Fighting in the Shade

by Sterling Watson

It was too late for surprises, but one came. Billy could not find it in himself to hand over his helmet. Time rolled on. Even in the midst of this foregone conclusion, in the time he had been given to think and plan, he had not anticipated this. That they would take his helmet from him here on the field.

  At last he willed his arm to Prosser’s hand, his fingers opening when Prosser grasped the helmet by its face guard.

  Prosser said, “Now give me your jersey.”

  Billy did, and it was easier. A little.

  “Now take off your shoulder pads.”

  Billy did.

  He stood bare-chested, cool now in the closing afternoon. Someone behind him snickered. A voice whispered, “He likes to run naked. Make him run naked.”

  Prosser’s eyes snapped to a face behind Billy. “You shut your mouth,” he said, his voice low and cold. Billy felt the boys behind him freeze. “Another word out of you, and you’ll go where William Dyer goes.” Prosser jerked his thumb in the direction of the field house. “Now give me your shoes.”

  Taking off his cleats, Billy hopped stupidly on one foot, then the other. Better than sitting. He handed the shoes to Prosser who tossed them onto the pile of gear.

  “Now leave this field of honor.”

  The moment seemed to Billy to require his own last word. He had listened to Prosser’s carefully chosen words. But the coach had ended this drama with the right one. This was about honor. Billy was to walk off this field half naked in his stocking feet while all of them watched him go. Curtain down.

  He considered saying more. More than his confession of drinking. In movies, the condemned man was given a last word. Billy did not think he was up to it. He stood in front of Prosser, consulting his thoughts.

  They were empty. He turned and walked slowly, with what dignity he could imagine for himself now, along the fifty-yard line, through the trampled gap between the bleachers. When he came to the arch, he squinted up at Dienekes. We shall fight them in the shade. Billy walked around, not under the arch.

  At home, Billy went to his father’s bedroom and looked at himself in a full-length mirror. He had stood here when the house was empty, guilty in his naked skin, in a mood that was brooding, illicit, exultant, admiring the body he had built through long, fierce labors on the fiery practice field. In a boy’s green and yearning way he had dared to see himself enlarged in the glass—immortal, heroic, tragic—a character from a legend. Now in the mirror he saw that he had begun to disappear. The boy who looked back at him, haggard from lack of sleep, hungry but unable to eat, still shocked and exhausted by his own incomprehensible acts, might not be here at all the next time he stood in front of this mirror. A week ago, Billy Dyer had been a football player, newly admitted to the brotherhood of the varsity. William Dyer, step forward, please! The boy in the mirror was named William, not Billy. Who was he? What did he do? Who were his associates? What were his pleasures?

  Another word out of you, and you’ll go where William Dyer goes. Where would William Dyer go?

  Staring at the diminishing image in the mirror, the body growing smaller, the eyes losing light, Billy Dyer considered that perhaps without football, invisible and nothing were his names. The voice in his head asked, And are you ashamed?

  Today, Prosser and the team had shamed him. By the fire of Mystery Night, Billy had seen his comrades shame themselves and had tried to save something for himself and maybe for them. Dignity? Identity? Something. He was not proud of hurting Sim, hurting him in that place of shame, but always when he remembered Sim’s cry of pain, he saw, too, the flashlight in the boy’s hand, at its highest arc, poised before falling onto Billy’s burning skull. Turning away from the mirror, he knew that invisibility was now his desire. But he would not embrace shame.

  PART III

  SEPTEMBER

  THE HELOT

  Only the Spartans enslaved other Greeks. The enslavement of the Helots was a source of trouble. Occasionally the Helots revolted, and the Spartans suppressed these revolts with bloody reprisals. To guard against plots among the Helots, the Spartans created a secret police, the Crypteia, and any Spartan was free to kill a Helot he regarded with suspicion.

  The Crypteia used the night as a cloak for its activities which helped spread fear. The average age of a member of the Crypteia was eighteen.

