She held her pom-poms down against her thighs. “Get away from me, Head Lice.”
I took off running for a good twenty yards, which was okay, seeing as a Ninety Six halfback was going down the sidelines and it looked like I just wanted to keep up and watch better. When he ran out of bounds I stopped and began my slow amble again. I didn’t turn to see if Bennie Frewer had caught up with me. When he did, at the first turn around the track, I said, “Hey, let’s go get a seat over on the visitors’ side and pop these Coke cups.”
Bennie said, “I know all of our cheerleaders’ phone numbers. You know how I can keep track of them all? By using either pro football players’ numbers, or stock car drivers’ numbers. It’s easy. Everyone in Forty-Five has the first FO, you know. And then there’s a nine for everyone. Then it’s like this: Johnny Unitas, Don Meredith. That comes out to FO-nine-one-nine-one-seven. Or your number: FO-nine, Richard Petty, David Pearson. Ferrell Waldrep’s is FO-nine, Bob Hayes, Fran Tarkenton. It’s easy.”
We made it around the second turn of the track. Ninety Six scored for the third time in the first quarter. I said, “I use a phone book when I want to find out someone’s number.”
Bennie Frewer scratched his head and veered off toward the wooden bleachers. I think he might’ve mumbled, “You would,” like that, but I wasn’t sure. He said, louder, “These cups aren’t going to make the same kind of noise on wood that they would over on the cement stands.”
We sat down away from the hundred or so people who’d traveled the fourteen miles between Ninety Six and Forty-Five, both towns named for an Indian maiden who ran that many miles to warn settlers of the invading British. I thought, What am I going to do in a pup tent with Bennie Frewer for the rest of the night? I thought, What did he mean by what he wanted to do to Ferrell Waldrep’s B-side? “I wish they sold Milk Duds at the concession stand,” I said.
We looked out at the field. For some reason Ninety Six decided to perform an onside kick, and they recovered it easily. Bennie said, “They’re out for revenge, Mendal. Oh, they want to take us over. Last year they only beat us forty-eight to nothing. It was an upset, my father said. Some of the parlay-card people lost some money on that one. Ninety Six was supposed to win by sixty points.”
I didn’t ask Bennie what “parlay card” meant. What did this poor guy think about between eight-thirty and three o’clock every day, seated two rows from everyone else because of his head lice, while the rest of us tried to think up similes and memorize the birth dates of John C. Calhoun, Francis Marion, and Strom Thurmond? I wanted the halftime show to include a display of some of Forty-Five High School’s track and field stars. I wanted a pole vaulter to have his bamboo stick to shatter, for the shards to blind me. I wanted a javelin thrower to screw up and toss his spear through my brain.
I looked forward, and didn’t feel the wooden bleacher plank bounce as Shirley Ebo—still the only black girl in our class—stepped our way. She said, “Hey, Mendal. When did you and Bennie Frewer ’come friends?”
I said, “Shirley!” and scooted over. “Come sit down right here. Why’re you over on the visitors’ side? Come sit down.” I patted the bleacher and got a splinter.
Shirley shook her head no. She wore a thin black and gold cotton dress, the colors of the Ninety Six team. “Daddy and I sit over here every game. He says we got to pull for everyone else, he says. He says the best offense is a good defense, he says.”
Bennie Frewer didn’t look up at Shirley. He kept his eyes on the field. “My dad says the same thing. Hey, Shirley—you want to come over to Mendal’s house tonight? We’re camping out in the backyard. We’re going to have some beer and a fire.”
Shirley looked back in the stands for her people. “I might can come by there.”
Bennie said, “You’re number’s FO-nine, Willie Mays, Joe Willie Namath, Willie Mays.”
I wanted a shotputter to show up and land twelve pounds of iron on the crown of my head, a discus thrower to take me out between the eyes.
WE POPPED OUR CUPS. No one noticed. Ninety Six recovered fumbles and ran them back for touchdowns. One cornerback intercepted three passes in the second quarter. At halftime the score was fifty-six to nothing. Shirley went back up to sit with her mother and father. I said to Bennie, “Let’s you and me go on back to my house. My father won’t be there yet. He’s playing cards with Comp’s father. We can maybe find his stash of beer and add it to what we already have, you know. We can make some prank phone calls, seeing as you know all the numbers.”
