Call Me by My Name

by John Ed Bradley

  Tater stayed clear of South City Park the rest of the summer. He didn’t see us lose the Babe Ruth League title by dropping two straight to the Steers in the season’s last game and tiebreaker playoff, and he missed the awards banquet at the barbecue pits, where, in his absence, I won the trophy for the Redbirds’ most valuable player. Mama asked me if I saw him around anymore. I told her no, why would I? And that was the truth, even though it was also the truth that I’d spent a lot of time looking for him.

  I rode my bike down past the barbecue pits to the bayou and whiled away many an hour on the pedestrian bridge. I spat at the water until I had cottonmouth. I stared off at the trail, trying to will him to materialize. One day I was hanging around by the snowball stand, listening to music when The Beatles came on. They were singing “She Loves You” again. It made me feel so bad I got on my bike and rode out of the park as fast as I could.

  I wanted my reuniting with Tater to seem accidental, but I knew he was done with us, and the only certain way to see him again was to show up at his house.

  It was the first week of August, and the park was starting to quiet down, with the baseball and swim programs finished until next year. I rode to Abe Lincoln and stopped on the corner and had a look around. I wasn’t there long, maybe five minutes, when I heard music coming from down the street. I recognized the car. It was the one from three months ago, the black sports model with white racing stripes running from end to end on the hood. It moved faster now and fishtailed around the corner. Then after another few minutes I heard it approaching again, only now it was coming right at me.

  I don’t know why I didn’t try to get out of the way. The only defense I put up was to wave my arms, and then the driver’s door flew open, slamming into me and the bike and sending us sprawling against the curb. It happened so fast I didn’t have time to brace myself. I hit the ground hard, and one of the bike’s pedals dug into my shinbone just below the knee.

  I didn’t get a good look at the driver, and he was long gone by the time I got my wind back and stood up again. I could feel blood from my knee running down into my sock. My shorts had split open along the seam that ran from the waist to the crotch. My right shoulder and ribcage were throbbing.

  What had I ever done to that dude? I wondered.

  I limped over to Tater’s and banged on the front door. It took only seconds for him to pull it open, and he immediately started calling for his aunt. I would learn later that the kind of house they lived in was a shotgun, with a total of four small rooms leading from one to the next, all the way to the back. Tater put my arm over his shoulder and led me through a living room and bedroom. Next up was a bathroom, and past it I could see a kitchen. His aunt Nettie, appearing by my side all of a sudden, was not quite as ancient as I’d imagined. She seemed familiar, and then I remembered the lady with Tater at the movies four years ago. She wasn’t wearing a domestic’s uniform but a stylish outfit with a lot of color and open-toe shoes that showed her painted nails.

  I roughed out a description of the incident, and she shook her head. “Lord, that boy,” she said.

  “You know him?” I asked.

  She didn’t answer. Instead she guided me to the bathroom and turned on the water in the tub. It was an ancient claw-foot job with a metal hoop above it holding a shower curtain. She removed my shoe and sock and put my leg under the water. It didn’t burn for long, and then the water went from cold to warm, and I could feel the pain go away and my body begin to relax. I felt like a little kid, the way she handled me. She rubbed the tips of her fingers over the cut and puckered her lips and blew on it. “Shh, shh,” she kept saying. The pain in my ribs and shoulder was still there, but I’d been hurt worse, and the truth was I worried more about the rip in my shorts than the injury. The rip had left me exposed, my underwear showing.

  “You’re going to be fine, Rodney,” Miss Nettie said in a reassuring voice.

  “You sure I don’t need stitches?”

  She shook her head. “You got a cut, nothing terrible. But it’s more a brush burn—you must’ve scraped it on the cement.” She said it this way: see-ment. “Some air will do you good, so let’s not cover it just yet. When you get home put some Mercurochrome on it. Will you make sure to do that?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She dried me off with a bath towel, then used a small pair of scissors to trim the skin around the wound. Her hair was done in a long braid pulled in front of her shoulder, and it hung down almost as far as my leg.

  “Now, Rodney,” she said, “you’ll need to give me those shorts. I’ll sew the seat back together and make them as good as new.”

  “Thank you, but I don’t think so.”

  “You’re going to need to ride your bike home later on, right?” She laughed now. “You’re a big guy. The police might come and arrest you if you go out like that. We’ll put this towel around you and you go sit in the room with Tater and relax yourself. I’ll have the shorts ready in no time.”

  Old rose-colored paper with a flower pattern covered the walls. A small lamp with a canvas shade was burning on a table in a corner. A double bed with a plain spread took up most of the room, but there was a second bed, a single with a wrought-iron headboard, standing against the wall. Over that bed there was a black-and-white photograph of Bart Starr, quarterback of the Green Bay Packers. The photo showed him wearing a dark number 15 jersey and pitching the ball at the camera. The picture was signed in ballpoint ink and housed in a metal drugstore frame.

  “Nice, huh?” Tater said, standing behind me.

  “Better than that,” I answered.

  The room was so tiny that only a narrow space about a foot wide separated one bed from the other. “Sit over here,” Tater said. He nodded toward the smaller bed, then sat on the edge of the larger one. “Come on, Rodney. Take a load off, man. You can look at Bart Starr.”