  FOURTEEN

  At school, Billy was a novelty of gossip and rumor, fair game for any gibe artist or geek sophomore wit. He endured taunts and slights, though sometimes his blood rose and he longed to show how his fists could shut mouths that mocked him. Then an automobile accident involving two cheerleaders, a tourist from Maine, and some empty beer cans captured the imagination of the school.

  One of the cheerleaders suffered a broken wrist. The tourist was unhurt in all but pride and pocketbook. The usual tribunals met to decide if the girls, both residents of Monmouth Park, would continue to cheer for the Carr High Spartans. The decision, in favor of the girls, was balanced on the statement of an older brother who gallantly claimed to have consumed the beer and left the empties in the car. Billy lost his position at the top of the tree of gossip.

  Carr High was giddy with anticipation of the first game of the season. Friday afternoon at the pep rally in the gym, two thousand students filled the bleachers, the band played an earsplitting “On You Spartans,” and the cheerleaders displayed the skills they had practiced hard through the late summer while the team toiled on the blazing practice field. Students clapped and rocked until the bleachers groaned under them. White and red pom-poms rolled and tossed like foam on a bloody sea. Coaches spoke of toil, sacrifice, honor, and victory. The grand finale was the introduction of the players, each boy called forth by name in solemn cadence by Coach Prosser. Starters and subs alike walked, eyes downcast in warrior modesty, from the shadows of the locker room into cavernous light and noise. Each was greeted by a crash of applause, the pounding of drums, and the leaps and splits of cheerleaders. Sim Sizemore, tall, blond, and smiling, was among the last called out to the loudest applause. Ted Street gave a short, halting speech while Coach Prosser stood nodding to the broken rhythms of the quarterback’s embarrassed words.

  Billy Dyer followed the crowd to the gym intending only to look in and then pass on. This was not for him. Not anymore. But standing at the door as stragglers rushed past him to look in vain for seats in the bursting bleachers, he felt the tidal pull of what was about to happen. The music, the murmur, then the applause of the frenzied crowd, the arcs and splits of short red skirts and tanned legs, the stirring words of coaches and players. Against his will and better judgment, he stepped inside and stood in the shadow of the bleachers. And as he watched the players walk to their places behind Coach Prosser, saw them standing in line, hands clasped behind them military fashion, a pain like the stabbing of a lance pierced his chest. He bent double in the shadows with the sudden agony of it. Then his body snapped like a bow drawn and released, and something flew from him, an arrow of bitterness, regret, and love, through the vibrating air of the gym… to them, the team, to join them for a moment, to be with them again, and then Billy braced his aching body upright, stepped out of the shadows, and moved invisibly through the door.

  On Sunday at noon, Billy’s father called him from the Sunrise Country Club. “Come over here, son. We’ll have lunch in the grille.” There was something rare in his father’s voice. Billy could not tell what it was. His dad loved golf. Maybe he had won money in a match.

  The Sunrise Club had been built in the 1920s in wild country east of Oleander; now its minarets and Moorish arches anchored a neighborhood almost as fancy as Monmouth Park. When Billy got off the bus near the eighteenth green, the day was bright, breezy, and as cool as autumn could be in Florida. He walked to the clubhouse, past the lowered blond head of the receptionist, past the big ballroom with the lush burgundy carpet and ancient crystal chandeliers, and into the dark mahogany and bright brass of the grille.

  His father sat alone at a table in the middle of the room,
flushed from the sun, a thoughtful look on his face and a glass of scotch in front of him. When Billy approached, he looked up and smiled. “Billy! Sit down, me bye.”

  Sometimes his father put on the phony Irish accent, calling him boyo and bye and laddybuck. His father, a man of many voices. Way back, his father’s people were Irish, but his father had grown up in South Georgia. The Georgia relatives spoke with heavy, and Billy thought elegant, Southern accents, but his father had ruthlessly expunged his own, replacing it with a chorus of put-ons. In addition to the Hollywood Irishman, his father did “The Devious German” (Cherman), learned in the prison camp, “The Stalwart Russian,” learned from the Red Army tank division that had liberated him from the prison camp, and a pretty good Bill Dana (My nane Jose Jimenez). Once, in a rare moment of reflection on the war, he had told Billy that in basic training, soldiers from New York and New Jersey had ridiculed his Georgia drawl, and so he had taught himself to “speak American.” Which meant his business voice, the dialect of TV anchormen. The scotch in his father’s glass was pale, fragrant of burnt cork, and almost gone. When the waiter came, he ordered another. “And a Boy Scout cocktail for my son here.”

