Call Me by My Name

by John Ed Bradley

  “It looks like he’s stomping roaches,” I said to her instead. “Stomping and missing. God, he’s almost as bad as me.”

  She’d only started to reply when a figure broke from the dance floor and went straight at Tater, knocking him to the ground and upsetting the lamp, which thrust that part of the room in darkness. The music stopped. Cries rang out. I saw a table with food tip over. Then Tater appeared again—or rather a shadow of Tater—and he was pummeling the guy who’d attacked him. He had the upper hand now. The guy curled up with his arms covering his head, and Tater kept striking him, driving punches wherever he could fit them. I felt the old impulse to help him out, but it was obvious he didn’t need me. He might’ve been a boxer hitting a speed bag, his fists moved so fast. Then several figures converged on Tater and pulled him away, and my brain processed the hulking silhouettes and gave me names—Randall Wallace and Stanley Redd, football teammates. A moment later Tater came crashing through the center’s doors with Randall and Stanley attending to him. Patrice appeared next, and finally a crowd of excited kids tumbled out.

  Angie pushed her door open, but I reached over and grabbed the handle and pulled it closed again.

  “It’s not our place,” I said.

  “What does that mean, Rodney?”

  “You’re not going out there.”

  “Who would do that to him? Who would just run up and knock him to the ground like that? Did you see? He wasn’t doing anything.”

  “Give me the key, Angie.”

  She was still watching the building as she held it out to me. I started the engine and shifted to first.

  “Who does it, Rodney? Why?”

  In the building now the overhead lights came on, even as the music started playing and dancers returned to the floor. I could see a couple of people I recognized from school helping up the person who’d struck Tater.

  His hair was teased out to a size twice as large as everybody else’s, and he wore chains around his neck. The family resemblance was uncanny.

  “It’s always something,” Pops said the next day at the kitchen table.

  He’d heard about the fight, and now he was weighing in.

  “If it’s not this,” he said, “then it’s that. Why does so much happen to that boy? He shows up and there’s automatically a score to settle.”

  That seemed to do it for Angie. She got up and left.

  Mama had cooked a pot roast and mashed potatoes, and we’d returned from mass only an hour before. I’d hoped for a quiet meal without the subject of race dominating yet another conservation. Still, I couldn’t help but consider Pops’s words, especially since he kept repeating them in an effort to bait me: “Always something, huh, Rodney? Is it in them? I wish somebody would tell me.”

  I considered the litany of things Tater had been through since we’d known him. And I understood what Pops was getting at, even though I would’ve put it differently. Tater’s guilt or innocence didn’t matter; they weren’t even the issue. What mattered in most instances was his skin color. And what mattered every other time had even less to do with who he was.

  “Angie, come back to this table right now, young lady,” Pops called out.

  Her response was no response. We could hear it from the kitchen.

  Tater called later that afternoon as Angie and I were doing homework. Not wishing to rile Pops any more, Mama came to my room and whispered that it was for me. I went to the kitchen phone.

  “I saw this truck last night heading south with two white people in it,” Tater said. “The driver looked like Bigfoot. He also looked like he was in a hurry. I’m sorry if the passenger saw what I think she saw.”

  “Why’d he do it?” I asked.

  “You’d have to ask him, Rodney. And while you’re at it, find out why he busted your leg open that day with his car door. The dude’s crazy.”

  “I know he’s crazy, Tater. But what is it between the two of you? What happened that he’s still coming after you?”

  “Nothing happened,” he said, “except that my mother took his father away from his mom and him, and then disappeared for good once he shot her and turned the gun on himself. Robert blames me. He’s always blamed me.”

  “But you were a baby.”

  “That’s right, I was.”

  “And in his mind you were the cause of it?”

  “Yeah. Me. Tater Henry. I did it.”

  Perhaps because we’d been to church that morning, I tried to remember the story in the Bible about brothers who compete for their father’s love. I hadn’t been much of a catechism student, and now I couldn’t remember if it was Cain and Abel or the prodigal son. In any case, it was the one where only confusion and heartache came to the good son in the end.

