Call Me by My Name (18 page)

“
Tay!
” kids shouted.

“Ter,” answered others.

Poor Albert took it hard. Shoulders slumped, head hanging so low his chin touched his chest, he looked defeated as he walked up to the podium to receive his award. I wondered how to get the student body to cut him a break, but then Tater rose to his feet, stepped up on the bench where we were sitting, and started applauding. Positioned in the middle of his classmates at center court, he put some fingers in his mouth and wolf-whistled. Everybody stopped and looked at him, and in that moment he pointed to Albert who was up on the stage. “Al . . .
Bert
!” he shouted. “Al . . .
Bert
. . . Al . . .
Bert
. . .”

The calls for Tater ended, and I shot to my feet next to him and yelled “
Bert
” after each time he yelled “Al.”

In no time the whole gym was chanting Albert's name.

The school didn't even attempt to have a prom. Instead the front office gave permission to the students to stage their own, as long as they were held at venues that weren't school property. White leaders rented out the VFW Hall. Black leaders booked a church community center on the north end.

Both proms were open to juniors and seniors, and no less than three people invited Angie to go with them to the white prom. One after another she turned them down, explaining that she had other plans. This wasn't true, but she said it with such sincerity that none of her suitors questioned her.

I'd invited Regina Perrault, but she'd politely declined and used the same excuse as Angie—she had other plans. Regina sounded genuinely aggrieved, which helped with my disappointment, but I later learned that she, in fact, was going with a former boyfriend, Shane Gautreaux. Shane had graduated the year before and now was a Marine Corps private waiting for deployment to Vietnam. Angie encouraged me to invite someone else and rattled off a list of candidates, but for me it was Regina or no one. I decided to stay home and lick my wounds instead.

It was the actual day of the prom before I realized that Angie wasn't going because she didn't want me to be at home alone when she was out having a good time.

“They're just friends,” she said.

“Who are?”

“Regina and Shane. She asked him because he's shipping out soon.”

I didn't want to talk about it. “What are our plans?”

“I was going to ask you.” Before I could make a suggestion she said, “What if we crashed the parties?”

“Don't you mean party?”

She didn't answer. More than four months had passed since our encounter with Charlie LeBlanc, and she'd successfully recovered from the experience by focusing on her studies and after-school activities, often chocking her days so full that Johnny Carson was deep into his monologue before she surrendered and went to bed. We still had classes with Tater, and still sat next to him, but I didn't notice any tension of the romantic sort between them. For all I knew it had been repressed into oblivion, and I found myself hoping for that.

One day after track practice, Tater and I were walking to the locker room when he told me he was exhausted because he'd stayed up late the night before talking to Patrice Jolivette on the phone. Thrilled to hear it, I shared the news with Mama, knowing that she'd pass it on to Pops. I just wanted things to be normal at home—normal, as we knew it.

“Is it true he's with somebody else?” Pops asked me.

I knew he meant Tater. “I believe he is.”

“Thank God in heaven,” Pops said. “Remind me to light a candle next time we're at church.”

I'm not sure why, but I didn't tell Angie about Tater and Patrice. She'd been getting a lot of attention from guys at schools, and I suppose I thought none of us would benefit from a discussion about Tater's current status. I didn't want to distract her, I guess it was, and I hoped she would explore the possibility of another relationship. One of her admirers was Donnie Landry, a senior who'd taken her to see
Gone with the Wind
when it returned for its annual showing at the Delta. Donnie owned his own car, and on weekend nights he and Angie often went for drives around town, returning to Helen Street with just enough time to make curfew.

I asked her once if they ever went parking out on Nap's Lane, and the only answer she gave me was a giggle. I'd thought Donnie might be gay, but her reaction told me I was wrong.

“What do y'all do out there?”

“What does anybody do?” she replied.

“Do y'all make out or something?”

“I'm suddenly very uncomfortable with this conversation,” she said. But it was an answer, the one I'd hoped for.

Mama said she wanted us home by midnight, which seemed generous considering our usual 10:30 p.m. Saturday curfew. We began the evening at the Little Chef, then headed out to the VFW Hall on North Liberty Street. I was driving, which prevented me from seeing much, but the prom was exactly what you'd expect from a large social given by a school like ours. Girls wore homemade formals with corsages either pinned to their gowns or held to their wrists with elastic bands, and the boys wore mostly pastel-colored suits with shirts open at the neck or finished with narrow sock ties. There seemed to be as many people outside drinking and smoking under the trees as there were inside. Through the open front door I glimpsed a rock band in matching red outfits playing on stage, and out in the night I heard the thumping of a bass guitar and caught occasional phrases from a singer struggling with “Like to Get to Know You” by Spanky and Our Gang.

On our third pass in front of the building, I spotted Regina through the door. I'd heard people say she looked like the model Jean Shrimpton but with a more voluptuous figure. Now I felt blood vessels clamp shut in my neck at the sight of her slow-dancing with the smartly uniformed Shane Gautreaux, and then a dizzy spell came on. Part of me wanted to rush the place and hit Shane the way I hit the blocking sled. But another part—the one where my sanity resided—wanted to leave the prom as fast as possible. That was the part that prevailed.

