When he walked into the newspaper building carrying his mother’s handwritten summary of his father, Billy’s mood was dark. He reflected that a man’s life could, if the world wanted it that way, be reduced to little more than throat clearing and mumbles. He stopped on the white marble steps under the high blue sky and looked around at people coming and going, young and old, rich and poor, black and white. The youngest person within the reach of his eye would live at most another eighty years… and do what? Masticate, defecate, procreate, masturbate, expectorate, congregate, separate, debilitate, and expire.
In his finest hour, his father had flown a bomber through skies full of fighters and black flak to drop bombs on cities full of people like the boy who stood on these steps clutching a dead pilot’s biography. What did this mean? The question oppressed Billy more than the envelope in his hand full of his mother’s schoolgirl cursive, more than the sky that loomed above the city like the blue lid of a coffin. He wondered if it would be better simply to walk to the nearest garbage can and discard the obituary. Your father was always melancholy. Had his father known this oppression, lived with it every day like an evil twin, while others walked in sunlight? Had it killed him? Billy didn’t think that whiskey or the fight with Jimmy Clokes, or even the bad things his father had done for Cam Sizemore, were enough to make a man put a gun to his head.
Why did you follow him? Why did you witness his humiliation?
Inside the Grower building, Billy handed his father’s life to a man in an ink-stained vest who tossed it into a tray with the other deaths of the week. Billy waited to be thanked, even to be acknowledged, but the man kept his eyes on the blotter in front of him and called, “Next!” A woman with tears in her eyes waited behind Billy.
When Billy walked into the Cool Room, Ellen, the hunchbacked bartender, gave him a complicated look. She knew his father would never sip scotch here again. Something turned over in her gaze, something like motherhood, something that wanted to comfort, but this thing shrugged and fell asleep again, and a smirk hooked the corners of her mouth. Billy chose the table where he had always met his father. Ellen brought him a Coke and left without a word. He waited, drumming his fingers on the table.
Coach Rolt opened the door and peered in as though something might leap at him out of the gloom. Two gin saints at the bar swung grave eyes at Rolt, then turned back to their drinks. Billy was surprised to see his coach. He had received a phone call from a voice he did not recognize, a deep, musical country voice, telling him to “meet someone” at the Cool Room at the usual time. Who knows the usual time? Who knows I met my father here?
Rolt came at Billy blinking, his nose working busily at the odors of rancid beer and smoke. He stood over the table, trying to command the moment. As usual, to Billy, he seemed lost. He wore a light-blue windbreaker and a yellow sport shirt, white sneakers, and khakis. A tourist getup. When he unzipped the jacket, Billy heard the sigh of gut falling. Rolt sat across from him and flopped an envelope onto the table.
“So, Billy Dyer.”
Billy said, “Yes, sir.” Was it somebody’s joke to send Rolt with money?
“The honest kid who didn’t like what went on at the hunting camp.”
Billy didn’t answer. Didn’t touch the money.
“Take the money, kid. It’s your bonus, a little extra. Actually, a lot. Don’t leave it on the table like that. You’re making us both look dirty.”
Billy examined the red scar that ran from Rolt’s lip into his nostril. It had been a freak thing, Billy’s fist stamping the soft flesh against Rolt’s rabbity teeth, tearing skin like orange pulp.
“You don’t take it, kid, I’m taking it back.”
Rolt’s voice was high for a grown man’s, something childish in it. Everything he said sounded like a complaint.
Ellen approached, but Rolt waved her away, never moving his eyes from Billy’s face. She clumped back to the bar on heavy orthopedic shoes. Rolt said, “So sorry to hear about your dad, Billy.”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t or you’ll what?”
Billy dropped his eyes down to the table, grinding his teeth, jaw muscles aching.
“You wouldn’t get away with it twice, kid.” Rolt’s voice was louder now. Excited. “You wanna go out in the parking lot and try it again? You sucker-punching little shit.”
Billy stood, fists clenched. Light washed the room, and Billy heard the murmur of traffic from the open door. Blake Rainey said, “Len, you’re keeping me waiting.” Rainey’s six-two frame came at Billy in a brilliant halo, his face invisible. Billy turned to Rolt. “Len,” he said, and laughed. “Len?” Rolt backed away.
