The men sucked breath through their teeth and swung angry faces to Billy, but Rainey’s eyes went sleepy with cunning. “You want… exactly two thousand dollars? That’s your deal, is it?”
“That’s it.” Billy glanced at his father again. David Dyer shook his head a second time, closed his eyes.
“Exactly? No more? No less?” Rainey said. “Why?”
“That’s my business.”
“Wait outside.” Rainey turned away from Billy to a window that framed a long slope of green lawn and the glittering waters of Lake Georgia.
PART IV
OCTOBER
THE CITIZEN
King Creon: As long as I am King, no traitor is going to be honored with the loyal man. But whoever shows by word and deed that he is on the side of the State—he shall have my respect while he is living and my reverence when he is dead.
Haimon: I beg you, do not be unchangeable. Do not believe that you alone can be right. The man who thinks that, the man who maintains that only he has the power to reason correctly, the gift to speak, the soul—a man like that, when you know him, turns out empty.
—Sophocles’s Antigone
(translated by Dudley Fits and Robert Fitzgerald)
TWENTY-ONE
After classes ended, Billy waited until the last minute to enter the locker room. He wanted the whole team there. He wanted anything that would be said or done, any problem, to come immediately. He stood in the doorway, halfway between the heat and light of the afternoon and the sweat-spiced gloom and cool of the locker room, his eyes drinking it. How he had missed this! It was life to him. He had been living in a city of the invisible dead. The team was here, boys half-naked and half-armored, shedding their classroom faces and manners and shrugging on the hard skin of combat. Their talk was low and distracted as their minds struggled with what would happen on the field. One or two noticed Billy. Then more. Their bodies lost the languor of their metamorphosis from students to players. They stood still, watching Billy Dyer in the doorway, half in sunlight, half in shadow.
Charlie Rentz and Ted Street emerged from the training room wearing only jockstraps, fresh white tape covering their shaved ankles. Coach Rolt followed carrying surgical tape and scissors. The three stopped, stared at Billy. Billy took in Rolt’s torn mouth, the pent anger in his eyes, and, for the first time up close, he saw the faint tracery of scratches on Rentz’s forehead and cheeks from his drunken charge into the briars of Mystery Night. He looked at them, they at him. Here it was. Trouble or otherwise, he wanted it now. He stepped into the room and stood waiting. Rentz bit down his jaw and walked to Billy. He held out a big hand, its knuckles bruised and scabbed. “You’re with us again, Dyer. Nobody’s gonna fuck with you. Play the game like we know you can, okay?”
Some bravado came to Billy—Nobody better fuck with me!—but he killed it. He nodded, took Rentz’s hand with all his strength. “Thanks, Charlie. I’ll do my best.”
Then the team heaved its common breath of rage, grief, and thanksgiving. Billy heard in this breath a dirge and a warning. Quiet talk started again as they went back to armoring themselves. Billy nodded to Coach Rolt and waited, but the man said nothing. So Billy walked to the dark hole of Prosser’s office. It came to him that he would never have dared in his past incarnation as a Spartan to approach this doorway, much less enter uninvited. He stepped inside.
Coach Prosser sat shirtless in red coaching shorts, his bare feet resting on flattened shoes, his heavy chest furred like a bear’s. Semper Fideles was tattooed on his right shoulder. He looked up from a clipboard of mimeographed plays and blinked at Billy through reading glasses that made his dark eyes swim. The effrontery of Billy’s entrance flared in those eyes, then went out. Billy glanced around. An ancient Bell & Howell eight-millimeter projector hunched among stacked reels of game film. A blackboard was covered with plays drawn and redrawn in murky layers of chalk. The dim office was so small, so crowded with boxes of equipment, bottles of salt pills, and stacks of old Coaching magazines, that Prosser in his bare skin seemed enormous—a lion caged in a gypsy wagon.
Before Prosser could invent some welcome or admonishment, Billy said, “I’m here, Coach Prosser. I’ve stayed in pretty good shape by working, but my memory’s rusty on the plays. I’ll catch up. I’ll give you my best.”