  And so I did that, taking in the quarterback in his black cleats, the ball pitched at a perfect spiral. I wondered why a guy Tater’s age would be sharing a bedroom with his aunt. I also wondered why Tater would hang a picture of a white player above his bed when there were plenty of black heroes he could’ve displayed: Gale Sayers, the running back; Muhammad Ali, the boxer; Oscar Robertson, the basketball player; Hank Aaron, the baseball star. The room was finished with a painted chest of drawers, an old wooden chair with Tater’s penny loafers under it, and, hanging by the door, a faded picture of Jesus.

  “In case you were wondering,” he said, “I mostly sleep on the couch in the front room.”

  “I wasn’t wondering. How’d you get it?” I didn’t have to tell him I was talking about the photograph.

  “Bart Starr sent it to me.”

  “And why would he do that?”

  “Because I wrote him a letter.”

  “That’s all it took?”

  “I told him he was my favorite player and that I was going to play quarterback for the Packers one day. Next thing you know that picture’s in my mailbox.”

  A Negro playing quarterback in the pros? I knew it would never happen, but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings by saying so.

  “Was the car a black Camaro,” he asked, “with stripes and a big antenna coming up out of the trunk?”

  I didn’t remember the antenna. “Big white stripes took up the whole hood?”

  “That’s it.” He walked over to the chest and opened the bottom drawer. He dug under some clothes and found a pocketknife, which he unfolded to reveal a well-worn blade. “Nobody does that to one of mine and gets away with it. I’ll fix him.”

  “How’re you planning to do that, Tater?”

  “The less you know the better.”

  “You’re not going to stick him with that knife, are you?”

  He snorted a laugh that let me know what he thought of the question. “He’s a no-account hoodlum always looking for trouble. Everybody calls him Smo
oth because he’s just so cool, you know? He can’t stand seeing people get anywhere, can’t even tolerate a nice guy like me having a white friend. You’d be surprised how many other black folks feel that way. It’s not just the whites not wanting us to mix. I’ll wait a few weeks until he won’t think to make the connection, then I’ll pop one of his tires.” He closed the blade and returned the knife to the drawer. “How come you crossed the tracks today, Rodney?”

  “No reason.”

  “I can’t believe y’all couldn’t beat the Steers again.”

  “I know.” And now it was my turn to show him something. I reached down the front of my shirt and pulled out Angie’s key hanging from around my neck. “It’s for the lock on the gate to the pool yard. Miss Daigle gave it to Angie so she could go early in the morning and get some laps in before they opened up for the day. Angie’s season is over, and Miss Daigle must’ve forgotten to ask for the key back. I’ve been planning this since the swim meet when you told me you’d never been in a pool before. We have almost three weeks before school starts.”

  “Get out of here, Rodney.”

  “I already got permission from Mama. Pops doesn’t have to know.”

  “You would do that, man?”

  “She wasn’t easy. I had to work it hard. I told her it was a gift we’d be giving you. She finally broke down and said it was fine as long as Pops didn’t find out and we went well enough before Mr. Fontenot reported to clean the pool. There was one other thing. You’d have to get the green light from your auntie. Think she’d let you?”

  Miss Nettie must’ve been standing outside the door the whole time. She leaned in and tossed my shorts at me.

  “Yes,” Tater said, reading the look on her face. “I think she would.”

  The night before his first lesson I put a bath towel over my alarm clock to make sure the sound was muted when it went off at 4:00 a.m. Mama had left some cold bacon and biscuits for me on a plate on the stove, and I ate them standing at the sink. I’d worn my swim trunks to bed, and now all I had to put on were a T-shirt and flip-flops. The key to the pool yard hung from my neck. I’d had less than six hours of sleep, but I wasn’t tired at all. I kept working through a checklist in my head of the different exercises I planned to teach him once we got in the water. It was a quarter after four when I heard someone shuffling toward me from down the hall. I was preparing to apologize to Mama for waking her when Angie appeared. She, too, had gone to bed in her swimsuit, although I hadn’t known this until now.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” I asked.

  “I’m going with you,” she said. “I’m the one with experience teaching kids how to swim. You can barely tread water.” There was a biscuit left on the stove. She sat at the table and ate it. “We have two and a half weeks, Rodney—enough time for me to teach him, but not nearly enough for you. Sorry, baby.”

  We set out on our bikes a few minutes later, pedaling at the same speed and moving through clouds of bugs that swarmed under the streetlights. The only person we encountered was a newspaper deliveryman making his rounds in a pickup truck. He motored past us, holding the steering wheel with one hand and flinging rolled-up papers from his open window with the other.

  We reached the pool and deposited our bikes under one of the bleachers and only about ten feet away from where Tater had been hiding in wait behind a tree. He stepped out and said, “What are you doing here?” It startled us both.

  Angie shushed him. “I came to help. I’m the swimmer in the family, remember?”

  “If only you knew how much this means to me, Angie.”

  “I’m glad,” she answered. “But don’t you think you should lower your voice a little? All three of us could end up in jail for this.”

