Out in the warm brown water of the lake, they swam shyly around each other in circles that grew ever tighter until they joined hands. Billy pulled Moira to him, and it seemed inevitable that she should say, “Go ahead,” and that he should move into her and keep moving, her thighs in his hands under the water, their lips together in a rocking, breaking kiss, his feet dancing on the sandy bottom until she met his eyes with anger and yearning and pushed him away hard just as he shot skeins of white into the water between them.
In the soft, sad warmth of afterward she lay her head on his shoulder and her lips moved against his skin. “Billy, I’m the rat. I told on Mrs. English.”
Separate of his will, Billy’s flesh recoiled, but Moira held him tight, pressed not her lips but her teeth into the muscle of his arm.
“Why?” he whispered. They’re after Mrs. English. Because of us.
She bit his arm. “Do you know why you hurt Sim?”
“He was trying to kill me. They all were.” But he heard his voice falter. The tremor of the lie. Maybe it was true. Maybe somewhere deep in him was buried that want: to take Sim’s place the easy, dirty way.
“But you hurt him… that way. You didn’t have to do that to save yourself.”
Billy was cold, though the water was warm and Moira’s body in his arms was human warmth itself. Her sweet breath rose to his nostrils mixed with the smell of his own skin. This could have been perfect.
She said, “Maybe we did those things for the same reason. I’ve thought a lot about it. Mrs. English said she was doing good, doing it for us, what she imagined us to be, the future of the world or something. But I knew she did it for herself, not us. And it made me angry. So I told on her.”
Billy held Moira hard now.
“It was her satisfaction,” Moira whispered, “her perfection I hated, I wanted to ruin. Her thinking she could make a perfect world in a crappy house in a filled-in swamp ten miles from a horrible orange juice factory, just by playing the right music and saying smart and sophisticated things. It was all a load of crap. She only made us more unhappy. Different from everybody else. She should have told us to go to the football games and scream our heads off for you crazy mean assholes running up and down and crashing into each other.”
Billy bared his teeth and pressed them to Moira’s soft white neck. She believed Sim was the perfection he’d had to ruin, the same way Sim and Rolt had ruined the perfect comradeship of the team. “How do you feel about what you did?” he asked softly
“Rotten. How do you feel?”
“The same.” And Mrs. English doesn’t know whose teeth are at her neck.
Moira pushed away from him, did not look back when she waded to the strip of white sand where her clothes lay piled atop her tennis shoes. Watching her rise shocking white out of the dark water, the slick curves of her hips and thighs in sad glorious motion away from him, he thought, She’s leaving me.
Dressed, they sat on a bed of brown needles in the shade of a tall cypress. Moira hugged her knees to her chest, and Billy drew circles in the sand with a twig. Moira’s voice was flat. “What are we gonna do now?”
Billy was about to say, I don’t know, but bad things happened when he didn’t know. He wanted knowledge.
It had been five months since summer practice, those long, burning days of August when the only knowledge that mattered was the way of violent collision. Since then, he had said too many times, I don’t know. He had told himself he didn’t know why he had punched Coach Rolt. Why he had hurt Sim Sizemore. Why he had taken the money. Why he had followed his father to Carver Heights.
What are we gonna do now?
Billy drew an X through the circle he had made and stood up. “Maybe we can get clean.”
Moira’s sad eyes said she didn’t think so. “Don’t tell, Billy. Don’t tell anyone I’m the rat.”
THIRTY-FOUR
On Monday morning, when Billy parked in the Carr High lot, there was something wrong. A group of students stood by the crescent drive in front of the school watching three football players, Tommy Bierstadt, Ted Street, and Gary Bland, all in red varsity jerseys, approach the flagpole. Tommy Bierstadt untied the cord that moved the big American flag up and down the pole. Silently, somberly, flanked by Street and Bland, he reeled the flag halfway down the pole and secured it again. The stars and stripes hung at half mast in the still air, and a boy in the group near Billy whispered, “I thought we only did that for presidents and generals and stuff.”
A girl wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “It’s our flag. We can do anything we want.”
