Fighting in the Shade

by Sterling Watson

  Rainey nodded solemnly. “You’ll play one more game. When Tallahassee knows you lied, they’ll leave it to us to keep or cut you. We can’t win without you, Billy.”

  Billy nodded. “I’ll think about it, Mr. Rainey.”

  He was walking away when Rainey called out to him, “Oh, Billy, one more thing. If you went to your father’s office the other night—if you went there and you found anything I need to have, that would be a part of the bargain too. Do you understand me, son?” He pulled a book of matches from his coat pocket, lit one, held it up to show Billy the flame, then flicked it into the grass between them.

  Billy nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “And Billy, remember this. Your father is gone now where the cares of this world can’t follow, but he leaves his name behind. His good name. What would he want you to do? Think about that, son. What would your father want you to do?”

  Again Billy said, “Yes, sir.”

  FORTY-ONE

  If I give you something, will you tell Herb Klein to leave my father alone?” Billy pushed away the tuna sandwich Mrs. English had bought for him and looked around the diner. Two truckers at the counter talked speed traps over pieces of cherry pie, a woman in pink hair curlers whispered into the pay phone, and Delvin, the counterman, dug a finger into his ear and examined the results.

  Mrs. English smiled, calm and caring. Almost motherly. When Billy had called to ask for a meeting, she had not seemed surprised.

  Am I, is life, that predictable?

  She reached out and covered his hand with hers. Cold. “Your father’s dead.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “You mean the freeway? Leave it alone?”

  “I mean my father.”

  She took her hand away. “Billy, if there’s more, Herb will find it.”

  Billy said it again: “I want him to leave my father alone.”

  Mrs. English only looked at him.

  Billy remembered standing with his forehead pressed against the cool metal of Sim Sizemore’s locker, thinking that faith was really hope. The desire to believe without proof was all you could have of God. He would have to hope she could bargain with Klein.

  “Coach Rolt,” he said. Len.

  Mrs. English lit a Winston. She picked a thread of tobacco from her lip, rolled it between stained fingers, flicked it at the floor. “Leonard Rolt?” She said the name like it tasted bad. “How is he the solution to our problem?”

  “After my father died, he gave me money.” Billy wiped his hands on his jeans under the table. “Klein can get to him. He’s weak.”

  “How can Klein get to him?”

  Billy closed his eyes and saw again the silver, sandy road, the full moon high and golden, the night he had run from blood-mad boys, and then the night he had returned to that road and decided to be clean. He opened his eyes, rubbed them hard with the heel of his hand. “First, I want you to understand something. It was about… For a long time it was about a promise I made. A promise I still believed in after things went bad.”

  She smiled softly at him. “Fine. That’s part of the story. Part of the truth. Tell me about the promise and how it went bad.”

  He told the story of Mystery Night.

  When he finished, out of breath, mouth dry, stomach lurching, he looked into her eyes, wondered if it made any sense to her, if there was anything like it in the life of a woman, a teacher, a lover of books, anything that could make it matter to her as it did to him. He wanted her to know that he had tried hard to learn what was dirty and what was clean since rising and running from the elephant line into this future. That he had sat at a table in a country club and refused to tell his own father what he had just told her. That she was now the closest thing in his life to a parent.

  “I liked what happened that night before it went bad. The bonfire, the older guys with their torches and the poetry words. I swore an oath. We all did. I was close to them, closer than I’d ever been before. I loved them. They were my family. Then, after the bad things happened, I still wanted to keep the good part. The friendship was gone, so I decided the good part was my promise. That I wouldn’t tell. That a promise means something. They kicked me off the team and lied about the reasons. They turned me into nobody, nothing, a fruit pusher, but I still thought if I kept my promise I could hold onto something clean. They took me back because they had to, and I won games, but the money I took made football dirty. The promise was the best thing I had.”

  Her eyes were full of the heavy sorrow that he had seen poetry bring to them. “Yes, Billy, I understand. We all want to keep what’s good, and it’s hard when you learn that good things are done by bad people, or worse, that good people do bad things for good reasons. I’m a Jew, you probably know.”

