Fighting in the Shade

by Sterling Watson

  He raised his head from the consideration of symbols and called out to the audience, “Judge Oliver T. Billingsly, are you here tonight?”

  Two men of the school board groaned so miserably that a hundred eyes shifted from the spectacle of Billy to the grief that was their eyes. In the front row at Billy’s feet, Cam Sizemore lowered his face into his hands.

  Billy repeated, “Is Judge Billingsly here? No? Well, he sure as hell is in this bag. My father was called,” Billy pointed his finger at Helene Dane, “in your newspaper, a bagman. And he was. He gave me money. Rainey’s money. He bribed. And this is his bag. And Judge Billingsly is in it, and so is…” Billy turned and pointed his finger at Blake Rainey. “So is Mr. Rainey there. He’s in this bag too.”

  Rainey rose, stumbled, came at Billy. “Give me that!”

  Billy tossed the bag from the stage to Herb Klein, and he liked how well Klein caught it, how he cradled it under his arm. The way Billy had once caught and cradled a football. Coffin corner.

  Rainey stopped, hopeless, lost, ten feet from Billy, his eyes full of nothing.

  Billy called out, “Tonight I’m the bagman!” He looked at Rainey, beyond him at the board, pointed his finger at them. “And you’re all in the bag.”

  Moira ran to the foot of the stage and threw herself into Mrs. English’s arms, pressing her lips to her teacher’s ear, whispering. Billy knew what she was saying.

  He slipped out of his father’s uniform and stood before the town a boy in his good school clothes. He held the uniform up for all to see, to show a last time the Flying Cross, then he let the blouse fall to the stage. “I’m not good enough to wear this,” he said, almost to himself. And then he whispered, “But I’m getting better.”

  FORTY-SIX

  Cam Sizemore could hear music in the background, a torch song of some kind. Non, je ne regrette rien. He tried to remember his college French. Something about love and regret. He pressed the phone to his ear, straining to pull Blake Rainey’s words out of the electrical storm in the wires. Wires that stretched, miraculously, 4,500 miles across an ocean. Blake Rainey said, “That fuck Klein still writing about us?”

  “Yes.” There was no reason to elaborate.

  The judge they had purchased had bought himself back, if not from disgrace and disbarment, perhaps from imprisonment, by admitting that he had been paid to condemn some land where a highway might be built in a manner more or less favorable to certain parties in Oleander, Florida. Blake Rainey was not exactly on the lam in Paris, and Cam Sizemore, at least for now, was not exactly the man left holding the bag. But the Jew at the newspaper was, like all of his kind, persistent, and the Florida Bureau of Law Enforcement was showing a keen interest in Cam’s connection to some dealings in land.

  He said to Blake Rainey, “Billingsly’s talking to the BLE.”

  “Good God,” Rainey sighed into the phone, his voice flattened, distorted by the weird, living force that fired words across an ocean. “We’ll have to deal with him, Cam.”

  It sounded to Cam Sizemore like a threat—not to the judge, but to Cam himself.

  The torch song crested in the background. The crowd applauded. Cam imagined a smoky Parisian basement, candles in wine bottles, men in berets with Galois dangling from pouty lips, the singer some painfully thin creature with needle tracks under the sleeves of a black jersey. But then he thought, no, Blake Rainey’s wife, the bovine and useful Janine, would never be seen in such a place. It wouldn’t be a basement, and most of the people would be Americans looking for the authentic Paris and finding only themselves.

  Sim would have gone to Paris, or to Athens or Berlin, would have traveled abroad, anyway. Gone somewhere to have what the Germans called a Wanderjahr. The year of wandering, doing what you liked, thinking long thoughts, sowing wild oats before you settled down to hard work, real life. Cam would have seen to it that his boy had that year, would have gladly paid for it. And it would have made the boy a better man in the long run. But now there was no boy, no Sim anymore, and there would be no long run, no man. Now there was only the daily grind of grief and self-defense, and living with a woman who cried for her lost son, and who sometimes looked at the boy’s father as though their loss were his fault.

  Cam Sizemore was tired. He had lost a son to the rash acts of a boy. His own acts, calculated and venal, had taken a boy’s father.

  Sim fought, and I must fight until we meet again on the other side.