The boy opened his mouth to argue, but, seeing the girl’s stricken face, closed it.
Billy touched her shoulder. She turned, her eyes swollen and red. He said, “What… ?”
“Oh, Billy!”
She plunged into his arms, and her wet face burnt his chest through the cloth of his shirt. They all knew him, a football star. This embrace was a sad thrill for a girl whose name Billy didn’t know. She sobbed into his chest. “Sim. Sim died last night.”
At lunchtime, Billy slipped away from the mourning campus, found the address in a phone booth, and drove to the Sizemore house in Monmouth Park. It was the biggest on its street, on the widest lot, at the end of a cul-de-sac on a little rise above Lake Georgia. Like most of its neighbors, it was white with green shutters and tall columns, reposing gracefully amidst beds of azaleas under high, elderly oaks. At the curb, Billy parked behind a new Cadillac and a Buick Roadmaster. He examined the house. The only sign of grief was a wreath of black ribbon on the front door. Billy drew a deep breath, held it, sighed it out. What are you doing here? This is wrong. Leave them alone.
The front door opened and a Negro maid let two women out. In almost identical black dresses, the women came down the redbrick walk toward Billy, their heads together, whispering. One carried a wicker basket, the other had a blue tea towel draped over her arm. They brought food, Billy thought, and what have I brought?
The women saw him, offered sad smiles, got into the Roadmaster, and purred away under the shady trees.
The maid answered Billy’s knock, her face composed. Billy said, “I need to see Mr. Sizemore. It’s important.”
“Well, all right then. Come in.”
Billy stood in a foyer as large as his living room, facing white plaster walls, a high, vaulted ceiling, a polished oak floor, and gold-framed engravings of steam locomotives. From somewhere in the house came the murmur of talk, the faint scraping of china and cutlery, the smell of coffee. The maid returned with a woman Billy took to be Sim’s mother. There was little likeness of face or body—she was short and thick—but something in her eyes was Sim. Something casually certain, not exactly haughty, but certain all the same. The thing Billy had seen in those blue eyes by firelight when Sim had called out, Billy Dyer, step forward, young man.
She wore a black dress and a strand of black pearls, and she had been crying. Her eyes and cheeks were puffy, and she had applied heavy makeup to mask the effects of sorrow. She looked at Billy and smiled thinly, moving past the maid who stepped back and was discreetly gone. Sim’s mother held out her hand to him. “Do I know you, young man?”
Billy took her hand, held it, and had no idea what to say. Did she know him? They had not met formally, but she might have heard of him. Might even have heard his name trumpeted from loudspeakers high in the cool night above the hysterical noise of football games. Had his name been darkly discussed at the dinner table or in the bedroom after her son had taken sick and left this house where wealth could not protect him? Or had she been completely protected, as Billy imagined were the wives of men like Cam Sizemore, from all knowledge of boys like Billy Dyer and the things they did with boys like her son?
All Billy could manage was, “I played football with Sim.”
The woman let go of his hand. Her back stiffened, and her eyes cooled. Football. If it was not Billy Dyer himself she knew, then it was football, and football, she knew, had hurt her
son.
Billy heard footsteps in the hallway behind them, and Cam Sizemore appeared, followed by the maid. He wore a black suit, a white shirt, and a black tie. His body moved as though he carried crushing weight, and the look on his face was weary inquisition. When he saw Billy, the phases of reaction passed through his eyes like the flickering images of a silent movie. Surprise, hurt, embarrassment, anger, struggle, cold civility. “Billy, what brings you here?”
“Mr. Sizemore, I…” Billy looked at Sim’s mother who looked at him and then at her husband with all of grief’s questions in her eyes.
Cam Sizemore put his hand gently on his wife’s shoulder. “Caroline, let me take care of this. I’ll just be a minute.”
“But Cam, what is it? What is it you will take care of? What does this boy—?”
“Caroline.” A note of firmness. “Go on back to our guests. I’ll be with you all in a few minutes.”