  His father thought the Boy Scout cocktail was a good joke. So did the bartender who mixed ginger ale with 7UP, splashed grenadine on top, and added a blue paper umbrella. When the drinks were served, two women at a nearby table, their faces rosy from the morning’s round, smiled fondly at Billy and his father. Billy preferred straight Coke, but the Boy Scout was a Sunrise Club tradition for fathers and sons.

  His father sipped the second scotch. Billy asked, “How’d it go this morning? Did you win some money?” His father played serious wagering golf and said his winnings paid for the club membership. Billy doubted it. Still, he was proud of his dad for beating rich men at their own game.

  “Pretty good, my stout fellow.” His father took another sip, looked around the room as though someone might be listening. “Very good, actually. I took Cam Sizemore for a hundred bucks on the back-nine press.” Billy had no idea what a back-nine press was, but winning was good. Billy smiled. His father looked across the room. “That’s Cam over there by the window.”

  By the wide picture window that let onto the swimming pool sat a tall man whose face did, when you knew the connection, remind you of Sim’s. And Billy recognized him as one of the men who had sat in a business suit on the top row of the bleachers during summer practice. Beyond the window in the buttery sunshine, women in bathing suits aimed dark glasses at magazines, and high school girls Billy knew sunned themselves with a more professional attention to the results. Billy watched Sim Sizemore’s father lift his scotch with a curve of the wrist that mimicked his son, the way Sim trotted off the field, arms swinging, hands like flowers on wilted stalks. Girlish.

  Billy’s father winked. “I wish there were more guys like Cam around here.”

  Billy took a sip of the too-sweet Boy Scout. He was hungry. Last time here he’d had a very good cheeseburger, but his father seemed in no hurry to order. They didn’t speak while Billy pretended to read the menu. His father picked up his own menu, put it down again, and said, “Well, gentlemen, I suppose you are wondering why I asked you here today.” It was the British accent. Fair, but not as good as the Irish. Billy peered up from the menu into his father’s serious eyes. Scotch or the sun or both had reddened their lids.

  “Billy, why didn’t you tell me you were kicked off the football team?”

  Shame returned. A dying rodent gnashing in his bowels. Billy’s eyes slipped out of focus. The sweet drink gagged him. He wanted to rise, leave, but his father’s disappointed eyes would not let him go. All he could think to say was, “Who told you?” His words like a leak of stale air from a punctured tire.

  “Well,” his father answered in a cold, flat tone, “actually, it was that son of a bitch over there by the window who told me. I would rather have heard it from you.”

  Billy looked down at the tablecloth. He wanted to say, I wish I’d told you. But he found that he didn’t wish it, even now. He wondered what hurt his father most, his son’s not trusting him with the truth or others knowing it before he did. So many people knew Billy’s story. The fact that somebody in town might not yet know it appealed to Billy. Protecting that fact for as long as he could had seemed a good idea.

  “Were you ever going to tell me?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it doesn’t matter.”

  “You mean football doesn’t matter. I think that’s what you mean. Does your telling me matter or not?”

  “It matters more to you than to me, I guess.”

  His father looked at him like he was fighting the urge to send a fist across the table. Maybe that was why he had chosen this place for their talk.

  There did not seem to be more to say. Billy’s father sipped his scotch, turned the glass on its sodden cocktail napkin, and didn’t look at Billy. Billy’s own vision narrowed to the table in front of him. His hands played numbly with a fork. The waiter came again. Billy’s father ordered a third scotch. “Another dram, please, landlord!” His voice too loud now, gathering again the attention of the two women who had smiled maternally at Billy. When the scotch came, Billy dared a glance up, but his father was staring at the far corner of the room, his eyes full of insult and sorrow.

