Outside in the parking lot, his mother handed him the box of ashes. Billy held it, waiting. She said, “I want you to keep half of him. I want you to buy two urns, tasteful silver ones, and divide him into two parts—keep one and give me the other.”
Billy blinked. He considered the idea insane, but he would do it for her. He would have to. In a quiet voice, he said, “Okay, Mom, I will.”
He expected her to ask him again to come and live with her. He had steeled himself for that, had practiced the words he would say. Lies about football and schoolwork. The truth was Karl. Billy could not sleep where Karl had slept. But she didn’t ask. She dug in her purse and handed him an envelope, then stood on her toes and kissed him lightly on the cheek. She brushed his cheek with a fingertip where she had left a trace of lipstick and whispered, “You’re such a big boy now. I have to reach up to kiss you.”
Billy took the ashes to his car. When he turned, his mother was sitting behind the wheel of the Dodge. He removed the envelope of money from his pocket and passed it to her through the window. Then he could not help himself. He looked around to see if anyone was watching them. Nothing moved within the reach of his eye. He wanted to ask her if this meant the end of Karl, but it was not the place, the time. He wondered who or what would take Karl’s place. She was beautiful now, but still unfinished.
Instead he said, “Goodbye, Mom.”
She turned and her eyes were suddenly wide and bright above her gaunt cheeks.
“Bye, Billy.”
He watched her drive away, her elbows high like a jockey’s, hands gripping the steering wheel.
I shouldn’t have done it, he thought. I should have mailed the money to her. Today she wanted to give, not take.
At home, Billy placed the box that held his father’s ashes on the kitchen table and took the envelope into his hands. It was thick with mysteries. He tried to remember his mother’s eyes as she had given it to him. Had they held any urgency, any special message to go with what the envelope contained? Billy tore it open and two keys fell into his hands.
Dear Billy,
Enclosed you will find the obituary I wrote for your father and the title to his car. The police have the car and will give it to you per my instructions. I want you to sell it and keep the money. I took the liberty of putting your father’s signature on the title. No one needs to know your father didn’t sign. A wife gets good at these things after a while, most do anyway. The other key is to your father’s office. I want you to go there and get his things. Give his clothes to the Salvation Army (keep what you want), and take away any papers you find, especially any insurance policies, his birth certificate, Air Force discharge, etc. I will tell you what to do with them. Take the obituary to the Grower. Please do these things for me.
Your father was always melancholy, Billy, especially after the war. You and I can only guess at what war does to people. Your father would never tell me. If he had, maybe I could have helped him more than I did. I want you to know that I tried to help him, especially at first, though later it became hard for me to do anything. And I want you to know that you were always so special to him. He always tried to be big in your eyes and never to hurt you, except in the ways that all fathers hurt their sons. I want you always to try to do what we did in the chapel today. Send your father the best good that is in you. Wherever he is, he will know. I believe he will know. If we do that, especially if you do it, he will send back his own best good, and you will always know that he loved you and that he would have stayed with you if there was any way.
Love,
Mom
Billy returned to football and played with a cold fury. His blocking was so vicious that boys conserving their bodies for the final game whispered to him through lips that seethed with pain, “Take it easy, man. You trying to kill somebody?” Never were Billy’s hands more sure in snagging Ted Street’s spiraling shots. Never had he run faster. It seemed to him that he had finally reached in speed that place where only Sim Sizemore had run. After Billy met Charlie Rentz helmet to helmet in a demolishing collision that left Rentz for the first time in anyone’s memory dazed and unable to rise, Prosser pulled Billy aside and said into the cage of his helmet, into his crazed eyes, whistling breath, and ringing ears, “Save it, son. Save it. Don’t use it up now. We’ll need every bit of it and more. Do you understand me?”
Billy nodded, “Yes, sir,” but he didn’t understand. He knew only the avidity, the fury of contact, the reason he was here, had always been here.
