Fighting in the Shade

by Sterling Watson

  When Rainey dropped him at the house on the oil road, the black Lincoln whispering to the curb, Billy got out and reached back in to take the hand the man offered, to grip it hard.

  Rainey said it again: “You’ve got a future with me, Billy.”

  “Thank you, thank you, Mr. Rainey,” Billy said with all the ernestness that was in him.

  The Lincoln slid away into the night, and, as Billy turned to face the seedy house, the light in his father’s window went out.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Moira Davison walked through the cafeteria line, sat for a few seconds with her intellectual friends, then rose, her chin a degree higher than usual, and carried her tray to the table where Billy sat alone. She made it look easy, but Billy figured it was as hard as anything she had ever done. She was crossing a line, putting herself publicly with the boy who had been disgraced, then reinstated, the boy who had scored three times in the homecoming game. A fierce, weird joy rose in Billy as he glanced around at the wondering faces.

  Blushing, her thigh touching his, Moira examined her greasy sloppy joe. Billy’s plate displayed meatloaf, the day’s other choice. He wasn’t hungry. Mrs. English had said that in poetry lovers lost their appetites. Billy sometimes thought he felt about Moira the way men felt about women in poems, especially the confusion. The little package she had given him the night of the party, warm from the skin under her bra, was locked in the glove compartment of his car. For the Prevention of Disease Only. He had seen little of her since that night. Now here she was, a blush, a warm thigh against his, an announcement to the world of Carr.

  Moira reached over and touched the back of his hand. “They’re after Mrs. English.”

  Watching her walk across the room, Billy had wondered what she would say. A shy but flirty, Hi, Billy, or maybe something truly bold: Do you still have it? But her first words were about their teacher. She lay her hand on his and looked at him, dark eyes flaming. “Because of us. Mr. Sowers called her in yesterday and ‘counseled with her’ about ‘certain activities.’”

  Because of us?

  “Those assholes on the school board say she’s been ‘associating with students in improper ways and deviating from the curriculum without the permission of superiors.’”

  Billy said, “Associating… deviating?”

  “Which means,” Moira explained, “playing Bob Dylan for us at her house and talking about The Catcher in the Rye, for Christ’s sake.”

  Billy felt his chest empty of poetry and joy. He closed his eyes, opened them to… What was Moira? A friend? A carrier of the disease called love?

  She whispered, “What should we do?”

  He shrugged, felt his face grow hot. He didn’t know what was right, but he knew what her brainy friends would do. They’d talk about it. They’d compare the school board and Mrs. English to characters in books, and it would make them feel smart, and they wouldn’t know the difference between feeling good about themselves and actually doing something. They’d talk until they felt so good that it seemed to them the problem was solved.

  Billy said, “I don’t know what you should do.”

  Moira frowned. “I wanted you to know what’s going on. Because you like Mrs. E., and, because, well, you’re part of the group now.”

  Billy blinked. The Catcher in the Rye (a book he had not read), parties with spiced grape juice and cigarettes. How could these things concern the school board? Serious men? Moira seemed to want his outrage, so he tried. “I’m… sorry.” The silence lengthened. Curious eyes watched them. Just before the bell rang, Moira reached under the table, found Billy’s hand, and gave it a hard grip of conspiracy.

  Though some fell away in fear of the school board, a small band of rebels still met at Mrs. English’s house. Billy Dyer joined them. He asked Moira, “Why is she doing this? She might lose her job.”

  She answered in Mrs. English’s classroom voice, “She feels compelled to help creative and interesting young people find one another.” They laughed, but Billy knew that Moira, like the others who wore black and drank grape juice pretending it was wine, was devoted to her teacher. They loved her because she saw good things in them, things they could not see in themselves. For the small band that stayed, Bob Dylan was the standard-bearer. One night the group had stood transfixed listening to the full seven minutes of a song called “The Chimes of Freedom.” Billy understood some of it. Tolling for the deaf an’ blind, tolling for the mute. For the mistreated, mateless mother, the mistitled prostitute, for the misdemeanor outlaw, chained an’ cheated by pursuit… plucked a chord in his heart. He had stood in the darkness, smelling the spicy incense that Mrs. English had ceremonially lit as the song began, giving himself up to the fierce indignation of that prophetic voice.

