She immediately wished Didi had been there to whisper a better line to her.
But it seemed to work for Colin Ring.
Annie Stratton made a point of starting with the townspeople and ignoring the reporters. She’d get to the newsies later. They could stew for a while. She gestured to a woman near the back of the central section of the auditorium. An assistant with a microphone made his way back to her.
“My name is Lucy Blaine,” she said. The woman looked to be in her early forties, had long strawberry blonde hair and the air of a slightly wilted flower child about her. “I understand, Mayor Steadman, that you support a rationalist view of natural phenomena. But there are many of us, including Native American peoples, who take a more spiritual point of view. We believe a spark of the divine exists in all things. We believe that there are larger powers than ourselves, and they can be influenced to act on our behalf or against us. I personally believe that such a spirit exists in the mountain lion you’re trying to kill. I don’t think you’ll succeed no matter how many hunters and trackers you bring in. But even if you do, what’s to say the spirit of another wild animal might not be turned against us? Or some other type of natural disaster might be visited on us. Before
any
further life is taken, I suggest we, as a town, approach Mrs. Cardwell and see if we can’t heal the hurt in her heart. I think that’s our only chance to get things back to normal around here.”
Scattered applause rippled around the room. Annie picked out a man seated in the front row of the right hand section. He was a husky white guy dressed in casual clothes who looked to be in his mid-thirties. He seized the microphone instead of letting the staffer hold it for him.
“My name is James FitzHugh, and the first thing I want to say is I am
not
a racist. I was raised to be a good Catholic, and the nuns beat it into my head that we’re
all
God’s children. I also learned, when I was studying my family tree, that one of my great-grandpas was an indentured servant back in the Old Country
after
Lincoln freed the slaves here. So, I’m not a fan of human bondage. That said, I also have to say it really frosts me every time I hear a black person say that whatever is bad in his life is my fault. Mine or some other white guy’s. What is that if not racism? Nothing bad that happens to black people in America is the fault of the person who looks back at them in the mirror each morning. I get the impression a lot of blacks in this country think everything would be just peachy if only the white folks disappeared. My answer to that is look at how things are over in Africa — or Detroit, for that matter — and tell me how things are when blacks don’t have whites to use for scapegoats. I don’t know if animals have spirits like that lady just said, but I agree with her that Mrs. Cardwell was pissed off when she laid into our town. Call it a curse or not, she knew she was directing her anger at white people.”
FitzHugh handed the microphone back, and received significantly louder applause than the first speaker. Annie consciously chose a black man seated at the left of the room as the next up.
He was of medium height and a slim build. He had a receding hairline. He wore gold wire-frame glasses and a sports coat, giving him a professorial appearance.
“My name Christian Banneker. One of my forebears, Benjamin Banneker, helped design Washington, D.C. Almost every male member of my family has been a college graduate for the past one hundred years. Almost every female member of my family has been a college graduate for the past seventy-five years. My relatives have become ministers, educators, doctors, and officers in the military. Following in Benjamin Banneker’s footsteps, I am an architect. I am also the heir to two very fortunate traditions. The first is being a member of a family that insists on rectitude and education as the pillars of a good life. The second is to be a citizen of a country that recognizes that human nature is both flawed and perfectible. I don’t blame white people for my shortcomings; I only ask them not to overlook their own. We all have work to do on that person we see in the mirror each morning. Lastly, I would like to express my heartfelt sympathies to the Cardwells, the Castlewoods and the Masons.”
Banneker’s comments received the best reception yet. When the applause died down, Annie called on a man in the dead center of the audience.
He was tall and rawboned, wore khaki slacks and a plaid shirt, and looked to be in his fifties. “I’m Ezra Tilden, and I guess I’m kinda like the chief of police up there. I was raised to think that some people were better than others because of their skin color or their religion or their accent or whatever the hell else my parents thought up. And I believed what I was taught for a good long time. But finally I got out in the world enough and grew enough brains to figure out that what I was taught as a child was both right and wrong. Some people are better than others. But there are no hard and fast rules as to why. Skin color surely isn’t a sign. You know how I figured that out? I met a
blind
racist. This man had been born blind, but he told me blacks were no damn good. I asked him how he knew what the hell color a person was when he couldn’t see anybody. Then just to mess with his head, I asked how he even knew everyone wasn’t playing a big joke on him and
he
was black.”
That got a laugh from the crowd. Even the mayor smiled.
Tilden continued, “I agree with Clay Steadman that our town isn’t cursed. If God wanted to kick some ass around here, He wouldn’t be working on such a piss-ant scale.
One
mountain lion? If that’s the best God can do, he’s gettin’ old.”
People started to laugh again, but Tilden held up his hands.
“Please. I don’t mean to make fun of what happened to the folks who did get attacked, and that poor young Mason girl. Or Reverend Cardwell, either. I’m glad that Fansler punk is in jail, and I hope his pain will be prolonged, too. As for whoever killed the reverend, I wouldn’t mind seeing
that
sonofabitch nailed to a tree — as long as it was a dead tree. Wouldn’t want to hurt any innocent plant life.”
Tilden looked over his shoulder at the first speaker, Lucy Blaine, momentarily. “Ma’am, I’m not qualified to say whether we’ve all got a divine spark in us, but I figure if that’s so, maybe people have got a little more of it than mountain lions. I say we trust our police department to catch the people who are dangerous to us, but the state of California has to trust us to protect ourselves from animals that are dangerous to us. A bunch of do-gooders in Los Angeles and San Francisco pass a proposition saying you can’t hunt man-eating predators? Well, to hell with that! It’d be like us passing a proposition protecting drive-by shooters. Wouldn’t those city folks scream then?”
Amid a flurry of favorable outcries, Ezra Tilden turned his gaze directly toward Clay Steadman.
