Safe from the Neighbors

by Steve Yarbrough

“I’m a girl,” she said, “that plays like a boy.”

  “Twenty-one?”

  “Yeah, but no free throws.”

  He tossed her the ball. “Ladies first.”

  She tossed it right back. “Do you see any ladies? I sure don’t.”

  “Okay. Have it your way.” He backed up a few feet, then dribbled into the area where the lane would have been if there was one. Pulling up, he shot right over her. Too late, she put her hand in his face.

  The ball whooshed through the remains of the net, his first basket in years. He didn’t go to games anymore or listen to them on the radio. He’d never even seen one on TV.

  “See?” he said. “The fact is, I’ve got a natural height advantage, and more often than not that’s what this game comes down to.”

  “There’s such a thing as court intelligence, too. And I have a feeling that I’m probably smarter than you.”

  The next time he hit from twenty feet. “You may be smarter, though I seriously doubt it, and in any case it doesn’t make much difference. Your body is a prison.”

  “Yeah, and I have a feeling yours is, too.” She grabbed the ball and zipped it to him. He realized only later, he told me, that it was an unusually crisp pass. Passing, when he played, was his weak point, but the offense was set up for him to be the ball hog.

  He drove the lane again. This time she jumped in front of him, sticking her face right in his chest, and he bowled her over. Rather than pull up and shoot, he reached down and offered her his hand, letting the ball skip into the ditch.

  She slapped him on the wrist. “That was a charging foul,” she said. “My ball now.”

  “Au contraire, ma’am. That was a blocking foul. Your left foot was about six inches off the ground. I’m not even sure the right one was down.”

  “Bullshit. But if you need to cheat to stay ahead, take the ball. And by the way? Fuck you.”

  It was the first time in his life, he said, he’d heard a woman use that expression, and he knew the shock showed on his face. But she’d provoked another reaction, too. They were playing a game and, when they started, the object was merely to score the most points. The end result was a foregone conclusion. Now the object of the game, as far as he was concerned, was to lower her self-esteem. Why should she have so much of it anyway? She might be a tall, good-looking woman, but she’d never gone to college and was married to a terminal redneck.

  He lifted the ball out of the ditch, wiped off the slime, then walked to the end of the court, turned and drove on her. This time she got set, determined to hold her ground. He gave her a little head fake, which threw her off balance, and breezed right past her for a layup.

  He walked the ball back up the court, bouncing it chest high. “You should have accepted my offer”—bounce!—“to let you go first. At this rate”—bounce!—“you’ll never get to take a shot. If you’d gone first”—bounce!—“you could’ve taken exactly one.”

  The next time down the court, he switched the ball to his left hand and shot over her right shoulder. He hit from fifteen, from twenty. She was breathing hard, her face bright red, her sides starting to heave. “I can’t believe,” he said, after hooking one in down low, “that it’s in a school district’s best interests to spend money on girls’ basketball. Maybe that’s why your town went broke. Hard Cash? What a joke.”

  He told me he finally decided that in order to complete her reduction, he really ought to let her shoot one. So on his next possession, he drove the baseline, lifted his right foot as high as he could and shot between his legs. “Damn,” he said, when it caromed off the makeshift backboard. “Missed one.”

  She grabbed the ball and shoved it at him. “Look, I don’t need your charity, okay? We can just quit if you don’t want to play.”

  “I don’t really want to quit yet. I actually expected to make that shot. Why wouldn’t I? I’ve made everything I put up all day. Maybe you don’t want to play? Scared you’ll get stuffed?”

  She wasn’t fooling anymore, he said, and hadn’t been for the last few minutes. Her sweater was damp, dark spots spreading under her arms. He found himself wishing he could see her glistening flesh.

  “I’m not scared I’ll get ‘stuffed,’ as you put it.” She still had the ball in her outstretched hands.

