Fighting in the Shade

by Sterling Watson

  Was this Billy’s punishment for not telling his story? His father’s face was set in cold determination. Billy shook his head. It would not be right to walk across this room and present the son of Mr. David Dyer to Mr. Campbell Sizemore’s son, Simpson. Let the Sizemores eat in peace. Billy closed his eyes and remembered Sim holding a flashlight above his head on a game trail in the midnight woods. His fist driving up into Sim’s groin. The exhaustion, the outrage, the strangeness of that night. The cry of pain.

  When he opened his eyes, his father was standing a little unsteadily, a warped whiskey smile on his face. “Come on, son.” His father began walking toward the table by the window. Billy could not let him go alone.

  So this, Billy thought when Campbell Sizemore looked up from his scotch and rib eye with onion rings, is a country club. A place where people who hate you must be treated with courtesy.

  Billy’s father said, “Campbell, this is my son, Billy.”

  When Campbell Sizemore looked up at Billy, his eyes said, I know. The story of the hunting camp, the elephant walk, the red Chevy stolen and returned, the blood from Billy’s gashed knee on the floor by the accelerator pedal. The cry of pain? Campbell Sizemore wiped his mouth on a white napkin, slid back in his chair, and swept his hand at the table. “Join us if you’d like,” then to his son, “Sim, remember Mr. Dyer?”

  Everyone looked at Sim Sizemore who smiled reflexively, the old confident Sim. He said, “Hullo, Mr. Dyer.” The white napkin in his hand was spotted with ketchup. He tugged it into his lap. He didn’t look at Billy when he said, “Hey, Billy. How’s it goin’, buddy?”

  Both men, perhaps equally gone in their scotch, waited. Billy felt his back probed by eyes behind him in the grille. Pretty girls and their mothers looked in from the pool. Billy said, “Hello, Sim.” He wanted to ask Mr. Campbell Sizemore how he had found the right moment to tell Mr. David Dyer that his son had been kicked off the football team.

  Billy’s father said, “Thanks, but we can’t join you. Things to do.”

  Cam Sizemore said, “Sim’s not feeling well. He’s not eating.” The look he gave his son was curious.

  Sim shifted in his seat. “Dad?”

  Billy took a step away from the table.

  David Dyer said, “Not yet, Billy. Let’s conclude this. What are you saying, Cam? Are you trying to tell me something else about my son?”

  Cam Sizemore looked at Billy’s father for a long time. He spread his hands on the table as though he might stand up, then he looked around the dining room at the interested faces. He bit at the corner of his mouth. “I only said that Sim has been a little under the weather.” He glanced at Billy, then back at Billy’s father.

  Billy’s father said to Sim, “Well, you boys were rivals. Playing the same position. But I know Billy wishes you well, Sim. Billy?”

  “Yeah, uh, yes, that’s right,” and to Sim, “I hope you feel better.”

  Billy’s father said, “Sim’s a big strapping boy. He’ll recover his appetite. Growing boys like Sim and Billy will eat you out of house and home. As the saying goes.”

  Billy reached out and took his father’s arm, felt the hot trembling under the shirtsleeve. He said, “Dad?” He said again to Sim, “I hope you feel better.” He looked at his father, then at Mr. Sizemore who cleared his throat, picked up his napkin, and patted his mouth. Both men had tears of rage in their sun-shocked and whiskey-loosened eyes.

  FIFTEEN

  Billy took a night job at the Honey Bear Orange Juice concentrate plant. A great lighted city of noise and steam and stink, it slumped on the eastern horizon of Oleander like some alien spaceship that had landed in fire and smoke to devour the town. But it never reached the town. It called the town into itself, and it devoured only time and sweat and hope.

  When he came home after his first night at the plant, his father was waiting up for him. Billy walked quietly into the dark house, into the smell of cigarette smoke and scotch. He sensed his father close, but could not see him. Then the red coal of a cigarette lit his father’s long, tired face.

  “Where have you been, sir?” His father sat in one of the moldy rattan chairs on the lanai staring into the dark backyard.

  Billy told him.

  “The juice plant? The night shift? Sir, that’s hard, dirty work for the son of a lawyer. Why do you want it? You could do other things… with your newfound time.”

