Fighting in the Shade

by Sterling Watson

  “Sure,” he said, “I promise.”

  She stubbed the cigarette out in the desk drawer, got up, and walked around to stand over him. She knelt by his chair and rested her hand on his thigh. “Billy, this is going to change your whole life. You know that, don’t you?”

  He nodded. “But it’s right. It’s the right thing to do, isn’t it, Mrs. English?”

  She thought about it for a while, gave his thigh a warm pat, and sighed. “Yes, it’s right… Last chance to back out, Billy.”

  “I’m in. But what about Moira?”

  Mrs. English frowned. “I don’t know what’s going on with her.”

  Billy nodded. I do. “She’s the, uh, editor, right? Don’t you have to ask her?”

  Mrs. English raised an eyebrow, tossed dark hair out of her eyes. “Yes, I suppose I do. I think she’ll go along with it.”

  It was only after Billy was outside in the hallway, after he had nodded again to Tony Dunphy puzzling over the mysteries of sporting grammar, after he had smiled thinly at the two sophomore newshounds, that it occurred to him. This will change her life too.

  The next day, Billy’s letter to the state athletic association was published in the Spartan. The newspapers were distributed in the afternoon, and it took only minutes for a copy of the Spartan to find its way to the offices of the Oleander Grower. The next day, the Grower’s morning headline read: Football Player’s Father Was Bagman: Gave Son Money in Saloon.

  Billy’s story hit Oleander like a hurricane. Everywhere people talked about it, argued it, denied, decried, and cursed it. In barbershops, restaurants, on street corners, in the school board chambers, and at dinner tables, it was the subject of stormy discussion. After a day of hastily convened conferences, Coach Prosser and Carr High School Principal Boyd Sowers denied any wrongdoing. No one, they stated flatly, had paid Billy Dyer to play football. Coach Prosser pointed out that Billy had received a serious head injury and speculated that this might account for the boy’s confusion. Mr. Blake Rainey stated that the men Billy Dyer accused had indeed gathered at his house. The boy had been dismissed from the team for violating training rules, and they had met to discuss his reinstatement after a sufficient time of punishment. Mr. Rainey said that they never discussed any sort of financial arrangement with the boy. He concluded his statement with the opinion that, in addition to the head injury young Dyer had received, the sudden death of his father by self-inflicted gunshot wound might also have caused the boy to become confused about these very serious matters.

  At school, Billy was cursed and accosted. Football players, by Coach Prosser’s order, gave him a wide berth, though their eyes told of things to come. He was challenged to fights by ordinary humans. He avoided some, accepted others. After a bloody brawl with a fat boy from a family of grove workers, Billy was hauled to the principal’s office. When he stood in front of the secretary’s desk, his knuckles scraped, bleeding from a split lip, Principal Sowers got up and closed his door.

  Mr. Laird strode in and seized Billy’s arm, shoving him toward the hallway. “Billy, you are suspended from school for disruptive behavior. Remove everything from your locker and get off school grounds. You’re no longer a student until this is settled.” There was nothing in the lean, hard man’s eyes but the efficiency of contempt.

  Four cheerleaders stopped Billy in the parking lot. The girls demanded to know why he wanted to hurt the Spartans. He decided not to reply, was about to get into his car, when one of them, Susie Strickland, burst into noisy sobs. She was Charlie Rentz’s girlfriend, a ripe, freckled redhead with legs that jumped higher and split wider than any other girl’s on the squad. Billy could see that her tears were not mere accusation. True grief poured from them. Why did he want to rob her of the chance to cheer at the state championship?

  Billy muttered, “I only told the truth.”

  “You lied!” hissed Sally Tifton, a tall, coltish pediatrician’s daughter. She lunged, raking at Billy’s eyes. He ducked her awkward swipe and backed away to cries of “Coward!” and “Traitor!”

  Moira Davison appeared behind the four girls, holding a trigonometry book to her chest and grimly smiling. “For Christ’s sake, Sally,” she said in the bored tone she used at Mrs. English’s parties, “what if it’s true? What if there is corruption in our sacred game of football? Doesn’t that matter to you? Isn’t that a bigger thing than… cheering, for Christ’s sake?”