“It’s just as well,” Blake Rainey said. “It sounds harsh, but it’s the truth.”
Rainey dropped the newspaper onto the grass between the two white lawn chairs. Children shouted from a diving float two houses down the lakeshore, then a dog barked high and sharp. Mrs. Stringfellow’s Chihuahua, a pissant breed. Rainey liked his dogs big, and capable of biting if the need arose. A half mile out on Lake Georgia, a ski boat plowed a white wake under a high blue sky, the throaty burr of its engine pleasant at this distance. Rainey turned his glass of whiskey in its cold puddle on the arm of his chair.
Cam Sizemore lifted the Oleander Grower from the grass between their chairs and glanced again at the article about David Dyer. Local Attorney Apparent Suicide in Carver Heights. He thought maybe Rainey was right, that David Dyer, his old law school classmate, had come to the end of his tether more or less at the right time, but he didn’t like to hear Rainey say it. No one, not even Rainey, as practical a man as Cam Sizemore had ever known, should call death a convenience. Just as well? If there were Fates to insult, Rainey had thrown the gauntlet. Cam Sizemore said, “I don’t think he would have hurt us. It’s a sad thing. A waste.”
Rainey took a crudely audible drink of whiskey. “Christ, Cam, of course he would have hurt us. The question is, did you know he was that… unstable? Did you know it before we used him?” Another loud swallow, then the ice shaken in the glass like dice at a gaming table. “A waste of what?”
Cam Sizemore remembered a shred of poetry from college days. He had majored in English before going on to law school and had liked it better than he cared to admit. He had thought about teaching English for a while, before his better judgment had settled the matter. Most lawyers majored in history and most lawyers he knew thought poets squatted to pee. But he said it anyway: “Any man’s death diminishes me. Don’t you know that, Blake? No man is an island, entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”
Rainey picked up the bourbon bottle from the grass beside the newspaper and poured himself another portion. “Cam?” He offered the bottle.
“No. I’m fine, thanks.”
Rainey sipped this time, and his voice was peaceful when he said, “Well, the main thing is that he did for us what we needed done. What you and I sure didn’t want to do, and now there’s no one to talk about it.” Rainey drank and rattled the ice again. “Unless you, or one of the others, gets loquacious.”
Cam Sizemore considered explaining to Blake Rainey what he had said about the death of David Dyer. The scrap of poetry. That it was a sentiment, universal, nothing to do with business. Instead he said, “David got us some attention we don’t need. I’ve wondered if there was, maybe, a little bit of intention in that.”
“Don’t get psychological on me, Cam. Poetry’s bad enough on a sunny day.”
A girl child in a white bathing suit leapt from the diving float, describing a sweet, pure arc of tanned limb and white cloth against the green of cypress trees at the far end of the lake, then cut the brown water like an otter. She surfaced, screeching with joy. Rainey saluted that joy with his glass, then turned to Cam Sizemore. “You think something percolated up out of the muck and mire of our tortured friend’s… what, soul, id? I don’t. I think he was a drunk, and it was an impulse. I’ll grant you this: Our David wasn’t here for a long visit. His kind come and go quickly. Sic semper… potor. Always thus with the drunkard. It’s just the way things are.”
Cam Sizemore looked at
Rainey, considered opening a discussion with him, a discussion of the way things were.
Rainey drank again. “I sent our friend to search David’s office. He didn’t find what he should have found.”
“Maybe David got rid of everything before he—”
“Or hid it. That would be like him.”
Cam shook his head, the motion a little weary. “What’s going to happen now… to Billy Dyer?”
“He’s gonna be sad for a bit, our Billy, and then get over it. He’s gonna play a great game, one more game, and then his season will be over.”
