Fighting in the Shade

by Sterling Watson

  Billy’s father had wanted the divorce, but, Billy thought, had not foreseen its consequences. The loss of a wife and home had made him sad. The day Billy’s mother left town, his father finished half a bottle of scotch, dragged their possessions onto the front lawn of the good house, and sold everything they could do without. Frightened by his father’s grief, Billy had protested only a few of his losses. In their driveway, he had sat behind a card table taking money from smiling, calculating strangers, as his family’s possessions changed hands. One part of Billy’s mind made change that day, converting the past into cash, and another part secretly started a new life. There might be good in what was coming, Billy told himself. He and his father would live in a house empty of anger, live together simply as men, in honesty and parity, sharing want and comradeship alike. It would be an unusual life for a boy, but Billy hoped not a bad one. And he would see his mother often.

  Then, as Billy’s father drank more, came and went at odd hours, and never talked about how he made a living, they had slowly become not two men, but Sir and Sir, two characters speaking lines of dialogue from their favorite movie. Holding each other not in their arms but with humor, at arm’s length. And in their daily rituals of distance, Billy learned the habit of secrets. He kept things from his father because his father kept things from him, and secrets seemed to be merciful. His times with his mother were his biggest secrets.

  She had moved to Sarasota, Billy supposed, to put distance between herself and the past. And she wanted no doubt about David Dyer’s responsibility for their son. Sarasota was a richer, prettier town than Oleander, with exclusive shops, pearly beaches, and no citrus industry to smear its blue air with fog and stink. His mother found an apartment and a job in the best department store. With her employee discount, she bought pretty clothes and makeup. She lost weight, acquired a tan, and moved from the housewares department to a cosmetics counter, where she looked, to Billy’s eye at least, more like a model than a mother.

  She had always been pretty, but never, even to the son who loved her, glamorous. Billy had watched her transformation with fascination and hope. The housewife he had seen pushing a whining vacuum cleaner, or shoving mousy brown hair from her sweating forehead as she fried eggs, had become slender and sleek, cool and remote in an immaculate white smock, confident in her words to customers about shades, textures, and lotions. She was, in Billy’s eyes, reborn. Delivered from his father and the trouble that had dogged the Dyers to Oleander.

  The man in the damp gray suit closed the newspaper, sighed again, and rose to leave. And then Billy heard his mother’s high heels clicking smartly on the marble floor of the hallway outside. He closed Birds of Coastal Florida and prepared a smile for her.

  In her looks she did not disappoint. She walked toward him in a lime-green fitted dress with a green and white polka-dotted belt. She had good arms, taut and tanned, and somehow they were even better flowing from lime-green silk. She fanned her face with a delicate, red-nailed hand.

  “Whoo, Billy, it’s hot up here. You’ve studied enough.” She winked at him. Studying was their ruse for Billy’s waiting here. “Let’s go for a walk in the park.”

  All day, since rising, eating cereal with his father, and lying about going to the library to study—But Billy, school hasn’t started yet. I know, Dad, but I gotta get a head start on algebra; gotta pass to stay eligible—Billy had wanted to say one thing, and when he sat with his mother on a bench under a tall live oak overlooking the small lake that cooled the park, he said it.

  “Mom, I made the team. I’m… second-string flanker-back.”

  “Billy, I’m so proud of you. Did you do any touchdowns? Oh, you’ll be careful, won’t you?”

  “Sure, Mom. I’ll be careful.” She was hopeless about football, but it was a sweet hopelessness, and he would not have to explain second string or even talk about his prospects to take the starting position from Sim Sizemore.

  His mother opened her purse, took out a bag of peanuts, and tossed one to a pigeon. She watched the inevitable flock of birds gather, then put the peanuts away and lay her hand lightly on Billy’s knee. “Billy, I have some news too. I’ve… met a man.”

  The joy of Billy’s revelation, the news of making the team, died in his chest. He could say no more about it. This was bigger news. Maybe a bigger joy. But not his joy.

  When he didn’t speak, she said, “Billy, are you all right? Did you hear me?”

