Fighting in the Shade

by Sterling Watson

  Roundabout. Cam Sizemore looked out at the horizon. The sad, simmering field disappeared and he saw it all again, the cloverleaf. Four-leaf clover. In England, or someplace in Europe, he’d heard they’d call it a roundabout. Well, whatever it was called, it was money.

  Cam wanted what was best for his county and his town. And this, he knew, this field, what would come, was the best thing. Most of all, he wanted what was best for his son, Sim. There had been trouble between Sim and Billy Dyer. That night. Mystery Night. Sim would not say exactly what had happened between them, but something had, and Sim had been hurt. Over it now, maybe, though the boy did not always seem himself. Maybe it was best that Billy Dyer should fade away into Blake Rainey’s orange juice empire. Burn up his Bolshevik energies pushing oranges in the middle of the night. Maybe it was best that Sim had no rival. Best that David Dyer’s son was gone from the bright picture of the future.

  SIXTEEN

  Half asleep, Billy heard a car stop in his driveway. The doorbell rang.

  He rolled from his bed and rubbed his eyes. The room smelled of sweat and oranges. What was this, Friday afternoon? It was five o’clock. He had slept since school ended at three. Shirtless and barefoot in jeans, he opened the door.

  “Hello, Billy.”

  The girl who had surprised him that day after the scrimmage stood in the bright sunlight on his front porch, smiling, ample, and covered in smooth white skin. The girl who drove the white Plymouth Savoy. She wore a black dress, black-framed glasses, and black flat shoes. She stood close, tilting her pale face up to him, drilling him with large brown eyes.

  “I’m Moira Davison.”

  She pronounced her name Mwah-rah. It was a girl’s name he had never heard before. He had seen her a few times at school. Once she had smiled at him as he turned a corner, but it had been too late to smile back at her.

  She did a double take and covered her mouth with her hand. “Jesus, look at your hair.”

  Billy scratched his belly, rubbed his eyes. His father’s car was gone. The front yard of weeds, the cracked driveway, and beyond it, the reeking oil road, were all barriers this girl had crossed.

  “Uh, come in,” he said, hating the thought of her crossing this threshold too.

  In the living room, she stopped and looked around. Watching her take it all in, Billy’s senses honed themselves to an impossible sharpness. Could she see the pee stains on the terrazzo floor from a previous tenant’s dog? Smell the sweet rot of the kitchen garbage can and the butts in his father’s ashtray? See the scotch-glass rings on the coffee table, the greasy trail in the dining room carpet? That the aluminum stand supporting the television was missing a wheel? Did she see this place as simply trashy or as the lean hideout of two men? Men without women. Sometimes Billy tried to see it that way.

  He said, “Excuse me,” went to the bathroom, and caught his reflection in the mirror. Jesus! His hair. He splashed water on his face and raked wet hands across his head.

  When he returned, Moira inspected him, her eyes sliding to his bare belly and back to his face. He considered scratching his armpit, making ape noises. Wasn’t this a visit to the zoo? He considered putting on a shirt.

  Dust rose when Moira sat on the couch, and she waved a pale hand at the floating motes. She took off the black glasses, gave him a serving of dark, dramatic eyes.

  Billy sat in his father’s cigarette-burnt chair. “How did you know I live here?”

  She looked at the backs of her hands, then shyly at Billy. “I dropped by the other day. Your dad said you weren’t home.”

  His face flamed. His father had opened the door to her. He could not imagine the scene. He hoped his father had been… all right with her.

  “I like your dad,” she said quietly. “He’s nice.”

  Billy watched her. Wished she’d leave.

  She said, “Sorry if I did something wrong. I was just… thinking about you. The way people were talking at school. About football and all.” Her pale cheeks colored.

  “It’s all right.” His words sounded as though they came from someone else. “Now you’re here.”

  They sat, their eyes alighting here and there and then moving on. After a while, Billy did not wish she would leave.

  “I like this place. It’s comfortable.” To prove it, she stretched and lay back on the couch. Billy figured she wanted him to look at her, so he did. She had the body of a woman in a painting, large but with pleasing proportions. She watched him stare at her until something was accomplished. Billy did not know what it was.