Rainey tilted his head back and squinted up at the brilliant blue, heard the little dog bark and waves drumming the bow of the ski boat on the far side of the lake. The sky opened all around him: everything was blue and fiery sun. As long as his eyes aimed upward, straight into that blue, all of this—children, dogs, boats, and men, even dead men—all of it was illusion. He felt for a moment that he could rise up into that blue, keep on rising into the infinite spaces until looking back, if he chose to look, he would see nothing but the indeterminacy of matter. He laughed quietly, closed his eyes, and the sun was a dark blot, fading on the backs of his eyelids. Just the whiskey, he thought. Just the whiskey talking. “Our Billy’s gonna do what we all do, Cam. Play out his season, hang up his helmet, and get on with his life. As much of it as is left to him. Let’s hope he lasts longer than his father did. Rainey lifted his whiskey, examined it, put it carefully back down again on the arm of his chair, cleared his throat. “How’s your boy doing?”
It was a long time before Cam Sizemore could answer.
He didn’t say the word. Sim.
He told Rainey they were using a new doctor. He didn’t say she was the last resort, but Rainey knew. Cam Sizemore said, “A lady doctor, not that I like it. Or her. An internist, Dr. Davison. They say she’s the best… for this kind of thing.”
“Good,” said Rainey quietly. “Good.”
“Yes, it is good. We’re doing all we can, and we’ll see what happens. We’ll see.”
Rainey poured the ice from his glass into the grass. “Well…” He pushed himself up.
“Our Billy,” Cam Sizemore said. “You called him our Billy. Is he ours now, Blake?”
“He was always ours.”
THIRTY-THREE
Moira Davison called Billy’s house. “How are you? It’s been a while.”
“I’m all right.”
Her voice changed when she said, “There’s something I want to do for you.”
He waited. “Do for me… ?”
“Come to my house. Please, Billy.”
Following Moira’s instructions, Billy drove east out of Oleander through a pine forest. He turned down a long private drive and stopped by a house like something from a science-fiction movie. It was made of redwood and bare concrete, a composition of circles and rectangles on a sandy bluff overlooking a lake.
The lake swung away right and left, bounded by forested hills that sloped to coves of water lilies and cattails. A pair of ospreys rode the blue air above the brown water, their wings never beating. Billy got out of the Fairlane and watched shadows move on a downstairs window, heard television gunshots and thundering hooves. From a balcony on the second floor, Moira leaned out and put a silent finger across her lips. A minute later, she stood in front of him in jeans and a white T-shirt, her feet glowing in white socks and sneakers. Billy liked this Moira, clean and athletic. He had only seen her in the black outfits of school and Mrs. English’s nights.
He said, “You don’t see a lot of places like this around here.”
“It’s my mom’s dream house.”
“Well, I’m impressed.”
Moira shrugged. “The basement leaks. We moved here from Connecticut after my father died. When they told my mom you don’t do basements in Florida, she took it as a challenge.” She kicked the sand at her feet. “Dig six inches and you hit water.”
He examined her pale, oval face. There was something new in her brown eyes this afternoon. Something that said, Take care.
“Let’s go for a walk.” She started off toward the woods along the lakeshore.
“Sure. Walk where?”
She paused. “I’ve got something to show you.”
Moira stopped in a stand of cypress trees on a carpet of russet needles in a brilliant shaft of sunlight and waited for Billy to catch up. They had walked for almost twenty minutes, following paths dug by the hooves of cattle, then covered by leaf and needle fall from the tall pines and oaks that loomed overhead. He asked where they were going, and Moira smiled, put a hand on his chest, and shoved playfully. “Can’t you keep up? I’m just a girl.”
She took off again through the forest in a steady stride that Billy admired, and he could do nothing but follow. They walked for another ten minutes, finally breaking through a thick copse of pine saplings at the shore of a vast lake. Breathing hard, Moira stood half hidden in pine boughs and pointed. “Look.”
