Fighting in the Shade

by Sterling Watson

  Billy could have struck him down but didn’t. Waited. Sizemore sensed him, turned. Billy stood naked in front of him. In front of the red jersey he had wanted so badly. He could not see Sizemore’s eyes, but knew they were filling with fear. Sizemore whispered, “Hey, Charlie. Here he is. He’s out here.” The words lost in Rentz’s rage.

  Billy stepped closer. He saw Sizemore’s face clearly now in the moonlight. The question in it. Who is this boy in front of me? Is he a boy or something else? Rentz’s roaring fury was spending itself among the vines and briars. He had stopped screaming for Billy’s blood. Now he grunted and raged at the pain of entanglement. When Sizemore looked at the wall of green where his courage, Charlie Rentz, was failing, Billy said, “You wanted me. Here I am.”

  Sizemore swung the flashlight at his face. Billy ducked, dug his feet into the sand, and butted Sizemore’s chin. He felt in his skull bone the cracking of jaws, heard Sizemore’s “Unh!” Sizemore swung the light again, and Billy’s brain filled with a crazy blue glow. He sank to his knees. When the flashlight came down again, he could only raise a hand weakly to block it. The light in his head changed from blue to a thin white and his vision wavered. He shook his head, trying to fill darkening eyes with sight, trying to think. He looked up and, through a strange shifting haze, saw the flashlight rising again, saw it pause above Sizemore’s head. Billy drove his right fist into Sim Sizemore’s groin.

  The scream was like nothing Billy had ever heard. It was feral, so loud and piercing that, even as the night forest spun around Billy, tilting, then coming back to balance, he knew that wild animals miles away heard Sim and shuddered, nerves twitching under their hides. Moaning now, Sim fell to his knees, and Billy closed both hands on the boy’s throat. Bucking and flinging, kicking, clawing at Billy’s face, tearing at the hands that held his breath, Sim tried to free himself. Billy knew a moment when he could hold on and finish this, throttle the life out of Sim Sizemore. But the weird light in his brain bled from white to blue. He let go. The handsome face, the tall, graceful body, the faster, better pass catcher, fell like so much wet laundry at Billy’s feet. And now Rentz was coming, raging, exhausted but coming. He would be free soon and bloody full of hate for Billy Dyer. Sizemore moaned, holding his groin with both hands. Charlie Rentz’s thorn-raked arms, his ripped red jersey, emerged from the scrub.

  Billy sprang upon Sizemore, tore the red jersey from his back, and ran with his prize to the road.

  TWELVE

  At midnight, Billy parked Sim Sizemore’s red Chevy on the crescent drive in front of William B. Carr High School. Stark naked, exhausted, blood seeping from his gashed knee, he stood beside the car with Sim’s red jersey and keys in his hand. He considered throwing the keys into a storm drain. Instead, he put them into the ignition and threw the soiled jersey at the pool of his blood on the floor of the car.

  He set off through the breezeways of the ghostly night school, glancing back at his bloody footprints. He ran like a wolf through the little park beyond the stadium, snuck down an alley behind a row of houses, and crawled under a clothesline, pulling from it a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. He would have to walk home barefooted, the last part on the oil roads, but now at least he could not be arrested for public indecency.

  At home, he crept through the back door, into the screened porch his father grandly called “the lanai.” The house was dark and quiet save for the chugging of the air conditioner in his father’s bedroom. Billy raised his tired face to the blackness and thanked his Baptist God that his father was not awake and waiting for him. He sat in the bathtub scrubbing oil from the bloody soles of his feet until there was only a pale olive stain. When he closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against the familiar bathroom tile, a weird stream of pictures—flame and water and darkness and blood—rushed at him. The voice in his head said, If you hurt him bad, you’ll pay. You’ll pay for it. And you should.

  Tomorrow was the first day of school.

  After his night of drinking and running, fighting and driving naked and bleeding, and creeping home in stolen clothes, Billy was too nervous to want breakfast but swallowed cereal and juice to deceive his father.

  His father’s breakfast was black coffee and a cigarette. Through a cloud of smoke, he asked Billy, “How’d you get those scratches on your face?”