  “I heard. I’m… glad.” It was what he could give her. The only thing that would matter to her. He had always wanted to give her things but had never known what they should be. His Christmas presents were always well meant but dumb or obvious, and her eyes when she opened them were always appropriately appreciative, but he had never seen her really want a gift from him. He had never given her joy. He looked at her now. Her eyes were somber and suddenly filling with tears.

  “Thank you, Billy,” she whispered. “His name is Karl.” She pulled a small pink handkerchief from her lime-green purse and blotted her eyes, careful with her mascara. She looked away at the fountain in the center of the park, took two deep breaths, set her shoulders back, and turned to him with a smile that was as good as any gift. “I want to tell you about him. He’s tall and broad-shouldered, and he has a big, deep voice, maybe too big sometimes, and he has big plans. Plans that include me. But they’re expensive, Karl’s plans. Oh, they’ll pay off eventually. That’s another big thing about him. The size of his ambitions. He’s larger than life.”

  Billy’s mother blinked, stopped as though a voice had told her, Too much, too much for a boy. Your son. A blush darkened her tanned cheeks.

  “Oh, I don’t know, Billy. It’s hard to describe. Karl is just…” She shrugged, and her smile was younger than she was, a little embarrassed.

  And Billy remembered the day in the kitchen of the good house before the divorce, his mother drinking whiskey and whispering through slow, loose lips, “They don’t sell spare parts for people.”

  And now he wanted to say, So, Karl? None of his parts are missing? but he smiled back as best he could, and stared out at the fountain where people gathered on summer days, standing downwind and basking in the cool mist. Today there was no wind, but a few people stood with their faces lifted to the breath of the fountain. A big man who had been looking up, watching the jets of water turn to white froth against the blue sky, rolled his head thoughtfully above thick shoulders and walked toward Billy and his mother.

  His mother stood and smoothed the lime-green skirt across her thighs. “Billy, Karl is here to meet you. He wants to take us to lunch.”

  Billy stood beside his mother and watched the big man coming. About the height and weight of Charlie Rentz, he thought, and the same thing in his eyes.

  His mother introduced her son with a sweet shyness, her face flushed, eyes bright for his approval, and what could Billy do but shake the man’s hand and mutter what he had been taught: “Pleased to meet you, sir.”

  Karl towered over Billy, using his size as some men did, looking down with a grin while his handshake made Billy’s eyes water. He wore yellow trousers with a satiny sheen, a green-and-red checked sport coat, and a blue silk shirt, open at the throat. It was the kind of getup you saw a lot in Florida, but Karl’s version was louder than most, like his voice when he said, “So, finally I meet the famous Billy.”

  Billy thought his mother should have been blinded by the colors Karl wore, but her eyes ate him up.

  PART II

  SEPTEMBER

  THE MYSTERY

  The mysteries of the cult of Eleusis, a city near Athens, were secret initiation rites of death and rebirth. Many noted ancients, including Philip of Macedon and Caesar Augustus, participated in the rites. What sets the Mystery of Eleusis apart is that no one ever broke the oath of secrecy required of all participants.

  An inscription found at Eleusis reads, “Beautiful indeed is the mystery given us by the blessed gods: death is for mortals no longer an evil, but a bless
ing.”

  NINE

  Some of the guys talked about a hunting camp by a lake in the deep pine woods east of the city. There were rumors of wild parties, of men and boys drinking together, of young hunters smearing the blood of a deer or a wild hog on their faces or shoving their heads into the gutted maw of a still living animal. Local men, Billy had heard, used the camp in the spring to give the best high school seniors a first taste of fraternity life. These gatherings featured kegs of beer, vats of boiled shrimp and blue crabs, swimming and waterskiing, and speeches by college boys and important men in politics and business about the eternal bonds of Greek life.

  The parties were not about recruiting, Billy knew that. The boys invited to the hunting camp were the sons of the prominent families of Oleander and nearby cities. Their fathers and grandfathers were fraternity men. The parties told the older men that a boy could hold his liquor, that he could talk to grown men as an equal, and that he could witness what happened in the woods and not tell about it. But some did tell, and some of the stories included women. One of the older men, Billy had heard, might bring a girlfriend, or might pay a woman who worked at the juice plant to dance for the boys. This, too, was a test.