  The furnishings of Mrs. English’s house told stories, too. Shakespeare’s sardonic face held the place of honor in her dining room. Hung nearby were photographs taken at a Florida migrant labor camp and a framed leaflet from a political rally: While there is a lower class, I am in it. While there is a criminal element, I am of it. While there is a soul in prison, I am not free. The words of Eugene V. Debs. The center, the shrine of her living room, was a locked antique bookcase. In it, Moira pointed out, were Grove Press books by Henry Miller and William S. Burroughs. There was even a contraband Paris edition of Ulysses published by Sylvia Beach. Billy nodded, pretending to know what he was seeing, sharing the awe.

  “You can go to jail in America,” Moira whispered, “for merely possessing these books.”

  Billy asked her what Mrs. English’s husband did.

  “Oh, he’s working on his thesis.”

  Billy just said, “Ah,” pretending again to know what it meant. Was a man paid to work on a thesis, or was Mrs. English the breadwinner? The idea repelled Billy, though he liked Paul English well enough. The fragrant pipe smoke and the tweed sport coats (worn with the air conditioner raging while it was ninety outside) reminded him of men in old movies who sat by firesides with their feet on the backs of sleepy hunting dogs. Catching Paul English at the far end of the backyard discreetly drinking whiskey confused the image somewhat, but not so much that Billy was troubled. The dark rooms, the political talk, the protest music, and allowing students to smoke: These were dangerous things for a teacher to do in a town like Oleander. Mrs. English’s students understood this. She had trusted them. They had agreed not to talk, except among themselves, about her parties. But someone had told. How else had Mrs. English come to the attention of the school board? Billy smiled sometimes, thinking how much her special students resembled the football team. Their Mystery Night had happened not at a hunting camp in the woods but at Mrs. English’s house. And someone had given up their mystery.

  Scooping hot cookies onto a plate in her kitchen, Mrs. English said, “Oh, Billy, I met your mother down in Sarasota. At the cosmetics counter in lah-de-dah Jordan Marsh. That place is so pretentious… but anyway, I like her. We talked about you. She was surprised to hear I know you.” She drew on a pair of oven mitts and went to the stove. “She wasn’t surprised to hear I think you’re a very intelligent boy. She must be proud of you. Does she come up for the games?”

  “No,” Billy answered, hoping she would think his face was, like hers, red from the heat of the oven. “She, uh, doesn’t like football. She’s afraid I’ll get hurt.”

  Mrs. English shrugged off the mitts and put a warm hand to his cheek, but her eyes were dark and piercing. “Billy, she didn’t know you were… out of football for a while. I shouldn’t have said anything. I guess I blundered, but I thought she knew and would be happy about your doing so well now. She asked me why you were… put off the team. I said I didn’t know. But I told her everything is fine now. It is, isn’t it?”

  She watched him with those fierce eyes, waited. He had to say something. “Yeah, Mrs. English, it’s fine now. I never told my mom because she was… having some problems of her own.”

  The teacher sighed. She seemed relieved, and Billy was glad. She ca
me closer, glancing at the kitchen door behind him. “The divorce was hard for you, wasn’t it?” Her eyes were suddenly large and wet. She picked up a dish towel and daubed at them. “There’s something I don’t tell many people, but I’ll tell you. This is not my first marriage. We were too young, my first husband and I. I thank God we had no children.” She saw what was in his eyes and stepped back. “I’m sorry, Billy. That was too much for you, wasn’t it?”

  “No,” he muttered. Her hand had felt good on his cheek. “No, it’s all right, Mrs. English.” A misery of things to say filled his mind, none of them right. He and his father rarely talked about his mother. Since that day in the Cool Room, it had been Sir and Sir, and his mother was the woman in their movie who lived at a sad but humorous distance. Had his mother talked to Mrs. English about his father? About Karl? He hated the thought of her selling lipstick to Mrs. English. He stood there, his face blazing as his thoughts churned.

  Mrs. English pressed the towel to her eyes again, and then, fluttering her eyelashes, threw it with sudden anger at the countertop. “I’m a sentimental fool.” She took a deep breath, touched her hair, fanned her red face with her hand. “You and your mother will work things out. And maybe I’ve helped a little.” Then she was off to deliver cookies to the young people she believed would author a new world.

  Billy watched her go, wondering why she had opened herself to him. Would a sentimental fool do this with other students too? He wondered if she knew how the school board had found out about her parties.