Bennie stood up. “I don’t have head lice. Everybody thinks I have lice, but I was just an actor in a documentary. No one in this town seems to understand. There’s no real Godzilla, either, by the way. No matter how far people stretch, they’re not going to find the truth they’re looking for.”
I could’ve told Bennie that he shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition. I had no clue what he meant, seeing as he had the word “truth” in his statement, something everyone else in Forty-Five never puzzled over, either. I said, “Uhhuh,” and looked back for Shirley. She stood up, clapping and dancing as the Ninety Six band came out playing a selection that may or may not have come from The Sound of Music.
I said, “My dad says that my mother didn’t keep him on a short leash as much as he just kept running around the stob until his neck was right up against it. He says it a lot. He promises it’s the truth.”
We rode our bicycles back home. Me, I had only a spider bike one-speed, but Bennie had this thing that looked like a dirt bike, put out by somebody better than Schwinn and with this three-speed toggle switch in the middle. I was pretty sure that he got it from the money he made starring in that ETV-produced documentary. We zigged and zagged past each other up Powerhouse Road, and turned on Dead-fall Road, neither of us with headlights or reflectors. Because the entire town was at the football game we didn’t pass a car in either direction.
At my driveway I said, “I hope my father put some batteries in the flashlight.”
“I hope he had some money left over,” Bennie said. “My dad says that your dad owes him some money. For something. My dad’s playing cards with your daddy and Mr. Lane, too. I guess that’s it.”
I didn’t look at Bennie. I didn’t say, “Well, I figured that out a long time ago, seeing as Dad made us be friends for the night.” I said, “Probably.”
We found a pit of ice holding a six-pack of PBRs. The canvas tent had five regular aluminum spikes holding it down, plus this one long thick metal stob. A fire pit two steps from the ice hole burned slowly, and a bag of marshmallows and Valleydale hot dogs were set right inside the tent’s entrance. My own sad, red cotton sleeping bag had been rolled out next to Bennie’s goose-down mummy bag. Bennie said, “I thought you said your father said we’d have some peach bounce.”
I walked around the tent and found a half-pint of homemade whiskey strung up from a pine branch, like a piñata. I said, “My father lies at times.”
Bennie said, “Yeah, tell me about it. My father’s the same. And my father says your father lies all the time.”
Of course I wanted to punch him in the face hard, and I would’ve, had I not thought that I’d get lice on my fist. A few years later I would feel the same way when I realized how I could make fun of South Carolina, but if anyone from elsewhere came down and said something like, “Hey, this state’s got a collective IQ of something like eighty-eight”—which might have been true—I would start off with head butts and end with kicks to the crotch.
I said, “My father’s many things, but he ain’t a liar, Head Lice.”
Bennie crouched down next to the fire. He held his hands out. “It’s going to be a long life for both of us. You’ll see what I mean.”
We were twelve or thirteen at the time, understand. How did Bennie Frewer become so cosmopolitan and philosophical and worldly? Would he become a man who would later change the world in regard to cancer and/or world peace? Or would he become another pathetic loser running the Sout
h Carolina Student Loan Corporation? I said, “Don’t call my father a liar. You have to take that back.” I stood up, like I would fight—something I learned to love doing later on in life, unfortunately.
Bennie said, “I was only talking. Nothing. I’m sorry if I insinuated anything.”
I was trying to figure out what “insinuated” meant when Bennie pulled down his pants right there outside the tent and said, “My big brother taught me how to do this. It feels good.”
I thought he was trying to pull off his pecker, that’s what I thought. I won’t lie and say I didn’t watch. When it looked like Bennie Frewer had started peeing, though, I ran inside my father’s house. At that moment I realized all the things Bennie wouldn’t be in life.
He yelled at me, “Come on, try this! Try it, Mendal! This is a feeling you ain’t had in your life!”