  Billy said firmly, “They pay the most. The most you can get around here.” He had lied about his age to the bored secretary who had rubber-stamped his application. He was a year too young for the job, but what was a year of muscle and bone?

  “Ah, the money, then,” his father replied. “It pushes us, doesn’t it? The necessity of it. More than we know, I sometimes think.” He pulled a hand down the side of his face with a scraping Billy heard. The cigarette glowed again, but the red light did not find his father’s eyes. Billy had only the tone of his voice to read. And the clink of ice in an empty glass.

  “I proved I could make the team. That’s the most important thing. I can bring in money now, to help. And… I want a car.” It was the most believable thing. Every boy wanted a car. Billy didn’t, particularly, but his father wouldn’t know that. He had hitchhiked to the plant without difficulty. On that country road, most of the drivers were plant workers.

  His father got up and moved toward him, into the dim glow of streetlight through the front window. He was wearing only underwear, and Billy marveled at the hard youth of his body. His father said softly, “Well, Sim Sizemore would have played ahead of you. You would have sat on the bench. Isn’t that what you told me?”

  This was the hardest thing for Billy, the thing he had not expected his father to say. He remembered exactly what he had told his father that day back in August. I’ll beat him out… because he’s scared. He doesn’t like to hit. When the time comes to stick, he avoids it. I’ll beat him out.

  Now he would never know. Time would tell Sim’s story, but no magic could reveal what Billy would have done on a football field. He was sure of one thing: It would have galled him beyond measure to ride the bench watching Sim perform the graces of the game he loved. He shrugged in the darkness. “Maybe so, maybe not.”

  “Well, all right, son.” From a tree in a yard nearby, a whip-poor-will sent them its weird midnight cry, To wit, to wee; to wit, to wee. His father called them lawyer birds. He sighed and drew on the cigarette again. “You better get to bed now. It’s only four hours till you have to get up for school.”

  Billy walked toward his room, then turned back. “I’ll keep my grades up. I can sleep in the afternoons. It’ll be a little weird, but I’ll get used to it.” He wanted badly to sleep the time when football was played.

  “Sure, son,” his father said. “Sure. My own peregrinations are a little strange. We’ll be two of a kind.”

  The trucks, big Reos and Diamonds and Macks, came from the orange groves where they had stood all day waiting to be filled by Mexican pickers. The oranges went from canvas sacks, borne on the backs of these tough brown men, into the stainless steel truckbeds, and then to the plant. Drivers backed the big trailers down a steep ramp with a conveyor belt at the bottom, twenty trailers abreast, twenty men or boys like Billy laboring in them, pushing the oranges onto the rolling belt.

  It was hot in the steel trailers from the baking groves where the sun beat down on the fruit all day. Even at night, on Billy’s graveyard shift, the oranges radiated heat until morning. Billy liked his job best when the cooling rain came, and it rained often in Florida in the early fall. In a yellow slicker he pushed fruit to the conveyor that fed the tables upstairs in the long grading house, which in turn fed the machines that squeezed the oranges and routed the juice through miles of pipes to the canning factory. Night and morning, sun and rain, the plant made juice.

  Pushing fruit for eight hours at night, Billy was invisible within the high walls of a trailer. He was nobody, neither Billy nor William. His muscles heaved oranges, blood
flowed in his veins like oil in the engines that moved the belts and elevators that rolled oranges to the great, grinding maw of the factory, and Billy went nowhere. And he came to think of himself as a machine, part of the factory. Something called time passed as he worked, but the factory was always the same and so was the action of his muscles and bones. In action his body sweated and ached, but it could go on forever, and invisibility was not shame.

  Billy bought an old black Ford Fairlane with a rebuilt engine and good rubber. Driving to work were his best times. Those fifteen miles into the country, a machine guiding a machine, he watched the green and russet land roll by until the hangarlike buildings, the high derricks, and the rocketship evaporator tanks of the plant came into view.

  His days were divided into three parts. He worked at night, went to school, and slept. The hours that had contained football—from the nervous anticipation in the last class of the day, to the practice or game, to the showering and binding up of wounds and the celebration of exploits, to the descent from the adrenal heights of struggle and danger, to the dull exhaustion of aftermath—these became hours of sleep.