  He went out to the backyard where Moira and some of her friends smoked under the mango tree. At Billy’s approach, the girl next to Moira dropped her cigarette, her face a mask of embarrassment.

  They all treated Billy differently now that his pass catching and vicious blocking had helped the Spartans win three in a row. Now that the headlines raved of a state championship, Billy could no longer hide here. On Friday nights he was a hero on that lighted acre where violence and speed were craft and virtue, and here he tried to prove that two worlds could become one. Who was this girl? Irma Baum? Shy Irma. A sophomore? Good at… chemistry? He said, “Hi, Irma. Good to see you.”

  Her metal-braced mouth smiled wide. She swallowed audibly and breathed, “Hi, Billy.”

  He listened to some talk about a French novel they had all read, then moved away to stand by himself at the back fence. The regional championship game was tomorrow night, and his hands trembled when he imagined it. He had never before suffered these nerves, and he wasn’t sure why they were coming over him now. He had played the season, his part of it, with the calm and poise of a man doing a job for pay. But now the town’s anticipation, the constant chatter of his name in the mouths of Oleander, was finding its way inside him and making him an amateur again.

  He turned to leave, but Moira stood in his way. Her face was white in the darkness, her painted lips looked black, not red. “Billy, did you hear about Sim Sizemore?”

  He waited.

  “He’s in the hospital. They say he’s not coming home.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  At the reception desk of Oleander Memorial Hospital, Billy gave his name to a young woman wearing a blue suit and an orange scarf. He asked for Sim Sizemore’s room number.

  She consulted a form. “I’m sorry. You’re not on Mr. Sizemore’s visitors list.”

  Billy hadn’t expected this. And he hadn’t anticipated the woman’s hard eyes and unforgiving mouth. He looked at her, trying to think of something. She helped him.

  “Dyer? Billy Dyer? You’re the football player?”

  He nodded.

  “I saw you catch that pass against Manatee. That was—”

  “I’m his teammate. I need to see him before…” He did not know how to finish.

  “All right. I guess we can make an exception. He’s in 607. But you can’t stay long. He’s very sick, and we don’t want him… well, you know.” She smiled, a reprieve of the unforgiving mouth.

  Billy nodded, thanked her, and headed for the elevators.

  Room 607 was empty, but the bed was unmade and a meal had been delivered. Steam rose from a covered bowl. Whatever was in the bowl smelled stringent like the air here on the sixth floor. Billy heard a voice from the hallway and a Negro orderly pushed Sim Sizemore through the door in a wheelchair. A sheen of greasy sweat covered Sim’s pale face. He was breathing hard when the chair reached the bed and, as Billy watched, the black man gently worked his hands under Sim’s legs and lifted him like a child to the bed. And Billy thought, Those legs. They dangled, thin and stunted from a green gown. Sim’s whole body was smaller, so much smaller, and so pale, and his face so gaunt, flesh gouged from his once-sunny cheeks. But the legs. The legs thin and withered, the skin at the ankles an ominous blue. The muscles, fashioned by so much beautiful struggle, were… just gone. And in only two months.

  Billy thought of his father and the war. The broken young bodies he had seen and never talked about. Men shot to pieces in airplanes, lives reduced to gore in twisted metal and flushed away by hoses.

  After settling Sim in the bed, the big black man stepped back and looked at him from calm, passionless eyes. He had lifted the damaged boy without effort of body or apparently of spirit. He said, “Mr. Sim, a friend of yours here to see you.” He turned to Billy. “You two play on the same team?”

  Billy nodded. The black man turned from Billy’s troubled face back to Sim who slumped, uncomprehending. The orderly positioned the wheeled table that held the steaming bowl across Sim’s chest. “Well,” he said, “I leave you young mens to your conversation.”

  Billy could not make himself approach the bed where Sim Sizemore sat like something hung from a hook, bony shoulders poking up the cloth of a blue cotton gown. He watched Sim grope with trembling hands for a spoon. Oh, Christ! Billy stepped forward and helped the spoon into the curved claw of Sim’s hand. Sim’s eyes slid toward him, grim and soporific. Hot broth dripped from the spoon as it swung toward drooping lips. Too late, Billy steadied the spoon. Broth dripped onto Sim’s chin, trickled to the white flesh of his exposed chest.

  Billy closed his eyes and remembered the fight with Sim Sizemore on a sandy game trail in the midnight woods. The exhaustion, the outrage, the strangeness of that night. His fist smashing the soft place between Sim’s legs and something there breaking. The cry of pain.