Rainey said, “Wait for me in the car, Len.”
Billy and Blake Rainey stood over the table, waiting. Rolt threw the door open, and someone closed it.
Without glancing back, Rainey said, “Thank you, Ellen.” He gestured at Billy’s chair like he owned it. Maybe he does. When Billy didn’t sit, Rainey did. Billy backed toward the door. Rainey looked down at the envelope on the table. “Sit down, Billy.”
It was not the public voice, firm with command, of the meeting in the house on Lake Georgia, nor the voice he had used with Rolt, bemused by folly. This voice was fatigued by some burden of knowledge, and it made Billy sit. His back to the bar, Rainey raised a hand. Ellen clumped over with a glass of whiskey and another Coke.
Rainey picked up the whiskey and rubbed the glass with both hands. “I don’t know what you’ve learned about fighting, Billy, but there is a school that holds you better kill a man like Len once you’ve marked him.”
Billy looked at the hands that held the whiskey, tanned and calloused like a cowboy’s, the long fingers graceful in their caress of the glass. He looked at his own cleat-scarred hands, the proud markings of the Spartan clan. He didn’t touch the Coke.
Rainey raised his glass, took a pull, mulled the whiskey in his cheeks, and swallowed without wince or apparent pleasure. “A man you hurt will hurt you back, Billy. It’s a law. So you kill him when you have him down, or you hope he’ll want more than your life. To most men, there’s only one thing worth more than your life, Billy, and that’s your shame. They’ll let you live after you mark them, but only to see you shamed and wishing you were dead.”
Rainey said, “Your father was a hurt man, Billy. Maybe you didn’t know it, because he was good at concealing what hurt him. But maybe you knew it. I think you did, at least a little. I think you’re a smart boy, smart enough to know this thing about your father.”
Rainey touched his chest while he spoke, as though this knowledge came not from the head but the heart.
Billy’s trembling hands spilled Coke on the table. He glanced down at the mess, unable to remember ever touching the glass, then shut his eyes. “Don’t talk about my father.”
“I have to, Billy. He was a hurt man, but he didn’t know who or what had hurt him. He wasn’t sure, so he couldn’t wait and wish to see some other man dead. You see, he was always going to do what he did. Always. Nobody, except God Almighty, knew when, but some of us knew he was going to do it. With a gun or a car or a bottle or a woman. Turned out it was a gun, but he was always going to do it.”
“No,” Billy said.
“Yes,” said Rainey, “and it’s not your fault. It’s nobody’s fault except maybe the war. Maybe it’s mostly the fault of all and everything that was the war. What you need to know, what I can tell you because I fought the war too, is that you helped your father stay in the world as long as he did. Without you, he would have done it sooner. You gave him life, Billy, just like he gave it to you, and you need to be proud of that.”
But Billy couldn’t be proud. Not with money between them on the table. Not with this man sitting across from him where his father had sat fumbling for Billy’s hands under the table, saying, “Take it!”
Billy whispered, “No,” again, searching Rainey’s face for something that might be honest. He said, low, “My father worked for you. What was he d
oing?”
Rainey waved the question away with a graceful arc of his long fingers. Lifted the amber glass and sipped. “He didn’t work for me. He might have done some things for someone who does things for me. None of it’s on paper, most of it’s just favors. Courtesies between gentlemen. Professional courtesies.” Rainey leaned forward, softened his tone. “Billy, you’re smart enough to know change has to come. It can’t be stopped. Smart people want to do the changing, control the progress. Some things, like Carver Heights, are immediately painful, but merciful in the long run.”
Mercy. My father was in the business of mercy? “Mrs. English. Is getting rid of her progress? Is it mercy?”
Rainey pushed back in his chair. “You one of her students, Billy? That woman’s insane. And dangerous. It’s another thing you don’t know yet, but you will. When you have your own kids.” He framed the whiskey glass on the table with open palms. “All I have at heart is what’s best for Oleander. It’s about order and standards. Law.”
