Fighting in the Shade

by Sterling Watson

  She said, “That was some game. You were great, you know that? I don’t think you know how good you are.”

  You don’t know how bad I am.

  Billy said, “Yeah, it was a great game. Nobody thought we could win. Not even Prosser. Hey, what’s up with Mrs. English? How come she showed up? She told us… what was it? Football is a mindless rite of the boobwahzee.”

  “She likes you. Maybe you don’t know that, either.” Moira took a thoughtful swallow and stared at the bottle. “How come your dad wasn’t there?”

  Billy leaned away from the shaft of light where their faces knew each other. In the darkness he thought about it. Because he pays me to play. There was nothing he could tell her. From the darkness, he whispered, trying to make it light, “He doesn’t approve of me playing. That day I got hurt back in summer practice, he asked me to quit.” He leaned back into the light.

  Moira drank and winced as she swallowed. She looked at him with the somber, comical eyes of an apprentice drunk. “So, you caught the pass that won the big game. You’re the biggest hero the Spartans ever had.”

  Billy examined her eyes for irony. Didn’t see any. She loved what he had done. He took a long, hot drink of the rye and wished that they could talk. Really talk. That he could tell her what Prosser had said. Ask her what it meant. Ask her if there was any way out of this thing he had bought for himself. By selling himself. But he didn’t trust her, was not sure why. Maybe it was the expression on her face when she had told him about sneaking into her mother’s office and reading Sim’s medical file. There was cruelty in her and cunning. Maybe all girls had it who weren’t exactly pretty. Maybe all people had it who were shoved to the edges of life by the pretty, and the smart, and the rich who strolled down the middle.

  Moira said, “You’ll be the king of the school next year. Gonna win another state championship?”

  “Whoa, we haven’t won this one yet.”

  “One more game. You’ll win it. I feel it, right here.” She thumped her ample chest with a drunken fist. “The whole town’ll go crazy.”

  “Maybe.” Billy was thinking about what would happen, had to happen, next year. Summer practice would bring fresh talent to the team. Prosser would rid himself of dangerous Billy Dyer. One way or another. “I might not play next year,” he said. “This year might be all she wrote.”

  Moira did an inebriated double take. “Man! You’re shitting me!”

  The whiskey pooled in Billy’s belly, exaggerating his hunger for what was not here. Someone to talk to, someone who would not publish what he said. He looked at the half-empty glass in his hand, set it on the floor. He wanted to be alone. He looked at Moira. You are alone, Billy Dyer, he thought, and maybe not suddenly. Maybe you have always been alone and just didn’t know it. He got up, stretched, and faked a yawn. “I gotta get some sleep now. Thanks for the drink. And… for coming by an’ all.”

  Moira set the bottle on the floor, got up unsteadily, and came to him. She lifted her face up to his, but she had done that before. For effect. When she kissed him, the surprise of her doing it was larger than the surprise that he liked it. It was his first kiss, and he thought how strange this was. The two of them in this seedy house drinking stolen whiskey, Moira half aware of herself and about to do things she would regret. She pressed her breasts against Billy’s sore chest. His battered body liked hers.

  “No,” he said.

  “Yes,” she whispered, “to the victor go the spoils.”

  Gently, he moved her away. “No, really, I… You’re not spoiled.”

  “Yes. Really. I am. Completely.”

  She buried her face in his neck. He wound his hand into her black hair, pulled her head back, kissed her so that he could say he had kissed, not just been kissed, and said, “It’s late. You gotta get home or your mom will have the cops searching for you.” With the second kiss, he knew twice as much. Now he knew everything.

  “I’m at Derek’s.”

  He had forgotten the Derek ruse. He moved her to the front door, an awkward dance, opened it.

  She put both fists to his chest and shoved him away. “All right! I can take a hint.” She looked at him for a long time. “Okay!” she shouted, anger burning in her big, dark eyes. “See you around the campus. As they say.”