  Sim Sizemore turned lacerating eyes on him. The boy looked ten years older. Even his hair had thinned. The sallow skin of his gouged-out cheeks was almost transparent. Molars showed beneath his ears. Dark blue bagged under his eyes. A decade of worry had been written on his brow since Mystery Night. Surprised in his stupor by Billy’s face, Sim put the spoon down and tried to push himself up in bed. He smiled, reflexively, grotesquely, like the old confident Sim, then seemed to know where he was. He reached to the table and tugged a white paper napkin to his face, wiping. “Is that Billy? Hey, Billy. How’s it goin’, buddy?”

  Billy leaned down to him, thinking, It can’t be comfortable looking up at people all the time. He rested his hand on the bed next to Sim’s. He said, “Sim, I’m… sorry.” To see you like this? For what I did to you?

  He looked into Sim Sizemore’s eyes. They seemed to know too well their own struggle and to know Billy.

  “Billy, you hurt me. You hurt me real bad.”

  Real. Slurred, it came out leal. Sim pushed down with both hands trying to lift himself. His eyes struggled to see Billy clearly.

  Billy remembered his old, worthless explanation. You hurt me, too. “I’m sorry I hurt you,” he said again.

  Eyes suddenly wet, Billy went again to the midnight woods. His disembodied will hovered above the game trail looking down on the act. In his rage it had seemed that Sim was not a boy but something unnatural besetting him, trying to kill him. That Sim was Monmouth Park, a straggler from the parade of good fortune, lost from the march of wealth, a thing Billy could treat as he wanted to. That Sim was all bad fortune. That Sim was Revenge.

  Sim sh
ook his head, stared coldly at Billy, his eyes clarifying. “No. You killed me.”

  Billy’s stomach churned. The steam from the broth sickened him. He whispered, “You’re gonna get well. You’re gonna be all right.”

  Sim managed an earnest, stolid expression, the face of a man who wants to be believed. “I never told anybody. It wasn’t me that told.”

  It seemed to Billy there was not much time now. It was wrong to ask, but he needed to know. He leaned close to Sim’s ear. “Sim, how do you know my father? That day at the country club, you said you knew him.”

  “Oh… uh, yeah.” Sim struggled to think, to move his tongue. “My father made me help… houses in Carver Heights. He’s teaching me… legal work. Your dad and me worked together. Getting them ready for… We…” Sim ran out of breath, but his claw hand made hammering motions. Motions of demolition.

  Billy pulled away from the bed.

  Sim’s eyes filled with panic. “Billy, how’s the team?”

  “Not so good without you, Sim.”

  “I’ll be back. Play next year.”

  All Billy could think was, You’re a senior. There is no next year. He took a step toward the door and said, “You’ll come back. Next year.”

  Sim Sizemore whispered, “Those guys are gonna get you… after football’s over. You know that, don’t you?”

  Billy whispered, “I know.” Then once more, “I’m sorry.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Helmets covered with the starry scars of a thousand collisions had been repainted bright red for the regional championship game. But there was superstition too. Boys put on their uniforms exactly as they had the night Billy rejoined the team. That game against the wild country boys from Osceola High had turned the season around. Some boys wore socks or jocks saved from their best games. Ted Street took the chewing gum from his mouth before going to be taped and stuck it to the lintel above the shower room door. A piece of gum for every victory since the crowd had chanted, Bill-ee! Bill-ee! Bill-ee! Boys reverently touched the gum before trotting out to the bus that would carry them to the stadium in Orlando. Tommy Bierstadt taped his St. Jude medal to his chest under his shoulder pads so that no tackler’s helmet would insult its sacred countenance. The boys knew that Coach Prosser had turned down an offer of new red jerseys from Mr. Blake Rainey and the Booster Club. At the club meeting, Prosser had said, “We gone dance with what brung us.” The crowd had laughed and cheered. Billy dressed out as usual, then went to Sim Sizemore’s locker and pressed his forehead against the cool metal. The locker was the shrine of his remorse. Leaning there, he considered God, that He might be listening, considered hope, considered God and hope one and the same, and muttered, “I’m sorry. Get well.” Then he went to a mirror above a sink and stood summoning back as best he could the quiet, cold face of professional mayhem. The face of a hired man.