  She said, “You live alone with your dad?”

  “Yeah. My mom… lives in Sarasota.” It came out sounding like a good thing. A rare thing. And it was. If not good, rare. He didn’t know any kids whose parents were divorced.

  Moira sat up, her frown quick and dark, the way a girl might look when a kitten stepped off a curb into traffic. “Do you miss her?”

  “Yeah,” Billy said quickly. “I go down and see her. She, uh, works in a department store, and she lives pretty close to the beach.”

  He could see that she doubted… what? His visits to Sarasota? His mother’s proximity to the beach?

  Moira Davison’s eyes burned with the interest girls had for the lives of women. “Did your mom, did she… remarry?”

  Billy closed his eyes and saw Karl walking toward him from the fountain in the city park. Finally I meet the famous Billy. “No.”

  Moira shook her head almost imperceptibly. Her eyes said she was filing his mother for further review. She lay back again on the couch. “Uh, Billy, do you read the Spartan?”

  It was the school newspaper. Though he didn’t, Billy nodded.

  “I’m the editor, and Mrs. English is the faculty advisor. We work together, so I know her better than most students do. She sometimes has… certain students over on Friday nights. I’m one of her regulars, and we can invite anybody we want.” She gave him the look of a conspirator. “We have refreshments, listen to music, and we… talk about important things. Things that need to change at school.” She waved an expansive hand at Billy’s living room. “And in Oleander. I want you to come. Seven o’clock tonight. The address is in the phone book under Paul English.”

  The words made Billy shiver. He had not pictured Mrs. English, with her drab sack dresses and dark, hostile eyes, as a married woman. And who were the students who dropped in on Friday evenings? Game nights. He imagined a group of self-declared intellectuals and hopeless geeks looking for any sort of attachment.

  But he imagined Moira too. Being there with her. Would he be with her, or just be there? He couldn’t ask. He waited.

  “Please,” she said. “Please come. You’ll like it. I promise.” She walked quickly to the front door, and Billy followed. She turned and tilted her face up to him again, so close he could feel warm breath. “Please.”

  Billy said, “Okay,” and reached out to open the door.

  From the front porch, he watched her back the white Savoy out of the driveway onto the oil road. She smiled, waved, and drove away without looking right or left. Across the street, a neighbor, Mrs. Kudloe, a thin woman who wrapped her gray hair in a red bandanna when she did housework, stared from her front porch. She flung a bucket of dirty water into the yard. A boy and girl in a house unsupervised. It was not a good thing.

  SEVENTEEN

  Mrs. English lived in the new suburb in the palmetto country east of town. The house was modest and vaguely Spanish with an orange tile roof and arched windows. A little walled garden hid the front door. Sprinklers hissed into the warm night, and two young palms struggled for life in a Bermuda lawn. Billy parked and stood under the bright moon, watching shadows move on the curtains of the picture window. What are you doing here? Still time to leave.

  No one answered his knock. Cautiously, he opened the door and stepped inside. He smelled good things. Strong coffee. Something baked. He crept down the hall, promising himself there was still time to get out. Mrs. English stepped from a doorway w
earing a black sheath like a costume in a movie Billy had seen about a totalitarian future when people dressed in grim, sexless bags. She held a platter of chocolate chip cookies. A pale, balding man followed her, carrying brownies. He was slim and round-faced and wore horn-rimmed glasses, a gray sport coat, and a knitted black tie.

  Mrs. English smiled, her dark eyes widening with surprise. “Billy! Moira said you might come! Glad to see you. This is my husband, Paul. Paul, Billy Dyer. Billy’s interested in… the ancient Greeks.” She gave Billy her smile of weary irony and plunged into the darkness of the living room.

  Paul English took Billy’s arm and drew him toward the voices and music. “Come on,” he said, “better not delay your presentation at court.”