Mrs. Sizemore stared at her husband for as long as it took Billy to close his eyes and listen to his pounding heart, then she lifted her chin an inch, narrowed her eyes at Cam Sizemore in a way that only he could recognize. She turned to Billy. “It was good to meet… one of Sim’s friends. He had so many. So many nice boys. Please come see us again, Billy.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Sizemore.”
When she was out of earshot, and they heard her soft sad voice mingle with the others and with the sound of cups settling gently into saucers, Cam Sizemore said shortly, “Come with me.”
Walking behind tall, elegant Cam Sizemore, Billy saw again how his body resembled Sim’s and thought, Would Sim have aged this way? They followed a hallway to a staircase and climbed to a closed door. When Cam Sizemore opened it, stepped inside, and waited for Billy to enter, Billy hesitated because the room was a scene from a movie. It was a captain’s cabin on a clipper ship. Billy gazed at the rough-sawn mahogany floor, the golden oak walls, and a windowful of blown glass panes, rounded like the stern of a ship. There was a globe in a cherry stand, a telescope on a tripod, and a big brass binnacle bolted to the floor. Inside it, a lighted compass quivered with the motion of the earth. A study, Billy thought. A gentleman’s study. Cam Sizemore walked to the window and glanced out at glittering Lake Georgia, then turned to Billy with a puzzled expression. “What, Billy? What, and why today of all days? What could you possibly want that brings you here today?”
“To apologize.”
Cam Sizemore walked quickly to the door, opened it to the barely audible murmur of mourning humanity. “All right. You’ve done it. Now I have to—”
“It was me. I hurt Sim. On Mystery Night. I didn’t mean to do it, to hurt him that way, that bad. We were fighting… after I ran away from the… ceremony, and he and Charlie Rentz chased me and things just got out of hand.”
Watching Cam Sizemore’s tired, eternally burdened eyes, Billy tried hard to say it right, hoped to say it in a way that would lessen his own burden and also increase it. The increase would be his debt to this man whose boy he had hurt. You killed me. The decrease would be his duplicity.
Slowly, Cam Sizemore shook his head. “I know, Billy. I’ve known all along that something happened between you and Sim. He would never tell me exactly what. I know why he wouldn’t tell, and so do you.” Billy Dyer and Cam Sizemore, initiates of Mystery Night. “He gave his word. I don’t know if it’s right or wrong, but here it’s the way we live.” He turned away to the window again.
And die, Billy thought.
Cam turned back. “Do you think I want to stand here and listen to you divide the responsibility between yourself and my son. Some for you and some for him. Something happened. And Sim is dead. And now you’re here to do what? Make yourself feel better? Make me feel better? You can’t do that, Billy.”
“I’m trying to do the right thing.”
“For you or for me?” Cam Sizemore pointed at the door. “For that woman down there who doesn’t know what happened, has no idea what went on in the woods, who is right now wondering, even as she tries to keep a teacup balanced on her knee, what in God’s name we are talking about up here? And do you think I relish the idea of going downstairs and telling her? If you do, you’re an even bigger fool than I thought you were. What I’ll do, Billy, what I’ll have to do for the sake of simple mercy, is make something up. Perhaps you can help me do that. What shall we say we were talking about up here? Work? Will you work for me now, Billy, like your father did?”
When Billy began to cry, Cam Sizemore turned away to the window, stood facing the glittering blue lake for a space, then turned back and took the boy in his arms.
Sim had died hard.
Cam Sizemore had seen death only twice. The gentle slipping away of his grandmother in a bed in the family home in Tallahassee after a stroke had taken her consciousness and apparently her pain. Before that on a country road, when Cam was a young man, a gas line welder had stepped between two trucks at the wrong time. As a small crowd of travelers and road workers had gathered, the welder, pinned between a winch and a trailer hitch, had asked for a cigarette, and, smoking it hungrily, looked down at the place where his rib cage was crushed so badly that bones punctured his faded blue shirt. Then he had drawn a final breath of smoke, expelled it with a sigh, and closed his eyes. Cam and the others who had stopped perhaps to help had watched the cigarette fall from the man’s fingers.