Across the lake Billy could just make out the rooftop of the pavilion where he had eaten delicious boiled shrimp dipped in spicy red sauce and drunk his first whiskey, and where, after nightfall, a fire had been lit and a mystery had commenced. He looked at Moira who pointed at the hunting camp as though aiming a gun.
“I was there that night,” she whispered. “I saw what you did.”
Billy’s vision lurched, replacing the lake and the faraway pavilion with a dizzy tilted vista of blue sky. He turned, got her face into focus, and waited, his stomach churning. She lowered her hand and peered at him. “I heard about Mystery Night.” To the question in his eyes, she waved an impatient hand. “You guys think it’s a big secret, but people talk. Even the guys who don’t make the team know what goes on. I came out here that night and hid and watched. I saw what they did to you. You were the only one who… resisted. I saw you punch that fat-ass Rolt in the mouth. I was twenty yards away. One of your buddies almost puked on me where I was hiding after he stuck his nose up some other football star’s ass.”
“Jesus Christ,” was all Billy could manage.
“Yeah,” Moira said, “him, too.” She reached down, picked up a piece of driftwood, and threw it violently into the lake. Billy remembered the night in Mrs. English’s backyard. What’d all you tough guys do out there in the deep, dark woods? Then Moira giving him a medical description of what he had done to Sim Sizemore. He looked out across the lake, slitting his eyes so that the rooftop of the pavilion was only a russet blur. She had watched them. Seen them all naked, crawling. The elephant walk.
Moira whispered, “But you took care of Sim Sizemore, didn’t you? You had the satisfaction of doing that.”
Billy’s vision tilted again, and his stomach lurched. She was only guessing. She could not have followed the herd of bloody-minded boys on the long run that ended with Billy and Sim alone on a game trail in the thickest forest. Billy struggled to make his voice firm, natural. “I didn’t do anything to Sim. All I did was run.”
“Yeah, right. That’s why you ran from Mrs. English’s party the night Sim collapsed on the field. And cried in my arms after the Orlando game. Shit. You hurt him so you could take his place on the team.”
Billy stared at her. White-hot anger burnt his limbs. He thought of leaving her here, where no one would find her. Where the buzzards that soared overhead for a few days on the steaming air would mean only that a sick steer had wandered too far from a pasture or a dead gator had washed ashore. He considered the problems this would solve and those it would create. The anger flickered out, leaving him limp and tired.
He turned and moved into the forest, and after a while she was beside him, touching his shoulder. “Wait. I said I could do something for you, remember?”
Billy stopped walking, sighing up at the blue sky through a gap in the branches. Moira gave his shoulder a gentle tug and turned back toward the lake. Billy followed.
At the edge of the water on a narrow patch of sand strewn with driftwood, she stood w
ith her back to him and took off her T-shirt, wiggled out of her jeans, kicked off her shoes, leaned down in white bra and panties, and pulled off her socks. She tucked her socks into her shoes and turned, looking at him. “I’ve always wanted to do this. You know, the Adam and Eve thing?” She waited, her eyes appealing, the hard light burning the soft curves of her white body.
Billy took a step toward her. Was this the thing she could do for him? Give him this for what had been taken away? He stripped to his underpants.
Her cheeks coloring, Moira said, “Might as well go all the way,” and shed the last white cloth. Doing it, she was graceful, but Billy had noticed how her voice guttered in the back of her throat when she said way. She stepped backward into the warm shallow water. “You coming, Adam?”
Billy had never seen a girl naked. He liked what he saw now, and when he removed his own last tatter of civilization he was a little swollen. They stood staring at each other, both blushing, and Billy felt good with the sun on his secret flesh, glimpsing the amber buds of her nipples and the black delta between her legs. And Moira looked at him with steady speculation.
Maybe it was the beginning of a new world. The only possible world. For Adam and Eve, the past was a ruined garden. Billy remembered tossing a football with his father in a sunny backyard. Gone. Someone else’s garden now. She took his hand and led him toward deeper water.
Fighting in the Shade Page 20
