Fighting in the Shade

by Sterling Watson

  Even though a caravan of buses and cars full of Spartan fans would cover a mile of the new interstate highway north of Oleander, the Spartan crowd would be vastly outnumbered by the screaming, chanting, booing, singing fans of bigger, older, and richer Orlando High. Orlando would dress out twice as many players as the Spartans, and their marching band would make Carr’s look like a string quartet. From tackle to tackle, Orlando outweighed the Spartans by two hundred pounds, and their line was not just big but quick. Their tall, fast quarterback threw bullet passes, but the bread and butter of their offense was a disciplined, punishing running game. They ran big fast backs, boys the size of the guards and tackles of other high school teams.

  The Oleander Grower had analyzed the teams and profiled the players. Billy’s skills and record on the field had been reduced to clichés, mostly pleasant. He was a workhorse of the offense, a selfless blocker, a receiver who made up for what he lacked in speed with fearlessness across the middle and a cunning determination when he ran with the ball. Ted Street was a steely-eyed field general with a shotgun arm, Tommy Bierstadt a shifty scatback with an uncanny instinct for the open field. Charlie Rentz was dubbed “Night Train,” for the way he crushed whatever crossed his path.

  One Orlando sportswriter compared the hometown eleven to Marciano, the great heavyweight noted for punishing his opponents so terribly with body blows that they dropped their hands. Then he went for the head. The Orlando quarterback would pass only after his fullback and tailback had made the Spartans fear the run.

  If Orlando had a weakness, it was their defensive secondary, so everyone knew the Spartans would throw. And if their defense could hold Orlando to three touchdowns, the smart money said Ted Street and Billy Dyer would score four times.

  The Orlando stadium was a vast ravine of light and sound. An ancient shrine to a team and its tradition. When the Spartan buses arrived, the voices of thousands called from beyond the massive stone walls like a warning from over the horizon, the rumble of an invading army, horse and foot, teeming and without mercy. It was bigger than anything the boys had ever seen. They reminded themselves of their preparations, their talent and courage, but still they hesitated, gathered in quiet groups before the gate that opened to the blazing field. Coach Prosser saw what was happening and jogged into the lead. “Come on, boys! Bow your necks! Spartans don’t walk in, they run!” And so the team rallied, cheered, and charged the gate.

  The teams warmed up on their sidelines and near their goal lines to the competing tunes of their bands. The occasional shout of encouragement floated from the nervous hum of the crowd, but few boys dared search the stands for faces they knew. Billy did calisthenics, ran pass routes breaking a good sweat, then stood at the sideline with Ted Street somberly catching and throwing the ball, practicing high-and-low, right-and-left catches, cradling the ball to his midsection and closing his eyes to picture the shock of collisions with boys bigger than any he had fought but Charlie Rentz. You helped me, Charlie. For all your small viciousness, your big ass made me ready. I hope.

  But he wasn’t sure. Something was different. It wasn’t just the size of all of this, the strangeness. It was Billy’s hands. They trembled, numb and wet, smearing the new pigskin he tossed to Street. Billy pulled a long breath and stole a glance at the Oleander stands. Moira Davison waved at him, her eyes avid with the spectacle. She sat with kids from Mrs. English’s group. And there was Mrs. English too. What point was she making by attending a football game? Billy imagined his father’s face in the crowd, and sorrow lanced his chest like a runner’s stitch. How it would have felt to see him there!

  At the Oleander bench, his teammates were gathering for the prayer and a last thrust of fists to the circle before the kickoff. Across the field, the Orlando players, a sea of orange jerseys, flowed to their bench. Their coaching staff of six waved impatient hands to muster them. Billy peered up at the night sky, at the dazzling lights that ringed this homicidal acre, then shook his head to rid his eyes of false stars. Coach Prosser said, “Billy, come over here.”

  Billy looked into Prosser’s face, but saw only stars. They faded from white to yellow in his retinas. He shook his head, tossed the ball to Ted Street, and jogged to Prosser.