  They ate in silence, Billy a cheeseburger he did not taste, and his father a club sandwich. When they finished, his father looked at the scraps of their meal, his half-dead scotch. He sighed. “Billy, were you treated unfairly? If you were, if you had told me, I might have been able to do something about it.” He lifted both hands, palms open, let them drop.

  Billy thought about it. He could not imagine the acts of a father, any father, that could undo what had been done. A meeting with the coaches and the principal, an appeal to the newspaper, letters to some governing body of high school athletics, a lawsuit—none of these nor all of them together could have saved Billy Dyer. The real power in Oleander, maybe in the whole world, was in locker rooms, and on chalk-striped fields, and at hunting camps deep in the woods. This was not a thing of law but of style. Even if you won by law, if you lost style there was no victory. Law was fairness and equal treatment, style was luck and friends and taking your lumps with the right kind of smile.

  Billy considered that there might be one exception to this rule of locker rooms and hunting camps: If a father were highly placed to begin with, maybe his son could not be treated as Billy had been. Billy’s father had never been high, and something, after they had moved to Oleander, had brought him lower.

  Billy said, “I was treated fairly… if you consider it fair that things are like they are. You have to fit in, do things like other people do. If you don’t, then it’s fair I guess when you get…” Hurt? “When you don’t get what you want.”

  His father looked away for a long time, frowning at Billy’s words, trying to take in what was surely the most careful attempt to speak truth his son had ever made. “Billy, what happened? Why did they kick you off the team?”

  “I was accused of drinking whiskey.” They both glanced at the glass in his father’s hand. “I did drink. I didn’t deny it. They kicked me off.”

  His father waited, wiped his mouth with his napkin, then his forehead in exasperation. “But? And? There must be more to this.”

  “There’s more, but I can’t tell it.”

  “Why not, for Christ’s sake? Look what they’ve done to you.”

  Billy couldn’t look, couldn’t see himself. What was his father saying? Was it so clear that he was damaged? He hadn’t looked in the mirror again, afraid to see nothing.

  He said, “I promised not to tell.”

  “Did everybody promise? Did they all keep their promises?”

  “I don’t know. That’s not my problem.”

  It was too much. His father was angry again. He clenched his jaw, snatched his pack of Winstons from the tabletop, and fumbled two matches be
fore popping the third into fire. Billy remembered the day his father had asked him to quit football. Take what happened to your head as a letter from the Fates and get out now with grace… You don’t know all that football is, and all that it will require of you and take from you in a place like this.

  Now he wanted to say, gently, Dad, you know how it is here. You tried to tell me.

  His father smoked, replacing the still air above their table with a gray cloud whose smell, mixed with odors of scotch and blood from Billy’s cheeseburger, seemed to Billy the essence of something male. His father pulled the last lungful of smoke from the cigarette, carefully smashed it in the ashtray between them, and sighed. He lowered his head and leaned toward his son.

  Billy leaned close too. His father said, “Son, were you the only one drinking? Were you sitting somewhere under a tree, like the village idiot, with a bottle of whiskey in your hands? Did someone just happen to see you there under that tree? And did that someone go tell the coaches what you were doing? Is that how it happened? Is that why you were kicked off the team? Nobody else was… involved?”

  This was the end. If Billy gave up the others, he would break his promise. If he answered this question, there would be others, and once he started, where would he stop? He did not want to hurt his father’s feelings, make him any more angry than he was. He said quietly, in a voice he hoped communicated respect and certainty at once, “Dad, I can’t say any more about it. I promised.” Burn inside. But never tell.

  “And I can’t make you tell me. I’d like to, but you’re too big for that now.” His father shoved back from the table. He turned his chair to the side, crossed his legs, and lit another cigarette. With the second smoke, he drank scotch, ignoring Billy.

  Their waiter silently administered the check, and Billy’s father signed it. “Well, time to go, I think. But first we need to say hello to your friend.” He nodded toward the window by the pool. Sim Sizemore had joined his father.