  Angie appeared in the kitchen and held her hand out for the receiver. I gave it to her.

  “You need dance lessons,” she said.

  I heard laughter and a muffled reply.

  Then she said, “Of course I will. But I think Patrice might object. Clear it with her first, will you? I don’t want her to come after me the way your brother did last night.”

  Another inaudible answer.

  “Okay, half brother. I stand corrected.”

  It was hours later, long after I’d gone to bed, when she came into my room and stood next to me in the dark. I’d been sleeping off the chaos of the night before, and it took a while for me to understand that I wasn’t alone. She must’ve just had a bath and washed and blow-dried her hair. She was combing it out, giving it the required strokes.

  “Rodney,” she said, “I want you to know that I’ve had it with your contradictions. You have to do better.”

  “My who?” I said into my pillow.

  “Your contradictions. How do you live with them, Rodney? How do you live with yourself for that matter?”

  “I just do, Angie. Will you let me sleep now?”

  It wasn’t the answer she wanted. “You can love him, but I can’t? You can want to protect him, but I can’t get close? Why is that? We’re twins.”

  “Yes, but I’m the boy twin. And you’re the girl twin.”

  “You’re the boy twin? You’re also the worst kind of hypocrite. I would also say you’re something else, but I’m not here to call you names.”

  She had me now. I sat up and turned on the lamp. “I wish you’d stop thinking about only yourself, Angie. Think about Mama and Pops for a minute. They have to live in this town. Pops could have problems at the plant. Mama could lose work. People will shun them. And what about me? I won’t be able to walk the halls at school without people saying things. And you know what things. It’s not cool, Angie. Do you know one white person at school—no, make that in town, the whole, entire town . . . Do you know one white person who’s with a black?”

  “Yes.”

  “And who is that?”

  “Jules Taylor Rich,” she said, naming a local attorney.

  “Yeah, but Jules Taylor Rich had to go all the way to Wisconsin to find her. That’s where they met—in Madison, Wisconsin, at the college there. Ask Mama if you don’t believe me. That woman doesn’t have a friend in town, Angie. The blacks have nothing to do with her and the whites don’t either. And people look at their children . . . well, like they’re Martians.” I was awake now. I was good and awake. “You’ve taken it far enough.”

  “But I’ve taken it nowhere.”

  “In this case nowhere is farther along than you need to be. Aren’t there any other boys for you to fall in love with? What about Donnie?”

  “Why Donnie? Because he’s white?”

  “Yes, because he’s white.”

  She started combing her hair again. I could hear numbers as she ticked them off under her breath: “Fifty-three . . . fifty-four . . . fifty-five . . . fifty-six . . .”

  She counted all the way to a hundred before
letting herself out of the room, but I couldn’t get back to sleep. I lay awake thinking about what a hypocrite I was. She’d said I was something else, too, without naming it, and I knew what it was and knew she was right.

  I was a racist.

  Yeah. That was the word.

  I needed a summer job, so Pops helped me get a part-time gig at the plant, loading tractor-trailer rigs. After a week the manager asked me if I knew any other high school boys looking for work, and I recruited Tater.

  It was weird how I felt about him. One moment I burned with resentment for the troubles he’d brought to my life, and the next he was the guy I liked hanging around with better than anybody else.

  We usually started the day at around 5:30 a.m. to avoid the heat. Pops was still on the job when we punched in, which meant that for the first few weeks, with the Cameo tied up, Tater and I had to get to work on bikes. I rode mine, and he rode Angie’s. She’d let him borrow it until we could figure out a solution to our transportation problem.

  It was Pops who came to the rescue. One day, when he should’ve been sleeping, he hopped a ride with a neighbor to a used-car dealership out on the Ville Platte Road and returned home with a four-door Mercury Comet. It had a hundred and sixty thousand miles on the odometer, but the engine had been rebuilt, and the body and tires were good. And it was the family car we’d needed for years. Pops wanted to help me out, but he was also tired of Mama’s complaints about the four of us having to go to church crammed on a bench seat made for three.