  Prosser lay his heavy arm on Billy’s shoulder pads and walked him a few feet away from the nearest group of boys. They stood facing the field. In front of them, the officials gathered at the fifty-yard line for the coin toss, impatient for the team captains to report. The field judge looked at his watch, gawked a question at Prosser. The coach leaned his big ginger head to Billy. The aura of the man was huge. Billy had never been this close to him before. Never been embraced by him. The masculine cocktail of sweat and breath, the weight and power of the arm that held him.

  “Billy, you’re not with us tonight. I can see it. Play hard tonight, son. Give us everything you’ve got. Don’t save anything for later. You won’t be moving on, Billy.”

  Billy’s mind emptied. He shook the last electric stars from his eyes. He tried to look at Prosser’s face, but the man gripped him hard, thumped the side of his red head twice against Billy’s helmet. Billy said, “I’m not good enough for college?”

  Prosser whispered, “No, son, it’s not that. You play for money, and that’s all you’ll get. You’re not going on. Play hard, you hear?”

  Prosser shoved him away. Even as it happened, and he stumbled from the force of the coach’s huge hands, Billy knew it would look to the fans like a rough embrace, a man and boy’s dance of encouragement. He looked at Prosser’s big broad back, then down at his own hands. So be it. The shaking had stopped. They were solid now, and still.

  Orlando won the toss and powered to a quick score. It was a flawless drive, a series of short, crushing slants, sweeps, and dives, a brutal show of deft ball handling, fearless running, and disciplined blocking. After the extra point, when the Spartan defense came off the field, Billy saw the shocked eyes of people who had witnessed an accident. One or two limped. Charlie Rentz bled from a cut above his eye. A few muttered under their breath, “Christ!” and “What the fuck?”

  Before trotting onto the field for the kickoff, Billy went to Rentz. Rentz looked at him from avid, outraged eyes. “Holy shit,” he heaved, spraying blood onto Billy’s jersey. Then he smiled and shoved Billy toward the field. “Go get ’em, Billy. We need one bad.”

  The Spartans drove, stalled, and punted, and for another hour the teams churned the middle of field, thrusting, pounding, then sputtering before punting. At halftime the score was Orlando 7, Spartans 0.

  Most of the second half was the same, a brutal slugfest between forty-yard lines. But late in the fourth quarter, Orlando scored again on a five-yard sweep, and the Spartans followed quickly with two touchdowns of their own. The first was a thirty-yard run by Tommy Bierstadt, a miracle of feinting and cutting back that ended when Bierstadt lowered his helmet and speared the belly of a linebacker twice his size so hard that the boy buckled into the end zone. The second was the freak reward of a blocked punt.

  With the score tied 14–14, the Spartans kicked off and smothered two Orlando runs. On third and five, Charlie Rentz read a play-action pass and red-dogged, sacking the Orlando quarterback. When the Orlando punter shanked the ball out of bounds, the Spartans took possession at their own forty-yard line.

  All night with swing passes, short throws over the middle, and screens, Ted Street had done what he could to offset Orlando’s size. All night he had taken a brutal beating. As his blocking had inevitably broken down, his passes had emerged miraculously from clawing clusters of orange jerseys, spiraling out to Billy and the other receivers seconds before Street fell under the sickening smack of armor.

  With fifteen seconds on the clock, the Spartans had managed to feint and deceive their way to the Orlando twenty-yard line. After a vicious late hit, Street had to be hauled to his feet by Billy and Tommy Bierstadt. They shook him, called loudly into the confused holes of his eyes. Street shoved them away, drew a long, ragge
d breath, probed himself under the right arm where an orange helmet had speared his ribs, and said, “All right, we’re taking it in. Billy, it’s your number. If I get it there, will you bring it down?”

  Billy looked at his calm, dry hands. The hands of a working man. He had caught seven passes. He looked at Street, around at the exhausted, shocked faces of the circle, and smiled. “Yeah.” He looked at Tommy Bierstadt, then at the fullback, Carl Coker. “You guys keep them off Ted, okay?”

  The two backs nodded. Street broke the huddle.