Prosser stared at him, filled the furry bellows of his chest with a long breath, and said, “You don’t, I’ll kick your ass all the way back to that goddamned orange juice plant. You understand me?”
“Yeah,” Billy answered, “I understand.” He smiled at Prosser’s arched brows, cold and certain eyes.
“Yeah? Yeah?”
“Yes, sir,” Billy said.
“That’s right. Now get out of here, Dyer, and don’t ever cross that threshold again without knocking.”
“Yes, sir.”
Eddie Doerner waited at Billy’s locker. Three spaces away was Sim Sizemore’s locker, empty now, his name still lettered on it. Doerner’s arms were loaded with socks, jocks, pads, and helmet. He handed the bundle to Billy. A pair of cleats was slung by tied laces over his shoulder. He passed these to Billy as well. “Your old shoes. Coach said give you the ones from summer so you won’t come down with blisters.”
Billy laid the bundle on a bench. He raised the shoes to his face, smelling the odor of a boy from last summer, a Billy Dyer gone from this world, a boy who had lived and then died on that practice field. A new boy looked around at his teammates now, saw them smile at a kid smelling his shoes, saw some of them turn away in embarrassment or confusion. Billy stripped off his clothes quickly, stood naked in the cool, malodorous gloom surrounded by armored boys, their nervous energy thick as fog around them. He pulled on the clean white jockstrap and then held the shoulder pads high above his head. He held them there, as high as he could reach, then stepped under and lay on his shoulders the iron rack, settling the weight of poetry and mayhem upon himself again.
TWENTY-TWO
At six o’clock, Billy’s father called their house from a pay phone. “I’m in the Cool Room. Come here, Billy.” Billy could hear the TV muttering at the bar and the jukebox playing “Tennessee Waltz.”
He dodged through the traffic on South Citrus Avenue, pulled open the door, and walked into drifts of smoke and the yeasty odor of spilt beer. Hunched over a glass of scotch, his father sat at the bar in a gray business suit a decent distance from two other solitary drinkers. When he saw Billy, he winked at the bartender, a thin woman with a sloping shoulder. “Ah-hah. Ellen, there’s my boy. Come over here, Billy.”
He stood in front of his father and Ellen. She moved with a lurch and regarded Billy at a slant. There was something wrong with her spine. Some kind of deformity. What she understood about men like Billy’s father was perfectly formed in her eyes. “What’ll you have, Billy?”
“Uh, a Coke.”
She pulled a bottle from a cooler, levered off the cap, pushed a cloudy glass at Billy, then turned away to the television.
Billy’s father led him to a far table, settled his scotch in front of him, and took an envelope from his coat pocket. “See this?”
Billy nodded.
“Take it under the table.”
“Take it… ?” Billy looked at his father, at Ellen, watching Queen for a Day.
“Under the table,” his father said. He stared hard at Billy and slid the envelope from the tabletop into his lap.
Billy’s mouth was dry when he reached under, groping for his father’s hand, feeling the envelope shoved roughly into his grasp.
His father took a swallow of scotch and tapped the heel of the glass on the tabletop. “Because that’s what you’re doing. You know that, don’t you?”
The approximate shape of it appeared to Billy now, what his father was showing him. “Yeah,” he said, “I guess so.”
“And you know what it means?”
Billy nodded. But he wasn’t as sure as he wanted to be, about a lot of things. “Dad, how do you know Sim Size
more?”
His father’s look of puzzlement arrived too late. Billy had caught the cunning in his eyes. “I play golf with his father, Billy. You know that.”
“But Dad, at the Sunrise Club Mr. Sizemore said you knew Sim.”
“I work for Cam Sizemore. I play golf with him on Saturdays and politely take him for all the cash he brings along, which isn’t enough, Billy boyo, to compensate me for his company. Other times I work for him.”
“What do you do for him?”
“That I’d rather not say. Can we leave it at that?”
Holding an envelope of money under the table, Billy thought about it. Too many things were left “at that.” Things that flew like dark, diseased birds above the heads of boys like Billy. Circling in a yellow haze, they shit and pissed, those birds, and it was a fetid rain that fell. Billy shook his head, peered into his father’s eyes. “No. We can’t.”