  In the dark living room, everyone wore black. Kids stood around in murmuring clusters. Some laughed and gestured, but the main impression was of seriousness, as though every conversation were a caucus. Billy recognized faces, knew some names, and there were strangers too. It would be nice, he thought, if the Billy Dyer of Mystery Night, the boy who for a few days had held the whole school in a breathless suspension, were unknown to some of these kids. The possibility cheered him, gave him the courage to step over to a table at the curtained picture window and pour himself a cup of something dark and steaming.

  Mrs. English was at his shoulder, a little out of breath. “That’s mulled grape juice,” she said.

  Mulled? He lifted the warm cup to his lips, tasted cinnamon, nutmeg, and… Welch’s. It wasn’t bad. And there was a, well, a sophistication to it compared to Coke and 7UP.

  “There’s also coffee and hot cider with honey. Cookies, of course. And Billy… don’t stand off by yourself. Circulate.” She put a hand on the top of his head, circulating him.

  Billy turned to the dark room. A few eyes sampled him, but mostly there was a studied indifference. He could not bring himself to crash a circle of darkly swathed characters, so he walked over to the record player and sifted albums. His musical education came from church, the radio, a TV variety show that featured an opera singer who could “hit high-C,” and a violinist known for tossing a sweaty mane. He didn’t recognize Mrs. English’s artists (Billie Holiday? Thelonious Monk? Charlie Parker?). Roy Orbison was more to Billy’s liking.

  “Hey, Billy.”

  He turned to Moira Davison’s face, luminous in the dark room. She wore a black dress and black stockings, and again she stood close. She smiled, took his arm, feeling his biceps.

  “Oooh,” she said, “you’re a hard one. What do you think of all these weirdos?”

  Billy shrugged, blushed in the darkness. “They’re okay, I guess.”

  Moira smiled sweetly. “If you ask me, there’s as much bullshit here as down at the stadium. Come on. Let me introduce you to some of it.”

  Billy spent the next half hour moving from group to group, steered by Moira Davison. Some of his fellow students recognized the bad boy who had been tossed off the football team. Others had no idea who he was. A few seemed to resent him. These, he figured, had decided that the membership of Mrs. English’s Friday nights was fixed, no intruders.

  He met a chubby boy who said grandly, “I’m in the theater department.” Billy knew there were plays at Carr, but he had never seen one. He remembered when he would have said, “I play football.” The football department? He said, “I push oranges.”

  “You push… ?”

  “Oranges,” Billy helped. “I work at the juice plant. You know, Honey Bear Juice. Fresh from the grove to your table.” He did the Honey Bear Juice commercial dance for Moira and the boy, the fat smiling cartoon bear with no genitals who did a lumbering jig.

  The boy snorted a laugh. “We could use you in the theater department.”

  One group asked him how he could possibly deny himself the pleasure of attending the football game on a Friday night. Clearly they were proud of themselves for resisting the mindless migration to the stadium. Billy’s answer was, “How can the football team stand to miss this?” Sputters of laughter. One or two chins lifted in annoyance. Billy chuckled at his own suggestion, then imagined it. This room full of guys in jerseys and pads, the two groups mingling in some kind of crazy harmony.

  People arrived and left. Billy and Moira connected and were separated. They were together at a party, but he did not think he was with her. He listened more than he talked. He heard about Machiavellian (What?) intrigue in student government elections, outrage at the school board’s banning of The Catcher in the Rye (“I ask you, for what possible reason?”), about plans to join Martin Luther King Jr. at the slave market sit-ins in St. Augustine (“Think about it. There’s not a single Negro face at Carr. We go to a lily-white high school.”), about the scandalous love affair between a brilliant young math teacher and an older woman who taught typing (“Imagine what they talk about on a date!”), and about their general discontent with “this parochial town” and especially their own school which was a “swamp of mediocrity” and “an assassin of young minds.”

  A tall, bespectacled boy said to Moira, “Why don’t you write about something important in the Spartan?”

  Others took up the call. “Yeah, why is it always clubs and the honor society and,” looking at Billy now, “football?”

  Moira nodded grimly, swallowing, her pale throat coloring. “We will. We will. Just gotta find the right thing… the right way.”