  “Running through the bushes.” Billy gave back an embarrassed grin. “Some guys and me, we had a race in the woods.” It was the truth.

  “You ought to know better. You’ve only got the one face, sir, and it’s not a bad one to look at. I’d take better care of it if I were you.” He put out the cigarette in his coffee cup and looked at his watch. “Well, off to the salt mine.” He got up from the table, shrugged on his suit coat, and picked up his old leather satchel.

  Billy was wearing his best new shirt. His father turned to the front door, then looked back at him from under elevated brows. “Gad, sir. I forgot. This is the first day of school?”

  Billy nodded.

  “Well, then, sir. Remember the old motto, Mens sana in corpore sano. It means, roughly, Be as good a scholar as you are an athlete. No better time to start than the first day of a new year.”

  At school, everything seemed different. Billy had not slept, was covered with scratches and bruises, had improvised a bandage for his gashed knee, but he did not think the difference was in himself. This morning was not strange because it was the first of the year, but because somebody had told. A city of fire stands behind us. Burn inside. But never tell.

  It was not the way people looked at Billy that convinced him someone had told. It was the way they looked at one another. Their eyes were full of the precious, furtive excitement they saved for days when a popular boy had broken up with his steady girl, or a popular girl had been seen out with a bad boy from a rival school. This morning’s excitement was deeper, more grave, and more frightening. And everybody seemed to feel it. Groups and cliques put their heads together in speculation. Others just stood in awe of it, waiting for bad news to clarify.

  He did not see Sim Sizemore or Charlie Rentz among the crowds that waited for the doors to open. Sim had retrieved the Chevy, or somebody had.

  Fatigue caught up with Billy in third period English class, and a strange sadness crept over him. It was a feeling he had never known before, a heavy weight upon his heart. He wanted to lay his head on his arms and sleep, not because he was exhausted, but to slip the burden of this melancholy.

  His English teacher had the funny name, Mrs. English. “English English,” the students called her, or “English of English fame.” She was small and olive-skinned with thick black hair, nervous hands, and dark, hostile eyes. You couldn’t miss the nicotine stains on her fingertips or the tobacco scratch in her voice. She wore a sexless brown sack dress. Billy’s mother would have said she had a nice figure, but figure was a word girls used to describe other girls. Boys said body. When girls said figure, they meant someone was homely but all right. When boys said body, they meant they wanted to see and touch. Billy had heard she was new to Oleander, a loner, didn’t gab with the other teachers in the lounge, and stayed after school sometimes to hold “seminars” with a group of special students. This morning she spoke to the class with keen intensity about their textbook, holding it in her nervous fingers like it might shatter if she dropped it. Billy looked with a sinking heart at the sheer thickness of the book.

  Mrs. English told them to open their notebooks and list what they had read during the summer. “Pick something and write about it, just your thoughts. You don’t have to structure it any particular way.” Billy wrote about a William Campbell Gault football novel he had read. Mostly he summarized the plot. When that got too complicated, he wrote why he liked the book. The main character was a halfback who had to overcome his fear of contact in order to realize his true potential. He finished just as the bell rang.

  Billy saw Lane Travers in the hall. Travers squinted at him, distracted, Billy guessed, by the pain of a bourbon headache, b
ut aside from the greasy sweat on his face and his slitted eyes, Travers did not seem much changed by the experiences of Mystery Night.

  Billy called experimentally across the crush of rushing bodies, “Hey, Lane. How you doing?”

  Travers said, “Oh, hey, Billy,” and moved on.

  Last night my face was this close to your naked ass, Lane Travers. What is going on here?

  Walking the halls between classes, Billy met boys from the team. He was ready for anything: to be greeted warmly as the one who got away, to be shunned as a cheat, to be cursed or dragged into a bathroom and beaten. Nothing would have surprised him. Nothing but what happened, which was… nothing. He didn’t see Sim Sizemore and only saw Charlie Rentz at a distance, not swaggering as usual, but walking with gingerly, wincing steps. Maybe Sim had skipped. Billy remembered his cry of pain in the dark on the sandy game trail. He had hurt Sim, hurt him there in that private place. He told himself, It was no more than he tried to do to me. But the echo came back: You’ll pay.