  “I’m not giving her to you,” he said of the Cameo, “but she’s yours to use for now. Share her with your sister, and take your mother wherever she needs to go. You’ll have to pay for gas and help with the insurance.”

  So Tater returned the bike to Angie, and I picked him up each morning and drove him to the job. We rarely worked past 10:00 a.m., then we had doughnuts and chocolate milk at a bakery in town, and reported to the weight room at school. Done with lifting by noon, I dropped him off at home and returned to Helen Street for lunch and a two-hour nap. Then I went back to his house at around three o’clock and retrieved him a second time, now for baseball practice.

  We’d graduated from the Babe Ruth League to American Legion, which meant we were playing teams from other towns. Pops let me drive the Cameo to away games, and I loaded two teammates in the cab and fit more in back, along with the team’s equipment. There usually were three or four cars in our away-game caravans, each of them packed with teenage boys in pinstriped baseball uniforms, but one time I was the only player who could get a vehicle and I had to drive the entire team, fourteen guys total. We had five up front and the rest in back. Good thing the game was just twenty minutes down the road in Rayne. Avoiding the interstate, where I was sure a state trooper would pull us over, I drove the truck down less-traveled roads to Shuteston and Church Point, then shot southward through rice fields until we arrived at the ballpark.

  We were the Warriors, and our coach, Danny Arnaud, told me I was the largest player in team history, which dated back nearly forty years. Coach Arnaud took more pride in this than I did. The local paper ran a story about how he had to special-order my uniform (XXXL), spikes (size 18), and batting helmet (8 ½). They were so expensive that most of the money I made at the plant that summer went to paying for them. As I read the story, I kept seeing a made-up picture of Regina Perrault shaking her head in disgust as she sat with the paper and calculated my measurements. If she was reading right (now I was imagining her thoughts), my head was almost as big around as her waist. Like a fairy in a children’s book, she could take a bubble bath in my shoe.

  Time in tractor-trailer rigs and the weight room had reduced my bulk and made me leaner and more muscular, but I was still a behemoth and, to some, a freak. During batting practice before games, I put on shows, hitting balls over the fences and deep into the cane and bean fields where the parks had been carved. Most of the balls were lost until harvest time, when the combines came through and kicked them up. Even players for the other teams paused to watch me take batting practice. I led the Warriors that summer with twenty-nine home runs, a fairly sizable number if you considered we played a thirty-five-game schedule. As the season went on, fan attendance grew to where it was standing room only. They came and stood along the fence and took pictures with their pocket cameras, the flashes going off when I came up to bat.

  While many, I’m sure, came to see “the Boog Powell of Cajun Country,” as one newspaper columnist called me, even more came to see Tater, who the same columnist had labeled “the Roberto Clemente of Acadiana.” Tater’s batting average was .547, the best in our region, and he was so adept at stealing bases that most catchers let him advance without bothering to challenge him.

  Deep into the season I noticed that it wasn’t only regular folks who were coming to see us play. College recruiters also started turning out, the identity of the schools they represented stitched in bold lettering over the pockets of their polo shirts and on the crowns of their caps. They wanted us for baseball, but then a football coach, LSU’s Beauregard Jeune, attended one of our home games.

  Coach Jeune paid at the gate. Then he walked through a mob of fans and took a seat at the top of the bleachers. People kept approaching him for autographs, and the game announcer welcomed him in the voice that he usually reserved for home runs. Some of the locals started chanting, “El Less Hugh . . . El Less Hugh . . . El Less Hugh . . .” And Coach Jeune stood and waved to them like a politician on the stump.

  The NCAA had a rule prohibiting football coaches from speaking to high school talent in the summer, but Coach Jeune didn’t need to visit with Tater and me. That he showed up told us all we needed to know.

