by Pat Conroy
In that summer, I would remember my friends and their souls, light and air-streamed as mallards, set loose among the vast table linen of the great salt marshes, happy among the green riches of a land so full with life that the rivers smelled like some perfect distillate made of spartina and the albumen of eggs. The boys of the low country were accustomed to taking their pleasure from the rivers around Waterford: fishing trips that lasted for days, floating through a dozen tide changes, rubbing baby oil and Mercurochrome on their sunburned shoulders as the game fish of those moon-leavened waters fought for permission to take their hooks—the sheepshead, the migrating cobia, the spottail bass, the sweet-tasting trout—all those fresh fillets would turn golden in their frying pans and fill their bellies and brighten all the generous upright days of their boyhood. The marsh country satisfied all five senses of a boy a hundred times over. I could close my eyes while throwing my cast net for bait in a tidal creek at low tide, and the summer air would fill my lungs. I could believe that I was a sailor, a merchant marine, a sea-born creature of water and marshes. The black mud of the creeks squirted between my toes and I could hear a porpoise driving the mullet toward a sandbar in the river.
Jordan’s effect on Waterford was cataclysmic, though it would take years to assess either the damage or the benefits of his bold passage through the life of the town. For his contemporaries, he opened up the windows of time, he brought news of the great wide world to their door. Life was fable and theater and myth because Jordan willed it to be so.
Jordan was a military brat, the son of a lieutenant colonel, and one of those migratory, interchangeable, and ultimately invisible children who drifted in and out of the colorless housing of the two Marine bases in town and the naval hospital. The lives of these children were so transient that there was little reason for a native Waterfordian to waste time getting to know them well. They simply passed through the town and its schools each decade, mostly unnoticed and unpraised.
Capers, Mike, and I first saw Jordan on Dolphin Street as we were slowly making our way to an American Legion baseball game at the high school field. We were in no hurry and moved slowly down the main shopping street during one of those fragrant Southern days when the pavement was hot to the touch and all the plants seemed about to burst into spontaneous combustion. The heat lay inside of things. Blasts of cold air came from within the stores whenever a shop door opened and hit the three of us with a welcome coolness. Sailboats were stalled in the windless bay like dragonflies trapped in the amber of a weatherless high noon that would last forever. Time stood still and babies in their carriages squalled from discomfort and heat rash and the impatient lassitude of their mothers. The summer wrote its name on the sizzling asphalt and there was not a dog in sight.
“What in the hell is that all about?” Mike said, the first of the group to spot Jordan flying down Dolphin Street on a skateboard, weaving expertly and dazzlingly between cars in the stalled traffic.
“Damned if I know and damned if I care,” Capers said, feigning indifference, but there was an edge of uncertainty that both Mike and I caught. Capers was the arbiter of fashion and trends among our group. He welcomed acolytes, but didn’t cotton well to rivals.
“That’s the new kid,” I said. “The one from California.”
I never forgot that first sighting of Jordan Elliott, his palomino-colored hair floating above him as he shot down the street on the first skateboard ever to make it across the borders of South Carolina. I watched in awe as Jordan navigated between Buicks and Studebakers while all the eyes on that Southern street turned their collective, disapproving gaze on the stranger. Jordan wore a bathing suit, a torn-up tee shirt, and cut-off tennis shoes, and he moved down that street noisily and showily, making hairpin turns and reverses that seemed impossible and superhuman. His sunglasses were wrapped around his head and appeared more like a mask of defiance and outlawry than anything to do with the laws of optics. Store owners and customers ran out into the shimmering wall of heat to watch the performance.
Deputy Cooter Rivers was issuing a parking citation to a tourist from Ohio when he noticed the commotion and whistled Jordan to a stop in the middle of the street.
Deputy Rivers was an amply built, dull-witted man who had an amateur actor’s love of crowds and he was delighted by the attention he drew from his townsmen as he approached the long-haired boy. Deputy Rivers said, “Well, well, Little Eagle. What have we here?”