  He wasn’t about to take it. “You know you can’t make a shot on me,” he said, smiling as if to show he bore her no ill will for that “Fuck you,” though he did and he could tell she knew it. “Are we agreed about that?”

  “No, we’re not agreed about that.”

  She walked the ball to the other end of the court. He bent his legs, crouching. She turned and dribbled towards him, keeping the ball close to her body, dribbling with the pads of her fingers. When she drove close enough, he committed and went for the steal, but she had a nice spin move. He recovered in time to slap at the ball, but he knew perfectly well that he’d hit the back of her hand. “Foul on me,” he said.

  “Foul on you.”

  She brought it in again. This time he took nothing for granted, moving with her towards the corner, then back to the top of the key, keeping his left foot forward, left hand extended, palm up, to swipe at the ball. She was a lot better on offense, he told me, than defense.

  When she tried her spin move this time, he was ready. She leaned into him as she put up her shot, and he got nothing but ball. He shoved it right in her face.

  She wheeled away, holding her nose.

  “Hey, look, I didn’t intend to do it so hard,” he said, which wasn’t exactly true. He laid his hand on her shoulder.

  He told me he never saw it coming. One minute she was bending over with her back to him, and the next thing he knew she’d punched him in the mouth. It hurt. She hit like a man.

  He put his hand to his mouth, then lowered it and looked at his bloody fingers. “You know what?” he said.

  Her nose was still red. “What?”

  “Fuck you, too.”

  He said it, and God knows he meant it, but when she stepped closer he couldn’t make his feet move. Her face grew big, then even bigger. Her mouth opened, her tongue flicked out and she licked that blood from his lips.

  Listening to him talk about the day they shot baskets, I wondered if I’d ever run into him when my mother took me into town on her shopping trips. I didn’t know him then, so he would’ve looked like just another man who was obviously better off than my father, who wore a tie and wasn’t a farmer. If I had seen him around this time, I wouldn’t have known that he’d lately been split down the middle, that over the next several months two versions of Ellis would inhabit the same space, each trying to outlast the other.

  “We never played basketball again,” he said. “We took to meeting wherever we could, often around noon, usually in a town nearby. Our favorite was Belzoni. I didn’t know anybody there, and neither did she. There was a café on the highway back then that served the best chili burgers either of us had ever eaten. She had this way of hiding her mouth behind her palm if I made her laugh while she was chewing. The gesture would’ve seemed precious and dainty if a smaller woman like my wife had made it, but when she did it there was an offhandedness about it that I found entrancing.

  “I loved drinking with her in the middle of the day. She always had alcohol. Sometimes it was regular bonded whiskey, in a bottle with a printed label. Sometimes it was clear stuff in a Mason jar and she wouldn’t say where she got it, just laughed, turned it up, took a swig and smacked her lips. She’d say things like ‘Who would’ve thought corn and chicken shit could taste this good?’”

  He told me it thrilled him when she said “shit” or “fuck” or even mild swearwords like “damn” and “hell.” Those words were exciting not because they sounded dirty in her mouth but because they didn’t.

  Most of all, he loved how she behaved when removing her clothes in a motel room, talking about inconsequential things, mostly, as if nobody was watching her disrobe. “Ever heard the term hill-dropping?” she once aske
d, unbuttoning her blouse on a blustery day in January. They were in a motel across the highway from the café in Belzoni. The radiator was on—you could hear water gurgling through the pipes—but so far it hadn’t accomplished much.

  “Hill-dropping? I don’t think so.”

  She tossed the blouse onto the foot of the bed and reached around behind her back to undo her bra straps. “That’s how they plant cotton now. They’ve got these four-row planters that drop four or five seeds in little hills about eighteen inches apart. It used to be that the planter would just drop a steady stream of seeds down the middle of the row, but not anymore.”

  “And it’s an improvement?”

  “Yeah, because they don’t have to put hoe hands in the field to thin the cotton out.” She dropped the bra on top of her blouse. “Remember when they first started calling those things bras instead of brassieres?”