  He didn’t.

  “Your father flew a B-24. I saw it in his obituary. So he was a good man who bombed cities, killed innocent people to rid the world of the monsters who murdered my people. Who hated the Jews and wanted them dead. I lost uncles and aunts and cousins, Billy. In the camps, they were starved and shot and gassed and burned, and, God help me, I’m grateful for men like your father, but the good and bad are all mixed together. They can’t ever be separated. Not in this world. Maybe in the next, if there is one, but not here. So for now, for us, the good and bad are just the food we eat and the air we breathe. Unless we choose not to. And choosing not to breathe, Billy, means we die.”

  “My father chose not to breathe.”

  Mrs. English looked away. It was too much for her. “I know, Billy. I’m sorry for that.”

  Billy said, “Moira Davison.”

  She smiled. “What about her, Billy? Have you two… ? Is she your girlfriend?”

  Billy didn’t know the answer. What was Moira now? They had been one flesh, then Moira had named them one spirit in their violations of the innocent. There’s nothing for us now, Billy. We’d only put two bad things together and make something worse.

  “She was there that night. She saw everything that happened.”

  “But I thought—”

  “Nobody knew she was watching.”

  “So Moira saw Leonard Rolt presiding over the whole thing?” Her voice was low and full of awe. Was it awe for the eyewitness, Moira? A dark enjoyment of human comedy? Simple disbelief? Billy didn’t know.

  Exhausted, his voice blown out like a candle by words he had thought he would never say, Billy nodded. Yes.

  “Well,” Mrs. English said with a sad, grim smile, “that’s it. That’s corroboration if I ever heard it.”

  “My father?” Billy said.

  “We’ll see, Billy. I’ll talk to Herb.”

  FORTY-TWO

  The Spartans did not play in the state championship game.

  Mr. Leonard Rolt cleansed his soul. He told the story of Mystery Night and admitted that he had paid Billy Dyer to play football. Principal Boyd Sowers expressed outrage at the actions of Mr. Rolt, declaring Mystery Night inappropriate activity supervised by Mr. Rolt off school grounds. He fired popular coach Edward Prosser. Mr. Rolt’s teaching certificate was revoked. Mr. Blake Rainey called the allegations of cheating unproven and expressed outrage at the decision of the state athletic association. The Spartan football team was put on probation for five years.

  The town’s outrage was of two kinds; a united people became two warring tribes. Those who did not care about what happened in the woods, even if they acknowledged that it was worrisome in certain ways, wished that the placid surface of life had not been disturbed. That their town’s reputation had not been sullied. Most of all they wished for what was lost, the championship game. This tribe hated Billy Dyer like the devil for stirring up trouble.

  The other tribe demanded an end to Mystery Night. Loyal fans and good citizens of a good little city, they were called to moral consciousness by Billy’s revelations. Of course, men of both tribes had been to the woods themselves, had sung the songs, walked as elephants or done whatever Spartans did in their day, and these men had some
explaining to do to friends and families and perhaps even to themselves.

  A city of fire stands behind you. Burn inside but never tell.

  Preachers preached about dancing with Satan in the forest—the oldest American story. They preached about moral rearmament, about reclaiming the football team from pagan Sparta and naming it for heroes of the faith. The Reverend Castle, minister of the First Baptist Church, wrote to the editor of the Oleander Grower suggesting that the team be renamed the Saints.

  In an editorial, Helen Dane, owner and publisher of the Grower, told the town that there was more to know about powerful men in Oleander who had paid a boy to play football and sent him and others into the woods to do vile things. She called them “old-style plutocrats” and said that the Grower would now look into the matter of an interstate highway.

  Drunken men came late one night in a caravan of cars to bawl obscenities at Billy’s house. They threw rocks and bottles at his door and windows and called him out for a fight or a beating. Billy hid in the dark until they left. He recovered the leather satchel from the old space heater, threw it and some clothes into the Ford, and drove to his mother’s apartment in Sarasota. He found the place empty. She had moved away. Away from Karl. Good. She’ll start a new life.