  Sally Tifton’s eyes shot scorn at Moira, then she looked at the other cheerleaders, all of them lathered in bright passion. Her pretty blue eyes seared Billy again, and she hissed, “I hate you, you trashy shit!”

  “Trashy?” Moira stood in front of Billy, looked at his battered face, then turned back to the cheerleaders. “Sally, why is it always about class with you?”

  Susie Strickland snapped, “You! Why did you put that crap in the Spartan? You won’t be editor very much damn longer.”

  She stamped her foot and whirled, tanned thighs golden in the afternoon sun. The cheerleaders walked away hotly whispering, an eight-legged creature of bright Spartan red.

  Moira smiled weary irony at Billy, a form of comfort. “We can always count on Monmouth Park to adjust our moral compass.”

  Billy was not much comforted. If he didn’t leave soon, Mr. Laird would call the police. Moira moved close and touched with her fingertip a drop of blood that had fallen from his split lip to his shirt. Behind her the sky was low and yellow, and the sandstone buildings of Carr High seemed to lean backward into the grove of jacaranda trees that shaded the campus. Mrs. English, her face too far away to read, observed from the window of a second-floor classroom. Nearer, a group of students watched Billy and Moira with the interest they’d apply to dogs copulating in the street.

  Moira said, “Well, you’re not our only exile. They’re sending Mrs. English to the retard school in Osceola. You gotta admire the irony. Her trying to teach Catcher in the Rye to a bunch of morons. She told Derek her husband’s gonna finish his thesis and get a college job. Fat chance, if you ask me. Useless prick.”

  Billy leaned against the Ford, and Moira came to him.

  “This place makes me sick. Let’s go to my house. I’ll get us into my mom’s liquor cabinet. That’s medicine for you.” When Billy glanced again at the students behind her, she lowered her voice. “We could go to the lake.” She waited, her eyes promising better medicine than alcohol.

  Billy swallowed, closed his eyes, and saw himself and Moira in the warm water, one flesh, then parting to share that other knowledge. I’m the rat.

  “Come on, Billy. Come with me. I don’t care what this school thinks.”

  He tried to smile at her invitation. Could only bite his lip until it oozed fresh blood. “Thanks,” he said, “but I can’t, not now.” He looked at Mrs. English standing in the window. He wiped his mouth with his hand, looked at the blood. “There’s just too much going on right now. I have to think things over.”

  She lifted her hand from him, pulled the trigonometry book back up to her breasts. “Did you, Billy? Did you take money?”

  He nodded. It was his story now.

  “Why?”

  “My mother.”

  “Your mother? Is that a joke?”

  He shook his head. “My mother and a man named Karl.”

  Maybe someday he could tell Moira about the bruise on his mother’s neck. How she had begged him not to kill Karl. Convinced him that Rainey’s money was better than a dead man. Someday Moira would be a woman, and maybe she’d understand. But not now.

  She said, “I know why you did it.” Then she whispered, “I don’t want you to come to my house. There’s nothing for us now, Billy. We’d only put two bad things together and make something worse.”

  It was Billy’s turn to ask a question. “Did Mrs. English tell you she was publishing my letter?”

  Tears formed in Moira’s eyes. “She said she tried to reach me… to consult with me about it.” She wiped her eyes angrily with the back of her hand
. “You noticed, I guess, the paper appeared without the names of any student editors. She did that… to protect us.”

  Billy held her.

  She whispered, “What’ll happen to her now?”

  “I don’t know. All she did was print the truth. She did it because she had to, so maybe it doesn’t matter now… what happens to her.”

  Moira looked at him, confused.

  “I know a man who says the world always makes us dirty.” Rainey’s law of the fallen world. But some of us try to get clean again.

  Moira glanced behind her at the students watching them, two dirty kids, then moved her face closer to his. “You didn’t tell her, did you, Billy? About me?”

  Billy shook his head. “I won’t tell her.”