  “That was just after the war.”

  She unbuttoned her jeans and pulled them down over her thighs. “My momma had a thick accent like they do back in the woods in Sharkey County, and she never learned to say ‘bra.’ She called them ‘briars.’”

  He said she didn’t make love like he’d expected. Given her aggressiveness on the basketball court, the forthrightness with which she stripped and her occasionally profane tongue, he was prepared for a certain degree of crassness, but instead she always lay down beside him and rested her head on his chest and said, “Hold me for a while before you get after me.” And so he always did. He held her and stroked her hair, and she put her palm on his stomach and let it lie there.

  She talked sometimes about her husband. From the outset she’d made it clear that she had no plans to leave him, and not just because they had kids. There were things about Arlan to admire, she said, even if he couldn’t see them.

  “Well, I’m afraid I can’t. Not much point in trying to conceal that.” He knew he should change the subject, or at least fall silent, but that wasn’t in his nature. He asked if she knew what went on at those Citizens’ Council meetings.

  “I can guess.”

  He told her about the one at City Hall, how her husband and my father and the other men spoke openly about putting black people who’d registered to vote out of their houses and making sure they couldn’t find work.

  “So far,” she said, “they’ve been pretty successful at it.”

  “They won’t succeed forever. They’ll start failing soon, and I wouldn’t like to be them when that day comes.” He heard himself drone on: “That fellow your husband hangs around with, the one who looks like a beanpole?”

  “James May?”

  “He follows your husband around town like a pet. He’s got ‘loyal dog’ scrawled on his forehead.”

  “He and Arlan knew each other growing up.”

  “He always has such a hungry look in his eyes.”

  “Maybe he’s never had enough to eat.”

  Ellis told me that Nadine said my father wasn’t a bad man and neither was Arlan, that they both grew up poor, went off and fought in the war and, after they came back, had never known a day when they didn’t have to work hard. The thing was, she said, if you didn’t own at least a thousand acres, in the Delta you were a nobody. And if you wanted to be a somebody, according to Arlan, you had to join the Council. He talked all the time about securing their children’s future.

  When she said things like that, what Ellis found himself thinking of was a future with her. For him, that meant stolen moments, and he failed to see why they couldn’t steal them forever, but she said when they started they were already in overtime. “You’re at the free throw line,” she liked to tease. “Better sink another one if you can before the buzzer.”

  Her tone, when she made those kinds of statements, was far too breezy for his taste. She’d started it all, making the initial approach, stalking him at the grocery store when he had his kids in tow. She was the one who got emotional when they met to shoot baskets. He did tell me he conveniently managed to overlook the fact that he’d gone to the trouble of finding out what he could about her husband, then flipped through the phone book and called her when he knew Arlan wasn’t at home. But even so, if he saw her downtown with her kids, she wouldn’t even glance at him.

  He in turn couldn’t stand the sight of her children, especially the girl. He saw them all one day on Front Street, right there in front of the Piggly Wiggly, a week or two before Christmas, a life-size Santa rotating above them in the window, Nadine talking to my mother, a sack of groceries tucked under her arm. He knew better than to speak. All he did was try to make eye contact as he passed, but the girl caught it and her dark eyes flashed.

  “Do you ever wonder,” he asked, lying beside Nadine in bed in the motel down in Belzoni, “what it would be like to see each other at night?”

  “Oh, hon, what difference would that make?” Once again: easy and breezy.

  “What difference does any of this make, then?” he asked. “I go to the store to buy ketchup. I’m not thinking of you, I don’t even know you exist. I’m mentally composing the first paragraph of an editorial when you pop up out of nowhere and start that shit about me ringing one in from thirty feet. You’re lucky I don’t wring your neck.”

  “You won’t wring my neck,” she said, “but Arlan would if he ever found out what we’re doing.”

  He laughed. “That little man? He couldn’t get his hands around your neck. You’re too damn tall.”

  “He could if I was lying down.”