  Mrs. English emerged from the hallway that led to the backyard. Had she been out there smoking? Billy had seen students sneaking out for butts. That a teacher allowed this awed him. She looked at her special students. “My goodness, we have a quorum tonight. Let’s vote to loosen up ole Carr High.” Her students crowded around her. “It’s so wonderful to see you all here,” she said, looking not at them but into the darkness above their heads. She closed her eyes and when she spoke again, Billy saw sudden tears on her cheeks. “You convince me,” she began, “that we are not lost here in this time machine of the American South. You don’t know what an anachronism this place is, but you will. Soon you will. You are the ones who will know. You will know that your town is a racist place, that your president has sent advisors halfway around the world to fight in a jungle. You will know it soon, and you are the ones who will do something about it. I trust in that.” She wiped her eyes with both hands. “And it sustains me. Believe me, my brave young ones, it keeps me going.”

  Finished, she drew her eyes out of the far away, the future where young people grew up to be heroes. She wiped her cheeks again and whispered, “Forgive me. I know some of you think I’m silly. A silly old lady. Just… promise me you’ll remember these nights when you’re old and silly like me.” She smiled and laughed. “I’m sorry. That was too much for some of you, wasn’t it?”

  Moira took Billy’s hand and gave it a sudden pressure. Mrs. English turned and walked into the kitchen.

  Billy glanced around, saw faces as uneasy as his own, and saw, as well, heads nodding in ardent resolve. How strange. How strange it all was.

  Moira pulled him away from the crowd down a dark hallway into the private part of the house. She stopped at a door and drew her finger across her lips. She opened the door and motioned him inside. They stood holding hands in the dark, and Moira whispered, “I know this house. Mrs. English has me over sometimes to work on the newspaper. We’re… friends.”

  Billy heard the pride in the whispered word. He wanted to leave this room. What would happen if Mrs. English found them? Moira let go of his hand, and a light came on by a bedside. She opened the drawer of a night table and reached in, held something out to him. “Know what this is?”

  He went to her, took it, a small plastic package. He read the lettering, For the Prevention of Disease Only. “Yeah,” he said, swallowing, “I think so.”

  Moira sat on the bed, then lay back against a pillow like she had on the couch at his house. Billy stood, holding the package in his hand, imagining himself naked with Moira on the bed.

  She said, “You gonna go back to
the team when your banishment is over?”

  Billy shook his head to fling the image of their coupled bodies from his mind. He walked to the bedside table and dropped the package into the drawer. What was she doing? They were in a bedroom, and she was asking about football?

  She folded her hands behind her head, adjusted the pillow. “I’m surprised ole Prosser hasn’t called you in. He needs you.”

  Billy had tried to ignore the fortunes of the team, but in Oleander it was impossible not to know that after three lopsided wins, the Spartans had lost a squeaker. Then they had lost their fifth game badly, but the season wasn’t ruined. A strong finish might still secure a spot in the regional playoffs. Billy had heard that Sim Sizemore had played badly. That Prosser had even tried the hapless Tony Dunphy at flanker. Then he had moved fast Chris Meeks to the offense, but that had only left a gaping hole in the defensive backfield. Opposing quarterbacks had filled the hole with completed passes.

  Out in the living room, someone put the needle on a Bob Dylan album. Billy heard the muffled opening lines of “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.” Moira might have rights in this room, but Billy didn’t. He said, “Hey, don’t you think we ought to…”

  “You always haul ass when things get interesting? Stick around and tell me why you quit football.”

  “I didn’t quit football.”

  “Something happened.”

  “Nothing happened.”

  “Something happened out in the woods. It’s called Mystery Night, remember?”

  “Goddamn it! I did not quit football!” Fists clenched, Billy stood looking down at her.

  Moira pushed herself up, pulled her legs under her. She took a deep breath, held up an open hand. “All right, you didn’t quit. You just didn’t do anything to stay.”

  “Like what?” Billy said, his heart hammering against his breastbone. A sadness pouring into his chest.

  “I don’t know. There had to be something.”

  “Maybe there would be, for somebody like you. Ah, fuck it.” He left her sitting like a high school Buddha on her teacher’s bed.