“What’d you want? I’m in a hurry,” Jordan said behind his sunglasses, and he seemed oblivious to the commotion he was causing.
“Put a ‘sir’ on the end of that sentence, boy,” the deputy thundered.
“Which one?”
“What?” the deputy said, confused. “All of ’em, boy. Every goddamn one of them if you know what’s good for you.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Jordan answered, “but I don’t understand a word you’re saying. Could you please speak English?”
Mike and I joined several members of the crowd as we burst out laughing.
“Boy,” the deputy replied angrily, “I don’t know if you’re considered funny where you hail from, but you try to rattle my cage with your brand of crap and I’m liable to shut your runnin’ gums in a hurry.”
Jordan stared out from behind his sunglasses, unreadable, foreign, in perfect control. “What did this guy say?” he asked the crowd and again there was laughter.
Cooter Rivers’ accent was indeed thick and difficult even for a fellow South Carolinian to decipher. And when provoked, the deputy talked faster than normal and this accentuated a slight speech impediment that the public schools of Waterford never quite got around to correcting. His gutturals were lazy and his labials floated toward incomprehensibility. Agitated, his words ran together in an untranslatable stream. Cussing beneath his breath, Cooter wrote up a ticket and handed it to Jordan. A few men in the crowd clapped as Jordan studied the ticket.
Jordan then said, “Did you finish high school?”
A flustered Rivers answered, “I almost did.”
“You misspelled ‘violation,’ ” Jordan said. “You misspelled ‘moving.’ ”
“I got my point across,” the deputy said.
“What do I do with this ticket, man?” Jordan asked.
As Deputy Rivers made his way through the crowd, he shouted back, “You can eat it for lunch for all I care, Little Eagle.”
The crowd began to disperse and most of them missed the moment when Jordan ate his traffic ticket as easily and deliberately as a carriage horse eating a carrot. He munched on it, then swallowed the last of the ticket with a slight gagging sound.
“You play baseball?” I asked.
“I play everything,” Jordan said, taking his first look at the tall, rangy, flat-nosed boy I was in those years.
“Any good?” Mike asked.
“I can play a little bit.” And in the secret language of athletes Jordan was letting us know that we were in the presence of a player. “My name’s Jordan Elliott.”
“I know who you are,” Capers answered. “We’re second cousins. I’m Capers Middleton.”
“My mother said you would be too ashamed to come meet me,” Jordan said, amused. There was something both charming and off-putting about his self-assurance.
“I heard you were weird,” Capers said. “You just proved it.”
“Capers! What a name. A caper’s a little berry in Europe they put on fish and salads. It tastes like shit.”
“It’s a family name,” Capers said, thornily, defensive. “It’s very important in South Carolina history.”
“Oh gag,” Mike said, pretending to throw up on the curb.
“My father thinks the Elliotts back here are hot shit,” Jordan confessed.
“It’s a fine South Carolina name,” Capers agreed. “Very fine.”
“I knew I should’ve taken that vomit bag the last time I flew Delta,” Mike said and Jordan laughed.
“I’m Jack McCall,” I said extending my hand
. “A McCall’s next to nothing in this town.”
“Mike Hess,” Mike said, bowing. “Capers lets us hang around to polish his coat of arms.”
“They both come from very good families,” Capers said.
“Capers thinks we come from white trash,” I said. “But he’d die of loneliness if we weren’t around.”
“You shouldn’t’ve eaten that ticket,” Capers said. “It showed a disrespect for the law.”
“Let’s bring him to practice,” I said. “We’ve got three guys hurt.”
“How’re we gonna explain his hair to Coach Langford?” Capers asked.
“He’s from California,” Mike said. “That explains everything.”
If we had walked on to the baseball field with a Mau Mau chieftain or a Tibetan basketweaver, Coach Langford’s reaction could not have been more incredulous.
“Well, what do we got here?” Coach Langford said.