  Cam had awoken the previous night from fitful sleep with Rainey’s words echoing in his head: Our Billy. He was always ours. What if it were true? Sitting on the edge of the bed, Caroline lost behind him in the only peace she could have now, the exhausted sleep of grief, Cam had tried the proposition in his mind. Wasn’t there some mystic law of compensation, some ancient tribal obligation? A thing you turned away from at the risk of your soul? You took a boy’s father. That boy took your son. That boy an outcast, an exile. You took that boy in. You became, by obligation, his father. Cam remembered with a terrible vividness holding Billy Dyer in his arms and stroking the soft back of the boy’s head. And thinking of Sim.

  Sitting on the bed holding his head in both hands while Caroline slept, Cam had whispered aloud into the darkness, “But I am in disgrace. And shame cannot be a father.”

  He took the phone away from his ear. It lay black and incomprehensible in his hand.

  “Cam? Cam, are you there?”

  He cradled the phone. His hands were wet. He did not remember touching his face or when he had started to cry.

  FORTY-SEVEN

  Billy feared dreams of his father. He tried not to have them, but the dreams came—of his father alive in a coffin, gaping his mouth to scream, raking with bleeding hands at the white silk so close to his face. When the dreams woke him, he sat shivering on the couch in his father’s office, smelling on its cushions his father’s aftershave, hair oil, and sweat. Sometimes he got up and went to the closet where he kept the box of ashes and held them in his hands until he was sure that his father had never been buried.

  Then one night in his sleep Billy walked from the shade of a dark forest harrowed by the calling of beasts into a green summer meadow. Someone waited for him by a fence at the far end of the field. Billy walked cautiously, then eagerly toward a meeting. His father turned to him just as Billy arrived, winded but happy, at the fence. His father smiled. He looked younger than Billy remembered. The marks of worrying the years were gone from his face. He bent and lifted the lowest strand of the fence and gestured for Billy to crawl under. Billy knelt and crawled, then held the wire and his father followed. When they stood together on the other side, his father flung an arm easily across Billy’s shoulder and said, “Now we go on, son,” and they started to walk.

  The phone woke Billy before the dream was finished. Its insistent, mechanical sawing pulled him angrily out of sleep. Reaching for it, he remembered stepping back, away from his father, refusing to go on as the sky darkened and a cold wind rose. The last of the dream was his father’s arm sliding from his neck. He could not recall what they said as they parted.

  Moira asked, “Can I come over? I need to talk to you.”

  Moira needed. Billy remembered her sobbing, whispering to Mrs. English at the foot of the stage while everything around her spun into the new alignment of Billy’s revelations. Only Billy and Mrs. English knew why she cried, what she whispered. Now she needed.

  “Can I come over, Billy?”

  “No. I’ll meet you at Turville’s. And bring money. I need to borrow some money. I’ll pay you back.”

  “Turville’s?” Moira sounded lost.

  “In housewares,” he said.

  When Billy walked into the housewares section of Turville’s Department Store, the Christmas decorations were up, and hidden speakers were playing “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” Moira was hefting copper-bottomed saucepans with a homemaking expression on her face. He stood watching her for a while, holding the box of his father’s ashes under his arm, im
agining Moira making a home. Maybe. Possibly. Everybody married somebody, mostly. She might have it in her. He walked over to her.

  She put down a pan and looked at the box he carried. “What’s that?”

  Billy held it out to her. She read the label: The Mortal Remains of Mr. David Dyer.

  “Holy shit!” Moira said.

  The woman behind the cash register looked at them sharply.

  Moira said, “What are we doing here?”

  “Buying urns.”

  “Urns?”

  Billy held up the box. “Two of them. For my father. I have to divide him into two parts. One for my mother, one for me.” The man who lived a divided life. Which urn will hold Melancholy?

  “Okay. I think I get it, but…”

  So Moira set herself to the task, and soon she found two pewter containers. “These are really meant for flour or rice or something, but the lids are snug and… don’t you think they look like urns?”

  Billy could only vaguely picture an urn. These seemed to be about the right size. He nodded and Moira took them to the cash register, opened her purse, and regarded the prim woman who had objected to her bad mouth.

  “I apologize for my language,” Moira said, “but something surprised me. I want to purchase these, please.”