  The Spartans won three straight, and Oleander rejoiced in these lopsided victories. Teachers opened Monday classes with, “Wasn’t that some game? Wow! Go Spartans! Now let’s get down to business, here.” Boys Billy Dyer had struggled and staggered with, depended on, and held in awe through the parched days of August, shunned him in the hallways and classrooms of Carr High. Billy paid as much attention to lessons as he could on five hours of sleep, but sometimes he drifted off and awoke to a teacher’s question and the laughter of his classmates. His hardest times were lunch hours. He sat alone in the cafeteria, head down over a tray, then went to the library to read before the bell rang for afternoon classes.

  One day, Mrs. English ducked in to return a book. She noticed Billy, walked over, gave him her usual impatient expression, then, strangely, rested a hand on his shoulder. Billy’s book was Weapons of the Ancient World. Large, it propped itself on the table in front of him. Sometimes, he could sleep behind it.

  “Well, this is interesting.” Mrs. English pointed at the illustration of a ballista. “They didn’t have siege engines like that when the Spartans fought the Persians. The very first use of a catapult was by King Dionysius at the battle of Rhegium. Philistus reported that it turned the tide of battle.”

  Billy sat paralyzed under her hand. She expected him to speak. A fragment from the book fell into his memory. “Those Greek ships, those triremes? Didn’t they carry some kind of machine that squirted fire?” Sweat sprang to his forehead and palms.

  “Why yes, Billy. I think they did.” Her eyes softened at him. “Billy, are you all right? I heard…”

  He had to get out of here. “Yes, Mrs. English, I’m fine.” He stood, and her hand fell from his shoulder. “Well, uh, I better get to class.”

  She frowned the way she did when she parsed a poem. “Billy, I’m worried about you. You’re not doing so well. You failed the grammar test. You don’t seem interested in anything that happens in my classroom.”

  Billy liked her. Maybe because she seemed tired in the right way. Not tired of students or poetry—she got weirdly excited about Shakespeare—just tired of the bullshit routine around the school and kids who put more effort into shirking than working. He wanted to tell her she was right, that he didn’t care much about her class. That would be a no-bullshit answer, but it would hurt her feelings. He liked her too much for that. He said, “Sometimes it’s hard for me to pay attention. I mean, I get infinitives, but gerunds and participles?” He shrugged.

  She watched him thoughtfully for a space. Then she said, “You… played football. Come with me.” She walked into the stacks, and he followed her. She stopped in the corner of the room farthest from the checkout desk, grazed her fingers along a shelf, and selected a book with a caressing motion that made him think, Loving. She handed it to him: The Spartans. “Read it. Football isn’t war, but the two have some things in common.” She bit her lower lip. “You need something now. New interests.”

  It was dark where they stood close to one another. The pleasant odor of old paper, glue, and linseed oil rose up around them.

  Mrs. English put her hand on his shoulder again. “Billy, what happened? Tell me. What did they do to you? You have to tell someone. You can’t just—”

  “No, I don’t. I don’t have to say anything.”

  “Billy!” Her whisper was angry and secret in the gloom of the stacks. “People were talking about you. Something happened. I have my sources of information, like most teachers do, but I never got anything that made sense. It’s like there’s a gulf between the classrooms and that football field. What did they do to you? You don’t look good. You look tired all the time. Your eyes are… lost.”

  Lost eyes. The dark space where they stood close together was the school, but somehow apart from it too. Billy looked around. Listened. He could see only his teacher’s face, usually skeptical and ironical, gentle now. He could hear only the air whispering from the vents above their heads. He felt trapped and safe at once, and suddenly he liked the feeling of her hand on his shoulder. For the first time since Mystery Night, he wished he could talk to someone.

  “I’m all right,” he said. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll work harder, get my grade up.”

  “Oh, Billy!” Her brown eyes dug into his, wanting more.

  He lifted the book: The Spartans. “I’ll write a book report. For extra credit. That’ll help my grade.” And he would, he told himself. But he would hate it.