“Military brat, Coach,” I said. “Came from California.”
“He looks like a Russian Communist,” Langford whispered.
“He’s Capers’ cousin,” said Mike.
“A distant cousin,” Capers quickly said.
“California, you say,” Coach Langford said. “We’ve got a spare uniform, son,” Coach Langford said. “You ever play this game?”
“A little,” Jordan said. “You ever pitched?”
“A time or two.”
“Put a sir on the end of that,” Coach Langford demanded.
“Sir,” Jordan said and he said it with the exact same inflection and feeling as though he had uttered the word “shit.” He had a genius for making an adult feel uncomfortable without resorting to overt discourtesy. Jordan Elliott was the first rebel I knew to enter the precincts of Waterford since the firing on Fort Sumter, the first who treated men in authority as aliens, as interlopers whose job it was to depress the natural joy and ebullience of youth.
As we watched him put on the uniform, Capers said to us, “I think we made a big mistake bringing him to practice.”
“I like him,” Mike said. “He takes no shit. He acts just like I would if I had an ounce of courage. Which I proudly do not.”
“He’s an athlete. That’s for sure,” I said, studying the skateboard. “How’d you like to try to ride that thing?”
“My mother told me all about him. They should’ve put him in reform school years ago,” said Capers.
“Let’s see if he can pitch,” I said.
“He’s just a poor Marine brat. They move every year. Give him a chance,” Mike added.
“None of them fit in when you come right down to it,” Capers said. “They don’t know who they are. Got no place to call their own. I feel sorry for them.”
“He’s an Elliott. A South Carolina Elliott,” I teased.
“From a fine family. Very fine,” Mike added happily.
Capers smiled as he watched Jordan walk onto the field.
“Pitch, new boy,” Coach Langford said, tossing Jordan his own glove and a baseball. “Where’s your hat?”
“The hat didn’t fit.”
“All that damn California hair,” the coach said. “We gotta do something about that situation. Otis, you bat, son. The rest of you boys spread out in the field.”
The catcher, Benny Michaels, finished fastening his gear, then crouched behind the batter’s box and started taking warm-up pitches from Jordan. Jordan warmed up slowly, but you could tell it wasn’t his first time on a pitcher’s mound. There was nothing fancy in his delivery; it was workmanlike and competent. Then Otis Creed began to run his mouth.
Otis was the first boy in Pony League to chew tobacco on a regular basis without throwing up. His father ran the marina on the inland waterway and Otis carried with him that freckled, sunburned look of someone who had grown up around boats and the good mechanical smell of small engines being repaired. He could tear down a boat’s engine as easily as a recruit could assemble a field-stripped M-1 rifle. Otis could not diagram a declarative sentence or find the value of X in the simplest algebraic equation. Waterford was a town famous for its street fighters, and Otis Creed moved with the slack-jawed swagger of the natural bully.
“I never batted against no girl before,” Otis said loud enough for even the outfielders to hear. “She’s kind of purty too.”
The laughter spread through the ranks of the team, but it was nervous reflexive laughter.
Jordan started his windup and threw his first pitch straight at the fillings in the upper part of Otis Creed’s mouth. It was with that pitch that the boys of Waterford learned about the speed that Jordan brought to the task of hurling a baseball. Benny never came close to catching that first one. It hit the chicken wire backstop with a solid twang as though a string had broken on an overtuned guitar.
“She tried to hit me. That was intentional,” Otis said, rising and dusting off his pants and pointing his bat menacingly at Jordan. But Jordan paid Otis no attention at all, just received the toss from the catcher, then walked back to the rosin bag, tossed it up and down a couple of times, the dust exploding between his fingers like a dandelion going to seed.
“Throw strikes, new kid,” the coach ordered.
The second pitch was thrown just as hard. It missed Otis’s throat by a millimeter and sent Otis spinning out of control once again, falling backward toward the visiting team’s dugout.
“Otis, you look a bit tense in the batting cage,” Coach Langford said.
