Suitcase City

by Watson, Sterling

  David Dyer approached the group.

  Rainey said, “David, you missed it. Where you been?”

  “Doing your bidding.” The newcomer was tall like Rainey, slender with black hair and dark, sunken eyes. He looked toward the playing field where the pounding feet of fifty boys raised a cloud of gray dust.

  “Your boy got hurt, Dave,” one of the men said. “Got into a scrap with Ray Rentz’s boy, then got hurt. Took him in early.”

  “Hurt?” David Dyer said. “Billy?” He squinted as though a strong beam of light had been shot at his eyes.

  “Don’t worry, David,” Rainey said, “Your boy’s all right. He’s a tough little nut, your Billy.”

  The men walked to Dyer’s old car. He reached into the front seat, removed a worn leather satchel, took from it a sheaf of documents, selected one, and spread it on the hood. The men gathered around.

  “Judge Billingsly will sign the order condemning the land.” Dyer’s forefinger traced a line drawn in blue pencil from a point north of the city, down a corridor of empty country, through the city, and out again to the south, into what the men knew was scrubland, forty miles of green that led to Sarasota. “And the judge’s man in Tallahassee will see to it that the state pays our price.” David Dyer tapped the map with a forefinger. “It’ll run through Carver Heights, just like you planned, Blake.”

  “I planned? We all planned, gentlemen. And a beautiful plan it is.” Rainey looked at each man in turn. “This road gives us two things: money and health. I know you have all thought about the money, probably more than you should, but have you considered well enough the health? We’re getting rid of what’s unhealthy in our town, and so our public service is double. It’s double, gentlemen.”

  Rainey stopped, pleased at his own invention. He took a long, satisfied breath of orange-smelling air. “Good work, David. And you gave the judge our token of appreciation?”

  “I gave it to him.” David Dyer lifted his finger from the blue line on the map, looked at his hands, then at the field where the boys had just cheered—a ragged, exhausted echo—after their last sprint. Now they would run or stagger to the locker room. He turned back to Blake Rainey. “He said to tell you he appreciates it.”

  “Oh,” said Rainey, “appreciation is a part of it, but ownership is the better part. We own a judge now, gentlemen. For a while I thought I’d have to make one of you a judge.” He looked at them, all lawyers, the way he always did when the subject of their profession came up, with an expression of comic tolerance. “But the material here is thin.”

  The men chuckled or groaned, all but David Dyer. He glanced up at the trees that shaded the parking lot, oaks that had stood here a hundred years. He closed his eyes and rubbed their lids with a thumb and forefinger.

  Cam Sizemore said, “Blake, spare us the cracker wit. Save it for the great unwashed.”

  Rainey gave him the brief, sharp look, then grinned a reprieve.

  “I won’t even say fuck you today, Cam. I’m just too happy. You’ll take care of our good David for me?”

  “I’ll take care of him.”

  David Dyer gathered the papers and put them back into the satchel. The men scattered to their cars. Dyer caught up with Sizemore and held him back by the arm. “Cam, is Billy all right?”

  “Yeah, like Blake said.” Cam Sizemore looked at his arm until David Dyer let go, then he put two fingers to his forehead and tapped. “Just got his bell rung. But if it happens again, you should worry.”

  FOUR

  The dim, silent locker room stank of wintergreen liniment, rancid sweat, and the pine tar that was painted on blistered feet. Later, the stinging odor of ammonia would become almost unbearable when last year’s varsity heaped their uniforms on the floor. Eddie Doerner would stay late into the evening running the mountain of laundry through the industrial washers and dryers in the training room. Boys who had not yet made the team took their uniforms home for washing. After practice, these boys scattered off through the town carrying reeking gym bags or, the poorer ones, football pants stuffed like scarecrows with reeking jocks, socks, and jerseys.

  Lying naked on a bench, Billy heard a hundred feet pounding toward the locker room. He must have fallen asleep again. He shoved himself up, held his head in his hands, and tried to breathe sense and grace back into himself. Crazy. Charlie Rentz had gone crazy out on the field. Rentz would be after him now, more than ever. And Charlie’s best friend was Sim Sizemore. And what had Prosser said? Until Doc tells me he can play football. Billy walked to the showers ahead of the crowd and held his head under the spray, kneading a rising bump with his fingers. It hurt less now, but his eyes still saw strangely, as though down a long hazy tunnel.