  “There’s not a soul in this park but us,” Tater said, still using his normal tone. “I got here thirty minutes ago, and I still haven’t seen a single car pass by.”

  “We have an hour and a half,” I said, whispering despite his confidence. “I checked the news last night, and it said daybreak is at seven, which is also the time Mr. Fontenot comes to clean the pool. We need to be out of here by six thirty at the latest. That’ll put Angie and me at home before Pops gets back from work.”

  There was a security light at either end of the pool house, cutting the dark with a yellow-green glow. Angie led us through the gate to the lifeguard station. She and I needed only seconds to strip down to our suits, but Tater’s baggy trunks were under a layer of everyday clothing—long pants and a shirt with buttons, and brogans that needed to be untied. His shorts were new—so new, in fact, that the price tag was still on them. Not wanting to embarrass him in front of Angie, I walked over to him and pulled it off.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I kept it on because I thought you might not show. I was ready to return them in case you changed your mind.”

  Angie swam a couple of laps to warm up, and when she finished, she came over to where Tater and I were standing at the shallow end. “Are you nervous?” she asked him. “You don’t look nervous.”

  “I’m excited. I’ve never been in water this deep.”

  “You’ll experience two things when we go out a little deeper. You’re going to be concerned about touching bottom, and the weight of the water against your chest might scare you a little. See those numbers along the side of the pool?” She pointed to them. “That tells you how deep you are. Three is three feet. Four is four feet.” She moved closer to him. “Okay. So the first thing you need to learn is how to hold your breath under water.”

  “I can do that already.”

  “Then show me.”

  “I learned in the tub when I was little.”

  She nodded. “Show me.”

  And so he did. He went under and stayed down for about thirty seconds. “Good,” she said. “Now I want you to watch closely and do what I’m doing.”

  She held on to the ledge and extended her body out behind her, and then she started to kick her legs. Her kicking was so smooth it barely roiled the surface. I imitated the exercise and after studying us a while Tater positioned himself between Angie and me and began to kick.

  “Excellent,” she said. “Now give me your hands. I want you to keep kicking, and I’m going to guide you from one side to the other. We won’t go deep. Keep your head out of the water and breathe normally. Stop when you get tired.”

  She waited at a short distance with her arms extended out in front of her and her hands turned palms up on the surface. It was sharing the water with him that people would’ve objected to. And their hands touching. Their hands touching would’ve had more men wanting to strangle him. He started to kick and to propel himself forward, and they came together easily enough, and she was moving backward now and guiding him to the other side. They went round and round in this manner, and I lay on my back on the rippled surface and gazed off at the stars in the sky.

  “I had me a twin once,” Tater said when they stopped for a break.

  She nodded. “Rodney told me.”

  “They gave her a name even though she came out already deceased.”

  “I’m sorry,” Angie said.

  “It was Rosalie.”

  “Rosalie,” she repeated.

  “I sometimes wonder what she would be like—what kind of person, you know? I never knew her, but I always knew she was missing. I could feel it.” He waited until Angie looked at him. “You could’ve taught her to swim too.”

  Even in the strange light from the pool house I could sense a stillness coming over Angie. She went down under water, then immediately came back up, in a move to clear her head, I supposed. “Ready now for the next challenge?” she asked.

  “Ready when you are.”

  She held his hand and led him out into deeper water until the surface reached halfway up his upper torso, and she showed him how to stroke his arms. He held his hands open as she did�
��flat but slightly cupped, thumbs tucked—and they walked back and forth from one side of the pool to the other making roundhouse motions against the surface. “You’re a natural-born swimmer,” I heard her say. “Like a Labrador.”

  “Like a who?” And then came Tater’s laughter, too loud for comfort, really, as it echoed in the trees toward the barbecue pits. “Better watch out,” he said. “I’ll be racing you before you know it, Angie Boulet.”

  “Yes, you will. And beating me.”

  And his laughter came again.

  I’d left my wristwatch on top of my shirt, and now I climbed out of the water and padded over to the lifeguard station to check the time. We still had ten minutes left and he was already close to swimming. I leaned forward to put the watch back, and in that instant something shot past me on the other side of the fence. It was a jogger, running at a labored pace only about ten feet away. He was wearing heavy gray sweats with the hood of the sweater covering his head. He navigated the sidewalk, then cut over past the bleachers to a path that took him into the trees toward the picnic grounds. When he didn’t slow down, I figured he hadn’t noticed us. I checked my watch again—it was 6:23. If he lived nearby, we could probably expect to see him each morning at about the same time. Most joggers I knew kept to a strict routine.

  And this was how it happened. The jogger returned every morning at the same time, a man as routine in his habits as the sun itself. Only the color of his sweats seemed to change as he alternated between gray, royal blue, and navy. We ended each lesson as soon as he ran past us and turned for the trees.

  Baseball had brought Tater and me together, but it was those mornings in the pool when we really got close. “I can’t believe how cool he is,” I told Angie as we were riding our bikes home after the first week of lessons.

  “Me neither,” she said.

  “Sometimes I forget he’s black. It’s like he’s anybody else.”