“He’s wild as a billy goat, Coach,” Otis shouted.
Jordan said, “I still remind you of a girl?”
“You sure as hell do, Goldilocks.”
The next pitch hit Otis high on the rib cage, making a sound like a watermelon hit by a throwing knife.
I was standing next to Mike in the outfield and said, “Otis could never read the handwriting on the wall.”
“Looks like we found us a damn pitcher,” Mike said.
“The question is: Can he throw it over the plate?” I said.
Otis rose painfully to his feet, roared once, then started out toward the mound, brandishing his bat. The long-haired boy did not appear to be cowed and took several steps forward to meet Otis’ charge. Coach Langford got between them first and kept them separated with his spavined, meaty hands.
“Not smart to make fun of a boy who throws that hard,” Coach Langford said to Otis. “Can you get that ball over the plate, son?”
Jordan turned his blue eyes at that drawling, overweight coach who ran a gas station for a living and brought an irrepressible love of sport and young boys to the task of coaching. Even then, Jordan could take a quick read of anyone, and was as clear-sighted as he was mercurial and moody, and Jordan saw the goodness of the man below that primitive, fascist exterior that is the general rule among the Southern fraternity of coaches. It was the man’s basic and abiding sweetness that Jordan felt as Coach Langford put the ball back into Jordan’s glove and said, “Son, now I’d like to see you strike him out.”
In four pitches, Jordan struck Otis out swinging. There was an audible murmur from the boys in the field as they admired the speed of Jordan’s pitch and the explosive, satisfying pop it made in Benny’s glove.
For Capers, Mike, and myself, the addition of Jordan completed our group in some elemental way. In our junior and senior years of high school, Jordan was the right halfback in what became known as the Middleton backfield and we lost only two games in those final two years. On the basketball team, Jordan was a tremendous leaper, a scrapper under the boards, and he hit the jump shot from the corner that won the lower state championship game against North Augusta High. His pitching improved every year as he grew into his formidable manhood and his fastball was timed in the high eighties by the end of his senior year when he took his team to the brink of the championship.
But it was Capers who recognized Jordan’s potential that day: Beneath the flowing mane of blond hair, he saw both the attractiveness and the danger in Jordan’s rare smile, rare in its
openness and candor, hidden by the rebellious, unhappy boy who seemed at war with the entire adult world. Capers recognized the sexual aura that Jordan wore in his insolent, thin-lipped assurance. Sensing a potential rival, he sought to befriend Jordan before the stranger proved dangerous.
No protest ever arose from me or Mike because we had learned from our early boyhood to follow Capers’ lead in everything. Capers expected it as one of his natural rights in a friendship that had been imbalanced from the beginning. Because Capers grew up in a household that revered politics, he understood the strategies that involved silence and indirection. He would plant an idea in Mike that would cause an argument with me and both of us would turn gratefully to him for relief or intercession. Often, he simply became the tie-breaking vote called to intervene between his bickering friends. His tyranny was encased in velvet and appreciated. Capers admired the horseplay and mischief that Mike and I brought to his straitlaced life; he rarely made any demands of his own and Mike and I never realized that Capers always got his way. We were the instruments of a superior political instinct who was ruthless in the sweetest, most generous way. In the South, the cotillion of Machiavelli is always played as a soft-shoe, in three-quarter time.
But it was Skeeter Spinks who really bonded the friendship of the four of us. Skeeter came out of the lowest echelons of the white South and he came out mean. His time in high school had been a reign of terror for Waterford’s teenage boys because Skeeter liked to brag that he’d beaten every boy in school at least once. Smart boys especially dreaded his approach, for he took special pleasure in humiliating them. His frame was enormous and he combined an overworked farm boy’s strength with a lifetime of bad manners. He was volatile, thick-necked, and the possessor of a both razor-blade and hair-trigger temper. Skeeter was one of those boys of nightmare that make having a penis during an American childhood almost unendurable.