  The camp was used for another purpose, Billy had heard. In the early fall, boys who had made the varsity team at Carr High were taken into the woods for a party with the older players. No one Billy knew had revealed any particulars of this party. He had heard only one thing: It was called Mystery Night.

  Billy drove out to the hunting camp with Lane Travers, the boy who had vomited when the jerseys were given out. The first mystery was that Travers had called to offer a ride. Somehow, he knew Billy would need it. At eleven o’clock, at the end of a long sand road in a pine forest, they found the camp, a simple screened pavilion built on an Indian mound overlooking a vast lake. Cars were scattered among tall old pines. Billy saw Sim Sizemore’s red Chevy and Jimmy Bishop’s gorgeous green Bonneville. When he and Lane Travers stepped out of Lane’s old Buick and stretched under the fragrant canopy, they smelled spicy shrimp boil and the greasy smoke of grilling burgers. Their teammates wandered here and there in bathing trunks, or bare-chested in blue jeans and holding sodas and beers. Billy looked across the car hood at Lane, who frowned back at him at the sight of the beer.

  They walked to the pavilion, where boys dipped their hands into a steaming pile of boiled shrimp that had been poured from a cauldron onto butcher paper spread across a trestle table. Boys raked shrimp from the pile, hulled and ate them, fanning their scalded lips, whimpering as much at the spicy flavor as at the pain. They dipped shrimp into crocks of red sauce, threw their heads back and let fall whole shrimp, chewing and swallowing, blowing, “Whew! Whew!” at the burn. They cooled their throats with long drafts of beer or soda. Billy and Lane looked at each other again, shrugged, and bellied up to the steaming shrimp. An outrageous sound erupted.

  “THERE IS A HOUSE IN NEW ORLEANS THEY CALL THE RISING SUN…”

  Someone had brought a record player and let loose at brain-maiming volume this gravelly, grim dirge. It was the hot song of the summer. A song Billy had been told was about a girl in a whorehouse. Getting into the spirit, he grinned at the boys eating from red-stained hands. It was all here in this beautiful, primal place—food, drink, music, friendship. If he got the chance later on, he planned to try waterskiing.

  *

  “Go on, take it,” redheaded Jimmy Bishop said. “Don’t be a pussy.”

  Billy took the beer bottle from Bishop’s hand. They were pushing him, and he didn’t like it. Two other guys in the circle, Lewis Cordes, the tight end, and Gary Bland, the punter and placekicker, stared at him, eyes red-rimmed from sun and drink, then looked at the beer in his hand.

  “Come on, man,” Bland said in the high, nasal voice that Billy had never liked. They were standing on a carpet of pine needles, sunlight behind them slanting across the far shoreline of the lake, cresting the green treetops with gold, glancing coppery from the tannin-stained water of the lake, and striking their sun-burnt flesh with a stinging force. It was still beautiful. Even if things had changed a little in the last hours, it was still beautiful.

  Billy looked at the faces that looked at him, at the bodies, hard, sun burnt, bruised and scarred from summer practice, at the hands that held the cold, sweating beer bottles. He lifted the beer to his lips and drank, liking the shock of cold on his tongue, then not liking the sour, yeasty flavor.

  “It’s about goddamn time,” Jimmy Bishop said in mock anger. He smiled at Billy and raised his bottle in a salute that was somehow like a punch. Billy imitated it, meeting Bishop’s eyes. He drank again, liking the taste a little better.

  The boys talked about the coming season, their toughest opponents, their chances for the state championship. Billy listened, nodding, sipping, trying not to take too much beer too quickly before he discovered his capacities. He did not want to get falling-down drunk as some of the boys already were, stumbling into the pines to puke.

  He had seen Charlie Rentz and Sim Sizemore off and on during the afternoon. They were taking care of things, emptying the garbage cans of shrimp hulls, boiling more shrimp to a bright red perfection, adding beer to coolers full of ice. They and other veteran players were the hosts, but they were revelers too, and getting, or so it seemed to Billy, as drunk as any of their teammates. Perhaps they, being older and more experienced, held the beer a little better, held it at least until they too had to walk off into the woods and relieve themselves of it, but they were now, as the sun withdrew its fire from the pine treetops across the lake, like everyone but Billy Dyer, drunk.