“Mr. Mayor, I’ve got to tell you, if I see any mountain lion around my house, I won’t stop to ask if it’s our local marauder. My policy will be to shoot on sight. If that’s civil disobedience, so be it. If you want to prosecute me, I’ll take my chances with a jury of my peers. That’s all I’ve got to say.”
Clay met the man’s eyes and spoke softly. “I’m afraid we’d have to accommodate you with that prosecution, Mr. Tilden. You or anyone else of a similar mind.”
Annie Stratton decided it was time to let the working press have its turn.
Gayle Shipton, who’d spent years in pitch meetings with the
sleaze de la sleaze
of Hollywood, figured she could put up with just about any man for an hour or two. But this limey letch was almost more than she could take. He’d ordered stout for
her,
vile-looking black stuff that looked like it had passed through a barnyard animal with a urinary infection.
That, and he had his hand up her skirt before she even got a chance to see if he had clean fingernails. Well, okay, she’d flashed him a little of the old beav, but he didn’t have to be so rough about it — and so obvious. They were seated at a small table, and if anyone ever took their eyes off the damn televisions, they’d get quite a show.
When Colin Ring tried to stick one of his fat fingers inside her, she pinched the back of the offending hand sharply enough to draw blood. He quickly — thankfully — withdrew it, and she tugged her dress down. But when the Englishman spotted corpuscles flowing freely from the rip in his flesh, he saw red in more ways than one. For one head-spinning moment, Gayle thought he was going to bash her right there.
She saved herself by saying in a husky snarl, “You play rough, I play rough. You play nice, I’ll play nice.”
Not a bad line, Gayle thought. Of course, maybe she was just remembering it from some old Lauren Bacall movie. Still, it seemed to be working. The brows over Colin Ring’s piggy little eyes unfurled themselves and a grin appeared at the corners of his lipless mouth.
“Too bloody right!” the Englishman roared with laughter. He slapped the table hard enough to produce a credible impression of a gunshot. For the first time, all the eyes in the bar turned away from the televisions and looked at them.
Gayle quickly lowered her head. She didn’t want to be remembered being seen with this creep. If people couldn’t see her face, all they’d recall would be her hair and her tits. In this town, that wouldn’t narrow things down much.
When she thought it was safe, she looked up.
Colin Ring was regarding her with a devilish grin.
“Very well, my dear,” he said. “Where shall we go to play nice? Your place or mine?”
Damn! He was right, she thought. Her stupid line implied an invitation. That was the problem with spoken dialogue: you couldn’t rewrite it.
What was she supposed to do now? She hadn’t played things the way Didi had told her — to tell Ring there was someone he had to meet. She’d revised Didi’s scenario so she could play the
femme fatale.
What a dipshit mistake that had been. Now, if she told this pickled porker there was someone who wanted to see him, he’d be sure to smell a rat.
Well, one thing was for certain, his place was out.
“My place,” Gayle said with a smile she hoped wasn’t too transparently phony.
As they rose to leave, she hoped to God that Didi had a way out of this for her.
A reporter from
The New York Times
asked the first question. “Mayor Steadman, with the exception of a few people like Mr. Tilden, many people respond to questions concerning matters of race, religion or other sensitive subjects by saying what they think is publicly acceptable, while they privately hold views that are just the opposite. How do you know a majority of the people in your town don’t, in fact, believe that Mahalia Cardwell has cursed it, and resent her and other African Americans for what she’s done?”
Clay studied the man, looking at him as if he were a specimen best examined under a microscope.
The mayor began with a question of his own: “How do you know Mr. Tilden isn’t a hypocrite and a liar, too?”
With his words, Clay did what many would have thought impossible: He made a reporter blush.
“He … he simply struck me as credible,” the reporter said defensively.
“But other people don’t? Mr. FitzHugh was quite blunt about his resentment. He doesn’t like to be blamed for other people’s problems, and I don’t know of anyone who does. Mr. Banneker is proud of himself and his family and doesn’t want people to stereotype him because of his skin color, and that’s perfectly natural. Ms. Blaine expresses a reverence for life greater than mine and perhaps your own. In fact, all of the people who have spoken here tonight have struck me as both sincere and vitally concerned about their town.
“Still, your question is
how
do I know when people are not being honest. I’ll tell you how: I can
smell
deceit. It stinks. It has just about the same rank odor that cynicism has. But let’s put my nose to the test.” The mayor looked over to the phone monitor. “Do we have a call you can put on the speaker?”
With the click of a button, a woman’s disembodied voice sounded in the room. She sounded middle-aged with no discernible accent. “Hello? Hello, am I talking to the town meeting?”
“Yes, ma’am, you are,” the mayor said.
“My na —”
“Please, if you don’t mind,” the mayor interrupted, “would you withhold your name? We’d like you to remain anonymous so there will be no reason for you not to give bluntly honest answers to a few questions. Would that be all right with you?”
“Oh … well, okay. Sure. I have something to tell you, but what do you want to know?”
The audience listened with fascination to the drama Clay had constructed.
The mayor said, “Let’s start at the beginning: How did you feel when you learned of Reverend Isaac Cardwell’s death?”
“Awful. Just terrible … I wept.” The woman’s voice filled with emotion. “I looked at the picture of that poor man in the paper and I asked myself, ‘How could anyone do such a thing?’”
“Did it matter to you that Reverend Cardwell was black?”
“No!” There was a pause for reconsideration that nobody in the audience missed. “Well, yes it did. That image reminded me of pictures I’ve seen in books. History books, you know. Where blacks had been lynched or burned. I felt a deep sense of shame that something like that could happen in my town. I felt
angry,
too. It felt like the anger my husband describes to me when he hears about a man attacking a woman. He takes it personally when one of his own kind does something like that. I felt the same way.”