  Behind him, the locker room filled with the noise of heaving lungs, scraping cleats, and sodden cloth slapping the floor. Hot bodies crowded toward the cooling spray. Ted Street pushed past Billy, then stopped. “How you doing, Dyer? Feeling better? You sure was blocking your young ass off out there today.”

  Street’s words were life to Billy. The older guys were stingy with praise, waiting to see who would make the cut before they extended the courtesies of teammates.

  “Thanks,” Billy sputtered from under a jet of water. “Yeah, I feel better.” He considered making a joke, something about how he hoped to stay conscious for five plays in a row, set a team record.

  Charlie Rentz brushed past, giving Billy more shoulder than was necessary. Billy looked back at him, preparing for what he had brought. Rentz grinned. Blood seeped from the cut under his chin. The entire lower half of Rentz’s face was red and swollen. He raised a hand, fingered the blood, licked it, smiled, spit bloody phlegm at Billy’s feet. “I bleeve you was trying to knock my dick off today, Billy boy.”

  Billy grinned back. “That was the general idea.”

  Rentz shrugged. “You hit hard. That’s good. We need it.” He looked over at Ted Street. “Just don’t make a guy look bad, man. We wouldn’t do that to you.”

  You’d rip my head off and shit in it.

  Billy said, “I’m just trying to make the team. Like you are.” It was the wrong thing to say.

  Rentz threw his head back and howled at the steamy ceiling, his eyes wild, his voice keening to the end of a long breath. “I already made the team. Ain’t I, Ted? We are the fucking team, Ted and me.”

  Street looked at Rentz with the cool speculation of a quarterback. “Yeah, you already made it. You could improve, mind you, but you made it.” Street moved his gaze to Billy, a hint of something like kindness in his eyes. “You. You’ll make it too, so why don’t you guys cut the personal shit.”

  Billy watched them, Street and Rentz. For a moment he wondered if they were screwing with him, but the look in Street’s eyes was steady, assessing, patient. Wouldn’t Rentz, like the rest of the team, take his cues from Ted Street?

  Billy said, “Thanks, Ted. I appreciate it. It’s not personal.” He turned to Rentz, offered his hand. Rentz smiled, looked at Billy’s hand, lifted his face so that blood trickled down his muscled throat, and howled again at the ceiling. He and Street headed deeper into the shower room.

  Billy toweled off and pulled on his clothes, hating the way they stuck to his skin. His body, thirsty and confused, could not stop sweating. He was stuffing his football pants with laundry to carry home when Sim Sizemore and Charlie Rentz stepped out of the showers. Rentz grinned, his chin still bleeding. Size-more stood shaking water from his long, muscled arms. Billy stopped, taking him in. God gave you those long arms for pass catching. Mine are too short.

  Sizemore said, “Wash the puke off your face, Dyer.”

  Before he could stop it, Billy’s hand went to his mouth.

  Sizemore’s lips made a kiss, then he mouthed a word.

  Pussy.

  Billy’s body went rigid. His eyes framed Sizemore, and everything else was gone. His heart flamed with violence, sickness drained from his stomach, and hot rage poured into the empty place. He took a step toward Sizemor
e, another. Fear leapt into Sizemore’s eyes. Another step. Sizemore stepped back, looked behind him at Rentz. Rentz moved away from him, giving ground to what would happen. And Billy let himself smile. And the voice in his bruised skull said, Enough. Enough for one day. Go home.

  * * *

  Holding his head carefully upright and carrying his stinking half-man of stuffed football pants, Billy Dyer walked out of the dim field house into a fiery noon. Behind him, scrubs hooted and moaned in the showers they now had to themselves. The haze above the city was a dark, septic yellow, the color of sputum that lingers in a wracking chest.

  He stepped reverently under the Spartan arch and, crossing the practice field, stopped to consider this place empty of sweating, struggling bodies. He was obscurely proud that not one blade of grass grew on these hundred yards of ground. It was a dirt bowl flanked by sagging bleachers, a place of pain, humiliation, exhaustion, rage, and sometimes triumph. It was right that such a place was ugly. Here, he had found mysterious, necessary things in himself. He gazed around at shredded mouth guards, tape, and tatters of bandages, a ripped chin strap. He half expected to see torn flesh and teeth among the trash.