  He told me he hated to think of her lying down with Arlan Calloway. A journalist was supposed to be married to the truth, and for much of his life he had been, but after they got involved he lied to himself all the time. He told himself his main problem with her husband was political, when deep down he knew perfectly well that if Arlan would just walk out his front door, taking the kids with him and leaving his wife alone for the taking, he’d forgive him for every racist notion he ever subscribed to. The Meredith case was winding its way through the courts by that time, and Arlan could have stood on the corner of Front Street and Loring Avenue with a big sign saying LYNCH JAMES MEREDITH, and Ellis never would’ve mentioned it in the paper, so great would his gratitude have been.

  He wanted to be with her every few days—in this motel room or another, it didn’t really matter much where. He wanted something permanent in a transient environment, something he could leave behind today and go back to on Thursday and find it just as strong because he’d left it alone for the last forty-eight hours. That, he told himself, was what he wanted.

  “Don’t you ever get scared?” she asked him there in the motel.

  “Scared of what?”

  “Your wife finding out.”

  He couldn’t imagine how she could. They had one car, and he drove it. She was busy taking care of their kids. She stayed home all day, and hardly anybody around Loring knew her. Anyway, nobody knew about Nadine and him. They’d been careful about that. “No,” he said, “I guess I don’t.”

  “I do. I wouldn’t want to do that to another woman.”

  Even when somebody’s lying motionless beside you, you can feel when she starts to pull away. He’d never known it until that day but could detect it then, some faint lessening of the pressure exerted by her hand on his chest. They’d been seeing each other for three months. Though the end was hardly imminent, he could feel it coming, and this made him want to do something rash. It never occurred to him, he told me, that what he was doing right then, at that moment, was.

  “I’ve never seen the inside of your house,” he said.

  “Well, I’ve never seen the inside of yours, either.”

  “I don’t know what the floor looks like in your kitchen.”

  “You don’t need to.”

  “What we’re doing is not about need,” he said. “It’s all about want.”

  “How do you turn the word profound,” she asked, “into a noun?”

  “Profundity.”

  “Then, hon, I think y
ou’ve just uttered one. What we’re doing is all about want.”

  It certainly was, and he wanted her, so he turned towards her and pulled her into his arms, thrilled by her size, though until now he’d always been drawn to smaller women. “I hate it when you talk so flippantly about this coming to an end,” he said. “Just plain hate it.”

  “I want you to,” she whispered, her nose nestling against his neck. “Remember how you felt when you played your last game? That’s how I want you to feel when this ends, only ten times worse. And I want you think about that every time you’re with me.”

  “My last game ended in a loss.”

  “So will this one,” she said.

  They kept it up, Ellis told me, through the spring of ’62, meeting for lunch and sex whenever they could. Her daughter was in school, her son in kindergarten with me, Arlan in the field, so it was easy enough to slip away every few days. “Then when summer rolled around,” he said, “she fobbed the kids off on your mother a couple of times a week.”

  “I remember that,” I said, and for a moment it was as if I were watching a movie, in which a little dark-haired girl with skinned knees begged her mother to take her along to wherever she was going.

  While they conducted their affair, the rest of the people in the state—and a good many folks in other parts of the country, too—became intensely focused on the Meredith case. It was clear, Ellis said, that a showdown was coming. In late June, in New Orleans, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered Ole Miss to admit Meredith for the fall semester. But one member of the court began issuing stays, the first three of which the full court of appeals invalidated. When the maverick judge issued a fourth stay, Meredith’s lawyers, joined by the Justice Department, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

  People were starting to go crazy, and Ellis registered their madness, which at another time in his life would have absorbed all his attention. But the editorials he wrote that summer, as the state became a powder keg, were tame. He weighed in on the issue a couple of times, duly noting there was no point in trying to put off the inevitable, that the longer they drew things out, the worse the consequences would be, but his words lacked the passion that was being spent in cheap motels from one end of the Delta to the other.