His father sighed, put his hand to his forehead, dragged it down his face. “All right then, son. But you won’t understand it. It’ll be hard for you.” His father leaned away from him, sank back in his chair. “There were, or I should I say, there could have been, some proceedings brought against me. Having to do with a certain old battle-ax named Maudie Rayle, whose late husband’s estate I probated, and also having to do with our friend Cam Sizemore.” His father looked at him. The appeal in his eyes, the naked wanting, made Billy’s eyes blink with tears. “Do you have anywhere to be, Billy? This will take a while.”
It seemed that Billy’s father had done what no attorney should ever do, and none could justify no matter what his circumstances. Billy’s father had done this thing and had justified it to himself quite elegantly. For a while. And the whole business, he told Billy, might have turned out all right. Might have turned out so that it was only his eternal soul he put in jeopardy and not his livelihood, nor his good name, nor his license to practice law, nor his very freedom to roam the streets of this great republic rather than to take his exercise on a prison yard.
Billy’s father had dipped into the trust fund of the aged and ailing widow, Maudie Rayle, in order to temporarily achieve a state of solvency. Bad investments had put his back to the wall. He had intended to put the money, with interest, back into the fund. He had in fact found the money to return and had been about to do so when he received a surprise visit in his seedy but still, to his way of thinking, honest law office, from a fellow attorney, an old law school classmate, Cameron Sizemore, who, it turned out, was a nephew of Maudie Rayle’s late husband, Franklin Parsons Rayle. The battle-ax, it seemed, had roused herself from the apathy of illness and old age sufficiently to send certain financial statements to Mr. Cameron Sizemore for his learned scrutiny.
Mr. Cameron Sizemore had found certain discrepancies. His further investigations revealed that Miss Maudie Rayle’s attorney, Mr. David Dyer, had helped himself to the sum of thirty thousand dollars. When he confronted Mr. Dyer with his findings and learned that the man had every intention of returning the money, he let Mr. Dyer know that he had taken the liberty of satisfying the old lady’s curiosity and, indeed, her ferocity, by himself replacing the funds. He had done this out of the goodness of his heart, to settle the old lady’s mind, to safeguard the future of a fellow member of the bar, and in exchange for certain additional considerations.
“And to own my balls forever,” Billy’s father told him.
Billy wiped his eyes on his shirtsleeve. Connections crackled in his mind like lightening in a stormy sky. He said, “Before Mom left us, when you and her were fighting, it was about this, right? And we moved here… because Mr. Sizemore knew about you and made you work for him?”
His father closed his eyes, nodded. “And it’s why we live where we live, Billy, and have only our very modest pot to piss in. I’m paying Cam back… with interest. He keeps me on a short leash, financially speaking. He likes me at the club, for the competition and the wagering, and he likes me—and you—on the oil roads just so we don’t get any false notions about our… quality.”
“And so you know Sim Sizemore… how?”
“Oh,” his father said, hollow now that the story was out of him, bemused it seemed by the irony of it, the evil majesty of timing so bad and family relationships so accidentally unlucky. He waved his hand at an imaginary insect that beset his vision. “Sim and I have labored together in the elder Sizemore’s vineyard. That’s all I’m willing to say at the moment.”
“Does Sim… does he know about you too?”
Is that why he hates me, calls me a pussy, saved me for the second elephant walk? Is that why?
“I don’t know, son. I don’t know what his father told him. I can’t imagine what purpose it would serve to be so cruel.”
His father lit a Winston, blew a plume of smoke at the ceiling. His face and neck were a waxy yellow. His hands trembled as they slowly turned the glass of scotch in its wet ring on the table. He smoked in silence for a while, then blinked and looked at Billy with a sudden grim curiosity. “Let’s talk about you now, Billy. What a day, huh? What a day. Ever think you’d make it to Blake Rainey’s house? Not to mow the lawn, I mean. I mean his invited guest. Ever think?”