  “Hey, Billy.” A girl stepped out of the shadows between banks of bleachers. Billy flinched, shifted the reeking half-man from his shoulder to his side. She seemed pleased to startle him. It was the girl who had waved to him. She held a book in her left hand. “Did I scare you?”

  He shrugged. “Uh, it’s okay.” He touched his head and tried to smile. Her eyes went soft and vague in a way that Billy had never seen before outside a moviehouse. Her face was pale, not tanned like most girls’ faces, and not freckled either. Alabaster. He imagined her wearing hats in the sun like older women did when they walked downtown.

  “Well…” She looked up at him, raised a hand to shield her eyes. “I thought you were great in the game.” Her voice came from some sweet-humming motor deep in her chest. It sounded honest and innocent, but there was something else, something playful, that might make fun of a boy with a bump on his head, walking with his scarecrow of laundry.

  He nodded. “Was I better than that book?”

  She smiled. “Yeah, it’s pretty dull. So is football, most of the time, but… that was something. Ole Prosser with his foot on Charlie’s head. And he tossed you like a rag doll. You don’t see that every day. You and Charlie are gonna be friends again, right?”

  “I don’t know if we were ever friends, but it’ll be all right. Eventually.”

  “Well,” she said again, “it was really… something to see.”

  He couldn’t tell if she meant to belittle. His head throbbed. Life was all words to girls, notes written in class, chatter, dialogue from movies and songs.

  “Seen enough?”

  She didn’t like it. Her eyes tightened as though the light were suddenly brighter. He could see her heart beating now at the base of her throat, a mad little tremor in the white skin. She looked around at the bleached pine of the grandstand and the empty practice field. “Yeah, I guess.”

  Billy wiped his sweating face with his forearm, which was a rage of bruises, scabs, fire-ant bites, sandspur boils, and hard muscle.

  She glanced at it, swallowed, looked up at his face. “Are you okay?” She reached a pale hand toward his head, stopped it halfway.

  “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “My car’s here. I’ll take you home.” She walked ahead of him through the runway to the sandy lot behind the bleachers, turned, and waited. Her car was a new white Plymouth Savoy.

  Shame was like a blindside tackle. His father’s battered blue Mercury was parked next to the Savoy. His father sat at the wheel watching Billy and the girl. Billy felt his face taking a liar’s shape. He said, “Oh, uh, no, I can’t do that.” He couldn’t let her take him home. To the shabby house on the crushed oyster shell road in the flat, shadeless grid of streets where he lived with his father.

  The thing that shamed him most about his neighborhood was that the shell roads were sprinkled with oil. It was collected from service stations, trucked in, and sprayed to settle dust. It did. Instead of a choking dust that coated trees and whitened the windows of cars, there was a burnt-oil reek. The oil soaked the leather soles of Billy’s shoes. Sitting in classes, he could smell them. Once, a cheerleader, Susie Strickland, had wrinkled her nose and said to everyone, “Pee-eew! What’s that smell?”

  Billy looked at the Mercury, his father waiting, watching. “Coach Prosser says we have to walk. For conditioning and things.”

  The girl smiled again, but there was a sadness in her eyes that he hoped was not pity. She said, “Some other time then. Well, uh, see you around.”

  She got into the Savoy, and he walked to the window. “Yeah, see you around.” He forced himself to meet her eyes. “As they say.”

  She started the engine, touched the weird Plymouth push-button drive, crept forward, then accelerated. Her white arm came out waving, and he saw her glance at his fathe

  FIVE

  When Billy threw his laundry into the backseat, his father said, “Gad, sir, and how are you?” “Fine, sir. And you, sir?”

  The Maltese Falcon was their favorite movie, and this was their greeting. His father said, “How’s that head?”

  His father was a tall, long-faced, dark-haired man in gray suit pants and a white shirt with rolled sleeves. His suit coat was thrown over the back of the car seat. He smelled of cigarettes, aftershave, and whiskey.

  Billy smiled his best. “It’s nothing. Just got my bell rung.”