  Moira bowed her head and covered her eyes with both hands. “Do you think she knows? Is that why she didn’t tell me about printing your letter?”

  He wondered what bothered her most, losing the scoop or losing Mrs. English. Moira, the fire-breathing editor, had said to him at Mrs. English’s house, Tell me and I’ll write it up in the Spartan. Maybe it’s the story I’m looking for. But there was another Moira, dark and furtive, also searching. That other Moira had seen Mystery Night and hadn’t written a word. That Moira, midnight traveler of dark forest trails, secret watcher, had written only an anonymous letter warning the school board about her teacher’s parties.

  “She told us we’re the idealists of the new world,” Billy said. “So that’s our job now, ideals, and hers is…” He couldn’t finish, lacked the words. But he thought, Fighting in the fallen world. Then he whispered, “Maybe she just wanted to protect you, like she said.”

  The innocence you hated saved your neck.

  PART V

  NOVEMBER

  THE EXILE

  To the ancient Greeks, to wander, without friends or shelter, was considered a fate as horrible as death.

  “I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.”

  —Aeschylus

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  The state athletic association met to discuss Billy’s case. They had received phone calls and telegrams from coaches, parents, and players from all over Florida. They postponed the championship game for one week and suspended Billy from practice until the matter was concluded. If Billy’s allegations were proven true, the association would have no choice but to declare forfeited all games in which Billy had played. Orlando High School would play the Jacksonville Lee Generals for the state title.

  Sports writers called Billy for interviews. He refused them. The scribes of the sports page, he figured, wanted more than anything to write about the championship game. The boy who had put the game in jeopardy would be meat for their knives.

  Mrs. English called. “Well, we knew this thing would get big. I guess we just didn’t know how big.”

  Or how bad, Billy thought. He could hear the excitement in her voice, a nervous throbbing underneath the ordinary sound of cigarette-scratchy scorn. He had to admit his own excitement too. When he asked himself if he was certain about what he had done, the answer came back, Almost. When he asked himself how he felt, the answer was, Almost clean.

  He had not told Mrs. English about Mystery Night. Only that he had been banished for drinking and then had been paid to play after Sim Sizemore got sick. About that, she had said, “So, the rules were somewhat elastic?”

  He could hear her smoking. The suck and sigh of her habit. She told him, “Some of my colleagues haven’t been very nice to me in the hallways of dear old Carr. In their view, Mr. Rainey’s the volcano on our tropical island. If we don’t bow to him and sacrifice virgins, he’ll erupt and we’ll all be killed.” She laughed quietly into the phone.

  Billy liked the way she talked to him now. As if he was a man and they were in this together. He wasn’t sure he liked where things were going.

  “What about Herb Klein?”

  “Oh, he’s with us… until he isn’t, I guess. I don’t know what Herb’s limit is.”

  “Did you know him before… ?”

  “Socially.” She sighed into the phone. “Billy, there aren’t that many people with… our values in this town. We tend to find one another. Herb’s boss, Helen Dane, is the one who really matters. She owns the Grower. One time at a League of Women Voters luncheon, I heard her refer to Blake Rainey as an illiterate fruit peddler. That made my day. If Oleander has an aristocracy, she comes from it. She remembers when the Raineys used to pick fruit for the Danes.”

  Billy thought of Rainey in the dark loft of the old mercantile. We all got along, because we knew who we were. And football, Billy, football was part of what held us together. Made us proud of Oleander.

  The state athletic association sent two men from Tallahassee to investigate Billy’s accusations. A man told him on the phone, “We think it’s best not to see you in Oleander. Nerves are pretty raw down there.” They would meet him at a hotel in nearby Manatee.

  Wearing cheap, ill-fitting gray suits and carrying briefcases and raincoats, the two men approached him in the lobby. Former coaches, Billy figured, stern and commanding figures. The older one, tall with crew-cut white hair and gray-blue eyes, pointed at the elevator. “That way, William.”