  He drove back to Oleander, drove in circles until he was sure no one was following him, then drove to his father’s office where the rent was paid for another month. He moved in late at night, parked his car two blocks away, and burned no lights.

  Herb Klein called. “Billy, is that you?”

  “How’d you find me?”

  “Where else would you be, sleeping in a ditch? I tried your house.”

  “What do you want?”

  “What do I want?” Billy heard the flick and scratch of a lighter. Klein blew smoke into the phone. “That’s cold, Billy. I don’t deserve that. We both got what we wanted. You just got more than you expected with your piece. But you know what? You should have expected it.”

  You should have told me. “What do you want?”

  Another smoky sigh, a pause, then, “Well… to tell you this: The story of Billy Football is over. I’m going back to the freeway. Gonna write about the guys in the tall grass. Gonna step on some bellies and see whose guts spill.”

  “Leave my dad out of it. Mrs. English said you wouldn’t write about him if I told about Mystery Night.”

  “No, Billy, you hoped. There were only two promises. The one you made to those assholes in the woods, and yours to Judith English. Remember what it was? You promised to tell the truth. Maybe you gave up the football story to keep me away from your dad, but I don’t make the rules. Tomorrow’s a new day, and the Grower doesn’t throw blank paper at the reader’s doorstep in the morning. You ought to know that by now. If there’s something good about your dad you want the world to know, tell me. Tell me everything. But I decide the story. You gotta trust me on that one.”

  “I said I don’t know anything.”

  “And I say you do.”

  “Fuck you.” Billy hung up the phone.

  He turned on a lamp and, in its cone of light, knelt to retrieve the worn leather satchel from under the couch. He had examined the papers in it for corroboration of money paid to Billy Dyer. Now he looked at them again—maps, receipts, carbons of bank drafts, appraisals, the names of men in business and in law. He finished confused and uncertain of their meaning. He was sure of only one thing: his father would not want anyone to see these things. Billy turned off the lamp.

  Carrying the satchel, he walked to the back of the office and down the stairs. In the darkness, he felt his way along the side of his car until the gravel of the alley scraped beneath his shoes and he smelled the stench of garbage. He walked like a blind man, one hand outstretched before him, following the odor of rotting food until he made out the dim glimmer of tin. He reached down, lifted the lid from a garbage can, and held the shabby leather satchel above its dark hole. Do it! Give this bag of shit to stinking oblivion! Let Klein kick what he can from the bellies of men who spill their guts.

  “Call it a diversion,” Blake Rainey said. “It’ll work. It always works.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” Cam Sizemore stood at a window in Rainey’s third-floor office. Honey Bear Juice, Rainey’s vast enterprise, rumbled and steamed below him, rolling on as far as Cam could see. A half-mile-long line of trucks hauled fruit from the groves. Fifty gleaming steel trailers stood in rows at the conveyors as many men, foreshortened dwarves in Cam’s vision, shoved the yellow fruit from the trailers onto rolling belts; strangest of all, men looking like Eskimos in quilted overalls piloted forklifts to and from a freezer as big as a battleship. The fifty-gallon drums of concentrate they hauled sent columns of vapor towering into the air.

  “We sack the bitch and play the Commie card.”

  Rainey sat in a simple ladder-back chair with his silver-toed cowboy boots crossed on the scarred desktop, an old oak rolltop that had belonged to his grandfather. A folksy touch, Cam thought, the Napoleon of Industry managing an empire from a desk the size of a beach towel. If there was a piece of paper in the room, Cam couldn’t see it. Rainey liked to say that the business was all in his head where nobody could meddle and tamper. Rainey lifted a Civil War bayonet from the desktop and scraped the edge across his cheek as though he were shaving. Cam closed his eyes and in the darkness saw their ancestors, his and Rainey’s, gaunt, grim men whose eyes had seen the horrors of Cold Harbor and Vicksburg, dry-shaving by firelight on the eve of battle in that great conflict Rainey called the War of Northern Aggression.