  She stumbled backward onto the porch, caught herself, raised a hand to her mouth, and squinted around the midnight neighborhood. “That was too loud, wasn’t it?” she whispered, crossing her lips with a finger. “Shhhhhh!”

  Billy winced, stepped into the night in front of her, searched around. Dew dripped and fog rolled, but no one stirred. Down the street a dog reeled off three desultory barks.

  She leaned toward him, braced both hands on his shoulders. Quietly, she said, “Why can’t you have fun? Let yourself enjoy what you did tonight? Enjoy me? Wouldn’t it be good to have me? It’s Sim, isn’t it? I know that’s what it is.”

  Billy felt water come to his eyes. And with tears a great exhaustion. He had pushed it away as often and as far as he could, but always it came back. It came late at night before he fell exhausted into sleep, and it walked in monstrous shapes into his dreams. He had hurt someone. You killed me. Not someone. Sim. He had not intended to, or had he? Hadn’t it been an impulse, ungovernable? Had he resented Sim’s unreasoned hatred for him and then released his own? How he wished he had not thrown that punch.

  Moira lifted her hands from his shoulders to his face. Her drunken thumbs moved across his cheeks raking hot tears.

  “Yeah,” he muttered. “Yeah, you’re right. I don’t enjoy things much sometimes.”

  “You feel bad,” she whispered. “You’re tired, and you feel bad. Magic boy.”

  “Yeah,” he whispered back. “Tired and bad.”

  “It’s Sim?” Her thumbs moved beneath his eyes. “Tell me.”

  Billy couldn’t say it. He shook his head. Watched her cunning eyes, wishing again that he could talk to someone.

  After Moira’s Savoy rolled away into the foggy night, Billy sat thinking in the dark on the lanai. About what had not been accidental. Moira surprising him that August day after the scrimmage, knowing his name. Why hadn’t he seen it then? She had found him that hot afternoon. She had wanted him. For something. He had been a poor boy on a bad road, then a mystery boy banished from the team, and then the magic boy who won games. He wondered if what she wanted had changed as he had changed. Tonight she wanted a kiss and a confession. Would have given one for the other.

  It was almost light when Billy fell asleep, the aches and joys of the day settled into his bones, his last thoughts of Moira’s kiss. And of Sim Sizemore waiting in a dream.

  TWENTY-NINE

  It was always the same when Billy took money from his father’s hand under the table in the Cool Room—a rough thrust, a fumbling grab, as though his father sought to teach Billy a lesson he just could not learn. After their exchanges, his father looked at him with sad love and mild suspicion. He seemed to regard Billy now as an accomplice. His face was gray. Food spotted his ties. His suits that had smelled pleasantly of tobacco and dry cleaning now reeked of anxious sweat.

  He lifted the first scotch of the day, peered at Billy through its amber lens, sipped, and set the glass down. “I was with Cameron Sizemore today, performing my duties. He told me something you might want to know. Poor Cam, he cried when he told me. They don’t expect his boy to make it. A wasting disease of some kind. An infection. And he said, Tell Billy we’re all proud of the football he’s playing. And tell him Sim is glad the team is doing so well, though he misses football very much. Very much, and then he cried. I felt sorry for him. As sorry as a man can feel for the man who owns him.”

  “So do I,” said Billy. Meaning it. “So do I. For both of them.”

  With a shaking hand, his father removed the envelope from his breast pocket and held it under the table. The envelope, with David Dyer, Attorney at Law printed on it, was creased and soiled.

  Billy pushed back from the
table. “I don’t want it. I’ve had enough.”

  His father reached down with the money, shook it angrily as though baiting some creature that crouched between them. “What do you mean, sir? That you have been paid enough? You no longer need the money? Your mother no longer needs it for this… project you won’t explain to me? You’ve had enough because some appetite is sated?”