I had never thought of myself as a prude, but even back then I knew that I could only put my hands to me ears and hum “Camptown Races,” and pray for the first time that my father would come home way earlier than he normally came home on poker nights. I yelled back toward the backyard, “No! No! No! I think I need to be in here in case Dad calls and needs a ride back home!” It’s not like it hadn’t happened before.
MY FATHER KNEW POKER. He taught me early on that a straight flush beat four of a kind, and so on. I knew from the age of seven that three of a kind beat two pair. I don’t want to sound like I got brought up in a den filled only with statistics and probability—I also knew how to make a variety of omelets—but that’s how it went. I learned poker early on. We didn’t have dog racing in South Carolina officially, or I would’ve learned how to bet those things, I’m sure.
“What do you think the odds are that Shirley will come by here after her folks go to bed?” Bennie Frewer asked me after I came back outside. I sat about twenty feet away from him, on the other side of the fire. I didn’t want to chance his springing another leak or eruption.
“I kind of like Shirley,” I said. “I know she’s black and all, but I think she’s the prettiest girl at school.”
Bennie laughed and scratched his head with his left hand. “I kind of think of her as my girlfriend, too. She won’t talk to me, though. She don’t talk to hardly anyone, as far as I can tell.”
I said, “She comes over here sometimes. I’m betting that she’ll come over. Hey, you want to pitch pennies or something?”
Bennie shook his head. “My brother says that I’ll last longer now for beating myself earlier. I wonder if Shirley might be interested in my playing her A-side. I’m thinking her A-side might sound better than her B-side. She’s got a nice face and all.”
I stared at Bennie Frewer like a good cat stares down a snake. I wasn’t sure what he meant—he might as well have been speaking in tongues—but it didn’t sound like he wanted to treat my friend Shirley in a way befitting a sad, sad girl who didn’t want to hang out with white people all the time.
“Don’t talk like that,” I said. In my mind I went through how three of a kind beats two pair, a straight beats three of a kind, a full house beats a flush, and so on. This is funny—when I finally got a real girlfriend in college I ran these options through my head while making love and almost made it all the way to royal flush one time.
Bennie bent over and got a can of beer out of the ice. “I know you make all A’s in school, bubba, but you aren’t all that smart when it comes to the ways of women, are you? I can tell. Man, when I was making the documentary I learned all kinds of things from my TV mom. She used to be a model. She almost made it up in New York on one them soap operas.”
I said, “You lie.”
I could hear gravel crunching on the driveway. Both Bennie and I stood up and looked to the side of the house. Shirley Ebo ambled up as if she was waiting for a late bus. “Y’all ain’t drunk, is you?” she said.
Bennie Frewer said, “Would you please tell Mendal what it means to play a girl’s A-side and B-side? He doesn’t even know. I told him that I would play your A-side, Shirley. That’s a real compliment.”
Shirley walked to the fire and stuck her toe on a piece of molten pine. She stepped over and picked up a beer. “What?”
Bennie spread his hands out and sighed. “What am I doing in Forty-Five?” he said. “I got to get my parents to move us to a place where people know some things. Like Florida. Shirley, get in this tent with me and let me show you some things. I’ll give you a dollar.”
I think it was my second punch that made him lose his balance and fall into the fire. Shirley yelled out for me to stop. Bennie’s head fell right onto a smoldering log, and the only thing I could think about was how a head louse would probably pop in the same way a swollen tick did. I pulled Bennie from the fire and pushed him toward the ice pit. There was an audible sizzle and the smell of burning hair.
Bennie pushed himself off the ground and said, “I’mo tell on you. I’mo kill you,” which is the same thing I would’ve said and done, I know.
“I didn’t like the way you talked to her,” I said, pointing to Shirley. “It’s also not good to go over to someone’s house and pull your pecker out. I read it somewhere. In one of the advice columns.”
Shirley stepped back twice and said, “Y’all gross. Y’all too weird for me.”
Bennie Frewer pulled his sleeping bag out of the tent, rolled it up haphazardly, and got on his bike. He rolled away awkward as an escaped hubcap. I yelled, “I didn’t mean for you to land in the fire,” which was true.