  The rift was bridged. The woman smiled and complimented Moira’s taste.

  In the parking lot, Billy thanked her.

  Moira said, “You’re gonna divide you father now?”

  Billy said, “No, later.”

  Moira said, “Let’s do it now. At the lake.”

  Billy and Moira knelt on a blanket by the shore and carefully poured David Dyer into the two urns. When they were finished, Billy’s stomach was uneasy. He was glad to see the urns closed. Moira said, “What now? I mean, what will you do with your half?”

  “I don’t know. Keep it, I guess.” But Billy wasn’t easy about sleeping where the ashes slept.

  “Don’t people… scatter them, um, somewhere?”

  Billy thought about it, looked out at the lake, back at the woods.

  Moira said, “I mean, someplace meaningful to the person, like a place where he was happy or something.”

  Billy nodded, set the urn down an arm’s length from the blanket. A place where his father had been happy? That would be an investigation for another time.

  Moira stood and began to remove her clothes. “Only in Oleander,” she said, “can you swim at Christmastime.”

  Billy turned and turned slowly in the warm water, taking in the sky, a rare high blue without the stain of yellow haze and painted with streams of cirrus clouds. On the near shoreline, tall cypress trees leaned over the water, and from the surface of the lake reflected light pierced his eyes, penetrating to the last cave of his brain. He looked with a strange longing at the far-off hunting camp, recalling how fine it had been at first to be there with the team, eating, drinking, and talking of deeds and dreams in the afternoon sun. It had all been fine, and if it had stopped before the fire was lit and the mystery commenced, it would have been one of the happiest times of his life. He had gone to the camp a boy and left it a man, carrying a man’s wound and a man’s guilt. And he knew that the vengeful enmity of other men was a page of his life still unwritten.

  Those guys are gonna get you… after football’s over.

  The night of the school board meeting a man, a stranger, ordinary of face and form, had approached him as he climbed down from the stage, after he had said, softly, But I’m getting better. The man had smiled into Billy’s upturned face, leaned close to his ear, and whispered two words. “You’re dead.” And then he was gone into the crowd, evaporated like a ghost.

  Billy turned from the faraway light and shadow of the hunting camp. He would never look at it again. His dreaming eyes searched for Moira, and he wondered what was her dream of the moment. She floated in shallow water near the shore, her eyes closed to the sun, the soft planes of her pale face already darkening a little. Billy swam to her and reached out. She took his hand but kept her eyes closed, and he watched the parts of her touched by the sun and the parts submerged. She folded herself, swung her arms out wide, and floated into his arms. She rode her thighs across his, the black delta just out of reach, and lay her face across the muscle of his upper arm. Her soft lips moved against his skin.

  “I told her it was me.”

  Billy nodded.

  “She said she thought it might be me. That surprised me. I asked her why. What she said… I don’t think I understand it. She said, ‘You did it because you wanted to be me, and it was too much for you. You knew you couldn’t be me, so the next best thing was to… kill me.’ She said I’m better for it, though. I learned a lesson.”

  There was not a trace of the old irony in Moira’s voice, only wonder and confusion.

  “The last thing she said, was, ‘Don’t worry, you didn’t kill me. A Jew has more lives than a cat. You took one or two, but I’ve got plenty left.’”

  “Where’s she going?”

  “She didn’t say. Just… away from here.”

  Moira pressed her lips to his shoulder, then turned her head away. “Billy, I want to try. I want to try again with you. I want to be clean.”

  He touched the back of her neck, the wet black hair fragrant of water and light, and whispered, “We’re all right now. We’re not two bad things anymore.”

  Billy hoped.

  “Can we be together?” Her voice was small. Scared.

  We’ll always be together, one way or another. You’re my first of many things. I’ll think of you with my last breath.

  He whispered, “Yes. For a while. For a long time maybe.”

  We will leave here and walk into a fallen world, but not the world of Rainey’s law. A world of hope.

  On the blanket on the sandy shore, Billy lay with Moira’s head on his shoulder, and after she drifted into sleep, so did he.

  In his dream, Billy Dyer walked out of the forest shade into the summery field and saw the tall man again, waiting by the fence. A warm wind blew, and the yellow haze was gone, and the sky was a perfect blue. His father waited at the end of the meadow.