“Like the law of killing a man when you’ve marked him?”
Rainey shook his head. Blew a long breath of frustration, picked up his glass, and drank the whiskey. “There’s more than one kind of law, son. The most important kind you don’t read in any statute book, but it’s the more valid. It and a few other things we won’t talk about today.”
Rainey stood, tall, gaunt, graceful, his face half shrouded in the smoke that floated over from the bar. He pulled up his black coat sleeve and looked at a gold watch. “Well, I have to go. Ole Len’ll be wondering if you and me have run off somewhere on him, gone fishing or something.” Rainey leaned down to Billy and spread his long tanned fingers on the tabletop. “I want you to think about all this, son. Oleander needs boys like you. We need you on the football field, and, after football, we’ll need you for bigger things. What you don’t know is that most of your life hasn’t happened yet, and what you do now, everything you do now, will prepare you to live for a long, long time.” Rainey buttoned his black suit coat around a trim waist. “Unless you die young.”
He reached out and moved the envelope toward Billy.
Billy took it, held it, felt its thickness.
It’s your bonus, a little extra. Actually, a lot.
Billy threw the envelope as hard as he could at the bar. Halfway there it opened and money flew out, scattered, fell like green leaves blown from a tree. It landed on the floor, on tables, and some of it on the bar and at the feet of the astonished gin saints whose gaping eyes received it as a miracle.
“Well now,” Rainey said. He walked out without a glance back at Billy or at the litter of money.
Ellen scooped what she could from the bar. “Thank you, Mr. Rainey. Thank you so much.”
Billy walked to the door, stood in the column of sunlight, and watched the black Lincoln whisper away, Rolt at the wheel, Rainey sitting behind him in the backseat, his head inclined as though in prayer.
I should have taken Rolt up on it. Len. In the parking lot, cracking out his teeth. Len. Stomping him. Pounding his face against the asphalt. Never letting him up. Done it before Rainey ever got out of that car. Ever said those things to me.
Billy imagined it with a clarity that frightened him, his hammering fists, the blood, the light in Rolt’s nasty eyes going out. I shouldn’t have taken the money. I should never have taken the money.
He stepped out of the smoke and gloom of the Cool Room into the bright parking lot, hauled a breath, closed his eyes, tried to shut off the stream of bloody pictures in his mind. He flung his arms out to ease the violent blood that swelled them, worked his trembling hands. Kill a man when he’s down. Hammering Rolt would only prove Rainey’s power. Rainey’s law.
Billy stood at the edge of the water, pulled two pennies from the pocket of his jeans, and tossed one into the dark water. It was crazy to be here.
He threw the second penny. Plonk. He made a wish: Make me clean again.
It was crazy to be here. There might be a night watchman, someone coming by to check on the place. He looked out over the vast, dark lake, warm and still under a moonlit sky. The water would hold the sun’s heat until almost morning. He wondered what it would be like to strip off his clothes and slip into the warm dark, swim out to the place where horizon and sky formed one black lostness. And not come back.
He could make out the hunched mass of the pavilion above him on the bluff and, beyond that, a faint gleam of chrome bumper, his Ford. He looked up at the dark sky and asked, Who’s in charge of this? A waterbird, some kind of crane, flew over, low, a sudden rush of sound above his head. The big wings, Thee! Thee! Thee!
Billy idled the Ford slowly down the sand road until he found the place where he had run naked and bleeding into the forest. He turned off the engine, got out, and stood on the white ribbon of sand. He looked up at the white moon, the warrior’s shield that had given him fresh courage on his run from murderous boys. He remembered how his heart had filled with hope, just before things went wrong. If only Sim Sizemore and Charlie Rentz had gone home and left Billy to spend a miserable night in the woods. If only Billy had not given in to his rage. Sim would still be a football player in the glory of his talent, and Billy would be a disgraced boy in a night world of rolling oranges. And maybe that other Billy would have left the night world eventually for something better, something good. Another school, good grades, even college. If only. If only and maybe.