“I was trying to show you something that felt good! Maybe you don’t want to feel good ever, for the rest of your life! I hope you don’t!” Bennie screamed over his shoulder.
Shirley Ebo said, “What did he mean? What did he mean, Mendal?”
I couldn’t tell her that I didn’t know. My new male ego wouldn’t allow for it. I walked behind the tent, reached up, and got the half-pint down from its noose. At the time I didn’t know that this entire incident pretty much shut up Bennie for the rest of his days in Forty-Five; we’d be in some of the same classes, but I would never hear him really speak again.
Nowadays I wish I could’ve patented whatever happened, bottled it, and learned to shut up about everyone else.
MY FATHER LATER told me that he almost hit Bennie Frewer, that the stupid kid was riding his bicycle in the middle of Deadfall Road with his sleeping bag unzipped and slung all the way down his body. Dad said that it looked like a giant blue cocoon coming up the macadam. Shirley and I remained in the backyard, coughing on peach bounce like fools. We roasted marshmallows, and then the hot dogs. Shirley said that she didn’t know the final score of the football game, seeing as the scoreboard didn’t go past ninety-nine.
We were drunk, drunk by the time my father returned all smiles. He said, “What did you do to Bennie?”
“Mendal saved my life, Mr. Dawes,” Shirley said. “We ain’t real sure what ever happened, but we think that Bennie had some ideas.”
I said, “Go ahead and get the yardstick out. I know you’re not going to believe me. Go ahead and hit me right here in front of Shirley Ebo.”
My father toed the fire. “Bennie’s having a rough time of it as of late, son. His daddy told me that he ain’t got no friends, for one. If y’all kids ain’t accusing him of having head lice, then y’all’re accusing him of being some hotshot TV star. Is that true?”
I said, “Is this really homemade peach bounce or did someone pee-pee in the jar?”
Shirley laughed and slapped her ashy kneecap. “Oh, it home brew. I had my daddy’s peach bounce before.” She slid on the ground toward me and put her hand on my bicep. “Mendal my hero tonight. That Bennie kept talking about doing something to my B-hind.”
My father crouched down. He stood on both knees and pulled his pockets inside out. They were empty. He said, “In case you want to know how I did tonight, I won. I took everyone’s money. And we were playing high stakes, son. We played dollar ante, twenty-dollar limit.”
My father took t
he last beer out of the ice pit and opened it. I said, “Where’s your money, then?”
“I owed. I owed some to Mr. Frewer, you know. If your mother ever calls up and asks how I’m taking care of you, please don’t tell her that at times I lose money and then I have to make up for it. That’s all I ask.” My dad reached over and tousled my hair. He pulled on one of Shirley’s thousand pigtails. He looked at his watch and said, “Man. It’s almost midnight. Shirley, do you want me to drive you over to your house, or do you want me to call up your daddy and say you’re safe here for the night.”
Shirley shrugged. “I might need to sit here make sure Mendal don’t get sick to his stomach. You got more beer inside?”
I’d like to say that a shooting star streaked across the sky like some kind of omen. I stretched out on the ground and put the back of my head, plus my hurt fist, in the ice pit. I looked upward, started to count stars, then fell asleep.
Nowadays I like to tell people that my father went inside to call Shirley’s father, and Bennie’s father, that Shirley struggled me up and put me atop my sleeping bag. I tell people that she unzipped the shell, splayed it out, and when we woke up in the morning I was on my stomach, she on her back.
I tell people that I knew exactly what Bennie Frewer meant about the two sides of a woman, but it doesn’t have to do with his A- and B-side versions: it has to do with kindness and patience, or patience and tolerance, or giving and forgiving. It has to do with respect and capabilities, with capabilities and truth.
But really, I woke up alone—which also happened more often than not later on in life—with my bike moved right outside the pup tent’s entrance, leaned fully on its kickstand. There was a piece of paper folded up and jammed into the grip of my handlebars, with “I owe” written on it, barely, in charcoal. She wrote, “FO, Willie Mays, Joe Willie Namath, Willie Mays.”
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