Billy took the envelope.
“Open it. Read it. Hit’s all legal. You got two weeks to get out. Cain’t no minor chile live alone in no house owned by me. When you was playin’ ball, I could overlook it, but now you nothin’ but a yellow dog, and I’m doin’ ever thang in my power to get you out of my house… Well, what’s a matter, boy?”
The man spoke so fast, shoving his sweating red face at Billy, mopping his jaws and neck with the red bandanna, that Billy could hardly take in what he was saying. “Evicted?” Billy muttered.
“At’s right. All legal. You read it. Ask me, you orter be out of here today, but the law done gone soft on deadbeats and turned against the landlord.” The short, red-faced man took a step back, shoved his hands into his hammy hips, and looked out at the neighborhood. “Hail, I owned this cheer land when it was an orange grove. I worked her when she was a grove, then sold her for houses and bought a few for myself… What, boy? You look surprised. You think your daddy owned this house? Your sorry-ass daddy tell you he owned the place?”
Billy stepped out onto the porch and shoved the man hard, watching him wave his arms like a pigmy high-wire artist in a strong wind, then fall backward, fear replacing ownership in his eyes. He landed hard on his fat ass. Billy threw the white envelope at the man’s heaving chest, watched until he got up and limped in a circle testing his limbs.
The man bawled to the whole street: “I’ll have the po-lice on you, boy. Amo go get ’em right now!”
Mrs. Kudloe called from her doorstep, “What’s going on over there?”
“Ain’t nuthin for you to stick your possum face into!” the fat man yelled back at her.
Billy went back inside, closed the door, and locked it. After a while, he heard the man’s car squeal out of the driveway.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Billy waited for Mrs. English in a booth by a back window in a diner on Highway 41. She walked in, shook rain from her black hair, waved to him, and dug a pack of Winstons from her purse. She lit up, took a deep drag, and stood taking the place in—the red vinyl upholstery, the wilting pies in a revolving glass case, the exhausted juice workers hunched over burgers, the fat counterman in a hairnet, and two elderly waitresses whispering over coffee at the counter. She smiled grimly, walked to Billy, and said, “What a grease pit! How’d you find this place?”
“I used to stop in here after my shift at Honey Bear. The food’s bad, but it’s open all night.”
“Right out of Kerouac. Life imitates beatniks.” She sat across from him and peered out the window at the rain, tapping her Zippo on the Formica tabletop. “Herb Klein’s been on the phone to Tallahassee. The word is they’re split. Some say you’re lying. You’ve got some grudge against the school, the team, the coaches, Blake Rainey. Something you’re not talking about. Yet.”
Billy started to make a weary protest, but Mrs. English raised her hand.
“The rest of them can’t imagine a boy with your talent doing this unless something really did happen.”
They never heard about Mystery Night.
It had been raining since sunset, a steady soaking drizzle that washed the yellow haze from the sky into the gutters of Oleander. Mrs. English examined the backs of her hands, dug at a cuticle with a bitten fingernail. “It’s your word against five prominent men. The state won’t keep Carr out of the championship without corroboration. Evidence of the money.”
Would it bother her, Billy wondered, if the state decided she had hitched her career to a falling star? A lying malcontent who had stained the honor of better boys. Maybe her parties and the unauthorized books had already ruined her career, and she had pushed on with Billy because she had nothing to lose.
She reached out and put her hand on his cheek like she had done once in her cookie-warm kitchen. Her hand was cold. “I’m sorry, Billy. Herb says he has to write it as it is. The story will be in tomorrow’s Grower.”
At midnight, Billy drove to his father’s office. He had visited his father here only once and had been surprised by the shabby austerity of the old loft above a barbershop in a failing neighborhood that bordered Carver Heights. Cars blotched with rust or dead with flattened tires lined the curbs. Grass and weeds grew tall, and dogs and children roamed, both a little wild. His father had rented the place furnished, accepting the odds and ends that equipped the kitchenette, sitting room, and office like a man only stopping for the night.