Holding his father’s hand, Sim had fought for every breath.
Cam had heard stories of the peace that came to some at the end. Some claimed it came to everyone. Claimed that in the final moments every man saw through the mist and storm of agony and loss, past the suddenly useless things of this world, and glimpsed a light, an eternal burning, whose enormity and finality brought calm to the most troubled mind, the most blemished soul. Not Sim. The boy fought to the last breath. The last faint glimmer in Sim’s eyes was an angry wanting light, a fading signal to an unfinished world. Do not follow me.
At the very last, as Cam held his son’s hand, tears streaming down his cheeks, poor, shattered Caroline out in the hallway in the arms of her Episcopal priest, father and son alone together in that last privacy, Sim had let go his father’s hand. And Cam, thinking this accidental, had tried to renew their grip, so as not to let the boy drift away, to hold him in this world where he so badly wanted to stay. But Sim let go again. Using strength he could not spare, he expelled his father’s hand from his own. And, understanding, finally, Cam did not resist. He goes alone. He goes there alone. To that last light. He does not reject me. He does not not want me. He wants his own last, lonely assertion of will in this world. He wants to stay. He fights to stay. But if he has to go—so young, so unfinished, so full of what he might have done—if he has to go, he goes alone.
We all go alone.
Cam Sizemore held Billy Dyer until the boy stopped crying. A man and boy alone together, where no one else could see or judge. This day would be their secret.
At the end of it, Cam stroked the back of Billy’s head, touched the boy’s soft young skin until for a dizzying instant it was as though he held his own son, and then he said softly into the boy’s ear, “Go ahead and cry. It’s what you need to do.” What we all need to do. What I did when Sim let go my hand. What I have not been able to do since that moment.
Later. “Sit down, Billy.”
They sat on the leather sofa under a tall shelf of calf-bound books in Cam’s fanciful captain’s cabin, the study where he did the legal work that bored him stiff and imagined himself reading Joseph Conrad or Melville and thinking long thoughts about days and nights at sea. Or better, imagined himself teaching young people about the literature of such things.
Cam Sizemore said, “I’m sorry too, Billy.” And before Billy looked up from his own young meditations, before the boy could ask a question, take them further into the uncharted waters of sorrow, Cam said, “For your father. For my part in what happened to him. Please accept my apology. And now I have to get back to my guests.”
Billy drove to
an auto-salvage yard on South Citrus and offered the key and title to his father’s car. He explained carefully the condition of the automobile, said he wasn’t asking for much. A short fat man in greasy coveralls with Melvin stitched above his heart was willing to give Billy five hundred dollars for the car sight unseen. Half of the book value. He said he was taking a risk but thought he could clean it up and sell it for a small profit. Billy saw in Melvin’s eyes, What a fool! He took the money, glad he would never see the car again.
He drove to Jimmy Clokes’s house, walked past the eviction notice from the City of Oleander nailed to the front porch railing, and knocked. Clokes’s wife opened the door, rubbing tired eyes and holding the baby on her hip.
Billy said, “Is Jimmy here?” Annie. Her name is Annie.
“He at work.” She gave the baby a soft bump with her hip and stared suspicion at Billy.
“I want you to give this to him when he gets home. Please tell him it’s what I owe… for the house.” Billy looked beyond her into the gloom of the small living room. “He’ll understand.”
She looked down at the envelope in Billy’s hands. “This legal? Jimmy ain’t in no trouble?” The baby boy blinked at Billy, reached out, and touched his mother’s throat.
Billy smiled at her ancient doubt. “It’s all on the up and up. No trouble.”
The woman took the envelope, backed into the gloom, shut the door.
THIRTY-FIVE
Billy delivered his father’s obituary to the Oleander Grower. A brisk gulf wind had blown away the yellow haze and given the town a rare blue sky. Sunlight struck the surfaces of things with a chiming clarity. On the sidewalks, people looked at their city and at one another, bathed in light, as though they were the gifts of a benevolent providence.
Fighting in the Shade Page 21