The low monotony of his voice scared Billy. “No, I didn’t.”
“Son, Billy my boy, where did you get that inspired nonsense about money from Blake Rainey? I’ve told you my story. Maybe now you’ll tell me yours. Back at Mr. Rainey’s house I couldn’t ask you.”
Billy said what he had prepared: “I wanted them to pay for what they did.”
His father looked up at the ceiling as though imploring the smoky air for words, wiped his face with a trembling hand, and peered down into the amber pool of his scotch. “No, no, Billy, I heard what you said. I heard you mention your mother’s name. What nonsense is it that involves your mother?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
His father drew himself up into his inebriated dignity. “So, it’s secrets now, is it, between father and son? Are you sure you want it that way, sir?”
It has always been secrets between Sir and Sir. But the sadness was like a fist wringing Billy’s heart. He said, “It’s… it’s something just between me and Mom. For now. It’ll be all right.”
“Like the money? Will that be all right, Billy? Or is the money for your mother? Two thousand dollars, son? That’s a lot of shoes and dresses. That’s diamonds and mink, Billy. You couldn’t have come to me with this? This thing about your mother?”
Billy shook his head.
His father’s voice was low and cold: “You wanted them to pay? It’s you who’ll pay. Believe me.”
“Maybe,” Billy said, “maybe not.”
“You’ve got a plan, have you?”
“I plan to play football again.”
“You realize what money under the table does to a football career? When the word gets out, which it usually does?” His father’s voice was suddenly too loud for an afternoon in the Cool Room. Whiskey-and-grief loud. Ellen glanced over from Queen for a Day.
Billy shoved the envelope into his pocket, got up, and slid his chair back toward the table. “Maybe things won’t turn out as bad as you think. They don’t always.”
“Don’t they? That’s your view, is it?”
Billy waited, said, “You coming home? It’s my turn to fix supper.”
His father looked past him at the smoke that hovered over the bar. “No. I’ll just…” He lifted his glass. “Finish this.” His eyes settled on Billy again. “That’s an installment, by the way. Nobody gives a kid like you two thousand dollars in a lump sum.” He raised his glass to Billy. “So we’ll be meeting here again. You’ll be paid once a week, until the football season’s over. Until you’ve finished your… job.”
Billy backed away, then turned for the door, the money a sad gravity in his pocket.
TWENTY-THREE
At home Billy called his mother. “I’ve got it.”
There was silence on the phone, then her sighing, then, breathle
ssly, “Oh, Billy. Oh, thank you. You don’t… you’ll never know what this means to me.”
For a moment she sounded to Billy like a schoolgirl. And for a moment he was her boy hero. Then he heard Karl’s voice in the background. Not the words—they were muffled—but the tone, quick and impatient. A low voice, rough like a saw blade burring through wood.
Billy said, “I’ll meet you after practice. Six o’clock. In the park behind the bleachers.”
When the old green Dodge Dart pulled into the shaded lot, Billy was pacing the carpet of pine needles under the tall trees, still sweating after his shower, his mind ablaze with the recovered sensations of football and his body aching again in the sweet and necessary way of the game. The Dodge was not part of his mother’s new life. It was the family car she had taken from the divorce. It rumbled and wheezed, black smoke pouring from the exhaust pipe.
Billy leaned into her window, and she kissed him quickly, looking into his eyes. He got in beside her, and they sat with the windows open, the evening breeze cooling Billy’s arms and face. His mother stared through the windshield at the swaying pine boughs. She wore a yellow scarf over her hair, knotted under her chin, the way she did sometimes on windy days. Billy placed the envelope his father had given him on the seat between them. His mother didn’t touch it.
“Where’d you get it?” she asked. He’d never heard her voice like this. Not even the drunken day she had told him not to marry a girl with missing parts. She sounded tired and scared.
“I got it.”
“Where?” she asked in the same flat tone. Still not looking at him.
“Some men… Dad’s friends. They gave it to me as a reward for playing football. They do it all the—”
“No, they don’t. Even I know that. But you got it for me.”
Fighting in the Shade Page 13