  As he had so many times that year, Billy would sprint down the sideline, fake the down-and-out, then cut across the middle, into the zone of mayhem where three defensive backs might converge on him at once. All night he had worked the Orlando cornerback his own way. The boy was slower than most of his teammates, but big and tough, and he had cursed and clawed at Billy, contesting every one of Billy’s seven catches. Now, Billy looked across the line at a stranger. The cornerbacks had switched sides. Confident eyes stared at Billy from the hollows of an orange helmet.

  The ball smacked metallic into Ted Street’s hands, the lines collided like giant scaly monsters, and Billy sprinted. The new boy, faster, matched Billy stride for stride, worked to his outside, took away the fake. Billy leaned into him, into the danger of collision that would end the play in a chaos of tangled feet, then broke too early for the inside. It was all he could do. And what would Street do now? Billy threw up his right hand, hoping Street would see the signal, then swerved to his right, breaking the play, wrong-footing the confused defender, cutting for the corner of the end zone. Running with all he had, he stole a glance back at the scrimmage. Street was awash in a sea of orange. Tommy Bierstadt was already rising from his block, a downed Orlando lineman beside him. Bierstadt’s eyes searched downfield.

  Wildly Billy scanned the electric heavens for the spiraling pigskin. Saw nothing in the white glare. His belly filled with dread, but he could only keep running, hearing the cleats of a free safety slicing in behind him. He looked back again and saw salvation in Tommy Bierstadt’s eyes. Tommy was not looking where the play called for the ball to go, he was watching Billy Dyer. The ball was feet away when light glinted from its spinning brown back. Billy leapt, hands and arms a funnel, stretched to his longest span, felt the ball screw hard into his fingertips, felt it tip beyond his grasp, then topple back toward him as his body made the crest of its leap, felt the slam of a helmet into the back of his neck, drew the ball down the funnel of hands and arms to a safe place under his chin, pulled his feet together for his return to earth. With an orange man clawing at his back, Billy landed in a shambles of flying chalk, dewy grass, and glory, his shoelaces scraping the right angle at the back of the end zone. Coffin corner.

  Billy lay still in the mad bawling of thousands of tongues, a roar that shook the very earth beneath his head. He let go of the ball, no longer precious, only a thing now that he had caught it, shrugged the Orlando defender off his back, heard the boy’s curse, then raked mud and grass from the cage of his helmet, opening his eyes to the raving, stomping, gesturing world. Hats, confetti, shredded programs, and even coats and sweaters spiraled in the air. And now an army of red ran at Billy. His teammates reached him, their cleats ripping the grass. They tore him from the ground and threw him into the air, making him their prize, their banner, their offering to the god, Victory. They held him aloft in a throne of hands and ran with him toward their bench, a prisoner from the Valley of the Shadow of Defeat, rescued and borne back to the country of the Spartans.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  After the wild celebration on the field, then another in the parking lot with the jubilant army of Spartan fans, after the long ride back to Oleander in a line of rocking, honking cars and buses fueled not by gasoline but by bourbon and beer, Billy walked at midnight with his teammates into the locker room at Carr High School. Most of the fans had moved on to bed or all-night parties. Only a few followed the team bus to the school, cheering and calling good-night to the boys as they walked in their stinking, stiffening uniforms to the field house.

  In the locker room, the boys—bruised, bloodied, and happy—were strangely subdued. We cannot fathom it, Billy thought. We won and we are going on.

  Prosser and the other coaches were somber as they walked among the naked boys dispensing rare and precious compliments and slaps on the back. Billy accepted with grace his portion of praise. Prosser’s was formal, a handshake and a few words: “Good job, Billy. Great catch.” He said nothing about their talk before the game, and nothing in his eyes acknowledged it. He did not gather the boys for a final word. Billy supposed he was conserving his powers for the two-week practice period before the final game. The state championship.

  As his teammates drifted away, Billy went to Sim Sizemore’s locker, traced his fingers across the strip of white surgical tape that held the letters of Sim’s name, and prayed again to the hope that was God. Make him well.