  When the final bell rang at three o’clock, Billy breathed a grateful sigh. If anything was going to happen, it would not happen today. The first football practice was on Thursday. Maybe then the team would let him know its mood. And there was Coach Rolt. He had hurt the man badly.

  Most of the high school teams in the county waited until the second week of school to start practice, but not the Carr High Spartans. Coach Prosser had ordered the team to meet him in full battle dress in the heat of the first Thursday afternoon. They must not dull the edge they had sharpened in summer practice. While other teams would run sprints in shorts and jerseys, do calisthenics, and run plays at half speed for at least a week, the Spartans would have a full-contact scrimmage.

  THIRTEEN

  When Billy walked into the locker room, the team was dressing out. The place seemed too quiet, but he was used to the crowded quarters of summer practice. The scared and vacant faces, the inadequate bodies of the scrubs, were gone. Billy greeted his teammates in monotones as he always had. They acknowledged him the same way.

  He had vowed that he would not be the first to mention Mystery Night. Let others bring it up if they wanted to. Maybe no one would. The furtive excitement he had seen on the first day of school had faded from the eyes of the Carr students. An air of quiet expectation had settled over them.

  Billy stood on the sideline waiting to be called into the scrimmage. Disgusted, he looked down at his clean uniform. On the field, a third stringer, a slow, clumsy boy named Dunphy, was playing Billy’s position, and playing it badly. Sim Sizemore had not shown up for practice. Watching the scrimmage, Billy tried not to think about Sim. No one had mentioned his absence. Coach Rolt had not come either, but Billy had seen him once, on Wednesday afternoon, walking into his drivers ed classroom, a place where everyone goofed off except when they watched gory films of auto accidents to scare them safe. A white bandage covered Rolt’s upper lip, and blue streaks ran up his cheeks into pools of black skin under his puffy eyes. He looked like a fat raccoon.

  Prosser did not seem to notice how badly Dunphy was doing. The boy didn’t even know the pass routes, and when the ball did find him, only by dint of Ted Street’s brilliant throwing arm, he dropped it. Charlie Rentz was making a feast of poor Dunphy, showing him no mercy. When Dunphy got up after being laid out like cordwood by one of Rentz’s vicious, obliterating tackles, or after he had simply fallen, tangled in his own feet, Prosser walked over and gave him a whack on his shoulder pads, saying, “Good job, Tony. Stay with it, boy.”

  When he saw this, a cold fear crept into Billy’s stomach. Never, not once during the searing agonies of August, had Prosser made such a gesture. The strange sadness Billy had felt since the morning after Mystery Night fell down on him now from the hazy yellow sky. His body was heavy, his mind dull. After a while, he did not know if he could run or even remember the plays if he was called onto the field.

  The scrimmage wore on, the boys curiously flat and out of rhythm for a first day when enthusiasm should have overcome any staleness from the end of summer break. Prosser never looked at Billy, neither did Coach Leone. They looked at the sideline, of course, calling in subs, but not at Billy. Late in the afternoon, when the five o’clock whistle sang its dirge at the Honey Bear Juice plant far away to the east, Billy began to feel that he was not really there.

  Coach Prosser blew his whistle to end the scrimmage, and the exhausted boys stood still, waiting to see what would happen. This was strange too. Ordinarily, they would have drifted toward the end zone to line up for wind sprints, the agony that ended every practice. They knew this day was different. Prosser called to the subs standing on the sideline, “Men, gather around me. Form a circle.”

  The boys near Billy jogged out onto the field, some of them for the first time that day. Billy trotted out with the others and stood at the back of the circle, his heart hammering, glimpses returning to him of that strange narrow vision he had seen in August when he had hurt his head. Prosser handed his clipboard to Coach Leone and pressed big, raw fists into the waistband of his coaching shorts. Took a deep breath. “Men,” he said, “something has happened. Something we need to talk about. This is the first day of a new season, and we have to be clean, clean together, before we can play the best football we are capable of playing.” He looked over at Coach Leone, who crossed his arms over his chest, nodded once, pursed his lips, and lifted his chin, staring off into the darkening haze.