  “And there was a fight? With Ray Rentz’s son? That was nothing too?” His father turned and looked into his eyes.

  Billy looked back. “I didn’t see you in the stands. How’d you know about… ?”

  “Ah,” his father said with a wizard smile, “I have my ways.”

  Billy gazed across the car hood at the empty lot. He wished his father had seen the scrimmage, all but the last part. Things had gone well for a while.

  They did not turn toward home. Instead, his father drove through Monmouth Park, toward downtown, and Billy knew something would happen.

  Built in a valley that sloped to a lake, Monmouth Park was the heart of Oleander. It was society, law and medicine, old money, grace, and manners. Mornings at Carr High, the sons and daughters of Monmouth Park turned the crescent drive in front of the school into a parade of good fortune. Rich boys stepped languidly from gleaming Detroit chariots and stretched in the sun in their Oxford cloth shirts, alligator belts, and Weejuns. They slapped notebooks against their thighs and stared at the ordinary kids as though they expected applause. Debutantes dethroned themselves in villager blouses and skirts, gave their bouffants last pats before lifting notebooks to shield their bosoms from lustful eyes. Sim Sizemore and Charlie Rentz lived in Monmouth Park.

  Billy’s father drove past houses with tall white columns, blue swimming pools, tennis courts, and maid’s quarters. The branches of ancient oaks embraced above redbrick streets, and Negro yardmen leaned on rakes frowning as the old Mercury passed. The car windows were open, and the air was cool under the trees.

  Downtown, they parked in front of McCrory’s Five and Dime. A sign in the window read, Fountain. His father said, “Mr. William, what do you say to some lunch?”

  “Lunch, sir? Yes, sir.”

  They took a booth in the back. Billy ordered a Coke and a cheeseburger, his dad black coffee. A blond woman in a lettuce-green smock delivered their drinks.

  His father said, “I spoke to Doc Runkle. He says you’ve had a concussion. Says it’s not like in the movies where our hero gets thumped on the head, goes to dreamland, then wakes up, scratches his noggin, and chases after the bad guys. Your brain swells. Something soft and delicate gets bigger inside a container.” He reached over and gently tapped Billy’s forehead. “Which can’t expand. It’s serious business. He’s benching you for a week.”

  “I’ll be all right.” Water came to Billy’s eyes. A week.

  His dad
smiled, shook his head. “You are a hardhead, aren’t you?”

  Billy looked at him, blinked at the tears. “Yeah, I guess so. Is that good?”

  His father laughed quietly. “Sometimes. Sometimes it’s just an invitation to a short, hard life.” His father turned his coffee cup in its white saucer, pursed his lips, and squinted as though his eyes hurt. “Son, I want you to consider quitting football.”

  Billy was on his feet. His father’s hand shot out to catch the Coke sliding for the edge of the table. It was a long walk back to the land of oil-sprayed oyster shells, and Billy figured he’d better get going. He heard at his back, “Billy!” and his father’s black business shoes scraping the tile floor. Behind the counter, the blond woman watched, mouth open, hands holding a half-eaten sandwich. Billy felt a hard grip on his shoulder.

  Softly, “Billy, come back and sit down.”

  His father put an arm across Billy’s shoulders and walked him back to the booth. Face flaming, Billy lowered his head. His father watched the woman in the green smock, smiled, shrugged, called, “The fevers of youth,” and hooked a comical thumb at Billy. The woman blinked rapidly, then turned her back. Billy’s father wobbled his head and said, “She doesn’t get my humor. Well, a lot of people don’t.” He cleared his throat. “And you. Gad, sir. I didn’t get two words out of my mouth before you bolted.”

  Waiting for his heart to calm, his face to wash of red, Billy examined his father. Was he a little tired, a little thin, a little shabby in a white shirt soiled at the collar, a loosened tie that had been knotted too often, and with hair that needed cutting? The man he had known before his parents’ divorce was disappearing. And he thought, Other things have changed. He doesn’t know me now. He will never know me unless I want him to. Billy wanted to be honest with his dad.

  “I don’t want to talk about quitting football. I’m not a quitter, and my head isn’t that bad. It’s gonna be fine in a few days, I know it is.”