Billy parked in front of the building, raising the growling outrage of a mutt from a porch across the street. He stood by his car waiting to see if any lights came on. Why did he feel like a thief? Didn’t he have a perfect right to enter his own father’s office? The dog grumbled and settled down. Its owners slept on. Dew drops pattered from trees, and the heavy air smelt as always of oranges.
Billy unlocked the door and stood on the threshold, staring into the dark, smelling the damp and mold. He closed and locked the door behind him.
The day of his only visit, he remembered thinking that, after the divorce, his father had chosen a divided world. In his social life he maintained a style, the man of a certain class who could, despite recent reversals, still afford a country club membership. At home he was Sir, wry, funny, and distant. Your father was always melancholy. Melancholy? Maybe Billy had sensed it that day of his visit. Glimpsed it hiding here. Maybe this office had troubled him, not because it was worse than the house where he and his father lived, but because it was the habitation of a man and his secret. The secret other. Melancholy.
Billy made his way to the little kitchenette, found a grocery bag and a box of matches. By flickering match light, he saw that his father’s messy desk had been cleaned. Documents lay in square stacks beside a black leather appointment book. Pens, pencils, and legal pads were neatly arranged on the cheap green blotter. The match burnt Billy’s fingers, and he struck another. In a file cabinet, he found his father’s GI insurance policy and honorable discharge, diplomas, his father’s birth certificate, and a copy of the divorce decree. He stuffed the grocery bag with the papers his mother wanted. Burning five more matches, he searched business papers for anything that might connect his father to Cam Sizemore or Blake Rainey. Corroboration.
He found nothing that said Sizemore or Rainey. He let the last match go out, dropped it, and sat in the dark, thinking. Maybe his father had straightened the desk. Maybe the straightening had been part of his leave-taking. Maybe he had done it, a last gesture of order, before going to meet Billy in the Cool Room that last time, then moving on to Carver Heights. No, someone has been here. Someone who wants things my father knew.
A car came slowly down the alley, washing the windows with light. Billy went to the kitchenette window and watched as it stopped and a man got out. He stood in the alley by the hood of the car and lit a cigarette. In the flare of a lighter, Billy saw a white beard, a green leather jacket, and a strangely complacent smile. The man smoked for a bit, looking up and down the alley, and then up at the curtained window where Billy stood. When the man dropped the cigarette, leaving it to glow on the gravel, and started toward the rear staircase, Billy knew he had to hurry.
Heart hammering, hands sweating, he felt his way in the dark to his father’s desk. He listened for steps on the back stairs, heard nothing, then heard the first faint scraping footfall, someone moving carefully in the blackness. Billy felt for the appointment book, held it to his chest, grabbed the grocery bag full of papers, made his way to the front door and down the stairs as silently as a boy could whose beating heart could be heard a mile away.
At home, sitting at the kitchen table, Billy opened the black leather appointment book and turned the pages, reading scribbled notes about the routine acts of his father’s life. Deadline: Johnson trust. Pick up dry cleaning. He drew his fingers over words his father had written, stared at his fingertips, faintly inky. He tasted the ink, remembering blood. He flipped through the Friday nights of the football season. Each one read, Billy plays… and the name of the Spartans’ opponent. On the last
Friday night, the night of the Orlando game, his father had written:
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
His father had often quoted scraps of verse, usually with a whiskey glass in his hand, his voice throbbing with emotion and his eyes searching the long ago. Billy studied the words, read them again, then again.
He was there. The thought struck Billy with a dizzying force. His father had been there, seen the Orlando game, the wild celebration on the field. Seen Billy lifted up and carried on the shoulders of his teammates. And home we brought you. But Billy had returned home alone, and then had come Moira, trailing her fingers in the dew on Billy’s father’s car.
He didn’t come to the game? Your dad?
But Billy chose to believe it. His father had been there. Somehow.
His father had made the last entry in the book on the day of his death. It said only, Herb Klein.
The journalist had told the truth. He’s in my appointment book. I can show it to you.
Billy reviewed the days when he and his father had met in the Cool Room. Sometimes they said, Meet Billy. One said, Pick up money. Meet Billy.