  Prosser looked up at the sky too, as though asking for inspiration. After a long pause, he said, “Men, one of you has broken our training rules. This boy has polluted us with behavior we can’t tolerate. You know me as a fair man, a tough but fair man, and you know the rules. The rules have been made plain enough to you, haven’t they?”

  The boys in front of Billy nodded solemnly. Ordinarily, Billy thought, his mind settling now, his vision widening, Prosser would have made them shout back to him as loud as they could, YES, SIR! Then, cocking his ear with a big, red-skinned hand, he would have kept shouting his question until they answered loudly enough. But this was different. Everything today was different.

  Prosser’s voice was moderate, his tone confiding but firm. “So, you men are telling me that the rules were clear?”

  Again, the boys nodded, looked at the ground, clawed the earth with their cleats. Yes, the rules were clear.

  Prosser nodded with them, then looked up into the yellow sky, his face warping with sadness. “William Dyer, step forward, please.”

  Please? Prosser never asks, he orders. Boys in front of Billy parted, and he walked to the center of the circle, stood in front of Prosser, his helmet dangling from his right hand, his eyes trying to meet Prosser’s for the first time that day. Prosser dropped his gaze from the sky, but still did not look at Billy. He stared past Billy’s right shoulder at the boys behind him. He said, “William, it has come to my attention that you have been observed drinking whiskey.”

  The dirty brilliance of it burst upon Billy. Even as it happened to him, the theft of all he loved, he had to admire the foul beauty. He could see the scene that lay ahead, could even hear the words they would speak.

  First Prosser would ask, Is this true, William? Did you drink whiskey?

  Prosser said, “Tell me, William. Is what I have heard the truth?”

  Now Billy would answer, Yes sir, it’s true. And now he would have a choice. Would he add this? And so were most of the boys here with us, and you know it. If he did, he would have the satisfaction of forcing Prosser to deal with another truth. A small satisfaction. But Prosser would be well prepared. This whole thing was a show.

  Giving Prosser and the team the drama of a pause, Billy thought about it. Did they take his thinking as guilty hesitation, his feckless lack of any plan? If so, fine. He was weighing small matters on the way to a forgone conclusion.

  As he waited, thinking, something caught his eye. High on the sagging bleachers where in August men in black suits had sat watching, two people perched. C
oach Rolt and Sim Sizemore. They sat with their arms folded, legs crossed, observing.

  Billy turned back to Coach Prosser who waited, stern and impassive. He said, “Yes, sir. It’s true. I drank some whiskey.”

  After the words were out of him, Billy knew he had chosen right. To accuse the team would accomplish nothing. There was nothing left to be accomplished but an ending. If he accused others, then the story of Mystery Night might be told. And denied. And maybe he would later find some satisfaction in that. He doubted it. More likely, he would simply live in gossip as both a lame accuser and a boy made impure by whiskey. He preferred a single vice.

  Coach Prosser met his eyes for the first time. His glare was designed for shock. He searched Billy’s eyes for the liar that lived in them, tried to stare him into looking away. Too late for any of that. And Billy saw fear in Prosser’s eyes. Far back in those caves once full of flame, he saw ashes. Prosser knew the injustice of this. Knew it as well as he knew the Spartan playbook. Good. The man knew at least a little shame. But Prosser had to play this out to the end, had to make it good and convincing for the boys who stood here in this circle, and for the town. A city of fire stands behind us. Burn inside. But never tell. Prosser had to cover his ass.

  He said, “William, you are a good football player, and this team needs good football players. It may be that this team will miss your skills, I do not know. I know this team will not miss your dishonesty, and I know this team needs its honor more than it needs one good football player. You have violated the honor of this team by breaking our training rules. For this reason, I have to dismiss you from our ranks, as I would dismiss any other boy who did what you’ve done. Give me your helmet.” Prosser held out his big red hand.