If only he had not asked Blake Rainey for money. If only he had not followed his father to Carver Heights. If only and maybe. Filthy words. How could one boy have made so many mistakes? Well, there was no going back. Even a mistaken boy knew that, and now Billy realized what was left to do. The idea had been rising, rising from a deep place in him for a long time. An act appearing, clarifying.
Life was a road that forked, the poet said, and you turned one way or the other. You had to choose. This road, bright in the glow of the moon warrior’s shield, was the end of one journey and the beginning of another. Billy knew what he had to do now. As surely as he’d known he had to play football. As surely as he’d risen from his hands and knees to run from the elephant line. And if he did this thing, maybe the road would fork again, out of the land of Maybe and If Only. A way to be clean again. No longer a mistaken boy, but a certain boy. A boy who might start over.
THIRTY-SIX
Billy found the cramped office of the Spartan at the end of a dank hallway in the back of the cafeteria building. A pretty girl and a tall, thin boy with acne, two sophomores Billy had seen around, glanced up when he walked in.
“Is Mrs. English here?”
The girl removed her bare feet from a desktop and smoothed down her skirt. She pointed at a closed door. “Knock.”
The office was furnished with desks and typewriters. Tony Dunphy, the boy who played behind Billy at flanker, pecked listlessly at a typewriter. His column was “Spartan Sports.” He turned, and Billy nodded. “Great game the other night,” Dunphy said, not for the first time.
“Yeah, thanks, Tony.”
The sophomores rolled their eyes and put their heads together over a page of copy.
Billy knocked, heard a firm, “Come in!”
Mrs. English’s office was small and disordered. Piles of old Spartans covered shelves beside stacks of yearbooks and style manuals. A shriveled apple core lay among scraps of notes on the scarred desktop. She looked up from a page of newsprint. “Billy?” She narrowed her eyes. “How are you?”
“I’m all right.” Billy took the chair in front of the desk, rubbed his damp palms on his thighs, felt his cheeks burning. “It’s, uh, confidential. Can we close the door?”
She went to the door, looked out, closed it, and settled again behind the desk. “What can I do for you?”
Billy swallowed a hard lump of something. The thing in his throat was his future. He pulled an envelope from his pocket and slid it across the desk.
Her eyes moved from his face to the envelope and back again, then she fumbled in the
desk drawer for a pack of Winstons. She lit one and squinted through the smoke. “Open the window.” When Billy was slow, she said, “The window. Over there. I’m not supposed to…” She waved at the hovering smoke, then pointed at the closed door, the junior journalists outside.
Billy liked watching her smoke. She did it like his father had, hungrily but with a certain style. She took a deep drag, blew smoke at the ceiling, and said, “I want you to think about this. I want you to be careful.” She pushed the envelope back toward him.
Billy leaned into the smoke from her cigarette, inhaled it. His father had asked him to be careful. Mrs. English watched him from grim eyes. She thought she knew what was in the envelope. She was giving him a way out. “Were you careful when you were my age?” He had asked his father the same question.
Her eyes searched the pages of memory. She made a half smile, pulled at the Winston, gave a harsh exhalation. “No, I wasn’t. Not very. Girls don’t play football, but we have our own ways to be stupid. Mostly I just didn’t take very good care with cars and boys. But I’m not telling you any of that, even if you ask me.”
Billy smiled. “Don’t worry. I won’t ask.”
She reached out and rested her hand on the envelope. “So, do I… ?”
“Yes.”
She took her time reading. He watched her, waiting for the moment when her face, the attitude of her body, would reveal her disappointment in Billy Dyer. How could she not be disappointed? There. There it was. He saw the moment. She rubbed her brow with a thumb and forefinger. “It’s not what I expected.” Her voice was cautious.
Or wanted, Billy thought. “But it’s a story?”
“Oh, yes. It’s a story.”
“And you’ll print it?”
She looked at the door again, and together they listened to the sounds of Tony Dunphy’s stuttering typewriter. “I don’t know if they will. I will, but there’s one thing.”
“Sure,” Billy said. “What?”
“Whatever happens from now on, you tell me the truth.”
Fighting in the Shade Page 22