  Bent Ellen looked over from the bar. Billy shook his head. “No. I mean I don’t want it.” In fact, Billy had heard from his mother that Karl was leaving soon. For New York City. To train in a gym. To become what he was, a man whose meaning was his fists. “I want you to tell them I won’t take any more. I’m through with it. I’m going back to—”

  “Ah, but Billy, didn’t I tell you? You can’t go back. You can’t go back to what you used to be. And whatever it is you used the money for, whatever you bought, whatever you own… that doesn’t matter. The money owns you now, Billy. The money and the men who pay it, they own you, and they will for the rest of your life.” His father smiled, and in the smile Billy saw their sad love and then his father’s love of the world, so vast, so full of mystery, so little understood, a world infinite enough to include this conversation and the memory of a father and son tossing a football in a sunny summer yard.

  Billy got up and backed away.

  His father’s hand stayed under the table. He stared into the smoky air above the bar for a long time, then tossed the money at Billy’s feet. “Take it. I can’t give it back to them on your instructions. If you want to give it back, you’ll have to do it yourself. My advice was worthless when I told you not to get involved in this. Maybe it’s worth something now when I say you’ve made a bargain and you’d better keep it. Those men don’t take kindly to changes of plan.”

  Billy bent and picked up the envelope, more to get the filthy thing out of public view than anything else. He put it in his pocket. Only one more time. And my mother needs it. This envelope is a bad thing in my father’s hands, and in mine, but in her hands it’s a good thing. Passing it to her is clean.

  Billy was halfway to the door when his father called to him: “Come back, sir. There’s one more thing. Cam Sizemore. When he talks to me about Sim, he… looks at me. He looks at me, Billy. I don’t know another way to say it. You told me you never did anything to hurt Sim. You told me that, Billy, remember?”

  Standing in a drift of gray smoke midway between his father and the bar, Billy thought, I should tell him what happened. Now I should tell him everything.

  He said, “I remember. I said I didn’t hurt him.”

  It was the day they had lain on the bed together, and his father had talked about the Norden bombsight. About believing in his own death. And Billy had said, No, Dad. Just football. It’s a hard game.

  His father smiled and lifted his glass in a shaky salute. “Yes, that’s what you told me. All right, then. You go along now, son. I’ll just sit here and finish the last one.” He did not watch Billy leave.

  Billy drove to a motel parking lot across the street and sat in his car watching the Cool Room. He would have to wait. He knew his father’s habits, at least those associated with scotch.

  Twenty minutes later, his father walked out of the bar, leaning as though a strong wind blew against his chest. At the door of his car, he had trouble with his keys. His head rocked back, he implored the sky for help, then stared with deep concentration into his hands. He punched a key into the door. When he pulled out of the Cool Room parking lot, Billy followed.

  Billy had been to the heart of Carver Heights only a few times. He remembered wandering here once when his mother had taken a wrong turn, remembered how frightened she had seemed as the streets narrowed, potholes thumped under her tires, and black faces watched them from the porches of sagging houses. They passed a group of young black men dressed in wine purple and canary yellow. The men pointed at them and laughed, and Billy sat tall and still beside his mother, letting her know he would protect her. His mother accelerated, but Billy turned to look back. The men had seemed in their liquid colors like one creature in violent musical motion rather than four men.

  Billy shadowed his father’s car into what some people called Shinetown, not because shine was what they called Negroes, but because long ago moonshine had been made here. Black men in ragged suits walked the streets with Bibles in their hands. Girls jumped rope in a vacant lot. Gaunt dogs roamed. The sky, still hot in November, hovered low and yellow. Billy’s father stopped at a narrow, clapboard house with the usual littered yard and listing front porch. Little more than a shack, it was one in a long block of similar and similarly sad houses. Billy hunched down in the car seat and watched his father get out, steady himself, and fumble in his pockets. He produced a notebook, flipped through its pages, then touched his coat above the heart.