  TEN

  Thirty naked boys stood around a roaring fire. Like some other things Billy had not noticed when he and Lane Travers had arrived in the early afternoon, the fire had been prepared ahead of time. At nightfall, the veterans of last year’s varsity had ordered the new boys to strip and sent them to the pit where firewood had been laid and doused with kerosene. The fire had come none too soon. Vapors rising from the cooling lake and the wind that moved the tops of the pines with a brushing sound had made the boys cold. And then the mosquitoes had come. The boys crowded close to the fire, slapping the stinging bugs, laughing and singing with the record player, and spitting beer into the blaze. Billy saw Lane on the other side of the fire, his arms slung across the backs of two naked boys, singing, “Louie Louie.”

  Billy had drunk five beers. He did not feel drunk, whatever that was, although after the third beer he had noted in himself, far back behind the place of keen thinking, a strange hilarity that strained to slip its bonds. He had learned that you needed to step carefully with five beers in you, take your time in reasoning things out. The lesson learned, life was fine. And there were advantages to the beer. The sting of the mosquitoes was not so maddening, and the stupidity of the worst boys around the fire was comically forgivable.

  He glanced to his right, uphill toward the pavilion, and saw the electric lights go out. Then a flame sprang to life in front of a face. The face of Sim Sizemore. Six more torches were lit in succession, and seven torchbearers filed down from the pavilion, the flames lighting their faces and torsos now covered in football jerseys. Billy was surprised and a little angered to see the red game jerseys, those worn only in the heat of battle and at school on game days. Sim Sizemore led the way, followed by Charlie Rentz and Jimmy Bishop. Next came Eddie Bierstadt, the tailback, Lewis Cordes, the tight end, and Gary Bland, the punter. Coach Rolt brought up the rear.

  The thirty boys around the fire were silent now save for the occasional slapping of a mosquito. Billy could not tell what surprised them most: the torches, the marching veteran players with grim, elevated faces, the sudden ritual solemnity of the night, or the appearance of Coach Rolt. When had he arrived?

  Even as Billy swallowed the last of his beer and tossed the bottle behind him into the woods, his instinct being to free his hands, something in him admired the planning of this, the shape of the story that was unfolding.
The remoteness of this place, the plenty of food, drink, and games, the loosening of inhibitions, the camaraderie and leveling of nakedness, then the sudden reappearance of authority. And two kinds of it. The veteran players and the coach. As the torch-lit procession arrived, some of the boys reached down to cover their parts. Billy thought he heard the voice in his head say Run! but he was not sure. Maybe the beer blurred his hearing. He shook his head, wiped his eyes to make sure he was really seeing this.

  The last torchbearer, Gary Bland, carried a canvas gym bag, and when the line of seven stopped, facing the boys who circled the fire, Bland dropped it at his feet. Every eye in the circle fastened to the bag. Coach Rolt, smirking as usual, stood behind the young torchbearers, his mealy face lit bright by the flames. The six veterans stared at the naked boys, and the boys began to edge away from them, breaking the circle into a horseshoe, opening a space of trampled sand in front of the fire. Sim Sizemore stepped forward, sweat glistening on his forehead and soaking the collar of his jersey. He threw his torch into the fire and said loudly, “Fire to the fire. Fire for the team.”

  The torch, a pine branch with a rag wired to its tip, landed among burning logs in a spray of sparks that made the nearest boys jump away.

  Charlie Rentz stepped forward and threw his torch. “Fire is light. Fire is pain.”

  Jimmy Bishop threw his. “Burn what is useless. Refine what is good.”

  Tommy Bierstadt threw his. “Burn the enemy. Burn your dead.”

  Lewis Cordes. “Burn inside. But never tell.”

  And finally, Gary Bland. “Piss on the ashes. Go to hell.”

  Coach Rolt, no longer smirking but grim, handed his torch to Sim Sizemore, who threw it into the fire, and said, “A city of fire stands behind us. We are fire and we are ice.” Rolt folded his arms across his chest like Coach Prosser watching a scrimmage.