Mrs. English read aloud from the appointment book. “Pick up money. Meet Billy.”
The diner was empty, and the counterman, Delvin of the hairnet and sweat-stained chef’s smock, watched them with the hopeful malice of a man who needed business. Mrs. English’s coffee cup was empty. Three dead Winstons were stubbed in her ashtray. Billy had not touched his Coke. These days his stomach lurched in the presence of food. He had lost five pounds. When he looked into his bathroom mirror, the sallow, unwholesome face of a haggard, wasted man stared back. Mrs. English looked older, too. When she dragged on her cigarette, an artery throbbed in a half-moon of dark skin under her right eye. The tips of her fingers were yellow with nicotine, and her hair needed washing.
She closed the book. “I don’t think so. This doesn’t say the money came from Rainey or he knew you were getting it. It’s still you against five good men and true.” She waited, digging with those dark eyes.
Billy took a deep breath. Five words: Pick up money. Meet Billy. All he could find and not enough. After running from his father’s office and lying in his bed unable to sleep, he had muttered to himself over and over again, Pick up where, from who?
Mrs. English turned her coffee cup in its gummy saucer. “Billy, Herb thinks you’re hiding something. He wants me to… get it from you. Remember that day back in September when we spoke in the library? I said people were talking about you. I asked you to tell me… what they did to you. You wouldn’t say anything.”
Billy remembered the quiet gloom of the stacks, the musty smell of books, her manner suddenly that of a woman, not a teacher. You don’t look good. Your eyes are… lost. He wondered how his eyes looked now.
She shook her head, blinked, curious and confused. “Billy, I’ve thought about that day a lot. Now I’m thinking maybe it was you who did something… to someone else. Maybe that’s why you won’t talk.”
She waited, and when Billy did not speak, she threw her Winstons into her purse, shoved out of the booth, and stared down at him. “All right, Billy. You’re on your own. I believed you, and you used me. I put my job on the line for you, and now this thing’s a dead end. If Tallahassee says you’re a liar, then that’s the news. Why not? You’re lying to me now.”
Her heels rapped the greasy linoleum, and her black skirt rippled around her shapely legs. She threw open the door and walked into the rain.
THIRTY-NINE
A full moon poured orange light across the dark surface of the lake.
Cam Sizemore stood on the bluff with the hunting camp behind him, remembering his own crazy mind on Mystery Night thirty years ago. The only year he had played football. The sense and nonsense of it, the fear, shock, and pride, and how it had all led in one way or another to this night. He looked at the glass of whiskey in his hand, swallowed some, felt his stomach churn with angry bile. Faintly, he could see down the bank the blackened circle where the fire had burnt and his son had ordered the elephants to walk. Where one elephant had refused his son’s command. Nothing like that had happened in Cam’s day, but it had been bad enough. Bad enough.
The sad fool, Leonard Rolt, a creature who liked to be called Coach, had told Cam and Blake Rainey about that night, his mouth twisting in anger, the scar a boy had given him lighting up red. Billy Dyer had said nothing to the town about Mystery Night. Nothing yet. Well then, the boy was still with them in his way, with all the men here tonight who had stood or knelt or crawled around that fire pit in the woods. Strange as it seemed, Cam Sizemore believed the boy would keep his oath, never tell about that night. Strange was the power of Mystery.
Behind him in the pavilion men drank, blew streams of smoke, sang, and danced like lumbering bears to a guitar played by a wizened, white-bearded man in a shiny green leather coat and emerald snake boots. Fred, the would-be bard from Rainey’s juice factory, hired for comedy and music. Why would a man, Cam Sizemore wondered, even one as absurd as Fred, willingly suffer humiliation to practice the art he loved? Cam considered himself fortunate to possess no art, and his son was the only thing in this world he had ever loved. Sim seemed long ago now, and Cam could not say why. He could say in his own heart and never to anyone else what he hated most about losing Sim. It was losing, every day, a little part of his memory of the boy. So every day, rising from sleep, and falling into it, he remembered as well as he could that moment when he had held Sim’s hand and then let it go.