  Rainey said, “What do they fear the most, our fellow citizens?” He pointed the bayonet at the window beyond Cam Sizemore, at the far horizon where on a rare clear day you could see the fourteenth floor of the Bland Hotel, the tallest building in Oleander. “It ain’t boys going naked in the woods or some little shit getting paid a few dollars to catch a football. And it ain’t losing the transitory joy of bragging about a state championship. It’s a woman like our Mrs. English who spends all day with their children in school and then all night with them at her house doing God knows what. That’s what they fear. Men and women alike, they fear losing control of their children. Their children’s minds. Their futures.

  “We need to divert their attention which, as we both know, is a restless thing that never lights very long in any particular place, and there’s only one way left to do it. We paint that bitch red, tell ’em she’s corrupting our youth. She’s Oleander’s own Red Menace. We make a good show of it, starting with firing her and publishing her sins in the newspaper. You can bet that legal sheepskin of yours, Cam, she’ll appeal our decision and we’ll have a school board meeting open to all. We’ll show the good citizens of Oleander that some strange fun in the woods ain’t what they really have to worry about. One Red in our school brings in more, and pretty soon the Reds are enlisting folks of color into, what is it, the class struggle? Mrs. English is our first outside agitator, and there’ll be more to follow, and hell and union wages to pay after that. We divert their minds, and our fellow citizens won’t be worrying about what some Jew reporter writes about a freeway running through nigger town.”

  “Maybe,” said Cam Sizemore. Three stories below him and five hundred yards away, an old black man in sweat-soaked khakis stopped pushing oranges and leaned on the steel wall of a trailer breathing hard and squinting up at the hammering sun. Sometimes, Cam knew, Blake Rainey saw things from this window that forced him to act. He’d walk down three flights of stairs and personally fire a loafer or a man breaking some petty rule, just to send a message. His was the all-seeing eye of Honey Bear Juice. Cam silently forgave the old man for taking his few minutes of unscheduled rest and turned from the window. “I don’t know if it’ll work, but it’s what we have now, unless you really want to turn old Fred loose on a newspaper reporter and a high school boy whose father shot himself to death.”

  Rainey swung his long legs off the rolltop, and his boot heels hit the floor wit
h two sharp reports. “Cam, a man would think you got some creaturely feeling for that bitch English.”

  Cam walked to the door. “She was Sim’s teacher her first year here. And a good one, he used to say.” Used to. Goddamn it. Goddamn it to hell. “No,” he said to Rainey, “I have no feeling for her one way or another. We both know she’s no Red Menace, but she probably is stuffing the heads of a few kids with nonsense it’ll take years to clear out.” Cam sighed. And they are kids destined to leave Oleander whether they meet an unhappy teacher or not.

  Rainey dropped the bayonet, and it stuck in the heart pine floor, swinging with a quiet scything sound. “She’ll find a job somewhere. They always do. And what’s a lady English teacher with unwashed hair compared to an interstate highway?”

  “Yes, what indeed?”

  Then Blake Rainey said something Cam Sizemore had never heard from him before.

  “I’m sorry, Cam.”

  “You’re… ?”

  “About your boy.” Rainey coughed or cleared his throat. “He was a good boy, and it was rotten luck. I know you’re proud of him. And you did everything you could for him.”

  “Yes,” Cam Sizemore said, “yes, everything.” But he thought, You can never do everything. No one can. Not in this world anyway.

  FORTY-THREE

  Lying on the couch in his father’s office, Billy heard a car idle down the alley. He got up gripping the butcher knife he kept at hand and crept to the kitchen window. Someone moved through the backyard toward the stairs, stopped, crouched, peered around. Heels tattooed the stairs, then came a hesitant knock. When Billy opened the door, Mrs. English cried out in fright.

  She put a hand to her heaving chest, expelled a shuddering breath, and whispered, “Billy! You dear, brave boy. I’m so glad to see you. Are you all right?”

  “Sure, Mrs. English.” He stepped aside to let her in. “I’m fine.”

  In the small kitchenette, she pulled him into her arms and hugged him hard. “I’ve been so worried about you.”