  In the room, the younger one, muscular and silent, opened a suitcase on the bed, removed a tape recorder, and plugged it in. “Test, test,” he said into the microphone. The machine repeated the words eerily. Billy hated tests. He had told himself to be ready for anything, but he was surprised by the cold distance in his inquisitors’ eyes. His hands sweated, and his knees shook. He was glad when they told him to sit down.

  Both men held notebooks. The tall, gray-eyed man began without preliminaries. “William, why did your father give you money?”

  “He worked for Mr. Rainey. They made him do it.”

  “As you know, Mr. Rainey denies that. What did your father do for Mr. Rainey?”

  “He collected rent.” And evicted people to clear the way for an interstate highway.

  Billy wiped his palms on the scratchy wool of his Sunday pants, filled his chest with air, tried to look honest and plausible.

  “Do you have any records of the money you received? Bank statements? Receipts? Anything signed by Mr. Rainey or anyone else?”

  “No. It was cash. I spent it on food and gas.” And Karl.

  “And this money was passed to you by your father in a bar?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. It seemed to be… required.” Ellen the bartender always watching, probably reporting to Rainey.

  “Mr. Rainey says he believes your father gave you money. He says the money may even have originated with him since your father worked for business associates of Mr. Rainey, but he says neither he nor any of the other men who met with you at his house authorized paying you to play. And they had no idea you thought you were being paid to play. They say the meeting at Mr. Rainey’s house was only about bringing you back after being punished.”

  Billy looked at the two stern faces. “He’s lying. I told him if I came back to the team, I’d have to quit my job. I asked for money, and he agreed.”

  “You couldn’t have done it any other way? What about your family?”

  “My parents are divorced. My dad wasn’t… doing so well. I couldn’t live with my mother in Sarasota and play football. I needed money.”

  “Assuming what you say is true, didn’t it occur to you that all this would come out? That you might ruin your future and hurt the team? Didn’t you think about that?”

  When Billy didn’t answer, the men glanced at each other as though something smelled bad. The truth was that he had not thought about it well enough until after his father died. He had wanted to help his mother. He had wanted to play football. And he had wanted to make the men who had taken football away give it back to him. On his terms, not theirs. Sitting in the library of Blake Rainey’s house in Monmouth Park, he could think of no other way to set his terms.

 
The two men closed their notebooks and stood. The younger one unplugged the tape recorder. The tall, gray-eyed man kept his back to Billy.

  Billy made himself say, “What’s gonna happen now?”

  When the tall man turned, his eyes were the color of dirty snow. “To be honest, William, we don’t know. If what you allege is proven, Carr High will forfeit the games you played. Typically, any coach who condones a thing like this is terminated. That’s probably another thing you didn’t think about.”

  Prosser? A legend, fired?

  “But why would they fire Coach Prosser and not Mr. Sowers? Why not kick Blake Rainey off the school board?”

  The younger man snapped the suitcase closed. The two picked up their raincoats and the tall man turned at the door. “We don’t have anything to do with principals and school boards. We do make recommendations about coaches. We’ll be making one in this case.”

  “When?”

  “When we get all the facts. When we’re sure we know what really happened.”

  “I told you what happened.”

  “Yes, William, you told us. Other people are telling us different.”

  After the men left the room, Billy heard the elevator door whisper open then shut. He was alone in a hotel in Manatee, Florida. Was the room rented for the day? Could he just stay here, rest, think, leave the world outside the door for a while, or would someone come and prepare the room for cleaner guests?

  At home, Billy kept the doors locked and lay on the couch in the odor of his own nervous sweat reading or fitfully sleeping. When a car passed or he heard voices from the street, he rose, heart racing, mouth dry, fists clenched, and peered out at a world that grew more angry with each hour that crossed the clock.

  A car pulled into Billy’s driveway, then a hand pounded the door. Billy opened it to a round, red face, a short, bald man in old-fashioned bib overalls, mopping his face with a red bandanna. The man held a white envelope in his pink fist. He looked at Billy for a long time, then shoved the envelope at him. “Hey, kid. You Billy Dyer, right? You evicted.”