  Walking to his car, he was happy to be alone with his memories of the night. It was the catch that mattered to him, the risk of breaking the play, the technical perfection of his leap and his gathering in, and the way his dragging shoelaces had made it legal. He knew it could have gone badly. No one would have blamed Ted Street for throwing the ball to the spot ordained by the play. No one would have blamed him for not seeing Billy raise his right hand. But Street had seen it.

  When they had jogged out of the stadium together to the waiting buses, Street’s gift to Billy was the best of the night. “I can’t believe you did that,” he’d muttered though his mangled mouth guard. “I just can’t believe it. If Prosser told us once not to do that, he told us a thousand times.”

  Billy waited.

  Street dodged into him, their shoulders colliding as they ran. “But you did it, man. You did it, and I fucking saw it. I saw it just in time.”

  And Billy thinking, This is it. Life. Mostly played to pattern, mostly rote, but sometimes a great notion. Then telling himself, Shut up, man. You were just lucky.

  Moira Davison’s white Savoy was parked in Billy’s driveway. He pulled the Ford to the curb, looked around at the dark houses slumped under thirsty trees along the oily street. His father’s car, dew heavy on its roof, was parked in front of Moira’s. He leaned into Moira’s window. “What are you doing up so late?”

  Her radio was softly playing the beautiful guitar of “Wild Weekend.” She grinned at him and held up a bottle of whiskey. Her smile was bent. “Night of the big game. S’like prom night.” She spoke slowly, her words thick. “Good girls get to stay out late, but they gotta behave. Mom thinks I’m spending the night at Derek’s house. Wanna drink, magic boy?”

  Billy reached in and took the bottle. “You do that? Spend the night at Derek’s house?” Derek was the thespian who wore long black scarves even in scorching weather. Derek’s hands fluttered above his shoulders when he talked. The label on the bottle said, Rye Whiskey. “Where’d you get this?”

  “From one of your grateful fans. Actually, some Rotarian fell asleep on the bus coming home, and I swiped it. Derek and me, we’re purely platonic. Now you, on the other hand. I’d give ole Plato the boot for you.”

  It was weird to be standing in his driveway after midnight, his battered body stiffening from the game, a bottle of whiskey in his hand. With a girl talking about Plato. Billy took a drink, felt the whiskey burn down his throat, liked it. “You call this behaving yourself? What if your mom calls Derek’s house?”

  Moira blinked innocently. “I don’t wanna behave. I wanna celebrate.”

  Billy took her hand, led her to the front door. She pulled away and walked back down the steps. She trailed her fingers through the dew on the hood of his father’s car, climbed the stairs again, and whispered, “He didn’t come to the game? Your dad?”

  Billy shook his head, drew a finger across his lips for silence, and opened the front door. Back in the driveway, he had considered sending Moira home, but he was too tired to sleep, his mind too
full of the wonderful, strange events of this night. Why not celebrate? His father was probably asleep, and if not, so what? Couldn’t Billy have a guest on the night of the big game?

  Inside the dark house, they stopped and Billy listened. Then he led Moira through the living room to the lanai and put his hands on her hips, gently pushing her down onto a moldy rattan sofa that faced the dark backyard. The air conditioner in the window of his father’s bedroom chugged and wheezed only a few feet away. It would cover what they said, but Billy put a finger to his lips again, leaning so she could see his face in the splinters of moonlight that fell through the branches of the dying grapefruit tree. He tip-toed to the kitchen for glasses.

  Moira poured whiskey into Billy’s glass and sat holding the bottle. Sitting next to her, Billy sipped and said, “I could get to like this stuff.” He remembered Prosser ordering him from the practice field. William, it has come to my attention that you have been observed drinking whiskey. The whole school board would drink with Billy Dyer tonight. Every fat, bald man jack of them. They’d roll drunk as lords on the courthouse steps with the boy who had caught that pass with three seconds on the clock. He raised his glass to Moira, who drank from the bottle, winking like a piano player in a cowboy cathouse.