachel said, “Spenser.” Her voice was sharp. “I don’t stand for that,” she said. “I won’t resort to it.”

I shrugged and looked over at the young cop. His partner appeared not to have moved. He was still sitting in the squad car with his hat over his eyes. Maybe it was an economy move; maybe the partner was really an inflatable dummy. The young cop grinned at me.

“Our civil rights are in the process of violation over here!” I yelled at him. “You have any plans for dealing with that?”

He pushed himself away from the car and swaggered over. His half-chewed toothpick bobbed in his mouth as he worked it back and forth with his tongue. The handle of his service revolver thumped against his leg. On his uniform blouse were several military service ribbons. Vietnam, I figured. There was a Purple Heart ribbon and a service ribbon with battle stars and another ribbon that might have been the Silver Star.

“You could look at it that way,” he said when he reached us. “Or you could look at it that you people are causing a disturbance.”

“Will you escort us inside, officer?” Rachel Wallace said. “I would say that is your duty, and I think you ought to do it.”

“We are here to prevent the spreading of an immoral and pernicious doctrine, officer,” Square Jaw said. “That is
our
duty. I do not think you should
aid
people who wish to destroy the American family.”

The cop looked at Rachel.

“I will not be caught up in false issues,” Rachel said. “We have a perfect right to go into that library and speak. I have been invited, and I will speak. There is no question of right here. I have a right and they are trying to violate it. Do your job.”

Other people were gathering, passing cars slowed down and began to back up traffic while the drivers tried to see what was happening. On the fringes of the crowd post-high-school kids gathered and smirked.

Square Jaw said, “It might help you to keep in mind, officer, that I am a close personal friend of Chief Garner, and I’m sure he’ll want to hear from me exactly what has happened and how his men have behaved.”

The young cop looked at me. “A friend of the chief,” he said.

“That’s frightening,” I said. “You better walk softly around him.”

The young cop grinned at me broadly. “Yeah,” he said. He turned back to Square Jaw. “Move it, Jack,” he said. The smile was gone.

Square Jaw rocked back a little as if someone had jabbed at him.

“I beg your pardon?” he said.

“I said, Move your ass. This broad may be a creep, but she didn’t try to scare me. I don’t like people to try and scare me. These people are going in—you can tell the chief that when you see him. You can tell him they went in past you or over you. You decide which you’ll tell him.”

The young cop’s face was half an inch away from Square Jaw’s, and since he was three inches shorter, it was tilted up. The partner had appeared from the car. He was older and heavier, with a pot belly and large hands with big knuckles. He had his night stick in his right hand, and he slapped it gently against his thigh.

The people on either side of Square Jaw unlinked their arms and moved away. Square Jaw looked at Rachel, and when he spoke he almost hissed. “You foul, contemptible woman,” he said. “You bulldyke. We’ll never let you win. You queer … ”

I pointed down the street to the left and said to the two cops, “There’s trouble.”

They both turned to look, and when they did I gave Square Jaw a six-inch jab in the solar plexus with my right fist. He gasped and doubled up. The cops spun back and looked at him and then at me. I was staring down the street where I’d pointed. “Guess I was mistaken,” I said.

Square Jaw was bent over, his arms wrapped across his midsection, rocking back and forth. A good shot in the solar plexus will half-paralyze you for a minute or two.

The young cop looked at me without expression. “Yeah, I guess you were,” he said. “Well let’s get to the library.”

As we walked past Square Jaw the older cop said to him, “It’s a violation of health ordinances, Jack, to puke in the street.”

Inside the library, and downstairs in the small lecture room, there was no evidence that a disturbance had ever happened. The collection of elderly people, mostly women, all gray-haired, mostly overweight, was sitting placidly on folding chairs, staring patiently at the small platform and the empty lectern.

The two cops left us at the door. “We’ll sit around outside,” the young one said, “until you’re through.” Rachel Wallace was being introduced to the Friends of the Library president, who would introduce her to the audience. The young cop looked at her. “What did you say her name was?”

“Rachel Wallace,” I said.

“She some kind of queer or something?”

“She’s a writer,” I said. “She’s a feminist. She’s gay. She’s not easy to scare.”

The cop shook his head, “A goddamned lezzy,” he said to his partner. “We’ll be outside,” he said to me. They started up the stairs. Three steps up the young cop stopped and turned back to me. “You got a good punch,” he said. “You don’t see a lot of guys can hit that hard on a short jab.” Then he turned and went on up after his partner. Inside the room Rachel Wallace was sitting on a folding chair beside the lectern, her hands folded in her lap, her ankles crossed. The president was introducing her. On a table to the right of the lectern were maybe two dozen of Rachel Wallace’s books. I leaned against the wall to the right of the door in the back and looked at the audience. No one looked furtive. Not all of them looked awake. Linda Smith was standing next to me.

“Nice booking,” I said to her.

She shrugged. “It all helps,” she said. “Did you hit that man outside?”

“Just once,” I said.

“I wonder what she’ll say about that,” Linda Smith said.

I shrugged.

The president finished introducing Rachel and she stepped to the lectern. The audience clapped politely.

“I am here,” Rachel said, “for the same reason I write. Because I have a truth to tell, and I will tell it.”

I whispered to Linda Smith, “You think many of these people have read her books?”

Linda shook her head. “Most of them just like to come out and look at a real live author.”

“The word
woman
is derived from the Old English
wifmann
meaning ‘wife-person.’ The very noun by which our language designates us does so only in terms of men.”

The audience looked on loyally and strained to understand. Looking at them, you’d have to guess that the majority of them couldn’t find any area where they could agree with her. At least a plurality probably couldn’t find an area where they understood what she was talking about. They were library friends, people who had liked to read all their lives, and liked it in the library and had a lot of free time on their hands. Under other circumstances they would have shot a lesbian on sight.

“I am not here,” Rachel Wallace was saying, “to change your sexual preference. I am here only to say that sexual preference is not a legitimate basis for discriminatory practices, for maltreatment in the marketplace. I am here to say that a woman can be fulfilled without a husband and children, that a woman is not a breeding machine, that she need not be a slave to her family, a whore for her husband.”

An elderly man in a gray sharkskin suit leaned over to his wife and whispered something. Her shoulders shook with silent laughter. A boy about four years old got up from his seat beside his grandmother and walked down the center aisle to sit on the floor in front and stare up at Rachel. In the very last row a fat woman in a purple dress read a copy of
Mademoiselle
.

“How many books does this sell?” I whispered to Linda Smith.

She shrugged. “There’s no way to know, really,” she whispered. “The theory is that exposure helps. The more the better. Big scenes like the
Today Show
, small ones like this. You try to blanket a given area.”

“Are there any questions?” Rachel said. The audience stared at her. A man wearing white socks and bedroom slippers was asleep in the front row, right corner. In the silence the pages turning in
Mademoiselle
were loud. The woman didn’t seem to notice.

“If not, then thank you very much.”

Rachel stepped off the low platform past the small boy and walked down the center aisle toward Linda and me. Outside the hall there were multicolored small cookies on a table and a large coffee maker with a thumbprint near the spigot. Linda said to Rachel, “That was wonderful.”

Rachel said, “Thank you.”

The president of the Friends said, “Would you like some coffee and refreshments?”

Rachel said, “No, thank you.” She jerked her head at me, and the three of us headed for the door.

“You sure you don’t want any refreshment?” I said, as we went out the side door of the library.