Cam finished his bourbon, turned from the ghostly beauty of the lake, and walked back into the smoke and noise.
Blake Rainey said, “Where you been, Cam? Out communing with nature? You always did have tender feelings for old mother nature.”
Cam Sizemore nodded, summoned a smile to his face. “It was the call of nature, Blake. The old mother gave me a bladder that fills up just like yours.”
“Watch this,” Rainey said, gesturing with his whiskey glass at the crowd.
A group of men shoved tables to the walls, toppling bottles and cans. They glanced at Rainey. He nodded. They pushed a woman to the center of the floor. She stood under a bare light-bulb grinning, brazen and fetching in red high-heeled shoes and a blue dress, a fleshy blonde on the far side of youth. Fred struck up “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” Men whooped at the first notes. The joy of cheating, Cam Sizemore supposed. Now all the masculine pleasures are accounted for.
The woman swayed slowly, her knees bent. Her heavy breasts rose when she raised her hands to the back of her neck, and the men cheered. Her hips rocked and her belly circled as her feet tottered on the red spikes. The crowd received her motions with a whooping, stomping roar. Catcalls and rebel yells. Someone dropped a bottle. The crash of breaking glass silenced then excited the men.
Blake Rainey pointed at the guitar player, called, “Come on, Fred, put some heart into it!” The old man in the green leather coat changed in midstrum to “My Baby Does the Hanky-Panky.”
Blake Rainey shook his head, walked to the woman under the lamp, and whispered into her ear. He stepped back with a boyish smile, took her by the shoulders, turned her like a child, and unzipped the blue dress from neck to waist. The woman’s white arms reflexively pressed her sides, her face burning red, but the men shouted with one voice, “Noooo!”
The blue dress fell around her ankles, hobbling her, tangling the red shoes. She stopped dancing and squatted, bra and panties black against white flesh. Two men came forward and steadied her arms as she stepped out of the dress. She straightened, collected herself into a moving picture of easy flesh. Someone handed her a whiskey bottle. She raised it, drank deeply, tossed it back. As she swayed, eyes closed, hands caressing her hips, she began to sweat. Red patches glowed in her cheeks and under her throat.
Boyd Sowers, fat and absur
d in a red nylon shirt, did his own hoochy-coochy as the woman danced. Beside him, the Reverend Castle, minister of the First Baptist Church, looked on transfixed. Like him, other men still wore suit trousers and white shirts with loosened ties. They had come here from Sunday evening services.
The woman waited as long as she could, but she knew that if she did not remove the black strips that held her last secrets, these men would do it for her. Someone shouted, “No hair, no fair!” to peals of laughter. When she stripped and Cam Sizemore saw all of her revealed, despite his shame he felt her thrill.
The guitar ground into “Careless Love.”
Standing on the bluff again, watching the moonlit lake, Cam Sizemore heard footsteps behind him.
“Bread and circuses, Cam. You know how necessary these things are.”
“I do,” Cam said. “I surely do.” He did not look over at the tall man beside him.
“But?”
“But, Blake? But? Am I the only one who reads the newspaper?”
Rainey said, “I sent Fred to search David’s office again. For the second time he didn’t find anything. He’s been to Billy’s house too. Nothing there, he says. And Fred’s as thorough as a possum on the carcass of a dead cow.”
Fred, Cam thought, whose talents exceeded music. “Is it good or bad that Fred hasn’t found anything?”
“Yes, Cam, it’s either good or bad. You’ve identified the possibilities for us. Fred said somebody was in David’s office just before he got there. Said he found burnt matches lying around. Smelled them too. Somebody used them to see in the dark. Somebody who didn’t want to turn on the lights. Why, Cam?”
“Scared. Which would mean… ?”
“That one of your possibilities is the more likely.”
“The bad one,” said Cam Sizemore, disliking this. Playing the straight half of a shabby comedy act.
“Well, either our good David cleaned up a mess for us before he… visited Carver Heights for the last time, or somebody found meat on the carcass. Tell me, counselor, if it was Herb Klein, wouldn’t that be unethical?”
Fighting in the Shade Page 24