Next we drove across town to the church center where the black prom was being held. I made a couple of laps around the building and then found a place to park. The building's walls were mostly windows, and there were no curtains to keep us from seeing inside. Mood lights were strategically placed in the corners of the room; it was just dark enough to make out figures moving around. Most everyone was dancing, while a few drank punch and ate finger sandwiches at tables arranged along the back wall. The scene was nearly identical to the one we'd found at the VFW Hall, except here instead of a band there was a deejay spinning records. And everyone was black.

We listened to songs by the Delfonics and Freda Payne, and then one from the Jackson 5. It was “I'll Be There,” which inspired shouts and squeals as everybody stormed the dance floor. Even Angie and I found ourselves brandishing invisible microphones and exaggerating the effort it took to get the words out:
“I'll be there, I'll be there, just call my name, I'll be there.”

“How are we any different than they are?” she said when the song ended. “I mean, how are we, really? Remember what Dead Eye Dud said in biology class about skin color? He said it was decoration, nothing more, nothing less.”

Something in the building had caught her attention, and I turned away from her now to see it. In the back of the room, positioned above one of the mood lights, I could make out the familiar, well-formed figure of Tater Henry dancing with the equally impressive Patrice Jolivette. Tater hadn't told me about his plans to attend the prom, but there he was in a suit, the front of his shirt open halfway down to his navel. I hesitated to look at Angie for fear of her reaction.

“He needs to stick to playing ball,” she said.

“It's true. The dude can't dance a lick.”

Certain it was time to leave, I started the engine and engaged the clutch, but she reached over and killed the motor. Then she removed the key from the ignition.

“Let's watch a while longer,” she said. “Please. It's kind of cute.”

Not that I hadn't had plenty of opportunities before, but this was the perfect time to ask her how she felt about him, even though if I were honest, it was a question I didn't want answered. As long as I didn't know with certainty, the possibility existed that her feelings for him were no different than my own.

“It looks like he's stomping roaches,” I said to her instead. “Stomping and missing. God, he's almost as bad as me.”

She'd only started to reply when a figure broke from the dance floor and went straight at Tater, knocking him to the ground and upsetting the lamp, which thrust that part of the room in darkness. The music stopped. Cries rang out. I saw a table with food tip over. Then Tater appeared again—or rather a shadow of Tater—and he was pummeling the guy who'd attacked him. He had the upper hand now. The guy curled up with his arms covering his head, and Tater kept striking him, driving punches wherever he could fit them. I felt the old impulse to help him out, but it was obvious he didn't need me. He might've been a boxer hitting a speed bag, his fists moved so fast. Then several figures converged on Tater and pulled him away, and my brain processed the hulking silhouettes and gave me names—Randall Wallace and Stanley Redd, football teammates. A moment later Tater came crashing through the center's doors with Randall and Stanley attending to him. Patrice appeared next, and finally a crowd of excited kids tumbled out.

Angie pushed her door open, but I reached over and grabbed the handle and pulled it closed again.

“It's not our place,” I said.

“What does that mean, Rodney?”

“You're not going out there.”

“Who would do that to him? Who would just run up and knock him to the ground like that? Did you see? He wasn't doing anything.”

“Give me the key, Angie.”

She was still watching the building as she held it out to me. I started the engine and shifted to first.

“Who does it, Rodney? Why?”

In the building now the overhead lights came on, even as the music started playing and dancers returned to the floor. I could see a couple of people I recognized from school helping up the person who'd struck Tater.

His hair was teased out to a size twice as large as everybody else's, and he wore chains around his neck. The family resemblance was uncanny.

“It's always something,” Pops said the next day at the kitchen table.

He'd heard about the fight, and now he was weighing in.

“If it's not this,” he said, “then it's that. Why does so much happen to that boy? He shows up and there's automatically a score to settle.”

That seemed to do it for Angie. She got up and left.

Mama had cooked a pot roast and mashed potatoes, and we'd returned from mass only an hour before. I'd hoped for a quiet meal without the subject of race dominating yet another conservation. Still, I couldn't help but consider Pops's words, especially since he kept repeating them in an effort to bait me: “Always something, huh, Rodney? Is it
in
them? I wish somebody would tell me.”

I considered the litany of things Tater had been through since we'd known him. And I understood what Pops was getting at, even though I would've put it differently. Tater's guilt or innocence didn't matter; they weren't even the issue. What mattered in most instances was his skin color. And what mattered every other time had even less to do with who he was.

“Angie, come back to this table right now, young lady,” Pops called out.

Her response was no response. We could hear it from the kitchen.

Tater called later that afternoon as Angie and I were doing homework. Not wishing to rile Pops any more, Mama came to my room and whispered that it was for me. I went to the kitchen phone.

“I saw this truck last night heading south with two white people in it,” Tater said. “The driver looked like Bigfoot. He also looked like he was in a hurry. I'm sorry if the passenger saw what I think she saw.”