  She took her hand from his shoulder and stepped away from him. “All right.”

  He forced a grin for her, cradled the book like a football under his right arm.

  “And Billy… ?” She smiled with tired irony. “You’ll run into some gerunds and participles in the book, but don’t let that put you off.”

  Billy said, “Sure, Mrs. English.”

  The song of the school year played on. Its high notes were dances and football games, club rushes and initiations, student government elections, the decorating of the gym for dances, the stairwell kisses and caresses of couples finding and losing themselves, notes furtively passed, dates hoped and begged for, granted and denied.

  A river of youth ran through the hallways and classrooms of Carr High, a rush of blue jeans and tan culottes, madras shirts and white blouses, cordovan loafers and Mexican straw purses, a flood that burst dams and scoured banks when bells rang, coursing and flowing, then spilling when the school day ended into lots and fields and roads rich and poor. In the stream of youth, the brightest and rarest color was the red of jerseys worn by Spartan players on the Fridays before games.

  The river of fall flowed on from September to October, past towns of nervous test-taking and sleepy villages of study hall, past noble cities of Latin and French and smoky hamlets of chemistry and biology stinking of sulfur and formaldehyde. And always the river gathered speed toward its destination, the high-water mark of fall semester. Homecoming.

  Billy Dyer was flotsam on the red current (or he was an eyeless creature in a dim bottom eddy), a citizen of no academic town or village, a colorless, dateless, danceless boy of no election, rush, or team. An ancient Spartan would have called him an exile.

  Blake Rainey said, “I told Prosser I supposed he did the right thing.”

  “You supposed?” Cam Sizemore said. He slowed the Buick Roadmaster, turned off the Tamiami Trail onto an asphalt secondary road, and headed west into the pine barrens. Blake Rainey sat beside him with a map and a plat book in his lap. A mile down, Cam Sizemore turned onto a two-rut sand track. The road wound between rows of live oaks that had been planted a century ago by some cracker cattleman running wormy longhorns on this hot, flat scrub. Cam pulled over and pointed at an old pasture. Far off, remnants of rusty barbed wire hung from cypress posts and an old shed with troughs and a salt lick moldered under the sun. “That’s it,” he said. “The clover leaf will be right there—
gas stations, restaurants, convenience stores on both sides.”

  “We own it all?”

  “All of it. Bought by proxy. Our agents were all… gentlemen farmers. The old clodhopper who couldn’t make a go of this place sure thought he saw us coming. Took us for a bunch of city slickers with no idea which end of a cow shits. We paid him three hundred an acre. He cried when he saw the check, thought he’d died and gone to heaven. His country lawyer told me. The geezer made him promise not to tell his neighbors how much he got. Said they’d think he made a deal with the devil.”

  Blake Rainey laughed. “Maybe he did.”

  Cam Sizemore wanted to be fair. “I don’t know if it was right, but Prosser did it. Maybe there was nothing else he could do. It’s a shame, though. Billy Dyer has talent. We could have used him somewhere. Maybe subbing for Sim. But Billy decided to go Bolshevik on us, didn’t he?”

  “He did,” Blake Rainey answered. “He surely did. Didn’t think he had it in him. But hell, maybe we saw it that day he punched Ray Rentz’s boy in the chin, cut him open like that. A boy from out of town, trying to make the team. You’d think he’d lie down and take his licking just to get along in the world.”

  “Billy’s a talent,” Cam Sizemore said evenly. He looked out at the simmering pasture, the rotting pine stumps, an old Farmall tractor dead in a pool of spilled oil like some slaughtered saurian beast. And he saw what was to come, the graceful mounds and curves of a highway cloverleaf, the sparkling concrete parking lots, the gaudy, beckoning signs, and the pumps humming with golden gasoline. “What’ll Billy do now?”

  “That’s the odd thing,” Blake Rainey said. “He’s working for me. The boy took a job at Honey Bear. Shoving fruit out of trucks on the graveyard shift.”

  “Be damned. Father and son, both working for you.”

  “Don’t be damned, Cam.” Blake Rainey closed the plat book and set it aside. “Half the county works for me, and so do you. And the last time I checked, so did your boy. In a roundabout way.”