  His father walked, rather grandly in his whiskey, a thin smirk on his face, to the front door and knocked. A black woman answered, a green scarf tied around her head. She leaned out, seemed to know Attorney David Dyer, spoke a few resigned words, then ducked back into the house. Billy’s father leaned heavily on the doorframe and waited. The woman returned with an envelope and Attorney Dyer took it from her, then handed her a piece of paper. She read it, and its gravity made her sag like the houses on this street, like Billy’s father’s shoulders. They exchanged a few more words, and the woman shut the door in Billy’s father’s face. She shut the door without heat, but firmly, and Billy’s father seemed surprised. He stood for a while after the woman was gone, leaning against the frame. Finally, he shoved off and walked, feet flinging outward, duck style, to his car.

  He made three more stops, all the same. Each time he got out of the car, he consulted the notebook and touched his coat pocket carefully at the heart, then he plunged toward a porch or stoop. What changed from house to house was not the way the black faces looked back at Billy’s father after reading the paper he handed them, but Attorney Dyer’s response. His father grew cold and diffident in the faces of these people and their surprise. Men and women, old and young, opened their doors to him, knew him, seemed resigned to him as they might be to any natural trouble, but also seemed surprised by the piece of paper he gave them. Surprised the way a cart horse might be when suddenly, at the end of a long day on the familiar round, a steep hill looms ahead.

  Billy’s curiosity itched like the sandspur punctures of last summer’s practice field. What work was this his father did for Cam Sizemore? Work that the loss of his testicles required him to do? And why did his father always touch his heart before approaching these houses? At the next stop, Billy pulled dangerously close, straining to see.

  Notebook in hand, his father knocked. A young woman stepped out on the porch and stood facing Attorney Dyer, hands on hips, head bobbing chickenlike as she talked. She was not taking this as the others had. Billy saw the blast of her vitriol hit his father’s face. Then a man pushed past her and shoved her back toward the door. He stood in front of the woman, his jaws working out angry words. Billy’s father stepped back and his right hand went to the left side of his coat. Billy shoved out of the Ford and ran.

  The man, not much older than Billy, raised a hand to Billy’s father’s chest, scraping hard where his father’s hand groped, forcing him to the edge of the porch where his heels slipped, and he rocked backward. When his father’s hand came out of the pocket holding a blue snub-nosed pistol, a shred of torn coat hanging from its barrel, Billy ran as hard as he could into a storm of cursing. The man and woman were a drum and shriek of words that Billy had never heard so loud in the afternoon. “Eviction!” “White motherfucker!”

  The man seized his father’s wrist before the gun could level at his belly. They grappled. Billy ran, his vision bobbing with his rising knees as it did on the football field, his breath a ragged rasping. He arrived as the woman raked her fingernails down his father’s cheek, then furiously kicked his shins with bare feet. Billy added his body to the three that struggled, wrapping his hands around the two that hel
d the gun, trying to keep its lethal end away from their flesh. He glimpsed his father’s ashen face, close enough to kiss. The black man, eyes crazed, rasped, “My house? You take my house?”

  Billy felt the wrap of hands weaken, heard a sigh, then a moan. His father sank to his knees on the rotting porch. Billy struggled alone with the black man for the gun. He whispered, “Stop, please stop,” into the cauldron of wild eyes and heaving breath.

  “Fuck you!” the man grunted, his hands working, a finger worming into the trigger guard.

  Billy shoved his face close. “Look. Look at me. I didn’t do anything to you.”

  The woman crossed his vision. She was only a girl. She pushed her small weight at them and whispered, “He right, Jimmy. You stop now. You don’t want kill nobody.”

  Her voice was a drug that took its time. The man fought on, exhausting Billy, their two bodies dancing, grunting, lunging, stomping, but finally the drug seeped in, awakening peace. Muscled chest heaving, thick arms trembling, the black man let go and stepped back. Billy threw the gun into the yard. His father went to retrieve it, and Billy had to stop the man from going after him. He shot both hands into the man’s heaving chest, the way he might free himself from a check blocking cornerback. “Please. Look at your wife.”

  “Fuck you, white boy. Talk about my wife. And fuck that white man. He your daddy, ain’t he? Look like you.”

  But he backed off into the arms of the girl, who hugged his back and stared cold menace over his shoulder. From behind him, Billy heard, “Come on, son. Let’s go.”