  My mother’s parents had a small cattle ranch outside of town on the Sunset Road, and every Saturday that summer, Tater and I camped in an old army tent under the pecan trees that stood along a bayou at the back of the property. We made sure to pack well for these adventures and brought along a Coleman lantern, a gas cookstove, and an ice chest filled with boudin, frozen fish, and candy bars. The heavy canvas tent trapped suffocating levels of heat and moisture, and some nights never did cool down below eighty degrees, but we managed the conditions without any difficulty because we’d become inured to it after our mornings at the plant and afternoons playing ball in the sun.

  My grandparents’ house stood at the front of the ranch, and you reached the bayou on a rutted dirt lane that ran a mile back between a wire fence and the grassy fields where the cows grazed. We lay on quilts under the stars and listened to Zydeco and Cajun music on Miss Nettie’s transistor radio, and a few nights after it got dark we had visits from Angie and Mama, who arrived in the Comet, trailing clouds of dust. The car’s headlights grew larger and brighter the closer they got. A cottonmouth infestation made the bayou too dangerous to swim, and I knew that the real reason they came out was to allay any fears that wild animals had made a meal of us in the night. They brought leftovers from supper and an occasional dessert, such as fudge bars, melting in a minnow bucket filled with ice.

  “What are y’all doing?” Angie asked this one night when she stepped from the car.

  “We’re camping,” I said. “What does it look like?”

  “But what are you doing?”

  Only now did I understand that she’d intended the question for Tater.

  “Camping,” he said. “Doing what you do when you camp.”

  She wouldn’t stop. “Such as what?” He started to answer, but she cut him off. “Where do you use the bathroom, for instance?”

  “Wherever they like,” Mama answered. “Let’s move on, baby.”

  But Angie was still waiting for Tater’s reply.

  “Behind trees,” he said at last. He looked off at an old oak thirty yards away. A roll of toilet paper sat on the tree’s roots.

  “We usually designate one for that purpose,” I explained.

  “Can yo
u imagine what life must be like for your bathroom tree?” she said. “You’re standing along the bayou, minding your own business and making the world a pretty place and processing loads of carbon dioxide and putting oxygen in the air, when all of a sudden you two show up. It must be traumatizing.”

  I supposed she was hoping for laughs. She got none.

  “Where’s Pops?” I asked.

  Neither of them answered, which told me he’d decided to stay home. It was his way of protesting, I knew. He didn’t want his daughter involved with Tater, and he wasn’t happy about his son’s involvement with him either. “Why can’t you go camping with T-Boy or one of those?” he’d asked me, producing the same silence that lately I answered most of his questions with.

  Angie hopped to her feet and brushed off the seat of her pants. “I’m ready when you are,” she said to Mama. Then she ran ahead to the Comet.

  “I’m so sorry,” Mama said to Tater.

  It was hard to tell whether she meant for just now or for other things. Tater put his arm around her shoulders and led her to the car. “Don’t worry about it, Mrs. Boulet,” he said. “I sure don’t worry about it.”

  I didn’t know what to make of Angie. She might’ve been a cheerleader at school, but she usually was a modest, private, serious-minded girl, and the type who made every effort to distract attention from the fact that she even used the bathroom. When we shopped with Mama at the A&P, Angie hid the toilet paper under other items in the buggy. The bathroom at home was always spick-and-span because she kept it that way, and I never once heard her pass gas let alone belch.

  I wondered if she was trying to be one of the guys, talking the way she thought we did when members of polite society weren’t around. It didn’t register that she might’ve been calculating whether she would be comfortable on a campout until the next Saturday when she showed up at our campsite alone. She arrived in the Comet, and rather than leftover supper and frozen dairy bars, she brought two six packs of beer. The cans were warm, and I figured she’d raided the stash Pops kept stored in the shed. By now Tater and I had already drunk the pint of tequila that Tater had pilfered from Miss Nettie, so the beer was much appreciated. Angie made room for the cans in the ice chest, then she removed a grocery bag from the car, holding a change of clothes, toiletries, and a family-size bottle of mosquito repellant.